the diet

Julie - posted on 12/05/2008

I had two with autism, one who would eat anything and the other who ate nothing. I posted on another question once before that the first thing I did when I started the diet was to buy GFCF junk food. A few days later my younger one would eat a few other items, but for a while we were limited to potato chips, french fries, popcorn, ham roll up, pancakes, and bananas. Notice they were almost all beige. I would say a little more than a year into the diet he started eating other things. I won't say it was not tough at first, but for us it was worth the investment in time and money.

Now, after being on the diet for almost 7 years, he eats a very well rounded diet. An example dinner is organic ground pork cooked with organic onion and garlic, organic broccoli, and organic quinoa. Quinoa is a super food that has been a real hit in our family! I really try to keep it simple, homemade, and to what extent I can afford it, organic. Also, last year I turned my whole kitchen GFCF. It is cheaper if we all eat the same diet and take less of my time.

I recently looked back through old notes pre-diet. Until I took out milk, about all he ate was cheese (we called him cheese-boy). After the dairy was gone, there were many days when all he would eat would be a cup or two of cheerios. His diet now is so much better.

One of the new things we are doing are green smoothies (although ours look more purple). I blend together 3/4 cup strawberries, 3/4 cup blueberries, 2 bananas, about 6 oz of baby spinach and 2 cups of water. It is absolutely yummy, and until they started helping me make it, they never knew it had spinach in it.

Please feel free to send me a message and I can let you know more about what we do. For us the diet has been amazing. 10 months of intensive therapy pre-diet got us nowhere. Also, check out TACA now. They have a good page about the diet.

Sorry if this sounds disjointed - I hate that I can only see a few lines while typing.

Good luck!
Julie

Jenny - posted on 12/05/2008

Hang in there Cristina. My son is 6 years old and has always had food issues and very picky eater. But he knows what I make is what is for dinner, and some nights he stuck to his guns that he wasn't touching a particular food on his plate. But he knows if the plate isn't clean than no dessert, so it's his choice. I started him on the GF diet at the end of august and we have had less battles not just over food but everything in general so we have noticed a difference. I really haven't "changed" his diet so much, just have gotten good at swap outs. Cereal is the hardest, not much is that nutritious but he is happy when he has at least 3 choices and he knows he can always ask for pancakes/waffles which we make GF. His biggest texture issue is with meat.. really hates it is his mouth. But we have made a deal that he needs to eat the amount that I cut up into small pieces on plate than that's all he has to eat. Granted it probably is only about a tablespoon but at least its some protein going down. A friend of mine son used to only eat like 3 things .. pizza, Doritos, and one other thing, after he went to OT for sensory disorder he has done so much better and started trying new foods on his own. All of this is difficult and know you are not alone.. I think all of us have wanted to pull our hair out at some point. So know you have other moms behind you and take one baby step at a time. :)

Kerry - posted on 12/05/2008

hello cristina, hang in there, I am sure a lot of successfully dieted parents had a hard time with introduction of new ideas/foods, especially if the child was older than around 3. I think that up to around 3 the more you experiment with food and give new tastes and smells, the bigger the childs food repetior sp? will be.
My children all eat any vegetable i gove them at dinner time, many of my friends are shocked when they see the kids go crazy for squash, choko and the like. I tell them that i always just gave the food to the kids on the plate without any comment, they didnt know that i didnt eat them, i just didnt put it on my plate. I think that if you let them know you dont like it or ar hesitant about it, they wont try. My 13 yo even wanted to 'have a go' at eggplant, so i cooked it for her (that one she did NOT like). So i just made it ordinary and said ok then if you dont like it i wont get it when i do the grocerys. Then she pipes up and asks for gold squash.!
GFCF was not around, or i hadnt heard of it when my children were small, we did try the diet of the time (finegold) on my oldest son when he was around 7 yo. I had the sheet pinned on the fridge and one day it dissapeared. My son looked at me at dinner time and said "im not on a diet anymore cause i ripped it up". So that was not a successful try. I did keep an eye out for trigger foods and found that if i kept amounts to a small portion, it would not effect him, but once you go over a certain amount in combination, there is a reaction. So i still to this day will give him 4 squares of chocolate and there is no reaction.
The triggers for my son such as beetroot, oranges, red cordials, i never buy in the grocery, so if he dont have it he cant want it. At family gatherings all relatives knew the triggers and could watch to see he didnt sneak bad foods. When he got to around 18 i would get an occasional tin of beetroot for his hamburgers, but by then he knew he could not eat it without a reaction, so he allows himself ONE slice.
So even without the fancy diets, patience and pereverance and a little creative shopping can reduce reactions. So stick to your plan and perevere.
My son was also tactile with food and wanted things like pizza with no cheese. :O i made it for him once, he decided himself that pizza was not right without cheese. He also could not touch minced meat, which was hard on the rest of us because of our love for spaghetti bolignaise. AHA this one i got inventive on. I made the spag bol sauce cooked the spag and then mixed it together, this i put into a casserole dish and made cheese sauce (lasagne style) for on the top, cooked for another half an hour and called it spaghetti lasagne. The kids luv it, and tactile sensitve boy eats it with no problem. After a few years i could do ordinary spag bol and he would eat it.
The specialist tells me that the gagging is an actual physical reaction so he suggested finding ways around arguing with him that he should eat something because i say so. He made his own decisions in his own time. He one day said to me about the spag bol, why do you make spag bol all the time mum you know i cant eat it. so i told him the truth, because mummy luvs it and could eat it everyday. he seemed to take that answer in, and made more effort.
In our house we must have square bread, unbroken biscuits, no fruit cakes, and thats just because mum doesnt like it when the bread isnt square. If a biscuit is broken then none of my 3 autys will touch them.
My gilr autuy 14 will not eat rice or anything that looks like its usual accompanying food is rice. The closest we can figure this out to is that she doesnt like the smell of rice, and the texture makes her gag.
So cristina its a long hard trip, its something you learn over time so keep up the good work it will be worth it in the end.

Karen - posted on 12/05/2008

Just asking, what diet are you trying to put him on to?
I've done the GF and CF diet for a good few years and it really has made a very big difference.
For us, it's been a case of, he doesn't have to eat everything, just some things, and try... and if he 'can't' and we aren't coping... it's ok, the world will not end, and we try again later.

The biggest result we found was taking him off dairy all together, then 2 weeks later we gave him and icecream as a reward for good behavior, and he literally went into his room and under his bed for 4 days... he didn't cope, it obviously triggered something - this was around 6 years ago now and today his system copes much better, it was hard, but worth it for the attention and capacity to 'be' with us. Today we are miuch more lax... when I started though I was 100% for 2 months, then fell over, so aimed for 80% plus, and that helped my sanity.

No clue if any of this helps, but yes, others go through this to some extent, and over time it changes... so don't pull your hair out about popcorn today., because in a year that may be all he eats for breakfast :)