Andrea’s Buzzing About:

“Oh, CRAP!” I exclaimed most vexedly from the kitchenette of the vacation condo.

“Shhh,” hubby chided from the living room where he and the kid had set up the chess board, “we’re playing a very intense game.”

“But I bought the wrong kind of chicken fillets — it has breading junk all over it. I can’t eat it, and I can’t use it in recipes.” I chucked the bag back into the freezer, and checked the other one, finding that it was exactly the same. Damn! I washed the cherries and ate several, feeling even more tired than before. Driving through the Rocky Mountain passes in the rain had been fatiguing, and it would also take me a day to get used to the 9090 feet/ 2770 meter elevation.

The local store hadn’t exactly been a close runner-up to the Whole Foods we’d visited yesterday while in Denver. We’d stopped at that market to buy lunches from their hot and cold food bars, and I’d been flabbergasted to find a whole aisle marked gluten-free. ::swoon::

If you don’t eat wheat (found not only in breads, pasta, pizza, crackers, cookies and cereals, but also an incredible number of processed foods), and you don’t eat red meat (mammals), then it’s really hard to dine out in the US. I try for most anything ethnic vegetarian or chicken & rice (that most flexible of dishes — there’s something in nearly every culture). If stuck in an American burgers/steaks/pasta venue, I invariably default to the salad, hopefully with a little chicken or grilled salmon for protein — that’s not bad, but there’s a limit to how much iceberg lettuce a body can stand.

It was a couple years ago that I started losing weight. While at an Italian restaurant, hubby suddenly piped up with one of his classic silly-old-hard-of-hearing-Dad malapropisms, “Mom is ‘emancipated’, don’t you think?” Of course, he meant ‘emaciated’. I became ten pounds underweight before a chance comment from a nurse a my uni’s clinic led me to figure out what was disagreeing with my gut.

A gluten-free diet of course requires a steep learning curve when shopping, but was less traumatic for me than for many people, simply because I’ve never been a big bread eater. At my apartment, loaves would linger until they got moldy, so eventually I resorted to buying packages of Dutch rusks for those rare occasions when I wanted something “on toast”. I tossed the rusks, and cleaned out the pantry where I stayed weekdays on campus. It was a bit like cleaning for Passover, except it wasn’t spring, and I’m not Jewish.

After being on a gluten-free diet for two months, I went to discuss the improvement with my GP. He drew blood, and the test came up negative for cœliac. Maybe it was just some kind of GI infection, I thought, and slid back into a normal diet with my family. And of course, got the typical problems, where wheat did the Macarena through my kishkas. A colonoscopy also yielded negative results. So technically, I’m not considered cœliac. I simply get the upset bowels and weight loss associated with gluten-intolerance.  (By the way, you can ignore the pseudo-science nonsense about wheat gluten — it does not really “turn into opiates in the brain”, nor does it cause ADHD, AS, APD et cetera.  Some people have gluten intolerance or coeliac in addition to ADHD, AS, TS or whatever, but there’s no causality. Wheat does unhappy things in my gut too, but when I stick to a GF diet, the only thing that improves is my gut. I’m still the happy ticcy, APD, ADHD aspie person I’ve always been … )

Back to the vacation, hubby and the kid left two days before I did, as he had out-of-town work he could do for a day. I took advantage of being alone to paint walls and to can up some jellies and garlic-dill pickles (everyone wants to eat the pickles, but no one wants to be around for the inception of pickles). On the ever-hopeful theory that maybe I’d just had problems in the past due to my gut biota being out of whack, I feasted on wheat for a day, consuming no less than four slices of bread, a couple of small cake rolls, and some crackers. Ooh, no good. At least no one else had to be around.

So, I avoid wheat, rye and barley. Doing so makes my innerds much happier. But it makes dining out a real challenge. Unlike a true cœliac, I don’t worry about contamination by trace quantities of wheat, but it’s still really hard to find foods that don’t disagree with me. I have to pack gluten-free energy bars for emergency rations.

The good news is that gluten-free (GF) items are becoming much more common in markets. I’ve been able to order a GF meal on plane flights (trust me, that’s not a luxury or merely “being picky” when I’m cramped in that flying can for eight hours). I even found a restaurant in my metro area that has GF pizza! Because specialty foods are expensive, I bake my own goodies. But the biggest problem is that most restaurateurs have never heard of such. It’s just one more thing that makes life a level more difficult.