I went for blood tests the other month about a low level pain I'd had all my life and got referred for a endoscopy.
Down the throat they went and gave me lovely pictures of my hiatus hernia, stomach and duodenum.
It looked like my 13year old face, or Edinburgh roads, riddled with pot holes.
As the doc explained after the process, the biopsies would go off to confirm if I was coeliac. 'Wheat free?', I muttered, oh well, I'm a stoic, I'll just change my diet.
As I looked at my diet which involved baking bread and pizza, eating three loaves of bread a week, cereals, pasta oh, um, mac and cheese pies, yeah and lager, looks like my broccoli, brussels sprouts and bananas are fine but everything else is off the menu.
I hear its quite life changing and in my case, 85% of my diet contained gluten, so yes, I did concur, but like with smoking it was obviously just time to move on.
In 2005 when I found I wasn't able to play as much football and started getting lifts between the 2nd and 3rd floor at work I realised the game was a bogey. I started writing "1000 reasons why I love smoking", a cathartic self help book, and decided not to smoke 50g of tobacco every day.
It was shit and I didn't like it but I found my breathing returned within a year, so it was probably the right thing to do. I'm not a reformed smoker, I still tell people how good smoking is for you, but it obviously has some distressing qualities which on balance make it slightly worse than a bar of chocolate, although for those with irritable bowels I'd probably say ditch the chocolate and smoke a fag. I'm not unique, for many, its obesity or emphysema.
Talking of which my weight then proceeded to return to my body at a rate of a stone per annum. When I created longer gaps in my smoking I was 13st and within a short period, 5 years without a fag found me at 17st 10lbs. I suddenly found I was having breathing problems but this time it was just the exercise of inhaling while carrying 2 kegs of beer around my body.
I've had two fags in the last 14 years, one turned out to be a single skinner joint, that I received from a pilgrim in Santiago de Compostela in 2013. As I took a long deep drag, I felt like my lungs had just received 8 Christmas's in one go and I held it so long in my lungs that no smoke came out when I exhaled. Oh how I laughed, it was even better than I'd imagined. That's when I handed back the dout and said oops sorry that's my first drag of a fag for a while as my head went deliriously dizzy!
The laugh about the gluten free was that you can have as many joints, as you like (boom! boom!) and I suddenly found myself losing a stone in a month. I had to substitute gluten free lager for Tennents, give up bread as the cardboard that masquerades as GF bread is cardboard. I had a soda bread that was ok, but generally speaking it was easier just to not eat bread, or breakfast. A couple of bananas and a melon would suffice.
Lunch was similarly simple. No more egg, bacon and chicken/avocado rolls, sausage rolls, peanut butter sandwiches. Baked tattie and beans was back on the menu, but no pies. Avocado and chicken wrapped in lettuce leaf worked well too.
The GF diet saw me lose a stone in a fortnight and when I received my diagnosis I was 22lbs lighter, oh, and not coeliac after all. The only difference was that the pain I'd had all my life had disappeared.
I'd had what I used to call the 'stitch you get after eating' not the one you get running since I was a kid. A low level pain that I'd never bothered seeing anyone about, its not returned in 2 months now so that, a the Swing Club used to sing in Dundee, is "Serendipity".
It transpires I'm a wee bit gluten intolerant, so now I dont eat pies, I'm Notso Fatso and a few pounds off 16st not a few pounds off 18st.
It wont work for everyone but if you try the gluten free bread, one loaf could last a fortnight and in that time your 'crass' diet may result in you making permanent changes. If nothing else you will have a new found understanding of what it is like to be a coeliac, a debilitating condition I would not wish on anyone.
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