Trailer Episode 01

Enjoy food, enjoy travel, enjoy life. You're listening to Travel Gluten Free by Elikqitie.
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Travel gluten free promo podcast. Welcome to the travel gluten free show. I'm your host Elikqitie, and I'm really excited to bring you my new podcast, Travel Gluten Free. First I wanna start off by thanking my podcasting friends who have really supported me through this whole entire process in my endeavor. So I'd like to first thank Chris Nesi from the House of Ed Tech Podcasts for inspiring me to podcast first. If you are a teacher or an educator, definitely check out House of Ed Tech from Chris Nesi. Awesome podcast. I'd like to also thank Dave Jackson from Ask the Podcast Coach for his awesome Saturday morning podcasting information, without which I probably would not be here as well. I would like to thank Emily Peck-Prokop at the Story Behind podcast who inspires me every day with the work that she does. Emily, you are a rock star, and she also does all her work on top of having a newborn baby, which is incredible.

I'd also like to thank my husband, Jeff Shumate, who has given me the time to create my podcast and support my travel gluten free endeavors. I'd like to start off my first podcast with a story about my dad. My dad's name was Larry and he was an awesome dad. One of the things other people loved about my dad as well is that he was just such a friendly guy. He would do anything for you. He would give you the shirt off his back. He was super friendly and had lots of friends. One of the things that we really bonded over, we were fixing antique cars. My dad had bought a 1933 Plymouth and he and I would work on the car, go to car shows, we would judge car shows together.

I've done a lot of work with antique cars with my dad and it was really, really fun. I really enjoyed it. And we were part of a big Italian family, so we ate lots of bread and lots of pasta, like a normal Italian family would, of course because, you know, you're Italian, you drink red wine. That's what you do. With this lifestyle, we obviously ate a lot of gluten and my dad always had these symptoms. Like digestive problems as far back as I can remember. He was diagnosed with IBS, which is irritable bowel syndrome, and he had several surgeries as a result of that. By the time I got in high school, he had had four surgeries.

Well, scroll forward to about the year 2005. And my dad was diagnosed with Adenocarcinoma, which is small intestinal cancer. And they gave him a few months to live. He actually lived past that two years and he passed away in 2007. Scroll forward, even to two years ago to the year 2016, and my younger daughter Aliyah was diagnosed with Celiacs disease. When you take a test, when you take a blood test for Celiac, zero to 15, if you fall within that scale is normal. And her tests came out to be 121, which is way above normal. Took her to two different specialists at the University of Utah because we live right outside Salt Lake City. And tne gastroenterologist said that if it's above 100, you really don't need to get any extra testing and that she is most likely Celiacs and so, so, so we had a diagnosis of my daughter as Celiacs, and then I put two and two together at the gastroenterologists appointment asked if anybody in my family had ever had Adenocarcinoma, who was obviously my dad. And so what I believe, and obviously I cannot prove a hundred percent, but most likely my dad had Celiacs and not IBS. If you do not know this, IBS is a very commonly misdiagnosed, so people will actually have Celiacs and be misdiagnosed with IBS instead. And so I believe that is what happened to my dad and he actually did have Celiacs, but back in the eighties and nineties, nobody tested for that. Had he known that, I know he would have changed his lifestyle and his habits. A couple of years ago, um, right about, right a little bit before my daughter found out she had Celiac, I found out I was gluten intolerant, and I had found this out from an elimination diet where you take everything out of your diet that is an allergen.

I found out every time I put gluten in my diet that I got really sick from it. So that's how I found out I had gluten intolerance. My Dad was most likely Celiacs, and my daughter is Celiacs. I figured out I need a lead a gluten free lifestyle. When I figured this out, I was like, game on, If I want to eat good food and I want to eat these things that I love to eat, like bread and all these other things, I need to figure out a way to eat these things and stay healthy and eat them without gluten but still taste good. And so my creativity light bulb went off and running, and I had all these different ideas about food that I could prepare. However, when I started trying to prepare these foods, I realized how challenging it is to be gluten free.

It is really hard because when you talk to somebody and say you're gluten free, they think, oh, you can't eat bread, but it is so much more than bread. And if you had been gluten free for a while, you realize it's in soy sauce. So that blows out Asian foods. Lots of dressings have gluten in them for a thickener and even toothpaste and cosmetics. I never realize how pervasive gluten is, especially in our American Diet, until I was gluten free. So every time I would try to change a recipe or create a dish, I realized that there's just so many variables that you have to consider when doing that. It's not just taking out gluten, you have to add other things, you have to cook it maybe a little bit differently. There's also an anxiety that comes along from eating anywhere else besides your own kitchen, obviously, because like for me, when I eat gluten and I'm gluten intolerant, I will, if I eat gluten, I will get sick for several hours and then I will be sick for days.

