Gluten-Free: Six Months Later

Eight months ago, I looked like this:

Two months after that was taken, in a desperate attempt to feel anything but sick, I took all gluten - wheat, barley, rye and anything derived from those products - out of my diet. After an uncomfortable week of withdrawals, I started to feel better - a lot better.

Today, about six months later, I look like this:

And yes, I have headphones on. I was listening to the Black Eyed Peas and didn't feel like stopping just to take a picture. I might be vain, but good music takes priority. 

The greatest thing about all of this is that I never did it for the weight loss. Honestly, I was sick of trying to lose weight. Anything I've ever done in the name of shedding pounds has backfired on me. I did this to get my health back, and my body is responding with a slow, but steady "Thank you!" And I am responding to my body responding by grinning every time I look in a mirror. I would say this is a rather pleasant side effect to improving the quality of my life.

I saw my doctor a couple of weeks ago for a physical and told her I had gone gluten-free. She was very supportive, especially after seeing the results on the scale. She does not recommend I get a formal test for Celiac Disease as I'll just cause myself unnecessary pain and sickness going back on the gluten in order to test for antibodies. It's very apparent that my body is allergic to gluten. Duh. As a result, I can never eat it again without getting sick. Ever. When I've accidentally ingested it at a restaurant or through cross-contamination making gremlin sandwiches and the like, I've been sick for two or three days. Yucky, awful, digestive issue sick. My symptoms point to Celiac Disease, and that's what I'm now informally diagnosed with.

I whined a lot in the first little while after being forced to make this lifestyle change. I like whining about new things as I adjust to them. It's my way of processing everything that's happened while simultaneously getting on everyone's nerves: two birds, one stone. I complained at how unfair this is, how hard it is, how tedious it is. The world makes it really easy to feel sorry for ourselves when we have to make a big change. I've quit drinking, smoking, and a few other unmentionables in my life, but gluten has definitely taken the cake - yes, that's a pun -  for most challenging in my day-to-day.

However, there's only so much bellyaching a girl can do before she has to accept what is and move on. I'm there, and looking rather fabulous in my acceptance if I do say so myself. There are some wonderful bonuses to being gluten-free. Allow me to explain:

1. I look hot. Oh, I'm sorry. Have I mentioned that already? My skin, my hair, my nails have all improved, and it's exciting to see what I look like underneath this weight. I love myself no matter what size I am - I had to learn to be kind to myself in that way years ago or risk passing on a lot of self-image crap to my kids - but I'm really enjoying this transformation. When I started, I was a size 20-22. I'm now a size 18, and will very shortly become a 16. I can't tell you the last time I was a 16. I think I might have been, uh, 16.

2. I have now have a healthy relationship with food. Food and I have made peace. I no longer crave carbs (save perhaps two days each month - and you can probably guess which two days), I just eat them when I happen to eat them. I will go without bread/bagels/insert-other-carby-food-here for weeks and not even miss them. I no longer need specific foods in my home or in my belly to feel happy/calm/like I'm taking care of myself. Food is no longer love nor comfort; It's a means to an end. I generally eat nutrient-dense foods that I've prepared myself rather than the processed, pre-packaged junk. The reason is twofold: First, eating out safely is a challenge unless I plan it in advance, and I can't afford to buy most pre-packaged gluten-free foods in the grocery store. Second, now that I don't buy them anymore, I don't really want them, either. My diet consists mostly of whole foods, and that's doing wonders for me in every way. I don't think I could have kicked my food issues as easily without having a disease that made me do it. That makes me very grateful, actually.

3. I'm super awesome. I'm more alert, less anxious, wittier, more creative, and overall a more interesting human being. Scientists didn't think it was possible to improve upon The Maven, but an unclouded mind in a detoxed body has made it so. How wondrous for all who are fortunate enough to know me. You're very welcome.

4. There is no 4, actually, but I figured that wasn't a very long list and I'm trying to impress people.

5. Or a 5, but I wanted to round it off. 5 points are better than 4, even if the fourth wasn't real. 

And there you have it: 3 5 great things that have happened to me since going gluten-free. I can't wait to see what the next 6 months bring.

