Hi!

I’ve been free from everything non-vegan for a while now, as has my husband. One of the biggest things we’ve noticed is not necessarily the limited diet (far from it!) but the attitudes of other people. When we were on holiday in Spain five years ago, we could only find a Mexican bar that gave us something remotely adaptable to eat. When were explaining to the waiter that we just wanted a plate of nachos with no cheese, his disbelieving response was ‘What? Sin queso? But that’s just chips!’ He walked off, shaking his head, convinced that the food were really wanted was lost in translation, and that we’d be sorely disappointed when he brought out our food.

Working in the motor industry, my husband works with a lot of strong-minded men – to say they were skeptical of his vegan diet would be putting it lightly! Over the last few years I have loved rising to the challenge of veganising various foods my hubbie thought he’d never eat again. Some of his personal favourites recently have been ‘Crunchie ice-cream bars’, and scotch eggs. He’s also loved showing off all the foods he CAN eat in front of his originally skeptical colleagues. They’ve gone from making carrot jokes that would make your mother blush, to being intrigued enough to put ‘orders’ in to our kitchen – I now have a waiting list of customers!!

Moral of the story? Being ‘free from’ pushes your boundaries, and challenges your creativity. It also makes you thoroughly appreciative of all the things we CAN eat. I love it!

I have Multiple Sclerosis and try to treat my symptoms as much as possible through good diet, exercise and alternative therapies. I read up on diets specifically to help MS symptoms and I came across research explaining how cutting down/cutting out gluten can help people with MS. I read about the reasons behind this and the stories from people this has helped, I decided to at least give it a try…

For a few months now I have been trying to avoid gluten and my symptoms do seem to be lessening so I am sticking with it. It can be quite difficult though, especially when eating out, luckily I don’t have to avoid gluten as rigidly as someone with Coeliacs disease so I can eat a few more products than a Coeliac which helps make life easier. I have found I am cooking more and experimenting with new foods (e.g. mashed carrots and parsnips instead of pasta with my bolognaise etc, it goes together surprisingly well!!) The one thing I haven’t done yet though is try any ‘free from’ foods, I have just avoided pasta and bread totally, but now I am ready to try some of these alternatives to add a bit of variety back into my diet. Hopefully you will find my story interesting and choose me as a winner.

Sorry for rambling on so long I am just quite passionate about the healing properties of food and using diet to control health conditions, I can be a bit of a bore with it lol.

Anyway that is me in a nutshell!!!

Thanks for reading

I have a dairy and yeast intolerance and was diagnosed 3 years ago , it was hard at first because i am a assistant manager of a cheese shop , I love cheese and wine and can not have either now

I soon learned that you cope with your situation and you cancut the foods out quite easily these days with the supermarkets offering their free from ranges , and alternative products I learned through trial and error and cooked at home , I make dairy free scones , yorkshire puddings and my famous brooklyn blackout cake , I just change the ingrediants in normal recipes for dairy free options and most of the time they work ,

I have people round to eat and they dont realise they are eating dairy free
on the plus side I have lost 3 stone in weight and have felt better than I have in 10 years

My allergy is very common. I’m not allergic to any food at all. I’m allergic to some E numbers, MSG, & any other rubbish that’s added to our food in this country.

Unfortunately, a lot of restaurants, etc, don’t bother preparing their own food. They buy ready-made food.
Once I had fish & chips, & I passed out. The chips were frozen, & therefore treated to stop them going black, & the batter came out of a huge carton.

After one Chinese meal, I couldn’t walk. I wanted to lie down on the pavement & sleep.
I get terrible stomach upsets & sickness. How do I cope? I rarely eat out. I prepare all my meals using natural food, which isn’t hard to do!If I do eat out, I ask them about their food.Usually the response is very helpful, & often enthusiastic as they discover things about their ingredients.

But sometimes I get ‘The Face,’ as though I’m stupid. Then I just turn around & walk out! The problem is a British one. Most of the rest of the world wouldn’t dream of using frozen, pre-prepared food.

So why are we being poisoned in the UK?

it’s so unnecessary. If they’re too lazy to peel a potato, they shouldn’t be in the catering business!

