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Personal Thoughts

Articles with my personal experiences and insights into over two decades of being grain free.

Lessons learnt about being grain free

While I have been grain-free alongside my husband for over a decade, I always felt that I sat outside of the typical reasons for being grain free – namely, dealing with auto-immune disease or chronic illness.  As a result of that, and as is fairly evident from the sugar laden recipes on this website, my version of grain free for myself was as long as it technically doesn’t contain a grain, I would eat any processed, refined, manufactured, packaged and sugar laden product and call it food.  I have throughout the years regularly gone on “health kicks” where I removed sugar and dairy from my diet, but inevitably the call of the sugar and carbs would become too strong, and I would fall face first into a plate of grain free pizza dough followed my large amounts of chocolate and ice cream.  Of course, a recipe for disaster, how could it not be?Read More »Lessons learnt about being grain free

About

I started on my grain-free journey 19 years ago when my husband became extremely sick.  He was eventually diagnosed with Crohn’s disease.  We rejected drugs… Read More »About

Top 5 Tips to Living with Food Intolerances

How to cope when your diet is different to everyone else’s and it feels like you can’t eat anything.

Living with long term food sensitivities isn’t easy. It’s navigating your way in a mine-field where your body seems to betray you at every turn. It can be depressing and extremely frustrating. It can also be lonely, especially if you are surrounded by friends with apparently cast-iron guts who have absolutely no way of empathising or understanding your unique stance on food.

Read More »Top 5 Tips to Living with Food Intolerances

Why did I go grain-free?

We personally went grain free almost two decades ago to deal with Crohn’s disease. This article will cover our reasons for going grain free and I’ll share my favourite resources that explain the science behind why going grain-free worked so well for us.

Is cutting out grains boring and restrictive?

This is not a diet of just salad and protein.  That would be really, really boring.  And restrictive.  (I should also point out that it is NOT ANYTHING LIKE OR TO DO WITH the Aiken’s Diet or any other low carb eating plans.  This is a diet for intestinal and immune health and wellbeing, and it is total lifestyle change and it not a DIET in the traditional sense of the word, although for simplicity I tend to refer to it as that).

To my mind, the typical Australian or American diet is WAY more boring.  Think about it:

You get up in the morning and have the same old cereal (wheat), muesli (wheat) or toast. (wheat)

Mid-morning tea you have a coffee or tea and some biscuits (wheat)

Read More »Is cutting out grains boring and restrictive?

Grain Free & The Food Pyramid

One of the first things I hear from people (by people I usually mean doctors and traditionally trained mainstream dieticians) minds when I tell them we are grain free is “that must be so unhealthy, you are cutting out AN ENTIRE FOOD GROUP”

Really?  Actually, going grain free is NOT always a low carb eating plan. Many people assume that cutting out grains is “completely cutting out a food group – isn’t that really dangerous and doesn’t it mean that you are going to be malnourished because you don’t eat bread or rice and pasta?”

Well, to see where this idea comes from, lets take a look at the typical modern day food pyramid:

Read More »Grain Free & The Food Pyramid

What is Grain Free?

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What I eat on a typical day so it doesn’t get boring

When first starting a grain-free diet it can be a little freaky to have all your staple foods suddenly taken away. The following meal suggestions for breakfast, lunch and dinner show how easy it is to eat a varied, interesting and nutritionally complete grain-free diet.

These are my “generic” grain-free suggestions.  Many of these ideas are not SCD, GAPS or PALEO “legal”.  They are not suitable suggestions for everyone and it really depends on your own particular grain-free approach and health needs.  If you are following a specific grain-free philosophy you can get lots of excellent ideas for that particular approach on the websites that are dedicated to that approach.  You can find some of these websites on the links page.Read More »What I eat on a typical day so it doesn’t get boring