Celiacs Disease and Maintaining Weight

Sorry you're going through this! The reason most people tend to gain weight after being diagnosed with celiac is because they go out and try all the gluten-free substitutes for what they had been eating. Some of them are higher in calories than their gluten containing counterparts, but some aren't. Read labels and pay attention to portion sizes and calorie counts, and you should be fine.

The reason celiacs gain weight after they eat gluten free is because their intestines heal and they are absorbing more calories than they were before. If your intestines were quite damaged, you might have only been absorbing 50% or less of calories consumed. Eating they same calorie count as it took you to maintain before may cause to to gain with healthy absorption.

Those peanut m&m's are evil!

I did gain weight after, but now weigh less than I have in a very very long time. As others have said, stay away from the GF substitutes as much as you can. They don't taste good for the most part, anyway. The occasional treat is fine, but make sure it's something that's worth it.

It's actually not true that most celiacs gain weight after going gluten free, although some of us can. In my experience (I have a LOT of celiacs in my family, and I'm active in the community a lot too), most of the time those who were overweight tend to lose weight (a lot of celiacs are actually overweight when diagnosed), those who were underweight tend to gain it, and those who were about average weight tend to stay there. Pretty much, it seems more like the body is just trying to normalize.

At first.

But AFTER one has healed, then I've noticed that those who eat a lot of the GF substitutions tend to gain weight, yeah. Avoiding those, and simply making more foods from scratch, really seems to take care of it.


The one exception I've seen, I only seem to see with the really, really skinny celiacs. Because it almost seemed like they'd had so much damage that their body had gone into starvation mode already, and their bodies are going nuts trying to gain weight back. Normal calorie amounts seem to be too much and they just ballooned in weight. Most of these had to either eat less than normal, or exercise a lot more. But they seemed the exception rather than the rule.


One important thing, though - you really do NOT want to put ANY eating restrictions on your body right now, in terms of calories and nutrients. Tons of exercise is likely not too great, either, if you're a celiac, anyway. It will take 6 months or more for your body to heal, and until it does, you are STILL not getting enough nutrients.

So any food restrictions mean fewer calories and nutrients for your body to use as it tries to heal you, which means slower healing. Trying to build too much muscle when nutrient deficient doesn't seem like the greatest idea ever. Better to keep moderately active, and then when your body has healed and is absorbing nutrients again, start up any more active exercising, you know?