We moved to a small college town near Pittsburgh, PA where my husband is from. He took a professor position, and I taught adjunct and worked at my tutoring job that went everywhere with me (it's an online job). The job wasn't great, and we were making plans soon to leave along with the other new faculty that had come in and balked at how crazy things were there.
I wasn't sure what was wrong with me, but the gray sky climate there seemed to zonk me, or so I thought, as a life long Alabama girl used to lots of sunlight and blue skies. I had even less energy than before, and I hibernated in the snowy, cold fall and winter that first year. Oh, and I got pregnant that October. Actually four months into it, I started feeling great, and I enjoyed my pregnancy. We took long walks up and down hills until I couldn't do it anymore in late pregnancy.
One thing I noticed, though, was that I had terrible edema with the pregnancy early on... like even before I was showing. My ankles were huge and puffy all the time. I didn't get it, and my blood pressure was fine as was my blood sugar, so the doctor said not to worry about it. I had cut out coffee but not gluten of course. I just didn't know.
My daughter was born in July of 2003, and I was happy but tired. I lost 30 pounds almost overnight (I had gained 45 with the pregnancy... way too much, and that was with exercise and trying to eat sensibly the whole time), but that still put me at a high weight. I had been packing on the pounds since my move. It was as if my gluten sensitivity and the changes had pushed everything into a new mode-- one in which things got bad for me quickly. So, when it was all said and done, I got back under a magic weight number for me... not svelte, but one that had people saying I looked good. Mesomorphs can carry a good bit of weight, after all, with the extra musculature. But I'll never forget one person asking me "when is your stomach going to go back like it was?"
Yeah, that's a question you don't erase from memory, though I'm sure that person has. Now I think it was the combo of gluten tummy and skin that didn't just bounce back after having a baby. We're all different after all.
A strange thing happened, though as I ate the usual fare at home and on campus and fought my food cravings and time marched on... plenty of healthy whole wheat (ugh! Now I want to scream!!), Subway sandwiches in the lunch hall, whole white pita wraps with tons of veggies and turkey. But still, I gained weight... another 25 pounds. Just getting up in the morning to teach was a struggle. I often picked my daughter up from childcare in those early years and took her home. I'd nap right alongside her, exhausted though I wasn't sure why.
I thought I was just depressed due to the climate and the crappy place we lived full of narrow minded people and not many I wanted to get close to.
And my weight. I couldn't understand it. I tried Weight Watchers, and it only made the binging I could try to control get worse. I figure that was because I was eating even more wheat than usual.
After that, I tried non-dieting. You know, eat when you're hungry, stop when you're full and float down to your body's desired weight. Airy fairy magic pie in the sky! So easy even an idiot could do it.
Um, yeah, right. As a person with gluten issues who was literally starving from not absorbing nutrients and whose hunger signals screamed for hours on end each day, you can figure out how wonderfully that went. I would go up and down on the scale and never understood how people knew they were satisfied when hunger just gnawed away at me.
After that, I found a program called Potatoes Not Prozac/Radiant Recovery. Then I thought, Oh, this is it! I'm sugar sensitive or addicted to sugar!
My husband rolled his eyes but supported me while saying, "another diet? Why can't you just eat and stop when you're full?"
I said, "I don't know. I'm not like you. I just can't."
It made a lot of sense. After all, sugar was like a drug for me, wasn't it? I couldn't stop after one brownie or cookie or... could I? So, I struggled with this program for several years on and off all told. I deeply respect Ms. DesMaisons, but I've come to believe that many of the people who land at her program have gluten intolerance, celiac, and food allergies and THAT is why they can't seem to stop eating! It's not really the sugar.
When I'd try to eat on program, I would get sick feeling and hungry after a big breakfast shake of oats, milk, and protein powder. Duh. Oats can really bother folks who have gluten issues, and I think I'm a bit sensitive to milk. So, yeah, Not a good thing. I remember noticing that when I took almost all the oats out, I felt better. Magic!
I still felt sick, tired, and awful. I'd suffered from terrible postpartum depression, and I wasn't sure why. Now, I think it was related to depleted vitamins and minerals in my malnourished body.
By 2005, my husband had found another job, and we were off to a new adventure, one that I looked forward to.
We headed to Canada, and the story of gluten and its effects on my life would unfold even more fully there...
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