Why gluten free?
These photos were taken in September of 2019. After a physically painful 2018 from shoulder and upper back issues, I was slowly getting back to dreaming and creating again. My cookbook was pretty much finished and I needed some photos of myself for the introduction page. I was excited. Yet who would have thought that it would still take me another 3 years to release this project that God had put on my heart. Fear of man does that and God had to speak through multiple people to help me keep my focus on Him and where He needed me to go.
My journey of clean and gluten free eating has been a building block process. It’s never been some trend I’m following or because some guru is me telling to do it. It’s because my health depended on it and I wanted to share with you a bit about my why behind it all.
In the introduction chapter of my cookbook I scratch the surface of how it all began. My first born baby was always sick and conventional medicine was failing her again and again. It led me into a very dark hole of anxiety and depression and getting out of it was an uphill battle that required crazy prayer and a lot of research. Making small changes here and there improved my daughter’s health but I had no idea just how much there was to learn.
By 2012, I was a mom of 2 girls and I started having my own health concerns. I couldn’t open a water bottle or pick up my toddler without sharp pain shooting through my hands, elbows, or knees. We were hoping it wasn’t rheumatoid arthritis and waiting for the test results had me at the edge of falling into a full blown panic attack. Thankfully, RA results were negative but other testing revealed my body was 98% reacting to gluten and my inflammation markers were high. A whole new reality was now in front of me. I not only had to learn how to live a gluten free life, I also had to become a lot more intentional about clean eating in general. And you know what? It overwhelmed me!
Learning about what to cook, what to cook with, what was worth buying, what was clean (not all gluten free stuff is clean) and how to budget it all out was hard. I had to sit down every week and brainstorm a nourishing, gluten free meal plan. It sounded simple at first but it wasn’t and there were times where I cried from sheer frustration.
One afternoon I was stressing over the grocery list. I was strategizing exact amounts of everything I needed because I didn’t have the luxury of just throwing anything into the cart. And the whole thing had me praying “Why me, God?! Why can’t I be like the others who get to eat whatever they want, buy whatever they want?!” And there was this instant sensation of chills all over my body and I heard the Holy Spirit say “Because you will teach others what you are learning, you will write a cookbook.”
The idea blew my mind. I chuckled, then I cried, then I laughed and then I cried harder because I felt God’s presence and it wrecked me. When I told my husband later that day about what happened, his instant reaction was “Do it! Get started on it immediately, start documenting everything you’re learning!”
A little over a decade later, here I am. I have learned a lot and it has been quite the ride. Never did I think I would do something like this. Never did I think it would be so hard to finish it. Never did it occur to me that satan would attack me left and right to keep me from working on it. But that is what he does. The moment you start doing what God has asked you to do, opposition comes and you have to keep pushing through.
My cookbook and this website isn’t about me. I want it to be about all the people it’s going to help. It’s for every person who finds themselves needing to do a revamp of everything they are buying and eating and not knowing where to start. I know what that feels like and I’ll be honest, there were times where I quit and went to back to eating gluten and eating junk because it was just too hard to develop a new rhythm. But the more I kept backsliding, the worse I was starting to feel health wise. I was only hurting myself more. All the cheating was no longer worth it because some days became so difficult that I couldn’t be fully present for my husband or my kids or anybody in general.
When you start to feel like that and find yourself so sick of feeling like that, developing a cleaner lifestyle is the best start, a start you will never regret. And I want to encourage you with this truth: eating cleaner isn’t hard, isn’t boring and definitely not limiting. You just need the right resources to help you and Dinner Starts Here is one of them.