Your Gluten-Free Life Will Stop Feeling Like Work

If you're newly gluten-free and everything feels like work right now, I want you to know something: 

It won't always feel this hard. 

Reading every label. 

Asking a million questions at restaurants. 

Bringing your own food. 

Traveling. 

Worrying about cross-contact. 

Explaining celiac disease over and over again. 

In the beginning, it can feel like gluten-free living takes up an enormous amount of mental space. 

But after doing this for years, most of those things that once felt difficult are just...normal now. 

So today I want to talk about the things that felt really hard at first, what made them easier, and why I don't want you judging your future gluten-free life by how overwhelming it feels today. 

 This episode is brought to you by Find Me Gluten Free—your go-to app for discovering safe, gluten-free dining options wherever you go!
Get your exclusive discount for our listeners at theglutenfreeengineer.com/findmeglutenfree
Because dinning out gluten-free shouldn’t be a guessing game! 

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Personal Disclaimer And Encouragement

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. If you're newly gluten-free and everything feels like work right now, I want you to know that it won't always feel this hard. Reading every label, asking a million questions at restaurants, bringing your own food, traveling, worrying about cross contact, explaining celiac disease over and over again. In the beginning, it can feel like gluten-free living takes up an enormous amount of mental space. And it really kind of does. But after doing this for years, most of these things that once felt difficult are just normal now. So today I'm going to talk about the things that felt really hard at first, what made them easier, and why I don't want you judging your gluten-free life by how overwhelming it feels today, because it will get better. Let's dive in.

Why It Feels So Hard

Carrie Saunders 0:54

Welcome to the Gluten Free Engineer Podcast. I'm your host, Kiri 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

Reading Labels Without Burning Out

Carrie Saunders 1:32

the show. Today we're talking about things that felt hard at first for me, but are really easy now. So if you're currently staying in the grocery aisle reading the same package for the third time because you're still not sure, I have been there, I have done that. It is so frustrating. But I want to reassure you, it does get easier. So when you're new to gluten-free, you find that you need to be looking at every single package, every single ingredient. You don't know which ingredients mattered, you might not know which brands are trustworthy, you might not know which products are naturally gluten-free. You might not know what might be hiding gluten in it. But once you get more practice at this, you're gonna know your brands, you're gonna know what you're looking for, and you're not gonna feel like you're starting from zero every single grocery trip. Experience reduces the number of decisions you have to make. So I want you to be patient with yourself if you're new or newish to being gluten-free. You're gonna have to still read labels and you're going to have to, you know, be extra careful. But as you get more practice at this, you'll just need to be reading labels occasionally when something changes or when you're buying something new. It's no longer as exhausting. Every time you shop, you will find those brands that are staples for you that you know are safe, all the products are safe because the whole line that they create is gluten-free and dedicated gluten-free, and it will just get easier.

Cooking Systems That Save Your Brain

Carrie Saunders 3:00

Also, if you feel like cooking is so laborious and there's so many decisions to make, I want you to know that it's going to get easier. In the beginning, you'll be like, What flour do I use? What noodles will work and taste good and not have some weird texture to it? How do I replace this? What's which sauce is safe for me to use? You're going to eventually get to the point where, like me, you barely have to think about it. You have go-to recipes, you have trusted ingredients, you have substitutions you know work, you have meals all your family likes. So at some point, I stopped cooking gluten-free food. I was just cooking dinner. I want you to realize that that you will get there. If you're still in that frustration point, you will get there. And that's what this podcast is all about is helping us be more informed and getting there and making gluten-free easy.

