Going Gluten Free. EEEK!

GOAL:  Stop feeling like crud and start losing weight.

PROTOCOL (yeah, I said I was a scientist):  Stop eating chemicals and determine which food groups make me feel like crud.

Do I want to go cold turkey and stop eating EVERY possible inflammation-inducing food immediately?  Or do I want to reduce one food at a time?  The risk is that elimination of gluten wont feel any different to me because I'm still reacting to something else.  But I'm going to give it a go.

So I'm gluten free as of yesterday.

Day 1 went well - I had ONE thing that contained gluten and that was the steak sauce my mom slathered on my meat at dinner.  I couldn't stop her, I didn't even know it was on there and honestly its a bit rude to tell someone that just cooked you dinner that you don't want to eat it.  Anyway it was only about 2tbl of sauce.  I definitely ate more than I normally do - I rounded out the day right about 2000 calories and I bet that's because I was kinda looking for something if you know what I mean.  Before dinner I was kinda like:  THERE'S NOTHING TO SNACK ON THAT ISN'T GLUTEN FREE!!  So by virtue of the fact that I couldn't snack I proceeded to NEED a snack IMMEDIATELY.  This makes no sense but mind games are part of this process and they need to be dealt with too.

My pantry is awful - honestly.  There are reduced fat chips (loaded with crud), pretzels, another kind of pretzel, crackers, 4 boxes of cereal, rice off all kinds (technically doesn't have gluten naturally but I will need to determine if my brands are sprayed with gluten-containing stuffs), pasta (hello?) and a few varieties of convenience foods like bars, fruit cups and fruit leathers.  Most will be off limits to me.

Despite snacking a bit extra, I woke up this morning and was down 2 lbs of most probably water-weight.  Day one of no gluten and 2 lbs go away?  If this keeps up I might accidentally lose some weight!  I'm motivated to continue.

It's Day 2 and I was a bit stumped on lunch.  I didn't have leftovers from dinner and my pantry is not friendly right now so I rooted around and found .... what's pictured above for lunch.  A beg of iceberg lettuce, a scoop of canned chicken (goodness I hope there wasn't nasties in there, I didn't think to check but its a good brand so hopefully nothing awful in it!) w/1tbl EVOO mayo and Penzey's buttermilk ranch seasoning (these are clean, I checked!), a handful of dried cranberries (clean!) and about 5 cherry tomatoes quartered.  It was ... DELICIOUS.  I paired it with some fresh pineapple that you can see in a baggie above and was totally satisfied.  And I *THINK* it was gluten free.

Tonight we will have grilled chicken and veggie skewers at the park - we're having a picnic!  YAY!

Later I will discuss why gluten is bad and list some resources people have shown me in case anyone wants to try to go gluten free.