Zena Wilde felt as if her world had contracted over night upon learning she had a gluten sensitivity. She comments, “It was overwhelming.” Everything I loved—bread, pasta, even soy sauce—seemed forbidden.
Zena, though, was not one to let food rules control her. Longtime clean eating advocate, she chose to reconstruct her approach to food from the ground up using her diagnosis as justification.
It made me slow down, she says. “To pay closer attention to elements. Cook more, pay attention to labels, and really relate to what I was eating. Bloom Nutrition Superfood Greens Powder, Digestive Enzymes with Probiotics and Prebiotics, Gut Health
From a constraint, what began as a reset turned into more. She concentrated on whole foods, including fruits, seeds, vegetables, legumes, naturally gluten-free grains like quinoa and brown rice. She investigated new textures and flavours she had once passed over rather than looking for replacements for what she missed.
That produced a clean-eating way of life devoid of sacrificing behaviour.
Little rituals made Zena happy: roasting sweet potatoes with rosemary, boiling lentils into soups, mixing morning green smoothies under morning light. “It has a rhythm,” she notes. And it brings a calm I never would have imagined.
More than anything, she discovered that eating clean is about letting the right things in rather than about excluding anything.
