Dear friends,

I ate the donuts. Three of them....two chocolate and one glazed. My better half wasn't too pleased. He told me to delete that last blog! You sinned Becky. Yes dear, I did. So now I make my confession public. I ate the donuts and they were delicious. I asked for forgiveness with each fluffy bite. My insides almost died but I am okay now. My four year old son has a will of iron. He has eaten NO gluten on our entire vacation. He resisted pizza, breadsticks, donuts, and s'mores. Can you believe that? Poor guy is scarred from his insides hating gluten too. Thanks for understanding that I am still a work in progress. Becky

Happy and Gluten Free

  I have been wanting share my take on being gluten free for a while now. I have several new readers and I just want to re-warn you that this blog is just Becky's opinion of whatever she feels like writing about. You never know what you will get here, but I enjoy capturing my thoughts and my family and making it into a book to put on my shelf. The boys love to read old blog books!

So we had better start a loooong time ago. My parents manage a Pizza Hut and always have. I love pizza. I grew up eating it ALL the time and LOVING it! I never got sick of pizza. I had a sad adjustment period when I got to college and realized I couldn't afford Pizza Hut! I also loved every other bread....cereal, toast, French toast, cinammon rolls, breadsticks, French bread, fried bread, Daylight donuts, oh I love dounuts, Carls Jr sausage biscuits, that dark bread at steak houses, nan bread, cookies, pretty much anything you can think of- I loved it. I had recently just learned how to make many of my own breads from scratch and was loving it. 

I was also diagnosed with psoriasis in 2003. It is a skin disease where your skin cells reproduce too quickly. It makes these red, itchy, ugly patches. I only slightly suffered for the first 6 years. As moved to North Dakota my psoriasis slowly got worse and then this January something happened and it became awful. I went from like 2% of my body covered to like..... 45% of my body being covered. It was not cool!

I was very uncomfortable and desperate for change. I tried everything to cure this from juicing, tanning, purifying my liver and every cream known to man. Nothing helped. In comes my crazy gluten free friend. She says to me "psoriasis is an auto-immune disease and gluten is related to auto immune diseases. I bet if you go off gluten, your skin will improve." Mind you she spoke with an urgent passion behind that sentence. Basically, I felt a nudging to do it. My spirit was willing but my flesh was oh so weak. By this time I was pregnant and sick and had even less self control than normal. I wondered if the nudging I felt was the Holy Spirit but highly doubted He would speak to me about food.

So, I tried to be gluten free for 3 weeks and quit on day 6. I really felt that I was wrong for quitting, but it was hard to abstain. I even had dreams about gluten. I know I was driving Brian crazy talking about it. Finally, I took a 300 food intolerance blood test with Alcat. I had only one food come back as severe intolerance- GLUTEN!

Since it was confirmed with science, I immediately started a GF diet. I was strong for about 4 weeks and I saw small improvement in my skin. Then I had a major breakdown. We traveled to Kansas City for my Dad's birthday and it was soooo hard. I wasn't able to enjoy gluten with the rest of my family and I wanted to. I was angry and also starving! The third day of the trip I broke down and had a Sonic breakfast burrito. Then the next day I enjoyed Fazolis in Iowa and continued eating gluten for a couple days. Then my consequences set in.... and it wasn't  fun. We will just say my intestines really appreciated the gluten break.

Since then I have released my anger and followed the diet. I also was encouraged by friends to embrace my red spots and find out how God was going to heal me, if He chose to do so. Ifelt that He had made the GF pth clear and if He wanted to heal me through GF then I needed to do it! I realized that God can speak to me about food and if He does, I need to listen. 

After being gluten free for 2.5 months (except for those rebellious days) my skin is almost totally healed and I Praise The Lord for that! He choose to heal me in an unconventional way, much like Namaan. He wasn't excited to dip in the Jordan three times, just as I wasn't excited to give up gluten. We both obeyed though and were healed. 

I can't tell you what a weight has been lifted from me.  It is easier now to eat GF because I know my consequences and I love my clearer skin. I am also thankful to my friend who had the courage to suggest the diet to me. We never would have come up with it on our own! That is the whole point of this blog, to encourage someone who might need to experiment like I did. I now tend to think taking wheat out of a diet will cure anything but I know that's not true. I highly, highly recommend reading "Wheat Belly" and getting a food intolerance test. Many loved ones say to me, "I can eat gluten, I don't have a problem"...... The trick is you don't know until you have been tested! I ate bread my whole life with no symptoms..... Who would have thought my skin issues were all because of gluten? Think about it!

 I also just needed an excuse to share my GF pictures. Enjoy!

So we made GF donuts....

They were awful!

These are almond meal cookies, not terrible.

This is Pamela's pancake mix that saved my life!

These are the biscuits that make Saturday mornings awesome! Thank you Jules flour!

This is a flour less chocolate cake that was also amazing! We hardly have desert now, so we were so happy to indulge in this.

Part of our transition was learning to step out of the box. I have to research everything now!  Five Guys has all GF ingredients excepts buns. So I happily took my GF bun and enjoyed my burger there with the rest if the family. There is nothing like enjoying a big burger when you are starving! And I had been starving for a while. It is harder to get Totally full on GF, but we are still learning.

This is MacKenzie River Pizza. Wow... It was amazing, and I am a pizza snob! I had to ask the waitress if she was certain that she ordered me the gluten free crust!

We also found a quant breakfast bakery in Billings, MT called Stella's. I have found that the larger the city, the better they cater to gluten free customers. These are my pancakes, which were delicious.

Now this, is not gluten free but I put the picture up because it was the first time I had strength to resist eating something so beautiful. Praise The Lord! From the sounds that came out of Brian... I can imagine how delicious it must have been.

It has been a hard transition, we were hungry for a couple weeks while I tried to figure out meals we could eat. It is soooo worth it though! I cant over emphasize that! Again, I praise The Lord for healing me. 

If you are considering this remember, food doesn't make or break your quality of life! Many say "I would rather have a good life that is short and eat what I want,  than suffer and live longer." Gluten free is not suffering, although it does suck at times and is hard, it doesn't effect my quality of life! My life is bigger than food and I hope yours is too!

Lastly, I want to thank Brian. He has been such an encouragement. He closes my eyes during Hardees commercials and fights for me when I am weak. Thanks for believing in these crazy circumstances and trying all my experimental food, while I simutaneously empty your pocket book. I wouldnt have made it far without you! Now I am off to Oklahoma. I only pray I have the strength to resist daylight donuts...