It’s hard to let go of wheat. At first as you start to heal and you begin feeling better, you’ll tease yourself thinking “I can still have a slice of pizza” or “just one doughnut this week”. You think because you’ve cut back so much on wheat compared that what you had before, that it will be fine!
But then you’re sick again with terrible pain, headaches, vomiting. And you quickly decide that nothing is worth that pain.
Took me about 1 year to get to that point. I know now that even the smallest amount of wheat will trigger an inflammation attack in my body, and it’s just not worth the pain.
I mainly eat a Paleo Diet which focuses on simple/non-processed foods and meals. However, I’m not a cook so I can’t give you suggestions on recipes or how to make eating not-suck, because truthfully, it will suck a lot more than the food choices you had before.
But I try to spice things up as much as I can, working with whatever ingredients I have, just to keep things different and interesting.
Dinner is usually a meat/fish with rice and steamed-vegetables. Sometimes I do baked-in-aluminum potatoes instead. But you’re free to decide how you’ll prepare the meat/fish – be it in oven, slow cookers, with butter or spices, etc. As long as you don’t use bread crumbs, right.
Lately we’ve been having a Chipotle-style supper: Tostitos/corn chips (which are Gluten-Free and have pretty simple ingredients), canned beans/corn warmed up, grilled chicken slices, cheese, and an avocado/guacamole dip (I found one at Walmart that uses very simple ingredients, but it’s not too hard to make your own either).
For breakfast I’ve been having coconut water, eggs with bacon and a mayo/dijon mustard sauce. And lately I’ll thrown in the Tostitos to every meal, just to get some crunch lol. When I’m too lazy to prepare food, I’ll just warm up my corn/beans and have them with Tostitos. It’s cheap, good source of fiber and protein, and fills me up with little effort.
The worst is being extremely hungry, and not having 45-60 minutes to prepare a meal. So that’s why you need to have foods you can eat in those emergency-like situations, or else you’ll screw-up and eat something with wheat, and big sick immediately afterward. Or being stuck in the city, have to eat at a fast-food place, and you can’t find any non-wheat options (or altogether, the place doesn’t list ingredients, and they sometimes have wheat in sauces and similar [ie. soy sauce at a sushi place] that you don’t expect).
So for those moments, you need to have quick simple meals that you can eat. Nuts, almonds, walnuts, rice crackers, etc.
I’ve been making my own Gluten-free pizza and Gluten-free cookies. I use the GF-flour from Robin Hood for pizza dough, which takes some time to prepare, but turns out great (you can also buy GF-pizza crust at Costco). The chocolate-chip cookies I use a rice-only flour because they bake better. Both end up tasting great, without the nasty pain of wheat food. But they are still high in fat and sugar, so it’s not something you should be eating frequently anyway.
You can still eat a lot of foods, depending on how simple you want to eat. I’ve had to cut out a lot of food because of recent stomach/abdomen problems, no more: coffee, alcohol, acidic foods, spices, teas. I’m cautious on the cheese and milk as well. I also was drinking an Almond “Milk” that made me really sick because it had the ingredient “carrageenan”.