Over the weekend, my husband found a new gluten free snack for me. It was Cheetos Simply Natural. Yesterday, I took them to work for lunch. It didn’t even occur to me that these would have milk or cheese in them (I’m just not used to thinking about it yet – so focused on gluten and sugar!) so I ate a full serving of them.
About two hours later, here comes the brain fog – which I haven’t had any episodes of since I cut out the dairy. But at the time, I figured my old symptoms were just getting kicked back up and I was just having one of those days. After all, last time, the dairy/cheese caused nausea and an upset stomach. I also had a massage on my lunch break and that can release toxins, etc, so I figured it may have been from that.
In all my infinite wisdom (ha!), we decided to try Mexican last night since the Cheetos didn’t cause any stomach issues. I ordered my usual (actually the only thing I can usually safely eat at a Mexican restaurant as far as gluten is concerned) and by the time we were leaving, my stomach was rumbling and felt like it was doing somersaults. And the brain fog that had eased up came back hard core.
Now, I definitely know something is going on with the cheese (still haven’t tested out other dairy products except butter for cooking). Supposedly with the cross reactions with gluten, your body picks up on that and reacts as if you’ve had gluten so you get all of the same symptoms.
Once again I’m left to wonder if this has been the cause of my symptoms for months now and it’s just now gotten bad enough to also cause the digestion type issues as well. I wish I had a food diary now as I’m curious if the days I had nausea when I was back on the Doxy, if I also had cheese that day. Not to mention the days I had brain fog!
Maybe this explains why the brain fog would appear so randomly and 99% of the time, it would be after lunch! That would be so nice if that was the case as that means it’s something I actually have control over! Not that I want to have to eliminate yet another thing from my diet but if it makes me feel better, then I will.
The good thing, if you can even say it that way, about cross reactions is if you come off of them for several months (3-6 is what I’ve read), you may be able to introduce them back without issue. The theory is that it gives the gut time to heal and once that has happened, it will no longer recognize non-gluten substances as gluten.
In the meantime, I’ll be doing more label reading and even more eating at home. The thought of going somewhere to eat and telling them I can’t have gluten, dairy or sugar is just too much! They’d probably just bring me a piece of cardboard! haha
So I’ll give it a few days to let this work its way back out of my system and then start tracking symptoms. I’m also going to start keeping a food diary again so I can keep track with any correlation between the food I eat and how I feel.
This is so ridiculous!! If this keeps up, I’m beginning to wonder what’s going to be left for me to eat!