Welcome to Emily EatsAbout a month ago, I started feeling really ill eating bread and pasta and other things that seemed to contain gluten and it looks like I have a gluten intolerance of some kind. We are not sure what it is, why it’s suddenly happened, what caused it and if it’s here to stay.
This was a big shock as I had never had a problem before, it was so out of the blue and making me so ill that we decided to cut gluten out of my diet immediately until we could get further testing.
This helped a lot and I started to feel a bit better.
My GP decided that I needed to see a specialist doctor to try and figure out what was wrong and why I wasn’t feeling well when I eat things with gluten or wheat in them. We met with him, and he listened to my symptoms, (A sore stomach, bloating, gassiness and nausea, and sometimes my mouth tingles and feels weird), felt my stomach, and told me that the best option would be to do a blood test. He would test for: Gluten Sensitivity/Allergy, Coeliac disease, Thyroid + Iron levels as well as some common food allergies such as milk, soya, and eggs just to cover all the major allergies and check if I am being affected by anything that might be making me feel unwell.
One of the major downsides of this specific blood test is: to accurately test for Coeliac disease, which is the main thing we are looking at, you must eat a normal amount of foods containing gluten for a period of time, prior to the test, to ensure that if they exist, that the antibodies your body makes if you are reacting to gluten, are present on the test.
This has been really tough, eating things that I know are going to make me sick and that I know are potentially hurting my body. I started off by eating gluten twice a day. I did this for 3 days, but I started feeling so sick that I almost threw up and that was new, as I had only felt mild nausea before. After this episode I decided to stop gluten for a day to give myself time to recover, then I switched to gluten once a day. My mum also found some medicine for me to take that has helped me to not feel so nauseous. It’s been really scary thinking about the possibility of having quite a serious food issue.
I know that there are much, much worse conditions and illnesses I could have and that there are people out there that have it much worse than me. However, the fact that I’ve been able to eat anything I want my whole life and now, suddenly, I can’t; has been hard for me and I’m still struggling to get my head around it. I have asthma and have got use to living with that, but this feels a lot harder.
Tomorrow, I have my blood test, I’m quite nervous, as I’m not a big fan of needles but I have the numbing cream that I’m going to put on and I know that in the long run, this is going to help me figure out what is wrong and is going to tell me what I can do and change to start helping me to feel better. I really hope that the results don’t take too long to come back but I know I will have to wait at least a couple of days.
So, wish me luck with my tests and if we find out what is going on with my body, I will continue to share what I am eating, and what I am avoiding, and if I have to live gluten-free, how we will manage that.
I miss bread, my mum says she is going to learn to make really good gluten-free bread for me, though…