Coeliac teenager, how not to miss out

[QueryA]

DS (13) has coeliac disease, just diagnosed this jan. we are coping okay home, food swaps and substitutions are working out fine. However he is really struggling with lunches at school and going out with friends.

school lunches, he doesn’t like gluten free bread much, only really tolerated it as toast. He isn’t keen on the wraps or thins either. He doesn’t want to take soup or salad (not that he eats salad) as he feels self conscious. Most of his group of friends walk down town for lunch and eat greggs or buy sandwiches from local shops or chips etc. I really struggle to help suggest what he can have. At home he has GF fish fingers or GF toast or something. I don’t want him coming home for lunch as he’ll miss out on important socialising and friendships. The school canteen is tiny and not really set up for gluten free.

similarly socialising at weekends. He wants to go out with his mates. But so much of it centres round pizza and wandering town buying doughnuts or sausage rolls. He just feels left out and a bit more depressed every time he has to explain he can’t have that to his mates.

I know there are bigger problems in the world. But he’s really down about it. Almost mourning the ‘life’ he expected. It would have been easier if he was diagnosed younger when I could control his diet a lot more, or older where he is more accepting of salads or sushi or stuff.

anyone else with a diet restricted teen? Nut allergy/diabetic/coeliac? How do yours cope?

My DS15 (and me sometimes 😳) get the double bacon cheeseburger from macdonalds and put it on a GF brioche bun when we get home, we have the chips too, never had a problem with cross contamination. You could take the bun with you I guess. He really struggled with wanting to be "normal" when he was diagnosed aged 6 but he knows gluten was limiting his growth, now he's taller than his non coeliac twin brother so he's fully on board with being gluten free, I think it helps that I am too.

See I think a lot of these suggestions are fine for adults or more confident teenagers but my youngest would crawl up his own arsehole rather than take his own bread roll into MacDonalds! This is the part that is really hard because he just doesn't want to be seen as different in any way. He tends to survive on crisps and sweets when he's out and about as he knows which brands/products are gluten free.

Thanks everyone. It is quite tough for him but he’ll just have to adapt. The one thing he is missing is kfc, which doesn’t seem to have any gf alternative, though I didn’t know Nando’s had gf stuff so will try there 😀

KFC is the thing we miss most (both DS and me coeliac)

If you google, there are lots of KFC style chicken recipes. I make them with alternatives that my dc can eat, still taste quite good.

Which is great, but the real bitch about things like coeliac disease is less about missing specific foods or restaurants (though that really is a bitch), and more about never being able to easily join in without thinking when one of your flatmates goes "let's order a pizza, who's in"; not being able to just say "it's such a nice day, let's grab lunch while we're out instead of going home" and know there'll be somewhere to eat; not being able to grab a fast food dinner at the service station because the traffic held you up for two hours and there's no McDonald's at this one so you can't even have chips; not being able to join in with pancake day without your special ingredients and separate equipment; having to refuse to try the special cake somebody made and brought in or the special dish from back home your friend from abroad made; not being able to just go down the pub with your mates, drink the same beers with them, and all stop off together at the kebab shop on your way back; knowing you can't join in with the buffet at a party because it's self-service and you can't guarantee nobody sprinkled couscous across all the salads.

Sitting with a little box of cold similar-looking stuff you thought about in advance, prepared and brought from home isn't exactly the same. Humans bond through food; there's a good reason we talk about "breaking bread" together. If you set yourself apart and don't eat what everyone else does, even if there's a good reason, even if everyone knows why, even if your friends and family are great and everyone's cool about it, you lose a fairly important part of the human social experience and a key tool we use to build relationships.

The recipes are cool and everything and I appreciate the helpful people who come up with them and share them, but it's not just about the breaded chicken.

Well, maybe for not notapizzaeater and DS it really is about the breaded chicken 😂 They do sound pretty keen.

But there's so much more to it too. I was diagnosed as an adult but partway through university, and it really annoyed me how many social and even academic or work-related things which had been easy and fun were suddenly a bit of a pain. My guess would be that emotionally and socially it would be even harder for a teenager.