My Gluten-Free Adventure

Well, it would seem that I'm past my 27th year and into my 28th year... when did that happen? I don't know when I got into my "late" twenties, but it seems to have gone rather quickly from what I can gather. I've been doing some "research" and everyone I've polled who is further along in this journey than I am says it only gets faster from here. If things go any faster I might not be able to keep up!! Already Isaiah is 3 and 1 month and Lydia is 18 months today! It is hard to believe that 18 months ago, a few hours from now (okay, like ten hours from now) will have been a full 18 months since I gave birth to our beautiful baby girl. Speaking of Lydia, she is what really prompted my Gluten-Free journey, inadvertently.

I have been feeling pretty crappy lately. That's an understatement, but I'll keep my blog clean of vulgar adjectives. I hadn't paid attention to how long I had been feeling yuck, but I finally had enough and began doing research to find out what I could do to try to get back to feeling like I was in my twenties and not in my sixties. Let's face it, I'm supposed to be in my "prime" and I feel more like I'm reaching my expiry date! I started doing some reading, quite by accident, regarding Gluten-Free diets. My love of blogs and reading what people have learned so that I might benefit from their experience and perhaps save myself some grief led me to a blog about eating Gluten-Free. That got me to thinking that it might not be a bad avenue to explore. Okay, in all honesty, I can't take all the credit. I had also been praying about how I've been feeling physically and asking God to show me what I can be doing to feel better. I don't want to spend my kids' childhood feeling like crap and being an observer, I like being involved and wrestling and playing with them... and lately I've been feeling too crappy to participate.

For starters, allow me to define "crappy". I've had a "perma-headache" since November of 2010. At first I attributed it to pregnancy/labour and hormonal changes. It wasn't always a bad headache and there was the odd day that it wasn't there, but more often than not it was there, in the background. It was killing my concentration and making me edgy. I'd learned to ignore it for the most part and had, in the last year and a bit, gotten to the point where I almost didn't notice it. I didn't bring it up as much and had just resigned myself to the fact that it was just there. I got glasses again about six months ago and that helped a bit, but there was still this nagging ache all the time. On top of that I've been getting migraines at an alarmingly increasing frequency. Before Lydia I used to get them once or twice a year - that felt pretty normal - but since mid-2011 they'd increased to monthly, and by September they were fairly consistent on a bi-weekly basis. Beyond the headaches I was having anxiety and heart palpitations. I'd also had heartburn, no matter what I ate, every SINGLE day since I'd been pregnant with Lydia. I told myself that it was just changes my body had made due to pregnancy and whatnot, and had gotten used to it. We all do it, right? Just push the pain back to the point where we almost don't remember what its like to NOT have pain, and go on living our daily lives, but definitely not to the fullest. I'd also began to have unexplained joint aches. At first it was little things, my hand would hurt for a week or so, my knees would ache in the evening, my hips would throb when I went to bed at night, my shoulders would burn during the day... it was just one after another after another. Beyond that I was exhausted ALL the time. It wasn't unusual for me to go to sleep on the couch at seven when the kids were in bed on a Friday night and sleep through until noon the next day... There were even some evenings I'd fall asleep as early as FOUR! I'd gone to my doctor and he'd said it was all stress related and had told me I needed to take measures to relax... I did, as much as a full-time working mom of two who has more hobbies than she has time does.. I would take a night out a week to take a long bath and read a book.... Garren would give me a back massage... we'd take a night off electronics just to relax and do nothing... but nothing seemed to help. I started taking more vitamins and trying to cut back caffeine... nothing seemed to make any difference.

