Are you tired of being gluten free? Do you wish you could start eating real bread, pasta, and deserts again? Here is the story of how I reversed my gluten intolerance and can enjoy all the wheat products once again.
Life was no fun being gluten free. Buying gluten free products was expensive and something I was not willing to pay for because it wasn’t worth it. They never did taste that great.
Not having gluten and wheat products like bread, pasta, and desserts made me sad. I really missed gluten so over the past 5 years that I have been gluten free, I never really bought into the fact that this was a better way to live for me. Sure, I didn’t have as bad of stomach aches and the other symptoms that I experienced, but I knew that deep down inside there was a better way to live. Surely, this was not the way that I was created to live.
I wanted to flourish, but I just didn’t know how. This is my story of how I became gluten free and then finally found healing and food freedom. I pray it encourages you in your own health journey.
Why I Went Gluten Free
Let’s begin with my childhood. I grew up in a third world country where we ate mostly fresh organically grown food. We ate a lot of bread, pasta, and dessert containing gluten multiple times a week.
Gluten and wheat products were never a problem for me growing up. I ate everything and enjoyed everything that everyone else was enjoying.
Then I came to the states to go college and must I say much about college food? It is meant for your survival and not much else.
At the time, I thought food was food. I had no knowledge of food quality or what the organic label was. In fact when I first heard about it, I thought it was just a scam to get people to pay more for food.
I wasn’t aware of very many symptoms of struggling with gluten until one night when I couldn’t go to sleep because I had the worst stomach ache I have ever had. It was so bad I had no desire to eat for the next three days. Every time I ate something, the stomach ache wasn’t as severe, but it wasn’t that great either.
A friend suggested that gluten might be the culprit so I mulled over the idea of cutting out wheat completely from my diet. After many weeks of feeling terrible, occasionally having bad stomach aches, and just being overly tired, I made the leap into a gluten free diet.
I did start feeling better, but not near enough to my liking.
I completely cut out gluten for 5 years and although there are many gluten free options of different foods, they were expensive and I couldn’t justify spending so much on stuff that didn’t taste like the real thing. The only gluten free food that tasted as good as the real thing was gluten free oreos and you can’t survive off of oreos.
I ate mostly whole foods that naturally didn’t contain wheat, and for the most part I enjoyed it, but I still had many struggles with not having gluten in my life.
My Struggles with a Gluten Free Diet
Like I said, eating gluten free was good for the most part, but when it wasn’t, it was very hard. I would get really sad and almost depressed because I couldn’t eat so many things. The times that were the hardest for me were…
- Restriction at gatherings – It’s hard to see something delicious when you are at someone’s house or a family gathering and refuse to eat it because you have decided to tell yourself that you can’t have it. It will make you sick, which might be true, but did God create us to enjoy life like this?
- Having non-gluten free family members – I am a full time homemaker and it is my joy as a homemaker to do extra things that my husband really enjoys. He really likes desserts so I would try to make gluten free desserts that we could all share, but they never were really good. Either they tasted weird or would fall apart. Sometimes they were just gooey. I did try making him regular desserts that weren’t gluten free, but then I would struggle with not eating it myself. Who can watch someone else eat a cookie and not eat one themselves? It was so hard watching him eat something with gluten in it like tortillas or a sandwich. It was just hard. I can do hard things, but consistently being faced with this hard thing often made me depressed.
- Desserts – I love cake, but I love a good guilt free cake even better! There were very little gluten free cake recipes out there that I felt actually contained healthy ingredients and that I could eat without feeling guilty. The stuff that was gluten free and healthy we couldn’t afford so I just didn’t eat dessert or tried to experiment with other flours and that typically didn’t go very well. There had to be a better way to live because I was finding this lifestyle not a good way to flourish.
- The Thought of Living this Way Forever – Deep down, I greatly disliked restricting my diet. It was hard in a very unhappy way. It seemed like an unnecessary struggle to have to eat no wheat products for the rest of my life. I just couldn’t do it, but I didn’t know where to find the solutions. I also felt that God did not create me to live this way. Surely there was some kind of freedom from this.
I knew that there was a better way to live, I just didn’t know where to look. I prayed and I searched, jumping on every train of thought from blogs and podcasts that sounded like it was what I was looking for.
The Things I Tried
I tried a lot of different things. Did I mention that shortly after I cut out gluten, I started having rosacea which is a rash on your face that will not go away and which everyone says is incurable? This along with my unwillingness with not eating gluten fueled my search for five long years.
Some of the things I tried were…
- Traditional Diets – Eating whole foods and whole grains, cooking from scratch. This was inherently good, but I was still missing key pieces to the puzzle.
- Dairy Free – On top of being gluten free, I went dairy free when my oldest was born because when I had dairy, I felt like whatever was passed through my milk to him made his stomach hurt and caused him to spit up a lot. I cut out everything except cheese. I just couldn’t go all the way. No wonder he struggles with food with the start that I gave him of lacking key nutrients even as a nursing baby. Cutting out more food didn’t help my health or my happiness in any way and it didn’t last for very long.
