Tag Archives: Gluten-free diet

On the road

What has been most interesting about this week is the way that each day has presented a new and very different challenge. Today’s was for Mike and, in many ways, it was one he looked forward to tackling. As part of his job, Mike usually travels to another site at least one day a week. On that day, he is given an allowance which enables him to buy lunch and, if necessary, dinner too.

We had been planning to make Mike a packed lunch for the day to make it relatively easy for him to stick to M’s diet, but when faced last night with what was in the fridge, he proposed something different. He decided to try and buy M-friendly food whilst he was out on the road, using nothing more than the Motorway services that most of us would have access to when we’re travelling by car, so no sneaky trips to a local supermarket where we know the options would be far greater.

I know that to many this may not sound that hard, until you begin to think about the options you have at a service station:

Sandwiches? No wheat or gluten allowed, or the dairy from the butter, or egg from the mayonnaise.
Pasties? No wheat or gluten again.
Chocolate? No dairy or soya
Crisps? These are potatoes, so must be okay, right? No, it depends on the flavour, but avoiding wheat, gluten, dairy and soya is actually harder than you’d think when it comes to crisps.
Chips? A lot of the fast food chains coat their chips in flour to make them crispy, so again it’s a no.
Burgers? Well, no to the burger roll because of the wheat and gluten, and probably no to the burger as that’s unlikely to be 100% beef and is likely to contain wheat rusk.
Gluten-free cakes or biscuits from coffee shops? These usually contain dairy or soya or egg, so are all a no. I’ve yet to find anything that M can eat, even with the allergy-friendly alternatives offered.

It’s been an interesting experiment and explains why we usually pack up our own lunches and snacks to ensure there’s something M and G can eat. Take a look below to see what Mike ended up with today:

	M	Me	Mike
Breakfast	A handful of raisins	Toast (1) with peanut butter	Bowl of Cornflakes Raisins Rice milk
Lunch	Crispbreads x2 Ham Cucumber (3 slices) Olives (3) Fruit smoothie Bear’s Fruit yoyo 2 tsp pineapple chunks	Crispbreads x4 Ham Cucumber Carrot Mushrooms Pimiento stuffed olives	1 large pack of sushi without the soy sauce Nkd date bars (2)
Dinner	Gluten free pasta with tuna, carrots, peas, corn & Solesse egg-free mayonnaise* (2 small bowls) *available from Asda	Gluten free pasta with courgettes, corn, asparagus, mushrooms, onion, garlic, tomatoes & coconut cream (1 pasta bowl)	Gluten free pasta with courgettes, corn, asparagus, mushrooms, onion, garlic, tomatoes & coconut cream (1 pasta bowl)
Snacks	Nkd Cocoa Orange date bar Nkd Berry Blast date bar Banana Grapes	Fruit tea	Apple juice

Mike’s one comment has been that today he has felt the most full since we started on M’s diet. The date bars are, apparently, extremely filling and even his lighter lunch today left him feeling more satisfied.

Before I forget, a couple of people have asked whether following M’s diet this week has seen any weight loss as I was anticipating it might. I can confirm that, having weighed myself before the diet started and again this morning, I have lost just over 3lbs in 4 days. I need to convince Mike to weigh himself to see if he’s seen a similar loss, though I’m not as confident that he knows where he started!

Half-way there

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That’s right, today sees us reaching the magical half-way point in our week-long attempt to keep to M’s diet. So far the journey hasn’t been too bad. Both Mike and I have had to deal with unexpected hunger pangs, but overall, the challenge is working well and really is showing me what M has to deal with on a daily basis.

Today’s challenge has been a different one yet again. G is baking at school today as part of her Enrichment morning and so I had to provide alternative ingredients to enable her to fully take part. The choice was to make either Chocolate Chip muffins or Rocky Road. I made the decision that Rocky Road was the more G-friendly recipe and, what’s more, both children have been begging me to make it with them at home and this ticked that box for G at very least.

As we are following the M-diet this week, I decided to try and replace the relevant ingredients with M-friendly alternatives. The 2 key ingredients were Rich tea biscuits and butter. The butter was easy as I just packed up the Dairy and soya free spread that was lurking in our fridge and crossed that off the list. The Rich Tea biscuits, however, proved to be more problematic. There are Rich Tea alternatives out there, but they either contain soya or egg, neither of which M can eat. I found, in the end, 2 possible alternatives: Doves Farm Fig and Quinoa cookies or Against the Grain Ginger crunchies. Unable to make a decision, I did the rational thing, I bought both and let G decide.

