The Great Gluten-free Diet Experiment has come to an end. I had intended for it to run to the end of June, but I've been at it for five weeks and I decided late this past week that it had gone on long enough. I started eating gluten free because I have had some symptoms over the last three years or so that haven't been relieved by anything that my doctor has suggested. Then I met someone who had had the same set of symptoms who told me that her condition had improved greatly when she cut gluten out of her diet, even though she had tested negatively for a gluten allergy. So I decided to cut gluten out of my own diet for a month or so to see if it had the same effect on me.
After a five-week trial I have noticed not one iota of difference in the way I feel. Some might say that makes the experiment a failure, but I declare it a success. I accomplished my purpose of determining whether eating a GF diet would help me. The answer is that it would not. So I can be confidant that something other than a gluten allergy is the cause of my symptoms.
I have mixed emotions about the result of the experiment. It would have been nice to have some relief of my symptoms, even though they are mostly just annoying and not life-threatening, but there were so many downsides to eating gluten free that I'm kind of relieved that I don't have an allergic reaction to gluten. Most of the prepared GF foods that we tried were inferior to the non-GF alternatives. To be sure my wife was able to cook tasty GF meals at home, but even eating a GF sandwich was a disappointing experience, mostly because of the tendency of GF bread products to be dense and largely tasteless and to crumble when they come in contact with condiments. That was even more disappointing if I decided to wash the sandwich down with a beer because I wasn't able to find much in the way of variety in the GF beers I tried and the taste was different enough from other beers I have had that it was more like I was substituting something entirely different rather than just another variety of beer.
It was pretty expensive to eat a GF diet, especially since my wife and I like to eat lunch out frequently. We weren't able to eat at a lot of the restaurants for which we have BOGO coupons, so we had to pay full price for two meals instead of one. In addition, the GF meals were more expensive to begin with and the restaurants that served them were often more expensive than the those where we usually eat. So the net was that eating a GF diet made us cut back significantly on eating out.
Eating gluten free put a real crimp in our day tripping as well because a lot of the places we like to visit are small towns that don't have much, if any, GF options for meals. So during the course of the GF experiment we've stayed home a lot more than we normally do.
We still have a supply of GF food in the larder and, rather than waste it, we are still eating it. We have begun to work some non-GF stuff back into our menus, though, and over the past couple of days we've started using the BOGO coupons again. I think we have eaten at three non-GF places on BOGOs in the last two days. That's more than we usually do, but Ellie has been champing at the bit to get back to our normal routine. This morning she has been looking through the adventure book with dreamy eyes, so I see a day trip or maybe a weekender in the near future. Works for me.
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