How in the world did I get here?

This is the first post in a series that I am going to write here on Gling. I wanted to share with you our journey, how we got to living gluten-free and loving it. So many frustrations, several triumphs, definitely not the path we would have chosen, but we are living proof that you can make the change.

For starters, let me tell you a bit about my family. My husband and I have four great kids, three boys and one girl. Our youngest is 10 and our oldest is 19. We live on a very small farm where we raise several different animals, have a garden, a growing fruit orchard and several kinds of berries. Life here is simple, for the most part, but there is always a lot going on.

As a kid, I loved to cook with my grandmother. I've mentioned her many times in past blogs. She was an amazing cook and I learned much from her. My passion has almost always been food. Always cooking, baking, creating and feeding my family as much "from scratch" dishes as I could, just like grandma did for her family.

The journey from eating and loving gluten-laden foods to being able to cook and love gluten-free foods has been an interesting one. For years, I worked to find ways to get more whole grains into my family's diet. I ground wheat berries to make flour and then used that in all of my baking for my family. Always focusing on preparing nutritious meals!

About ten years ago, my daughter started having stomach issues. She was quite young and it was very worrisome for us. Not knowing what the answer was, I talked to her doctor about what could be causing her to have these problems. I was told that my daughter had acid reflux and they wanted to put her on medication.

Now, I have never been one to just medicate and not try to find the reasons "why" the medication was necessary. This doctor wasn't one for asking questions, just wanted her to take a pill and leave it at that. When I asked what could cause a 3 year old to have acid reflux, he looked at me like I was nuts. The recommendation he made was not something I was comfortable with, so we went for a second opinion soon after that.

In the months that followed, the question was asked many times over to many other doctors, friends and even searches on line. The same thing kept coming back to me, and that was to look at our diet. I finally found a doctor that was not pushing me to just medicate her and we started talking about the "why" instead of just a quick fix.

Our family history was discussed and the recommendation this doctor made was to remove both dairy and gluten from our diets. That was completely overwhelming to me. I laughed and told him that I'd try to cut out dairy, knowing that there was a sensitivity there anyway, but that cutting gluten from our diet was more than I could even begin to think about at that time.

So, we started on that road, cutting out all dairy from our families diet. Why did we do this for the whole family? My daughter was not the only one having problems, hers were just worse than the rest of us. Our oldest son had shown signs of dairy intolerance at a very young age, so this was not outside the realm of possibilities.

Giving up dairy was hard, harder than anything we've tried to date. Cheese substitutes were less than perfect and we never did find one that would satisfy a cheese craving. I approached our dairy free journey much like the current journey for gluten-free eating. It had to taste as good as the original. With dairy substitutes, we never found one.

There were a few substitutions that we found that worked well for us, but as far as a melting cheese, we were constantly disappointed. Cream cheese, sour cream and yogurt were easily replaced. The search for a good tasting, melting cheese variety of any kind was frustrating at best. Eventually we gave up and just lived without cheddar and mozzarella, much to my family's dismay!

Cooking with soy and rice milk became second nature. For the most part, nothing was different as far as my cooking went. Other than the lack of cheese, we didn't feel deprived all the time. There were those occasional cravings and we really began to miss many of our family favorites.

We had few stomach issues for a while, but there were still some problems. For a while, we lived with them and thought things had improved as much as they were ever going to. As long as the kids stayed away from dairy, the severe stomach issues seemed to be better. Not gone, but better.

For a long time we lived thinking that the little bit of improvement was enough. I was in denial that I could do more, and so sure that removing gluten from our diets was beyond what I could handle or take on. Besides, how could wheat or gluten really be that bad for them? I bought good whole grain bread, made much of our bread and fed my family well. So I thought.