gluten fasting?

So, gluten fasting - not sure that's a real thing. But it's what I'm doing this week. There are a lot of pretty unrelated reasons why I decided to try out a gluten-free diet. 

First, I'm on Spring Break this week, so I knew I'd have a hard time avoiding processed food at home (my parents call  everything I make "hippie food made out of rocks and tree bark"... I like to remind them that it was not I who grew up in the '60s). Second, my little sister has been having issues with her stomach over the last year and a half, and she's tried different diet changes but never gave gluten-free a serious try. She agreed to try it with me this week. And third, a friend of mine recently gave up gluten (among other things) for health reasons and said she noticed being a lot less cold. If you know me, you know I am cold ALL the time, rain or shine. It's an issue that affects my life pretty significantly, but I've ignored it until now because I always assumed it was just my fate. When I heard there might be a solution, I decided it was definitely worth a try. 

So, as more an experiment than anything, I'm going to try gluten-free this week and see what happens. 

I officially began the experiment Sunday dinner. 

This was probably the most delicious omelette of my life. Onions, mushrooms, peppers & cheddar cheese.... MILES better than the one I made the other day with gruyere. I officially don't like gruyere.

Today, I ate oatmeal with peanut butter and bananas around noon when I woke up. Don't judge me, I was catching up from a crazy Saturday night.

For lunch/snack I had a bowl of rice, some sliced pickles and a hard boiled egg. 

For dinner, I ate some pork chops my dad had made in a slow cooker and refrigerated for us with some rice and a lettuce/spinach salad with a homemade blueberry vinaigrette (not as delicious as it sounds - more on that in a mo). 

I'm not 100% certain that the gravy the pork was cooked in was gluten-free, because I'm pretty sure he made it with canned cream of mushroom soup (which I'm pretty sure has gluten in it). But otherwise I haven't had any slip-ups today, which I'm proud about :)

I spent a lot of the day in the kitchen, just messing around. I made some blueberry jam (right) and got in trouble for it - the blueberries were my mom's, and she wasn't happy I used them. I also splashed some boiling water in my eye, which hurt a bunch for an hour or two. Feels okay now though, PTL. But while I was flailing around on the phone telling my mom I used her blueberries and burned my eye, I burned the jam. This wasn't a great success.

I also found some oat bran in the pantry and looked up a muffin recipe (I halved a recipe from Two Peas and their Pod and added chocolate chips) since I've been absolutely CRAVING bread. It's pretty pathetic how addicted I am, apparently, to wheat - it's been a little over 24 hours and I feel this constant need to eat bread, even though I've kept myself pretty full all day. It's ridiculous. In a feeble attempt to curb my craving, I made some oat bran banana nut muffins. They turned out pretty good, but the oat bran is a bit stale so they don't taste great. They also leave this kind of oily feeling in my mouth, even though I didn't use any oil. So that's sort of odd.

How do I feel? Cold and grumpy. So far no progress, though I hadn't expected any after just a day. I craved bread so much today that I decided to let myself slack off on the non-processed part of my diet a little (mostly just for the chocolate chips that were calling my name). 

Hopefully tomorrow will be a little more satisfying. If I don't see some serious results after this week, I'm not going to give gluten-free much thought again... I just love bread so much, and I can't make myself restrict something I LOVE just for kicks.

That's it for today! I'll update a little later in the week... Now I'm going to go curl up and finish the Two Towers with my blanket and glass of milk. 

I am a child.