Let’s start at the very beginning.. It’s a very good place to start!

I went gluten-free on December 3, 2009 because although it turns out that I don’t have Celiac, I’m very gluten intolerant. I was pretty sick for a long time (years of feeling tired and just generally unwell culminated into many awful months of severe sickness). But doctor after doctor, expensive test after test, no one could figure out why. Around October ’09, things got WAY worse and I thought I had something very, very wrong with me. Perhaps terminally wrong. I went through every test known to western medicine: blood work, CAT Scans, MRIs, Endoscopies, Colonoscopies… You name it, I had the test. But they couldn’t really find anything wrong with me. Doctors called it all kinds of different things (IBS, stress, fibromyalgia, depression) and prescribed all kinds of medications to mask the growing list of symptoms. Doctors sure do like to give you prescriptions! But it was a nurse practitioner who’d recently seen something on TV about Celiac Disease that put me on the road to Gluten Intolerance and, ultimately, to recovery. While her interest in food intolerance waned once my $800 Celiac genetic marker blood work came back negative, I finally took matters into my own hands and began an exclusionary diet the day after my Endoscopy. (I was told to keep up with the gluten FULL diet until the Endoscopy, which was difficult, but I’m glad I did: it showed severely blunted villi.) Once an actual “disease” was ruled out, all my doctors (GI, urologist, primary care, allergy) told me that it wasn’t the food that was making me sick. The blood test was negative! So...

What in the world is GFCF?!

I just got back from the allergist. “Hum… oh, no… you’re not allergic to gluten. No, no – you can still be intolerant of it – maybe even allergic. These scratch tests are only fifty percent eff – Oh! Wait! Yup. You’re allergic to Casein. What’s that? No, not meat. MILK.” I’m allergic to MILK not GLUTEN? Oi. So now I need to not only have a gluten free diet (’cause I don’t care WHAT the scratch test said: when I eat one BITE of bread my midsection grows more than FOUR INCHES in an hour from all the bloating and swelling that happens. Yes. I measured. Many times. ‘Cause I couldn’t believe it myself.) But now I need to add dairy products to my List o’ Nix. But I love, love, love cheese! And butter And ice cream … Hum. Wonder why I’m so .. um.. curvy. 😛 So, since I have to go through this, I figured I might as well write about it. ‘Cause it’s not going to be easy. And maybe if I blog about it, someone else can benefit from what I learn. And my mistakes. ‘Cause I’m sure there will be those. Here we...