A Tough Decision

I have to tell you that I just did something that literally pained me.  I just deleted many of my recipes from the blog.  And I really, really hated to do it.  Something I haven’t talked about here yet is that I have recently begun baking my Paleo goodies for a local organic grocery store.  It has been great, and the products are literally flying off the shelves.  I don’t want you to think that I took down my recipes because I am trying to force people to buy my food.  I promise that isn’t it.  I am a huge proponent of making your own food (obviously!!).  The issue I am concerned with is that someone else locally will see how successfully the food is selling and attempt to copy it.  That would be so upsetting–it literally turns my stomach to think about it.  So I have removed some of my recipes…..although a majority of them still remain.  I hope to share more with you soon….things that I’m not selling, that are easy to make at home…..when I figure out my new schedule and find some spare time.

In the meantime I do hope you forgive me, and understand.

Firsts

Today I made homemade mayonnaise–lemon dill mayonnaise to be exact.  I’d always heard it was easy, and now I  know that it is.

I also made pretzels.  Again, first time.  Last Friday, my oldest boy had a school friend who was celebrating a birthday.  This friend brought pretzels as a snack to share with the class, which reminded my son how awesome pretzels were.  I didn’t even think paleo pretzels were possible, but I found this recipe and gave it a shot and looky here:

They aren’t perfect by any means, but once I dehydrate them overnight, I think they will achieve crunchy perfection.  And then I think they will be quite amazing.

I also cut up a whole pineapple–a spiky, poky thing that has always intimidated me.  But whole pineapples were on sale for $0.99 at ALDI and I figured….well, now would be a great time to learn.  And it wasn’t hard at all.

Another first for today is kind of funny.  I garnished our dinner.  I’ve never done that before.  I’ve gotten accustomed to pretty food (so have my kids!) and I added a lemon slice to each plate tonight just because it made me feel happy.

I guess where I’m going with this post is that once you take those first timid steps and realize….hey, cutting up a pineapple is no different than cutting up a cantaloupe…..or when you make a new recipe and you nail it……or even when you think of a food combination that sounds tasty and it is….

for instance, this candy bar recipe–which is coming soon to the blog.

….you get confident and suddenly you’re doing something crazy like making pretzels or eating homemade yogurt out of wine glasses—just cause it’s pretty!!

And to think that when I married my husband 10 years ago, the only thing I knew how to make was meatloaf.

Things change and get strange with the movement of time.  It’s happening, right now, to you.–“Down with the Shine” The Avett Brothers

On Embracing It

Last night after I put the boys to bed, I was tired.  My husband was working late, so I had done the afternoon/evening routine alone–including an impromptu Costco trip.  I came downstairs and bypassed the couch, heading instead into the kitchen, where I started started soaking 12 cups of nuts for granola.  Then I rolled out and baked 2 batches of graham crackers and put them in the dehydrator.  And I pureed some cashews to ferment in the dehydrator overnight to turn into sourdough bread today.

I was tired.  And I was kind of headache-y.  I’m not telling you this because I’m trying to be a martyr–I’m not.  I’m telling you this because I surprised myself.  Because within minutes of trudging into the kitchen, I was re-energized.  I was singing along with Mumford and Sons on my ipod, and even dancing a little.  Sure, it could have been the new blonde roast Starbucks that I snagged myself on the way to Costco, but I think it was something else.

I enjoy this.  I love this.  I love my life.  And had you told me a year ago that this is my life, I would have been horrified.  Horrified, I tell you!!

But I love it.  And I feel more fulfilled than I’ve ever felt.

And I feel like I need to tell you that.  I’m not someone who came from a long line of food lovers and always dreamed up recipes in my spare time.  I fell into this quite randomly….through very troubling circumstances.  And I landed exactly where I was supposed to be all along.

I know a lot of people like my recipes and the Paleo lifestyle because they are into Crossfit and ripped bodies and super-health, and I love that!  It is awesome.  But there are others of you who are here as a last resort.  For your health or your child’s health, and I know it’s scary and it sucks at first.  But give it a chance.

It’s true–you may never like baking or spending time in the kitchen.

Or maybe you’ll find out that you love it.

Maybe you are going to meet your new best friend when you find out your kids both have similar food issues.  Maybe you are going to become an advocate for autism or Crohn’s or leaky gut and help others learn that diet can help in some instances.  Maybe you will simply and quietly remove all foods with artificial colors from your home, and that’s all you will do.

