In Which The Maven Admits to Feeling Freaked Out

Have I ever mentioned I have an onion allergy?

Not that it's ever been confirmed by an allergist, but raw onions (not well-cooked, for some reason) make my tongue and throat go numb, and make it a little harder for me to breathe. I've been known to vomit after accidentally consuming them, too. My doctor has recommended I get tested and carry around an epi pen just in case, but I have yet to do that. You'd think I have more pressing items on my to-do list, like raising three gremlins and meeting all their medical needs. I'll get to it - eventually. Hopefully before I actually need epinephrin.

But the most interesting thing about my allergy - or sensitivity I guess, since we don't know for sure if it's an allergy - is that the smell makes me feel sick. For whatever reason, I get nauseous whenever I'm around a cut up onion. This is why we don't have onions in our house. We don't cook with them. If my husband wants his onion fix, he gets it at work - far away from yours truly. It's been like this pretty much my entire life. The smell is overpowering to my senses and my body goes into revolt. But I can live with that, because my day-to-day isn't terribly affected. 

Recently, I've started getting grossed out by the smell of bread. I've been gluten-free now for almost four months. For the first month I missed the stuff terribly. I would breathe in the delicious smell of something I could not longer taste and pathetically pretend I had just had a bite. Gluten-free bread has nothing on its wheat-filled counterpart. The vast majority of it wants to make me scrape off my taste buds. It's heavy, flavourless and dry. I've found a couple of decent recipes, but they still don't come close to a good french loaf. 

By a couple of months into this whole no-gluten thing, I started dreading going down the bread aisle at the grocery store. The sweet, yeasty smell of hundreds of loaves made me feel a bit sick. I don't like the smell anymore, but I can manage the aisle with only a slight look of disgust on my face. 

But today - oh, today - I was blown away by my body's reaction to, of all things, toast. 

I make kid sandwiches (uh, sandwiches for the kids, not made out of kids - I'm not that burned out, people) every night to pack in their lunches the next day. It's part of my Awesome Mom routine, which is to be expected from me. I've got it going on in all the right places, and stuff.

-- Oh, sorry. What were we talking about? 

Anyway, while I don't love the smell of bread these days, I can still manage to make sandwiches. I wash my hands after, throw the cutting board in the dishwasher (to avoid cross-contamination) and go on about my life. But this morning, the boys decided to switch up their breakfast menu and ask for toast - something they haven't had much of since I went gluten-free. Generally, we don't use a lot of regular bread in the house (see cross-contamination reference above), but we do have a side of the toaster dedicated to wheat bread, so I popped a couple of slices in and left the room to do my makeup.

When I came back in, Geekster was buttering their toast, and I almost hurled all over the kitchen floor. The smell - that sweet, wheaty smell I used to love more than anything - made me turn around and head to the bathroom. 

It's official: my body hates gluten. It onion hates it, even.

I didn't puke, thankfully. But I gagged. And my stomach was in knots for a good half hour after I left the house to drive the gremlins to school. And no, I'm not pregnant. If you read my posts from last week then you know it's not cyclically possible. Besides, my husband got the big V in the Summer of '08 and I am not having a torrid affair with a fertile man (or an infertile man, for the record). But if you've ever been pregnant, then you know the feeling that overcame me. It felt like morning sickness, except I was fine before and am just fine now. That one smell sent my body into chaos. 

Geekster was so concerned that he said we should stop toasting wheat bread from now on. I told him that's silly: The kids should be able to have toast, and I'm 34 for crying out loud. I can handle feeling a bit woozy sometimes. It just took me off guard today, that's all. But then again, just about everything about my body since going gluten-free has caught me off guard.

First of all, I still get the occasional flare-up. It's usually a few hours to a day after I've been to a restaurant or wasn't vigilant about washing surfaces and hands in my own kitchen. I'll start to feel run down, sick, bloated, sore, and the digestive issues will kick in. It's like a mini stomach flu or a mini food poisoning that passes in a few hours. I had one this past Friday and had to cancel my plans. I was too sick to do anything but have a hot bath and sit in my jammies with some tea. These flare ups are rare, but when they happen they yank me out of my happy place and into the pity place of "this is so unfair". I've heard they're pretty common in more sensitive gluten-intolerant/celiac people. I was just sort of hoping I was of the less sensitive variety. Dammit.

