After coming back from our Swedish holiday, I noticed I had a lot of energy again. I was doing great, both mentally as physically, and really felt like myself again. After a couple of weeks, and getting my vaccines, I was a total mess. Low energy, often cranky, hiding away again. Something was wrong. Was it the result of the vaccines in this weird auto-immune system body? Or was it something more?
Just by coincidence really, my husband was doing groceries and noticed that the ketjap sauce we always use did in fact contain wheat. This might explain A LOT of my current low energy status. I was accidentily adding gluten to a couple of my dinners. Big No-No!
On top of that, I learned from research done by our Dutch celiacs association, that my favorite ingredient of lentils, also weren’t safe. Apparently, lentils grow on the stems of wheat, because they are such floppy plants. When harvesting it sometimes (but quite often) happens that wheat grains are harvested with the lentils too. I didn’t want to believe this at first, total denial. I went to my cabinet, where I have three different kinds of lentils stored, grabbed a hand of each of them, layed them out on a board and… FUCK! I indeed found wheat grains between them. Besides using lentils in my own dishes, I often eat storebought lentil soups for my lazy dinner evenings. So at least once but often multiple times a week, I ate something containing lentils. And wheat grains…
I was without knowing, poisoning myself. Both with the ketjap sauce and with my favorite lentil meals. This explained a lot of my low energy days, my physical pains, my migraines. Things I again, got used to and dismissed as “just my weird body being weird because of stress”. It was NOT stress though. I should have known. My husband even told me a couple of times, I needed to look into things again.
I am now looking into things again. And I am feeling so much better already, even though I know I’m not completely recovered yet. I have more energy, I have less migraines, I have less pain in my bones. My skin is looking better again too. It feels like I’m starting from scratch again, because I believed I was doing great with my medical diet. I KNEW what I could and couldn’t do. I took precautions with every meal and every drink and every snack.
It’s frustrating to know that it is so easy to make mistakes. And that there is so much we don’t know, that we can’t take any precautions against. Just this weekend, I told my husband I remembered reading about another thing researched. The coals used to barbecue, also often contain wheat. So they are also not safe. This is something that is NOT labeled on the coals themselves. So how can we know? How can we keep ourselves healthy?