'Why and how I started to eat gluten-free.'
Updated: Jun 24, 2021
Today I felt like talking about a topic I had some issues with recently: gluten-free. Each and every time I was saying ‘sorry, I can’t eat that because it contains gluten’, some people would reply ‘ha yeah I see, that’s trendy lately’. Erm… Great!
Just to be clear: no, I didn’t choose this way of life to ‘be trendy’, but to take care of my health!
Let’s go back in time. One year ago, my stomach hurt so bad everyday as digestion was hard, and I was extremely tired. I started to think I had a serious problem. I went to the doctor’s several times, and we ended up talking about allergies and intolerances. Actually, it was relevant to talk about it since my mother has many allergies (food colorings, for example). As far as I can remember, I always have seen her analyzing ingredients lists on each product she was buying. So it was indeed a possibility for me, to have allergies. The problem is: allergy tests are quite expensive! I decided to choose one test and see how it was going. The celiac test was negative, so I wasn’t allergic to gluten. However, I could totally be gluten intolerant. There is a great difference between the two options: allergy provokes important reactions while intolerance gives smaller everyday symptoms. According to the results, the doctor told me to avoid gluten and lactose for 7 months to see my body’s reaction once all toxins would be evacuated. This is how my journey began.
At the beginning…
I was motivated to stop eating gluten for a while. But now, it was all about understanding what exactly gluten was and where it was hidden. That was the first major puzzle!
Gluten is a protein that can be found in some cereals such as wheat (mainly), rye, barley, and spelled. I had t