Secondly, I am losing weight. And, while I'm happy about it, I'm also a little freaked out. Anyone who's lost weight after being heavy for a long time (in my case that would be my entire adult life) knows what I'm talking about: It's fucking scary. It's exciting, but terrifying. The Fat Activists are going to hate me for this comment, but I don't know what I look like under my fat suit. My cellulite-filled self is changing by the day. The jeans I got two weeks ago are already far less snug than when I tried them on, and not because my M&Ms-filled belly is stretching them (it really is full of M&Ms of the peanut variety right now. Mmmm, candy lunch.) 

For the first time in a long while, I'm not trying to lose weight. I still eat chocolate and chips when I feel like it. I still unflinchingly put butter on my air-popped corn. I eat when I'm hungry and stop when I'm satisfied, as I always have. I do a minimal amount of exercise - nothing like I used to when I was trying to shed pounds - and yet I'm watching my waistline shrink every week. I've discovered that I do have cheekbones after all; they were just taking an extended vacation in Blubberville, USA. My chin is a little lonely now that there's only one of her, but she's seeking a bit of comfort in her long-distance relationship with this thing called a "neck" that we found hiding under my head.

In short, I have no idea who this person is that's emerging from the archeological dig that is my body's weight purge. I have no clue if she's pretty, what her bone structure is like, what size her hips will eventually be. Thankfully it's a slow process, so we're getting to know each other without a lot of pressure. I have always identified myself as overweight; it's become part of who I am. My weight, as much as I have loathed it and worried about its repercussions over time, has been a shield of comfort, of protection from the world. And now it's leaving. After all the times I tried to get rid of it, how often I cried over it, I didn't realize I might actually miss it. 

And if you didn't think I was crazy before, I've now written an entire post to convince you otherwise. The Maven has a psychosomatic gag reaction to onions and toast, and is mourning her fat.  I may be nuts enough to warrant my own psychology study. Please send money to the following address. Thank you. 

I like to Smell Old Food (a gluten-free update)

Can I confess something in the deep, dark recesses of the internet where no one will ever see it?

I really miss wheat.

Wheat, barley and rye, to be exact. Glutenous substances I have banned from my life - most likely forever. Gods, how I miss them! Every day, I remember something else I can't eat. It makes for an often surly Maven.

On Canadian Thanksgiving in mid-October, I bid farewell to my old friend, Gluten. We had a long history together, but it turned bad toward the end and I had to take a break and see if he was the one causing the problems. I wrote about previously, but to put it in a nutshell, I was falling apart in multiple ways.

My dietary equivalent of  a bad boyfriend: Yummy, but no good for me.

Mentally, I was both anxious and depressed (neat trick), unable to to focus, quick to anger, and I forgot words and complete sentence more than I'd like to admit. I had writer's block 95% of the time, which is no good when you're, like, a writer. My brain and I all but stopped speaking to each other. Thankfully, she was kind enough to remind me to breathe and keep my heart beating, but not much else. She didn't do the Facebook equivalent of de-friending me, but she pretty much blocked me from seeing her Facebook wall and new photo albums. Bitch.

The rest of my body was not much better. A painful, itchy rash on my hands; pitted, ridged fingernails with white lines on them; unexplained elevated liver enzymes; acne; borderline anemia; the obvious weight issues; fatigue; digestive problems; and likely many other things I'm forgetting. My body was going into shutdown mode, and we couldn't figure out why. Every month was worse than the last, to the point where I thought I must be dying.

(The inner hypochondriac emerges. She comes out when my brain isn't staying on top of the whole logic thing. Hello, nice to meet you. By the way, you're probably dying.)

So, like I mentioned before, I found out through the wonders of the internet that all these scary/annoying things can be symptoms of celiac disease or, some, to a lesser extent, can be attributed to the less worrisome gluten intolerance fan club. They can also be cancer, liver or kidney failure and a few other scary things that might send my inner hypochondriac running for the nearest bar, but first things first: take out the gluten, and see how I felt. So that's what I did.

It's been about a month-and-a-half, so I thought I should do some updating. Status: I feel a lot better. Like, a lot better. I look a lot better. I have a glow to my skin again. I have more energy. I have less anxiety, and no signs of depression anymore. I have creativity again. My hair has shine to it (I feel like a commercial). My nails are growing in strong and healthy for the first time in years -which is a good indicator that my organs are getting what they need to work efficiently. About half my nail bed is new growth from the last few weeks. There are no pits, no white spots in that part of the nail, and they're not brittle anymore. When I eat, I feel energized instead of tired.