But isn’t that something?

Just embrace it.

“I will learn to love the skies I’m under.”–Mumford and Sons

 

The Myth of “Every Once in a While”

When I explain our eating plan to people, one of the first responses I get is pity for my children.  Even intelligent, thinking people who completely understand that my children need this for their best health and well-being think it is deprivation of the worst sort.  They imagine birthday parties and trick or treating and picture my children sitting mopey on the sidelines, possibly even taunted by their peers, unable to participate.  I absolutely worried about the peer response and whether my children would feel left out of certain events.  That’s one of the main reasons that I threw myself into this diet (and therefore the kitchen) with such abandon.  I vowed that I would be able to make anything that would be as good (or better–according to my boys) as the junk food equivalents they are faced with on a literal daily basis.  I’ve been very successful–although Mario is waiting impatiently for me to figure out a recipe for homemade Skittles.

What really surprises me, though, is that when a lot of people think of my children at parties, they are sad for them…..but not necessarily sad that they might be feeling left out.  Some people are genuinely sad that my kids are not eating the massive cupcakes with 3 inches of icing and artificial colors.  They are sad that my children don’t gorge themselves on ridiculous bags of Halloween candy.  They are sad, because in America, junk food has become an integral part of the childhood experience.  And we accept that.

Think about it.  You might hear parents say, “I don’t eat junk food/soda/kool-aid/candy–I just keep it in the house for the kids”.  That is so backwards when you think about it.  Giving the worst food in the house to the very people who are trying to grow and learn and develop appropriately?  Grown-ups being careful about what they eat, but then setting their children up for a lifetime of sugar addiction and carbohydrate cravings?  This has become totally acceptable behavior.

Then there is the argument of “every once in a while” and allowing treats on “special occasions”.  If we lived in a bubble, I would totally accept that.  Meaning, if my kids had no other interactions other than with our immediate family and our own activities.  Because then a special occasion would be one of four birthdays in a year.  Or a family trip to a baseball game.

But my kids go to school and each has around 15 classmates.  There are in-class treats for each birthday.  There are full-fledged off-site birthday parties to attend.  There are pizza parties and teddy bear tea parties and fairy tale balls and 100 days of school parties and gingerbread man decorating parties (none of which I am demonizing, mind you).  Halloween candy arrives on the grocery store shelves in September only to be replaced by Christmas candy only to be replaced by Valentines candy and finally Easter candy.  At birthday parties, you don’t just get cupcakes and ice cream, you get party favor bag, bursting with candy, to bring home.  Animal crackers and pretzels every Sunday at church and being handed a lollipop on the way out the door.  Girl scouts selling cookies, boy scouts selling popcorn, schools selling candy.  Please explain this myth of “every once in a while” to me.  Or special occasions–how do I choose which of these scenarios qualifies as “special”?

We walk a fine line with our kids on this.  We don’t want them to feel left out, but we also don’t want them to eat junk for the sake of eating junk.  We want them to make good choices, but we also want them to understand that sometimes their not-so-good choices will come with a tummy ache.  We want them to be label-readers, but we don’t want them to judge the choices of their friends.  I feel like it’s a literal tight-rope walk sometimes.

Here are some of the choices we’ve made since beginning this new eating lifestyle.  I don’t know if they were all good choices, but when we make mistakes, we just try to do better next time.

