Mimi's Toast examines the toll gluten takes on generations of one family. The author looks back at the terrorized life her
maternal Grandmother Mimi endured as a paranoid schizophrenic, brought on by gluten intolerance. The author explores her own physical health issues -- including being hypothyroid and severely anemic -- that were caused courtesy of gluten.
My wonderful Mother Pat recently sold a Texas beach house that has been in the family for more than 30 years. Family and friends gathered in Port Aransas, Texas to pack up Pat's belongings and send them to her where she is now living with my Step-Father, Lee. Lee is gravely ill and she cannot be away from him for long. Between that and a fast closing time, we had to hustle to pack up years of artwork as they are both fine art collectors as well as artists themselves. My Step-father's studio required 4 people packing for 3 straight days to get out all of his incredible sculpture. We packed up the entire house in just three days, which was no small miracle.
My Mother is a very warm and friendly person and she has tons of friends and they all wanted to help, some by having us over for dinner. I brought down three large Whole Food bags of food for me since I can't eat anything that has gluten, corn or casein in it. I figured I would eat mostly what I brought but attempt to get some non-buttered veggies and yummy fresh fish while out down at the Texas gulf coast.
I did quite well until we went to a friend's house for dinner. She was also gluten free and made a lovely and safe salad and a gluten-free lasagna. I ate it and it was GLORIOUS! I also ate it because she was very happy to present it to us and it felt odd for me to decline it (won't make that mistake again!). Only later, in the middle of the night when I woke up shaking did I remember why it was so damn good: the cheese! I was so tired from packing and so interested in the dinner conversation that I ate without thinking about it. Once you know you have massive food allergies, you can never again put anything in your mouth without thinking about it. I paid for that mistake for a full week, feeling lethargic and bloaty.
I asked on my favorite Yahoo group -- SillyYaks@yahoogroups.com -- how long the general recovery time was for your guts to heal after you were poisoned and the heartbreaking response was six months! That is very depressing. I don't know that I have managed to go an entire week yet without getting an accidental poisoning so I have at least six more months to go before my gut heals. Part of the reason is my learning curve but the other reason is that corn, gluten and caseins are in just about anything but whole foods. I even worry about the meat I eat as that cow was fed corn . . . .
Other than the one cheese poisoning, I did alright on the road. One night we all enjoyed butter-free Mahi Mahi and that was worth the drive down to the coast just for that! The packers all wanted Whataburger for lunch most days because they were a dedicated crew and they didn't want to stop packing long enough to head to a restaurant. I ate from Whataburger as well, getting two hamburgers sans the bun and cheese and with the veggies and I have say they were quite good. I also ate the french fries and that may or may not have been a mistake. There is quite the raging debate in gluten-free communities about whether or not fast food french fries are safe or not because they are usually fried in the same batter as things like breaded onion rings. Once I looked up the ingredients, I felt sick and now have ruled out fast food french fries. I suspect I have an issue with dextrose but even if I didn't, when you look at the ingredients of these fries, it is apparent that these are not what I consider to be real foods:
Medium French Fries: Potatoes, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, dextrose, disodium dihydrogen pyrophosphate (to maintain natural color). (Note: Deep-fried in ZTF Whataburger liquid shortening and seasoned with Whataburger fry salt. Menu items that are deep-fried may come in contact with other products that contain gluten, wheat, dairy, egg, soybean, fish, or animal products.)
I used to start every day with my favorite breakfast: whole wheat toast with cheese on top and some yogurt too.
Just as my grandmother Mimi did before me, I was poisoning my system with dairy (casein) and gluten in the bread. Mimi eventually went completely insane. I didn't but I was nearly bed ridden for two years in horrible health. I finally started down the path to good health, but it came at a high price. I will pay any price to be truly healthy, however. It is my hope that my experiences shared in this blog will save someone else all of that misery and money I have spent on getting smart about getting healthy.
One thing that I cannot stand the thought of ingesting any longer is casein, which is the protein found in all dairy products. You may think you "just" have a problem with lactose but you need to look further and read up on caseins.
You can start by reading this interview with a dairy expert. If this doesn't gross you out and make you run to your refrigerator and toss anything with dairy in it, nothing will.
I was always one of those super skinny girls who could eat anything and never gain a pound. You know, that irritating gal we now all dislike. Immensely.
