Speak sense to me about gluten

Hello Team Sarno!

So there I am, eating my slimey old gluten free toast and thinking 'What a joyless experience this is...'. So I went and checked the ingredients on the packet... there were 30 of them. Lovely things like palm oil and xanthan gum and more E numbers than Sesame Street brought to you by the letter E...

So then I checked the ingredients of the local bakery's sourdough. There were three (flour, salt, yeast. Four if you include water). And it's the sort of bread I've been dreaming about for the past 2 years...

So why am I gluten free?, I hear you ask. Because I got Graves Disease (an autoimmune thyroid dysfunction), and some people say that your immune system thinks gluten is your thyroid and attacks it. Other people, like endocrinologists, say this is hooey and to go and enjoy your pizza.

Anyway, I went gluten free to see if it would help.

The case for staying GF? My Graves went into remission nicely (in fact, my blood tests shot from hyper to hypo in a matter of weeks when I went GF! Though I don't know if they would have anyway)... My lifelong IBS seemed better... not miracle-cured, but better. After a few months I tried going back on the gluten and got all sorts of tweaky symptoms, not just from the Graves but other old injuries - surgery scars, gut pain, puffy eyes.

The case for eating gluten again? I hope the Graves was a one-off triggered by radio iodine treatment for cancer (a known cause) and a bereavement happening at the same time. Also I had a blood test for coeliac two years before I got ill and it was negative. My return of tweaky symptoms could have been TMS from spending all those months hanging about on the alternative thyroid sites. Real bread is yummy, GF bread is an abomination that barely qualifies as food and, if you feed it to birds, the poor little buggers sh!t everywhere.

There's a lot more to it than this, and there are medical papers against GF or speculatively for GF, and non-coeliac gluten sensitivity is a Thing now, but really, I'm wondering if anyone else has gone the 'food sensitivity' route and found it to be helpful or not?

And if not - how do you work the mind trick to stop fearing the food you've been so assiduously avoiding for months or years?! That's the big one!

Thanks for listening!

 

Coeliac (splng?) is real. That being said, statistically very very few people have it.

I would tend to agree with them.... I tried gluten free just because my GF is a health nut...but that crap is EXPENSIVE and as you said, also tastes like sawdust , excepting a few brands.

When I went OFF of it, I felt a little bloatated, but it was probably related to my lack of rerstraint in eating pretzels and wheat thins, not the actual gluten.

except for the puffiness, that sounds like a psychosomatic reaction...eating a ton of bread carbs does seem to make people look puffier, but I think that most of the other discomfort is TMS. We think something causes something, so it does (the Nocebo)

We eat too many carbs. I am sure it has an effect over time, and you feeling better after ditching gluten sounds familiar.....but real time 'symptoms'....I doubt it.

THAT is probably at the root of more of your stuff than anything you ate

 

Oh, absolutely! And people with thyroid conditions are more likely to also be coeliac/celiac (I'm in the UK where we spell it with an o! ) But still, as you say, statistically a tiny amount... but Graves is relatively rare too, so that's done a number on me a bit...

As for the puffy eyes, sorry, I should have said - part of the Graves was something called Thyroid Eye Disease - not everyone with Graves gets it, but I surely did... And I've been left with fibrotic damage to the eye muscles, which can make them stiff, and I have eye puffiness/fat deposits that fluctuate from 'almost normal for mid-fifties' to 'god, woman, put a bag on your head, you're making babies cry...'. I'm on the list for possible blepharoplasty, but the health service is really run down after covid, so...

The eyes are actually the worst part for me. A good night's sleep and a good mood helps; poor sleep and anxiety make them worse. I'm sure that TMS has a huge influence in this and it's my greatest struggle... but that, I suppose, is for another thread...

I do like a pretzel myself, @Baseball65 , there's no shame in it! But generally, I don't eat a lot of carbs... but my one slice of good bread a day... I used to love that. So there's an incentive to get me over the conditioning, I hope...

But I think you are so right about the bereavement being a huge trigger, and with a very complicated family, and happening at the same time as cancer, and my attempts to 'perfectionist' my way through it, and finding my husband pretty much useless at support because he was overwhelmed by it too... it is only a few years down the line that I'm starting to get a perspective on what a lot it was to go through! I've learned a lot, I've got stronger in many ways, but it was a hard process... and I'm just wondering if dickering about with gluten was a way of trying to control my life, or even to 'bargain myself better' with 'good behaviour'...

Well you've got me thinking! Imma meditate and get some sleep now... Thanks!

 

Have you looked into leaky gut syndrome? I also went GF for period of time and it seemed to get rid of a lot of symptoms I was experiencing but after going to a food intolerance place they said I couldn’t eat a lot of foods cos of the bad bacteria in my gut which was ultimately causing the problems.

They ended up giving me pre and probiotics to take and now I’m back on gluten and don’t get any issues at all but I am making sure to eat a bit more healthier than I did because I was very gluten heavy before hand. It all came about when I was under severe stress too.

 

There are people who have real food sensitivity issues, but they are very few and far between. I think being overly concerned about what we eat is a form of TMS. I understand and have been there. But I believe it is part of looking outside for the thing that is wrong with us, when the real cause lies in our psyche. Think psychologically as Sarno reminds us. The key to being free from all this body stuff is in the mind.

 

I wouldn't worry as much about gluten as I would things from boxes (packaged foods). A lot of the gluten free stuff that is marketed is expensive crap high in carbs and sugar. Anytime a person becomes "legalistic" about food and they start eliminating whole food groups, it's a function of psychology (placebo and nocebo). There are legitimate allergies and conditions of course, but if a person has a whole bunch of rules in their head or they hop from one trendy diet to another, it's a red flag for anxiety. It just becomes "food noise" and I'm pretty sure Dr. Sarno would say it's yet another DISTRACTION (!!!).

 

^^^ What they said^^^