The Gluten-Free Foods That Actually Hurt My Healing (Even Though They’re Safe)

One of the most confusing parts of going gluten-free is this: you remove gluten, you follow all the rules, and you’re still not feeling great. You’re eating foods that are technically gluten-free… so why are you still bloated, foggy, or uncomfortable? 

Today, I want to talk about the gluten-free foods that actually hurt my healing, even though they were considered safe. This episode isn’t about fear or restriction. It’s about understanding your body and giving yourself permission to listen to it. 

Stick around until the end, because I’ll share the biggest mindset shift that helped me stop chasing ‘perfect’ gluten-free eating.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Ground Rules
• 0:56 Host Story And Mission
• 1:34 Gluten-Free Isn’t Always Healing
• 2:48 Processed GF Foods And Gut Irritation
• 4:02 FODMAPs And Temporary Elimination
• 6:13 Problem Grains: Brown Rice, Oats, Corn
• 7:44 Nightshades And Hidden Triggers
• 8:40 High FODMAP Examples And Soy
• 10:10 Dairy Tweaks: Grass-Fed And Raw
• 11:20 Whole Foods Reset And Reintroductions
• 12:45 Newsletter Invite And Mindset Shift
• 14:05 Closing And Resources

Transcript

Carrie Saunders: 0:00

Quick reminder before we get started on this episode. This podcast is based on my personal experiences and isn't medical advice. One of the most confusing and discouraging parts of going gluten-free is that you might remove gluten and you follow all the rules and you're still not feeling great. This is very, very common for those who have just first gone gluten-free, or you may be one who have been gluten-free for a bit, but you still aren't feeling as great as you feel like you should, because you're eating foods that are technically gluten-free, but you might still feel bloated, foggy, or uncomfortable. Today I'm going to talk to you about what the gluten-free foods are that actually can hurt your healing and have hurt my healing, even though they're considered safe. And this episode isn't about fear or restriction. It's about understanding your body and giving yourself permission to listen to it. Stick with me until the end because I'll share the biggest mindset shift to help me stop chasing perfect gluten-free eating. Let's dive in. Welcome to the Gluten Free Engineer Podcast. I'm your host, Carrie Saunders. In 2011, I was diagnosed with celiac disease, a moment that changed everything. But I was determined not to let it hold me back. With my two engineering degrees, I set out to reverse engineer the gluten-free lifestyle, breaking down recipes, safety tips, travel hacks, and everything in between to rebuild a life I love. Whether you have celiac disease, gluten intolerance, or simply choose to live gluten-free, this podcast is for you. Join me each week as we simplify the gluten-free lifestyle, make it fun, and prove that you don't have to miss out on anything. Welcome back to the show. Today we're talking about how do we get to heal our gut, even if we're following all the rules and being gluten-free, but we still don't feel that great, or we've just started being gluten-free and we're not seeing the healing we want to see very fast. And gluten-free does not always mean healing-friendly. Um, the gluten-free labels only tell you part of the story because your gut might still be inflamed or sensitive, and you may be eating gluten-free foods that are irritating your gut still. Healing happens in stages and not overnight. I've talked about this a lot on the podcast. For me, I felt like I was feeling better about every month or so I would see this new stage of healing. And if I'd had the information I'm going to talk about in this podcast, I feel like I'm going, I would have healed faster because I didn't know all these things back then. It was like over 12 years ago or so, actually, more like 14 now. Um, and so I want to help you heal faster. And it's very common. This is not a personal failure, it's just a new way of life, a new way of changing our food. And we might need to be a little bit more attentive to our body and potentially more restrictive at first. And this is temporary, so that you can heal your gut and get back to normal. So, one of the things that is really an easy thing to do when you first go gluten-free, or you may have been gluten-free for a bit and you still do this now, is eating a lot of ultra-processed gluten-free replacement foods. We talk on this podcast about eating as close to whole foods as possible. And um, this is one of the reasons because gluten-free breads, baked goods, crackers, you know, all the processed foods, pastas, while those are technically gluten-free, if your gut is not healthy yet, not healed yet, it's going to potentially cause you issues because it uses heavy, it's heavy use of gums, starches, and fillers. And these can cause bloating, gas, and disguise discomfort. They are filled with soluble fibers that ferment in the gut. And if your gut is still damaged or inflamed, then that can cause gas bloating and cramping and cause you some discomfort. So, when people tell you when you go gluten-free, you should feel great in your you know gut area. Um, if you're still eating heavily processed gluten-free foods and you're