She opted for the ginger biscuits for the Rocky road and the fig and quinoa cookies for a snack after school. It was a real delight that she brought some home for us all to sample as I had to refuse the delicious-looking Banoffee Pie on offer in the office at lunch-time. I was very good as I sat around the lunch table with 5 colleagues all enjoying their slices. Tempted? Yes. Did I succumb? No. The Rocky road was sweet and ginger-y, but delicious and certainly we’ll be making it again.

Wednesday is swimming night, so the children usually eat a lighter meal in the evening. I had a tough decision as to whether to share the Chicken and sweetcorn soup with them, or make baked potatoes as I normally would. Guess what? I let them decide and they both opted for the soup. The chicken soup was fabulous, the gluten-free toast less so. It contains pear and so tasted sweet to me, but both children love it and it’s one of the few things I am able to get on prescription for M. I don’t think I’ll be rushing to share it with him on a regular basis though.

Our meals today looked like this:

	M	Me	Mike
Breakfast	A handful of raisins	Melon & pineapple chunks	Bowl of Cornflakes Raisins Rice milk
Lunch	Crispbreads x2 Ham Cucumber (3 slices) Olives (3) Fruit smoothie Bear’s Fruit yoyo “Wot no dairy” Peach & Apricot yoghurt	Crispbreads x4 Ham Cucumber Carrot Mushrooms Pimiento stuffed olives	Leftover French Onion soup (Home-made & 100% M-friendly) Apple
Dinner	1 ladle Chicken & sweetcorn soup Toast (2 slices) Cucumber (3 slices) Ecomil Vanilla almond milk dessert Rocky Road	1 bowl Chicken, sweetcorn & mushroom soup Toast (3) – Ener-G brown rice flour bread	1 bowl Chicken, sweetcorn & mushroom soup Crispbreads (2)
Snacks	Nkd Cocoa Orange Date bar Lo-profin vanilla wafers (2) Fruit Factory fruit string Fig & Quinoa cookie (1)	Fruit tea Rocky road	Banana Rocky road

Another day..

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…and another challenge.

Today has been a different kind of challenge for us. We have long been aware that as well as his dietary difficulties, M has also struggled in the classroom. He’s a bright lad, articulate and with an imagination that many would envy, but he has struggled to learn to read and write. He loves to be creative, to perform and can sometimes answer mental arithmetic faster than G, but he struggles to spell and put his creativity down on paper as the written word.

Having finally found the diagnosis for his health issues, Mike and I decided we needed to seek an answer to the academic ones. M completed 12 weeks of fairly intensive speech therapy at Easter which enabled him to say his “s” sounds clearly and we have seen his confidence grow. Now it’s time to see if we can give him a pair of metaphorical wings and watch him soar.

So, this morning, instead of heading off to school and work with our packed lunches in tow, M and I made our trek to the Dyslexia Centre for an assessment. M met with a lovely Educational Psychologist for just over 2 hours, where she put him through his paces. The answer came back with a resounding “yes”; they could identify the problem and there is something we can do to help. M has dyspraxia and possibly also visual dyslexia. This is going to be a steep learning curve for us, but in a nutshell, he is going to struggle with processing the messages his brain sends as they are not properly or fully transmitted.

We came away with 2 coloured acetates, one yellow and the other “celery” (I kid you not), which will help him track lines when reading text or numbers – this is the visual dyslexia part. We now need to research the options for an occupational therapist to help with the dyspraxia, an optician who specialises in the diagnosis of visual dyslexia and the processes we can put in place and can ask school to do to help him. Whilst this seems, and feels, like yet another set of labels for M, I am relieved to have an answer to his academic struggles and a resource to be able to find some fixes for it.

On the dietary front, both Mike and I have managed okay and, as I type this blog, Mike is putting the final touches to tonight’s dinner. My biggest struggle today has been hunger pangs, I have found that I don’t feel as full on M’s diet as I usually do, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. Mike’s is the continued avoidance of the cakes and cookies at work, which is definitely not a bad thing. The hardest thing for tonight’s dinner? No mayonnaise, which I love to eat with Corn fritters and sausages normally.

