Last night I was randomly switching channels and happened upon The Resident on Fox last night. They had a patient that had celiac disease.

I didn’t see the whole episode, but it seems a horse jockey was brought into the ER and had broken his arm. While in the ER they found he had osteopenia as a result of his celiac disease. Then the patient complained of severe and overwhelming pain from an unknown origin. As they were wheeling him into surgery, his wife found a plate of half eaten chocolate chip cookies nearby. The jockey had eaten the cookies. The jockey said that he was eating gluten to continue to keep is weight down so that he could continue to ride horses so his wife would love him.

Okay, let’s talk about how dumb the the idea that eating with celiac can keep your weight down. Eating gluten with celiac also leads to malnutrition, osteopenia, and potentially a devastating cancer. Let’s not even talk about the more immediate Now, in the show they did talk about the malnutrition aspect of continuing to eat gluten with celiac, so they did get it right. But, purposefully eating gluten to keep weight off is just dumb.

Since the name of my blog is “Fat Celiac”, don’t think I haven’t considered it – eating gluten to lose weight. Before diagnosis, I could eat anything and everything and be thinner. It was a lot easier to eat wherever and whatever I wanted. I might have not had much energy, but there are some days I don’t have energy now either. Is this diagnosis all its cracked up to be?

Anyway, I was really happy to see celiac and the long term consequences of the disease portrayed accurately in the media for the first time. Most often we are the butt of jokes or people call it fake. But at least this was a positive and mostly accurate display of the long term consequences of celiac disease.

I am super excited that celiac was portrayed in a relatively realistic way – thanks Fox.