Before this blog, I had another one. I’ve actually had a few over the past few years but I always get so insecure about them, that I would delete them. My last blog had two great posts, both about my transition into the gluten free lifestyle and I deleted the blog a month ago, completely forgetting to save those two posts so if I ever wanted to talk about it again, I could simply copy and paste. I really regret it now. The upside of this is that I get to talk about it again, but a year later. I’ll spilt this into two posts, because my other posts were too long and it really needed that second post to balance it out.
I can’t remember when I started to get signs that something wasn’t right. It might have been in the New Year of 2013, or slightly before then but I was having a really healthy year. I had came back from University the previous year and gave myself a good kick up the arse and finally started to get healthy and lose weight. I was the healthiest I had ever been, but I was getting sore heads, stomach cramps, feeling exhausted and having a really foggy head. Those were the main symptoms I had had. I was sleeping so much after college every day that I had to ban myself for an entire month because it was getting out of hand and when you’re so used to going home and having a three hour nap, once you ban yourself, it’s not pretty. I banned myself in the December of 2012 because I remember thinking half way through the month “Oh yeah, I’ll be off for the next weeks so I’ll not want a nap anyway”. I had no idea what was going on, absolutely none. I went to the doctor and told them what was wrong with me and I was told I should go off bread for a month. That’s literally what I was told. Going off bread didn’t help me, I think I done it for about two months and there was still no change. It had been suggested to me that maybe gluten was the problem, but I had no idea what gluten was, but I love researching (It was one of my favourite things to do in college for projects) so I done that and it was if someone had just watched me for a few months then wrote down everything that had happened. My symptoms and other symptoms were listed and it made so much sense. All the pain I was in, all the tiredness I had felt, all the times I couldn’t concentrate in class and sometimes struggled writing down the exact same words the teacher was saying on a piece of paper, it all made sense. It was gluten. It just had to be.
I’m not a huge fan of going to the doctors for a few reasons. 1) Whenever there’s something wrong with a woman, the first question they’ll usually ask “Is there a chance you could be pregnant?” I get it. I’m a woman and yes, we can get pregnant but it really annoys me that for the majority of time, that’s what we’re asked. 2) Appointment times. As I said, I’m not a fan of doctors so when I go, I am genuinely not well but whenever I would ring up for an appointment, I was given one for a week and a half later. I understand that if it was truly an emergency, I could get an emergency appointment or go up to A&E, but isn’t a week and a half later a bit ridiculous? So I was put off a lot and I didn’t think I would get anywhere fast. I’m pretty sure I went for another appointment a few months later but I can’t be 100% sure about that.
I was still getting cramps, I was still exhausted, I was still feeling foggy. I was exercising and some people thought I was tired because I was “working out too much”. Trust me, I didn’t over-do it and I wasn’t tired from it. I actually dread to think what I would have been like if I hadn’t been working out. I was still losing weight and I was eating enough for my body type and enough for me to lose weight. But the pains were still coming and in November 2013 I’d had enough. Enough of the stomach pains especially, I was a woman, we get period pains, I only expect pains once a month, not once a day for hours on end. So I did more research and found a centre that done allergy and intolerance testing near me.
In my next post, I’ll go through my experience of the intolerance testing and how it’s helped me ever since. I wanted to include it in one big post, but it’s much better to split it up into chunks (:
RetroSnowflakes 