Salads and Celiac

Happy May Day! In my world, May is special for two reasons. First, it’s Celiac Awareness Month, and second, it’s National Salad Month. It’s also:
-Meditation Month
-Mental Health Month
-Bike to Work Month
-National Blood Pressure Month
-National Barbeque Month
-National Photograph Month
-Better Hearing Month
-Motorcycle Safety Month
But spreading awareness of Celiac Disease and eating a daily salad is enough of a challenge for me. I don’t want to overcommit myself.

Let me be honest here for a minute: before my Celiac diagnosis, I didn’t really like salad. And now I love it. What happened? Well, bear with me, I’m going to wax nostalgic …

If you’ve been around for a while, you’ve probably heard me say that when I was was diagnosed with Celiac, I was (somewhat) asymptomatic. Because I didn’t think I was sick, I didn’t really think I needed to eat 100% gluten-free – I avoided obvious gluten, but wasn’t too careful about cross contamination. It didn’t take long for me to realize that I needed to be. One particular morning in December of 2009, (five or six weeks after my diagnosis) I bought a peppermint mocha at Starbucks on my way in to work (this was the same day I figured out about the hidden gluten in their chocolatey chips).

I was miserable – physically in pain and making frequent visits to the bathroom, but also, I felt stupid. I thought I should have been healing faster, and like I should have mastered label reading and eating gluten-free already (not true, by the way, it took a lot longer than six weeks before I felt confident about eating gluten free.) Anyways, that was the day I decided to get serious about my new diet. On my lunch break, I went to the nearest store and bought baby carrots, Kind bars, cheese (although I ended up cutting out dairy within a week) and a salad. It was a prepackaged salad with romaine, carrots, cucumber, red bell pepper, olives, and tomatoes.

I still think of that one as my gateway salad, because salads have been a staple for me ever since. Somewhere down the line, the wires in my brain crossed and I thought I had to eat salad all the time or I’d gain weight. But eventually, I got over it.

Still with me? Okay, so here in the present, I’ll be eating a salad every day this month. I think I’d bore you and myself if I posted it here on the blog daily, so instead, I’ll post a weekly round up on Fridays or Saturdays of the salads I ate throughout the week. And I’ll be posting often about topics related to Celiac.

Who’s with me?