THEN I read about Gluten sensitivities... most of what I have articulated above CAN be attributed to a Gluten sensitivity. There have been other issues, but those were the most pressing and debilitating ones... I was beginning to think I would never feel like myself again and it was getting quite overwhelming. So then one day when I was reading a blog about this whole gluten-free lifestyle I was eating an All Bran bar and noticing, as it was morning and the first thing I'd eaten, that a few minutes after eating it my throat felt scratchy and coated and I had this need to clear my throat to try and get rid of the irritation. Within minutes of finishing the bar the heartburn was back and I was back to feeling like crap... a tiny bell started going off and I started experimenting; I spent several days testing how gluten-type snacks effected me, and without fail, each time my throat felt itchy and scratchy and the heartburn was instant. I have several friends with severe allergies and when I asked them about the symptoms I"d noticed, each one confirmed that that was quite normal for an allergy/sensitivity. I've never had allergies to anything but bee stings, so this was uncharted territory for me. I'd been more conscious of allergies lately, however, because a few weeks prior to all this I'd eaten a granola bar and had a full allergic reaction to it. My tongue was itchy, my throat was scratchy, my chin was red and burning and my lips began to swell.. the reaction lasted several hours, but gratefully didn't progress past that level of discomfort, but I will admit, I was quite anxious throughout the whole thing because all I could think during it was that now that I'd already ingested whatever was causing my reaction, there was nothing I could do to stop how my body was responding. Throughout this I kept wondering if it was going to get worse.... I went home and looked at the box, thinking maybe I'd reacted to nuts... it was a certified "Nut Free" package... so once again I was stumped... fast-forward to last week.. I decided to conduct an experiment.. I cut gluten out of my diet 100%... even things without gluten were cut because I still don't know what does and doesn't have gluten. I started reading labels and more blogs to learn what grains do and don't have gluten. This is now day five...

I can tell you that this morning I woke up at six when my alarm went off and didn't feel the dread I normally do when I realized it was time to get up... Yes, I was still groggy because I am not, and probably never will be, a morning person... but I wasn't dead tired and counting down the seconds to when I would be able to fall back into my bed. I don't have, and haven't had in five days, heartburn and there has been absolutely nothing I've eaten in the past five days that has made my throat feel as though I've swallowed itching powder... and this is the first day in MONTHS that my hand hasn't ached. This weekend I got up on Saturday at SIX am and went grocery shopping, cleaned the house, baked bread, made several gluten-free (GF) snacks for work this week, made supper, took care of the kids by myself, as Garren was out all day, and when I went to bed after midnight, I didn't feel completely exhausted. I was tired, but not so tired that I wanted to cry. Sunday morning, while low on sleep thanks to a phone call waking me in the middle of the night, I was able to get up and go to church and not feel like i might fall asleep mid-service... I came home and made lunch for the kids, Garren went to take a nap, and I baked some more rolls for Garren and the kids for the week, made some more GF baking, made supper, packed a lunch for work today and packed up enough lunches to last until Wednesday, played with the kids, cleaned the kitchen and made dinner... went to bed around midnight and I wasn't too tired to chat with Garren for a bit before I went to sleep.

All these things sound trivial, but they are things that two weeks ago would have felt overwhelming because I felt so crappy. It wasn't any one things, though the exhaustion was pretty intense, but a culmination of all of these things that had me feeling as though I wouldn't make it to my "Golden Years" because I was already old...

Am I just being a hypochondriac? I don't think so. Apparently 1 in 3 people has a gluten sensitivity and doesn't know it. We eat gluten in virtually EVERY meal and snack without realizing it and when you overload your body with any one thing, you can develop a sensitivity. Beyond that, most of the things i"ve mentioned had I realized had been prevalent since Lydia was born. A surge or change in hormones can cause a sensitivity/allergy, not to mention your allergies change once every 7 years, and as I pointed out, I'm in my 28th year.. if we do the math on that... 7, 14, 21, 28.... Do I have a Gluten allergy? I don't know. Do I feel better since I cut it out? YES! I can't begin to tell you how excited I am to see how this journey progresses... it takes 6 months to a year for your gut to completely heal the damage gluten can do, and I'm only on day five... but if I have noticed such a marked difference in the first five days, imagine how I will feel in a year! I can conquer the world! LOL. Okay, maybe not, but I can go back to feeling like a human being again and perhaps finish some of the things on my never-ending To Do list.

So that's the beginning of an interesting journey. I will definitely be blogging more as I continue on my journey and I will post my progress and the GF recipes that I discover/create. That is another fun aspect of GF cooking... no matter where i read or what recipes I discover, most people say the same thing... GF cooking isn't an exact science, its all about experimenting and finding what works for you and your own tastes... so that's made this a LOT of fun :)

I will update ya'll soon!!