Renewed Motivation To Strictly Follow Gluten Free Diet

I wrote this blog post a little more than a year ago which detailed my main Celiac Disease side effect, Osteopenia (or lowered bone density). The post goes into great detail about the bone scan process and my resulting test scores which indicated a severe impact to my bone density due to Celiac Disease and it's subsequent nutritional deficiencies. It's pretty clear to see that if you are not correctly absorbing nutrients then there will be a multitude of effects on the body, include loss of bone density.

At the time of my previous post last year, my score of -2.4 was technically Osteopenia, but right on the border of osteoporosis. I was pretty anxious heading into a recent follow-up bone scan to see if my scores had improved after being on the Gluten Free Diet and supposedly curbing the Celiac Disease induced damage to my body. My doctor had told me that correctly following the diet could lead to a recovery of my bone density. For some reason, you never really know if you are following the GF diet correctly or is some small portion of Gluten still contaminating you, anyone else feel like this? I guess tests like this along with repeat antibody tests can really go a long way to building your confidence level that you really are Gluten Free.

I'm happy to report that my bone density scores did improve. While still having Osteopenia, my scores were more toward the middle range, instead of the high/border-line Osteoporosis range. The results were much better in my smaller bones (like forearm) as these are the first to recover while improving only a little in my bigger bones (like hips). These results have definitely renewed my motivation to keep going.

As I have mentioned before, a Celiac Disease diagnosis is the beginning of your journey to healthy living - it's not the beginning of the end of your life. For us, our diagnosis is really our cure... not very many diseases are like that. If you are not getting follow-up care like repeat antibody tests or bone density scans, please check with your doctor or use my Health Network to find a doctor who is familiar with treating those with CD.