Today we see the New Year featuring an interview with Isabel, creator of the blog “My Glutenacious Life,” an interesting blog about gluten-free travel as a Celiac. In addition, we announce that Isabel collaborated with Celicity from the beginning of the New Year, to help inform us and recommend excellent restaurants that offer gluten-free food throughout various countries in the world.
If you do not yet know our project, who better than herself to tell thee! Nonetheless, we present our recent conversation with Isabel.
When did the journey of “My Glutenacious Life” begin? When was the moment when you finally decided to open your own blog?
My Glutenacious Life is a project based on my own experience and the shortcomings that have come up when organizing a trip from celiac
perspective. I’ve always been a little globetrotter and it honestly never crossed my mind to stop traveling for being celiac, I love to travel! For me all that it entails is a little more organization and investigation prior to travel, especially to have localized sites where we can eat gluten; no matter how beautiful the place you visit is, it’s also very important to eat. It was at this stage of traveling and celiac when I realized that there were many places with centralized information, all information is spread over the Net, and had to search each site separately, making it the task planning very tedious. In addition, although there are pages reviewing and rating restaurants, there’s no specific area by and for people with celiac disease. Therefore, a little over a year, and after a long trip (where I had to start from scratch with very little information)
I started thinking about this project for other celiac travelers like me to help, and to encourage those who do not dare to take the step of eating out.
What can we find in “My Glutenacious Life”?
Especially a lot of food and cuisine; I think a topic that really excites celiacs (provided we get together because the topic is the conversation Star). I find it very rewarding to share my experience of those places where I have been served food without gluten. There are places that seem to be not strongly advertised in this regard, and often find fantastic sites through recommendations from friends or family. Of course, travel, because as celiac, we travel near or far, find where to eat gluten-free, also sometimes becomes an adventure; and sometimes we discover much more of a culture through cuisine only watching the sights. In between, all those points that I think may be of interest to another celiac, as new products on the market or attractive activities like tasting chocolate come about.
On what subject, from all you described, do you like to write?
It is difficult to select just one, because I chose precisely considering what would be most useful in helping other celiacs and the ones I like to write. Although I enjoy taking photos even more, I think a very nice way to tell a story, and as you say, a picture is worth a thousand words.
What is the goal of “My Glutenacious Life”?
Continue to grow and helping celiacs through my experiences, to make it easier to navigate when looking for an alternative gluten-free, especially while traveling. I hope it is a meeting place to exchange views and experiences.
What kind of topics are popularly visited in “My Glutenacious Life”?
As the core content is travel and food, the truth is there is very little variation, everyone likes both. It seems that the issues of travel and cuisine are very popular and important for celiacs.
When we go to “My Glutenacious Life” what draws attention to the quality of the photographs that accompany the posts? Do you
take a long time to enhance the image?
Thank you! All work takes preparation time back, but could not say if I spend a lot of time on one specific thing because I do it with pleasure; although I do not consider myself an expert, I always liked photography. In addition, as I mentioned before, to illustrate the words with an image it is very important, because it is not the same narrative without something visual to show; with an image the words come alive.
Do you provide your body and soul to “My Glutenacious Life” or do you combine it with other work?
My Glutenacious Life is very important to me that I dedicate much time to weekly projects but I have other responsibilities that I have to spend time on, so, according to the dates and circumstances, I can update more or less frequently.
As a celiac, what is the biggest difficulty you have encountered in your daily life?
Misunderstanding and lack of information, both present in restaurants and everyday life. It’s sad, but there are still people who believe that this is a fad or a trend that we continue to attract attention to, even to make you feel like a freak for this “strange” diet that you must follow or picky because “for some crumbs nothing happens. ” With regard to facilities, for me it is important to feel confident that they will take care of my food properly. With the new regulations to label products and the indication of allergenic products, gives the impression that you can go to any bar or restaurant, but you find that in many cases you do not really know how they handle products, especially to avoid cross-contamination, which is the biggest struggle people encounter. It is for this reason that I created My Glutenacious Life, in order to have the experience in the first person, and so projects like CeliCity are important to give value not only to the celiac community but also to recognize the work of those places that take gluten-free preparation seriously.
What trip / destination was most difficult to find gluten-free options?
I think it’s a topic among celiac, but in my experience so far, France is not exactly a place where it is easy to find gluten-free offer. However, it is not as bad as it looks (at least in Paris); I saw that while the supply has increased and there are many more sites than expected.
What motivates you to continue creating content?
The comments of the people, of course. All of them encourage me to continue with the project because it is a very good idea and are finding it very useful both for daily life and for future trips. That is precisely the purpose for which I started, to offer support and guidance that I missed at the time, so getting these comments support is a very good sign that we are on the right track.
You know Celicity? What do you think of our work?
I recently recommended the (non-celiac friends who thought it would be helpful to plan trips) and the truth is that it seems to be a fantastic idea. I wish I had known of it before! Sure it would have been very useful to prepare for travel, or simply discover new restaurants close to home I did not know.
What do you expect from this new collaboration with Celicity?
CeliCity unifies the community and helps the celiac to find places to go to eat; we can all contribute to enjoy this new life without gluten.Well, we hope so, sure this collaboration is looming and very enriching for everyone!
And as usual, remember that you can locate gluten-free sites worldwide in our app CeliCity, that can be downloaded in both the App Store and Google Play.
