This post contains affiliate links

My Gluten Free Journey and

How to Go Gluten-Free

You need to quit eating gluten! Those words strike terror in the hearts of people all over the world. While I wasn’t told those words by a doctor until after I had already quit eating gluten, my body was screaming those words. I have only been gluten-free for 5 1/2 years, but my journey to a gluten-free diet started many, many years before that. Today I am going to share that journey with you. Why I went gluten-free? Why you should go gluten-free? How do you go gluten-free? Answers to these questions will help you on your gluten-free journey.

Going Gluten Free is Similar to Experiencing Grief

The gluten-free path I have been on has been one similar to someone accepting devasting news or the death of a loved one. If you are reading this, most likely, you are in one of the five stages of grief: 

Denial – No. I don’t have to give up gluten. I will only eat it occasionally. Maybe it isn’t gluten that is bothering me. I will cut out caffeine or some other substance. Maybe I can take a supplement and be okay. If you have said any of those things, you are in the denial stage.

Anger – This is so unfair. I hate my life, and I hate having to live this way. I would rather die than have to give up gluten. Why can other people eat gluten and I can’t? Are you angry at your life? 

Bargaining – This is a bad step. It was the step I was in the longest, and this step caused me the most pain. God, I will quit eating certain foods, but please let me eat pizza. I will go gluten-free for 3 months, and then I will be healed. I bargained a lot. It didn’t work. 

Depression – This quiet, lonely place is where you begin to realize this is your life forever. I don’t want to live this way, but there is no other way. Why do I have to do this? Food is just not worth eating. Pizza now sucks. Donuts suck! All food sucks! Nothing tastes good. And I could remember how real pizza tasted. I remember driving by a Kentucky Fried Chicken and just wanted to eat the chicken and biscuits, and then get a pizza, and donuts and hating my life because I couldn’t have any of it.

Acceptance – Okay, if I can’t eat certain foods, I will find new foods I can eat. I will find ways to prepare the foods I love in new ways. There are foods I have never tried before. Let me experiment more. I can do this, and since I feel great, this is a great way to live! I am in this stage. Don’t get me wrong, I still have my moments of “I miss pizza and homemade Italian bread.” But nothing tastes as good as feeling healthier.

Once I was asked what my favorite food was. My number one favorite food is Kolachi (Slovak Nut Roll). You can make kolachi with fruit filling like apricot or prune butter. This is a perfect breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack food. My second favorite food was pizza. There was no way I would ever give up my 2 favorite foods. However, my life led me on a different path. 

My Gluten-Free Journey

My journey leading up to my body screaming to stop eating gluten started when I was young. I had allergies – most likely undiagnosed dairy and some other ones, and now I realize most likely gluten too. In retrospect, I exhibited all the signs, but this was 50 years ago. The technology for testing was decades away. The first real symptom that I could say, “It was something I ate” were migraines that started when I was 9 years old. I had migraines a few times a month. However, I never tied gluten to it. I thought it might be too much sugar or corn, but I never thought gluten.

The first time I noticed that gluten-free living might be for me was in high school. I already had figured out that I couldn’t eat corn several days in a row without feeling sick, both digestive and headaches. But when I ate pasta I definitely felt bloated. I would cut out bread and pasta and feel better, but then I always added it back in.

Fast forward to right before I was getting married. My husband is Italian and his family served pasta every Sunday. I was sick a lot. Diagnosis by the “experts” was irritable bowel syndrome. They told me (after I said corn bothered me) not to eat corn, seeds, nuts, etc. I also had a cardiac workup for chest pain, and I was told to not drink caffeine. Standing at the altar on my wedding day, I had a massive migraine. I went to my mother-in-law’s house and performed my standard protocol. I took 2 Tylenol and drank apple cider vinegar in water with a teaspoon of baking soda. This would cause me to burp and within a couple of hours the worst of my headache had passed.

After the birth of my 3rd child, I suffered what the doctor diagnosed as “postpartum depression.” I said thyroid. I said Hashimoto’s. The doctor said, “T3, T4, TSH are okay.” I was told to take pills for depression – Exercise – eat healthily. I refused the pills, but after months of exercising and “eating healthy” by 1994 standards, I was sicker than I had ever been. I reluctantly took the Prozac and seemed to be a little better, but the debilitating exhaustion never left. 

Child number 4 came, and when I was pregnant with child number 5, my ob-gyn took one look at me and said, “You have a thyroid problem.” Another specialist was seen; another specialist said, “you are just tired after having too many children.” I looked at the doctor and said, “in the future when you found another blood test to run, you will find that I was right about my diagnosis.” 

By this time I was truly exhausted. I didn’t trust my arms to hold my babies for any length of time. My arms and legs literally felt like they would fall off. If you ever watched Saturday Night Live, This was ME! I felt as though my arms would fall off if I picked up an empty laundry basket. I had visited the Emergency Room several times with chest pain where I had EKG’s, blood work, a treadmill test done, and each time they said I was fine. 

My Health Continued to Spiral Out of Control

I continued to decline over the next several years – massive headaches, extreme weakness, joint pain, muscle pain, digestive issues, burping all the time. The only time I felt any better was traveling to a sunny destination. But the effects of the sun were short-lived, and the exhaustion from packing and unpacking overshadowed the benefits. I honestly thought I was dying a slow and painful death. I didn’t share my thoughts with anyone. Most people thought I was a hypochondriac by this point. 

