• Low energy
• Extreme tiredness
• Weight gain/feeling fat (otherwise known as bloating)
• ADHD symptoms (I would be cooking dinner and wouldn’t realize that I had opened or even remember
opening ALL the cabinet doors open until my husband ran into one of them and bumped his head!)
• Trouble focusing
• Hormone problems (irregular, extreme cramping, mood swings most of the month, extreme anger)
• Stomach pain
Here are the symptoms (in addition to the above) that started to get resolved after going off gluten:
• Brain fog—Just a weird feeling that ten cups of coffee couldn’t seem to rectify and you just couldn’t
shake. A strange feeling that you had just woken up from a deep sleep, only the feeling wouldn’t go
away after a few minutes.
• Face breaking out—I have always had trouble with acne and it only got worse after pregnancy. It seemed
almost constant instead of once a month.
• Horrible, splitting nails
• Never being able to get that “full” feeling after eating a meal
• Sugar/carbohydrate cravings all the time
These are just some of the things that improved when I removed gluten from my diet! I was amazed that changing my diet would resolve so many things that I didn’t even think were symptoms. I thought they were just part of my normal life and I would just have to learn to deal with them.
The next few months were full of research and learning as I delved into what I was eating and what I shouldn’t eat to help me feel better. I thought that gluten-free eating would be hard, but other than bread and cookies, it was surprisingly easy. At least, I could still have one of my favorite foods—cheese! In fact, that was my first thought when I found out that I couldn’t eat gluten anymore was…at least I can still eat cheese!
Surprisingly, it takes months for gluten to get out of your system. A short amount of time for a gluten-free trial is 6 weeks, but it can take some people up to 6 months before they really start feeling better. After a couple of months I started noticing that some of the symptoms that I had experienced were coming back. They were particularly noticeable when I drank my morning coffee with half and half or when I ate some butter. I tried eliminating dairy for a week and then gradually started back with some cheese. I did not want to give up my cheese!