Week 18/2026: Gluten
Week of 27 April 2026
This was week 1 of my nutritionst-recommended food tolerance trial.
This post is wholly researched and written by me. I do not use AI in my writing. I will always bring you my stories in my real human voice.
The problem with gluten
I saw a nutritionist a few weeks ago to work through some changes I need to make to my diet that have come up from some medical advice. I blame this entirely on menopause. It’s that thing about how once you’re done child rearing, nature doesn’t want you any more, so all the things your lovely female hormones were protecting you from—disease and dis-ease—start to happen to you once you lose that protection.
Nature is brutal.
Anyway, the nutritionist and I had a chat about that stuff, and I also mentioned that some years ago the gastro doctor had suggested I had a non-celiac gluten intolerance.
Did I take that on board and cut gluten out of my diet? Or significantly cut it back?
No, I did not. Because bread. And pasta. And caramel slices.
So the nutritionist suggested, based on symptoms I described, that I do a trial of eliminating gluten (and dairy) for a week then reintroducing just one of those things to see what happens, and whether not having these things changes the way I feel. And the way I feel is kind of bloated and heavy and a bit unsettled, and I thought that was just the way I always felt and it was just me.
The gluten-free trial begins
I started with a gluten-free trial because I don’t eat a lot of dairy anyway.
And that was a tonne of fun. It meant avoiding pasta and many types of noodles, along with trying to find a gluten-free bread that was edible, which ended up being a search for gluten-free bread full-stop. I didn’t go out of my way to find it but none of the bakeries and places that stock the bread I usually get had gluten-free; one didn’t even offer it at all, ever. Another said they did, but not today.
(Yes, I could try baking but my energy for doing that is in the gutter, so no. I’m not doing that.)
I ended up with something from a supermarket that was …. not inedible.
I successfully avoided gluten for a week. I found that if I meal planned fairly well, it wasn’t too far away from my regular eating pattern. I’d already come to realise that caramel slices and such things were not doing great things for me, so I continued to not have them. Switching bread and granola for gluten free alternatives, not having pasta (sadface), and the one time I had lunch out choosing a place that had gluten free options. It wasn’t terrible.
And I did feel better without it. Or without dairy. Maybe both. I felt lighter and less weighed down and some of my clothes fit better.
I was looking forward to Friday pasta night, which would be the start of my gradual re-introduction. We get some absolutely fantastic pasta from a local Italian deli, and pasta night is a highlight of the week, or sometimes fortnight. The nutritionist had said some gluten-intolerant people can tolerate it for a day, maybe even two but for some people just one meal can be too much.
Pasta night
I definitely felt less good the next day and this continued to build over the weekend as I tried a few more gluten foods. So that’s good data and it means the gastro doctor was right and I probably should have listened to them.
So now I reset for a few days, and then reintroduce dairy and see what that does.
Habit tracker
Daily habits
- 15 minutes morning exercise sequence (7 days): 5/7
- Walk (7 days): 6/7
- 9.30 shutdown (6 days): 6/6
- Evening routine (7 days): 7/7
Physio exercises
- Calf exercises (7 days): 7/7
- Hip lifts (7 days): 5/7
- Sliding bridge (7 days): 1/7
Summary of the week
The best thing
Two weeks ago, I mentioned I’d learned of the peregrine falcon nest at Salisbury Catherdral.
Well, this weekend, the eggs started hatching and there are chicks.
Cute!
This week I learned
I learned what a data lake is. (When I say I learned what it is, I mean I read something about it and got very confused when the article started talking about data warehouses and data lake houses and all I can remember is a data lake is just a massive repository of data and anything beyond that is beyond me. They wrote the thing in words and I need a picture or something. I hope there are swans on the data lake.)
Also a species of ant new to science has been observed to clean the workers of a separate ant species, similar to cleaner fish. According to my mother’s New Scientist magazine this week, Mark Moffett at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History observed the Dorymyrmex ant cleaning members of Pogonomyrmrx barbatus, a species of harvester ant.
The cleaner ants licked their faces and inspected between their mandibles. Once they had been groomed, the harvester ants would throw themselves on their backs to knock the cleaner ants off.
Cool.
This week I noticed
Interesting shadows of people about to cross Macquarie Street.
The moon!
A black cockatoo in the tree at the front of the house (there were actually two).
What’s making me think?
Haemin Sunim (on Feel Better Live More podcast):
I have never existed outside the world.
We are connected.
When we end up thinking about things and conceptualise everything and see the whole world through the thinking mind, it feels the whole world is separated. That I can somehow exist apart from the rest of the world. But this is not the case.
Reading
- The Psychobiotic Revolution: Mood, Food and the New Science of the Gut-Brain Connection by Scott C. Anderson
- Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare
Listening
- Feel Better Live More Podcast
- Bohemia by Van Diemen’s Band
- The World Is To Dig by They Might Be Giants
- Dreamworld by Pet Shop Boys
Watching
- Resident Alien
- Doctor Who Fury from the Deep
About The Author
