Not just 3 years ago I was a regular fast food patron. (and boy do I mean regular! I think Eva was grown inutero on a taco bell and Chick-fil-A.) I found cooking boring as best, and a huge waste of my precious time at worst. My shelves were stocked full of convenience items. parboiled rice, wheat noodles, pasta sauces, canned beans, ice cream, prepared condiments galore, boxes and boxes of dried cereals, cereal bars, and cookies. my freezer was full of ready-made frozen items. I remember making beef stew often from a “beef stew kit” from Trader Joes. Cream of mushroom soup was an absolute staple!

And then Eva (5) was born. She has Sensory Processing Disorder and like many SPD kids, she had infant GERD (reflux) and many food allergies. Eli (9) had always been allergic to milk but that was simple – just avoid milk. no biggie. But Eva? she was allergic to everything! It was baffling and difficult to try to buy a new brand of an item only to realize she was allergic to something else in it. At one time she was eating cereal bars as a main staple in her diet while we figured out what she was allergic to – they were nearly $6 a box and full of nothing but fillers and sugar! The poor kiddo went through all sorts of poking and prodding by various specialists but nobody seemed to actually be able to pinpoint the problem. We still aren’t certain, 5 years later, exactly what it is beyond the basic label of  SPD.

Meanwhile I started becoming ill. At first I chalked it up  to being a sleep-deprived mom of a SPD toddler. But instead of getting better it was getting worse. Depression, weight gain, bowel problems, joint pain, year-round hay fever, exhaustion … I was handed the diagnosis of having “irritable bowel syndrome” and “arthritis” by my doctors.  and given a handful of meds to take every day. After finding no relief from any of the medications and having doctors insist nothing was wrong with me, I found myself searching the internet for answers. I toyed around with diets, food elimination, natural remedies, probiotics… you name it, I tried it but my symptoms only got worse. I found it almost impossible to get up in the morning because my body ached so badly. my hands and feet swelled up and my head hurt all of the time. I felt like i was falling apart. Finally a friend said to me that I really should consider celiac disease. “NO WAY!”, I thought. I can’t bear the thought of having celiac disease so I avoided testing for a long time, finally I caved. I gave the GF diet a quick trial run.. just to rule it out. Much to my dismay I started feeling better. My body aches calmed, my head hurt less, my joints slowly stopped swelling… and I never went back to eating gluten again! staying GF is worth it when you feel that bad!

soon I took Eva off of gluten and I was amazed! Her tantrums and earaches and sleeping problems got a lot better. (previously she spent the majority of her life screaming, crying and tantruming so any improvement was wonderful!) she started smiling more, and even enjoying life! Her vocabulary expanded and her personality came through. While it didn’t “cure” her SPD, it made life a lot more comfortable for her.

Skip ahead a couple of years and I have another baby – Ven. I hoped being GF for all of my pregnancy and nursing would prevent some of what Eva had gone through with GERD. But it didn’t take long to realize he had a lot more sensitivities than just gluten. I put myself on the SCD diet but as we found he was allergic/intollerant to many of the “allowed” food we had to make a switch. (I was down to eating meat and asparagus only!). After trying a series of dietary experiments I went whole hog and did the elimination diet. Ven is now 8 months old and I am still on the ED.

We are not exactly sure what’s going on with Ven’s digestive system right now. He see a holistic doctor who brings some relief, but we pray he outgrows some of it like Eva did. He’s still too young for western allergy tests so we are holding off, as for now I have a very limited diet and he is exclusively breastfed. We have tried him on a few foods a couple of times but they don’t stay down long and much screaming, fussying, crying and night waking happens. We’re still in the process of figuring out the root cause of his digestive problems. he wakes every 1-3 hours all night and doesn’t nap much. He is fussy a decent portion of the time, though he doesn’t scream much. He is very advanced like Eva is – standing on his own now at 8 months. (he sat and crawled by 5 months) and he climbs all over the furniture and up and down stairs. he’s a wild little thing! We just try to keep things as calm as possible. I stick to my simple diet and baby wear and co-sleep as necessary.

For now I am happy to provide him with breastmilk to meet his nutritional needs, but it does make it hard to work with such few foods. Because of this you may notice that I tend to make food from the same grouping of basic ingredients. I try to be creative as I can, but there is admittedly little variety right now. But is has allowed me to bring about my inner chef and get creative in the kitchen. I can truthfully say that I actually enjoy cooking now. ME! cooking! go figure… all it took was a 2 screaming babies and a case of celiac disease

Hopefully at some point my diet will expand and I can include more variety! But going through this hurdle with our diets has really taught me the beauty of the simplicity of real foods. Food – the way it’s meant to be eaten – without fillers, additives, unnatural sweeteners, and poisons leeched from unhealthy containers, it’s good for the body, soul and heart. I discovered cooking REAL food is exciting to the senses- the smells, tastes, textures and colors of real food are fulfilling to our bodies. We often over look the beauty of real food because we are taught it’s boring or too hard to make food. We are led to believe it should be left only to professionals. For 25 years I believed that lie and i missed out.

—Sometimes less really is more.

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