Hi there and welcome to my small corner of the web where I keep my notes to help me in my personal experience of going grain-free. I am a very average person who for a variety of reasons have needed to maintain a grain-free diet for many years.
While I am now following the Paleo Auto-Immune Protocol, this website is many years old and reflects my own personal journey, including in the past cooking with quinoa, amaranth, and buckwheat, which are pseudo-cereals and considered to be grains by many people.
Even though I myself am now following a paleo approach, this is not a paleo website. This website and its recipes started off many years ago, long before I knew anything about “paleo” and the grain-free resources were very limited. I initially went grain-free for my husband, who has Crohn’s disease. Going grain-free (but still eating pseudo-cereals like quinoa & buckwheat) put my husband’s Crohn’s in remission, you can read some more about that here. I personally found out I also had a problem with grains only recently, after having children and experiencing some autoimmune issues myself once I hit my 40s. You can read about my personal experience and how it helped me lose a fair amount of weight here. It has been a journey and my personal experience continues to evolve and be refined.
Doing my first whole30 over 12 months ago represented a real game-changer for me, and one I am very grateful for. If you haven’t heard of the whole30 before, I highly recommend this free online program. It is an EXCELLENT way to work out if grains, sugar and dairy have a negative impact on you as an individual or not.
So, if you are new to this site and would like to know where to start, here are some links that I feel are essential resources for anyone new:
The Start Here Section on Grain-Free Living – These are a list of articles written by myself over the past decade that contain many helpful tips and hints on eliminating grains from the diet.
The Whole30 website – all about the whole30 program.
The Whole9 Grain Manifesto – a good summary of why grains are avoided by some.
Marks Daily Apple – Mark Sisson is an excellent and balanced authority on all things paleo, you can spend hours reading through the archives on this site.
The Success Stories from Marks Daily Apple – There are some very inspiring success stories including people who started off in a very similar place to yourself. Have a read and you will be very encouraged by them (I certainly am).
If you want to read a book, there are many excellent books on the subject, many of which I have listed in my recommended reading section here. Two books that stand out for me personally are It Starts With Food* and also The Paleo Approach*