What would you do if you had to say goodbye to gluten? You know, the elastic protein that binds most of your favorite starches like bread, pizza and pasta?

Shauna James Ahern, author of The Gluten-Free Girl, was faced with that question three years ago when she was diagnosed with Celiac Disease.

"People assume I can't have any joyfulness about food because, you know, I constantly must be thinking of what I can't have. I just don't," she said.

Nope. Shauna thinks about the foods that don't have gluten.

"This morning I had roasted potatoes with lemon and rosemary and some beautiful chicken sausage and some eggs over-easy. For lunch I had a gluten-free pasta with slow-sauteed leeks that had caramelized with prosciutto on top and then hedgehog mushrooms and balsamic vinegar and fresh mozzarella."

Shauna found out she had Celiac Disease after months of feeling sick.

"I had no energy. I had migraine headaches all day long. I had to sleep 18 hours a day. I hadn't even eaten hot food in two months because it was just too much to even do anything other than grab a handful of bread, you know?"

Doctors couldn't diagnose her, so she figured she would just have to learn to live with it.

"And then a friend of mine called me and she had heard a piece on the radio about Celiac Disease and said 'I think this is what you have,' and I Googled my own diagnosis and thought, 'that's probably true.'"

That's when she went back to the hospital and was finally diagnosed.

"It just felt like freedom. It made sense because there had been so many times in my life that I'd been ill and nobody knew why. And this felt like the thread that ran through my life and I thought, 'finally I know my own story.'"

A blog followed.

"It just came out of this exuberance and this energy of 'Oh my god! Oh my god! I have so much energy now and I feel so well -- I want to tell the world!'"

Then a book deal.What would you do if you had to say goodbye to gluten? You know, the elastic protein that binds most of your favorite starches like bread, pizza and pasta?

"I've been writing all my life. And I always wanted to have a book and have them on the shelves. I just never thought it would a gluten-free memoir," laughs Shauna. "Life is full of surprises."

The former high school English teacher is working on two more books.

"My ultimate goal is that everyone will get diagnosed and there will be so much awareness that I'll never have to write about it again."

Places Shauna likes to Go Eat!: Impromptu (her husband is the chef!), Crush, Palace Kitchen, Lola, Tilth, Green Leaf (minus the soy and fish sauce), Kisaku, Rover's, Harvest Vine.

Shauna's blog:  http://glutenfreegirl.blogspot.com/