When I get sick from gluten intolerance, it's basically a cross between the flu and food poisoning for me and it goes on from three to five days. It depends on the type of gluten I've eaten, how much gluten I've eaten. I get really sick from eating it. So gluten for me is totally off the table. Besides the anxiety from eating out, right, because you don't know if you're going to be poisoned or I call it cross contaminated, you can't eat bread when you go out, so everyone else is eating bread and then you feel like you're missing out on the enjoyment of just sitting down and enjoying your food because you have to be so careful about the food that you pick, especially when you're eating out restaurant with friends. 

When I'm looking at a menu that's not labeled, I call it navigating a minefield, because I really feel like a menu that's not labeled is navigating the minefield. And I'm sure some of my listeners, also feel the same way who are gluten free. It's like does this have gluten in it? If you know, obviously chicken doesn't, but does the sauce on top of it have gluten in it? So it's really, really hard to navigate that. So me being the creative person that I am and the fact that like basically wasting time is my biggest pet peeve, I started figuring out shortcuts when I was making my own food and inexpensive ways to make gluten free foods and products because some of the things you can buy at the supermarket, but they're super expensive. So me being a teacher, I'm a full time teacher, I have very limited budget. I really wanted to figure out how to cook and bake gluten free and to do it really well. And after making many, many, many mistakes, cooking and baking gluten free, I finally started creating dishes that are gluten free that my friends absolutely love. I'm even the official dessert maker of our dinner party group of friends and uh, no one else is gluten free except me. So I always make gluten free desserts like cakes which I made for them and they rave about them. So I've gotten to a point where I've gotten really good at making gluten free food. I've been talking to other people about being gluten free, and I've heard how frustrated other people were as well. I remember being in that spot, just not knowing what to do and like, should I buy food, should I make food on my own, like what should I do with my new diet?

And you end up being frustrated and people were talking about being depressed when they got to eat and confused on like just not knowing what to do or how to eat. So when I look around at different resources, there's a lot of different resources but nobody really tells you how to be gluten free. And so that's really want to do. My whole purpose for making this podcast is to really share what I've learned about being gluten free so other people don't have to make all the mistakes that I made. So your life could be easier as a result of my endeavors and my trials and my practices. So at first when I wanted to share this information, I thought about reaching out to others by building a blog and then creating a podcast. Now Insert this meeting with Chris Nesi in early November of 2018. We were at the AMLE conference, which is an educational conference for teachers. It was a national conference in Philadelphia, so it's the fall, it's Philadelphia. The leaves are changing. It's really beautiful. Philadelphia. It's just an exciting place to be and it's my hometown, so I'm super excited to be there. Super excited to be talking to Chris Nesi, and as we're chatting, Chris points out the fact that millions of people have blogs and if I really want to reach more people and give my information and support to a much larger audience, I should podcasts. So the million dollar question that Chris asked me is why not start with a podcast first? Then a large flip switched in my head. I'm telling you, this totally redirected me to creating the travel gluten free podcast, which you are now listening to you today. So in the two months since Chris asked me why not start with a podcast first, I've spent over a hundred hours just researching and learning all sorts of new programs and buying gear for my podcasts.

So this process has been really long and hard, but I am finally here delivering to you my first audience, the travel gluten free podcast, which I'm really excited to share with you guys. So all of you out there, my travel gluten free friends, my GFFs. So, uh, if you are listening to this, I will refer to you as my GFF, my gluten free friend. I really hope you enjoy my content and please feel free to reach out with questions, comments, and podcast topics you'd like to see on travel gluten free. I'm planning on talking to, interviewing chefs, interviewing restaurant owners who have done the gluten free interviewing people who make gluten free products, and also interviewing people just like you and me who are gluten free, because I feel like it's really important to get, um, the, the pulse of people just like you and me who are eating gluten free and what their issues are and what I can just really support my followers with.

Definitely connect with me on social media. All my pictures on social media had been taken by me all my original work. This is not something I've pulled off of another, a picture bank like, like Pixabay. Um, I've actually taken all these pictures. This is all food I have personally eaten and so on. Twitter and Facebook. You can find me at travel, gaf me on youtube and pinterest. You can find me travel gluten free and on instagram and the web travel gluten free.me. So information on becoming a so sponsor. My social media links and information from my show will be found in the show notes. So check this out and remember my gluten free friends. You can enjoy food, enjoy travel, and enjoy life. This is the Elikqitie thanking you, my gluten free friends for listening to my first show.