#1 With this blog, I thee wed.

I feel as though my life has been renewed, I'm re-energized and this blog is my commitment to living a fuller life. No more procrastination, it's time.  It was a promise I made to myself a while back and it's powered by the encouragement of friends that I begin.

My journey to clear my mind and regain my health started about three years ago. I knew something wasn't right, I was loosing weight, having dizzy spells, my energy was depleted, I couldn't concentrate and I had what can only be described as brain fog. The mornings were the hardest part. I'll spare you the details, but let's just say I discovered an adult use for baby wipes. Each day I would wonder if I should call in sick, or wait to see what happens, and each afternoon, I would leave my place for my walk to work and pace myself. Where I used to practically skip along the pavement, now I was dragging along and resting where ever possible, like an old lady. I seriously started wondering if this was the beginning of the end of my life.

I was living in San Francisco, a city of every kind of diversity. Wonderful food was everywhere around me. On my walk to work each day, I passed through the predominantly Chinese neighbourhood of middle Clement St. with all it's Dim Sum shops and fresh bakeries tempting me to eat pork buns and Har Gao and Ham Sui Gok, the delicious and glutenous sweet rice flour pork dumplings, and the low price of 3 pieces for less than $1.20 made it even more tempting.  But as time went on and my food fears grew, my diverse palate and intake began to shrink. I thought that maybe I could figure out what foods were causing the problems, if indeed it was food, by the process of elimination.
I had already been pretty much avoiding lactose because a simple sensitivity had turned into a full blown intolerance, causing violent attacks in the night that started with heart palpitations and shaking like Wile E Coyote on TNT . By that time I began to really worry that my "food fascism" was starting to resemble Bulemia or Anorexia and as I looked inward for answers as to the cause, my confusion muddled my already fogged mind even more.

I began learning about Gluten intolerance and Celiac disease on the day my mother emailed me from her home in Florida to tell me that she had been tested for Celiac. I thought this might be my problem too, so I decided to learn as much as I could from the web, look for improvements and go from there. I had no idea at that time of the journey ahead of me. It was like leaving for school one day with a small back pack on and finding myself on a trip around the world.

I have bumbled my way along and struggled to find the foods that best suit my needs while paying close attention to my body's reaction. In this blog I'm going to share what I've learned over the past few years about how to best avoid gluten, where to shop for the best prices and what products are out there that can bring the joy back to your table.
I have relearned how to eat, cook, entertain and to help educate some people in the food industry.

Okay, that's enough for now, I'm going to eat! I'll catch you later.