- Plant Paradox – This was a diet created by a doctor out in California that believed we should be eating more raw veggies and less meat. I tried this and ate a lot of salads until I got so sick of them which led me to the last thing that I tried.
- Low Carb – There were no real results of being healthier following what was laid out in the Plant Paradox so I thought that maybe I just needed to do more. Maybe I hadn’t gone far enough down this path so for a few months I tried going low carb. Boy, was I starving all the time! I was expecting our second at the time and that didn’t help my hunger either. I would eat and eat and then eat so much that I felt terrible. There was no winning. It wasn’t the normal hunger of pregnancy. It was an insatiable lack of nourishment and I didn’t know what to do.
None of these things really gave me answers or solved the things that I was struggling with. But I refused to give up. I refused to think that there was no answer to my problems.
Soon after being low carb and then my daughter being born, God dropped the answer into my lap.
How I healed
It was two months after I had my daughter that I listened to my favorite podcast Simple Farmhouse Life that Lisa Bass had two women on to talk about Pro Metabolic Eating.
I had not heard a thing about this, but their stories were ones of deep healing from many things and it wasn’t some crazy diet where you restricted this and you couldn’t eat that that gave them healing. It was making a lifestyle shift of little habits and how they viewed food that brought them healing.
It was a God-send and I was all in! I sent that episode to so many people asking them what they thought. I felt a little crazy, but I was so enthralled that women could find healing from so much. If they could heal from all that, how hard would it be to heal from the few things that I had on my plate. I felt like it was possible so I jumped right in and got started with Pro Metabolic Eating.
I started feeling better and wasn’t so starving all the time even while nursing a newborn. I started sleeping better after years of randomly waking and not being able to go back to sleep for hours. The best part was that I was able to start eating gluten again!
This didn’t mean that I went all out all the time and never had any reaction. Here’s what I did to start eating gluten again…
- Homemade Sourdough – I started making my own bread products with sourdough. I had heard several years ago that people who are gluten intolerant can tolerate sourdough because the natural fermentation process breaks down the gluten making it easier to digest. I tried store-bought sourdough and making my own, but it still made me sick. It turns out the poor quality of the flour I was using because it was cheaper and additives are still hard to digest so it didn’t matter that it was sourdough. I gave sourdough a second chance a year later, but this time making it with organic flour and I have had nothing but success! There is so much that you can make with sourdough, too. There are blogs and blogs with sourdough recipes which is super helpful and wonderful!
- Organic Flour Products – Although homemade sourdough products like sourdough pasta are healthier because they are more fresh and are easier to digest, I just couldn’t wait around to learn how to make them so I bought organic pasta for a while. I love pasta and couldn’t restrict myself from enjoying it any more. Oh my! Did it taste good after so long of eating gluten free pasta and then none at all! I could tell I still struggled with digesting it so I do it sparingly now, but I got a pasta maker for Christmas so fingers crossed that I will learn how to make homemade sourdough pasta sometime soon. Life just isn’t the same without pasta!
- Followed Pro Metabolic Eating – There are a lot of helpful principles in Pro Metabolic Eating that helped lower the stress on my digestion so that it could get out of the flight or fight mode and relax enough to heal. I healed enough that I could eat whatever gluten I wanted at gatherings without major repercussions (usually it just made my rosacea flare, but no other problems). I could also make whatever dessert my heart desired with sourdough. I didn’t have to live gluten free anymore!
For awhile, I tried to stick solely to Pro Metabolic Eating 100% of the time, but that just wasn’t sustainable. Since then, I adhere to the 80/20 rule of following Pro Metabolic Eating 80% of the time and then not worrying and simply enjoying food the 20% of the time that I am out and about with friends, at families for dinner, or at Sunday School when someone usually brings a snack.
I wasn’t flourishing doing Pro Metabolic Eating 100% of the time, but 80/20 seems to be a good balance and has allowed me to eat well and not worry about the times that I don’t have as much control over food quality.
Final Thoughts!
God gave me food freedom through Pro Metabolic Eating! It wasn’t an overnight healing. It did take time, sadly more from trying to understand it and figure out how to make it work on a budget than from simply healing.
When starting something new, it can be overwhelming with all the information that is thrown in your lap. That is why I passionately and slowly share what I am learning about Pro Metabolic Eating here on the blog.
There is so much truth in this lifestyle, so much food freedom, and so much healing! I cannot tell you that this will solve all your problems, but I can say that Pro Metabolic Eating has gone a long way to solve mine way farther than anything else that I tried ever did. So if you are interested in finding out more on how I reversed my gluten intolerance and can enjoy gluten again guilt free, check out what I have written on the Pro Metabolic Eating page or jump on my email list and reply with any questions that you have.
Blessings on your health journey!
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