My father has coeliac disease and l bake his free from cakes, few shops sell gluten free , the supermarkets have a small selection , M& S are doing more, but the prices are so much more expensive,

Baking with gluten free flour is like working with playdough, even going out to eat you have to double check the menu, hardly any restaurants serve gluten free bread so sandwiches are out of the question , bread often has to be toasty as its as heavy as a brick, and its so hard to tell in some foods if they have gluten or not.

When I was first diagnosed with coeliac disease in 2009 I was initially hugely relieved that I finally knew what was wrong with me. For 18 months I had lived in constant pain. I lost two stone in weight during that period, yet my belly was permanently bloated. I became a virtual prisoner in my own home, too frightened to go out in case I had an urgent need for the loo. It was a hellish time.

After the initial relief came the shock and the feeling that I was alone, that I would never enjoy foods again. But that all changed when I was introduced to the Foods You Can Website by a friend. Some of the recipes are amazing – even my husband rates them (and he’s a very picky eater)! And the inspirational stories – particularly Bunmi’s – have been a tremendous support and comfort to me.

Almost three years on from my diagnosis, I am now far healthier, happier and optimistic about the future. Eliminating certain ingredients from my diet has not meant that I have had to eliminate great taste!

I always seemed to have a bit of a ‘funny tummy’ after certain foods and didn’t really think anything of it for a long time. However, it soon became apparent to family members that the problems were starting to affect my personal, social and work-life. After a lot of persuading, I finally went to the GP, who referred me for a barium enema and colonoscopy. I was, as many people are, very nervous about both procedures, especially after reading a lot about them (rubbish as it turned out!) on the Internet.

After the procedures, I was very relieved to be informed that my problems were nothing too sinister and were put down to IBS. The medication i’ve been prescribed really helps. However, I also have to help myself by watching what I eat. After doing my own food diary, I am now free from foods that have too much fat in them. I also avoid citric foods. I manage to cope with this without too many difficulties but it can be a bit tricky at Christmas time !

The night my young son had his first life threatening anapyhlatic reaction was a night we will never forget. Not simply because he got so ill, so quickly but it happened at my best friends 40th Birthday Party. It was an 80′s revival party and my partner and I had decided to pay tribute to our favourite band since school, the Cure and were dressed up as goths.

My son has been asthmatic since I stopped breast feeding him and we were always warned not to let him have nuts, just in case. That night, as we were all having fun, my son was laughing under a table with his best buddy who was eating a bowl of peanuts. All his little friend did was touch his cheek with his hand and within minutes he couldn’t breathe. At first we thought it was an asthma attack but inhalers didn’t help and his face swelled so we had to take him to casualty. My son was so brave and so wonderful but the doctors and nurses thought my partner and I were complete freaks, especially when the other half fell asleep on my sons hospital bed looking like Edward Scissorhands.

The hospital did not diagnose a food allergy but shortly after demanding to be referred it was confirmed within seconds of a test in another hospital. When the doctor told me my son could die if he was exposed to any trace of peanut I felt the world spin; it was a dreadful thing to know and change our life to adapt around. He has the most severe form of the allergy they had seen.

School has been the hardest to deal with. So many do not believe life threatening food allergy is a real affliction and it is really hard for a child at school. Parties are a nightmare and everything has to be checked. As he’s got older it is easier. He accepts it more now. The worse thing is him not being able to share birthday cakes, sweets and chocolates when the other children are having them so we have a special goody box just for him the teacher keeps in the cupboard.. I’ve had to join scouts with him to ensure no mistakes are made.

I’d always been the little chub at school, the one with the puppy fat, the one who was cuddly. To put it bluntly, when I was in primary school and Disney’s Lion King was released, and we played the characters on the playgroud… I was Pumba! Here’s Pumba if you aren’t aware (the pig, not the scrawny meercat!!) So, it’s safe to say, I was typecast!

Don’t get me wrong, I was a super-happy kid, had loads of friends and did lots of activities. I was always at dancing, netball, tennis, football, hockey, brownies, guides… anything going, i’d be there… so it wasn’t as if I was fat and lazy, I was just what my family referred to as ‘solid’!

