I would mark this up to something you eluded to it not being, you know that you always felt like crap on gluten. OK maybe you didnt "feel" like crap, but they were detrimental to your system. You kept doing it anyway and eventually, like with many things, your body/brain reduced its signals letting you know of the damage since you were ignoring them anyway. Once given a break and time to become sensitive again there you are...

before i started paleo i never felt ill. i had a very healthy SAD; sugar free, low salt, raw vege, unprocessed. but the difference in how i felt once the soy and gluten were eliminated was astounding. i have been 99% compliant to no grains-legumes-dairy since march and coincidentally today i am doing an experiment by revisiting my old SAD diet. one meal in and my tongue feels swollen, tingly and i have the oddest taste in my mouth that three brushings and 5 minutes with my water pic cannot remove. i have had a short headache that resolved itself followed by vague abdominal cramping. i do not think i will make it through the day.

i'm glad i opted for black coffee this morning- the dairy would have likely caused the perfect storm.

Paleo doesnt need to be expensive, why would you put your health at risk for the sake of bread and spaggetti? I have cheat meals, but if anything makes me feel ill I'll avoid it or try and find a less cheating way of eating it.

I had a similar experience. After going paleo and cheating I discovered I reliably get migraines after eating gluten if I am otherwise avoiding it.

Having discovered this and cutting gluten out of my diet I have been able to stop having the hormonal migraines that have plagued generations of my family. It is the first time in a decade and a half that I have been reliably migraine fee for this long.

The correlation was neither reliable, nor clear until I had done without for a long stretch.

May I ask why you haven't used tubers, both regular potato and sweet, to enhance your meals? They definitely will stretch a meal and are very inexpensive - I think Trader Joe's has organic sweet potatoes for around $2.50 and you get 8 in the bag, and they have many other bagged potato options for a good price. Any farmer's market can hook you up as well. Cauliflower is cheap too and you can chop it up finely to mimic rice, steam and mash like mashed potatoes, same with spaghetti squash and zucchini, especially now that they're in full season, can be used as faux noodles.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that when you ate foods that were too high in carbs, that the resulting glucose enters the bloodstream too rapidly... which could definitely be a part of "feeling like crap. Especially if you were super strict about what items you allowed into your meals. Your body is probably freaking out.

I don't know what kind you're eating but rice, corn and quinoa pasta have less gluten than wheat pasta.. would be an interesting test to see how you react if you choose to keep something like this around. I'm thinking tho.. if you feel like hell get it away and try other options that are just as affordable.

I ate toast every morning for most of my life before paleo and never had tummyy problems. My doctor randomly gave me IGG test for gluten (gliadin specifically). It was high, so I went off gluten. I started having big time tummy trouble after that, not even eating gluten. Now if I eat Gluten I am in a world of hurt (achy joints, inflammation, digestive upset). I kind of rue that day, and wish I had kept on the SAD diet. At least my stomach never hurt.

I think that you body has no longer committed resources to the fight since it was not under attack, and now that you reintroduced these things it is gonna take a bit to rebuild the defenses.

It is kind of like strenuous labor. After a few days it does not hurt anymore, you just do it and drone on and on for a bit. Just because it does not hurt does not mean damage isn't being done. If you have not hurt yourself too much you stop laboring for a while and not really notice too many benefits of it, but that first day back to work is gonna hurt all over again. The problem with gluten and heavy labor is that eventually you will start hurting again as there is only so much your body can handle over the long term.

I have tried different diets (Atkins, Zone, Nourishing Traditions, etc) and never went strict no-gluten until recently, on the Paleo diet. I was totally astonished by the positive health changes, and I didn't eat that much gluten before the change (maybe 1-2 small servings a day max). Starting the day I stopped eating grains, I lost about a pound a day for 7 days, and a host of other minor issues that I didn't know I had like digestion, sleep, mood, skin conditions, etc. all disappeared.

For a couple of months after quitting gluten, if I had literally one bite of anything with gluten, it would set off this chain reaction of digestive problems, sleep and energy problems, etc. which would last for 2-3 days.

Now, having been strict Paleo for a little more than 3 months, I can cheat with gluten about once every 10 days without much of a problem, as long as it is a fairly moderate amount, and is otherwise wholesome, for example I can have a couple of pieces of thin-crust home made pizza (including home made dough) which is rich with olive oil and Paleo toppings. However, if I try that twice in say a 2 week period, the effects of the 2nd cheat are really awful.

It is easy not to cheat now though, because bread, pasta, and basically anything made of grains tastes gross to me... the texture is a real turn-off, it is grainy and dry and a little too smooshy.

So I am coming to the conclusion that I did in fact have a problem with gluten, but had lived with it for a long time... I wouldn't say that I "didn't know I always felt bad", but a lot of minor health issues that I just took as unavoidable definitely were not. I suspect that this got worse as I got older (I'm 41), so probably affects me more than it did 10 years ago.

Glad I found this post. Since doing cheats after doing paleo for several months I have headaches and nausea (which I rarely have pre paleo.) I worry about my family history of diabetes. Hopefully, it's just an allergy response which can be remedied with adherent paleo.