AzizaRivers

^ I'm no doctor, but I highly doubt that there are cases of celiac "resolving." Appearing to resolve, yes, but not actually resolving. I don't know about non-celiac gluten intolerance, but celiac is permanent. Once a celiac, always a celiac.

A lot of celiacs, shortly after figuring things out, have a "honeymoon period" during which they seem to be able to eat gluten without ill effect. It's more common in kids than adults (this is why, years ago, celiac was thought to be something kids would outgrow) but it does happen to adults. You're still having gut damage, just not the same outward symptoms. If you keep eating gluten you'll keep hurting your insides, and your symptoms will eventually return, most likely.

Another oddity is that my eyebrows used to stop about 2/3's of the way across and since being gluten-free for a few years they go all the way to where they should end. A little thing, maybe, but it makes a difference.

That exact eyebrow thing can be a symptom of low thyroid. I don't know if that was ever an official issue for you or anything...but you may have dodged that one by ditching gluten. A common problem for celiacs.

That could work! They're actually pretty well held-together and self-contained after they're boiled, so you might be able to just freeze them after that.

I'm glad everyone is so excited! If you do make them, do let me know how they turn out.

By the way, the report a few hours after baking is that they do lose a little bit of moisture on the inside (but are still plenty good), so it might be a good idea to add a little more honey or agave or something, and possibly just freeze the extras after you've had your fill. That's what I'm doing before bed. They're still sitting on the kitchen counter and I've grabbed one each time I walk by, I've had a few too many!

Oddly enough, come to think of it, I haven't gotten a single mosquito bite this season yet. I happened to google "mosquito gluten free" just now, and there are tons of results! Apparently this is a common thing.

Before diagnosis, I had this particular soft pretzel recipe that I LOVED, it seriously was the best. Most of the things I loved pre-celiac are only eaten rarely now, although I have recipes for them, because we all know it's not the best idea to just replace gluten with all of the other carbohydrate options we have. But really...I was just craving a soft pretzel. A soft pretzel can't hurt anyone, can it?

Not anyone who is gluten-free, soy-free, dairy-free! This recipe is free of all those. I invented it based on my old favorite gluteny recipe as well as a few others I looked through while I was messing with ingredient ideas. Everything in here has a purpose, but I put some substitutes after the ingredients if you need or want to change anything.

Mix in a bowl, let stand until foamy:

4 teaspoons active dry yeast

1 teaspoon honey or sugar

1 1/4 cup warm water

Other ingredients:

1 1/2 cups potato starch

1 1/2 cups tapioca starch

1/2 cup rice flour

1/2 buckwheat flour

1/4 cup agave

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon xanthan gum

1 small egg

To be used at the end:

1/4 cup baking soda

water for boiling

SUBSTITUTIONS, ETC.

I did use one small egg, which I added only because I have chickens in my backyard and I thought it would help with structure. If you need it egg-free, go without.

If you can't have nightshades, try cornstarch or arrowroot starch.

If you don't want to use agave or don't have it, you could use 1/4 cup of honey instead, or 1/2 cup of sugar. If you go the sugar route, consider adding a tablespoon of honey as well (or molasses for flavor!), or one or two tablespoons of applesauce. I think the honey and agave really helped with moisture in my recipe so you'll need to make sure you account for that.

If you don't want the buckwheat, you could use sorghum or just more rice flour.

If you don't want the xanthan gum, I'm sure you could use guar or tara. If just leave it out and see what happens.

Directions:

Mix the flours, xanthan gum if you used it, baking soda (just the teaspoon for now) and salt in a large bowl. Make a well in the center and add the yeast mixture (which has been standing for about 10 minutes), egg if you're using it, olive oil, and agave or whatever other sweetener you picked. The dough will be fairly wet. I floured the countertop with potato starch and kneaded it well with my hands while adding more starch as needed. Let it rise for an hour or so. Preheat the oven to 400 F. Roll them out and form them however you like (I made 21 fist-sized pretzels).

Let them rise a little more while you go to the stove and boil 1/4 cup of baking soda with water 2 inches deep or so, enough to boil the pretzels a few at a time. Boil them for 30 seconds, flip, 30 more, pop them back over onto a greased (I used olive oil) cookie sheet. I needed two sheets for this. Bake them for about 10 minutes or so, checking and taking them out when they have started to brown a little.

I can have dairy, so I dipped them all in melted butter and then half in a brown sugar/cinnamon mixture after that. The ones I didn't sugar got salted with coarse salt. But you can do them however you like, since the recipe is officially dairy-free. You could try sprinkling salt or cinnamon-sugar on them before they go in the oven (it will stick while they're wet, if you're not going to use butter or a substitute).

This recipe is a little labor-intensive I guess, but it was SO worth it. They are excellent!

I do. My reason is that needing to read the ingredients list of everything I buy or put near my mouth gets me so sick of seeing ingredients I can't pronounce, or even more so, ones I can pronounce but can't believe I was actually eating them (high fructose corn syrup, etc.). So I've been eating a lot healthier and I prefer the simplest of ingredients. If I can avoid it, I won't eat anything that has unnecessary preservatives, enhancers or other chemicals. I make my own toothpaste out of coconut oil and baking soda, and I wash my hair with baking soda and rinse it with diluted vinegar. My body loves all of this, and I feel so much healthier when I am aware of what I'm eating, drinking, and intentionally applying to my body.

