What Is Left to Eat?????

It is beyond difficult to know what to cook for dinner -- or really any meal -- if you know that diary and gluten are poisonous to your system.

When you first figure out you can't have gluten, it is shocking, and then depressing. In that order. Then as you get a handle on the gluten issues, you learn that 80% of people who have a problem with gluten also have a problem with the proteins in dairy called caseins. So cheese, butter, yogurt, even many chips are out as they sneak in diary products.

So what's left to eat?

At first you feel you will have to subsist on eggs (if you aren't also allergic to them!), nuts, fruits and veggies and meat. And not much else.

But if you start to look closely at the grocery store, you will be pleased to find there are actually gluten and dairy-free baking goods in most stores. Some of them don't even suck. A few even taste better than the gluten stuff.

What you probably will soon realize is that the main problem with going gluten and dairy-free is that you have to seriously think before you eat ANYTHING. You may do what we did and stop eating out for months as you get used to your new reality. You might also start gaining weight as you feel sorry for yourself and load up on the good-bad stuff you can still eat, like corn chips.

You also see early on that there are no more fast foods in your diet, say other than a piece of fruit. But to have the fresh fruit, you need to go to the store a lot more often than when you relied on processed foods that lived for months or even years in your pantry.

But you will venture out again, wiser and healthier.

What is the alternative, after all?