My Soap Box....

So if you do not follow me on Twitter, you have probably missed the explosion of Tweets tonight regarding a certain article posted on Forbes website making the claim that most teenage girls who claim to have gluten intolerance are more often using it as an excuse to hide anorexia.

This is a very personal subject that is incredibly near and dear to my heart and if you want to read my thoughts and manifesto on this please feel free to read my article that I posted over on Delightfully Gluten-Free and I wanted to add a few thoughts here on how I responded to being diagnosed to what sounded like at the time, a pretty awful autoimmune disorder that had been making my life a living hell for nearly a year.

Me and Emmy Lou less than a week after I was diagnosed with celiac doing our "thing"

The photo above is one of my all time favorite photos. It was taken less than a week after I had been diagnosed, and instead of sitting around, locking myself in a room, and crying my eyes out for a month and a half I chose to go out and face the world head on and do my "thing" which was kicking behind and taking names in the livestock world. It was everything I had, and one of the places where I could succeed without being harassed over my weight or look by my peers. This was in the Grand Drive of a rather large open livestock show (which is a professional show), where we won Grand Champion Female after winning the national junior heifer show for our breed the day before, and one week later I won a class at the highly prestigious National Santa Gertrudis Heifer Show with Miss Lilly and baby Dolly.

Can you spot us? ps - I'm totally wearing a vintage shirt that I still own, it's a prized possession.

If I could go back in time would I change anything? Probably not, even with all the pain, sickness, and heartbreak of high school - I learned a lot. It's a part of who I am and who I will become. If anything I would probably just give myself a hug and promise that it would all make sense one day.