Guest Post ~ Nicolette Dumke

2012, Here I Come!

One advantage of middle age is the awareness of being much closer to the end of life than the beginning. This motivates me to make my time really count. I want to get as much as I can from 2012, and especially to never miss an opportunity to let my family and friends know how much I care about them.

The most common New Year’s resolution is to lose weight according to an article about weight loss in the January issue of “Yellow Scene,” a local Colorado magazine. The writer describes her experience of losing 20 pounds by joining a gym and working with a trainer. For the last several months she has spent the first hour of her day, six days a week, doing cardio and weight training at the gym. Achieving a healthy weight is a worthwhile goal and may even give us a more years in our lives, but exercise, when taken to the extreme described in this article, can make us less likely to permanently maintain a healthy weight. Walkers have the best track record for achieving and maintaining weight loss. See this page for more about how to exercise in a way that leads to permanent weight loss:
http://www.foodallergyandglutenfreeweightloss.com/exercise_right.html.

I am not making a resolution to diet or join a gym in 2012 because over 30 years ago I began a healthy eating plan designed to control hunger and insulin levels which has resulted in permanent healthy weight. To read more about my experience with weight loss, read pages 12 to 14 of this file:
http://www.foodallergyandglutenfreeweightloss.com/assets/InsideFGWL.pdf. To read about other people’s experiences, see the review at the top of page 2 and the letter on pages 5 to 6 of the file. To discover the principles behind easily-achieved self-maintaining healthy weight, see this page: http://www.foodallergyandglutenfreeweightloss.com/controlling_hormones.html.

In 2012, I would like to spend the time I don’t have to spend at a gym on fun activities such as these:

1. I would like to take more walks on the bike path that runs through our neighborhood. I’m planning to walk all the way to the west edge of the mesa we live on and spend time looking at the spectacular panoramic view of the Rocky Mountains. Not only is walking the best way to become and stay slim, when one walks surrounded by natural beauty, it is also very enjoyable!

2. I intend to finish a counted cross stitch project that was supposed to be a Christmas gift in 2011. It is a mantle clock with a stitched face, a fancy edge, and a verse. The kit includes a wooden frame (which I did actually stain and finish in 2011) and a clock mechanism. I love doing counted cross stitch because it is relaxing, creative, and says “I love you” to the recipient of the gift in a way that will outlive me.

3. I plan to make a piano bench cover for my husband. We recently had his piano tuned for the first time in ten years, and he wants to play it more than he has the last few years. I hope this gift will help motivate him to unwind with enjoyable piano practice often.

4. I want to make a long curtain for the patio-type door of my older son’s music room (small spare bedroom). The former owner left a thin curtain, but the one I plan to make with music-design fabric and an insulated backing will fit the theme of the room and decrease his utility bill. Like the previous two projects in this list, the curtain will be a gift that I hope reminds him that I love him every time he looks at it.

5. I’m hoping to re-learn to play the euphonium (tenor tuba) and be ready to participate in Tuba Christmas in December 2012. My two sons and I played in the Denver Tuba Christmas outdoor concert together for five years. Then I played by without them the year when my younger son was a freshman in college and my older son was a grad student at Purdue. (As an undergrad, he was 125 miles away and came home from college every year for Tuba Christmas). Playing without my sons was not as much fun and I got very busy with my business – too busy to practice – so I didn’t touch my horn for five years! A few weeks ago, we spent a whole day at the 2011 Tuba Christmas rehearsal and concert and watched our older son play. That day I decided that for the next Tuba Christmas I want to be sitting with my older son on the floor of the gym where they rehearse, where I will feel the whole building vibrate in time to the music. My younger son unstuck my horn valves for me, and I’m working on getting the muscle tone back in my lips and relearning the fingerings. There is a lot of work to do before I will be able to really play again. It’s coming back slowly because I didn’t learn this instrument when I was young. I was an adult beginner on euphonium at age 47!

Here are five health and work-related goals I hope to achieve in 2012:

1. I am going to continue attending a warm water exercise class one morning a week and, if time permits, would like to go twice a week. In addition to keeping me flexible and strengthening my muscles, this class is a wonderful time spent with friends. Although I attend the class for arthritis, moderate exercise such as this is ideal for weight loss.

2. I’m gradually increasing the resistance on my stationery bike, and hope to keep bumping up the number as the year progresses. I bicycle for arthritis, but leisurely to moderate-speed bicycling is also great for weight.

