Gluten Free Diet – I am so excited to provide you with the transcript of my Cravings Coach Show #8 on Gluten and Wheat.

Transcript of The Cravings Coach episode #8
See Gluten Intolerance Show for the original Podcast
More info: The Cravings Coach

DIANA WALKER: Hi, this is Diana Walker, the Cravings Coach. My topic today is gluten and wheat allergies, but specifically, how to follow a Gluten Free Diet and why we may have to look at taking wheat out of our diet.

Wheat is in the top eight allergens for people and it is very often misdiagnosed, wheat or gluten intolerance is. There are many people who have fatigue, they have joint pain, they have headaches, weight loss, depression, anemia and lactose intolerance, and these people can often be undiagnosed or misdiagnosed and can be gluten intolerant. It is becoming a more well-known fact that many of us are gluten intolerant, and that can also lead to celiac disease, which is even more extreme. One in 133 people in North America, could have celiac disease.

Now, I’m really, really fortunate to be able to introduce my good friend, we’ve known each other ten years, Aura Rose. Aura was actually one of the first people that I knew that went on a wheat-free and gluten-free diet and had tremendous results. So, I want to introduce Aura and have Aura tell us how she discovered her gluten intolerance.

AURA ROSE: Thanks Diana. About a year and a half ago I decided to go on a complete gluten-free diet. I had been struggling for over ten years at the time, with a lot of fatigue and particularly very low iron stores. Taking lots of iron supplements, trying to bring my iron up, and it wasn’t working very well. I knew that I used to have a lot of energy. When I was a kid, a teenager, I used to sit around the table with my family and my niece and would be jumping up and down and my dad would be telling me to sit still, because I had so much energy. I didn’t have that energy anymore. I wonder sometimes now if it didn’t actually change when I was pregnant, in my pregnancy, the hormonal changes that happened at that time didn’t cause this to become more severe. Because it was basically since my pregnancy that I had low iron and a lot more fatigue than I had in the past.

One of the things that I think is really important for people to know is what they say about a gluten allergy is, when you have that, you will often know very quickly when you go off of gluten. But you have to go off of all of the gluten, you can’t be picking and choosing. Within five days I could feel a huge difference. I had so much more energy. Within ten days I knew that I would never go back to eating gluten again.

DIANA: Wow. We were talking last night and your husband mentioned how actually at about ten days you were in tears because you had found the solution and you just knew, yes, you wouldn’t go back. We went out to dinner last night and I noticed that you had to really be careful. I said, “How can you do that?” And you basically said that it was so worth it, that it had transformed your life, you have your energy and your old spirit back. I know that even your skin coloring, etc. has changed so much in the last year. So, we would like to know which foods you have to avoid. I know it’s an extensive list, but if you could just give us some basic ideas. Then later we’ll go onto what you eat during the day, what your main sources of your diet are. But, what do you avoid? I think that’s what we want to find out right now. Thanks.

AURA: Well the most important things to avoid are anything that has wheat, rye and barley in it. There’s also some discussion in the gluten-free community whether you should eat oats. I avoid oats, but particularly among the Canadian Association, they’re not clear whether oats is actually a problem for people. I simply decided to avoid it because it’s not found in a lot of things anyways and so it’s quite easy to avoid. For me, the biggest change in my diet was, I used to eat two pieces of toast every day, wheat toast. Everybody knows that that’s where most of our breads are made from. But once you become conscious of it, there’s actually a number, and certainly a growing number, of gluten-free products available. Some people will say yes, they’re a little bit more expensive, yes they are. But for me, it doesn’t matter because the energy that I have is worth the couple of extra dollars that I spend in my grocery bill because I have to buy a loaf of bread that costs me $5.00 rather than $2.50 or $3.00. So, certainly wheat is a big thing. And wheat is found in an amazing number of products. Wheat is found in soy sauce. But, and again, there isn’t one soy sauce that’s made, there is wheat-free. Wheat is found in almost every canned soup on the shelf. Wheat is found in most spice mixes or special kind of mixes that you would use in like a chili mix or a taco mix or anything like that. When I first went off of gluten I was also a vegetarian and wheat is actually found in a lot of the meat-alternative products that are made. So like there’s a product called “round ground” which is basically a tofu hamburger, but it’s full of wheat. So there is a lot of products once you start reading the shelves, that you have to avoid. And just simple things. Like I was telling Diana, and she couldn’t believe that wheat is actually used as a duster in candies. So, individually wrapped candies, you shouldn’t eat those either because they’re actually dusted with flour. So one can say, “That’s a lot of things that you can’t eat.” But if you go off of that for five, seven, ten days, then you have the change in your energy level, or the change in how you feel, that I did. Then it simply becomes part of your life and you will learn to find the things that you need to find.

