No, not goodbye to gluten. Goodbye to gluten-free. Adios. Sayonara. Don't drop that bag of quinoa spaghetti noodles on your way out.
I'll tell you how I did it — and I'll tell you why I did it, why I relished the decision to do it, eagerly awaiting the day — but, first, some background:
As far back as I can remember, I'd always wanted to be a Goodfeather felt like crap. I'd get tired easily, had wild mood swings, and had some epic bowel issues that came out to play at the most inconvenient times. My dad was the same way, so I just figured it was something genetic, and my mom suffers from depression so that, to me, explained the mood swings.
I'd bury the grody feelings in caffeine, or exercise, or work; anything to take my mind off, but none of the solutions ever worked and the feelings never went away. It got really bad in my mid-twenties when physical symptoms — RLS-y feelings and this pain in my hamstrings I could only ever describe as "a headache in my leg" (fortunately not at the same time, however) — presented themselves and I was forced to see my doctor. He was puzzled by everything but sent me to a physical therapist for the leg pain.
Six weeks or so of PT visits, actually beginning some exercise again, working hard to change habits, fixed literally nothing. Then one day, my wife, a compassionate yet skeptical nurse, was doing some research on gluten-free diets (because some of her patients claimed they needed it, saying it was just healthier) and read the list of common symptoms of celiac and gluten sensitivity.
She read them off to me as we were two-thirds of the way through a pizza and I was swinging away at my second beer of the afternoon. I mentally checked the box next to one symptom after another and looked, mournfully, at the pizza box on the table next to us.
"This is the last pizza I get to have for a while, isn't it?" I asked, the bitterness evident on my face.
"I think you should at least give it a try," she said.
We worked on some meal planning and found a specialty store nearby where a helpful dude with dreadlocks pointed us toward some of the better-tasting GF foods. He was a strict vegetarian, and had tried gluten-free, but failed pretty quickly. My wife asked why.
"The beer. It's too hard to give up."
I nodded in return and looked away while he rang up our purchases.
Within a week, every symptom was gone. The IBS-y nonsense, the fatigue, the irritability, the 3pm brain fog, the leg pain, disappeared almost completely. Within a month, I was what Jamie Lee Curtis would call "regular" and I was able to take my dog for a run for the first time in years without intense leg pain. It was sensational.
Except that the diet is fairly terrible. I've been through vegetarian phases, I dabbled with strict veganism, I've given up foods and certain types of foods for different things, but never, ever have I struggled so hard simply to get excited about — sometimes even interested in — what I was eating.
"Yeah, I'll have the, uh.... Hmm... I guess I'll have the side salad, with, um... No dressing?"
Cue the sad looks from around the table, and the eye-roll from the waiter.
For the first couple years of my GF sentence, I had cheat days or weekends every so often, usually around holidays or when we were traveling. (We went to Portland for a week and I wasn't going to miss out on the beer.) But the punishment just got worse and worse. The fatigue, the bloating, the irritability, it took less and less to trigger a response over time.
Guinness — the last bastion of my pre-GF life that I could turn to in times of need — eventually turned on me and caused the same issues as a whole pan full of lasagne.
(In this desert of disappointing food choices, I did discover the joy of bourbon whiskey, distilled in my state's southern cousin. It's home and mine close enough I could spend a weekend walking through the sweet haze of rickhouses and enjoying the mellow, slow, hedonism-friendly drink of the bluegrass. The one, and possibly only, upside to this whole endeavor, but something I'll genuinely cherish and appreciate forever.)
Over the summer, while thoroughly enjoying sweaty Mason jars of mules and Manhattan nightcaps, I got into a real funk over food. I'd become a stuck wheel in group outings. The teetotaler at dinner. I'd become utterly, utterly tired of pretending the soggy gluten free pizza crust, or the stale-cake-textured bread on a sandwich, could compare to the real thing, and borderline depressed at the thought of keeping up that façade for the rest of my life.
So I decided — and, actually, declared out loud — I was going to try anything, whatever I could, to get over it. I started reading through this sub, I googled for cures to gluten sensitivity, I read blogs by people who clearly had no grounding in medicine or science (and sometimes barely a grounding in reality). I talked it all through with my wife, explained what I'd learned about leaky gut and possible causes of wonky gut flora, watched her roll her eyes so hard I thought they may not return to normal when I sarcastically name-dropped Jenny McCarthy, and hatched a plan.