Please consider yourself diagnosed. Humans went thousands and thousands of years listening to their own bodies, and only recently in our history have we decided that a special person with "special knowledge" is the only one who can tell us what is going on with our own bodies. There's something wrong with this, in my opinion.

You have had a horrible, memorable reaction to gluten after being gluten-free. You should be excited that your body gave you this clear of an answer to erase your doubts.

I second the above suggestion. If that doesn't work...

It IS possible, it's just that you have to be extremely careful, and your husband and whoever else lives in your house, or brings food into it, has to be extremely and wonderfully dedicated to making sure not a single crumb of gluten can possibly get into your food. I'm sure you're familiar with the the usual CC spiel about cutting boards, pots and pans, pasta strainer, etc. And even then, chances are good that at some point or another you will get CC somehow.

People will anaphylactic nut allergies almost never allow nuts to come into their homes, and prohibit the presence of peanut butter and anything else related. That's because they really don't want to risk something bad getting into their systems. This is a little like that. You may not be at risk of death if you get contaminated, like anaphylactic allergic individuals, but if you want to be truly safe in your home, you need to eliminate the source of the problem completely. It's all about what you're willing to risk.

That said, I live gluten-free in a gluten-eating home. The other people in my house are all very careful and vigilant and some of them I would even trust to cook for me, and do on a regular basis. The few times I have gotten sick since I went gluten free 6 months ago, I highly suspect they were not from my home but from food I had eaten while in my college dining hall based on what I recall eating on those days.

I second the applesauce. Applesauce was the only thing I could stomach for the months I was sick before diagnosis, and now it's my go-to food when I've had a gluten accident. I also much on rice chex dry because they settle my stomach without bothering it.

I cringed when you said you were uncomfortable after the tangerines--I can't imagine putting something so citrusy (acidic!) straight into an upset stomach.

Forget the gold standard. At least half of us on here had some negative result at some point anyway but are still happily and healthfully gluten-free celiacs.

Biopsies can be useful to determine your level of damage, and sometimes people get them a few months after going gluten-free to check how well they're healing.

If you are satisfied with your diagnosis based on bloods, and you're ready to just start healing and move on, don't worry about it. If you'd have to spend over a year making yourself sicker just to get a biopsy that may or may not be positive, especially if you know gluten-free makes you feel better anyway, don't worry about it.

I'm from Chester County! Downingtown, specifically.

As far as events, I know there was a "Celiac Day" food festival type thing a local hospital held last month. I didn't find out about it until it was over (from another Celiac friend) but I can try to figure out which hospital it was--they do it every year.

Gluten Free Philly http://www.(Company Name Removed - They Spammed This Forum and are Banned).com/) could be a good resource for you.

I'm also totally willing to share stories...I wonder if there are any more of us here.

EDIT: Okay, so looks like they're spammers based on the automatic removal of the link. Spammers aren't cool. But you can find the info if you use Google.

You can talk to a doctor about it, but be forewarned that not all doctors are well educated on celiac or gluten intolerance and you may or may not be getting accurate information. A few things you should know:

1. Some people have it even though they test negative, sometimes with both negative bloods and biopsy.

2. Many doctors will deny this.

3. If you go through testing and it's negative, you should give the diet a good strict try anyway. This includes watching out for cross-contamination (lots of info on that here).

4. If you do want to go through testing, don't go gluten-free in the meantime. In order for us to get positive results, we have to be eating a high-gluten diet. So if you go gluten free and you go for testing, you could get a false negative.

5. If you want to test your little one, you should know that testing is often inaccurate in babies and very young children. Plenty of kids and babies are successfully diagnosed, but parents sometimes have a hard time getting a solid diagnosis even when it really is the problem, until the child is older and often sicker, with more damage done. Use your mommy instincts.

6. Remember that an official diagnosis is little more than a piece of paper. If your body is telling you that you don't get along with gluten, don't let a doctor stop you from giving up the gluten and calling it a day. The treatment is the same either way: completely gluten-free diet.

Believe it or not, I had amazing success making banana bread with the recipe on the back of the Domino sugar bag and just replacing the flour will all rice flour and adding a teaspoon of xanthan gum. That was the first thing I ever baked gluten free and I couldn't even tell the difference between mine and the one my boyfriend's mother baked the day before (I loved the stuff and was torn up about not being able to eat it anymore, and I HAD to try making it). So that was before I knew that baked goods just with rice flour are less than satisfactory. Apparently in this recipe it doesn't make a difference, really. So easy.

Here's the recipe:

Open Original Shared Link

It wasn't the whole pint, I was just finishing up the last few bites. It was probably a quarter. Haha I wouldn't have bothered to ask what was bothering me if it had been the whole thing! Oh well, whatever it was, I know I can't eat it again. Some things are just a mystery.