• For Halloween (which is also Mario’s birthday, by the way), we allowed each boy to go trick or treating.  When we got home, we had them each choose 3 pieces of candy to keep and traded the rest in for a toy that they had each been wanting.
• For birthday parties, I always contact the host in advance to find out what they are serving.  I bring the closest equivalent I can manage.  If cupcakes are being served, I ask if there will be an extra cupcake topper I can use for my kids’ cupcake.  Recently we went to a party that was having ice cream.  I thought I would be super lenient and told Mario that he could eat the ice cream provided if he wanted to.  But he specifically asked me to make some homemade because it tasted better 🙂
• Both teachers let me know of food activities in advance and I do my best to make do.  I have made special gingerbread men for both boys to take to school to decorate at Christmastime.  I have prepared homemade doughnuts for them to eat at Santa’s breakfast.  I sent chocolate covered frozen bananas to the fairy tale ball for them to use as a magic wand vs. chocolate covered pretzel sticks.  I sent a small bowl of cooked quinoa pasta (which is technically NOT on our diet, but is way better than the regular wheat kind) for Luigi one day because his class was learning about Italy and would be eating fettucine alfredo.  I sent homemade chocolates for every child in Mario’s class to eat during a taste testing of sweet, salty, sour, etc.
• Our family went to a college basketball game and I opted to let the boys eat popcorn and tortilla chips.  I knew that the worst case scenario would be some stomach upset for Mario (which did occur the following day).  We discussed this possibility and we knew that the next day we would be at home and he made the decision that he was okay with that.
• My kids bring their own snacks to church every Sunday and we politely decline the lollipop on the way out the door.
• Sometimes it’s a plain and simple compromise and choosing of the lesser of the evils.  This past week was the 100th day of school celebration.  In the class, the kids counted out 10 of each of the following:  raisins, cheerios, golden grahams, marshmallows, M&Ms, pretzel sticks, chocolate chips, goldfish, dried cherries and teddy grahams.  That left them with 100 items in a ziploc that they were free to eat.  I spoke to the boys before hand and asked them please not to eat anything from their bag, and that if they brought it home, I would let them pick the M&Ms out to eat.  But everything else would be off limits.  And I’m not saying by far that M&Ms were the best choice here.  But I know that sugar bothers them much less than grains and that they would be most excited about the M&Ms.
• One lesson that I have learned with both of my kids is that they are mostly fine with not being able to eat the candy and junk that they bring home from parties.  But they want to keep it.  Mario has a bag of candy in his room.  Luigi keeps his in a doctor’s kit to give to his stuffed animals when he plays doctor.  Once Mario brought M&Ms home from school that were left over from a counting activity.  He said he didn’t want them but he was going to sell them to people who visited our house 🙂  It’s the act of throwing the junk away that rips their heart out.

What I wonder is, how do people who aren’t dealing with special dietary needs do it?  For instance, if you are a parent who simply wants to eliminate processed foods and sugars from your family’s diet–how do you handle all of these so-called special occasions?  I, at least, have a reason that most people can understand when I bring our own food places–my child will get sick if he eats your food.  But if you are just doing it to be healthy, would you be looked at as a snob?  I’m genuinely curious.  Some people live by a principle of 90/10–if you eat clean 90% of the time, it’s okay to indulge the other 10%.  That sounds pretty good, but if I let my kids eat everything they encounter out in the world on a daily basis we’d be more in the 70/30 territory….maybe even worse.

Of all the minefields I never expected in this parenting gig (and there are many!!), junk food is a HUGE one.  I’d love to hear how other parents are navigating this tricky area.

 

Gut, Be Healed (part 2)

to read part one, click here

Okay, at this point in our story, we have learned 2 things:

1.  We had to heal Mario’s gut.

2.  Nobody takes on a eating plan or lifestyle like this just for the fun of it.

Now, as all of this was going on with Mario, we had other things going on as well.  Our other son, Luigi (believe it or not, also an alias) is 5.  While he has never shown any typical food allergic symptoms, he was not immune to his own issues.  I’m trying to think of a good way to put this, but Luigi suffers from what you might call “space cadet syndrome”.  He is a bright child, but could very easily stare at a blank wall for an hour.  He has been known to stop on his way to use the bathroom, with his pants down–mind you–to sit down and play with cars.  As long as we’ve known him (Luigi was adopted at age 2.5), he has had what you may call an air of “dazed-ness” about him.  Luigi is also a wild card because he was born with a rare neurological problem.  Rare enough that not many doctors have heard of it, and the ones who have can’t seem to tell us how to deal with some of the “symptoms” we see, or even if the things we see are symptoms.  The more I read about diet, the more I wondered if a change in diet would benefit Luigi as well.

And then there was me.  I considered myself healthy.  My cholesterol and blood pressure are flawless.  I am an ideal weight.  I exercise for 4 hours/week because I am a water aerobics instructor.  I ate fairly decent food, I thought.  Yet I had headaches.  A lot of headaches.  If I didn’t have a migraine, I still walked around with an everyday headache.  Excedrin migraine was one of my food groups.  I wouldn’t say I was in chronic pain, but I had a lot of aches and pains.  I was going to the chiropractor more and more.  I was starting to worry that my kids’ memories of me were going to involve my husband saying, “play quietly, mommy has a headache again” while I laid in a dark room.  I was going to do anything I could to keep that from happening.  So, as I examined the health of my family, I had to consider that a change in diet might help me as well.

