“I’m gluten intolerant and can’t eat wheat and oats.”
When I say that
“Oh, that’s terrible! Wheat is in everything.”
“Have you been that way since you were a child?”
When I was a child, I ate a normal diet. I was healthy, and no matter what I ate, I felt nothing was ever wrong with me.
But now that I think about it, there were signs of gluten intolerance even as a child.
When I was in high school, I often had bread for breakfast and went to school. To my dismay, in the middle of the second period, that is, around 10 am, I already had no more energy and felt drowsy, tired and dizzy. So, I told my mother, “When I have bread for breakfast, I get hungry quickly, so can I have rice for breakfast?” She prepared rice for breakfast for me since then.
When I ate rice for breakfast, I never felt lack of energy or fatigue, and I thought it was because bread is just puffed up flour with lots of air and little real volume (…. Seriously. 🤣) But now that I think about it, I think that fatigue is due to the gluten.
I remember the several times when I went to an all-you-can-eat dessert buffet at a nice hotel with my high school swim club friends after school.
Every time on the way home on the train after eating a lot of cakes and sweets, I felt so sleepy that I had to hold on to the handrail to keep standing.
I remember it well because it was a sleepiness I had never felt before other than those times, so much so that I thought I was going to faint.