3. I am going to continue promoting my newest book, Food Allergy and Gluten-Free Weight Loss: Control Your Body Chemistry, Reduce Inflammation, and Improve Your Health. My goal is to get the website for this book, http://www.foodallergyandglutenfreeweightloss.com/, up to page one on Google searches. The book is currently on an online virtual tour which includes this blog post.

4. I am going to finish a revision of one of my older books, The Low Dose Immunotherapy Handbook. (More information about this book and treatment and food allergies in general can be found here: http://www.food-allergy.org/). There have been changes in sources for some of the very exotic foods people eat around the time of their low dose immunotherapy treatment for food allergies, so new recipes were needed. The revision is in the final edit stage now.

5. I plan to start my next book, a sequel to Food Allergy and Gluten-Free Weight Loss. In the last ten months since that book came out, I’ve talked to people who are following the eating plan. The thing that amazes me is how little some of them have to do to lose weight. A minor change in the timing of their eating pattern can lead to amazing results! I talked to a woman made one change – she began eating breakfast – and she lost ten pounds in a couple of months time. Another woman has not given up sugar but is diligent about eating protein-containing snacks and has gone from a clothing size 24 to a size 18. For these people, minor changes have obviously made their insulin levels low and stable and put their bodies into the “burn fat” mode as discussed on this page http://www.foodallergyandglutenfreeweightloss.com/controlling_hormones.html. Also, I have new recipes ideas to add fun to the eating plan. I want to develop these recipes and include them in the new book.

With all these things to accomplish this year, it’s time to get started. Here I come, 2012!


Nickie Dumke enjoys helping people with food allergies and gluten intolerance find solutions to their health and weight problems. She began writing books to help others with multiple food allergies over 20 years ago and the process culminated in The Ultimate Food Allergy Cookbook and Survival Guide. She says, “This book contains everything I know to help with food allergies,” and it has helped many people come back from near-starvation. Her other books address issues such as how to deal with time and money pressures on special diets, keeping allergic children happy on their diets, and more.

A few years ago, while listening to the struggles of an allergic friend on the Weight Watchers™ diet, she remembered her own weight struggles* many years ago and thought, “There has to be a better way.” This was the beginning of a new quest, and she is now helping those who are overweight due to inflammation (often due to unsuspected food allergies) or high-in-rice gluten-free diets, as well as those who are not food sensitive but want to lose weight permanently, healthily, and without feeling hungry and deprived. Her unique approach to weight and health presented in Food Allergy and Gluten-Free Weight Loss is based on body physiology and reveals why conventional weight-loss diets work against rather than with our bodies and therefore rarely result in permanent weight loss.

* (Nickie’s weight loss story, briefly, is that in her early 20s she could not lose on a calorie-counting diet in spite of repeatedly further reducing the number of calories she ate and swimming vigorously and often. Then she found a diet based on blood sugar control, lost weight without being hungry, and still weighs what she did in her mid-20s).

Nickie has had multiple food allergies for 30 years and has been cooking for special diets for family members and friends for even longer. Regardless of how complex your dietary needs are or how much or little cooking you have done, she has the books and recipes you need. Her books present the science behind multiple food allergies and weight control in an easily-understood manner. She has BS degrees in medical technology and microbiology. She and her husband live in Louisville, Colorado and have two grown sons.

You can visit Nickie’s websites at http://www.foodallergyandglutenfreeweightloss.com and http://www.food-allergy.org.


Food Allergy and Gluten-Free Weight Loss answers the question, “Why is it so hard to lose weight?” Because it’s hard to put a puzzle together if you’re missing some of the pieces. We’ve been missing or ignoring the most important pieces in the puzzle of how our bodies determine whether to store or burn fat. Those puzzle pieces are hormones such as insulin, cortisol, leptin, and others.

In addition, we’ve been given some puzzle pieces that don’t belong or fit in the weight-control puzzle. Much of what we’ve heard about dieting and exercise is incorrect and can cause loss of muscle mass instead of fat or even result in weight gain. The idea that weight is determined solely by “calories in minus calories out” is an assumption not based in reality. Most weight-loss diets require us to endure hunger much of the time, but hunger means that our blood sugar is falling or low and our insulin level may be rising. Prolonged hunger leads to the release of adrenal hormones, and the hormonal cascade which follows results in the inability to burn our own body fat as well as causing any fat we eat to be stored rather than burned to give us energy.