	M	Me	Mike
Breakfast	A handful of raisins	Sliced apple	Bowl of: Cornflakes Raisins Rice milk
Lunch	Crispbreads x2 Ham Cucumber (3 slices) Fruit smoothie Crisps (Plain) Bear’s Fruit yo-yo	Crispbreads x4 Ham Salt & Vinegar Mini rice-cakes	Leftover cooked rice and Chicken Korma Apple
Dinner	2 Tesco Free-from sausages 3/4 Corn fritter (home-made using my pancake recipe) Carrot (1 stick) Cucumber (3 slices)	2 Tesco Free-from sausages Tomato Mushrooms Asparagus Corn Fritters with added chilli flakes	2 Tesco Free-from sausages Tomato Mushrooms Asparagus Corn Fritters with added chilli flakes
Snacks	Nkd Cocoa Mint date bar Fruit Factory Fruit stars Doves Farm Fig and Quinoa cookies (2) Banana	Peppermint tea	Banana Apple

Day One – Sunday May 19th

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Today was the first day of our week on a M-friendly diet. Mike and I were both quite looking forward to the challenge of eating as our youngest does, not least to see what health benefits we gain as the week progresses. I don’t think it will come as any great surprise to anyone that Mike and I would both like to loose a little weight and this seems like the perfect opportunity to kick-start that whilst supporting M in his daily struggle too.

I’ve spent some time explaining to M what Mike and I were doing this week and think it only fair that I do the same for you. From today to Thursday, we will be eating food that M could eat if he wanted to, but will not be eating necessarily exactly the same meals. For example, Mike and I will be adding vegetables such as mushrooms, courgettes and tomatoes to our meals, knowing full well that M won’t eat them, but that they currently are part of his “safe” foods. Friday will be different. We will eat exactly the same things that M eats, nothing more, nothing less and, at M’s request, we have both agreed to drink his protein shake (Neocate Active) on that day too.

Breakfast was, perhaps, the easiest meal to cope with as, for the most part, it wasn’t going to see any major changes to our usual fare. Mike usually starts his day with a bowl of cereal, raisins and either coconut or rice milk and as M can eat all of that too, he didn’t need to change that meal at all. My breakfasts will need a little more adapting as I typically eat fresh fruit and yoghurt or some toast, neither of which fits into the wheat, gluten, dairy, soya and egg free regime.

Lunch was a little more challenging and saw our first pitfall of the week. We headed to Tesco to pick up a couple of their Free-from frozen pizza bases as well as a couple of other free-from ingredients to see us through the week. I was disappointed to discover that our local Tesco appears to have stopped stocking these pizza bases, which are the only ones I’ve found that M can eat as they are egg-free too. I had to make a quick decision and decided to pick up a pack of their fresh bases instead as they contain a little egg, but are safe for G to eat.

Getting home, I made my 1 remaining M-friendly pizza base into a pizza for Mike and him to share and used the smaller, individual bases to make a pizza each for G and me. The ingredients were as follows:

Heinz tomato ketchup and Barbecue sauce on the base (though mine had a home-made salsa of chopped tomatoes, onion, garlic, chilli flakes, balsamic vinegar and sugar)
Marks and Spencer’s salami slices and gluten-free breaded ham
Pimiento stuffed olives
Corn
Tinned pineapple (though I forego this as I’m not a fan of fruit and savoury together)

G had the same, except without the pineapple or olives and with some goats’ cheese grated on the top.

The pizzas were delicious, but I was soon to suffer the consequences of a very silly mistake. In my rush to check the ingredients to make sure that we weren’t inadvertently adding anything that M couldn’t eat, I forgot to check for my arch nemesis: potato. Within minutes of finishing my pizza, I started experiencing stomach cramps and quickly realised my mistake. Thank goodness that the mistake was mine and didn’t cause problems for my boy!

An afternoon bike ride and play in the park for Mike and the children followed, whilst I got started on tonight’s dinner. I decided to ease us in gently and opted for something I knew we could all eat and would enjoy – a Roast Chicken dinner. This consisted of:

Roast chicken (with enough left-overs for Mike’s lunch tomorrow, dinner tomorrow night for us all and even some chicken soup for later in the week)
Sweet potato mash made with Dairy and soya free spread for M and me
Mashed potato for G and Mike
Peas and corn
Carrots
Courgettes topped with mustard (just for Mike and me, though M did give this one a go)
Gravy made from Knorr chicken stock cubes (wheat and yeast free), onion and a little balsamic vinegar

I even managed pudding tonight and adapted a recipe for Treacle sponge pudding made with rice milk, rice flour, xantham gum, dairy/soya free spread and egg replacement powder and all cooked in the microwave in 5 minutes. Some custard made from Birds’ custard powder, sugar and rice milk topped it off perfectly.

Today was an easy day for us food wise. I chose to cook things that I knew were easy to ensure as being M-friendly as well as things that the whole family enjoy to eat. The rest of the week will most definitely be more challenging, but it’s a challenge that I feel I’m up to, after all I’ve been cooking this way for the last 2 years.

7 years to diagnosis

Searching for an answer