Groove

I am so on it.

It's Monday, there's a snowstorm outside and the gremlins are home for March Break (which also started early because technically it's still February, so really I'm just going along with things.) I have an extra child here for the day, and his mom insisted that he bring his Justin Beiber music with him because she knows how much I love it!

Please try not to drown in the sarcasm. It's thick and heavy this morning as I gasp for air filled with canned pop lyrics. She will pay dearly.

With ample eye twitches and a decent amount of caffeine in my veins, I have decided that it's the perfect time to jump on the NaBloPoMo bandwagon again - to save my blog.

In case you didn't know, NaBloPoMo is short for National Blog Posting Month. The concept is simple: you sign up on the site and commit to one post a day for the entire month. I've participated all of one time, in November 2009. That's me, always the go-getter. I was feeling in a slump when it came to writing - which is much like I'm feeling now - and I needed some motivation. So, I decided to take the plunge and post my face off, even if I didn't have much to say. It worked. Let's hope it works again.

It's come to this: I need to rekindle my love of humourous, narcissistic, attention-seeking writing, or abandon the blog altogether. Either I find my groove or I pack it up and let the dust settle on stay-at-home-mayhem for the last time. In the end, I don't need to post every day, but it should flow out of me far easier than it has been. I've been spinning my wheels of creativity for a while now, and it's time to do stinky things or get out of the bathroom.

Oh, dry your tears, already. Now you have to reapply all that mascara - what a waste. What's your boss going to say?

I'm the fat lady, and I'm not singing just yet. What you're hearing is the Beiber Fever oozing out of my living room walls. It's an honest mistake; he kind of sounds like a chick. I'm not willing to give up on a nearly five-year-old project that easily. This blog is older than my youngest child; it's a collection of our life stories over the last few years. It documents the ups, the downs, the scary, the wonderful, and the funny - especially the funny. It's so important to me that it practically has its own social insurance number. I don't want to let it go, but I don't want to do a poor job at capturing all my family's awesome in word form, either.

Some big things have happened in the last few months. Some of it I've blogged about, some of it I probably never will because I'm such a private person (yes, you may laugh now). But let it be known that I am a fundamentally changed woman: Maven 2.0, if you will. This new Maven is stronger, more capable, more interesting, and is faster than a train.

Oh, and while I'm at it, she has great abs and perky breasts. True story.

I'm no longer a full-time stay-at-home-mom, sort of. I regularly take writing and editing contracts, and there are two days every week - barring the occasional preschool plague - when all three gremlins scuttle off to school, leaving our home a quiet place. My entire diet has changed thanks to my good friend Mr. Gluten Intolerance. I've lost a fair bit of weight and am down nearly two dress sizes. My relationships have grown and evolved, my determination to live a happy life is more paramount than ever. Life is morphing, and I along with it.

I need to find a new groove: hence the word I've chosen for this post.

Every day for the month of March, I'm going to pick a word and write about it. If you have any suggestions, please feel free to post them as a comment here or anywhere on the blog's Facebook page. Go ahead, just throw them out there. I need to come up with 31 of them and am begging you to give me ideas.

And, if you haven't already figured it out, I'm an attention whore.  I love when you whisper sweet little nothings in my comment field. While you're at it, why don't you feel up my sidebar and become a fan or "like" me. Yeah, baby. That's like getting to third base in the blog world.

I might even respect you in the morning.

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. 

How not to take a self-portrait

Yesterday I was given a picture of Geekster and me which was taken at a wedding in late August. It's a nice picture and one that is now on my fridge for me to smile at as I hurriedly prepare meals at least one family member will loudly decline with a grossed out look on his face (It varies as to who will make said face, which makes it somewhat exciting. Kind of like a lottery, or bingo.)

August 2010

What I immediately noticed - and what shocked me more than anything - is how big I am in the picture. And I'm not a fat-hater - really I'm not. I've been overweight most of my life. In that time, I've been a healthier fatty and an unhealthier fatty. I don't think being skinny necessarily equals health, just as being un-skinny doesn't necessarily mean one's heart is going to explode in a mess of Cheetos. But in this particular picture, I realized just how sick I look; the bad kind of overweight. The bloated, tired, sluggish kind of fat. I was a few weeks away from hitting the proverbial wall and desperately attempting something that would end up changing everything for me. But at that time, I just felt like ass.

