My gluten free struggle

As much as I try to eat healthy, satisfying and safe food there are times when I have to confess that the world doesn’t seem set up for coeliacs yet. One of those times has been the last few days.

In Bolivia, a series of stomach upsets (gluten caused or not, who knows?) meant that I retreated to the safest foods. By which I mean something in a packet with an allergen statement that did not  mention gluten. (Normally I would consider fresh homecooked food safest, but with no kitchen and no way of cleaning fresh fruit, this is second best). This also meant junk food.

As ashamed as I am to admit it, I existed for nearly three days on skittles, milky ways and nestle trencito (chocolate). I wasn’t happy about it, but I felt safe and it got me past the worst of my tummy troubles. It helps that I had little appetite anyway.

Of course there have been consequences. Cravings, majorly pissed off skin and guilt that I deprived my body of nutrients mainly.

This for me is the worst of travelling. I can’t whip up my own bone broth when I think I’ve been glutened, I don’t always know what will make me worse, and I don’t have any trusted place to eat out; everywhere is new, and a leap of faith. Sometimes it feels I have to make a choice between junk food and nothing. And, I’m a hungry person, I never choose nothing.

But I don’t want to do this to my body. So for the next month I’m going to be junk food free. I want to stop craving it, and stop using it as a safety net. Which means I’m going to have to find some other solutions, and fast!

If you have any ideas for easy replacement foods (preferably low sugar) please share them with me!

British Airways- long haul and gluten free

airplane food (Photo credit: Sally_Vanilla)

I will start off by being upfront and honest- there are no photos of this food. I’m sorry but you’ll have to take my word for it, I had decided not to write a food blog so taking photos of the food would have been a bit doolally. It was only when I realised how much of my time would be spent focused on food anyway that I decided to write this but none the less, airline review = useful so here it is. Generic plane food photo included so you don’t feel like you are missing out.

London to Buenos Aires is overnight, so dinner and breakfast were served. There was either no mid sleep snack (previously Virgin have woken me up to give me a choc ice!), or I slept through it, which is disappointing.

Like many coeliacs, I was dubious about the food contamination/ quality so had a couple of snacks. These turned out to be unnecessary. Having selected my gluten free meal in advance, I saw it confirmed when I checked in which was nice. When it was brought to me (before everyone else, because we are special) all the individual items had little GF stickers on, doubly reassuring.

Dinner was Tilapia fillet in a tomato sauce with some veggies. I didn’t love it (but for full disclosure even before I was a coeliac I hated plane food) but egg ate what I left and enjoyed it. It was served with a minted bean salad (my favourite part) and strangely a piece of bread. I couldn’t work out the best way to eat it, so stared at it for a while and then pocketed it for when I had a craving. Desert was an unimaginative fruit salad; ditto for non coeliacs.

Breakfast I liked more, the hot meal being bacon, beans, mushrooms and served with orange juice. Overall, I think they did pretty well, and there was no fuss at all.

Oh,

there was also wine- that was good.