How a Simple Perspective Shift Can Change Everything

Last year I had moved to a gluten free diet for a few months, to see if it would help my IBS symptoms, that only seemed to be getting worse. After about the 4 month point I went back to eating regularly, because I wasn’t seeing enough change to make it worth it, and I was constantly stressing over what I could or couldn’t eat (which definitely doesn’t help my symptoms any either.

Over the last month, I’ve been working with a dietitian to try and figure out what foods might be triggering me, because I’ve been severely bloated pretty much 24/7 for what feels like forever, and again, it continues to just keep getting worse and worse. Among the suggestions she had during out latest appointment, she suggested trying to go gluten free again, even if just for a few weeks, to see how I feel.

I’m going to be honest, immediately my mind went back to all of the breakdowns I had last summer, all of the times I would get stressed out because I wasn’t sure what to eat, or because I had found “yet another thing I can’t eat”. I felt very reluctant to giving it a try, and even came up with an excuse as to why I wasn’t going to try that quite yet.

A little while after that [phone] appointment, I decided to sit down with my journal an write it all out, each of the suggestions she made. And throughout the time I was journaling I had come to the conclusion that I was just going to say “fuck it” and go ahead with it anyway. The reason this switch happened was because I realized that my priority right now just to feel better. Even if I have to make several changes all at once to get there. I can take the time later to figure out which of those individual changes is what actually did the trick.

The first time I went gluten free, one problem I had was that I wasn’t very trusting of the negative result I got from being tested for Celiac Diseas. This is because I had already started to cut out a fair amount of gluten from my diet which, with Celiac, if you’re not eating enough gluten at the time you’re tested, it can result in a false negative blood test result. As a side effect of this, I was convinced that I had to go into it at 110%. No cross contamination, no “‘treating” myself… nothing. My doctor has since re-tested me for Celiac, while I’ve been eating a full gluten filled diet…