starting your gluten free journey

Eating a gluten-free diet at first can feel realllllly overwhelming.

It feels like you’ll never taste the good things in life again.

And if you’re anything like me and LOVE food, this is a devastating feeling.

Eating gluten-free takes a lot of change. But those changes do not have to be the end of good food.

I want to show you how to make the gluten-free lifestyle do-able, even on a budget.

I’m not going to lie to you and say that it is easy, but my goal is to walk with you through the process and make it easier.

The first week can be especially difficult in this gluten-less journey. It’s hard to know where to even start. This post is very basic, with things you need to just get you through right now, and set you on the right path. If you feel overwhelmed, then you’re in the right place. My goal is to break down what you can do this week to adjust to this new gluten-free lifestyle.

1. Read labels

First things first. When you’re switching to a gluten-free diet, you’ll want to become a label reader.

Yep. You get to be THAT person.

Reading labels will save your bacon, though. You wouldn’t believe some of the things gluten gets snuck in to:

Cream of mushroom soup.

Frozen french fries.

Mentos.

The list is endless.

But sometimes looking at the labels is overwhelming in and of itself. And depending on your former eating habits, there may be a lot of ingredients that you can’t even pronounce, let alone know what they are.

Here are the things gluten is in:

Wheat

Barley (including barley malt)

Rye

Triticale (a cross between barley and rye)

Now, wheat has all kinds of forms, and gluten is in all of them. So that means you also want to avoid:

Spelt

Semolina

Wheat germ

Cracked wheat

Wheat bran

Wheat starch

Couscous

Einkorn

Durum

Matzo

Note: When reading labels, look at the “Allergies” warning under or near the nutrition label. They generally have to disclose if it contains wheat products or if it’s made in a factory that is not gluten-free certified (meaning it could come in contact with glutenous things in the factory). AND IT WILL BE IN BOLD!

If you see any of these ingredients or warnings, put it back on the shelf.

2. Swap out your regular flour based items

Sometimes it’s too shocking to go from eating regular pizza crust to eating cauliflower pizza crust (which I still find to be sorely lacking for me. Kudos to those of you who can do it). To make the switch easier, you can simply identify things that you still want to eat without substituting for a purely “clean” alternative (but it’s a good idea to work toward that).

Again, sometimes cauliflower just can’t fill a shoe (and don’t get me started on all the things garbanzo beans can’t replace).

You’ll want to find a gluten-free substitute to things like

Pasta

Cookies

Crackers

Bagels

Bread

Cake

Muffins

We certainly live in a time where gluten-free items are pretty easy to buy in-store. If the shock of this kind of eating is real, I’d say start this week by finding alternatives to your favorite things. Goodie Girl, Glutino, Simple Mills and Vans have versions of crackers and cookies that taste very similar to the real deal.

But if you are wanting to find healthier alternatives and save some money, which I of course advocate for, you can replace a lot of these snack items with healthy homemade versions or whole food snacks.

There are a few processed foods that I still continue to buy. I have found these foods not worth making myself:

Pasta, crackers, and chips.

The time it takes to make them doesn’t have great pay-off for me

Pasta

My favorite pasta in the world is Trader Joe’s organic brown rice noodles. Wanna know what’s in them?

Organic brown rice and water.

That’s it. I can pronounce those things, and I KNOW what those are! Yippee skippy.

They have spaghetti, penne, and fusilli style pasta, and work great as a straight-across substitute.

Tip: I like to add red lentils (beans) to my pasta sauce to add more nutrition and cut down on the carbs of the grain noodle. They blend in well with the sauce. Just add the lentils to the pasta sauce in a blend after microwaving them for 2 minutes with water. 1/4 cup of red lentils gives you 20% of your daily intake of iron.

Crackers and chips

For me, crackers and chips are not worth making (at least not often) at home. It’s a lot of work for such a quickly-consumed pay-off. We just don’t eat crackers or chips regularly around here, but when we do, I buy them.

3. Make your own gluten-free food at home

Now, if you are not a make-it-from scratch person, this is possibly the scariest sentence in this blog post.

However, if you’re trying to eat gluten-free on a budget, you and your kitchen are going to need to be best friends. Don’t let it scare you! You can do it.

You’ll need some kitchen tools to help make your life easier, but once you have the right equipment, you can start making delicious things at home. (And if you need me, I’m always here for you to reach out to. I love talking gluten-free food).

If you already are a make-it-from scratch person, you just need some pointers on how to work with gluten-free flours.

For some things, like cookies, it’s really not too different. But for other things, like bread, it’s just a matter of working more with batter than with dough. You won’t be doing much kneading anymore at all.

You will also be working with gums instead of wheat, which requires beating to activate it for the perfect chewiness.

I make everything from cake, to biscuits, to gravy, to bagels, to sandwich bread. All at home. All for about a quarter of the price I’d pay at a store for the same thing.

That’s motivation enough for me to make the time to make my own!

Start this week by browsing Pinterest or here on lemon8 for gluten free versions of your favorite meals. Create a gluten-free board and start saving recipes that you want to try! But before you dive into that, read this last tip to help you sift through which recipes to try…

4. Get comfortable with your new flours, starches, and gums

Once you start looking at gluten free recipes to make at home, you’ll quickly realize you need ingredients you don’t have.

My mom who does not normally eat gluten-free asked me if I have a gluten-free pizza dough recipe. Of course I was so excited to share a SUPER SIMPLE recipe! When I texted it to her, she replied, “It has ingredients I’ve never heard of”

So much for simple. Ha!

It reminded me again that I’ve been doing this for such a long time it all seems very normal.

But when you first start, it truly feels like learning a new language.

Take that as encouragement. All of the things that are a bit stressful right now will be second nature in a short time. You’ll be fluent in gluten-free-ese.

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