Let me take a minute here to thank God for my husband.  He clearly comes from heartier stock than the rest of us.  He rarely gets sick, and he just doesn’t have a lot of issues going on.  He’s easygoing and open to new ideas.  So when I came to him with this diet I found online…..this diet where we would have to ditch all of the food in our pantry and start over, this diet where there would be no more bread, no more grains, no sugar, no Nilla Wafers for pete’s sake, he said….okay, let’s do it.  Seriously, Jason, I love you.

So here we are.  8 months into a new lifestyle.  And things are good.  We are not all cured, but we are much improved.

Mario’s chronic loose stools are gone.  His stomach pain is improved, but sadly, it is not gone.  His skin still seems sensitive, but there have been no hives.  He does still have tics intermittently, but as strange as it sounds, they come in the spring and fall, like clockwork during allergy season.  Antihistamines help.  If Mario deviates from the diet, he usually has some intestinal repercussions.  Refined sugar doesn’t bother him as much as grains.  So I’m more likely to let him have a snack pack of Skittles at a class party than pretzel sticks (these deviations are rare).

Luigi’s attention span is greatly improved!  When school started, I allowed him to “cheat” on the diet during a class party, and he went into a haze that lasted around 5 days.  Even his teacher noticed.  I have no doubt that gluten causes him serious attention problems.  So when we allow him to deviate from the diet, we let him have rice or popcorn or even sugar, but never, ever gluten.

As for me, my headaches are–for the most part–gone!  I do still get migraines that follow my cycle and, on the rare occasion, when I do get any other kind of a headache, a quick dose of Ibuprofen or Tylenol clears it up.  My aches and pains are completely gone, and I only go to the chiropractor now to stay lined up, instead of hobbling into the office in pain.  I had to give up knitting a few years ago because the repetitive motion completely debilitated my arm and neck, but I have recently taken up embroidery, and I have no pain with that.  And yes, I do believe that my diet has everything to do with this.  For the most part, I follow the diet.  I spend all day in the kitchen baking things that I find delicious, so it’s not really hard.  When I do cheat, it might be on tortilla chips or sushi (rice) when eating out.  And it is possible that I ate about 10 bars of Ghiradelli peppermint bark at Christmas time.  But I never, never, never eat gluten.  And I have no desire to eat it ever again.

And then there’s Jason.  My sweet husband who eats whatever I give him at home and eats whatever he wants when he’s not at home 🙂  He felt pretty good then and he feels pretty good now.  He lost 6-7 pounds over the summer when we started the diet, and I think he feels pretty good about that.  I have to say that I notice that he eats less.  Not because we don’t have plenty of delicious stuff to eat, but because we are eating real food.  And real food is more filling and satisfying.

Ironically, I eat more.  Before this, for me, food was a chore.  I didn’t want to sit down and take the time to care.  I would drink a big glass of milk and eat a few spoonfuls of peanut butter just to tell my stomach to be quiet, to earn a few more hours doing things I thought were more important.  But I look at food differently now.  As I eat it, I appreciate what it’s doing for me.  I take time to prepare it well, so that I can not only enjoy eating it, but enjoy watching others enjoy it too.  I have a completely different outlook on food, and it’s creeped into every other aspect of my life.  I’m writing a food blog, for goodness sakes!

Soon I will tell you, step by step, exactly how we made the leap.  Our decisions were all very deliberate, and I believe our thought process will help you if you ever decide to make any dietary changes in your life.

I will leave you with this:  you will notice when I begin sharing recipes, I use almond flour in nearly 90% of my baked goods.  The high quality blanched almond flour that you will need to achieve heavenly grain-free goodness is only available online.  One of the main sources I use for almond flour is Honeyville Grains, and they are having a 15% off sale through January 22.  Just use the coupon code RESOLVE at checkout.  Now would be a great time for you to try almond flour if that is on your to-do list.  And then, when I share my first recipe, you will be ready to bake!

Gut, Be Healed (part 1)

I’m going to break this up into 2 posts because it’s a lot to….digest.  (that’s a good pun, I don’t care what you say)

So how did we get here?  “Here” being a place where we follow a really strict diet.

And where exactly are we?

I will start at the end and tell you that the diet we follow is called the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, from here on out referred to as SCD.  SCD is very similar to the paleo/primal diet and GAPS, in that it is a diet that is completely free from grains and all sugar (except honey–more on that later).  There are more dietary restrictions than that, but that is the readers digest condensed version.  The SCD diet was developed by Dr. Elaine Gottschall and is described in detail in the book “Breaking the Vicious Cycle”.  It is a diet developed for people who deal with issues like Crohn’s, ulcerative colitis, autism, leaky gut syndrome, or chronic diarrhea.

