The diet that kept me pedalling…

A week before I started the trip I was diagnosed with Coeliac Disease. This meant that I had to follow a gluten-free diet and could no longer eat products containing wheat, barley, rye and oats. It wasn’t an easy thing to work out while on the bike but I got the hang of it by eating a very simple and boring diet.

The big problem with the diet is working out all the foods that don’t seem to have gluten yet will have food additives such as modified starch, maltodextrin and caramel. These are often derived from barley or wheat. At the time I was doing this trip (2004/05) it was rare to find products labelled with gluten-allergy warnings in the USA. It has hopefully changed by now. In the United Kingdom the labelling is very common but is very misleading. For a product to be labelled gluten-free in the UK it has to contain less than 20 parts per million gluten, not so good if you happen to be quite sensitive to even small traces of gluten. I lost 8 kilograms in the first few weeks of living in the UK because of this. In an ideal world, a product labelled as gluten-free should not contain any traces or derivatives of wheat, barley rye or oats.

So the diet was boring but within two weeks I started feeling incredibly good. The constant tiredness I’d been feeling for years finally disappeared and some days I could just ride and ride and ride and…

BREAKFAST

  • Grits (from corn): Grits is incredibly boring by itself, it’s not dissimilar to eating beach sand. I’d try to always add a few spoonfuls of nutella, peanut butter or mixed fruit and nuts to give it taste.

LUNCH AND SNACKS

  • Snickers
  • Bananas
  • Dried fruit and nuts
  • Apples
  • Bananas, bananas, bananas, bananas…
  • Other assorted fruit
  • Snickers
  • V8 tomato juice drink
  • Rice cakes and peanut butter
  • Rice cakes and Nutella
  • Snickers
  • Rice cakes with peanut butter and Nutella
  • Snickers
  • Did I mention Snickers?
  • Over-ripe bananas, an apple and a litre of chocolate milk (induces headspins, though only worked in Montana and Wyoming where they have different sorts of cows I guess)
  • Fritos Scoops and Salsa
  • Snickers

DINNER RECIPES

Now here’s where I get real fancy:

CHILI CON CARNE AND RICE:
Ingredients:

  • 1 tin of Stagg “Chili con Carne”
  • 1 quantity Instant Rice

Method:

  • Cook rice.
  • Add Chili and heat through.
  • Serve.

I ate the above recipe more times than I can imagine on that trip. I recently found the Stagg brand in the UK and didn’t hesitate to buy a few tins.

Ok, if you can manage with the difficulty of that one you should be able to handle the following recipe. Because of the complexity of the recipe I only cooked this one when I was camped not far from a supermarket so I didn’t have to lug around a whole bunch of ingredients:

  SALMON WITH SPINACH, TOMATOES AND RICE:
Ingredients:

  • 1 tin of Alaskan Salmon (or for variation try some tuna)
  • 1 quantity Instant Rice
  • 1 tin Spinach
  • 1 tin Tomatoes

Method:

  • Cook rice.
  • Add Salmon, Spinach, Tomatoes and heat through.
  • Serve.
  • Follow with one litre of Strawberry Yogurt

Both of the above are cooked on my trust Trangia Stove that Mum and Dad got me a decade ago. For a list of international fuel names, not just for the Trangia Stove, but for all cooking stoves, check out this list.