The Gluten Experiment: Part 2

So, part 1 was going gluten-free. I basically hated that. I will readily admit that it would take a LOT of awfulness in a non-GF life to get me to stick to being GF.

Part 2 was to return to normal eating.
That's actually not quite accurate, because I returned to genuinely normal eating for about a week, but then spent 10 days traveling, and that included some fast food and lots of meals prepared by other people so not only was it not GF, it wasn't even really 'normal' for me. But I digress. Lots of people told me that they didn't notice much when they went off gluten, but they did notice negative changes when they went back on it. Thus part 2.

On my first day eating gluten again I noticed mostly just excitement and not having to stop and read every label (or look it up on www.zeer.com). I'm not sure that I ate terribly 'normally' that day because I was just sortof excited about eating whatever struck my fancy. I didn't notice anything in particular physically.
On the second day I had a handful of pretzels and noticed afterward that I felt bloated. I tried to pretend that I didn't.
On the fifth day we made BLTs (which I love) with store-bought bread (which I don't love, but we had a loaf in the house because Hubby had gotten it for making french toast and we were trying to finish things off before leaving on our trip). Again I got the bloaty feeling afterward, and I had only eaten the one sandwich.
I did not notice bloating at any other times. I didn't notice any real changes to my intestinal regularity (except that the backed-upedness lasted a few more days...but it had started during part 1, so I didn't think that counted as a 'new symptom).

Within a week of eating whatever I wanted, I did notice that if I had a carb-heavy meal (especially one that was white-flour centric), I felt somewhat lethargic and unwell. Not sick really, just sub-par. So I didn't even give it a full two weeks of eating whatever I wanted. I launched straight into part 3, which was to not sweat it about which carbs I had per se, but to aim for fewer rather than more of them (and to try to stick to whole grains--that was hard until I got home but is fairly easy now).

(stay tuned, part 3 is coming tomorrow!)