Fact or Fiction #1: Eating Gluten Free makes you skinny!

I can't even count anymore the number of times people have said to me or about me, "oh, she's so skinny because there's nothing she can eat, with this gluten free diet..." 

NOT TRUE! Quite the opposite, in fact. Back when I was very sick from eating gluten, I was losing weight like crazy no matter what I ate. My roommates and I joked about the pizza diet where you could eat pizza three times a day and still lose weight. That's exactly what was happening to me (well, 2 times a day). I had a raging appetite, ate anything I wanted and ate it in large amounts. Actually, I needed to eat this much because if I didn't, my blood sugar would start dropping. People thought I had a roaring metabolism. It seemed like any girl's (or an guy's for that matter) dream come true. But I felt utterly miserable all the time, and I wasn't absorbing most of what I was eating. This was serious malnutrition.


Now that I have been gluten free for so long, my body is starting to get on a more even keel. It's not true that I can't eat much on this "diet" - actually, I can eat every type of food out there, I just can't eat the regular prepackaged version of it in a lot of cases. I can eat cake. Just not TastyKakes (and I must confess, I don't mind!). I can eat as much fat and sugar and carbs as anyone else. I have to be careful to eat lots of fruits and vegetables and get enough fiber and vitamins and most of all *exercise*. And the bottom line is, I've gained back some weight. This is a good sign, but it's kind of scary at times. It makes me feel very out of control and at times, in some kind of absurd delusion, I long to go back to when I could eat massive amounts of anything and it didn't matter. 


But being gluten free means that my body can be healthy. And this means that I certainly can, and do, gain weight. Maybe I'm on a weird (to some) diet, but this diet has nothing to do with being "thin." If I wanted to be super thin quickly and easily, I'd just to back to being wretchedly sick on gluten all the time. The challenging part of being healthy is that I can gain weight, so to keep it off I have to eat right, eat in moderation, and exercise.


Yes, there are some stories I've heard of people who were greatly overweight and never could solve the problem until they went gluten free, but this seems to be less common than the weight loss problem involved with gluten intolerance. And I think in the case of many who were on the overweight part of the spectrum, going gluten free meant they suddenly dropped all kinds of processed, preserved, "fast" foods from their diets. And that would help almost anyone lose weight and feel better in the process. 


But on the whole, the myth that "Eating Gluten Free makes you skinny" is complete FICTION. Once you get the hang of it, and are cooking all kinds of delicious things, eating Gluten Free is more likely to make you fat!