Confessions of a Skinny Gluten Free Girl

I was a skinny kid. Actually it is not uncommon for people with gluten issues, who should be gluten free, to be skinny, especially those with Celiac Disease. We have issues with digestion and do not properly obtain nutrients from our food. But I was a seemingly healthy kid, so it was not too much of an issue.  Occasionally some doctor would tell my mother that she needed to fatten me up and so she would feed me extra bananas and make me down milkshakes packed with ice cream for awhile. Not such a bad deal!  I loved bananas, but the shakes were a little harder to handle – I always preferred food lower in fat – I would pick ice milk over ice cream any day, preferred non-fat milk to regular and wanted all visible fat removed from meat (on second thought maybe there was something wrong with me!). But I ate like a race horse so at the end of the day everyone left me alone and just chalked my boniness up to genetics.

I never minded being called skinny; it was just a part of who I was – “The Skinny Girl.” I was a skinny teenager and a skinny young woman, even after birthing two children. As time went by the girls and women we admired became skinnier and I went from being considered skinny to “normal.”

And then I got diagnosed as gluten intolerant and probably for the first time in my life was actually digesting the food I consumed in such great quantities. Combined with hormonal and metabolism changes I gained more weight than I was comfortable with.

I was in my thirties and had never dieted in my life; I had no clue what to do so I just cut down what I ate to next to nothing  and lost the weight. At the time I thought I was so clever but in truth, nothing was further from the truth. Not eating is not the way to properly loose weight if you want to keep it off. And so the craziness began.

After a few years of trying to recapture what I thought of as my identity – The Skinny Girl – I smartened up. I am now happy to be The Healthy Gluten Free Girl.

Eighty percent or so of my diet is really good – tons of organic vegetables, lean protein, whole grains, fresh fruit, some seeds and nuts.   I do eat desserts, I put cream in my coffee (organic cream, organic coffee) and I will even have a little bit of (GASP!) sugar now and again. But I believe nothing thrives in deprivation, so I never deprive myself.

I look at my body like a bank account and I try not to write checks I can’t cover. I keep my body fueled so it will keep going for me. If I indulge a little more than I should then I eat salad for the next meal or I will exercise a bit more. It is all about checks and balances.

I will admit this bank account point of view is a new concept for me. Previously I had been known to occasionally get real busy and forget to eat until late at night and then eat everything in sight and collapse into bed. (Seriously? I am a food blogger – how do I forget to eat?) In essence I was overdrawing my “bank account” and being assessed overdraft fees in the form of extra pounds around the middle.

Nowadays I try to keep my blood sugar even and so I eat often through out the day. I am still busy so I rely on some conveniences. I carry SOYJOY bars in my purse, have some stashed in my glove box and desk drawer and in my gym bag.

Before I was approached by SOYJOY to try their bars I stayed away from nutrition bars either because they contained gluten, tasted nasty or were made with soy isolate. SOYJOY bars are made from real, whole soy (not soy isolate) and real, whole fruit.

One of my favorite flavors is banana – ironic huh? My mom used to feed me bananas to try and fatten me up and now I eat banana SOYJOY bars to keep from getting fat!

I am grateful to SOYJOY for their commitment to making gluten free nutrition bars which are free from soy isolate, providing me a way to keep my body bank account balanced and be a healthy gluten free girl.

Have you tried this recipe? Give it a star rating and let us know your thoughts in the Ratings & Reviews section below.