Now I am no health-nut. I don’t exercise a million times a
week, I eat chips (fries), I like alcohol. I honestly think the best diets contain a
bit of everything; they are balanced. Every person should have a Big Mac every
so often but they should also eat cherries and berries and apples and lettuce.
When I was growing up however, I always had problems with my digestion. In my first year
of uni I lived off a diet of pasta and bread and I put on about a stone of
weight. A lot of that was from the amount of alcohol intake I had (I can’t lie),
but it was also because I was putting a huge strain on my intestines and not
even knowing it. The summer after my first year I lost the weight I had put on,
because I was mainly at home and not eating pasta (my mum hates it). My whole
life pasta has been my favourite food, I absolutely adore it. I could eat it every
day, easily. But, a couple of years ago I had to go to the doctor because I was
experiencing migraines and bad stomach problems (since I could remember), that were
getting worse. It took them a while to figure what was going on, but in the end
we realised it was an intolerence to gluten and dairy (Celiac's disease is a more serious form). What’s strange is that I honestly think,
in some small way my body was trying to tell me to avoid these things already.
I don’t like sandwiches, I’m not a huge cereal eater, I’ve never been one for
crazy amounts of ice-cream and I don’t eat cheese. The only thing that my body
shouldn’t have been consuming that I actually loved was pasta. Sometimes, you
need to listen to what your body is trying to tell you.
Since then, my life has consisted of trying (and mostly
failing) to find good tasting gluten-free and dairy free alternatives for my
diet. The dairy wasn’t hard to give up. As I said, I’ve never been one for much
dairy anyway, so the only changes I had to really make were to soya milk and
dairy-free sunflower spread. The gluten thing was a lot harder to figure out –
but only because of my hunt for pasta that tasted the same.