I stayed on the GF Train and started taking probiotics twice a day and made a conscious effort to drink a healthy amount of water. If the internet was accurate, I'd have some exciting bowel events if things were working. Two hearty poops every day for a solid week. Awesome. There's a gear turning in there somewhere.
A week and a half in, with plenty more reading under my belt, I added in L-glutamine tablets once per day, between lunch and dinner, and ate yogurt every day for shits and giggles. (Mostly the shits.)
Three weeks in, I went out with a friend for drinks. I studied the whiskey list but wasn't feeling at all moved. It was a warm late-summer evening, I'd had gluten-free sweet potato shepherd's pie for dinner, it was pint night at the restaurant. I wanted a beer.
I ordered a Guinness. And then another, marveling at how the simplest things can bring such great joy. I didn't feel a thing, aside from that unique-to-beer feeling of my face getting bubbly as I took the last swig of the second drink. I smiled a big, warm, happy smile the whole walk home.
A week later, I was ready to try the real thing. I was in a meeting with vendors at work and the lunch options were deli sandwiches or a bottle of water. I figured there was no better time to dive in than now, presented here with a ham-and-cheddar sandwich so simple and blue-collar my card-carrying union family may have wept at its brilliance.
It was about as appetizing as you'd expect, but I put it away all the same. And pilfered a cookie from another department's office. I felt fine. Good, even. I was cautiously elated. I asked my wife if we had any beer in the refrigerator at home (she never fully gave up the good stuff). She said she thought so. As soon as I got my son to bed, I cracked the first beer I'd had in more than a year: A Sam Adam's Holiday Porter. (I hope from 2015, but it wouldn't have mattered.)
It was simple bliss. I sipped it slowly. And, quietly, wished we had something better.
I waited a couple days before trying anything else gluteny to see if any symptoms would surface, and kept up the two-a-day probiotics (plus the L-glutamine), but none of the usual suspects came to visit. I was still cautious, but growing more and more excited. The next week I branched out a little more. I didn't hold the croutons on salad, and chose my salad dressing with reckless abandon. I had Taco Bell. At home, I broke out the real soy sauce and made pancakes with regular, old all-purpose flour. I cut back to one probiotic pill a day.
All digestive systems normal.
Now, in all this I want to be very, very clear that I am empathetic and sympathetic to the need for gluten-free diets. Amid the mockery of my skeptical friends and suspicion of my family, I came to understand the misery that this silly little protein — as well as the dance you do to avoid it — can bring on. I think most people could do without gluten, and everyone could do with a lot less of it, in their lives. I'm so happy restaurants and food producers are becoming more aware of what is a very real problem for so many people and are trying to take care of them. I will never question someone's dietary choices.
And I pray, earnestly, that this brief period of gastronomical tranquility and happiness continues, because my dietary choice, for as long as I can make it, will be to stay on the gluteney side of life.
Unfortunately, this experiment, while generally successful, has uncovered something I'd feared for a while: I'll set up an appointment to have it checked next time I'm in for a tune-up with my doctor, but I'm 95% sure I have a wheat allergy. After a very healthy summer and a 2016 with very few illnesses in the house, I've had a mild but persistent cough, congestion, and sputum since just after that ham-and-cheddar sandwich a few weeks ago. I have a similar reaction every spring when the pollen comes back out to play.
Honestly, if it doesn't get any worse I can accept it as the price I pay NOT to worry about whether or not there's a tiny little bit of gluten in any food I eat between now and when I'm too senile to know the difference.
If you're a reluctant, unhappy gluten-freer, and you want to give this a shot, I'm happy to give you a more detailed overview of the approach and to aim you at links for the pills I'm taking. I can't imagine it's for everyone, I can't imagine it'd have a scientifically significant success rate. But, if you're over it like I was and just want some goddamn pasta, it can't hurt too badly.
TL;DR: I had issues with gluten. I took some supplements to fix what may have been the problem. It seems to have worked, at least for now. I had soft-shelled tacos for dinner and wrote this while drinking an Oktoberfest.
Submitted October 09, 2016 at 06:30AM by Diauxreia http://ift.tt/2d3mXwJ glutenfree
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