Q&A: Why Cooking Is the Best Form of Self-Care
An interview with Christi Flaherty, founder of Real Food Sanity, on the joys of gluten-free cooking
Wherever you are in your gluten-free journey, chances are you do a fair bit of cooking for yourself at home. After all, celiac disease specifically can limit where you’re able to dine out due to the cross-contact risks.
Since I was diagnosed with celiac disease four years ago, I’ve swung back and forth between enjoying the act of cooking and thinking of it as a chore I’m unfairly stuck doing because I don’t have other options.
A few months ago, I connected with (the founder of Real Food Sanity) here on Substack—and I instantly fell in love with her approach to cooking as a form of self-care.
Reading her thoughts on cooking has helped me reframe my own relationship to this activity and reminded me that food has the power to nourish and heal the body (quite literally in the case of celiac disease since the only treatment is adhering to a gluten-free lifestyle!).
In her newsletter, Christi shares gluten-free, dairy-free, and soy-free recipes made with real ingredients (not packaged foods); tips for how to make cooking a self-care ritual; personal stories about food and the people who create, grow, and raise it; and her favorite product finds.
Plus, she just launched a weekly meal plan for paid subscribers. Each week you’ll get a PDF containing four meal plans based on two budget-friendly proteins, gluten-free recipes made with real, unprocessed ingredients, a full shopping list, and a component meal prep guide to help you get a head start on your cooking.
Check it out here:
It was a pleasure to interview Christi recently about her career as a private chef, her gluten-free journey, and her tips for gluten-free cooking. Read the full Q&A below!
Q: Tell me about your career as a chef.
A: I've been a private chef for around 20 years. I got started because I knew I wanted to cook for a living. I got my degree, did the whole corporate thing, and hated it. I love to cook and realized one day that's really what I wanted to do with my life.
I had just had my first child, so there was no chance I was going into the restaurant industry. So, I started getting out there and cooking for families and making my own path.
After a year of that, we took this crazy dive and moved to Napa Valley. We had no home or job but decided to go for it. I worked for families out there and did cooking classes. I also did some wine dinners for different winery owners and winemakers since my husband found work in the industry. After six years, we came back to Texas and I kept doing those things for families and individuals here.
One of the first families I had cooked for called me one day, and I had their meals all ready to take to them. They said, “Hey, we just found out one of our really good friends has brain cancer. Can you take your meals to her?”
I then ended up cooking for that family full-time. That family kept referring me to people who had either chronic or terminal illnesses. I knew instinctively because of my journey with gluten intolerance that food can be a medicine—and just as much as it can harm our bodies if we're eating the wrong things, it can heal our bodies if we’re eating the right things. I just didn't know exactly why.
People kept coming to me for that, so that became my thing. I went back to school to become a holistic nutritionist because I needed to know the why behind this. I got my board certification in 2020—so at one time or another in the last four years, I’ve either been a health coach, a private chef, or a combination of the two.
My clients almost always come to me because they can’t eat gluten or dairy. I’ve had a ton of people with Hashimoto’s, for example. Sometimes I cook for them, but more importantly, my role has become helping them know how to cook for themselves.
Q: When did you find out you were gluten intolerant—and how did that play a role in your professional journey?
A: It was early on. I started doing cooking classes and working as a private chef around 2003. Then around 2006 or 2007, I had a couple of doctors tell me to get off gluten, but I didn’t even know what that meant. I was in the culinary field, but I’d never heard that term.
They were telling me to stick to quinoa and rice. It didn’t make any sense to me. I didn’t understand why gluten was bad for me. The doctors just said I didn’t need it. Of course, without knowing the why, it’s hard to do the right thing—so I went on with my life. And on top of that, this was about the time I moved to Napa Valley, which is the land of bread and wine.
The last thing on my mind was not eating gluten. It was in 2008, a year after we moved to Napa, that I went to a third doctor, a naturopath, and she said, “You don’t need to eat gluten.” She sat with me for an hour—not 10 minutes—and explained why.
The third time around, I finally realized that something was wrong with my body that was going to be fixed if I could get this out of my system. I left her office and went to Whole Foods, which was right down the street, and wandered up and down the aisles crying. All I could think was, “What does my life look like now?”
It was a really big thing because then I had to figure it out. Since I’m a chef, I wasn’t going to not eat the things I love. I know that a lot of times, people just eat the same few “safe” things, like chicken and rice, because they don’t know what to do.
It became a quest for me to figure out how to make the things I love without using gluten. So I began creating gluten-free recipes. I’ve had a blog since about 2005, so I posted my recipes on there. I’ve continued to post recipes over the years on various blogs but have now landed on Substack and all the recipes and meal plans I create are published here.
