Am I learning from my mistakes?

I was feeling rather uninspired this morning. It was one of those times where I could have easily ended up spending my whole morning reading and achieving nothing off my to-do list.

I got caught up on the whole question of “am I going in the right direction?” Yesterday I had a meeting with my small business advisor and she had lots of suggestions; most of which I agree with. On leaving the meeting I knew that I had lots more to work on, but I also felt a little deflated that I had not achieved more. This is what lead me to old photos and from there it was a short hop and a skip over to – have I made the right decisions? Have we made good changes to our lives? What have we successfully changed? What would I do differently with hindsight?

Being a parent means that the most important measures are quality of life and level of health. The health of my family was not good a few years back. My husband was suffering with lots of issues and they seemed to be linked to his immune system. Then my son developed a strange issue with his eye. Sometimes when he blinked one eyelid would blink slower than the other. We saw lots of different types of doctors and the final referral was to a neurologist, something I was wary of. I didn’t want to get so caught up in the medical system that I lost control over his health and was on a treadmill of tests and drugs.

After a lot of research my husband decided that giving up gluten would help his personal situation. We decided that we should do it for the whole family. This was at the end of June 2016.

Almost immediately my husband and I lost weight. I had a little to lose, but he had quite a lot to shift. This was the first good benefit. The second one we noticed, was that my sons eye issue stopped. When he restarted school after the holidays it would sometimes return, only very mildly and it was always connected to eating gluten at school.

Two years later and we are still gluten free. My husband has lost over 30kg (still a few to go, but nearly there). My son is much healthier, he now choses to avoid gluten because of the consequences. I love that he understands the effects it has on him. Of course, he does break it sometimes, but he’s developing good habits which will hopefully last a lifetime.
Initially I have been quite anti giving up gluten because I couldn’t understand how something which man had eaten for so long could be bad for us. I kept coming back to the quote ‘man cannot live of bread alone’. This suggests to me that we could maintain our physical bodies with bread but our spiritual being needed more. So, if we could maintain our physical bodies with this one plant, how could it be so damaging to us now.

The brutal answer is that the wheat we have today is a completely different plant to the one from biblical times. I had a lot to learn. I had thought that I was helping my family by making all our food from scratch. Every tart, cake, bread, or pie they ate was made with simple basic ingredients. I now know that every time I took out the flour and kneaded a loaf of bread for them I was actually damaging their health. We had to give up a lot to achieve gluten-free. In fact, when I was wallowing through my photos this morning I came across a lot of food photography I used to take for my blog. Below is a selection of the foods I used to make and had to give up.

So back to my original question:am I going in the right direction with my life?

Answer: Yes, as long as I can move on and embrace change, even accept when I am wrong – I must be doing something right!

This was a traditional French apple tart which the kids loved. I used to make some type of fruit tart every weekend with which ever fruit was in season.








I remember the day I made these three. I was running out of flour and didn't want to go shopping so I divided it up. I made some biscuits, focaccia for the evening and plain bread for breakfast.







This one was one of the kids favourite, it is a brioche bread and I often used to make this so it was still warm when served at breakfast!