DIANA: Thank you so much Aura, that is really inspiring. And knowing you personally, I really have seen the amazing improvement. When I saw you before, for nine years, of course you were drinking lots of coffee or whatever it was, to help you get through the day. And neither of us knew, or I didn’t know, that you could be any other way. But now I just see you so vibrantly alive and, like I said, especially your skin coloring has completely changed. There’s just much more aliveness there. So I do know, I heard one analogy, a while ago, that your intestines, the villus that are supposed to be absorbing your nutrition is like a shaggy rug. So you’ve got all these little villi, and the gluten is like glue and it pastes those villi down, so just like a sheer linoleum. So of course, you can’t even absorb other nutrition. So it’s so critical. For myself, I’ve been cutting back, actually, over the last year off and on since I learned from Aura what a miraculous difference it makes. For me, I believe I am wheat intolerant, maybe not gluten. I seem to be able to have gluten in my life. But wheat, I’ve taken that completely out of my life. So it’s an inspiring way to go and many of you may not have thought of it before.

I have my good friend, Aura Rose, with me again today. Aura is going to talk once again on gluten, and this time, give me an idea, give us an idea, of what she eats on a daily basis. Because it can be quite overwhelming when you have to take gluten and wheat out of your diet in the very beginning. But I know she does it joyfully and she’s had amazing results. So here’s Aura.

AURA: Hi, and thanks Diana. I think what’s really important to think about when you’re removing gluten from your diet is not to look at what I can’t eat, but to look at what I can eat. I know that that really helped me, to keep in mind all the variety of food that are out there that don’t have gluten in them and to consider it an opportunity to eat different foods that you may never have considered before. So for me, I’ve found some really nice gluten-free breads that I like, and I eat those in the morning, instead of my toast. I have gluten-free bread and I have some fruit. Often, one of the things to consider is when you go out to eat, like let’s say you’re working during the day and you go out at lunchtime. There are lots and lots of places now that when you say, “I have a gluten allergy” they completely understand what it is that you need. They’ll talk to their chef and they will come and tell you what you can and cannot eat on the menu. You have to be careful. Because, for example, Diana and I were out the other day and I wanted to have salmon steak, but it was an Asian-marinated salmon steak. Well, it was already marinated, they couldn’t change that, and the marinade included soy sauce, and soy sauce has wheat in it. So you have to really be careful when you’re eating out, that you are very conscious of it and you say to them, “I have a gluten allergy and I can’t have anything with gluten in it.”

For lunch I will often simply have salads. And if I want to add a bit of what I call “heaviness” to the salad so I won’t get hungry later on during the day, I might crunch up some corn chips over that. Or I might have it with a rice cracker and some cheese on top of the rice crackers. There’s all kinds of varieties of rice crackers out there, and once again, even though they are rice, there are some that you need to look at because they will have a flavoring or a spice and they will have wheat in it. Which is funny, because they’re making rice crackers, but some of them actually have wheat as part of the combination of spices that they use to flavor the rice cracker. So you have to be always diligent in reading the labels of everything and everywhere that you go.

One of the things that happened for me that I think is important for some people to consider is when I went off of gluten I was a vegetarian. And I still eat 90% of my diet is vegetarian. I find it very hard when I go out with friends or family, to a restaurant, to continue not to eat fish or meat, when I’m in a restaurant. Because when you sit down in a restaurant and you open up the menu and you try to find gluten-free vegetarian in food, it is very difficult. So that is one thing for me that I also changed in my diet. When I went gluten free I stopped being a complete vegetarian. My husband is still a vegetarian, so I eat most days vegetarian, at home.

So then for dinner, we eat a whole variety of foods. We eat Japanese, we eat Asian, we eat Thai. So because we’ve been exposed to these kinds of foods, we’ve done a lot of traveling in Asia, it’s very easy for us to eat vegetarian and gluten-free because we cook our own meals, we use often a stir-fry, we’ll make a Thai curry. And all of those things in the Asian diet have very little gluten in it. So if you like Asian food, that’s one way to consider eating your meals in the evening, using Indian recipes or Thai recipes. So that’s really my day.

DIANA: I love that Aura, that’s so helpful. And we will see that it is a lot easier, especially knowing that somebody else is on this same journey us. So I hope that this has been of help to you in making your choices on a daily basis. We will be hearing again from Aura. Have a great day. Bye now. Make sure you check out  The Cravings Coach Diana Walker’s website. Thank you.

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