Another year has slipped away and as usual, it seems to have raced by but a lot has happened to me this year and I want to mark the end of 2013 by releasing it into the internet.
The story of 2013 really started in August 2012 with the London Olympics. We were back in Somerset after spending a week in London with some great memories, the Paralympics had started and the BBC scheduled a programme about Intermittent Fasting (IF) against coverage of the sport.
While the rest of the family were glued to Paralympics coverage, I snuck off to watch the IF. It suggested that you could heal youself, improve your energy levels, feel younger and lose weight so without telling anyone, I jumped in and embraced IF. I don’t know if I felt better as a result but I did start following a thread about IF on the Money Saving Expert forum which eventually lead me to Marks Daily Apple and the Wheat Belly Blog.
By the start of 2013 I had stopped IF after reading articles suggesting that IF was not particularly beneficial to women. I was beginning to realise that wheat was linked to a number of the problems I had had over the years and was beginning to cut back on bread and pasta, previous staples in the household diet.
Come Easter 2013, just before going back to work after the holidays, I treated myself to a savoury tea in a local tea shoppe. It was delicious, a huge hunk of cheese, pickle, tomato and a huge cheese scone all washed down with a pot of tea.
About an hour later I had a nosebleed, the first in a few days. Now I’ve seen this likened to a teenager’s bedroom. There is mess all over the place; clothes on the floor, dirty crockery, books, papers, makeup. Drop a couple of empty crisp packets in the room and you’ll never notice them. If you drop the same empty crisp packets in a tidy room though, they will stand out, calling to be picked up. It was like that with the nosebleed. I had tidied up by not eating wheat for a few days and now the crisp packets were pointing directly at the savoury tea and in particular at the cheese scone.
Wheat was therefore the first foodstuff to be eliminated. This wasn’t easy because wheat is in so much we eat. While I felt a lot better, not all my symptoms disappeared.
There is a lot more research published into coeliac disease and gluten and I started reading this although it did not seem that coeliac disease was my problem. Then one day in early summer I made a jelly for the evening meal. This was an instant jelly, set with cornflour that had been left over from a packet trifle mix and it set off a humongous nosebleed. This made no sense at all because there was no gluten in the jelly.
Further research later and I came across Peter Osbourne’s work and the idea that Prolamins in other grains could cause problems with gliadin in wheat being the worst offender. From the same source came the idea that coeliac disease is just one manifestation of the illnesses caused by Prolamins.
Armed with this information I visited the doctor expecting a fight because over the years doctors had not been overly sympathetic to my grumbles. However this time the doctor was in complete agreement; yes wheat could well be the problem, no it didn’t sound like coeliacs and actually there was no medical way of confirming my self diagnosis. He did suggest that I keep a food diary to help find out what was triggering the nosebleeds.
The food diary was really useful, helping to pin down more proteins. Going Against the Grain was also started at this time.
In the run up to Christmas I have not had time to post but there are a lot of posts lining up in my head for the New Year. I am feeling great.
Happy New Year and here’s to a health 2014 for us all!