Liking this photo - and having it on the fridge for all to see - is a big step for me. Generally speaking, I hate pictures of myself. I loathe, despise, am disturbed by pictures of me. Ironically, this means I take a lot of them (more on that in a bit).  You'd think that years of being tagged in sometimes less-than-perfect poses on social networking sites would make me more accepting of myself. Sadly, not so. I'm a girl, after all, and I have self-esteem issues. They're a lot better than they were ten - or even five - years ago, but there's still that nagging voice in my head that likes to tell me I'm far uglier than you.

The big difference yesterday, however, was not only that I liked a photo of me at one of my heaviest weights, but that it was the first time Geekster and I really saw how far I've come in the last three months of gluten-free eating and, more recently, natural adrenal gland support. The first thing I did, after picking my jaw up off the floor, was drag my hubby over to the camera and snap a current picture of the two of us to compare it to:

January 2011

Not too shabby, right? I should of gazed in amazement, made it my Facebook profile picture and stopped there.

But you know I didn't.

I'm an addict. Most of my addictions haven't been exercised in several years. However, there are a few - like chocolate and caffeine, for example - that I drag out to a dirty motel and make sweet love to whenever the mood strikes. But there is another nasty habit that I simply can't stop doing once I get started. It's so bad that I keep checking for hair on my palms for days afterwards. While less frequent a guest star in my situational sitcom than the aforementioned yummy food, it still likes to come out and play every month or so: taking pictures.

Now, as I mentioned before, I'm not too keen on Maven photos. Self-esteem issues = a fear of flashes and full-length mirrors. When I take pictures of myself, I generally snap a few dozen, then dig through them until I find one that doesn't want to make me want to eat a bucket of ice cream. Sometimes I get one - and furiously edit out everything I possibly can until it looks passable enough to share - and sometimes I dislike every single one and await the little black rain cloud that will follow me for the rest of the day.

But something happened yesterday. I actually liked the pictures I took.

I mean, sort of.

I liked the difference I could see in my eyes, my skin, my shrinking double chin. There was just one problem: the hair. I'm long overdue for a hair cut and the coif wasn't cooperating. Observe:

In this picture, I'm trying to show myself the difference between August and January. But I have a scarf on, and my hair is different, so I figured I should probably let the hair down and get my neck naked. It was all downhill from there.

Alright, not too bad. Angled shots are funky and make me look like I'm not aging from stress far too quickly as a stay-at-home-mom. Smile's good, not too much shine or makeup. But, um... The hair is kind of plain. I should probably try doing something with it, so I attempt to give it a little bit more body with my fingers...

Anyone read Dilbert cartoons? I do because my doppleganger is regularly featured. Alice is one of Dilbert's coworkers. And when I don't get a haircut, I look just like her (this is not a good thing):

Alice and I even think alike

Next, I tried ridding myself of the Alice 'do by holding my hair up, all cute-like:

There is bird watchers' club in my neighbourhood, and I may just invite them over to have a look at whatever just made a home behind my neck.

I was getting desperate. It was tussle time. Let the hair go a little wild and crazy, like a supermodel's. Yes, I could be a supermodel! So that's exactly what I did.

Canada's Next Top Inmate

Dear god. All I need is a pair of fishnets and a sign with numbers and this could be a mugshot. Note to self: supermodel hair is styled to look messy. This looks more like I'm trying to find my missing pipe.

The whole ridiculous attempt at boosting my own ego made me laugh. Did you catch that? It made me laugh instead of cry. How cool is that? I'm thirty-four and I finally find this vain excursion hilarious. That's growth. Growth as I shrink. Ironic, isn't it?

And then, finally, unexpectedly, the picture. I like this picture. It's not edited. It's not posed. It was effortless, and it was what I needed to see after all that (hot) mess:

I'm getting healthy. It looks good. It feels amazing. And I'm going to keep documenting it every so often so I can remind myself of how far I've come.

I deserve that for all the bagels I'm giving up.