Cooking dinner in my house is about as stressful as putting together two pieces of flat-pack Ikea furniture hung over, with my husband, on a deadline, with the kids milling about.
And the sad part is I used to love to cook.
Currently we have four people and four different diets going at my house. I am
Paleo, my husband is dairy free, my 13 year old daughter eats healthy stuff at home and buys junk food with her allowance whenever she gets a chance, and my son is everything free.
You would be right to ask the following questions;
Is this woman out of her mind?
Everything free? Is that even a diet?
Why don’t you just do the same thing for everyone?
No wonder you don’t want to walk into the kitchen, I’d be running out of the house.
Honestly I’ve read so much about food over the last few years I’ve lost my appetite. Food used to be about families coming together at the table, nourishing themselves and then getting on with their lives.
Now you need to hit three different grocery stores regularly to feed a family like mine. A hugely disproportionate amount of income gets spent avoiding things in food like; GMO’s in everything, rGBH in milk, artificial colors and preservatives in snacks, and pesticides all over our fruits and vegetables.
It’s now sexy to talk about what is ‘NOT’ in something. Look at the labels screaming “gluten free”, “no soy”, “rGBH free”!
When my son started pre-school his teacher said to me, “Stop telling me what he can’t have and tell me something he can eat.” That was six years ago and we’re still trying to figure that out. Over the years we have had to eliminate gluten, dairy, soy, corn, potato, and all preservatives particularly MSG. We have had to pay attention to oxalates, phenols and salicylates (green grapes – I shudder at the tantrum memories seared across my brain) and of course not letting the sugar intake creep up. At times he has been grain free and we realized he needed more carbohydrates. At other times his diet has contained too much meat and his ammonia level has skyrocketed. As his gut heals, his diet widens, but man, what a tedious learning curve this has been.
If you’d told me in my twenties that as a mom I would be considering buying Camel’s milk, thinking about purchasing a food dehydrator, weighing the advantages of splitting an Amish Cow with another family, or reading about the benefits of fermentation I would have said you’ve got the wrong girl.
But life throws things at you that you don’t see coming and back in those days we didn’t have a clue how much our son’s autism was related to his gut or how foundational food would be to his healing.
But food sensitivities don’t just belong to the autism community do they? Many other childhood behavioral issues may be related to a poorly functioning digestive system or poor diet. Many of the chronic and auto-immune illnesses becoming so rampant in our culture today are greatly helped with nutritional intervention.
So The Thinking Moms’ Revolution is teaming with Fearless Parent to co-host an event in Cranford, NJ on Saturday May 3rd that is all about food!
This event is chock full of information and guidance on what to feed your families, what to avoid, how to get the good food into your picky kids and on a budget. There will be a Round Robin Question and Answer Panel comprised of seven health coaches and moderated by Laura Lagano, MS,RD,CDN and Geri Brewster, RD,MPH, CDN with decades of nutrition experience.
This panel is followed by five phenomenal speakers including Holistic Psychiatrist and Medical Director of Fearless Parent, Kelly Brogan, MD, Sayer Ji the founder of GreenMedinfo, Jennifer Fugo creator of The Gluten Free School and author of the The Savvy Gluten Free Shopper: How To Eat Healthy Without Breaking The Bank, Camille Miller, the Executive Director of NOFA-NJ, the Northeast Organic Famer’s Association, and Louise Kuo Habakus who many of you know from her health advocacy work. She is the Executive Director of Fearless Parent, Co-host of Fearless Parent Radio and runs the non-profit Center for Personal Rights.
The event is packed with exhibitors, samples, and our sponsors are sending you home with goody bags loaded with even more good stuff.
I really hope you’ll join us for this very exciting event. I will be there, bringing up the caboose on the Health Coach Panel, as a parent who’s learned a few tricks and shortcuts over the years in making food changes with my kids.
I’m also hoping I might find my kitchen mojo again and fall back in love with cooking.
So come hang with a bunch of the TMR’s, the Fearless Parent team, and our powerful speakers. Let’s learn from each other about what the heck to make for dinner!
You can register for the event right here: http://fearlessparent.org/event/5314-stirring-the-pot-how-food-makes-us-sick-keeps-us-well-drives-us-crazy/
See you on May 3rd in Cranford!
Alison MacNeil
Wow. Sounds like a job for RBTI. That’s what freed us from food issues and ASD, both. And I can relate. It sucks.
There’s a family here that has FOUR children with eosinophilia (allergy to all foods). Meal preparation is easy for them, though expensive. The children eat nothing but gruel made from hypoallergenic formula. The two girls often refuse to eat it. It tastes awful. On special occasions the children are given food coloring to mix into it to make it look more appealing (not). They undoubtedly reacted to vaccines by becoming sensitized to EVERYTHING.
Does a meat-heavy diet raise ammonia levels? My son is allergic to everything with the exception of chicken, beef and lamb…we give him rice (low-level allergy) with his meat and he can eat a few veggies and fruits, but meat is the foundation of his diet since he doesn’t react to it.
It can. Generally, children cannot fully digest meat, but when digestion is weakened by toxin-induced liver damage, it is a much worse problem. Those blood urea levels cause heart stress from over-exertion because the blood gets too thick. Vitamin E helps.
Sad that eating healthfully nowadays almost necessitates a computer algorithm.
Oh how I remember the days when meal planning was simple and easy! Now, I dread it. Especially with a husband who does not see the value of special diets and how foods contribute to behavior.