What a wonderful thing to have stumbled across your forum and website. First of all, I just have to comment on how gorgeous the lay out is. It is truly a wonderful website, and the amount of valuable information here is staggering.

A gluten free lifestyle is something that I am still slipping into, but more and more is the life I’m choosing to live. I wish I could say that it was because I wanted to be healthier, but really, it’s because I love this woman who suffers from a gluten intolerance. My girlfriend has been tested for Celiac’s Disease, but it has returned negative. We’re led to believe, from her doctor, that the test is often a false negative.

For her, it started a year before we were dating. She’d been living in South America for a long period of time doing volunteer work. She and her roommates decided to do a parasite cleanse that lasted about five weeks. At the end of it, she suddenly couldn’t stomach gluten. Imagine the shock of someone that has had no trouble with anything, decides to make a healthy choice and then your body punishes you with a new intolerance.

Almost as soon as she eats anything wheat-based, she gets nauseous and has stomach pains.

If truly forced into eating something with wheat, she can usually get by with a digestive enzyme, but it doesn’t always help. Perhaps the most frustrating thing is that many people don’t understand how much has gluten in it, and how much really doesn’t have gluten. The lifestyle can be healthy, but it’s difficult to eat a certain way when you miss the way things were. She revels at the opportunity of eating one of her favorite foods. For me, I’m not going to eat foods she can’t eat in front of her. So, for the past year, I’ve been trying to live a similar life style.

I can honestly say that any one with the intolerance, whether its minor or something serious, impresses me. It’s as much a mind-set change as adding exercise to your diet. You can’t simply do it once, or just do it for a little while. It’s a life-style change, pure and simple.

We’re doing it, and have managed to find ways to eat both the foods we enjoy and the foods we should be eating.

The information in this forum, as well as the website itself, really has me excited that I’ll be able to find ways to assist her more and become settled into that life of gluten-free even better! I look forward to talking with all of you!

Keep on impressing!