In my mid 30s, the weight s-l-o-w-l-y started coming on, just as most of my major hormones started fading away. I became hypothyroid and losing weight while being hypo is perhaps nothing more than a fable or a myth, at best. Even medicated it is hard work to lose weight when your metabolism has slowed to a crawl.
Once I figured out that I was gluten sensitive as well as sensitive to corn and casein, I stopped ingesting any of that harmful junk. I waited in anticipation for the poundage to fall off, as I know it has for so many when they just stop ingesting gluten. I have never eaten as much fresh, whole food as I now do.
I am still waiting for the weight to fall off. Looks like the weight wait will be even longer -- in spite of my daily exercise that includes running our ranch and tending to horses and walking our 5 dogs every day and exercise videos when I feel healthy enough. Apparently some of us with gluten issues find that our bodies suck onto weight when we start eating right. Our metabolism has slowed to a snail's pace after years of eating food that was poisoning us. In a way I can't blame the body for that -- it thinks it is dying from the constant assault from harmful food so it goes into protection mode and slows down, trying to absorb what little nutrition that it can.
Now that my gut is in the SLOW process of healing, I am absorbing nutrients better and that means I am hanging on to calories better as well. So not only do I go without most foods that Americans eat all day every day, I still am not that skinny girl of long ago.
For the short term, I am very happy to have some of my youthful energy return, but once I have gone 6 entire months without any kind of accidental poisoning, I will start to look for that skinny girl inside me and do whatever I need to to coax her back into existence.
It's okay if you already dislike me for the future skinny girl I will become (again). I can handle that better than I can feeling like a bloated whale.
I am looking into good lifestyle changes to use and I am liking so far what I am reading about this diet plan. Please let me know if you have tried it and what your thoughts are about it.
We stopped trying to eat gluten in our house 10 months ago. We made many mistakes since the gluten-loving food industry sneaks gluten into products you would never expect to find gluten in, such as soy sauce. Just last night I ate a delicious gluten-free meal at P.F. Chang's and they brought me out some gluten-free soy sauce and it tasted so much better than the "normal" gluten-rich soy sauce. Why oh why would someone even think to add gluten to soy sauce?
After I started gaining a small measure of my energy back sans gluten, my husband and I decided to remove all caseins (the protein source in dairy) from our diets. I have learned the hard way that if you have an issue with gluten, you are very likely to have an issue with caseins as well. We did. Good-bye dairy.
We both slowly started feeling healthier than we had in years but still we both felt bloaty and still tired, especially in the afternoons. I happened to gain a significant and life-changing chunk of wisdom from an Austin pharmacist whom I called when I became concerned that my adrenal medicine might have dairy in it.
The pharmacist listened to my concerns and then asked me about corn. Was I still eating corn, he asked? I wasn't just eating corn, I was shoving in it as fast as I got my hands on it since it was serving as the one source I used to replace bread. I was eating corn tortillas like they were going out of production the very next minute.
The kindly pharmacist told me that corn is mostly genetically modified these days and most people have trouble digesting it. He recommended that I stop ingesting corn immediately. We did, and that meant another clearing out of the pantry. My God, what doesn't have corn starch in it????
We removed all the corn and corn-like products from our house and from our menus.
And then something miraculous started happening. It happened to my husband first. He was downright jolly in the afternoons, when we would normally be sagging and tired. He was singing and dancing in the kitchen and he started going on long walks again with our dogs. I noticed his increase in energy and I was very happy for him, but I wasn't there yet.
Weeks went by before I sat up one day and realized that I am never tired in the afternoons anymore. I even started singing and dancing and while fun, I am tone deaf so my apologies to anyone who has to listen to me sing. Next thing I knew, I was working out with a DVD I months ago with a trainer deemed "the toughest trainer in America." I haven't had the physical strength to work out for a decade.
Your energy level fades away slowly and you don't really notice it leaving, especially if you do what I did, and that is to prop yourself up with caffeine and sugar in the afternoons. Just as my energy level sagged over the past 10 years, it is now slowly creeping back in. I would do anything to feel vibrantly healthy again and to reclaim my long ago status as that of an athlete. Adding corn to the "will never eat again" column was easy.
Instead of those omni-present Got Milk advertising campaigns, I would one day love to see people asking instead: Have you been caseined?
