The Freshman 15

The hidden blessing in being diagnosed with celiac disease was I didn't gain the freshman 15, I lost it. When my roommates and friends were ordering calzones at three in the morning, I was munching on chips and salsa (my ultimate savior). And when they were devouring pastries and donuts at brunch in the dining halls, I was slowly eating my fruit and yogurt. 

When I was preparing for my move to college I was very nervous about what I would be able to eat. I would be living in a dorm without a kitchen and eating in a dining hall every day. It would be very difficult to automatically know what ingredients were in each meal, and even more difficult to make sure it wasn't contaminated. 

A few weeks before I moved into my dorm I looked through my school's website to see how they dealt with food allergies. I emailed the dietician asking questions about the dining halls and how I should go about making sure my  meals were healthy and completely gluten free. I set up a meeting with her for the day I arrived.

There was another girl at the meeting which relieved me. It's always nice knowing there is someone else going through this new transition as well. The dietician gave us a full list of "safe" foods for all dining halls, then we went on a tour of the dining halls and met with the managers. After the meeting I felt a lot more at ease about my new living situation. Then, the week started.

Although the school tries to accommodate students with food allergies, with about a thousand people eating at every meal it is hard to keep things uncontaminated. The peanut butter and jelly station and the condiment stations were typically the hot zones for contamination. The sandwich station was off limits, even if you just wanted the meat, because there was bread flying around everywhere. And then the food that was safe was always changing. Half way through the year Cocoa Puffs was no longer gluten-free, which left only Fruity Pebbles as a safe cereal (ick). And I will never forget the email from the dietician informing the celiacs that there was now flour in the scrambled eggs. Why there would ever be flour in scrambled eggs was beyond me. So there went another breakfast item. 

It was also so hard to keep track of what was safe and what wasn't. The chicken was safe at one dining hall, but not the other. And this server would go out of her way to find a piece of turkey without gravy on it, but if you ask that one it was like you were asking her to go out and kill you a whole new turkey. 

For awhile I was in a constant state of sickness, somehow eating something that had been contaminated at every meal. There were weeks when I only ate cottage cheese and rice because my intestines couldn't handle anything else, they had been damaged too much. I wrote to my dietician and she went about setting things up with the dining halls so that I would get my food straight from the kitchen to cut down on the chances of getting it contaminated and things improved.

After awhile I figured out the world of food delivery. For months I jealously watched my roommate have food delivered to her at any time of night while I sat and chomped on my baby carrots, finally I was tired of being left out. After a lot of research, studying the delivery menus and asking managers far too many questions I was able to order hot wings at two in the morning as well as, like a gift from heaven, pints of Ben and Jerry's ice cream. But thanks to my very low budget, this was only in dire situations.

My menu on a typical day would look like this:

Breakfast: cottage cheese and canned peaches, occasionally a hard boiled egg

Lunch: taco salad during the second half of the year (when they switched to a gluten-free taco mix!) the first half of the year I usually had cottage cheese again and a piece of grilled chicken.

Dinner: a cheeseburger without the bun and ketchup (all other condiments had a chance to get contaminated, ketchup was squeezable) and mashed potatoes or a sweet potato. 

Sometimes I would have a salad, but it tasted like plastic so I'd only eat some on rare occasions. 

Now, when I say this is a typical menu, I really mean I ate this exact thing almost every day. I might have a piece of turkey instead of a cheeseburger, and there may have some more fruits thrown in during the day, but that was basically it. As you can imagine, that gets pretty boring, and pretty soon I had no motivation to eat. Of course I did eat, but not as much as I normally would, just enough to sustain me. 

I lost twenty pounds that year and went down three pant sizes. By the end I knew that when I returned for my sophomore year there was no way I would survive eating in the dining halls again, I had to have my own kitchen. I'm off campus now, shopping and cooking for myself. I gained ten pounds back and I have not gotten sick from gluten!