Gluten Free Food, Reviews & Recipes
I started this blog to share my experiences of living as a coeliac in Sydney. However I have now expanded it and am blogging from where ever I happen to be in the world (at the moment Canada). I hope that you enjoy my restaurant, cafe and product reviews, recipes and much more!
My story
When explaining to people that I am a coeliac, one of the first questions that most people ask, if they know what coeliac disease is, is how did I find out I had it?
Well for many years I had a number of symptoms (that I nor my numerous doctors had connected to coeliac disease) including bloating, regularly getting very sick and recovering very slowly, tonsillitis, dematitis and the list goes on… I regularly went to the doctor complaining of these symptoms but they always just prescribed me antibiotics, told me to take Buscopan or to rest and let my body recover.
In 2009 I started seeing a personal trainer who told me to cut down on a lot of carbs (including bread and pasta) and I started feeling a bit better and hadn’t been sick for awhile so thought that maybe I was just overeating and that the problem had now been solved. Wishful thinking. One weekend in mid 2009 my sister caught a virus and passed it onto me, she recovered in a day or so, I on the other hand wasn’t so lucky and was in bed for a couple of days feeling very very sorry for myself.
It was at this point that my Mum said that something had to be wrong considering I was eating healthily and exercising more than most! Though our family was never into herbal remedies/medicine Mum suggested that I go and see a naturopath and so I visited Dr Senani Wijesena from the Natural Medicine Clinic in Cammeray. I explained all my symptoms to her, family history etc and she immediately suggested that I might have coeliac disease and so sent me away to complete a number of tests. Sure enough, my test results came back positive for coeliac disease.
Luckily for me, my uncle also has coeliac disease and therefore at the time I was diagnosed it wasn’t too overwhelming as I knew what it was and the types of food I now had to avoid. However that is not to say that my journey since then has been easy, in fact it has been a huge learning experience.
There are a number of resources out there for those with coeliac disease or a gluten intolerance, which have helped me immensely in my journey to date. One of these resources is each state’s coeliac society. The Coeliac Society of NSW run fantastic information sessions including how to read labels and also cooking classes as well as sending out many other resources to members.
From my journey so far, if there was one thing that I wanted to get across to those who are diagnosed with coeliac disease it is to be careful what you eat once you go gluten free as a number of gluten free foods are actually very unhealthy!
The one thing that still bugs me today, and which I believe will probably never stop bugging me is that before being diagnosed I was the person that everyone wanted to have over for dinner, I would eat anything and wasn’t fussy. Now I am the biggest pain when it comes to choosing restaurants and especially when going to people’s place for dinner. So hopefully for those non-coeliac’s reading this, if this blog does nothing else, it helps you understand what contains gluten and therefore makes your life a little easier when entertaining for a coeliac. In the meantime, please don’t hate us 
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