For a long stretch of my life, my own body was a puzzle I couldn't solve. I was constantly tired, foggy, and bloated. No matter what I ate, I couldn't put on weight — I was stuck at around 150 lbs at 6'1", which on my frame meant looking and feeling perpetually run down. I did everything you're "supposed" to do and still felt like something was quietly working against me. It turned out something was: I have celiac disease, and for years I had no idea how much it was stealing from me.
What finally changed things wasn't a miracle supplement or a new prescription. It was tracking — writing down every single thing I ate and every workout I did, day after day, until the patterns I couldn't see in the moment became impossible to ignore. This is the story of how that habit took me from 150 to 200 lbs of healthy, functional weight, and why I think it's one of the most powerful tools available to anyone managing a chronic health condition.
I Was Probably a "Silent" Celiac — Until I Wasn't
Here's something a lot of people don't realise: not every celiac gets obvious stomach problems. Some are "silent" celiacs — the autoimmune damage is quietly happening to the gut and the rest of the body, but there are few or no outward physical symptoms to warn you. For years, I believe that was me. The disease was doing its damage under the surface while I carried on with no idea it was there.
What tipped me from silent to symptomatic was stress. During university — studying through COVID, drinking more, and living on processed food — my body was pushed hard enough that the disease finally announced itself with real, physical pain. As miserable as that was, I've come to see it as a strange kind of luck. Silent celiacs can go undiagnosed for decades, quietly accumulating internal damage that drives up the long-term risk of serious complications. Developing symptoms is what forced me to find answers — and getting diagnosed and going gluten-free when I did very likely added years back to my life expectancy.
What Undiagnosed Celiac Was Doing to Me
Once the disease turned symptomatic, it came at me from every direction at once. I lived with horrible acid reflux, constant bowel irregularity, and stabbing pains in my stomach that would show up out of nowhere. I was fatigued all the time, and I kept straining the ligaments in my ankles and wrists — pushing myself too hard in workouts without realising my body couldn't recover or rebuild the way it should. Blood work eventually confirmed a damaged gut lining and genuine malnutrition — my body simply wasn't absorbing what I ate. It wasn't only physical, either. The condition wrecked my mind as much as my body: depression, brutal mood swings, flashes of rage, and severe anxiety that I'd wrongly written off as just "who I was."
Here's the part I still find remarkable: after years of being completely gluten-free, every one of those symptoms has cleared up. The reflux, the bowel problems, the stomach pain, the fatigue, the strained ligaments, the gut damage and malnutrition — gone. And the mental side lifted too; the depression, anxiety, rage, and mood swings I'd assumed were permanent turned out to be, in large part, my body screaming about something it couldn't tolerate. That's how completely a dietary condition can disguise itself as something else entirely.
When Your Own Body Is the Mystery
The hardest part of an autoimmune or dietary condition isn't always the diagnosis — it's the invisibility of it. Celiac disease, Crohn's, ulcerative colitis, IBS, Hashimoto's, food intolerances: these conditions rarely give you a clean, immediate signal. You eat something on Monday and feel wrecked on Wednesday. One day a food seems fine; the next it flattens you. Cause and effect get separated by hours or days, and your memory quietly fills the gaps with guesses.
Before I started tracking, I was managing my health on vibes and hunches. I thought I knew what bothered me. I was wrong about a lot of it. When symptoms are delayed and variable, the human brain is genuinely bad at connecting the dots — we remember the dramatic days and forget the ordinary ones. That's exactly the kind of problem data is built to solve.
Why Tracking Changes Everything for Chronic Illness
Here's the core idea: you can't manage what you don't measure. When you log your food and your training consistently, you stop relying on memory and start working with evidence. Over a few weeks, a food log turns a fog of "I don't feel great lately" into something specific — a timeline you can actually read.
For someone with a dietary condition, that timeline is everything. It's how you run a real elimination process instead of a vague one. It's how you catch the subtle triggers — the cross-contamination, the "gluten-free" product that isn't really, the ingredient hiding under a name you didn't recognize. Tracking gave my doctor and me something concrete to look at instead of me shrugging and saying "I guess I feel off sometimes."
How I Found My Triggers
Once I committed to logging everything — not just the meals I was proud of, but the snacks, the sauces, the "one bite" of something — the picture sharpened fast. I paired each day's food log with a quick note on how I felt: energy, digestion, sleep, mood. Within a few weeks the correlations jumped out. Certain "safe" foods weren't safe. Days that followed hidden gluten exposure lined up almost perfectly with the days I felt destroyed.
