G-F Dieting SUCKS!

I don’t have any personal experience with gluten intolerance, but I think probably just self-experimentation is going to be the only way to know. Why not stick with the gluten-free until you feel like your metabolism is in a good place, and then try to re-introduce gluten and see what happens. You should know quickly if you’re not feeling as well. You definitely don’t need gluten to heal.

I was moved to comment NOT because I know much about gluten stuff (except what I’ve read on the internet, sigh), but I was just moved by your story. That’s a lot you’ve been though … I could almost feel the exhaustion voyeruistically. :) So glad you’re taking it easier now.

“The internet told me” that most grains, except maybe white rice, have some gluten. Maybe you are already eating a little and tolerating it?

What Amy said sounds sensible — gluten isn’t an essential nutrient. :) And there’s no way to know objectively without experimenting.

On the other hand, if it’s really really bugging you, resisting the desire to try it might make me obsessive, if it were me. Depends on the risks vs rewards for you personally. How much is avoiding it bothering you? And if you do react, will it be really debilitating, or just a headache or something? Also depends on how close you think you are to metabolic recovery, naturally.

What does your intuition say? If you can get in touch with that, I bet that’s your answer, corny as it sounds.

I was gluten free for about 2 years as well. Got my mom on it (she’s still gluten free, much to my chagrin…) and my sister, for a time as well. I totally believed that everyone in the world should be gluten free as well, read wheat belly, etc.

I never got tested, but had plenty of “symptoms” I’d get every time I caved and ate something with gluten. REALLY bad diarrhea (sorry for the TMI) usually almost immediately afterward, within about 20 minutes to an hour. I’d continue having diarrhea for several days afterward as well. Headaches, digestive upset, extremely painful abdominal cramping for 3-5 days afterward, and usually some asthmatic symptoms as well. My lungs would feel like they were filling up with fluid or something. Also anxiety. I would get really bad anxiety within 6-12 hours of having eaten something with gluten. Needless to say, I was sold hook, like and sinker.

I’m not very patient, though, and by the time I started eating for heat, I was SO done with the gluten free thing that I just started eating. Anything and everything in sight. Sandwiches, pasta, pizza, pretzels, cookies. It had been so long since I’d been able to eat “normally” that it was actually difficult sometimes to think of things to eat, because I hardly remembered that the cookie aisle at the grocery store existed.

Anyway, I should definitely mention that I was taking digestive enzymes and betaine hydrochloride pretty regularly for the first 2-3 weeks, but I just kind of naturally tapered off of it once it didn’t seem like I needed it anymore.

I, and my husband as well, were both pretty uncomfortable for the first 1-2 weeks, with maybe some residual discomfort into week 3, but it was nothing like when I’d gone off my gluten free diet before. Honestly, I got such extreme hunger that I never let my stomach get empty at first, so I don’t know if that helped or not, but all of my symptoms ended up going away. No more asthma, ever. No more gluten-induced diarrhea, stomach upset (sometimes pepperoni pizza will still require me to take 1/2 a hydrochloride pill, but I think that’s more from the nature of pizza than gluten), or any of the other problems I suffered before.

I feel great. My periods have normalized, hypertension is gone, anxiety is way down, and the lifelong chronic constipation is gone, too.

Anyway, I would really encourage you to try gluten. Definitely do it at your own pace. I probably could have gone slower, but had been totally starving myself for so long that extreme hunger was INTENSE for me. I would also encourage enzymes and HCI. I don’t hear about them very often on here, and maybe it’s because supplements tend to be a little sketchy, but these two REALLY helped me make the transition. I don’t know if I would have stuck it out without them, they helped so much.

Well, I just wanted to share my GF experience. Sorry it turned into a book. This morning I ate a cannoli and a chocolate eclair for breakfast, though, and I feel not only fine, but great! So, I really think there’s hope for you! Just go with your gut (no pun intended) and move at a pace that feels comfortable for you, and seriously check out some digestive support to ease you through the transition.