I just finished off a pint of PD Coconut Milk ice cream (coconut flavor) and within 10 minutes I was feeling sick and had to run to the bathroom. Now I can feel the gas filling up my middle and I'm all sore and tender already...this is the fastest, clearest reaction I've had to anything since going gluten-free. Does anyone else have problems with this? I have no other known intolerances or allergens (though I suspect soy is messing with my hormones and I've almost cut it out completely). This first and only other bowl I had of this stuff hurt me too, but I only had a few bites and dumped the rest of the bowl, and I think that's because it made me feel bad. The ingredients are:

Organic Coconut Milk

Organic Agave Syrup

Chicory Root Extract

Organic Dried Coconut

Carob Bean Gum

Guar Gum

Natural Flavor

I don't know if maybe it's something else that's bothering me? I'm a big coconut user (milk, oil, just straight flakes) and it never gives me a problem. I don't normally have agave in the house because I use other things, but I've definitely had it before and I think I would have remembered if it had made me feel this bad. I've had guar gum in regular dairy ice cream before without a problem. Not sure about the chicory root or carob bean gum.

They carton says they test to prevent contamination by gluten and other "undeclared allergens," though they aren't any more specific than that.

Anyone else have a problem with it?

Lactose intolerance is extremely common in newly diagnosed celiacs--the villi that your autoimmune reaction was destroying are the same villi that produce the enzyme that breaks up lactose. There are different degrees of lactose intolerance so some people can do cheese and other things, while some can't.

About the lactose free milk--my partner's brother (who is not celiac) is extremely lactose intolerant and even the "lactose-free" milk gives him problems sometimes.

Also, the problem could be the casein and not the lactose. Casein (someone do correct me if I'm wrong) would still be in the lactose-free milk. Now, that wouldn't really explain the cheese, but maybe someone knows more about that than I do.

Since going free my acne on my face and upper back has almost completely gone away and my skin there has been much more smooth, less bumpy and gross.

As soon as you post the recipe I'm going to have to try it. Cookies are one thing I haven't gotten right yet, for some reason (though I've made awesome cupcakes and muffins), with the exception of flourless peanut butter ones. I just tried making banana cookies last night and they were half decent straight from the oven, but today the leftovers were super soggy and spongy and didn't taste like much besides banana and tapioca flour, even though tapioca was the least of the 5 flours I used! Oh, the mysteries of gluten free baking.

If you really suspect it, DO NOT just take her gluten free first to see if it helps. Go for testing first. In order for a celiac to have positive test results, they have to be eating a high-gluten diet. If you take her off gluten before she is tested, you run the risk of getting a false-negative (which is still possible even if she is eating gluten).

Have her tested first. If everything comes back negative and you have no other leads, THEN try the diet and see if it helps.

Someone gave me the book as a gift, and I feel the same way about boxed mixes. Why spend so much money, especially when I cane make it better form scratch? She does have a lot of good tips in there, so my solution has been to improvise a little bit by just taking the tips and using them when I make up my own recipes or adding them to existing recipes from scratch.

I've been all over the nettles. This was the first year I tried to do anything with them besides tea. We clipped the youngest leaves, steamed them and added a little salt and lemon juice. I have to admit that I was not really that impressed...though I think it was the preparation, not the nettles themselves. Maybe cutting them up small and mixing them in with rice or millet? I bet they would be nice in a berry smoothie. When I steamed them they got cold really fast, so it was like a mouthful of cool, soggy leaves. I'm not really a fan of cooked spinach either though.

If I don't come up with any way of making them that we like better, I always fall back on drying them and saving them for tea. They'll last me all year and it's delicious with honey, and very nutritious.

^ I agree. Nature has had no involvement in monoculture, mass production of foods, sucking them of nutrients, genetically modifying them, patenting them a la Monsanto, not to mention the way industrialized cultures eat their foods. Too much of the same thing, and generally prepared in ways that take the nutrition out and add the crap in. These are the behaviors that mess our bodies up so much that we show signs of physical addiction to foods and we crave them.

I just saw this post and picked up the box of Baker's sitting on the counter next to me, which I am about to use (in the next 10 minutes) to coat the peanut butter and coconut eggs that are currently chilling in the fridge. And crossing my fingers someone doesn't give us bad news. I'm not cautious enough and I rarely call of the ingredients look okay and if I haven't heard bad things.

EDIT: In little print it says it's manufactured by Kraft Foods, and I know for a fact Kraft is one of the food manufacturers that will never hide gluten ingredients in sneaky words.

I don't think anyone mentioned this yet though I've heard it is fairly common among celiac triggers...I'm pretty sure it was lyme disease.

In May of 2010 I had a few weird episodes of breaking out in hives with trouble breathing, went on steroids for them. Soon after, I found the bullseye rash, and went on doxycycline for a month. Terrible, awful drug. It sent my candida spiraling out of control, and a minute of sunlight made me feel like I was on fire (I had second-degree burns from the sun that summer, and still have scars on my hands and feet). Immediately after that, everything went downhill and I was diagnosed with 4 months. I did have a few symptoms that had started before that time that I didn't realize were symptoms until they went away (the awful sickness during my period, the crazy candida) so I'm not so clear on that, but I do believe the Lyme and it's antibiotics were the final straw for my body.