That's the part I want people with celiac or any food sensitivity to hear: the trigger you're missing is often something you'd swear was fine. Without a written record, I never would have caught mine. With one, the pattern was right there in black and white.
Gluten Hides Where You'd Never Think to Look
One of the biggest lessons was that going gluten-free isn't just about avoiding bread and pasta. Gluten turns up in places most people never consider — and for someone with celiac, even a trace is enough to trigger a reaction. I found it hiding in toothpaste and shampoos, in oat products (oats are naturally gluten-free but are almost always cross-contaminated during processing), and — most frustrating of all — in plenty of items labelled "gluten-free" without any certification to actually back the claim up. An uncertified label is a guess; a certified one is a guarantee. Logging everything I ate and used was the only reliable way to catch these hidden sources.
Eating out is its own minefield. The hard truth is that most restaurants are not truly gluten-free, no matter how accommodating the menu sounds. Genuine safety takes a completely dedicated gluten-free kitchen and highly trained, knowledgeable staff who actually understand cross-contamination — a shared fryer, a shared cutting board, or flour drifting in the air is all it takes to make you sick. Two places I came to trust and frequented are Annie's Seafood in Stratford and Riz 100% Gluten Free in Toronto — kitchens that take it seriously enough that I could eat without paying for it for days afterward. When you find spots like that, you hold onto them.
From 150 to 200: Rebuilding a Body That Couldn't Absorb Nutrients
Undiagnosed celiac disease doesn't just make you feel bad — it damages the gut lining and wrecks your ability to absorb nutrients. I could eat and eat and still not gain, because my body wasn't actually getting what I was putting into it. Being underweight wasn't a willpower problem; it was a malabsorption problem.
Once I cut out my triggers and my gut started to heal, tracking flipped from a diagnostic tool into a building tool. I used it to make sure I was finally eating enough — hitting real calorie and protein targets every day instead of guessing — and to log my training so I could see strength and body weight climbing week over week. That combination, clean nutrition my body could finally absorb plus consistent, tracked strength work, is what carried me from 150 to 200 lbs. Not water weight, not a crash bulk — 50 pounds of healthy, hard-won progress built on data.
It's Not Just Celiac
My condition is celiac, but the approach isn't specific to it. If you're living with an autoimmune disease or any condition where diet and symptoms are tangled together, the same logic applies. People managing Crohn's and ulcerative colitis use food logs to map flare triggers. People with IBS use them to pin down FODMAP culprits. People with Hashimoto's or other thyroid conditions track how energy tracks with food and training. People with type 2 diabetes track how meals move their blood sugar. In every case, the win is the same: you replace guesswork with a personal dataset that's true for your body — not a generic body in a textbook.
Chronic conditions are individual. What flares one person leaves another untouched. That's precisely why your own tracked history is worth more than any one-size-fits-all rule.
How to Start Tracking With a Chronic Condition
You don't need to be perfect — you need to be consistent. A few things that made the difference for me:
Log everything, including the small stuff. The hidden triggers live in the bites you'd normally not bother recording. Sauces, seasonings, "just a taste" — write it down.
Track how you feel, not just what you ate. A one-line daily note on energy, digestion, and sleep is what turns a food log into a symptom map you can actually learn from.
Give it time. With delayed reactions, a single day tells you little. A few weeks of honest logging reveals patterns that no single day ever could.
Bring the data to your doctor. A real record of your intake and symptoms makes every appointment more productive and helps a professional guide you far better than "I think some foods bother me."
The Tool That Made It Sustainable
I built the tracking habit long before it was easy — and honestly, the friction is why a lot of people quit. That experience is a big part of why CrossTrainer exists. Logging your food, nutrition, and workouts in one place, with a database of millions of foods and a simple way to note how each day felt, turns "I should probably track this" into something you'll actually keep up. For a chronic condition, that consistency isn't a nice-to-have — it's the whole game.
If your health feels like a mystery you can't crack, start writing it down. The answers you're looking for are often already happening in your day — you just have to make them visible. Tracking gave me my energy, my strength, and 50 pounds of my life back. It can do the same kind of work for you.
This article shares my personal experience and is for education and awareness only — it is not medical advice. Celiac disease and other autoimmune and chronic conditions require diagnosis and care from a qualified healthcare professional. Always work with your doctor before making significant changes to your diet or training.