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I always say living with Celiac Disease never gets easy but it definitely does get easier. With the right tools in your toolkit, mastering celiac disease can be possible. Here are some tools to master celiac disease that I think are essential to have in your celiac disease mastery toolkit.
Learning to live an entirely new lifestyle is overwhelming and involves a lot of change. Having an open mind when switching over to a gluten-free lifestyle is incredibly helpful. It helps you be more receptive of new things, solutions to challenges, and more.
Boy does having patience help with managing this disease. Patience not only for yourself but for your loved ones around you who are learning and adapting to help you too.
First, have patience for your healing journey. Healing your small intestine after a Celiac Disease diagnosis will take time. How much time does it take to heal? That’s different for everyone. No one’s healing journey will look the same. It can be so easy to be frustrated with our state of health and working on being patient and respecting your body’s changes as it heals can do wonders for mastering this disease.
Second, be patient with yourself as you learn to live gluten-free. You’ve been living a life of eating gluten for years, decades even. Learning to live gluten-free is not going to be easily mastered overnight. I’ve been gluten-free for around 7 years now and I still learn something new almost every day. This lifestyle never ceases to throw me curve balls, no matter how prepared I am. Having patience and understanding that you are on a journey of continuous learning is helpful in maintaining your mental health, if anything.
I probably sound like a broken record when it comes to support and celiac disease but support is so vital to mastering Celiac Disease. Support can make the difference between a 100% adherence to a GF diet and none at all.
I wrote an entire post about the importance of support with celiac disease and ways to find it, but basically, a gluten-free lifestyle can be extremely isolating and restrictive. In fact, studies show that sticking to a gluten-free diet (or living gluten-free) can feel more burdensome than lifestyle treatments for other common conditions. Support can improve adherence rates of a gluten-free diet, overall feelings of burden, feelings of isolation, stress, etc. Support essentially can improve your overall quality of life.
Switching to a GF lifestyle is HARD and you need to commit to it 100% if you have celiac disease. This myth that you can eat GF 80% of the time if you have celiac is just that, a myth. Any consumption of gluten will damage your gut. Stick with it and do your best to avoid gluten because your health depends on it.
Like any other invisible illness, celiac disease can drain your cup FAST! Have self-care practices and routines in place to keep your glass full is incredibly helpful to mastering Celiac Disease.
Everyone’s self-care related to celiac will look different but I’ve developed a few resources to help you with filling your cup routinely:
Last but not least on my list of tools to have in your toolkit to master celiac disease is a Gluten Exposure Recovery Kit (this is a link to my amazon store-front exposure list). Everyone’s exposure kit will be different depending on their needs and how they respond to gluten exposure, but developing a kit that you can easily access when gluten attacks to help alleviate symptoms is so helpful. Check out this blog post if you want to learn more about building a Gluten Exposure Recovery Kits check out this post.
In conclusion, having the right mindset and routines in place to help you handle the curveballs a gluten-free lifestyle might throw your way can be so helpful for mastering celiac disease. Hopefully, these tools to master celiac disease were helpful.
Comment down below tools that you keep in your celiac disease mastery tool-kit to help you keep a handle on your gluten-free lifestyle!