And you may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here?"

My journey to a glutenless life.

It all started with a bm, as many of the best days do. Only, on this day, I was walking into a LabCorp with my you-know-what inside a crisp white paper bag.

The receptionist greeted me with a smile. “Hi, I’ll be with you in just a few moments.” Only, you know at a LabCorp “a few minutes” is code for 17 hours and a hellish loop of infomercials for ailments you would have never been nervous about… until now.

Finally she calls my name and I hand off the bag with shame in my eyes. She doesn’t take the hint. “What are you dropping off today?”

I am at a loss for words in this room full of people staring at me with nothing else to do while waiting to get their blood drawn. A room where I have been sitting with them and my specimen for the last 17 hours. “It’s, well, it’s a bag of my poop.”

You’d think in those 17 hours I could have found the words “stool sample” or “human waste” but instead I announced to the entire room that I had been clutching a bag of my own shit. I smile sheepishly and slink out the door, hoping to never see any of them again. 

But was the humiliation worth it? A few days later, I get a call from the doctor. After years of nausea, acid reflux, debilitating exhaustion, gnawing stomach cramps, and countless medical professionals shrugging their shoulders, this doctor finally acknowledges that there may be some validity to my concerns. My calprotectin level, a marker of internal inflammation, is so hilariously high that it is time for an emergency colonoscopy! Finally, we’ll get some answers!

After a very expensive nap, the doctor decrees that I have “massive degradation of the stomach lining.” But unfortunately, he says, the root cause is unknown so I should leave him alone so he can go back to pushing papers and making the insurance men happy. Ah, the American medical system.

While regaling anyone who would listen with my sob story, a stranger asked “have you ever tried going gluten free?”

I’m a cook, eater, cookbook writer, food stylist, food show host, and all-around-food-obsessive…and I had never considered it.  

Frankly, I associated being gluten free with people cutting back on carbs who were pretending not to be on a diet and my little cousin with celiac who miserably ate passover desserts all year long. But I was desperate – so I gave it a try. One million pieces of dry rice bread later I was miraculously feeling better! “BUT WHY,” I wondered.

This brings us back to the labs. I found a very old, nearly dead but highly regarded doctor who ran every test known to man. As the lab results started rolling without context, I determined I had every disease from tuberculosis to sleep apnea.

“UCTD”, he said. “Undifferentiated connective tissue disease - a.k.a latent lupus.” Exciting name. “Though it isn’t curable, we do have a course of action to keep the flare ups at bay.”

Holy moly, a diagnosis!! The sky parts, angels sing, and 400 mg of Plaquanil descends from the heavens.

Turns out gluten, which has inflammatory properties, is one of the triggers for my flare ups. So the combination of being gluten free and taking my god-given Plaquenil seems to be doing the trick!

The truth is – I have known something was up since I was very little. As a kid, I was a picky eater and much of my diet was…gluten. I had massive stomach pains, an underachieving pituitary gland, no growth hormone production and was the last girl on earth to go through puberty.

Which is to say, it’s been a long journey, one I was reluctant to go on. But now that I’m here, I really am so much happier, and committed to finding the best GF dupes, since I know what the real ones taste like. 

Tash