Eating Out Without The Anxiety Spiral

Carrie Saunders 3:54

And then in the beginning, you know, restaurants felt so scary, you know, it was so anxiety driven. And I'm not really an anxious person, but it really did cause some anxiety. I didn't want to get that migraine, I didn't want to get sick. So, as you get more experienced with this, you are going to start being able to find the restaurants that you can trust. You can walk in, they're going to recognize you and they will know that you need to be extremely gluten-free and extremely, you know, cautious. If you get a new server, you can explain it to them. And I'm sure that they will talk to other staff, you know, double check with them. If you get a new server, of course, you're going to want to be a bit more careful and a bit more cautious. But as you get more familiar with restaurants that are staples for you, they will get very familiar with you as well. And things will become a lot easier. You won't have to ask as much questions. Obviously, if you have a new staff you see, definitely always ask questions just in case. If you want, there's even times that I will be actually the other day we ordered um Chinese from one of our restaurants here. And even though we've eaten these two same dishes, we got two different dishes out for years now, and they've been gluten-free and soy free. I just decided to do a gut check the other day and say, hey, are these still gluten-free and soy-free? So even if it's an established restaurant, feel free to just double check they haven't changed something.

Find Me Gluten Free App Tip

Carrie Saunders 5:19

And then when I'm in a you know new location or I want to explore some other restaurants, one of the tools I use all the time when I'm traveling is a Find Me Gluten-free app. I use it to see whether other gluten-free diners have experienced, you know, what they've experienced, whether they're celiac. And I use this to find places I probably would never have discovered otherwise. So if you'd love to try it, they have a great coupon for you. Just go head on over to the glutenfreeengineer.com forward slash find me gluten free, all one word, and you can get a coupon on your premium subscription. They also have a free version of the app, but honestly, um, we use a free version for a very long time, and I actually like the pain version, and it's very, very reasonable too.

Travel Packing Lists That Work

Carrie Saunders 6:03

Also, traveling used to feel like a huge project. Now we have a list of what we bring at what location or what type of vacation we're going on. You know, if it's a road trip, we have certain lists of things we will buy and bring with us. If we're flying, we have a different set of lists. Of course, there might be a little crossover there, but we have different lists of what we'll buy and bring with us. That makes it so much easier to already have a pre-plan in place so you're not rethinking it over and over again. So we just have like a document that we keep this information in. So we just bring it up every time we go to travel. It helps us not forget things. We actually started this well before being needing to be gluten-free or knowing that we need to be gluten-free when our kids were little. We were tired of going on vacation and forgetting a specific item, a specific toy, a specific staple that you need. So we made a packing list when our kids were little, when we would go to the beach. Well, we extrapolated that once we realized that I was celiac, and then started finding out the rest of the family was celiac too. Then we started, you know, making a list of what food products do we want to take, what meals do we want to take, etc. So making that list can help you feel more prepared and less stressed each consecutive trip you take. It's just going to get easier and easier. And then jumping back to traveling and to the Find Me Gluten-free app, one thing that I love about it is it helps us find these really, really eclectic, wonderful restaurants. It makes eating out when you're on vacation so much more fun because you find these little um restaurants that are either dedicated gluten-free or have a celiac safe portion of their kitchen. And you can find, you know, these wonderful places you never would have found before if you were just looking at normal conventional restaurants. For example, one year, this is before we figured out the whole rest of the family had celiac, but we knew I had, uh my husband and I went and visited Maui. And we found this little local sushi restaurant. This is actually pre-Find Me Gluten-free. We used Yelp to find it, and somehow we figured out it had gluten-free safe options to it. And we loved it so much, we went back a second time. Well, both times we were there, we were the only tourists there. There was all local people from Maui that went there. And the second time we went there, they even asked us, How did you even find us? You know, we told them yet we found them on Yelp. Because they were clearly like basically this. I like to call it this little hole in the wall. You wouldn't have, you would have driven by it and been like, I don't even know if that's a restaurant. But it was the best, most delicious, most fresh sushi we've ever had. And now we have this modern day app called Find Me Gluten Free. So it just makes it even easier to find really cool places like that when you're traveling, and it helps you have those great adventures.

