Breaking Up with Gluten? There's Life After the Divorce!

Breaking up with gluten is like getting a divorce
Give yourself permission to grieve

If you've just received the shocking news that you have celiac disease or non-celiac gluten sensitivity, you might be feeling overwhelmed and sad and angry right about now.

All at the same time. 

That's very common. 

Go ahead and give yourself permission to feel that way. It's okay to be hurt and angry.

While some folks do feel a great sense of relief to finally discover what has been making them sick for all of these years, the reality of what breaking up with gluten actually means in the real world -- a real-life divorce -- probably hasn't hit you quite yet.

At least, that's how it was for me.

I was overjoyed until the feelings of deprivation and loss caught up with me.

And yeah, they hit me pretty hard.

I had a meltdown right in the middle of Golden Corral.

I stood there watching an employee put french rolls on a white platter. With the same gloved hand, she then reached out and put handfuls of salad into the giant aluminum bowl at the salad bar, contaminating that entire bowl of mixed greens with bread crumbs.

After returning to our table and seeing what everyone else was eating, that I couldn't, I lost it.

I just lost it -- right then and there.

The realization that gluten free is for life, that you will never be able to eat what you want to, whenever you want it, is very similar to losing a loved one. There is a very real sense of loss.

The pressure builds until, eventually, it smacks you in the face full force:

Your relationship with wheat, barley, and rye is ending.

This doesn't mean that you'll never feel content ever again.

You will find a way to gain peace in your life.

The pity-party doesn't last forever.

Going on a gluten-free diet and the physical healing that results from eliminating as much gluten as you can will change your life for the better.

You won't understand how, or just how much, until that day comes, but eventually, you'll be able to look back and see just how far you've come since that fateful day.

Give Yourself Permission to Grieve

The first year is the hardest.

Everything is so new.

You feel all alone.

Grocery shopping takes hours to accomplish because you have to read every single label every single time you go shopping.

My first shopping trip took me a whopping 5 hours just to pick up a weeks worth of groceries.

And that's when I was feeling at my worst.

Don't bury your feelings. Let them bubble to the surface of your conscious mind.

See them.

Experience them.

Don't shove them away.

You'll just have to deal with them later on if you do. Or, they'll decide to take a different route that could leave you in a more challenging situation than you're in right now.

Get it over with. See this for what it is: a drastic lifestyle change. Because quite honestly, you might not ever get over it.

However, you can learn how to live again. You can heal and rebuild your lifestyle. You can adjust to all of the complexities and nuances and assertiveness that living without gluten demands.

You can even change the way you socialize, as well as the way you eat.

Going gluten free enables you to find a new level of contentment, a way of gaining a peacefulness inside for what's  going on, but you will never be the same again.

The person who could eat gluten no longer exists. 

You've moved on.

5 States of Being Involved in Breaking Up With Gluten

The five states involved in breaking up with gluten are emotional reactions to a sense of loss that a lot of people have when they first go gluten free:

• denial
• self-pity and apathy
• guilt and self-condemnation
• anger and resentment
• self acceptance

However, keep in mind that you might not experience eliminating gluten in exactly this way. These are just typical reactions that many people suffering from the loss of gluten go through in their lives.

Despite what you might have heard, grieving isn't a path. These are states of being, so you move in and out of them several times during the healing process.

This means that there is no set order to experience these states and you don't have to experience all of them.

They are just possibilities.

They are a way to understand what is happening to you, to see it more clearly, evaluate what is going on, and then decide what you want to do next.

There is no right or wrong with any of them.

Emotional State #1: Denial

This is the place where you land when you're in shock.

The diagnosis hit you out of left field because you didn't expect it. You haven't been sick, or if you have, you want the diagnosis to be something else.

You want to have something the doctor can cure, something less restrictive, perhaps. Or maybe, you want something that can be fixed with medication.

You have no idea how you're going to deal with this, so you push it away.

You don't want to change the way you eat.

