Starting down the path, or perhaps journey of living with celiac disease can be taken two ways. It is a curse upon the person who finds out they have it. The curse is the diet. The food choices for someone with celiac disease is they can eat anything they want to as long long as it does not contain wheat/gluten.
The bad news is just about everything imaginable has some form of wheat product in it. If you eat what is dubbed as, “The Standard American Diet”, you are going to feel pretty SAD. Not only where is that good old standby, white bread, but where did everything else go that people love to eat? Cookies, donuts, candy bars, ice cream, most breakfast cereals, almost everything that is part of SAD. That could make one quite sad indeed.
So what is the problem I wonder? If you read my post about my own journey down the weight loss road, you know I am no stranger to limiting eating choices. What I find exciting about a celiac disease diet, is it is no longer a choice to leave most foods we do not need to eat anyway alone. How liberating it is to be able to erase a whole plethora of calorie packed artificially created foods from consideration as part of, “…what am I going to eat”.
A friend told me when I mentioned celiac disease to him, “Man, I know a little about that, you are going to lose a lot of weight fast, because you can’t eat hardly anything! What you can eat is expensive, so your food bill will probably double.” I sure have not found that to be the case. In fact, except for a few cookies, and peanut butter sandwiches, and some occasional pieces of fried chicken, not much has changed in what I eat, or how much it costs.
From my weight loss experience I learned to eat a lot of fruit, vegetables, and whole grain foods. The whole grains that I was used to eating are out, but everything else is just a little shift in the menu planning. Home cooked beans are cheap and very healthy. Fruits are very healthy and they change with the seasons, vegetables are limited by imagination.
Instead of whole grain foods, corn cereal and corn tortillas are the easiest and cheapest substitute. Although a corn tortilla does not quite take the place of a fresh sopapilla with honey, it is not a big sacrifice. Living with celiac disease for the average american will feel like punishment.
On the other side of things, if one eats a diet rich in vegetables and fruits, plus foods from other cultures, and is not scared of eating a raw unprocessed piece of fruit, eating is no more of an issue than it was before. It just takes a little more planning and for forethought.
If you are looking for a way to eat healthier, especially if your goal is weight loss, the celiac disease way of eating may be your ticket to diet satisfaction and healthy weight loss. You can eat more of some of those foods you like because the list of foods you must ignore is so large. With a little optimism, a celaic disease diet, can be seen as The Joy Of Celiac eating is one road to better long lasting health. Happy eating and remember life is what you make it!
