GF: Back to back gut episodes

I’ve been extremely bloated for over a week; my gut episodes last between 24-36 hours, then start up again. My husband, who won’t do an elimination diet and loves packaged and junk food, has also had a few episodes this week.

The only new processed food we’ve recently added was Quaker Rice Cakes. I ate some as recently as this morning, but now I’m going to skip them a few days to see if that helps. I found a thread about Quaker Rice Cakes at Gluten Free Forum, and it seems many people there can’t tolerate Quaker Rice Cakes either.

 

WordPress posting from Firefox sidebar

Trying out a new (to me) FF extension.

 

Update on losing too much weight (duh)

I brought the scale in here so I could look it up online, but Health o meter no longer has our model on their site. I weighed myself a few more times in here, on hardwood floors, and got the same weight each time. Umm, we got all the weird readings when it was on the bathroom floor, with tiles, oops.

Now that it’s in here on the hardwood floor, it’s given the same reading many times in a row, about where I should be. But I did lose another pound, yay! And more yay that I’m not losing it too quickly like I thought.

 

Google calculator + recipes = long food

I was using Google to combine the dry ingredients in a recipe so I could divide it in half, to save some for later. I got the total amount in milliliters, but when I tried dividing that in half, I somehow ended up with millimeters and centimeters.

I should be able to fit the saved batch fit into the freezer, since it’s a bit under 6 inches.

 

Weight loss?

Since cutting back on sugar and high-glycemic foods (mostly), then wheat, I felt like I was losing weight. I asked my husband to buy a scale since we haven’t had one since the flood in 2001. He brought home a digital scale that required reading a book to figure out how to work it. At that time, I had lost six pounds, which was acceptable because it was still winter so I didn’t do my outside activities.

Now it’s a few months later, and it’s plenty warm to be outside doing gardening, foraging, and biking, but of course I’m going to start off slow (I do have my bum knee to consider). I’ve continued dropping a pound here and there, except I noticed I put on 2-4 pounds when I have gut episodes, but that’s probably due to inflammation, which retains fluids, and it goes away).

My husband’s noticed I’ve been losing, and he mentioned that he’s lost some weight recently too.

So now I’m noticing I’m losing even more weight, enough that I’m concerned about how quickly I’m losing it. Am I losing it because of malnutrition due to the self-diagnosed celiac? I try not to dwell on it, and fail by weighing myself yet again, only a few hours since my last weigh-in.

OMGosh! I’ve lost two more pounds in just a few short hours!

Reality slaps me upside the head like Jethro in NCIS; it’s probably the digital scale. I’ll get hubby to reweigh himself when he returns from work, and see if he’s lost even more weight since his last weigh-in.

 

Another gut episode, and sick afterwards

Since I self-diagnosed myself as having a problem with gluten after doing an elimination diet, I’ve had only a few gut episodes. Most were from my thinking I could eat just a little wheat, until I read that once a gluten-sensitive person stopped wheat they most likely would suffer from hyper-sensitivity if they ate it again. Once I figured that out, I bought non-gluten flour, baking mix, and pasta from the health food store, and the episodes dropped almost completely.

But I did suffer from an episode about a month ago after eating frozen peas with butter. I checked the package, and it only had peas listed. I also looked up the manufacturer’s website, and it stated their vegetables were gluten-free. I figured that I might have made a condiment mistake the day before (there’s hidden gluten in lots of condiments).

I made split pea soup the other day, and had another gut episode all day yesterday. I finally fell asleep after it settled a little, but I woke up feeling like I was fighting off an infection in my throat. I had brain fog, and achy neck and shoulder muscles, but was only slightly warm. I made meatloaf I had put up a few months back, got my husband to peel potatoes, and steamed some frozen broccoli, carrots, and cauliflower mix, then took ibuprofen 800mg, and Tylenol. I feel better, but still puny.

But two times with the peas? That’s not a coincident any more. I did a little search for cross allergies between peas and gluten, but didn’t find anything. I won’t be making peas again though.

 

Gluten free store south of Houston

I did an elimination diet after suffering from severe gut pain, and the OB and GI doctors ruled out many things after doing bloodwork, ultrasound, and a CT. I found out that eating wheat products is what’s triggering the gut pain, so it seems I probably have Celiac disease. The CT was done after I went to the ER because I thought I might have had blocked intestines (I’ve had a few patients with that in the past, and it seemed I had all the symptoms except for stuff coming up green, but the massive amounts of disgusting belches had me thinking it might happen soon).

Once I realized that wheat equals pain, it was easy to avoid wheat products the first few weeks. But after a while, I started craving baked foods like bread and muffins, and also pasta. So I had to find a store that sold gluten-free food.

I tried my local Kroger on South Belt, but I wasn’t able to find anything. I found soybean flour at Walmart. But I needed more, so I found Houston Celiac Support Group linking to WHERE TO GET GLUTEN-FREE FOOD In Houston. That’s where I found Erma’s Nutrition Center & Natural Foods Market. The store is on Upper Bay Blvd., between Nasa and St. John’s hospital.

