Before & After Cd Diet

[Guest LuvtoLaff06]

I was diagnosed last November with Celiac Disease due to symptoms of chronic diarrhea and weight loss. Confirmed through blood tests. I started on the diet. After one month I was sickly and depressed. My nails turned a grayish tint and became weak- easily splitting/breaking. My hair stopped growing completely. I was constantly starving!!! After almost 2 months, I gave up! I started eating normal again and now, 6 weeks later, my nails are white again and strong, my hair is growing, I'm slowly gaining back the weight, and have lots of energy and no longer depressed. The only symptom I still have is the chronic diarrhea, but I've lived with that for so long that it feels "normal" to me. I feel great!! So, it seems to me the diet doesn't always help! Just letting ya'll know my experience!

[Guest LisaB]

Sounds like a misdiagnosis to me, if you have celiac and go gluten free your absorbtion would improve, not decline. Makes no logical sense.

[aldociao]

So, it seems to me the diet doesn't always help!

LuvtoLaff,

It does sound not logical. Are you sure your gluten-free diet was a good one? If it was, you should not have gotten the symptoms you mentioned even if you are not gluten intolerant. A gluten-free diet, a good one, should bring health regardless of one's sickness. There are those on this Board who might be able to tell you if you did have a good diet. (I'm still in the process of finding out myself.) Why not post what you ate on a typical day, or days, so that it can be evaluated by others here who have thrived on the gluten-free diet for years?

You mentioned that your only symptoms prior to being diagnosed were chronic diarrhea and weight loss. My only symptoms (I'm self-diagnosed, awaiting results from Interolab) were weight loss and a difficult to define feeling of being neither well nor sick, a kind of fatigue that wasn't severe enough to cause serious problems but kept me for doing many of the things I wanted to do. Though there were signs, very minor signs, of feeling better for the first two months being gluten-free, only now, as I'm approaching the third month, has there been a very noticeable change for the better--more energy. The weight, 2lbs in the last week, is the first weight gain in so long a time that I can't remember the last time I wasn't losing, or remaining the same. I guess the intestine is healing, but it took almost 3 months for any really noticeable results.

I'm not suggesting that you should stay on the diet you were on--there has to be something wrong with it. But it certainly couldn't be because it's gluten-free. What I'm suggesting is that you give it another try after getting feedback on what might be wrong from those here who have the experience to help you in your food choices. If you do have celiac disease and you don't take the necessary steps now to deal with it, it can only get worse as time goes by, especially since, like me, you are mostly symptom free, without the helpful, though annoying, reactions that will tell you that you are doing what you shouldn't be doing. Not if you want health. --Aldo

[Laura]

Did your diet get worse in some other way? It can be hard to maintain a healthy diet when you have to eliminate so many things. Is there some nutrient that you got mostly through foods containing gluten or through something you ate with a food containing gluten that you didn't get on a gluten-free diet?

You don't say if you were diagnosed celiac with blood tests and/or biopsy, so if not maybe you were misdiagnosed. But I still don't see why, given a healthy gluten-free diet, you'd get the symptoms you describe. So you might want to go back and ask your doctor some questions, because neither of the sets of symptoms you describe sounds like anything I'd want to live with.

[Guest shar4]

Luvtolaf,

I'm sorry that the diet didn't work for you. I was diagnosed around the same time as you and went gluten-free, and have stayed that way. I had been taking iron supplements before diagnosis, and hadn't really noticed an improvement until I started getting B12 injections. I have to admit, I feel GREAT, and am starting to do things that I haven't done in a long time. I feel like I have years of downtime to make up for and I'm working on it every chance I get.

I hope things work out for you, and like some of the others, it sounds like there is something else going on.

Blessings.

Sharon

[Guest LisaB]

After one month I was sickly and depressed. My nails turned a grayish tint and became weak- easily splitting/breaking. My hair stopped growing completely.

Sorry to say, that is not enough time for those things to have occured in my opinion. I has taken years for that kind of decline even though I was very sick, once going gluten free and when I started to absorb nutrition, things started to turn around and quite quickly, but not that quickly.

It seems to me you would have to be only drinking water for something even close to that to be happening to you, you may have resented the diagnosis but I hope you aren't kidding yourself, your the only one that knows.