I try to be inclusive because I know not everybody cooks gluten-free. What I try to do is help people, in general, learn how to cook for themselves and do real food.
That’s why I called my Substack and my website Real Food Sanity. I feel like if you can eat real food, it can help with a lot of your health issues. All of my recipes are gluten-free and soy-free, and some of them are also dairy-free.
Q: As a chef, what foods or ingredients were you surprised to learn had gluten in them?
A: Sauces can have gluten in them. I’m a big sauce girl—I can never have enough sauce. I started looking at labels, going, “Why does this have gluten in it?”
I started creating all my own sauce recipes so I didn’t have to worry about that. I offer a weekly meal plan to my paid Substack subscribers—and one of the biggest things I do is teach people how to get flavor into food without having to worry about gluten.
Soy sauce was another big one. Why is gluten there? It was the biggest deal for me to recognize how many things gluten is in. In restaurants, it’s hard because they put wheat in so many things to thicken them.
There are so many other thickeners out there, so why? I really wish I could do some consulting for restaurants to teach them how to use other things.
Q: I love your approach to cooking as self-care. Sometimes I struggle with this and it feels more like a chore to me. What advice do you have for someone in my situation to help change their mindset?
A: I think the biggest thing to realize is that taking the time to make a meal for yourself is the same thing as taking time to go get a massage or pedicure. If you take time, it’s almost meditative. If you’re eating colorful vegetables or searing a piece of meat, you’re literally using every one of your senses.
If you can begin to see it more as a meditative activity than a chore, then it becomes self-care. And not only that but if you’ve got a family, you’re caring for them as well.
Then they begin to see that you’re taking this time to cook a meal—whether it’s for your family, friends, significant other, or whoever it is—you’re taking that time to really put things together to make something nourishing but also beautiful.
Take the time to use real foods and pay attention to the color, the sounds, the smell, the taste—all of it. I think it comes from my mom because she’s always hated cooking. Growing up, basically everything I ate came out of a can, bag, or box. I had no idea until I started getting out into the world.
When I was in eighth grade, one of my electives was a cooking class, and I chose to make a French meal. I couldn’t believe all of these flavors that I had never seen before. When I started using real food instead of boxes and cans, I thought, “Wow. Food actually tastes good.”
I’m in suburban Texas, and everybody does a thousand things. Nobody sits still. Nobody wants to sit down and eat a meal. That’s something that’s always been important for our family. My boys are now grown—they’re 21 and 25—but it’s still important for them to come home and have a real meal.
So that’s the whole idea. I think it’s because cooking is something that actually touches our bodies, souls, and spirits—as opposed to cleaning the bathroom or doing the dishes, which are things that have to be done.
Cooking is something that has always connected people—and honestly, I think that may be the root of it. It’s something that pulls people together. Food is meant to be a connecting point.
Q: What cooking advice do you have for someone new to the gluten-free lifestyle?
A: I see this a lot in the online groups I’m a part of, where people ask what to cook because they’re gluten-free. Everything in the produce section is gluten-free. All meats—so long as they’re not marinated—are gluten-free.
If you’re eating real food, it’s going to be gluten-free. So my biggest tip is to eat real food. If you can steer clear of boxes, bags, and prepared foods, you’re going to steer clear of gluten.
When you get into sauces and prepackaged items that have a ton of ingredients, that’s where you may find gluten. That’s why my second point is learning how to read a label. If you see more than five ingredients, then there’s a good chance you’re going to find gluten in there somewhere. It has so many different forms.
My third tip would be to try to get your family and friends on board and help them understand why you have to do this. If it’s a celiac diagnosis especially, let them know—get them to understand what it can do to your body. Explain how important it is to you and your long-term health—people can understand that.
With silent symptoms, it’s harder to explain because you’re not doubled over with pain—but it’s still going to affect your health. So talk to your friends and family. Like I said earlier, my whole mentality is around food connecting people. If you’re having to do your own thing by yourself, you’re not having that connection point.
Check out a few of Christi’s most popular gluten-free recipes and meal ideas
5 Simple Ingredients You Already Have to Make You a Better Cook
6 Homemade Salad Dressings to Make You Forget Bottled Dressings Forever
Want more gluten-free recipes? Make sure to follow Christi on Instagram and subscribe to her newsletter. She recently launched a weekly meal plan for paid subscribers, which is worth checking out for gluten-free meal inspiration!
It was an honor to be on your Substack. Thanks so much!
It really is! Fantastic!!