having gut problems, you might want to cut back on that. We're going to go into a little bit more details as to why in this episode. Because many of these gluten-free products contain ingredients that are high in FODMAPs. You may have heard of the FODMAP diet. It's a temporary diet, so don't worry about that. It's not like we're going to restrict stuff forever, but it is something my doctor put me on. I would say it was probably 10 or 10-ish years into being gluten-free. I was saying I still had issues. So, even me, you know, being very strict gluten-free for over 10 years, I was still having stomach issues. And it was some of the FODMAP diet, or some of the FODMAP foods, I should say. So, this episode is more about let's learn and heal and learn about what makes us feel good. So, don't feel like I'm trying to restrict you here. I just want you to feel better because then you can add back in these foods. So, just keep that in mind when we talk about this. Um, because these foods rely on, like I said, gums, starches, and fermentable fiber to mimic that gluten. So, if your gut is still healing, those ingredients can be really hard to digest. So, first we want to heal you, and then we can start adding in some of these favorite foods you might have. These foods can ferment very quickly, that creates a gas, that can irritate your already sensitive gut lining. So, even though they're gluten-free, they may not support your healing early on, or even like me, where I had been gluten-free for a long time, removing some of these helped accelerate my healing even faster, even though it'd been like 10 years. So, even though these foods are convenient, they can be getting in the way of you feeling good. That's the short version of the story here. So, what are we going to be looking for? So, gums and thickeners can cause you issues. Xanthem gum, gargum, kerogenion, those can be really hard to digest and they can irritate your already inflamed gut. Um, some of the high fiber ones too can really irritate your gut. So, please, please listen to your gut. If you're having trouble, back off of the gluten-free processed foods, go to more whole foods and heal, and then you can add back in some of those favorite processed foods that you like because we don't want to be deprived, but we also want to feel great. So, one thing I found out that while you know there are a lot of gluten-free grains, there were some that did not work well for me at all. Um, the first one I found out was brown rice. Anything made with brown rice, especially when I first went gluten-free, really irritated my gut. So I couldn't get like brown rice pasta, I couldn't eat brown rice, that really irritated my gut. So if you're having digestive issues and you eat brown rice, I highly recommend you cut that one out. Another very common one to cut out would be oats. Even certified gluten-free oats can be very hard to digest on an inflamed gut. Um, think about it as having like road rash. Maybe you fell down. You know, you're not going to want to touch or rub that part of your skin for a while until it's healed. This is what we're talking about inside our intestines. And our intestines have been damaged. They have let's call it road rash for lack of a better word. They're irritated. You don't want to put things through it that are rough, like brown rice, like oats. Um, another one would be corn that's rough on our system. Those aren't, you know, soft type of grains or soft types of foods. Um, so those grains have, you know, these protective mechanisms on the outsides of them and in them that help them survive in the wild, and putting them in our digestive system is an irritant for it. So they're not necessarily bad foods, but you might want to hold them back while you're healing. Now, another thing I ran into was that nightshades can be a trigger. And for me personally, tomatoes were the worst. And it took, I've just recently figured this out, like a year or two ago. So it took like 13 years or so for me to figure out that tomatoes cause me digestive issues, they can cause me headaches, um, allergy symptoms, they made me tired. Um, so note that even if you've been healed for a while, there may be one food or two that may be given you fits. So look at the nightshade family and see if there's something you eat a lot of and consider pulling that out to see how you feel for like a week or two. Usually it's something we're eating pretty pretty regularly or that can cause issues and that you're gonna notice. And then another thing that can get you, and I'm alluded to this, talked a little bit about this earlier in the podcast, is high FODMAP foods. So FODMAP foods are fermentable foods. It's it's an acronym for a pretty big word. So I'm not gonna try to pronounce it, but you can look it up, and we've definitely linked to it in our show notes to a great PDF that my doctor gave me when I was still having gut issues. It was about four years ago. And one of those items in there that I know really bothers me now is soy. So soy is a in a FODMAP family. Basically, these can create your gut to be fermenting, cause gas, bloating, and irritation. And a lot of people are sensitive to certain versions of these foods. So we have a link in our show notes at the