The White Flag of Surrender

I'm officially stepping away from the rotation diet. While it was useful, it was so much work that I could hardly handle it. Especially after Walker stopped sleeping suddenly and we all came down with the stomach flu. There was a night over the weekend when, after holding a screaming baby for 2 hours, waiting for him to fall asleep, I literally stumbled into the kitchen and cooked for 2 more hours so that we could have a picnic lunch at the zoo the next day. Because Walker woke up around 4 the next morning, I didn't get more than 5 hours of sleep that night. Totally not worth it, especially after it happened several nights in a row.

I did learn some valuable things in the short time we were following the rotation. I clearly need to do some eliminations and reintroductions for Walker. I was surprised that Ally didn't visibly react to anything, though she also refused to eat for much of the rotation. The entire time she wanted junk food, and I can't tell if this was a detox reaction or if was stress from starting school. I haven't been on a scale, but I'm sure I gained significant weight on the diet. We wound up eating alot of grains, which are healthy but not at all what my body needs to be its best.

On the rotation, I noticed how our limited diet restricts the variety that we consume. I think I do a good job of including a wide variety of foods, especially fruits and vegetables, in my family's diet, though coming up with the variety required by a rotation diet was very, very difficult. The rotation magnified the way in which I tend to reach for the same safe, reliable foods that my children like over and over again. From a nutritional standpoint, I find this disturbing.

Two, eating a completely whole-foods diet is incredibly difficult. By whole-foods, I mean including no processed foods in our diet. I was, again, amazed by the amount of processed foods we eat, even though they are all gluten/dairy/soy free, mostly organic, and mostly things I could make myself if I had the time. Cutting these things our entirely was incredibly difficult, and the amount of associated cooking and food prep to provide my children with a basic, complete diet every day was nearly impossible.

A-Ha!

We've had he first a-ha moment of this rotation diet. Walker reacted to something we ate yesterday. I should have figured it out last night, when it took him 2 hours to fall asleep. He would drift off, sleep for about 1 minute, jerk and wake himself awake, screaming bloody murder. Over and over again for 2 hours. It was hell.

This is how Ally used to sleep. For her first 2 years, she literally never slept without my hand on her body. That drifting off/waking screaming pattern literally lasted all night for several months before I finally eliminated dairy from her diet (she was around 20 months old). I was so tired from taking care of her in the middle of the night that I could barely function.

The brain is a wonderful thing, the way it protects us from prior unpleasantness. I had literally blanked out much of her sleeplessness until I saw it in her brother last night. I didn't recognize it for what it was right away, but when I looked at Walker this morning and saw his face, I knew immediately. I couldn't even call them allergic shiners--it was more like dark caverns running down his face. And a few hours later, he had diarrhea.

This is the rotation diet working: his overall allergic response has been toned down enough that we can see the things that are bothering him more clearly. It's how I identified Ally's problem with soy and citrus. Now the detective work begins. The major suspects from yesterday are chicken and corn. Corn is a common allergen and there is a history of meat allergies in Peter's family, so it could be either.

I'm praying that it's corn, because that's easy for us to cut out. We could live without chicken, too, though homemade chicken bone broth is a major source of bone-building minerals in our diet, which would make losing it a big issue in our dairy-free household.

Resistance

The children and I need to go on a rotation diet. I've known this for several months now, and have been putting it off. Isn't that ridiculous? Knowing what you need to do to be healthy, and then not doing it? It's a major issue for me.

In our family, we already eliminate (except for occasional cheating) the gluten, dairy, and soy that I know is harmful to me and my children. Many people with food allergies also find that it's helpful to rotate other common allergens (or, for some people, all of the foods that they eat): if you eat a food one day, you don't eat that food again for the following 3 days. The idea is to lower the overall allergic response in your body by not allowing problematic foods to continuously irritate your system.

Ally and I used a rotation diet for two months in 2007, and it was the best I have felt in years. I lost major weight and had energy to spare. Ally's allergy symptoms, which persisted despite a strict elimination, were almost entirely healed by the rotation, and we identified several other allergies that I didn't know about before. I felt so good that I got pregnant again, almost two years ago from today.

Unfortunately, I also have vivid memories of standing in my kitchen and crying almost every day of that diet. It was so hard. Having to restrict our intake so severely, making everything that we eat every day from scratch, not being able to rely on leftovers for the next day's meal . . . it is hard, hard, hard! So I've been resisting, for months now.

But I can't anymore. Ally's been having headaches (one of my most acute allergy symptoms) off and on all summer. Walker's allergic shiners just won't clear up, he's dealing with bowel discomfort, and the quality and consistency of his sleep is really deteriorating. And I feel like total crap. All day every day, sort of a cross between having the flu and being sore after a hard workout--even though neither is true. So now I'm going to stop writing, go sit in a hot Epsom salt bath, and do some menu planning. And sigh--I just sighed out loud. Luckily, I know this time the work is worth it.

Allergic Shiners

I wasn't planning to go in this direction so soon, but Walker gave me such a great opening this weekend I had to take it.

About a month ago, I took Walker (who is almost 15 mos) to the doctor with his third respiratory infection in the last 6 months. (Man, how many prepositional phrases can I get into one sentence? Jeez!) We had a chat about the likelihood that he may be developing asthma, how an increase in the histamine response in his gut (due to untreated food allergies) could increase his histamine response elsewhere, like in his lungs.

That was the final straw. I had been resisting the idea that he was food allergic, but this conversation, combined with the all-day crank-a-thon that had been our lives for several months, continual runny bowel movements, and poor eating just pushed me over the edge. We took him off dairy and became more vigilant about abstaining from gluten. Within a week, the daylong “waaahhhh” that had been grating on me all day every day for months had stopped. He’s eating more and stopped gagging on his food (which he had been doing several times per day). What an improvement!

This picture doesn’t quite do justice to what his face looked like Saturday morning, as though someone punched him in both eyes. No, nobody’s hitting kids around here. That’s what he looks like after the aforementioned junk food eating extravaganza. And he only had little bites of stuff here and there! This is one of the amazing blessings about having food-allergic children: their sensitive bodies so easily betray that which is malfunctioning inside of them.