Last night I was listening (and being inspired by) Pat Flynn’s latest Smart Passive Income podcast (#141) And so this morning, while I cooked skillet after skillet of homemade hash browns for my sweet family, I started thinking about what I’d learned about cooking and eating gluten free during 2014. Â It’s been a year of discovery and trying new things in the kitchen; a year of leaning how to heal and all of the new recipes and techniques that involves.
I’m so very thankful to be going into 2014 knowing that we are all completely satisfied with our gluten free diets and that the depression and fatigue that I’ve struggled with for the past 18 months are on the way out due to the dietary and lifestyle changes we’re making. Yay! It’s awesome to have hope that you will consistently feel better and be able to enjoy life. Even you haven’t found that hope yet, I hope you will in 2015.
10 Things that I Learned in 2014
- Where and how you bake your bread matters as much as anything in getting a good rise.
- Figuring out how to consistently eat a high-protein breakfast within 30 minutes to an hour of getting up is worth the effort.
- You can easily make homemade yogurt in a cooler.
- My healthful gluten-free diet  may look very different from your healthful gluten free diet due to what is or isn’t going on in our bodies. Woohoo, I’m under orders to eat GF grains!  And not fast! And I’m supposed to eat a snack before bed! And doing all of that makes noticeable improvement in my health.
- Homemade chicken broth is amazing. I will never go back to store bought.
- Detoxification is something that our bodies do naturally. It’s not a scam or a fad. There are legitimate reasons that you and I should be helping our body do detoxification better.
- Making lard form scratch is somewhat gross, but very interesting. And it sure beats using vegetable shortening.
- If you let gut inflammation go on long term it will screw up your endocrine system and your mental well-being.
- Having pie crust dough in the freezer is very handy, and very tempting.
- The bad bacteria in your gut release a substance that makes you crave sugar before bed, because they know that your body is going to try to kill them of during the night. If you eat the sugar, they can survive. Â Sinister, right?
What have you learned about being gluten free this year? Let me know in the comments. You never know, it may be exactly what I or one of my other readers needs to know about.