First Post

My favorite food is Bread. Doesn't really matter what kind, though there are many that I love more than others, with rare exception (rye, yeck), I love it all - sourdough, ciabatta, focaccia, wheat, french, baguettes (!), bagels, cornbread. I love all of Bread's cousins too - pasta, gnocchi, pizza, cake, cupcakes, croissants. Oh my.
As with all relationships, there began to be some disagreements. Somewhere around college, I started to notice that my stomach hurt. A lot. Sometimes more than others. Looking back it was not exactly coincidental that my diet consisted largely of pizza and bread, but who knew then?
About 6 or so years ago, I saw my doctor in Boston about this recurring (and near constant) stomach/abdominal pain. I was referred to a specialist. They did a lot of tests. Test results? No issues. No gluten allergy. Maybe a sensitivity to gluten. Likely IBS, but they couldn't be sure. They put me on a medication which the FDA has since pulled from the market for giving people heart attacks.
My love of bread and all of its associates continued to overshadow this pain until this year. I'd learned to avoid the white bread, because that caused more pain than the whole grain stuff, but all the same, it was an unsolved problem. Certain meals caused agony.
A good friend of mine came to visit around the holidays and let me know she'd been gluten free for 5 weeks and felt amazing. Why not give it a try, I thought? Eliminate gluten from my diet for a week or two and see how I felt. How hard could it be?
The first week was easy. No bread, no problem!!! I had brown rice pasta in the pantry that I'd been putting off cooking for about 2 years - no time like the present to try that out. And it was good! Who knew? I'd been eating smoothies for breakfast anyway, so that was an easy meal to start my new gluten free days. Lunch meant salad, and I'd stopped keeping croutons in the house long ago to control my borderline addiction to their yumminess, so not a big deal.
Dinners proved to be a bit more challenging.
Day 1 - fish tacos - easy!
Day 2 - Beet salad, shared fries and red wine while out with friends - easy!
Day 3 - Indian food, sans naan - good to go.
Day 4 - Enchilada casserole - yum!
I don't remember my exact meals for the ensuing days, but for the most part, it wasn't too bad. I could still eat all kinds of good food! And because I was not eating bread, I found that I didn't feel so guilty about tortilla chips and french fries and chips - foods I'd avoided for years! What a revolution.
The weekend came and with it some cons. I went out for drinks and apps with friends. Ordered a cocktail, and the group ordered some apps. The tough part - most good apps have bread in them. So my friends ate apps. I ordered another cocktail. On an empty stomach. Normally in these situations, I'd switch to beer to slow down the intoxication process. Beer has gluten in it. That night ended early.
Next con - I travel a lot for work. Now, I've never had an easy time with airport food anyway, but the elimination of bread made it WAY harder. No more standard veggie quesadilla order from Perrys in the Delta terminal at SFO. No more Thai dumplings from Balducci's in Terminal 2 at JFK. I found myself eating a lot more of the peanuts they pass out on planes - thank God I don't fly the airlines where they stick to pretzels!
Quick lunch in NYC proved to be the next hurdle. There are sandwiches everywhere. Soup comes with bread or crackers. Salads come with bread or pita or (gulp) croutons. Dessert options are typically cookies or brownies. And who wants fruit when its 10 degrees out? The first couple of days were tough, but by the end of last week I was getting very frustrated. Needless to say I was happy to get back home to CA.
It is not going to be an easy road. Some restaurants are awesome and will go out of their way to make your meal gluten free great. Some don't get it - like the Chinese place on 39th I went to last week - so despite my careful ordering, I was in PAIN for 2 days afterwards. Some are honest - like the Cafe on Geary in SF I tried yesterday that told me they had nothing on their menu that I could consume safely.
People have asked me - is this a forever thing? Or just something I'm doing for now? My answer is it is a forever thing for now - I may cheat from time to time. I'll see how I feel when I do. I suspect I'll feel awful and go back to my gluten free zone, but who knows. For now, wheat and I are not speaking.
Here's the bottom line - I do feel better with the gluten out of my system. I'm learning where it hides in food and what to avoid. I have more energy because I'm not in pain. My skin looks better. All good things. And I'm learning to cook with these gluten free ingredients, which is kind of fun. My husband is being incredibly patient - his payoff is I'm happier and not miserable after eating. He even really likes the GF pizzas we've made at home, and loved the quinoa mac and cheese I made last night for dinner. So onward we go. To be continued...