Breaking (Up With) Bread

One of the hardest things for me to give up when cleaning up my diet was bread. I LOVED bread. Sourdough bread, scones, cookies (breaking up with Mr Oreo was tough), bread sticks, pizza, chocolate almond croissants, stone baked baguette, you name it, it had my name on it.

I didn’t just love eating bread, I adored baking it. Although I never got to the sourdough expert level of my sister, I was pretty full on with a fridge and freezer full of starters, sometimes getting up an hour earlier to bake a batch of sourdough bread BEFORE going to work. Dedication! And pure and utter addiction - and you know it is addictive when most people will exclaim “oh, but I could NEVER give up bread!” as soon as they hear what paleo/primal/low carb entails.

In the end, bread had to go because the evidence spoke for itself. Removing it was like flipping a switch on my skin, it suddenly cleared up completely. What relief, what joy! And how angry I was that I hadn’t known this when I was a teenager and young adult (hey, or a 30-something woman), suffering from what was supposedly a natural phase of adolescence. Whatevs. Makes my blood boil.

Although I will sometimes still eat gluten in the form of an especially appealing dessert or scrumptious artisan bread, I am very quickly approaching the point of eliminating it all, including the tiny bits in my favourite ice cream, Cookies and Cream (getting to a point of nit picking, I know...). Why? Because I am realising that the damage I saw for years on my SKIN, will have had an equivalent on my inside. Articles like this, gives me more qualms on ingesting something as toxic as gluten, just for the sake of occasionally “treating myself”. What harm have I already done myself with almost 40 years of a wheat heavy diet? Could I have avoided my allergies? What diseases have I created the perfect conditions for in my old age? I don’t want to know, but I also don’t want to continue adding to the damage.