You don't want to change your life.

Coping with reality isn't a possibility right now. 

When you're lost in denial, you feel numb. This can't be right, you think. It's got to be a mistake.

You feel a strong urge to keep looking for the correct answer. A different answer. A better answer that will be more comfortable and soothing to live with.

Denial tells you that you need an answer that will let you continue to eat your favorite foods.

One of the things you can't make gluten free is
soft, fluffy raised donuts -- which are
one of my favorite foods!

While denial is a perfectly okay place to land after receiving a celiac diagnosis, it's a bit dangerous, too.

Most people who enter this emotional state keep eating their favorite foods filled with gluten, or cheat occasionally, because you don't want to believe it's harming you. Or, you don't know that it is.

Others deny that cross contamination is a very real issue for them. You just don't want to believe it's true. You don't want to believe how strict you must follow the diet to stay safe.

So, you continue to go out to eat once or twice a week, have a slice of pizza or a sandwich when you're at a friend's house, grab a donut when the boss brings them into work, go out to your local bar with the guys after work, or refuse to replace your toaster and cutting board.

Since you don't believe you have celiac or gluten sensitivity that badly, you won't take the proper precautions, even when you continue to feel ill.

Researching what's necessary to keep yourself safe would open your eyes, so you don't want to do that either. You don't want to think about the real possibility of getting cancer. You'd rather pretend that cancer isn't a possibility for you.

Denial allows you the space to blame the doctor or the gluten-free diet you're on and claim that it isn't working for you.

The only way out of this condition is to believe that celiac disease or super sensitivity is real. But when that first happens, you tend to fall into one of the other states fairly quickly.

Emotional State #2: Self-Pity and Apathy

Self pity and apathy paralyze you to act
It is a stagnant place to live

Self-pity is when you feel sorry for your self, and you want everyone else to feel sorry for you too. While you might think that self-pity is a silent place to be, it's really not.

Most people caught in the web of self-pity are very vocal about it. There is lots of complaining and voicing of your frustrations here, especially if you're a super-sensitive celiac and don't feel better right away.

There is a tendency to blame society for the way things are.

Grief for the foods you have to leave behind has become so much a part of your life that it threatens to drag you down into the mud just as far as you can go.

If you go too deep, you'll pull back from friends and family, instead of vocalizing your pity, walk around in a daze of fog, and wonder if life is even worth living anymore.

When you're in a state of self-pity, you complain and cry about your situation. You become extremely anxious and depressed.

If you can't go out to dinner or enjoy family gatherings anymore, if you can't just take off for the weekend on a whim because you have to worry about how you are going to eat, then what else is there to do in life?

Is life even worth living anymore? 

Maybe it would be better if you just curled up and died. If you don't wake up tomorrow morning, then that would be okay with you.

Another word for self-pity is apathy.

Apathy is the state of being where you don't feel like doing anything because you believe that your situation isn't going to change no matter what you do.

For a super-sensitive celiac, this might manifest as being too afraid to socialize or leave the house for fear of getting glutened.

You might also feel that there's nothing you can do because there's no cure for celiac disease or non-celiac gluten sensitivity, so why bother going anywhere?

This is a stagnant place to be. You literally can't do anything when you're drowning in anxiety and depression.

It's the very bottom of the various emotional states that people choose to live in, but you don't have to stay there. You can choose to see your situation differently.

You can even choose to feel differently.

Emotional State #3: Guilt and Self-Condemnation

When you enter the state of guilt, you begin to question your self. This may, or may not, follow denial or apathy. You might feel guilty while feeling sorry for yourself at the same time.

If you've gone a long time without a celiac diagnosis, you might have quite a bit of physical damage that is permanent.

And if you believe you are more sensitive to gluten than everyone else, have more violent symptoms when accidentally glutened, or are forced to live with a lot of restrictions, you might decide to play the "what if" game:

• If only I'd gone off gluten sooner, then maybe I would be able to enjoy a more normal life.
• Maybe I wouldn't have to live in such a bubble.
• Maybe my body would have healed a heck of a lot faster than it's healing now.
• Maybe a gluten-free diet would have been the answer to all of my problems.

