wheat and other gluten-containing grains out of your diet certainly isn’t a bad thing and can have significant health benefits if you eat a wholesome, diverse diet. Heck, it can even be the key to maintaining your weight!
Maybe you’ll find it compelling to adopt a gluten-free lifestyle when you realize that the gluten-free diet may relieve or even completely alleviate certain health problems. (The earlier section “Making nutrition your mission: Head-to-toe health benefits” lists the conditions exacerbated by gluten.)
This isn’t a diet du jour. We realize that new diets pop up faster than celebrity babies with odd names, and that the diets last about as long as the celebrity marriages do. This is a lifestyle. It’s a lifestyle that’s perfectly in sync with the way our bodies were designed to eat – and that’s why it’s so effective in improving our health.
Our bodies weren’t designed to eat that junk listed in the “Common foods that contain gluten” section. Bagels? Cereal? Pasta? We don’t think so! Our bodies can rebel against those foods in ways that can sometimes severely compromise our health, and for many people, the gluten-free diet is the best – sometimes the only – treatment.
Chapter 2 of Book I explains more about gluten’s effect on the body. For extensive, detailed information about the many medical conditions that benefit from a gluten-free diet, see the companion book to this one, Living Gluten-Free For Dummies (Wiley).
Mastering the Meals
This book is about a lifestyle, not a diet. But no matter where that lifestyle takes you – eating in, eating out, attending social events, choosing, planning, shopping, preparing – being gluten-free all comes down to one thing: food.
If you’re a culinary hacker and you’re afraid you’ll have to wake up at 4 a.m. to bake gluten-free bread and make pasta from scratch, turn off the alarm and go back to sleep. Plenty of gluten-free specialty foods are available to take the place of all your old favorites. Better yet (from a health standpoint), you’re likely to find that those foods become less important to you. And considering that they’re really not very good for you, that’s a good thing.
Whether you’re a kitchenphobe or a foodie, living a gluten-free lifestyle offers you an enormous selection of foods and ingredients to choose from.
Putting together smart and healthful gluten-free meals is a lot easier if you plan ahead. Walking through a store, perusing restaurant menus, or (gasp!) sitting in a bakery with a growling tummy isn’t exactly conducive to making good food choices.
One of the coolest things about adopting a new dietary lifestyle is exploring new and sometimes unusual or unique foods. You may never have heard of lots of gluten-free foods and ingredients, many of which not only are gluten-free and delicious but also are nutritional powerhouses. With the new perspective on food that the gluten-free lifestyle can offer you, you may find yourself inspired to think outside the typical menu plan, exploring unique and nutritious alternatives.
The healthiest way to enjoy a gluten-free lifestyle is to eat things you can find at any grocery store or even a farmer’s market: meat, fish, seafood, fruits, and nonstarchy vegetables (see Book II, Chapter 3 for more tips on shopping). If you want to add canned, processed, and even junk foods to your shopping list, you can still do most of your shopping at a regular grocery store, and you can even buy generics.
If you hope to enjoy the delicious gluten-free specialty products that are available these days, you can find them in health food aisles or at health food stores or specialty shops. Or you can shop in your jammies on one of the many Internet sites specializing in gluten-free products.
For the most part, a gluten-free kitchen looks the same as any other kitchen – without the gluten, of course. You don’t need to go out and buy special gadgets and tools, and with only a couple exceptions, which we cover in Book II, Chapter 2, you don’t need two sets of pots, pans, utensils, or storage containers, either.
If you’re sharing a kitchen with gluten, you need to be aware of some contamination issues so you don’t inadvertently glutenate (contaminate with gluten) a perfectly good gluten-free meal. Keeping your crumbs to yourself isn’t just a matter of hygiene, but it can mean the difference between a meal you can eat and one you can’t.
Give someone a recipe, you feed ’em for a meal. Show them how to make anything gluten-free, and you feed ’em for a lifetime. The point is, you can make anything gluten-free, and you’re not constrained by recipes or the fact that you can’t use regular flour or breadcrumbs. All you need is a little creativity and some basic guidelines for using gluten-free substitutions, which you can find in Chapter 4 of Book II.
If you’re a die-hard recipe fan, never fear – you find all kinds of recipes in Books III through V. Most of them are super simple to follow but leave your guests with the impression that you spent all day in the kitchen (and being thus indebted, they may volunteer to do the dishes).
Getting Excited about the Gluten-Free Lifestyle
Most people who embark on a gluten-free lifestyle are doing so because of health issues – and that means they have little or no choice in the matter. When people are forced to make changes in their routine, especially changes that affect what they can and can’t eat, they’re not always so quick to see the joy in the adjustments.
If you’re a little gloomy about going gluten-free, you aren’t alone. But prepare yourself to read about the scores of reasons to be excited about the gluten-free lifestyle (for you impatient types, feel free to skip to Chapter 6 of this Book for a jump-start on the “Kumbaya” side of being gluten-free).
If you’ve been eating gluten for a long time – say, for most of your life – then giving up foods as you know them may seem like a tough transition at first. Besides the obvious practical challenges of learning to ferret out gluten where it may be hidden, you have to deal with emotional, physical, social, and even financial challenges.
You have to do only one thing to learn to love the gluten-free lifestyle, and that’s to adjust your perspective on food just a tinge. You really don’t have to give up anything; you just have to make some modifications. The foods that used to be your favorites can still be your favorites if you want them to be, just in a slightly different form.
Or you may want to consider what may be a new and super-healthful approach for you: eating lean meats, fresh fruits, and nonstarchy vegetables. Again, you may have to tweak your perspective a bit before the diet feels natural to you,