The straw that broke the camels back was when I went to the dentist. He gave me a “preventative antibiotic.” I took Clindamycin for 1 1/2 days. To an already fragile immune system, this pushed me over the edge. I was sick, sick, sick after 3 doses. So I stopped taking the antibiotic and added in a strong probiotic, but everything I ate for months made me sick.

I finally found a wonderful family doctor that listened to me. Doc said, “I am certain you have Hashimoto’s.” He ran a TPO – Thyroid Antibodies Test. The test was POSITIVE! Finally, I had an answer. My doctor agreed to let me try natural supplements and diet. I ran home and started to research. I found out that your body treats gluten the same as it does your thyroid.

Now at this point, I still didn’t connect my “Hashimoto’s symptoms” with my digestive issues. I thought if I treated my thyroid, I would still have digestive issues. I didn’t realize how interconnected everything was. My diet consisted of yogurt and fruit and vegetables. I successfully added in meat, but anytime I ate any bread, pasta, desserts, donuts, I would relapse. And the burping was bizarre. My husband said I was burping in my sleep. And the chest pain continued.

Even after going gluten-free, I suffered horribly. Part of that was my fault. I thought that if I ate gluten-free most of the time, I could still occasionally eat gluten! I tried that for about a year. NOPE! Not Going to Work! It takes gluten at least 3 months to leave your body, plus it takes extra time for your body to heal after that. And since I had been sick for over 2 decades, it would take a long time to heal. In fact, I am still in the healing phase. 

Slowly I noticed changes. I no longer burp in my sleep. My chest pain that I was certain would kill me is gone. At the 6 month mark of being totally gluten-free, I noticed that I don’t have migraines anymore. I still get headaches, but not the debilitating, can’t get out of bed headaches that plagued me since I was 9. 

Occasionally I am glutenized when I go out to a restaurant or when I eat something that someone else has prepared. My kitchen is almost 100% gluten-free. A few of my family members still eat gluten. There are people that don’t understand cross-contamination – no you can not cut a gluten-free pizza with the same pizza cutter you just used on the gluten-filled pizza. 

Why Go Gluten-Free?

Studies suggest that if you have any autoimmune disease (Hashimoto’s, Lupus, etc.), going gluten-free will help. It is not a cure, but it will stop some of your symptoms, but you must be 100% gluten-free. You cannot dabble in the gluten-free lifestyle and say it didn’t work. My body was slowly killing me. But my main reason for going gluten-free is that I couldn’t live in pain on the couch anymore. I needed to find a way to enjoy the life I have.

My fourth-born son has said that he only knew a mother who was sick a lot. He remembers me getting up and doing school with him, and then laying on the couch. Day-after-day. My children deserve better than this. They deserved a mom who could take them places, play games with them, and be a mom. My granddaughters deserve a grandma who can get up and dance. And my husband deserves a wife that doesn’t always have a headache.

If your health and your family are not enough reason to go gluten-free, there is nothing that will propel you to give up gluten. Don’t your children deserve to have a mom that is a healthier version of you? Don’t you deserve to feel your best?

How to Go Gluten-Free

This isn’t an easy road. I get it. But you cannot do the slow ease out because you will never see the benefits of being gluten-free. At this point in my life, I have replaced all my make-up, my shampoo, facial cleansers, etc. with gluten-free alternatives. I do not want to have gluten-remnants on my hands, and I do not kiss my husband if he has eaten gluten. I watch for all forms of gluten in all foods. 

Today it is so much easier to be gluten-free than it was years ago. There are many alternatives, but be aware that many “gluten-free” processed foods are not healthy foods. I try to eat whole foods as much as possible and use gluten-free processed foods occasionally. Many of these foods are loaded with sugar and other flours that may irritate you. 

As I mentioned, I cannot eat corn. To find out what other foods bothered me, I did the AIP Diet (AutoImmune Protocol Diet). This was harder than just being gluten-free. I eliminated all sugar, dairy, gluten, grains, beans, lentils, nightshades (tomatoes, peppers, eggplant), garlic, and many seasonings and spices. I ate this way for 5 months and then discovered that I cannot eat lentils and beans, garlic, pork, and some other grains.

This website will help you determine the sources of gluten and how to avoid them – Celiac Foundation.

Finding Gluten-Free Recipes

Michelle at Honest & Truly shares recipes that are gluten-free. And after years of trying to find a gluten-free pie crust that we all loved, I finally found one (recipe here!)

Although this lifestyle is hard, it is worth it. But at the beginning of trying to be gluten-free, I had so many setbacks. There were weeks that I stayed up every night sick because I had been contaminated. My attacks were always worse at night. Those days I spent a lot of time in the tub soaking in Epsom salts, eating apples (which really work well for me), drinking apple cider vinegar and lots of water, and taking probiotics and digestive enzymes. The longer I am gluten-free, the quicker I am able to get over being glutenized. I have fully embraced the gluten-free lifestyle because it has made me a healthier version of myself, and I will share recipes that I find to help on your journey to wholeness.

[amazon_link asins=’006257129X,0615825796,0578135213,1941169082,B019L319CO,B007SM71H8,B00JUGP89I,B01AMBUGRI’ template=’ProductCarousel’ store=’amotsrantho-20′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’5193a8af-fa71-11e8-a8db-418d74b556e7′]