Happy Celiac Disease Awareness Month! For the Month of May and hopefully beyond, I am going to share a number of blog posts on my website with a behind-the-scenes look at our experiences with ALL THINGS CELIAC.
Those who know me personally know I am passionate about All Things Celiac. I get easily worked up about food labeling, drug labeling, restaurant cross contamination, awareness within the medical community, self-diagnosis, reluctance to be tested, screening and testing, ability for my son to socialize easily… are you getting the picture?
My posts here are mostly about delicious, easy to make food and how to live a healthy, gluten-free life with some planning and preparation. Sometimes I fear that it looks too easy. There is a ton of planning, preparation and sometimes angst that goes into daily existence living with celiac disease. As a mom of someone with celiac, I balance making things easy for my child to lessen the burden of living with an autoimmune disease with educating and encouraging him to take increasing responsibility for his gluten-free and health needs.
I don’t talk about these challenges often on the Healthy Gluten-Free Family platform for a variety of reasons. Mostly because when my son was diagnosed 8 years ago I made a promise to him and to myself that I would not let Celiac stand in the way of his pure enjoyment of food and dining. A few years after his diagnosis, the world of gluten-free food exploded and my son became the target of kids’ teasing (it was never officially bullying but it hurt a sensitive elementary school boy nonetheless). From then on, all my son wanted was for people to know that gluten-free food can taste great. And thus with limited hours in the day, and the need to constantly feed my growing teenage boys, my online focus has been on sharing great tasting, easy to make gluten-free food.
On the advocacy front, I co-run a local Parent Group for kids with celiac disease, and I advocate constantly on a local level and wherever our travels take us. I use every opportunity I get to educate about celiac disease whether its with doctors, restaurants, friends or schools. I receive and respond to TONS of messages from people asking about how we travel, dine out, manage the social life of a teen with celiac and the like. So in honor of Celiac Awareness Month, I plan to share our experiences in a series of blog posts and will hopefully continue to do so more frequently on an ongoing basis.
Click here to read more about How we learned our son had Celiac Disease.
Click here to read more about Why we are the Healthy-Gluten Free Family.
Click here for a Celiac Fact Sheet from the University of Chicago Medicine Celiac Disease Center