There were two very pleasant and helpful ladies working there when we went, so I was shown the gluten-free area right way — it’s in the center of the right wall. They had many snacks and pastas, bread and baking mixes, and many individual non-gluten flours. Since I had searched online stores before going, the sticker-shock wasn’t too bad. But after figuring in shipping prices, being able to have them immediately, and spend my money locally, the prices weren’t too awful. But enough so that we’ll be eating more rice and potatoes than pasta!

I’ve only used Pamela’s Baking Mix, and Tinkyada’s Spaghetti so far, but have been very pleased with how they turned out; even my husband liked the waffles and muffins from the mix, and spaghetti with marinara sauce.

I bought some individual flours so I can make my own GF flour, but either Erma’s didn’t have brown rice flour, or I didn’t look hard enough. I found a few starches at My Quaang on Scarsdale, but didn’t see brown rice flour. Maybe Hong Kong Market will have it — we didn’t go there the same day, even though it’s on Scarsdale also, because I was still pretty high from the pain meds the ER gave me.

If we map out enough gluten-free stores, it won’t be so hard to find for others.

 

Testing Windows Live Writer

I tested Windows Live Writer with Blogger, but there’s a few things I don’t like about it:

• When I published to Blogger, the post was a draft instead of a published post. So unless I’m able to figure out a work-around, it’s very annoying to have to load Blogger in the browser to publish it, then enter in that annoying captcha thing.
• The test image — hosted on Picassa — won’t load in Firefox; it wants to load in a graphics editor/viewer.

So I’m trying Live Writer here to see how posting works with Live Writer, and posting photos.

This is from last year when I was trying out a cheap camera. The water didn’t get into my house, but it did get into the house across the street. The only time I’ve had water come into my current house was during Tropical Storm Allison in 2001.

Time to test publishing with Live Writer.

UPDATE: Live Writer works great with WordPress, and the linked photo loads properly in Firefox.

The only thing I don’t care for in Live Writer so far is the spell check doesn’t allow us to ignore single words. We either have to add the offending word, or ignore all (UPDATE 2: I’ve been informed that I misinterpreted this; it continues to spell check after ‘ignoring’ the highlighted word).

 

SciGuy: Houston’s Hurricane Hero

Houston Chronicle’s SciGuy’s blog, by Eric Berger, is who I trust the most when it comes to reporting (and educating us) about hurricanes in the Gulf. In almost every hurricane related post, he teaches us something else about how hurricanes are formed, or how they’re tracked by advanced technology.

Here’s a recent article about Hurricane Umberto, which almost popped up out of the blue after forming in less than one day somewhat close to shore: “No tropical cyclone in the historical record has ever reached this intensity at a faster rate near landfall.”

SciGuy: The remarkable and rapid strengthening of Humberto. Why?

PS: It was nice that the TV media didn’t totally freak out over Humberto, and was still able to provide good coverage. NBC’s Frank Billingsley did a great job, even with his voice all froggy.

 

TV shows I watch

We don’t have cable or a Tivo setup, so we watch TV the old fashioned way most of the time. I don’t know if it’s because I’m picky, or if it’s that I’m not willing to pay to watch shows that I think aren’t very good. Whichever it is, I only watch a few shows regularly:

Monday: 24 and Heroes

Tuesday: NCIS and Boston Legal

Wednesday: Jericho, Criminal Minds, and when ABC decides to allow us to watch Lost again in mid-season (ABC seems to really stink at being able to set a schedule for their popular shows still, but I suspect part of it might be coming up with a story that’s halfway believable for Lost)

Thursday: Supernatural

Friday: Ghost Whisperer

Saturday: -

Sunday: Desperate Housewives

I’ve been known to miss episodes of Ghost Whisperer and Criminal Minds, but I almost always catch the other shows when they air. If two shows have the same time slot, I’ll watch the other show online (I watch 24 on TV, then Heroes online, mostly because I can’t get 24 to play on my pc — I guess I’ve got something blocking their weird media format.

As far as the new shows advertised, my husband seems interested in Journeyman, and I might try out Pushing Daisies and CBS’s Moonlight (I couldn’t find a webpage for it, but they have the samo trailer shown on tv on their 2007 CBS Fall Showcase — I’m not very hopeful for this show, but I’ll give it a try.

I don’t watch reality shows or talent competitions (except for the finals, if they don’t run against one of my favorites — if they do run against a fav, I won’t try to watch it later online).

If I had cable, I would have watched The Dresden Files and Farscape. But the Sci Fi channel canceled both of them — I read that Farscape fans had to hound Sci Fi very aggressively just to get them to close out the series for the fans! I HATE when networks suddenly cancel a show, and don’t close out a series properly!

NBC’s Surface had a very large following, with very little promotion on NBC’s part — after they lost all their Thursday hits, and before Heroes. But idiots that be canceled it. The link above is for SaveSurface.com, fans are trying to convince NBC to bring it back. Hopefully since they got rid of the “main idiot”, they’ll bring back their popular show.

According to a lot of articles I’ve read, traditional TV networks are slowly being phased out by the internet. I’d think they’d want to keep their viewers happy by not canceling very popular shows unexpectantly, and closing them out properly. Instead, they seem to be pushing their viewers away by canceling beloved shows, putting out new shows that aren’t very good, and forcing views to watch repeats whenever they’re not able to keep up with their schedules. I wonder if it’s not the traditional networks own fault that people are switching to the internet for their shows.