I feel alive. My non-medical opinion through a great deal of talk and research, is that my digestive system is repairing itself enough to absorb the nutrients my body has been lacking for a long time. That's why everything is slowly getting better, and why I suddenly feel ten years younger. How frightening, and yet how very exciting. It's worth a damn parade, I tell you.

But I still miss wheat. Not enough to eat it, but I miss it. Soft bread, freshly made bakery goodies, all those other carb-filled calorie killers that used to kindly stuff fat around my hips and heart to keep me warm in these cold Canadian winters. Any bread I make is either too wet or to dry. Buying it at the store costs twice as much for half the amount, and some of it is puke-bucket-worthy from the first bite (I have yet to actually barf, but come on: forcing someone to eat an entire slice of some of this stuff might be considered torture in some countries). All of it needs to be toasted or warmed, or it tastes like cardboard.

When I make pizza crust, there's no stretching or rolling. I mix it in a bowl and slap it on the pizza tray, smooth it out with a wooden spoon, and put it in the oven to "pre-bake". What on earth is pre-baking? It sounds like pre-drinking, but a lot less fun. I then take the hard, misshapen mishap of a crust out the oven, slap some ingredients on it - lots and lots of ingredients so that I can pretend the crust doesn't exist - and put it back in. If I'm lucky, it wont' fall apart the minute I try to cut it, let alone pick up a slice.

I now eat my pizza with a knife and fork. How dignified. I could practically be royalty. Bitter, gluten-free royalty.

My friend Robyn and I talked about this a couple of weeks ago. As humans - and especially women - we have attachments to certain foods. So, there's something a little sad and unfair about having to say goodbye to foods that have been a part of our lives for, say, about thirty-four years. I'm going to go through a grieving process over Montreal-style bagels and Honey Nut Cheerios, as lame as that makes me.

Believe me, I know this is for the best. The way I feel today is definitely worth getting rid of what ailed me before. And, if my suspicions are correct, this decision will not only prolong my life, but return a quality to it that I've been missing for years. In the end, this not a huge sacrifice for the sake my of my health.

So, when I make something glutenous for my kids (including Gutsy, as the gluten-free thing had no effect on him whatsoever), I now do something so lame, so embarrassing, that I can't believe I'm even writing it:

I smell it.

I can't believe I just typed that out. As if I'm not a big enough loser. But I'm nothing if not honest, so this honest loser admits to smelling the bread, the cake, the bagel, the cereal, the crackers... anything I can't have anymore. I take one giant whiff, and for some reason that seems to be enough. My brain - who is now on speaking terms with me after some couples counselling - then remembers what it tasted like, and it almost feels like I just had a big bite. I'm relatively satisfied, and I go on with my life filled with shitteous substitutes.

As soon as I figure out how to make this work with chocolate, I'll be a very slim woman.

So, here's my dilemma: I can be tested for gluten intolerance and celiac disease. However, I'll have to go back on gluten for up to three months before the testing, and even at that point may not get accurate results. Is it worth doing, since it's obvious I'm at least gluten intolerant if not full-blown celiac based on the changes I'm already seeing? If I test positive, I go on a gluten-free diet as that's the only thing that manages this condition. But then I have to go through feeling like crap all over again just go to back on the diet I'm already on. I'll need to detox all over again, which was no fun the first time (three days of painful aching all over my body. Yuck.)

My alternative is to see my doctor in a few weeks and get an overall blood workup to see if I'm still borderline anemic and if my liver likes me again. If everything looks good, it's sort of a roundabout way of getting the same answer, but less official and possibly less accurate. So what do I do?

Yes, I'm asking. Give me your opinion. You know you wanna.

Anyway, that's my update. I don't really have time to start a gluten-free blog right now, so a post about my boring ol' dietary issues is going to come up every now and then. You've been warned.

On the plus side, Geekster recently challenged me to write a short children's fable with the title "Horny the Unicorn and the Gigantic Sack." You know how I love a challenge. And you know you're at least a little bit excited about how I'm going to pull that off.

Onward, Horny!