So, I went through all of my childhood and up to the age of 18 without knowing there was any kind of problem! I remember suffering really bad tummy aches as a kid and constantly having this big pot belly, but this was just me, I was the one with the belly! No one ever thought to question it. Even when I went to the doctors for my asthma, one told me, AGED 15 that I needed to lose some weight (great… how impressionable do you think I was at that age? Correct, very!) Anyway, it was hard as I never had a bad diet – full of healthy food, we rarely ate take-out food and literally I can pin point the times I ever had a burger from the well know golden arched restaurant! So, we were at a bit of a loss.

When I moved out of home to begin my foundation course, I decided enough was enough. My stomach was actually hurting now! So, off I went to the doctors, to be put on a reduction diet and be given a bottle of Gaviscon (which made me gag so I had about 1 tsp and didn’t even contemplate the rest!). The reduction diet was brilliant and showed what was making my stomach bloat up… wheat, gluten, rice and white potatoes! And, the doctor was able to confirm that I had IBS! Relief! But… no help?! No prescriptions to help me know what to eat? Reading material… nope! Nothing… just cut out these things and see how it goes.

And so began the pancake year… Yes, this is exactly as it sounds! At this point I had no clue of what to do, i’d just moved away from home and the supermarkets weren’t exactly over-flowing with gluten free products. I didn’t know about blogs and online communities so I felt so alone in everything, plus, I was kind of embarassed to have to follow a ‘special diet’ as I didn’t know anyone else in a similar situation. So, I made what I knew – pancakes – using gluten free flour. I was too shy to take over the kitchen as I do now as I didn’t want to be in the way of everyone, the oven was so rubbish I didn’t dare to try baking anything, and, I didn’t want to live off salads as, as much as I knew that was healthy, I was a student dammit! I was going to enjoy myself. I had pancakes with cheese, pancakes with crabsticks, pancakes with syrup, jam, just margarine… anything really! But over that year, I gained my ‘Fresher Fifteen’… and some! I was seriously out of control as my body had gotten so used to the fatty, doughy ‘treat’ that all other food was boring and alien to me.

I moved back home at the end of my Foundation year and before starting University and my mum helped me to get everything back on track. We got me back to healthy food, salads and vegetables we important to me again, and I felt better, so I thought I was okay to re-introduce wheat and gluten again, and, it didn’t seem to be too bad…

Well, this time, thankfully it worked out! I was able to go ‘back to normal’ after four months on the reduction diet. And, the best thing was that I could enjoy my month long trip to India without too much trouble… or so I thought! Within a week of being there, I was bloating, hurting and this time the weight was just falling off me as I was unable to keep anything down. I spent the rest of the trip on a diet of plain bread, mashed potatoes and bananas (not great if you’re wanting to enjoy some of the most delicious food you’ve seen, but the only thing for me as I couldn’t figure out what was happening!) I returned home, and after a couple of weeks of fairly plain food, I was okay again, not brilliant, but I was able to keep food down and, I started running… this should have been a sign to me that exercise was important to my stress management, but, as it was the summer break, I wasn’t especially stressed and I had the start of University to look forward to, so everything was under control.

A year later and I got hit by Swine Flu, at the same time as this, I was on a work placement with a 2 hour commute there and another 2 back, I was moving out of my flat and generally the stress was piling up (I can feel myself panicking just writing this!). One week away with the family confimed everything for me, I had to cut out the wheat and gluten again. And this time for good. During the week away I was really careful, I ate wheat and gluten free products, lots of fruit and vegetables, cut out the rice and potatoes as I had done the year before, and within a few weeks my body was feeling good again. I went back to the doctor who confirmed all of what I had been worrying about and from this point on, I knew what was wrong.

