Why a Cheese Sandwich is my Kryptonite

Thanahi reveals how she has adapted her diet to address her food intolerances

I found a great video in the Amanda’s Kitchen section of the website the other day while avoiding another football match on the TV. It was an introduction to Libby and her ‘Cooking Without’ series. If you haven’t stumbled across this yet, it’s definitely worth a look, especially if like me, you have food intolerances. Unfortunately the road to finding out that’s what I had was not an easy one for me. A few years ago I started to seek help from my GP as I was having terrible problems with my digestive system. I won’t go into the symptoms, but let’s just say that they had started to get in the way of my job. I frequently had to rush out of meetings, and one week, things became so bad that I was unable to eat or drink anything without it ‘reappearing’ in a matter of minutes. I lost more than half a stone that week and started to get very frightened about what was causing the problem. After months of tests and hospital appointments, I found myself lying on a bed waiting to go into a CT Scan with a hoard of doctors around me trying to find a vein large enough to inject some dye into. I was so dehydrated by then, that even though they were using a needle meant for babies, they weren’t having any luck. Lying there that day while all the fuss went on around me, I thought about all the things the doctors had already tested me for. It wasn’t cancer, I wasn’t a Coeliac (allergic to Gluten) and I didn’t have Crohns disease. Whilst I was obviously relieved, I was eventually told that I had IBS (irritable bowel syndrome) and I’d just have to manage the symptoms. Given the effect that my frequent trips to the loo were already having on my life, I was left feeling pretty desperate and upset. After a little bit of a cry, I decided I would have to sort things out myself. I’d been watching one of Amanda’s series on the TV at the time and was hooked on the progress of a young woman who’d had the same diagnosis as me and seemed to be responding really well to treatments at a spa. Also my boss had recently seen a nutritionist and was raving about how she’d helped him, so I got the number and booked an appointment. Talking to her resulted in a lot of 'lightbulb' moments. This is going to sound crazy, but for years I had thought that it was perfectly normal to rush to the loo after a meal in a restaurant believing that there must just be a lot of establishments with poor hygiene or that I was very unlucky and seemed to always get food poisoning. As I type this I still can’t believe that I thought that was normal! I always had a runny nose too but the GP had told me I was allergic to dust. Then I realised that all these things had started to happen after a terrible allergic reaction I’d had to Penicillin as a teenager. My poor body had been trying to tell me for years that something was wrong and I’d just ignored it, so my body had started to shout a bit louder! The nutritionist suggested I go on an exclusion diet cutting out a variety of foods and after just a couple of days I felt amazing. So good in fact that I was a little afraid at what might happen when after a while she suggested I add back one food group at a time and see what happened. It seemed that cow’s milk wasn’t my friend and wheat resulted in a very bloated tummy. So I cut these out of my diet. It was pretty hard for me but I started to cook different things and eventually I discovered that rather than buying the processed wheat and dairy free products available at the supermarket, it was better to just have something different. So breakfast cereals became porridge, milk chocolate became dark chocolate and the trusty sliced loaf got replaced by Rye bread. I bought some cookbooks to help me, but did find it hard finding recipes that eliminated both wheat and dairy. These days I’m a good few years down the line and my body can tolerate more than it used to. If the dairy is very low in fat it seems to cause me less problems and I’ve found a couple of supplements that help me too. Libby’s recipes look great though and I’ll definitely be giving them a go. It’s great to see this kind of support on the website and thanks Amanda for making the TV programme that sparked an end to all those grim trips to the hospital!