Archive for February, 2010

Champion kyaker Glenn Singleton is living proof of the benefits of correct diagnosis and treatment for people with coeliac disease.

Glenn, who represented Australia in six world kayaking championships and 31 World Cups, has won seven National Australian Open titles, the K2 1000m Gold and the 2003 World Cup.  He also qualified for Australia for the Beijing Olympics in the K4 1000m.

“Despite being a pretty fit bloke, I was always tired and had an aggravated gut a lot of the time.  On top of that, I had anaemia and had been nutrient deficient for years,” says Glenn.

“I used to put it down to the fact that I was training pretty hard and pushing my body a lot.

“I’d tried a lot of things, but eventually, my GP said “We need to do something different here,” and sent me to a gastroenterologist for tests.  That’s when I found out I had coeliac disease.
 
“As a 26 year old guy who loves his food, I was really worried about how I’d cope, especially as an athlete who ate mountains of bread, pasta and cereals before training!

“But I was relieved to find out what was wrong and since following the gluten free diet, the difference in my general wellbeing has been huge.  I’ve put on 10 kilos and went from training once a day to four times a day with no ill effects whatsoever. 

“But the best thing was that I improved my time by a whole 15 seconds, which was a massive increase.

“And these days, I’ve gone from someone who didn’t know much about cooking to being a pretty dab hand in the kitchen even if I say so myself!  I’m always developing new gluten free recipes to keep my diet interesting and tasty. “

 Chris is a professional fire fighter who loves playing with his small son and building and flying gliders with this wife in his spare time.

But life wasn’t always so good.  When he was 44, Chris became seriously ill and no one knew why.  He was chronically tired and lost a massive 10 kilograms in weight in a matter of weeks.

“It was so serious I was getting ready to sell the house and the plane because I thought I was going to die,” he said.

“Looking back, the problems really started back when I was a baby.  I used to get terrible tummy upsets even back then but the specialists said there was nothing wrong.  Then as I grew up, it just became worse.  Wind was a problem too, I was known for being able to clear a fire station in seconds!

“But all of a sudden, my health took a real nose dive.  The tiredness became so severe I couldn’t work, the tummy upsets were continual and my concentration was shot to pieces, I couldn’t remember even the simplest things.  Then I developed huge lymph nodes.  The specialist said he’d never seen lymph nodes that big in his life before and I thought I probably had lymphoma.”

“At that stage, I thought I was a dead man walking.” 

After a lot of tests, Chris was diagnosed with coeliac disease.

“It was such a relief to know I was going to be ok,” he says.  “Within five days of eating gluten free I felt better.  The tiredness disappeared, the tummy upsets stopped, I put on 13 kilos and best of all, my lymph nodes settled right down.

“I just wish I’d known what to do so much sooner.”

“Some days I was so tired I could hardly get out of bed in the mornings,” says Meg.  “But I’m a pretty positive person and you just push through it as much as you can.

“But then I started to feel really sick whenever I ate anything.  It was like car sickness and sometimes the nausea was so bad I just wanted to lie down and die.  Then I started losing weight too - I went down from 52 kilos to just 45 kilos.  I’m 156 centimetres tall so I looked all skin and bones.

 “I thought I had a stomach virus and I just kept going.  Then you start to put it down to all sorts of things like not eating properly and trying to pack a lot into a day.  But things just didn’t get any better, no matter what I did.

“In the end, I realised that there had to be something seriously wrong but I still had no idea what it was.  It took me six months of medical tests to find out.”

“Looking back, I started to put all the pieces together and it made sense.  I remember one time when I had a big bowl of spaghetti the night before a tennis match and the next day, instead of being full of energy, I could hardly move.  It also explained why I always felt worse at the weekends because that was when I would have cereal for breakfast. 

“The day I stopped eating gluten, I felt 100 per cent better.  The tiredness and lethargy just disappeared as did the stomach pains and nausea.  I started to put on weight and look human again.

“But I felt unwell for a long time before I was diagnosed.”

Helen’s a busy historian  and spends a lot of time in archives, she work as a freelance historian, has written a book and even runs cemetery tours!

Nowadays she has a busy job as Mayor – chairing all official council meetings, meetings with community groups, other local government & state and govt reps, lobbying for Council, promoting environmental and heritage.

However, she didn’t always have such energy.  Helen was diagnosed with a wheat allergy 20 years ago and omitted wheat from her diet but kept eating rye!  It wasn’t until Christmas Eve  2005 that her diagnosis of coeliac disease was finally confirmed.

Prior to that Helen was losing weight, had a bloated tummy, bowel upsets, felt tired and had chronic constipation all her life.  Her GP ordered a colonoscopy and Helen asked for a blood test.

After starting the gluten free diet she felt wonderful and found the change to the new regime easy as she was used to omitting wheat.  The tiredness and tummy symptoms are now gone.  In fact the distended tummy went in a matter of only a few days and Helen now has so much more energy.

Helen finds the Coeliac Society a tremendous help with the practical advice and restaurant listings to her her manage her coeliac disease.