Adventures of Gluten Free Living

A few months ago, after poking around on the internet, I decided to try being Gluten Free (GF) for the month of May, just to see what would happen.  After doing some reading on the internet, I didn't think I had a gluten intolerance, but I had read that being GF gave you more energy and was good for allergies.  I've been tested multiple times for anemia and mono due to my severe lack of energy in life and I've suffered from allergies since I can remember.  I figured at the worst, it would help me cut out too much processed crap (cake, brownies, cookies, pasta, etc) and at the best it would make me feel better.

Well.  I did feel better.  A LOT better.  I wasn't exhausted all the time (tired, yes - exhausted to the point of feeling like I couldn't function, no) and I actually stopped taking my allergy pill and felt fine.  In May.  When the pollen comes out and turns our cars yellow.

This was an exciting moment.

But then May ended and I figured I'd end my experiment and just go back to living life how I always had, eating whatever.  And I started feeling like crap.  I had headaches nearly every day - which, I realized, I had been dealing with for almost as long as I could remember.  They weren't BAD every day, necessarily, but definitely a low-grade headache almost daily.  And I had stomach aches and reflux issues, which again I realized I had been dealing with on a daily basis.

All of that had disappeared when I went GF for May.

So, after a few more months of experimenting and going back and forth between feeling great and feeling like crap, I think I have figured out that I may have some sort of gluten intolerance.  I seem to have a magic threshold that if I go over, I am miserable, but if I can stay under, I am ok with a small amount of gluten.  On the plus side, this means I can have a tiny piece of cake at birthday parties, or try my MIL's lasagna without offending her.  On the minus side, it means I can ONLY have a small piece of cake or TRY the lasagna.  Italian food is my all-time favorite.  I cried when I realized that my favorite restaurant in the world is now probably a "Well, I guess I want it badly enough that I'm willing to feel awful for a few days" place to visit.

And my obsession with baking cupcakes and decorating cakes?  Well.  I've tried pretty much every kind of GF baking mix that's out there and I have yet to find anything that I think is worth buying.  I have not yet ventured into the "buy a kitchen scale and bake from scratch" mode of GF baking, but it may be coming soon.

In the meantime, I've been trying to figure out both new GF recipes and ways to adapt some of my old favorites to be GF.  I'll post them as I use them - whether it's a keeper of a recipe or a fail.

Some people have asked me about being GF and if I have any tips.  I should preface this by saying that while I try to be as GF as I can, I am not actually as strict as others.  So, if something is processed on the same equipment as wheat or says "May Contain Wheat" I usually try it once, while staying GF with everything else.  If I don't react, I don't worry about it.

To start with, I should say that we don't eat a lot of wheat stuff to begin with. We don't eat bread, we're low on sweets (usually) and G (husband) doesn't like Italian food, so we don't eat a lot of wheat pasta. The biggest wheat thing I ate was Kashi cereals.

For breakfasts, I switched from Kashi to Chex - they have a ton of gluten free options. I also added yogurt, cheese or eggs to get protein, otherwise I am STARVING by like 11am.

Lunch was hard, not gonna lie. I ate a lot of salad with grilled chicken on it or leftovers from the night before. Most fast food was out - no Subway, no Chick-fil-a, nothing with a sandwich. Chipotle and certain Noodles dishes still work, though.

For dinner we made a few changes. Rice and rice noodles were still fine, so we based meals on that. We eat a lot of grilled meat with veggies/salads anyway, so that wasn't too hard. No more regular noodles - although Wegman's has some really good GF pasta that even G didn't mind.

Snacks were hard, too. No pretzels or cookies, cake, brownies, etc. I miss brownies and cake the most. There are a bunch of GF options we tried and they were all....dry. Not great.

The biggest swap I made was just to make sure to ALWAYS have veggies, fruits, cheese and yogurt on hand for snacks when I was hungry. And popcorn and nuts. I swapped in dark chocolate for the cakes and brownies when I needed a sweet craving.

Also, I don't drink beer, so I didn't have to worry about that.

Those are my thoughts and hints.  Tomorrow I have a GF lasagna recipe to post that substitutes zucchini for noodles.  It's SO GOOD and almost makes me not even miss regular lasagna.