Our story is not one where a member of our family got a cut and dry diagnosis of something like Crohn’s and a doctor said, “hey, try this diet–it’ll change your life!”.  And we said “super!”, and the next day we started the diet and now we are a perfectly healthy family.  Oh, if it were only that easy.

Our journey has been going on for years and it is not over.  Our journey began with our oldest son, Mario (yes, I changed his name to give him a semblance of privacy.  He is a 6-year old who will be thrilled to learn that his online alias is in honor of his favorite video game character), who in spite of being incredibly active, full of life and downright joyful, began having problems around the time he turned 4.  In addition to the chronic loose stools and sensitive skin that he had his entire life, he began showing signs of repetitive neurological tics.  Toe tapping, nose rubbing, loud breathing.  What we initially viewed as adorable quirkiness quickly turned into not just a nuisance, but a near-diagnosis of Tourette’s.

Here’s where the story gets hard to follow.  And if you think it’s confusing and overwhelming to read about, just imagine living it.  Cripes.

As I researched tics, I learned that foods could be a culprit.  So I jumped on the bandwagon of the diet du jour and my son went gluten-free.  Nothing changed.  We began seeing an allergist who pressed me to test Mario for food allergies.  I relented once my son began breaking out in hives in conjunction with severe tics.  The results from the skin prick testing showed allergies to:  chicken, beef, shrimp, peanuts, eggs, rice, corn, oranges, cottonseed, chocolate, and something else which I can’t remember right now.

Yikes.  But when I changed his diet, the tics disappeared.  It was amazing, and worth it.  Until…..month by month, things would change.  Suddenly a new food would bother him, like grapes.  Or I would do a small test with one of the supposedly “allergic” foods and he would be fine.  It was a confusing and frustrating time.  And beginning the year that he turned 4, he started to complain daily of stomach pain.  Not nausea, just pain.  And he still had the chronic loose stool.

We sought help from our pediatrician who sent us to a pediatric gastroenterologist.  They took stool samples, breath samples, blood samples.  He went to Children’s Hospital and had days worth of testing.  And after all that, they said…..nothing.  Not only was he “fine”, but the blood tests that the doctor had done for food allergies showed that he had NO food allergies.  (remember that the other allergy tests were skin prick testing)

Enter mama bear and the internet.  Nobody was helping my child and I had to do something.  Through google I began to learn about leaky gut syndrome, a problem that most doctors don’t even recognize to be legitimate.  It sounded so much like what Mario was dealing with.  So here is where I explain to you in my own terms and understandings what was going on with Mario, and why.

Leaky gut is the result of damaged lining of your intestines.  Why people get leaky gut isn’t always known, but my gut tells me (hahaha) that Mario’s was brought about in part due to the chronic antibiotics he took as a baby when he suffered from ear infections.  So when your gut is porous or leaking, small food particles leak out into your bloodstream.  Your body is like, “hey, who the heck are you?  I didn’t authorize a piece of shrimp to be up in here”.  And so your body does what it’s supposed to do when an intruder comes in–it fights it.  This “fight” can manifest itself in many different ways–eczema, diarrhea, hives, chronic pain, autism, and apparently in our case tics.

So consider the skin testing Mario had done for allergies.  He was gluten-free at the time–if you go in a store and buy gluten-free snacks, what is the first ingredient?  Rice.  Boom!  Allergic to rice.  And all of the other “allergens” were things he ate a lot of.  They were present in his body in places they shouldn’t have been.  So when the skin was pricked, it reacted like, “I know you, you bugger, you are NOT supposed to be here, so I’m gonna swell up and get all angry and red”.  Was he genuinely allergic to these things?  No, his body was just ticked off at them.  This is also why, as his diet changed, his sensitivities changed.  When you have leaky gut, you are eventually allergic to everything you eat!  Which leaves you with one option.

Heal your gut, yo.

From that point on, my number one job as a mama was to heal Mario’s gut.

to be continued….(and yes, I promise to get to the recipes soon)

This Space

Beginning a blog is a daunting task, because…..where do I begin? In time I plan to share with you how I got to where I am.  Why my family began this strange and winding food journey we are on.  How it has transformed our health. I plan to share resources, original recipes, and wisdom I …