Month 17

February 2009

Food trials keep failing. One after another after another... and we rarely get to add another food to our limited diet. I made a huge decision this month to do something different.

I have made the decision to no longer be afraid of food.

That might sound silly to some, or obvious to others. But food has been THE focus of my life over the past year, and each food reaction is just a little more stress added to my mental load. Another concern is that because we've been eating such a limited diet, 1) we could create new sensitivities by eating the same thing over and over, and 2) we are not getting an adequate variety of vitamins and minerals.

So- the new plan is:
Every day I go to the grocery store and pick out a food that we either haven't eaten in a long time, or have never eaten (this started out as a plan to get a new food once or twice a week, but I got so excited about the idea it turned into every day.) I buy enough for the family to eat for one meal, and that's it. We eat it one time only. The premise is this - by eating foods only one time, you should be able to avoid allergic reactions. The first time you eat a food, an antibody is created so that the next time you eat it, it can attack. Well, if you never eat it again, your body never 'attacks' (reacts). Besides avoiding reactions, I'm hoping that rotating in new foods will give us the boost of extra nutrition that we need for healing. Oh- I've also added a zinc supplement and liquid magnesium supplement (yuck!) to my diet. Next, I'm hoping to add some B vitamins and folic acid, as those contribute to healing and detoxifying the body.

So far this month, we've tried:

• canned pears (which had previously caused a reaction, but I hadn't eaten in 6+ months)
• fresh garlic
• rutabaga (I had never eaten before!)
• kale (also never eaten)
• mandarin orange
• mango

DD has enjoyed every one, even the garlic. :) She has actually had a few mild reactions though, which was quite surprising because as I mentioned above, this shouldn't be physically possible according to all food allergy rules. Which means that we're also dealing with food chemical sensitivities (see Types of Allergies- I added a brief section about this). Recent discussion on my favorite forum (mothering dot community) has been about detox pathways in the body: how/why they get blocked, what effects that has, how to fix them. I've only started my research and my head is already spinning. But I'm hoping to catch up to the brilliant minds there and start clearing our detox pathways, which *should* help get rid of the food intolerances and chemical sensitivities (but not the IgE allergies.)

Oh- I almost forgot to mention that I finally finished reading Healing the New Childhood Epidemics by Dr. Kenneth Bock. I added some notes in the Books section, but I wanted to mention here too that it is really an amazing book. Very well written- some tearjerking stories, and good information about the how's and why's of food allergies (and asthma, autism, and ADHD.) I highly recommend it!! The book also talks a lot about methylation (which is one of the above mentioned detox pathways), which makes it even more important for me to start my research on fixing our detox pathways!