Well, here I've come full circle again. When I first began this blog I was about a year away from going Gluten Free for the first time. I began using this blog to chronicle that journey and record my favorite recipes. I was GF for six months and I felt fantastic. Downside, eating GF can be expensive (if you're trying to recreate GF versions of your favorite foods) AND a lot of work, trial and error. As a result of trying to hard to eat GF versions of what I'd gotten used to I eventually lost motivation and went back to eating how I'd eaten before, slowly, but the same nonetheless. Fast Forward five years and here I am with the same health problems that I had before and I know that changing the way I eat will make me feel better, but I am absolutely dreading changing the way I eat. I am a carbohydrate girl ALL THE WAY, but beyond that, I'm a bread girl. I LOVE plain bread, bagels, waffles, buns, pizza, pitas, tortillas, crackers, naan... if the base of it is bread, I love it. This is a problem since most "bread" products that are GF are essentially cardboard with some salt for flavor. If they're not cardboard then they're gummy and dense, not a good texture for a bread of any sort. Those downsides aside... after beginning last year and saying I wanted to get healthy again I cut grains out of my diet. I noticed a drastic change in my energy level and my healthy in general. It was pretty drastic, but not impossible. I discovered pretty quickly that if you're not trying to eat things that resemble the things you miss it isn't as much work. True you have to change your way of thinking, but what life change doesn't require a change in mindset?
As things stand, pre GF, the list of things that are motivating me to make this change is pretty long.
- Daily headaches
- Migraines 1-3 times a month (sometimes to the point of numbing and paralyzing half my face)
- Heartburn that doesn't go away, starting from my first meal and lasting until I go to sleep at night
- Exhaustion that doesn't go away. I can go to bed at a decent hour and wake up feeling like I've had no sleep. I've tried using sleep apps to track my sleep cycles and make sure I'm not oversleeping, but nothing helps and I literally drag myself around all day, everyday
- Constant brain fog. I feel like I can't think and it makes me entirely unproductive. It is mentally exhausting and definitely contributes to my constant state of exhaustion. Sure, it looks like I do a lot from my FB photos, but what those photos don't show is how many time I had to either lay down to combat the grogginess or to just get enough energy to finish the task I started.
- Bone or Joint Pain. I had come to just accept that these aches and pains came with the territory of no longer being twenty, but when I was reading my original post about going GF I was reminded that I had these aches and pains in my mid twenties and they went away when I went GF. I'm really over my knees aching for no apparent reason or my hands locking up because I had the audacity to do something creative for more than fifteen minutes..
There are a host of other things that I've experienced, but really.. it doesn't matter what my "symptoms" have been up to this point, what matters is that they go away. So here I am.. I vaguely recall the last time I went of Gluten I had some pretty nasty withdrawal symptoms including headaches, night sweats and horrible nightmares... but I'm pretty sure I'll survive. This time I'm more familiar with things that aid in detox, so I'll be doing that at the same time just to help this little process along. According to my blog entries, day five was a good day. I'm looking forward to feeling my age again, because I've felt about seventy for a while now and I'm over it. I'm going to go stock up on my GF flours tomorrow. I've got the basics in my freezer, but who keeps Amaranth flour? Really? ... ah well. Here's to another one of Maegen's adventures.. go big or go home seems to be my motto.. so as of today I've had no gluten and, incidentally, I don't have heartburn .. I'll keep making the kids and my husband normal food until I've used all that stuff up, but after that they'll be mostly GF with me. I don't cook multiple meals in this house, but if they're out at a restaurant or something I'm not going to enforce GF eating. Guess we'll see how I feel next week.
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