sandsurfgirl

We eat at El Burrito Jr. in Seal Beach quite often and I realized I had never posted about them. It's home cooked food and pretty inexpensive. The best thing is nearly everything on the menu is naturally gluten free. It's a family run place and when I was diagnosed one of the girls there went over the entire menu and ingredients with me. We have never been glutened there in 3 years!

The chips are safe to eat.
All the meats and tacos are safe.
Beans and rice are safe.

The only gluten containing ingredients are the flour tortillas and the enchilada sauce has flour as a thickener.

I order the tacos, beans rice, nachos, tostadas.

Their salsa is safe and they also have a red sauce they put on the tostada that is safe too.

If you are in the area check it out. It's directly across from the beach.

Depending on who is working, they may not know what you mean when you say gluten free. Just order the things I put on here, or ask them about flour. That will make more sense. There is no soy sauce in anything.

When I was waitress, we would get hungry because the shifts are long with no breaks. The servers at every restaurant I worked at would grab a crouton, dip it in the vat of salad dressing and eat it as a snack.

I had forgotten about this until recently. So last night I ate at Lucille's from their gluten free menu. I discreetly asked the waitress if they did that with the salad dressing and promised I wouldn't tell on her if she was truthful. And she admitted that yes, they do dip croutons in the dressing.

So I will be ordering oil and vinegar when eating out, even if they have gluten free dressing options.

You also have to be careful of spreads like Mayo, etc. because they slather it on the bread and dip the knife back in. Thankfully In N Out has little packets of their spread on the side.

I have what I call "fat celiac" the one where doctors refuse to think you have celiac because your metabolism slowed down and you gained weight for no reason instead of you getting very thin. I was always thin and was able to lose weight easily if I gained a few pounds, always athletic, dance teacher, worked out a lot, surfing, mountain biking, etc. Then one day I just couldn't lose weight no matter how hard I worked out. Everyone was baffled and then doctors just accused me of not really working as hard as I said I was or eating junk food all the time which I didn't. AT one point I was seeing a personal trainer 3 times a week for an hour doing ALL plyometrics, taking a professional 1 1/2 hour dance class on Saturdays and then heading to the beach for 3 to 4 hour surfing sessions after my class and I was still 30 pounds overweight and could not lose it. Tried several diet plans and followed them religiously and... nothing, nada, big fat zero weight losses.

It's been 2 1/2 years since diagnosis for me. I still have quite a bit of weight to lose. I just can't wrap my head around dieting. After all the years of feeling sick and starving all the time no matter how much I ate. Then the deprivation that comes with the gluten free diet (yes I am a great gluten free baker and I can make the most kickass german chocolate cake you've ever tasted, but still... can't raid the dessert table at Soup Plantation.) I just cannot deprive myself of food.

I want to EAT! For my whole life eating made me feel sick. Eating gave me stomach pains. I tried several different types of elimination diets to figure out what was wrong with me, different weight loss diets to lose the stubborn weight that responded to nothing. Now I'm on a gluten free diet for life. Messing with my food for so long has messed with my head.

I need to diet badly but I don't want to!!! I hate being overweight. I loathe not being able to wear all the cute clothes I want to wear and I hate feeling like I'm carrying around all this extra baggage. But.... I don't want to diet.

I find myself doing what I call entitlement eating. "Well, I wasn't able to eat those cherry cupcakes at the party so I'll go home and make myself a gluten free cherry cake... and eat 3 pieces of it. And eat some more at breakfast."

I have a celiac child so I work very hard at not depriving us of fun good foods. But I eat too much of them because I want to eat. After starving for years I want to eat.

So how do you untangle your mental dieting mess.

I posted these on another thread but I think it's good to have a thread for this.
Here are my tips. Post yours and spread the wealth of knowlege.

I use a cute cooler bag from Rachel Ray that looks like a purse. Not sure what guys can use, but maybe a smallish cooler in a backpack?

I have a small thermos for soup or pasta, etc.
Small stainless steel containers. If you search for them on a certain site we can't link to there are a whole bunch of different ones.
Tiffins are great little stainless steel bento box type containers in one or two layers. I just ordered some of those. It's circles that stack and interlock.
Mr. Bento or Ms. Bento keeps food hot or cold for hours and hours.

Bed Bath and Beyond sells an individual cupcake carrier. It's shaped like a cupcake with a dome lid so the frosting doesn't get ruined. I use it for my son to take a cupcake to parties.

All those containers aren't cheap but they will last forever. You don't want to carry hot food in plastic. Dangerous with the leaching chemicals. We don't use plastic at all in our house for food storage.

There is a microwave gel pack you can put in the cooler to keep hot food hot. Coolers are not only for cold food.

Here is my VERY BEST TIP!!! I found this by googling.
The BEST thing I've used for hot food is to heat bricks wrapped in foil in the oven, put them on a towel in the cooler and then the food on top in stainless steel or foil if its' solid like pizza. Then put towels over all of it and seal up the cooler. Keeps it smoking hot for hours. I put pizza in that contraption out of the oven and took it to a party. 2 hours later it was steaming when I unwrapped it and tasted so great nice and hot. I'm going to try breaking up a brick into smaller pieces for small meals and see if it works. Must heat in the oven, not in microwave!!!!

I bought small ice blocks and use more of them if I need more ice. They pack well in and around food. If I just want to take a small snack like a string cheese I put it on the small ice block and wrap both of them together in foil and throw it in my purse (backpack for guys.)

I've taken food to so many parties and get togethers and nobody knows the difference.

I think that one day they are going to find a missing link for celiac testing. I think there is another antibody or a whole different substance in the body that they haven't discovered yet that will point to celiac.

There are too many of us on this board who were deathly ill and debilitated yet we were either only positive on one or two of the tests in the panel or we were barely over the limit positive. Or negative which is just shameful. If someone is that sick, it's not logical that their antibodies will be that low. Something is missing.

Or there is some sort of inverse relationship that they are missing.

Celiac testing is one of my biggest sources of anger about this disease. I HATE seeing all the hell people go through on here who are clearly sicker than sick and yet their tests come up negative and they don't know what to do. I hate and loathe even more when they have a big reversal of symptoms when they try gluten free but they doubt themselves or feel like the celiac stepchild for not being "real" bonafide celiacs.

I hate the gluten intolerance label with a purple passion. It lowers people's expectations of what the disease can do to you. It makes them feel like it's not as serious even though in their heart they know it is. And I think the majority of intolerant people are celiacs who have been failed by the crap garbage that passes for testing. If you say you are intolerant there is not a waiter or restaurant manager in the world who is going to take you serious and good luck getting most docs to take that seriously too.

The most discouraging thing I have seen in a long time was that article about how bad endoscopies are. Dr. Green or whatever his name is (Is it Green? I forget)insists it's the "gold standard." He's not far from me and he refused to take me as a patient because I refused endo. I got a positive blood test and I wasn't consenting to invasive procedures and eating gluten any longer. I was going to die if I kept eating gluten as far as I could tell.

The stats on endo were abysmal. Most doctors not performing them correctly, reading the results wrong. People's lives are at stake.