– Catie

I’ve been back on gluten since early March, soo.. 6 months or so? I did have some of the same response as previous times I’d gone off a GF diet, but it didn’t seem anywhere near as extreme. I think there were several factors involved in that.

First, I’m actually eating on a regular basis for the first time in my life. I have Asperger’s and it sounds ridiculous, but I literally found eating to be kind of an irritating chore. There were so many, much more interesting things I would rather have been doing than finding, cooking, and eating food, or even going out to eat. And, with the dialogue in our society being that it’s perfectly normal and healthy to completely skip meals and starve yourself, I thought I was doing just fine. I figured it was akin to intermittent fasting or something. So, part of it (I think) was that I was making eating a priority and getting enough calories for the first time, pretty much, ever.

The second thing, and the biggest I think, was the HCI and enzymes. I’ve never gotten any fancy ones, just general HCI and digestive enzymes. I buy them off Amazon.

Enzymes: http://www.amazon.com/Source-Naturals-Essential-Enzymes-Capsules/dp/B000GFSVPU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1376775176&sr=8-1&keywords=digestive+enzymes (I’ve also gotten the NOW Foods brand. They call it Super Enzymes, I think.)

HCI: http://www.amazon.com/Betaine-Hydrochloride-Pepsin-250-Tablets/dp/B00068IY0O/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1376775273&sr=8-2&keywords=betaine+HCI+tablets (I like these ones specifically because they’re tablets and I can break them in half. Now that my digestion is really getting back on track, I never need a full tablet and almost always break one in half.)

I’m not sure how I knew I needed HCI. I was actually doing GAPS (ugh) when I heard about it, and from there I started taking it for heartburn (it worked wonders for my heartburn). I think my low metabolism was probably accompanied by low stomach acid, but I don’t really know. You’ll know if you don’t need it, or if you need less, if you get some mild heartburn after taking it. That had never happened to me when taking them (I was seriously about to take almost any amount and feel nothing in the way of heartburn. I might get gross diarrhea, but no heartburn) until I started raising my metabolism. Now I know I can only take half a pill, and even then sometimes I’ll get a little bit of a burning sensation since I just don’t seem to need it much anymore.

So, the supplements were probably the biggest thing in toning down my reaction, but I also think that learning to really listen to what I was hungry for helped, too. Especially in the beginning, I would find that it was difficult to tell what I was actually hungry for. I had been on such weird diets for so long that it was hard to think of what I *could* eat, and from there, I just didn’t have a really great ability to discern what my body wanted. But I do know that when I ate things that didn’t sound palatable to me, my body didn’t seem to want them and would let me know via my stomach feeling kind of weird and off.

More about my history, umm….

I grew up eating whatever I wanted. My mother dieted, apparently a lot, while I was growing up, but (maybe it was the Asperger’s?) I guess was oblivious, because when my sisters and I were having a conversation a few weeks back, I said something like, “I’m surprised how open Mom is to dieting now, it didn’t seem like she did any of that when we were kids.” And they looked at me like I was crazy and told me she’d been on every fad diet that came into vogue since the beginning of time. And now, she doesn’t have a uterus, gallbladder, or the thyroid they irradiated before removing.

BUT ANYWAY… I don’t remember a ton of unhealthy relationships with food. My friend’s parents were all heavily into dieting and I do remember my friends counting calories, but we were never told that we were fat or anything of that sort (two of my grandparents said it a couple times, but my mother jumped so far down their throats they never brought it up again). I never was rail thin. I remember being a size 12 at 13 (probably 5’5″ at the time?) and a size 12, really, from then until 21 or so when I gained a bunch of weight due to a serious bout of depression and ballooned up to asize 16.

I never felt awesome about my weight, always felt fat and overweight, but never did much to combat it. I ate whatever I wanted, literally whatever I wanted, I just never ate enough unless I was really depressed.

