The Proctitis Pages
The Proctitis Diet
The
Proctitis Diet - The gluten free diet after fasting.
The proctitis diet is a
completely gluten free diet which means if you want to remain free from
symptoms, manage your condition and protect yourself from future flare up’s
then the diet must remain free from wheat in any form. Some other grains are
also included in this fist point because grains that are indirectly related to
wheat (close biological relatives of wheat grain) such as Rye, Barley and Oats
also contain gluten. However these
grains seem to contain lower levels of gluten but they can and will make you
sick or increase your symptoms if you carry on eating them in your daily diet.
This is especially true if you are highly sensitive or intolerant to gluten.
The proctitis diet is
a vegetarian diet & there is no point in pretending otherwise, so I make no
apology for this fact. It is a very healthy diet & it can contain a lot of
variety that means it doesn’t have to become boring or dull (it’s only
limited by your own imagination and creativity in the end). This means you don't
have worry or be depressed because the food in the proctitis diet or gluten free
diet is delicious, I enjoy the food I make each day and I am completely
confident that you will also find this in your life too. Gluten free food can
& is wonderful and very enjoyable, it also has the benefit of keeping you in
good health.
For sheer practical reasons you will probably find that cooking for yourself is going to be a way of life & a vital skill (if you don't know how to cook go & learn!!. I don't accept that men cannot cook for themselves. If cooking for yourself is going to heal you & give you good health once again isn't it worth the time & effort to learn. For me cooking is one the great pleasure's and a fundamental life skill I wouldn't be without.
For some people making the
change to being gluten free will be a long and hard road, whilst for others it
will present little difficulty. It depends upon where you start from, we all
start from different places. The degree of difficulty in making the change to a
gluten free diet will depend completely on your previous diet (the diet you’ve
probably been eating for many years), I suspect that for those people who like a
lot of meat or fast foods & lots of sweet things then its going to seem like
a big challenge or even very daunting to them. But for those people who have
been long standing vegetarians changing to a gluten free diet probably wont be
nearly so much of a problem and the adjustments involved not that difficult.
The proctitis diet requires
hot cooked foods (not hot as in chili's & peppers). So cooking regular hot
meals is an essential element of the diet.
Gluten Free Staple foods.
All
diets have staple or foundation foods on which the remaining diet is based (or
formed around). In the western cultures these are all based on or around wheat
or wheat products. So becoming gluten free (Intolerant to wheat or wheat
products) means that we must use and discover alternatives to the usual staple
foods that we had previously taken for granted.
Gluten Free
Staples are: (these are all energy giving foods).
The problem with no
gluten in cooking (i.e. binders).
One of the challenges of cooking without gluten is finding ways to bind foods in cooking. Gluten is a sticky substance that for example gives bread its close texture and allows us to literally cut slices. Now the problem with a cooking without gluten is we have to find alternative binding agents that can be used safely as a substitute. Fortunately there are a number of substances that can be used to prove the binding we need, one such substances is tapioca. Tapioca is a starch which comes from the cassava root.