My biggest mini-coeliac started school last week. A whopping 2.5 hours a day for eight days to start off with. Rather easy to work around… not. (Ooohhh that is so 90s of me, reminding me of when I was at school myself.)

Four-year-old Megan has literally changed overnight. On her first day, an older pupil showed her how to hang upside down on a climbing frame…  a little difficult to watch when you have worked on neurosurgery. The next day, she told me she would rather go on a play date alone – rather than with me. Next stop… buying her own flat?

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I have had a bit of a roller-coaster ride with lactose.

I always used to feel sick – it was just the norm. I had to push myself through nausea to get anything done. Somehow, though, you get used to it.

After being diagnosed with coeliac disease in 2012, I realised I was reacting to lactose as well as gluten. I felt really sick in the mornings, from milk on my cereal, and then noticed it eating yoghurts and chocolate.

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Unless you’ve had your head stuck inside a gas oven for the past week, you’ll know The Great British Bake Off is back.

Despite being on Series 7, I only sat down to my first episode last year. As I’m coeliac, I thought the cakey subject matter would frustrate me. Like a horny nun sitting through Magic Mike Live. Continue reading →

Before I got diagnosed with coeliac disease and lactose intolerance, I used to go to festivals with minimal food. A few sausage rolls and a bag of crisps was enough to get me by. Now, I usually have bags and bags that are full to the brim and will feed me, my husband and our two mini coeliacs for the whole time.

It is not such a problem when we are camping or when we take our young girls along, as it means there are lots of places to stash gluten and lactose-free essentials. The pushchair and the changing bag come in doubly useful.

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The older you get, the more bothered you are about what’s going on inside your body instead of on the outside.

Crying over fringes, spots and big noses is replaced by freak-outs over lumps, aches and barking coughs.

And so the latest worry in my life is not wrinkles… it’s bones. And whether they are of the normal variety found in a 30-something or those of an elderly lady and newly hatched sparrow. After a bone density scan at hospital, I should have the answer.

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Following on from her last blog, Teresa Buckle, who has two children with severe allergies, explains why her dream break was so nearly the holiday from hell…

So, we were after a family holiday – somewhere hot where we could have a great adventure. And we found Gambia, which looked brilliant in the brochures. It was in our budget and had beautiful beaches. Perfect, we thought.

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Choosing the right destination and accommodation for a family holiday is always a big task. But when you are catering for two children with food allergies, it is a mammoth one. You need to be certain you can actually feed them.

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The last couple of blogs have been about meal disasters and accidents involving nut allergies and getting glutened in unfortunate places.

So in the latest of this series, I thought I’d share with you my lactose mishaps and how my body reacted.

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Summer holidays. Sun, sea, sex (or sleeping, if you have small children). And for coeliacs, the dark cloud of gluten following you around.

So no surprise that I was glutened very recently – on a family trip to Fuerteventura.

My Spanish is poor. What I do know I gleaned from working two summer seasons in Ibiza in my youth – so I could certainly have got the grandparents into a nightclub for free. But explaining I couldn’t eat barley and wheat due to a chronic disease, then go into the finer points of cross-contamination? No way, Jose. Continue reading →

Here, Jemma recalls the last time she had an allergy flare-up, the unusual thing that helped her through it and why she landed a free meal…

Touch wood, I have not yet had a critical, red alert, EpiPen episode. But sometimes a nut ingredient will sneak its way into something I eat and cause me to have a nasty allergy flare-up.

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Gone are the days where cooking dinner was the last thing on my mind when I arrived home. Or when I woke thinking of what easy, greasy food I could order to cure my hangover.

I must confess that there were rather a few occasions where I was too tired to even think about anything other than ringing a takeaway. And many a night where a greasy pizza or kebab was ordered, possibly with chips, chicken nuggets or garlic bread. Continue reading →