So, I continued like this, eating mostly fast food and whatever was in the day-old bin at the Starbucks I worked for (oops, don’t tell the manager…), cupcakes, pumkpin bread, lots and lots of breve lattes… until my husband and I moved to South Korea in 2009 and it suddenly fell to me to learn to cook.

It’s not easy to teach yourself to cook off the internet without being influenced by other people’s ideas of health, so I fell into the WAPF way of eating. Living *in* a fairly traditional culture at the time, with tons of kimchi everywhere (which I do genuinely looove and miss), it just seemed to make sense.

Then I read about GAPS and planned to do the Intro Diet as soon as we set foot back in America. I lasted four days. Epic fail and I’m so glad it was, can’t imagine what eating a diet consisting only of soup could have done to me at that point. I killed the GAPS diet with a Five Guys double cheeseburger. After GAPS, I cut out sugar. After sugar, I cut out grains completely, deciding to go for a completely grain free diet, ala the Full GAPS Diet. It improved a lot of things for me and it did REALLY clear up my husband’s allergies and my asthma. So, I’ll give it that. But it sucked. We eventually devolved into a low carb gluten free diet, consisting mainly of meat and vegetables since I’d started reading more about Paleo/Primal. Most breakfasts consisted of eggs and bacon. Two foods I never want to touch again with a ten foot pole. I hated eggs then, but ate them since they were supposed to be nature’s wonder food. Since March, I have neither cooked now eaten one. Best thing that ever happened to me. Ugh, eggs.

Anyway, so I was literally subsisting on primarily butter, eggs, bacon and cashews, some coconut milk, steak, and when I wanted to feel really guilty, mandarin oranges or dark chocolate.

Since I started eating for heat, it’s been a sort of slow journey of finding out how to listen to my body. In the beginning, I would regularly leave Whole Foods with a box of cupcakes that would be gone by the evening, pizza, potstickers, chocolate mousse, and full fat milk. After the extreme hunger subsided, I got really nauseous on a regular basis. I would eat, but 1-2 hours later, I’d feel sick. Thankfully, that phase has passed as well, and I’ve started craving a mostly low fat diet. To me, that is completely bizarre, as I’ve never eaten nor even wanted to eat a low fat diet. I’ve always loved deep fat fried…pretty much anything. But now french fries and cheeseburgers (my two top favorite foods before this) just make me feel kind of sick to think about. I definitely eat them when I do want them. I don’t abstain based on any negativity harbored against fat or french fries and cheeseburgers. I just don’t want them most of the time. Instead, I had a fruit and yogurt smoothie and a mozzarella and chicken quesadilla for lunch yesterday.

Although, the cannoli and eclair I ate for breakfast were hardly low fat… I guess I should say I’ve been craving most of my fat from dairy. Don’t know what that’s about.

Oh, my gosh. Talk about writing a book…

All of that to say, I NEVER thought I’d be where I am right now. I didn’t like milk and always craved steaks and cheeseburgers before. Now, I get most of my fat and protein from dairy and don’t generally care much for meat.

It’s such a cool process to go through. I seriously love watching my food preferences change and seeing how my body reacts when I just eat what it wants and give it enough calories.

Blah, blah, blah. In short, I think listening to your body is SO key in the process and that the body performs miracles on itself if you just pay attention. I hope any of that was cohesive/made sense. I don’t have time to read back through it because I have to go to dinner soon, but I am sorry I get so long winded… :D

I definitely think gluten issues are real. My friend’s mom had issues with high blood pressure and allergies and high cholesterol, and gave up gluten and all of them totally resolved (she is not eating low-carb or anything; she just replaced the wheat with quinoa, rice and fruit, etc.). I can’t believe that’s all in her head. But at the same time, I think it’s important to remember that it’s a minority of the population that has an issue. Just because some people have problems doesn’t mean everyone should avoid it. There are whole populations that thrive on gluten-rich starches. You may fall into the minority that has issues, but it’s probably better to listen to your own biofeedback than read articles on it.

Did you read this post Matt did last year? http://180degreehealth.com/2012/12/the-gluten-free-diet-craze