We got caseined over here recently. We were at a local, small town restaurant and I pulled the waitress aside and said we could not eat gluten, dairy or corn. How I wish I had said PLEASE don't give us anything that has casein in it. PLEASE.
What is casein?
Casein is a protein that is found in milk and used independently in many foods as a binding agent. You stand at least a 50% chance of having an issue with caseins if you have an issue with gluten. Isn't that special that they run in the same crowd?
My husband has felt for years that he was lactose intolerant so we removed lactose from our diets . . . but didn't yet know about caseins, which were still present in the lactose free milk and in many, many other suspicious foods we were still consuming.
I stopped ingesting caseins to support my husband and I was convinced that I did not have an issue with "dairy." I was wrong. I knew I did when I finally added some dairy back in my meals. I felt awful for days. It wasn't pleasant.
When we ate at the locally owned Mexican restaurant, I ordered chicken fajitas and ate them with no tortillas. Jeff had a wonderful grilled shrimp salad. If you can get through a Mexican meal and not touch a single corn tortilla chip placed on your table, you know that your will power to stay healthy is growing. We had no chips and felt good about our food choices.
A few hours later, Jeff's stomach was in knots and he did not feel well at all. I felt okay which may mean something or it may mean nothing at all in terms of my ability to digest caiseins. I called the restaurant and the hapless person who answered it listened to my questions about gluten, corn and dairy. She put the phone down and I could hear her yell to someone "HEY! do we put gluten in anything these people had for lunch here? They had chicken fajitas and the shrimp salad." She came back to phone and informed me that nope, we had ingested no corn, gluten or dairy. I didn't feel right about her "researching" my questions and by the way Jeff was feeling, I knew he had gotten something bad for his system, but what? It's the not so fun game of trying to figure out what you ate where that was now poisoning you. That game gets old in a hurry.
Then my phone rang suddenly. It was the restaurant owner! She wanted to tell me to ask for her next as she knew exactly what the ingredients were in every meal. She then asked me a question I will never forget to ask in the future: "did you tell the waitress to leave out the dairy or did you tell her about caiseins?"
I did just say dairy! Wow, someone in the teeny small Texas town we live in knew about caseins! She told me that they dip both the shrimp and the chicken fajitas in BUTTER before they grill them. Butter has caiseins! Our food sleuthing worked this time, not that it helped Jeff in the short term but it will for all of our future food restaurant dining. That restaurant is now our favorite little restaurant in town and we send them customers by the boatloadfull. (Though I do think it would help to have all of their waitresses well versed in casein-ology)
After that meal, I look the waiter in the eye and say clearly: we have some SERIOUS food allergies, please help us to not anything that might possibly contain wheat, gluten, corn dairy or anything that is made of a dairly substances such as butter.
Then I ask my honey if he brought that epi pen with him. Okay, I don't always ask about the epi pen but I will say that if I feel the waiter is not paying attention. Usually the threat of my throat closing up tends to make them perk up a bit and listen. Not that my throat would swell up but that sounds so much prettier to say than my guts will swell, don't you agree?
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.
Image by Sterin via Flickr
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vYlj6jP4yJ3QljlRpkosOML9FlxVKzM2GDgjGbJ7_vTs4HGqLnElj5FxJbjBCsUZhG40wsJEJHvOvsif7WWvc-U9Pk72Ft_Bk5yDq3nI0YShqdq1af7jIagh6c-4q4yA0i4lrGRD_cT59EjquUNjiv=s0-d)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_ua604cHP_acppldQCYW3GmO8H_HBhcdCYfIc0c6hdS1IkUIhPHGa_XKb2zWkYfNhPH4AtUjY0Qw1S3tj7mHo4XbIcWvqyhTr_GpCyKNx7ZKq4RQm6Bng0clBZEYDJDWCIfcKcgyVSVib0Km1totjqz=s0-d)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vchKNA5sZOoaQ0HhRytiJ7zHhN_skry845bHfRy_SJTWgAYnxSUGY0uCBCeKVNoJ2R4FFVdBvw-AvsVEqeddjEshiNhUttX4dM-PB2yziZk5UVey7yLUQDGPTxxZkBTY2BgF6D9YsJbxAZI0iY9DU=s0-d)
Posts
