Sadly Gluten Free

It's a sad thing, but now I find I have to avoid foods containing gluten if I want my digestive woes to go away. For years I have been addicted to bakery goods. I adored anything that contained copious amounts of flour, especially bread. To me, there is no better aroma than the smell of fresh bread baking in an oven. I am drawn to baker's shops and those quaint dark little cake shops in St Kilda, ( a suburb of Melbourne) Somehow I never associated the bloating and burping with bread. I think I never wanted to. I did have a blood test done once and it came back clear. However everytime I eat anything with flour in, the same set of symptoms kick in.
My doctor suggested staying away from bread if I thought it was the culprit. Later another doctor told me that I have a cluster of illnesses now thought to be associated with gluten intolerance; asthma, osteoporosis, migraines and constipation that together suggest a gluten problem. I do not think I have celiac Disease though as this causes other more noticable problems.
Sometimes I just wonder if it is the wheat that we now grow for milling. When I was a kid I often stayed on a wheat and sheep farm in the Western Australian wheatbelt town of Koorda. There the wheat was so high that it came up to my chin as I ran through it. Now it would hardly reach my knees and no, it's not because I have grown. Wheat varieties are now shorter and they are higher in protein too. When I was a kid there where very few additives added to bread dough. Now flour is just one of ten or more ingredients listed on the label. Improvers, acidifers, finishing agents, added gluten, preservatives, all ensure allergy prone people have at least a few problems with eating bread.
In the 1940's and 1950's bread got stale and could only be used for toast the second day. Now here, some bakers only bake once a week and bread sold in this state, actually comes from Victoria.
Sometimes a gluten problem can be funny. A couple of months ago, my daughter Aly and I were having tea in Sizzlers. After carefully scrutinizing the salad bar menu, I selected some pumpkin soup for a starter. I only took a few spoonfuls when I realised that it was made from a packet mix and not from fresh ingredients. A short time later I burped very loudly. A little boy, around six years old looked at me with admiration and said "that was a big mans burp". His mother was horrified, but I thought it was funny. Here is this sixty six year old woman emitting burps that make our kids proud. My grandson Nathan thinks its cool. It is probably the only thing about me that is!

Eat to Live = Nutrient Dense Foods

The foods featured in this eating plan are unrefined, nutrient dense foods that contain maximun nutrients per calorie. Foods such as leafy greens, vegetables, fruit, beans, nuts and seeds are the backbone of this way of eating. Other foods such as dairy, meat, fats salts and sugar are discarded or allowed in limited quantities only.

Eating for health, rather than for fun is something I needed to work on. While I may love to eat certain foods such as icecreams, cakes, chocolates and hot chips, the aftermath of eating these foods is quite frankly, not worth the discomfort.

Asthma, headaches/migraines, obesity, lethagy, depression are all made worse by a bad diet. Now having changed my basic foods, I find I get fewer bouts of depression and headaches. Dairy was always a trigger for my breathing difficulties and I can only eat these products in limited quantities, if at all.

Luckily for me I changed to a vegetarian diet over 20 years ago. This was funny because I had always been a big meat eater and a avoided vegetables at all cost. How things have changed. I now love green veggies and cannot tolerate the smell of meat cooking. Just contemplating eating the greasy flesh makes my stomach churn.

Fruit is by far my favourite food ever. I love it fresh and raw. The only fruit that's improved by cooking, in my opinion are apples, laden with spices. Cooked in this way, they are a taste of Heaven on Earth.

Beans presented a much bigger problem. After following a raw food diet for some time, I could not get my head around eating large quantities of beans. But time and practise helps with all things. Now I quite look forward to a plate of bean stew, or soup. Given that the weather has been cold here lately, beans have played an important part in my diet. As the days get warmer, I guess I will eat more salads. My favourite salad features avocado and is topped with grilled portobello mushrooms. this was my one big cheat when I was a raw fooder. No matter what the weather was like, I would always feel warm and cheered after eating this combination. Other bean products like as tofu and soy milk, are ok in limited amounts.

The huge amounts of leafy greens required on this diet is rather alarming. I mean, how can I eat a pound of cooked greens as well as a pound of raw ones? I would have to hire an extra stomach from somewhere, lol. Nevertheless, I continue to try to reach at least part of that total.

Nuts and seeds, needed for the goodness of their omega 3 fatty acids, are something I struggle with. Even soaked, they still present problems with my digestion. One thing I have noticed with being Seriously Sixty, is that I cannot take the liberties with food that I once took. I am prone to constipation and I have to be somewhat careful when it comes to eating large quantities of nuts.

This plan also realises that we live in the real world, where copious amounts of food is ever present and much of it is great tasting junk. So allowing 10% of total daily foods to come from non-recommended sources, makes life interesting. Most of the time I don't want the built in cheat, but it is nice to be able to indulge in my own addiction, peanut butter. Sometimes I add in some brown rice to my dishes, but only 1/2 a cupful at a time. This adds the fibre I need to help my sluggish digestion.

I wonder if I am alone in this, but I think, study, read so much about food and I spend very little time in actually eating it. Now that really is food for thought.

* Includes other non-starchy vegetables like tomatoes, zucchini, mushrooms etc.

Why I Eat To Live?

Most people think I am obsessed with eating to control my weight. Well they actually think that I obsessed full stop! However they completely miss the point that by eating healthily, I have controlled tha asthma that has plagued me since I had the first attack at the tender age of fourteen months. During my teens I spent an average of one week per month in bed unable to breathe enough to speak or walk. It did not help that my mother was a heavy smoker either. This was in the 1950s and then no one linked smoking with health problems. It was not until 1986 when I first started eating an almost completely plant based diet, that I finally beat the onset of severe episodes. However no matter how hard I tried, I still have to take some pretty serious medication to control the attacks. On the brighter side, I have not been hospitalised for asthma since 1986.

Now I would dearly love to cut out the dependence on steriod inhalers. Can this be done? Especially since I have scarred lungs from all that wheezing over the decades. I truly believe that if anything can do this, it is a nutrient dense eating plan and for me that plan is Eat To Live