what i miss

Mostly I miss being able to eat whatever I felt like. Yeah, I always had to worry about what might disagree with my stomach - but that was the thing, sometimes I would eat something and be fine, then eat it a day or week or month later, and be sooo much LESS than fine. Now I can't pick up anything in the "inner aisles" of the grocery store without scanning the ingredient list - some of the things in the outer aisles need to be scanned, too. So I guess what I miss most is my ignorance? It's easy to be ignorant. Now I have to make good choices or pay the price (nausea, head ache, general malaise).

But for specifics:

I miss oreos.
I miss being able to whip up a batch of cookies or cupcakes.
I miss pie.
I miss macaroni and cheese.
I miss tortillas. (Have yet to have a taco in the last two months that doesn't have my entire face and both hands covered in taco-stuff.)
I miss being able to buy a box/bag of "food" for lazy food preparation.
I miss sammiches.


But it's getting better. It's getting easier. When I see a picture of a sandwhich, I recoil a bit, because I know how terrible and awful I would feel if I ate it. Christmas at my parents' was a fun exercise in staying gluten free. I didn't want to be miserable, but my mom had made poppyseed bread, which is my absolute favourite! so I kept joking about different processsed food stuffs - well, if it has gluten in it, at least I'll be able to enjoy the poppyseed bread because I'll already be feeling miserable from this! Luckily (unluckily?) nothing I ate had gluten in it (except for some gravy at a HyVee food court. oops!)

So, I've been gluten free (except for two mishaps) since Dec. 1. And I've had very little in the way of any sort of grain in that time, too. I've made steps toward eliminating (or severely cutting back) the presence of processed food-stuff in my diet. I've almost completely eliminated franken-foods like hydrogenated vegetable(*cough*SOY*cough*) oils and HFCS.

Go me!