It hasn’t been the easiest time for me, I’ve spent the best part of three years trying to understand what my body is telling me, and everyday I get a panic about what’s going on. But, I’m learning to control my stress through exercise and my body through diet and I am getting there bit by bit. I’m not going to lie and tell you everyone has been amazingly supportive – I’ve had people saying horrible stuff about my IBS, someone who constantly questioned me about my weight when I first got diagnosed, to the point of accusations, I’ve had to re-educate the whole family (no mean feat when I was explaining to my grandparents as they are meat and two veg and a shed load of potatoes people, so that’s been hard), not to mention having to adapt everything I know, but it’s really shown me who my real friends are, in a non-cliche way! I’m lucky I have a family who loves their food and are willing to sit through countless trials of my cooking, I have a boyfriend who has supported me through everything – from accompanying me to hospital, to listening to me moaning on about my tummy, to supporting my baking and being a massive help in the kitchen and I now have a whole new bunch of friends on Twitter and here who every day offer such fantastic support and encouragement to the point of me actually applying to competitions with my recipes! I cannot believe how far I’ve come with everything and how much of a future this has created for me. I hope that through my blog and twitter I am able to help even one person see that being intollerant or allergic to something is not the end of the road with food, it’s the start of a far more exciting and adventurous journey!

So… now I know that when ‘big things’ are happening and i’m likely to be stressed, I need to stock up on peppermint tea, charcoal tablets and weather it out… I’m ready for all the challenges i’ve set myself and that my wonderful twitter and blog followers have set me, and the ones my family and friends have set me too. I’m really looking forward to the next chapter in my wheat and gluten free life, as so far, it’s been amazing! And do I now hate pancakes after eating them so much? No way! I love them more… just maybe not every night?

I was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease when I was 13 after months of pain, diarrhoea, vomiting, and extreme weight loss. I lived fairly symptom free for most of my teenage years until, at 19, a consultant decided I was doing so well I should come off my medication. I have had active Crohn’s for the 11 years since.

In 2006, I had surgery to remove a damaged part of intestine. I was living in extreme pain, unable to eat, and quickly becoming weak and skeletal. The surgery should have made me better. It didn’t. I couldn’t gain weight, I was constantly tired, always cold and in pain. Diarrhoea, bloating, and acid reflux were now part of everyday life. Finally, I couldn’t take it any more. I broke down in my GP’s office and my Gastroenterologist rushed me in to hospital for a gastroscopy, suspecting that the Crohn’s was presenting in my stomach.

No one was expecting Coeliac Disease. The test was just procedural for one of the biopsies taken. My Consultant broke the news to me and explained that the only treatment for Coeliac Disease was life-long abstinence from all foods containing gluten.

My first reaction was relief! Followed quickly by a real sense of empowerment. The past 13 years of my life had been at the mercy of doctors and surgeons, medications controlled the symptoms of my Crohn’s Disease (some more successfully than others) and all the decisions were out of my hands. Coeliac Disease was different, I was in control! I could chose to embrace this new diet, cut gluten out of my diet and I would get better.

I went home and threw out all the bread, pasta and biscuits, then I went online and found the Coeliac UK website. I threw out all my mustard, soy sauce, butter with crumbs in, brown sauce, cous cous and gravy granules. I bought new wooden spoons and chopping boards. I was determined that I would never knowingly eat gluten again.

It’s not all been plain sailing, far from it. I have walked out of restaurants when they wouldn’t cater for me, gone hungry at all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets, and burst into tears in the Free From aisle at Asda when they discontinued my favourite rice noodles! I have had a few accidental glutenings that have left me feeling horrible for days on end. I have been told that it’s all in my head, that I’m just a fussy eater or that I’m attention seeking. My husband (then Fiancé) had a hard time accepting the changes – he was concerned that it spelled the end of our social life – where would we eat?! Who would invite us for dinner now?!

Five years later, I have no regrets. My diet has become richer and more varied since I was diagnosed with Coeliac Disease – I cook homemade meals from fresh ingredients most days, I bake several times a week, I have tried quinoa, millet, red rice and buckwheat. The Coeliac community is a close-knit and incredibly supportive group of people who are always willing to share suggestions and experiences with each other. A diagnosis of Coeliac Disease, or any other gluten intolerance or sensitivity, is not the end of your journey with food – it is just the beginning!