The Eating Experiment: Pt 1, the Whys of Going Gluten-Free

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So I mentioned in my Lent post that I have been almost entirely gluten-free for going on two months now (save those dark chocolate brownies on the first day of Lent. Mmmmm, sacrilicious).  The desire to change my eating patterns for better health started several years ago--but I will write about that next.  The more recent impetus for this first change was that bad cold/viral/bacterial/who knows what that pretty much wiped me out for almost 2 months.  My family all got a touch of it, but just a touch--for them it was just a mild cold, easily shrugged off, while for me it became an ongoing, life-sucking drudge. 

(by the way, one of the fun things about writing in this blog is that I get to stir the gray matter a bit, and words that seem like they might say what I mean float to the surface, pleasant re-discoveries that don't normally come into use.  But I don't trust my instincts usually--I have to look the words up to make sure I'm not using them too outrageously.  So just now I had the pleasure of looking up the definitions of drudge, dredge, and dreck, and finding them all pretty much just what I had thought, which is most satisfying.  As is learning that dreck is Yiddish.)

So after being under the weight of illness for over a month, I remember talking and swapping woes with my dear Becky, who was herself also going through the same yuck.  She told me about a conversation she had recently had with her own mother, who lives just down the lane from her.  She had been bemoaning her illness, and commenting on how something was going around and everybody had been getting it (which was true--a friend of mine who is an ER doc locally told me when the wave of sick people started coming to the ER, the docs all said to one another, "Is this what the flu is going to look like this year?"  But then a month later the true flu suffers starting coming in, so something else had been making the rounds first).  But Becky's mom just said to her, "Becky, I haven't gotten it."  Becky's mom was attributing her overall good health to being gluten-free, which she has been for years.  So, Becky decided to try going gluten-free. 
So there I was, sick, desperate for anything to help me get better, and knowing in my core that my diet probably had something important to do with how I feel and how I fight illness--I heard this story from Becky, and in the very same week no less than three bloggers I read announced they either were or were going gluten-free, for health reasons. 

It seemed like the writing on the wall. 

Oh, and by the way, I did not go to the Dr. for my illness.  First I thought, Oh this will be over with soon, it's just a cold.  Then I was getting better, only to have a terrible rebound.  Then when it was at its worst, the last thing I wanted to do when I felt so cruddy and was just managing to keep my head above the water in my homeschool and household duties was work out the logistics of getting to the dr. without or without four children. So I said to myself, If I don't get better soon, I'll go to the doctor, but in the meantime I decided to try the gluten-free (GF) thing to see if it made a difference in my healing.   And it really was not that hard to do--a GF diet is free of wheat, barley and rye, but still allows oats, cornmeal, rice, quinoa and potatoes. (And a bunch of other uncommon flours and grains, like millet and almond flour, but I don't think I'll be going there.)  My goal was just to see if I could avoid gluten for at least 6 weeks and try to determine if being gluten free seemed to improve my overall well-being.  

I really do not know definitively whether or not the gluten was hampering my immune system; all I can say is I did get better pretty quickly after that. I would say I was 95% normal after a week and 1/2 of going GF.  But it could have just been the illness finally running its natural course.  So I decided to stick with the experiment through Lent, giving a longer time period for my body to respond.

I looked up the symptoms of gluten insensitivity on various medical webpages, and those do not particularly seem to fit me, so I don't think I will end up keeping a gluten free diet longer than Lent.  At that time I will re-introduce gluten foods slowly, just to help confirm whether or not I feel a difference in my body.  And I'll try to re-introduce only the grains that are best for us, like whole grains--and limit how much I ingest in a day, since while gluten so far does not seem like a big deal to my body, I am sensing that carbohydrates in general are problematic for me.

continued in Pt. 2, for anyone who might find this interesting ; )