As I watch the young moms at our church and hear them talk, even seeing the amazing photos they post on facebook, I find that they take a healthy and almost obsessive care to find the best foods for their children and to make them as appealing as possible. It's a wonderful thing to see, and I know that the community that they have together not only encourages all of them to do their best, but enables them to learn and implement new ideas as they support one another. They are an amazing bunch of women! Every young family should have such a community around them.
They take such care in part for the basic nutritional needs of their kids and to avoid additives and pesticides; but they do also because food allergies, sensitivities and just plain strange symptoms are now so common from the foods that seemed normal and harmless just a few years ago. Now it's almost a sure thing that someone at any gathering will be avoiding wheat...or milk...or peanuts. When my son has all his friends over, out of 12 kids there are two who can't eat wheat. And even though we avoided wheat for one year at our house, since we're not doing it any more, it's hard to remember what a poor allergic kid can eat! I need to keep a list of possibilities handy for those days.
When my son and I were avoiding wheat (it wasn't for celiac, but to eliminate some symptoms of sensitivity), I decided that rather than focus on the wheat we weren't eating, I'd focus on all the normal recipes I could assemble that already don't have any wheat. I made a list of my son's favorite foods and put the wheat ones at the bottom. I put together a binder that started with all the online resources I could find, all the charts and lists of types of flour; I maintained a list of the various flours I'd found at stores in the area and how much they cost (too much!). You wouldn't have to do this; I'd avoided wheat for a couple of years before my son without any special effort just because I don't find bread or noodles that important, and I just left them out for my own purposes. I can't afford to devote a lot of money to specialized eating, and so for that as well as to make the transition less painful, I tried as much as possible not to use things that took special ingredients; still, for my son who would crave bread and pasta, I had to put out some special effort.
I put dividers in my binder and printed up pages and pages of recipes by category, mostly things I'd collected online and put in MS Word documents. Some were just copied from books I'd borrowed from the library. Overall, even once we stopped avoiding wheat (since we found that until just recently our symptoms had subsided), I had found some wheat-free recipes that we still would use even in normal eating. One other benefit is that in using alternate flours, it struck me that almost surely the nutrition was better-rounded than with just eating wheat. For that matter, while avoiding wheat products, I lost some weight just thanks to that one aspect of my diet. Not a lot, but a few pounds. An amazing side effect that I didn't expect was that the plantar fasciitis I had completely subsided and hasn't been back. It had been so bad that the doctor was starting to talk about surgery on my achilles tendons. I'm so thankful that we went through the wheat-free diet even just for that one benefit!
I relate this whole method that I used and the benefits because I know there are many people who are stymied by the food allergy problem. If you look at it from the point of view of what you can have instead of what you can't, you may find your diet a lot more doable and beneficial than if you are focusing on being deprived. It will also help you to reach out to others who are having difficulty. I have shared many of the recipes I discovered and the stores and websites with friends when I heard that they had to start on it; you will be able to help others as well in just a short time. In fact, I think I will be relating some of them in the near future in my posts on this site.
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