Honestly, You're Not Sorry

I have a condition called Celiac Disease. It's an intolerance to wheat gluten, which means that I can't eat any of the following things:

Flour
Cookies
Cake
Pretzels
Bread
Cereal
Donuts
Cupcakes
Cake
Fried Food
Pasta

There are a number of other, more random things I can't eat:

Pringles - The only potato chips I've found that are made with flour
Soy Sauce - They actually add wheat gluten to it (why?????)
Twizzlers - Would you have guessed that one? I was totally surprised by that!

Any number of bajillion other annoying things are also gluten filled, like for example, certain chicken broth, most salad dressing, many many sauces, sprinkles, etc.

To answer your first question: No, getting diagnosed with this did not make me skinny. I know, right? You'd think there was nothing fattening left to eat. But you are forgetting Reeses Peanut Butter Cups, which are gloriously gluten free. I'm kidding - there's still tons of food in the world I can eat.

I was diagnosed about five years ago, and at first it did feel like there was going to be nothing left to eat, and also like I was being punished. No more bagels? For real? But you know, I was happy to stop throwing up and all the other extremely unpleasant symptoms of the condition I had developed over the years.

So I adapted my life. No more bread basket at restaurants. No more birthday cake at parties. I had to be more creative in my eating - breakfast and lunch on the go can be hard (especially the no sandwich thing!) but man, you can really make anything work if you need to. I eat these things for breakfast called "Envirokidz Bars." They are children's gluten free puffed rice cereal bars. And I eat the peanut butter flavor, which has a panda on the box (each flavor has its own theme animal). And you know what - they are actually delicious! And portable. And only like 2 weight watchers points (Weight watchers is a story for another day though).

But now it took me like ten paragraphs to get to the point of this story. Which is that the one thing I probably like least about having celiac disease is people's reaction to it when I explain it to them. Here's a good one: "Oh my god, I would die if I had that!" Gee thanks.

Another fave: After eating something with gluten in front of me (which is fine with me, its not an airborne allergy, so really, I can't expect people to change what they eat just because of me and I wouldn't want them to) they will be like "Oh this is SO DELICIOUS. Oh sorry Lisa, I feel terrible for eating this in front of you. But it's soooo good." Um, shut the fuck up ok?

Now, I am soooo not going to compare having celiac disease to having one leg on any kind of serious level. But let's just re-imagine those 2 scenarios if that was the case. "Oh Lisa, I can't believe you have one leg. I would just die if I had only 1 leg. Thank god I have 2!" or how about this: "I love running. Running is so much fun. Oh, sorry Lisa, I know you have one leg, and you'll never be able to run. I won't run in front of you anymore."

Rude, right? Just let me live in my world, where I have to pretend that bakeries are invisible. And bring me some peanut butter cups, stat.