Another problem with most weight loss diets is that they strictly dictate food choices, lack the flexibility that those on special diets for food allergies or gluten-intolerance require, and deprive us of pleasure. Individuals with food allergies face additional weight-loss challenges such as inflammation due to allergies which can lead to our master weight control hormone, leptin, being unable to do its job of maintaining a healthy weight. Those with gluten intolerance often eat a diet too high rice. Rice is the only grain which is high on the glycemic index in its whole grain form; thus eating too much of it will raise insulin levels and cause the body to deposit fat. Although the recipes in this book were developed for those on special diets, non-sensitive people will enjoy them as well, and the weight loss principles in this book will help anyone lose weight. (A chapter of recipes made with wheat and other problematic foods is included for those on unrestricted diets).

The most frustrating deficiency of conventional weight loss diets is that they don’t work long-term. Low-calorie, low-fat diets can lead to loss of muscle mass, and with less muscle to burn calories, this type of diet effectively reduces metabolic rate so we need less food. Rare is the person who loses weight by counting calories and keeps it off after they liberalize their diet! However, continual dieting for the rest of your life is not the way you need to live, and you do not have to be deprived of pleasure in order to lose weight. Overweight is not due to a lack of willpower. Rather, it is due to a chemical imbalance in our bodies. Once we begin to correct that imbalance by applying the principles in Food Allergy and Gluten-Free Weight Loss, we can lose weight without hunger or deprivation and can maintain a healthy weight permanently and easily by regaining normal self-regulating hormonal control of our weight.

Excerpt:

Why have we cut calories, nearly eliminated fat, exercised strenuously, and yet not lost weight or kept it off? It’s because we were not working with our bodies. Instead, our efforts were based on the faulty assumption that “calories in minus calories out” is the major or only determiner of weight. We were ignoring the most important factors in our bodies’ decisions about whether to store or burn fat – hormones such as insulin, cortisol, leptin, and others…
The hormone insulin has a major influence on weight and hunger. High levels of insulin make us feel hungry and activate the enzyme lipoprotein lipase which takes fatty acids from the blood and stores them as triglycerides in fat cells. Therefore, by preventing insulin spikes, you avoid storing recently eaten fat and leave it in your bloodstream to be used for energy.
Low blood insulin levels allow the enzyme triglyceride lipase to be active. This enzyme promotes the breakdown of the triglycerides stored in fat cells and liberates the fatty acids from them into the bloodstream to be used for fuel. Thus, by keeping your insulin levels stable and low, you can flip your fat control switch from “store” to “burn.”…
The most important hormone for long-term maintenance of a healthy weight is leptin. However, it can be made ineffective by inflammation. You may be thinking, “I don’t have any major problems with inflammation.” Read the next few paragraphs and then decide whether this applies to you.
Sometimes inflammation is obvious – it causes redness, warmth, and/or pain. However, chronic inflammation can be silent. If you are overweight, you may not know it, but you are experiencing silent inflammation. As we gain weight, our bodies do not add more fat cells. The fat cells we already have become larger and are filled with more fat instead. They may leak as they are stretched more and more. Then immune cells called macrophages come in to clean up the mess. The macrophages release inflammatory chemicals in the fatty tissues as they are cleaning up…
Your body counteracts this silent inflammation by producing anti-inflammatory substances. Some of these interfere with the function of the hormone leptin. In optimally healthy people, leptin is responsible for automatically maintaining weight at the right level. Some people do not gain weight no matter what they eat. If they overeat, their well-functioning leptin control system boosts their metabolism and decreases their appetite to restore them to their best weight. When leptin is made ineffective by inflammation, the dysfunction is called leptin resistance, meaning that even though you have normal or high levels of leptin, your leptin does not work to suppress appetite and speed metabolism, thus maintaining a healthy weight.
This may sound like a depressing vicious cycle. Excess fat leads to inflammation and the substances that counteract inflammation (which are necessary to keep silent inflammation from causing symptoms) make it impossible for the body’s weight-control hormone, leptin, to function properly. Don’t despair though – there is a way to break this vicious cycle. There is also good news: As you slim down, leptin resistance abates and when you reach a healthy weight, you won’t have to struggle to maintain your weight. Your newly-functional leptin system will control your appetite and weight.