Gluten Sensitivity & Me

Hi, I'm Athena McCrary.  I created Glutenfreeology because I was extremely frustrated when I found out I couldn't eat gluten.  The cost of gluten free bread, flour, pasta, cookies, etc. is several times more expensive and in most cases a lot smaller than the same food made with wheat.  In my early days of being gluten free, many of the popular recipes online tasted more like bird food than anything I wanted to eat.  So that's why I created this website.  For people like me who don't have a choice about eating gluten free and want to enjoy their food without sacrificing taste.

When I first started getting sick  I went to an internal medicine specialist and said "Test me for EVERYTHING!"  She did an allergen test but I didn't and still to this day, do not test positive for Celiac Disease.  I continued to get sick (nausea, vomiting, fatigue ... ) off and on for 2 years until I tried an elimination diet and discovered gluten was what was making me sick.  

Today more research has been done on Celiac Disease and Gluten Sensitivity.   The Celiac Disease Foundation shared the results of a study run by the University of Alabama at Birmingham that discovered Black Americans are more likely to test negative for Celiac Disease using the current blood testing standards.  I felt such a huge sense of relief when I learned this because I now know that there's nothing that I could have done differently to get diagnosed sooner.  

I've been on this gluten free journey for over a decade and now more recently diagnosed with Long Covid.   Sometimes I feel like that 80s song "letting the days go by... let the water hold me down."  Then I have a stretch of days where I feel completely normal until my body decides to do another rinse and repeat.   I am still figuring things out but also very hopeful that sometime in the near future the medical community will have a breakthrough on autoimmune diseases and chronic illness. 

UPENDED 

To mark Long Covid Awareness, I decided to share my story.  I normally post food videos that only show my hands but for 2025 I want to do some things differently.  The WHO recognizes March as the "world's" Covid-19 anniversary but for me the virus began to affect how I moved in the world in February 2020.  This has been my experience.