Not likely, but that's what guilt does to you.

You turn the blame inward on your self and feel like you should have done things differently. If you had, then maybe your life wouldn't be such a nightmare now.

Guilt is a tool of the inner critic. 

She can be quite unforgiving. She keeps you living in the past, a past that no longer exists.

What you did or didn't do yesterday or even five years ago doesn't matter anymore. There is nothing you can do about it. The past is over. It no longer exists.

Try to place your attention on what's going on right now and find things in your life that you can be grateful for. Gratitude is a great way to start the healing process. It will help you to live more joyously right now.

Emotional State #4: Anger and Resentment

Rejecting your anger and trying to hide those "why me?" feelings won't help you feel any better.

Believe it or not, you have to allow yourself to freely feel the anger -- fully and completely -- before it will begin to fade.

While anger generally comes from feeling hurt and helpless or victimized, how you think about your self, others, and the world around you will determine how quickly those angry feelings move on.

When anger comes to stay, you can get caught up in holding onto resentments that can make your life pretty miserable.

Discovering that you have to break up with gluten is painful.

You're bound to feel disappointed and hurt. There is nothing wrong with that. You didn't do anything to deserve this, so why is it happening?

Anger is one of those emotions that tend to turn into blame very quickly. The drive to find something that will take your pain and misery away, to help you feel normal again, is the drive to find something to blame it all on.

Blame helps you make sense of what's happening, so you can get back to normal again without having to take responsibility for the way you're feeling.

Anger occurs when you don't feel in control of the situation.

When you feel that you've been mistreated, and that things should be different than they are.

The hurt makes you feel vulnerable and victimized.

However, anger isn't bad.

It's just a way of handling the shock and the hurt that either took you by surprise or yanked away all of the things in your life that were important to you.

What you find important in life can be changed, however.

All you need is a new vision.

A new understanding.

Emotional State #5: Self Acceptance

Acceptance isn't tolerance.

It's not putting up with the situation, while cursing gluten under your breath. Cursing gluten is resentment and blame.

Acceptance also isn't about trying to recreate your past life either.

Self-acceptance is about seeing what's going on right now as a challenge to rise up to, a new project to work on, rather than a problem or situation that needs to be gotten rid of.

Self-acceptance is the point in the grieving process where you realize that you are in charge of your feelings and decide that:

Food isn't going to make you feel miserable anymore.

Yes, you'll want to figure out how to live in a gluten-saturated world without gluten. Be in the world but not controlled by society, others, or food.

You'll want to learn how to adapt and adjust to what's happening to you. You'll want to find new interests, and create a new reason to live.

At this point in the healing process, you're ready to make peace with your past, and most importantly, make peace with gluten.

There's Life After Divorce from Gluten

Make non-food activities more important than food
Get outside and start to live joyously

You can never replace what you've lost. You can't go back and stop whatever triggered the celiac disease or non-celiac gluten sensitivity. That wouldn't be realistic.

But you can:

• educate yourself on where gluten hides
• keep up with the latest scientific findings
• make new friends who support you
• try new foods you haven't eaten before
• create new recipes or adapt old ones to be gluten free
• take up a new hobby you're passionate about
• spend more time outdoors with family and friends
• plan out vacations or weekend getaways ahead of time
• have holiday gatherings at your house
• go to the movies and skip the popcorn
• take a leisurely Sunday drive and bring along a picnic lunch
• play with the kids or your grand baby

While some things might continue to be off-limits for you, even after you travel through the state of self-acceptance, there is so much in life that you can still enjoy.

There are many things to still be grateful for.

Breaking up with gluten won't ruin your life. It won't take everything away from you.

Only a few things will change. 

Most of the enjoyable things in life are still available to you, even if you are a super-sensitive celiac.