My Journey Part 1

When I was in the third grade I would go to the nurse everyday because I had an achey stomach. She always sent me back to class telling me I was fine.  I didn't think I was making it up, but I was so young and impressionable that I just let it go. For years, I would get sick  and the doctor would say, you're fine, there is nothing wrong. I would get sick after dinner before a date and I would tell myself it was pre-date nerves. I missed over 60 days of school my senior year of high school. I started getting sick in really inconvenient places.  Every time I  went out with friends to a concert or to the beach or a movie I would get sick. Not to mention  I started gaining weight like crazy.  I went from being really skinny in high school to extremely overweight and hating myself. I started to hate looking in the mirror and I hated going out of the house because I hated how I looked.  I knew people talked behind my back and I knew I was fat, but I was so sick I didn't have the energy to do anything. I tried working out but it took way too much out of me. I just gave up.
My family saw how badly this was affecting me and they couldn't stand to see me so helpless and depressed so they decided to take action and fix this. My mom scheduled doctor appointments with different specialty doctors and my quest to find out what was wrong with me began. When I went to the GI doctor they told me that they'd do an endoscopy but they probably wouldn't find anything and I would just have to naturally cleanse my body. I went in for the procedure and when I woke up the doctor said they may have the root of the problem. They found a marking on my small intestine and said that it was likely that I had Celiac Disease. I had never even heard of it. I was like, "Okay, so what does that even mean?" He told me that my body doesn't process gluten, an enzyme in wheat, and I would have to stick to a strict diet. This was not okay. All I ate was pasta and bread. How was I supposed to quit eating my favorite things? When I started researching, I stared at the stuff I couldn't eat and broke down and cried. No way could I do this. Naturally as an immature college student, I didn't listen and continued to eat gluten, and fast food and made myself sicker. I started getting heavier until I wasn't far off from 200 pounds and I hated myself even more. I felt so defeated and so sick to the point I could barely function or move and I knew that this is when I had to make the change. I prayed to God to give me the strength to start my new life of gluten free living and to help me courage to become healthy and lose the weight. This was the start of my amazing journey.