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.