glutenfreeengineer.com for this PDF from Stanford. It's a great little summary PDF. Again, this is a temporary thing. You want to go off FODMAPs, follow the directions for um several weeks, and then you want to add in one at a time um maybe your favorite foods first. So for me, I found out that apples, I don't deal well with a high volume of law of um raw apples. Now I can deal with apple pie, thank goodness, ones that are cooked. Um, but raw apples give me fits. Now that my stomach is more healed, raw apples aren't a problem anymore. So this is all about getting us healed, not restricting our diet. I want to stress that so much because I know when we go gluten-free, we are like, oh my gosh, I can't eat anything. Well, I'm just, you know, let you know this is temporary. We figure out what bothers us and we put back in what doesn't. Um, and these can also include dairy products or in the fermentables. Um, and then let's speak on dairy real quick. So, one thing I found as a celiac and um just general healing is that certain dairy is much easier on my stomach than other dairy. So, if you're a person who thinks that you can tolerate dairy but not too much, I um encourage you to try to eat only grass-fed cow dairy and see how you feel. You might see a huge difference for me. I could tolerate dairy, but you know, sometimes it did give my stomach an issue. Well, that's when I was eating a conventional dairy and not um grass-fed dairy. Luckily, here locally, we have grass-fed um milk from Snowville. Um, we also get the carry gold butter, which is a grass-fed dairy, and then I like to eat uh raw cheese. Um, you can look in your local stores to see if you can find cheese that says raw cheese on it or from grass-fed cows, much easier on your stomach. So if you have trouble with dairy, that's something you can do. And again, dairy is in the FODMAP list of holding off on that um for a bit. There's a certain um types of dairy you can eat, and then other dairy they want you to hold back on while you're on that FODMAP diet. So if you're having lots of issues, I would go to the FODMAP diet and try it for a few weeks, like I said, and then add in what your favorite things are to make sure they aren't bothering you. And you're gonna really feel much better. You're gonna really heal your gut with that one. Um, and so what you want to do, let's just get down to it. What actually helped heal my gut? Temporarily focusing on whole simple foods, one ingredient foods can really help you heal. You may only need to do this for a few weeks to a month or two. So don't think like this is going to be like for your whole life. Um, you might want to rotate some foods instead of eating the same thing daily just to give your digestive system something different, um, maybe something a little easier or variety, you know, so that we're not um wearing weighing on it too heavily. And then we want to reintroduce food slowly and intentionally. And like I said, start with the ones that are your favorites so that you're enjoying your eating, so you're enjoying your life because we want to be happy. Our food is our fuel as well as sometimes our happiness too. So we want to be introducing food slowly and intentionally, and I like to start with my favorites first because we don't want to feel deprived, right? And then I want you to track symptoms without obsessing over them. Notice how your body feels when you try and you know, us uh re-add in a food. Pay attention to it, log this, you know, don't like obsess too much, but we want to be mindful of what we're putting in our body and how we feel. It's just the best way to heal and to move forward in our healing journey. So if you're not already on our newsletter, go ahead and jump on over to thegoonfreeengineer.com and click on that newsletter link at the top and sign up. We send practical tips in our newsletter. Um, right now we're sending them every other week. It's not a high-volume newsletter, so don't worry, we're not going to bombard you with a ton of emails. And we love to have you in our community over there. And then that biggest shift that helped me healing my gut was letting go of the idea that gluten-free had to look like everyone else's gluten-free. Once I stopped chasing what was allowed into my diet and started paying attention to what actually made me feel good, everything changed and I felt so much better, and I hope you do too. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Gluten Free Engineer. If you found value in this story, please share it with someone who might need encouragement on their own gluten-free journey. For more tips, recipes, resources, and even links to my YouTube channel, head on over to theglutenfreengineer.com. It's your one-stop hub to make gluten-free living simple, fun, and full of flavor. And don't forget to subscribe so you never miss out on an episode. And we will see you next week. The Gluten Free Engineer Podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. I share my personal experiences and stories about living with celiac disease and navigating a gluten free lifestyle. This podcast does not provide medical advice. Always consult with a qualified healthcare professional for medical questions, concerns, or advice specific to your health.