This week we are featuring Shauna Ahern of The Gluten Free Girl and The Chef. Shauna was first brought to my attention when one of my good friends had to start eating gluten free. She was raving about this fantastic website that was giving her recipes she could actually use! With 1 in 133 people diagnosed with Celiac Disease, this eating style is a way of life for many people. Shauna makes this way of life a lot easier with her great recipes. Please help me welcome Shauna James Ahern.
Hi. My name is Shauna James Ahern. I am alive.
I have been alive since August of 1966. Or, should I say, I have been on this earth since then. I haven’t always been alive. For much of my life, I felt lousy. Low in energy. Sick and sometimes depressed. I didn’t know why.
Still, I survived. And I laughed deep from my belly, in most moments of the day.
(Well, except for those six months in the seventh grade I was so embarrassed of my loud laugh that I forced myself to let out only a tiny heh.) I adore being here. I am constantly amazed by life and frequently struck by the absurdity of it. Mostly, I’m grateful.
And I’ve been writing about all of this from the moment I could pick up a pen and put words on the page. I’m a writer. I write about little moments of being awake in the world. Sometimes, I write to remind myself to wake up.
And now, at the heart of everything I do, and the monikers of which I’m most proud? I am the wife of my tender-hearted, hilarious husband and the mother of our darling daughter.
Oh, and by the way, like millions of humans in the world, I have to live gluten-free. I have celiac disease, although I chafe at the word disease. Being diagnosed with celiac changed my life, in ways that I could never stop listing. Now, I am no longer low energy, prone to falling ill, or depressed. Now, I am free. Now, I am alive.
And I don’t miss gluten at all.
taken on April 20, 2005 — ten days before diagnosis
taken in early June, 2005 — one month after being gluten-free
In the early spring of 2005, I was terribly ill. My body required 18 hours of sleep a day, my stomach ached all the time, and I could barely move without hurting. Doctors ordered one medical test after another, and none of them yielded answers. (The low point is when I endured a colonoscopy and endoscopy on the same day. Bleh.) All I could eat was soft bread, chicken noodle soup, and crackers. No one understood why I was so ill.
It had been a hard few years. In the winter of 2001, I suffered pneumonia for the sixth time in my life. In the beginning of 2003, I required emergency abdominal surgery for a fibroid tumor that had grown to the size of a grapefruit. In the winter of 2003, I was t-boned by another car, in a terrible accident that changed my life. My body reminded me, every day, how lucky I was to be alive, with pain from the injuries that didn’t go away. Just as I was starting to recover, I fell into that crisis of 2005.
It started to feel like I would never be well.
When I received the official diagnosis — you have celiac — I clapped my hands and said yes! The naturopath was a little surprised to see my celebration.
I’m not the only one who had to fight her way through the medical system to receive the correct diagnosis and become healthy for the first time in my life. Americans have to wait an average of 11 years, and many doctors, before finally being diagnosed. It is estimated that 1 out of 100 Americans has celiac disease. Only 3% of us have been diagnosed.
We have to change this.
After I was diagnosed, I felt reborn. I became a self I had never been before.
And I started writing about it. About amaranth and quinoa, ume plum vinegar, how to braise a lamb shank, and the life of food I began to live. I wrote to teach, to lead other people to the awakeness I was feeling. I love the fascination of the human body; I dissected cadavers in high school. (It was for an advanced biology class.) And yet, I had never heard of the condition that had been commanding me all my life.
I did the only thing I knew how to do. I began to write.
And thus, this website was born.
Since starting her blog in 2005, Shauna has written two books, Gluten Free Girl and Gluten Free Girl and The Chef.
These books are a must for anyone who loves good food and can not eat gluten. Stay tuned this week for amazing recipes, tips, and photography from Shauna, The Gluten Free Girl.