Bringing Your Own Food With Confidence

Carrie Saunders 8:49

And then when we're talking about social gatherings, bringing my own food stopped feeling weird. In the beginning, it felt so awkward. You wonder whether you think people are think you're being rude, you'll wonder if you'll offend the hosts, you'll wonder if you're making too big of a deal out of this. These are all things that ran through my head, especially early on. And what changed for me is when my the oldest child got diagnosed with C Lac disease. That changed so many things. My mom protection mode kicked in, my mama bear kicked in, and suddenly protecting him mattered a lot more than what anyone else thought. This was my emotional turning point, and just being like, this is you know who I am and what I need. I need to be, you know, gluten-free and seriously gluten-free. And so does my oldest child. And it's just what it is, and other people can think what they want, and I just really don't care. That's just kind of where I started to go with it. And it was such a relief to have that. I don't know what you would call it, but you know, just have that confidence of, you know, this is just the way we are, and other people are going to have to accept it or not. I can't control them. So more you do this, the more it's going to be easier. People will also get used to the fact that you need to be gluten-free. They will stop questioning it. They will stop asking what happens when you get gluten. Like that's just, you know, I understand. I get it. People want to know the answer, but you know, sometimes they don't want to, they don't want to hear what I have to say about what happens. I usually I focus on the less disgusting parts. And I talk about, you know, the migraines and the other things that people don't think about. I'll say, well, besides digestive issues, I get migraines. I feel like I have the flu, you know, and I focus on things that might help educate them a little bit more than, you know, oh, it just gives me some diarrhea. You know, that's really not what it is. It it can cause so much to your body, as we all know, so much nutritional damage. So you're it's just going to get a lot easier as you've explained this, you know, to different people that you run into. It just gets a lot easier. And I feel like anymore, it's so much easier now than it was, say, 10 years ago, to say you need to be gluten-free because it's now, you know, a lot more recognized, a lot more people are educated about celiac disease and gluten intolerance. And then if you're in that awkward stage still, which is completely, like I said, normal. It's it's just a stage that we tend to all go through.

The Power Of No Thanks

Carrie Saunders 11:18

Something that can be really simple, and it's you might not think of it, is you can just simply say no thanks. If you're unsure about a food, you don't want to get into how they cooked it, where they cooked it, what ingredients it is in it, etc. You can just simply say no thanks or no thanks. I'm not hungry at night now. No apology, no big explanation, no debate, no, but she made it especially for me. You can just simply say no thanks if you're not sure if it's safe and you don't want to take that risk and you don't want to ask a bunch of questions. It's one of the easiest ways I made gluten-free living simpler is realizing that I don't have to make every food situation work. Now, you know, I've been gluten-free for about 15 years now. Not everything is still super easy. There still are awkward moments. So I don't want to just, you know, try to pull the wool over your eye and say it'll never, you know, you'll get to a point where it's never hard because there are sometimes still some awkward moments for me, even to this day. You know, large events can still be awkward, especially when you don't know the host, you don't know how the food was prepared, you're not sure who's safe to ask, you know, whether your food's safe. Um, everyone is just eating without thinking about it. That can, you know, make things a little bit awkward. But the difference is now I know how to manage it. Maybe I eat before I go, maybe I bring my own food, maybe I just simply say no thanks. So the situation isn't necessarily easier, but I'm a bit more confident in handling it, which in the end gives yourself a little bit of relief. I do still miss the convenience sometimes because even after all these years, sometimes it would be just, you know, wonderful to just stop by a restaurant and just eat and not have to research, no questions, no planning, um, you know, just walking somewhere and ordering. I do miss that. But gluten-free living has also pushed our family into experiences I might not have had otherwise with food and finding those local restaurants, finding those, you know, wonderful places to eat. We, you know, we recently went to Williamsburg and found some of the most delicious food I've ever eaten in my entire life that was completely safe and completely gluten-free. So try to focus on the positive things, even when it

Finding The Upside And Reducing Stress

Carrie Saunders 13:32

gets a little bit tough, that's going to make it feel easier for you and make your body a bit less stressed. When and as we all know, when we have C Lac disease, stress can really cause some of those symptoms to be even amplified even more. So, how can we make this easier? How can we make this more fun? Is really the theme of this podcast episode. And knowing that it will get easier over time. It won't necessarily be perfect ever, but it will definitely get easier over time. Just practice, repetition, have some systems, and that's going to build your confidence and your experience, and things will feel much better.

Share Subscribe And Closing Notes

Carrie Saunders 14:11

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.