My Gluten Free Journey
I was always a kid with a tummy ache… I went to countless doctors from the time I was 6-7 into adulthood. I was poked, probed, and prodded from every end and angle. It wasn’t fun. After many years, I was told I had Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) and Grumbling Appendix Syndrome. I was also told that I just needed to have a good fart?!?!?! I was in constant pain and no one could give me an answer. My hands and feet would swell up and I felt like I had a swollen belly all the time. Of course, as a teen, this didn’t help with body image issues.
Eventually, I stopped going to the doctors and just accepted my fate, I had IBS and that was that. I would look up the symptoms of IBS desperately trying to understand my syndrome and would often feel more misunderstood as my symptoms didn’t resemble the symptoms listed. It was so confusing and I felt completely misunderstood.
I went on like this through my teen and young adult years. I was constantly tired, not feeling well, and anxious. During my 3rd and 4th year of University, I developed severe anxiety and thought it was only due to the stress I was under trying to get good grades, work 20 hours a week and get the summer work experience I needed to hopefully land a job in a bad job market. I turned to coffee to help me through.
Coffee carried me for many years… it helped me find a husband!!! LOL! I would finish up my day at University and then stop at Starbucks on the way to my evening job. I managed to meet an amazing man who became my best friend and husband.
We got married! Woohoo! He then went to University and I was suddenly a new Grad putting my new husband through 4 years of University. The exhaustion, lethargy, brain fog, and anxiety continued. We drank A LOT of coffee. Well, of course, we were just starting out, working/studying long hours, and trying to survive. Each day I would drag…. I thought it was the stress and the boring profession I had chosen. I was disillusioned, of course, I blamed life circumstances as I didn’t know any other reality.
Woo hoo! We survived, my husband graduated from University, I got my professional designation and we had a baby on the way. Now life was going to get better….
Enter baby…. A sweet little spirited girl. Labor was awful, and It became an emergency. Okay, the lack of sleep and healing, etc… I told myself that was why the depression set in and the anxiety increased. It would get better right? Nope… didn’t help. Our wonderful little girl didn’t sleep through the night until she was 7 (more on this in her story).
We were all stressed, neither my husband nor I was sleeping. He started to not feel well. We thought it was just the stress of a new career, a baby, and very LITTLE sleep.
When our daughter was 3, we took an amazing trip to San Francisco. The trip was life changing in more ways than 1. Not only did we fall in love with the City, my husband also got deathly ill and started puking uncontrollably. He lost 10 pounds in about 5 days. It was traumatizing! He was embarrassed and I thought he was dying. I remember being on a packed subway car and he started to puke, he had to swallow it back down because he couldn’t puke all over the packed train car.
Once we got back home, he went straight to the doctor. The doctor started to ask about family history and because my Mother in Law is Celiac, my husband got tested. His antibody numbers were so high that the doctor was so confident in the diagnosis that he didn’t feel it necessary to order a biopsy to confirm a diagnosis.
My husband started to eat gluten free immediately. Within 2 weeks I had a new husband. He started to gain back the weight he lost and actually started to re-gain some of the energy that had been lost. We thought his body aches, gray appearance, and brain fog were due to his demanding job and our lack of sleep.
Slowly, he regained his strength and returned to the man I had met years before. The move to a gluten free lifestyle was hard. He had been a pasta/carboholic for years and I had no clue how to prepare gluten free meals, beyond teasing his mother that she needed to eat cardboard. We started to make gluten free meals for him but my daughter and I would still eat glutinous meals.
Our daughter started to have learning challenges and still wasn’t sleeping more than 45 minutes at a time. She was almost 7 and hadn’t lost a tooth and her hair wasn’t even at her chin (more on her gluten free story). We had her tested for celiac. The doctors thought it was unlikely that she was celiac but reluctantly agreed given that her Grandma and Dad were both positive. Shockingly, the test came back positive!
We agreed to do a trial…. We were going to eat 100% gluten free as a family for 2 weeks and see if it made a difference for our daughter. Wowsa, we had a new kid in 2 weeks. She even recognized she was feeling so much better that she never wanted to eat gluten again!
Surprisingly, during this process, I also started to feel better. Hmmm, that was odd. I ignored it at first and would still eat gluten and treats when at work. I started to notice my symptoms more. Wow, this is weird. I would get itchy eyes when I ate something with gluten. My anxiety would almost seem to ramp up. Wow, so incredibly weird. I was also trying to lose weight during this time, so decided that eating treats on coffee breaks didn’t make sense, so essentially committed to no junk while working or going out for lunch.
I started to feel better! My brain fog cleared, the swelling in my hands and feet went down. My anxiety lessened and I didn’t feel like every single day was such a drag. I kept it up for a few months. I then convinced myself that I was making it all up and went on a bender! I ate pizza, cheeseburgers, poutine, donuts, all the goodies one weekend. Wow! That was a mistake, I felt like I got hit with a ton of bricks. My eyes were burning (like someone had rubbed a cat all over my face) my hands and feet swelled up, my tummy got bloated, my body ached, and my thinking resembled that of trying to maneuver through a marshmallow cloud. Plus, I had a number of MAJOR panic attacks. I convinced myself that I had developed celiac and went to the doctor for testing. The results came back negative! What?!?!? How could this be? I felt so much better and then got so sick when I ate gluten. I didn’t believe it. I turned to genetic/sensitivity testing. Yep, both sets of tests came back with a Gluten Sensitivity! Okay, wow, this suddenly made sense. I didn’t have IBS, I had a Gluten Sensitivity and was genetically pre-disposed to getting Celiac
I have successfully maintained a gluten free diet for close to 5 years now. I have been glutened or made the mistake of being sucked into my favorite cheeseburger. I quickly realize how awful I feel. Within 20 minutes the itchy eyes start and over the next 24 -48 hours I got through various stages of sickness, bloating, and anxiety.