A Well Fed Heart

Chapter 15 Preservative free cooking wasn’t the whole picture. Over the years I was exposed to many thoughts about foods and their place in my own diet. It wasn’t until I had my son and began to understand from mainstream sources of education and information that many of his issues were related directly to the foods that I had chosen for him to grow and develop. My “normal” was about to be challenged with the exclusion of preservatives, then gluten, dairy, soy, legumes, corn and finally starches. The purpose of this book was to share the steps that were taken to recover my child and heal myself. I don’t expect anyone to make these changes without looking deep within themselves intuitively and it is important to note that these changes to our family’s diet occurred over period of more than six years. I offer the old adage “when you know better, you do better” and with that the first step to knowing better is acknowledgement that there is something wrong. My intuition was so faint at first when it came to the foods that I offered my baby. With actually having a baby the quality of my own meals had improved. I became more diligent with my own diet during earlier years although, as described in the previous chapter, during the toddler years and a little beyond up until the age of 4 we fell off the food wagon by opting for cheap and quick take away food. Food became part of my rewards system to encourage William to do certain tasks. He was fed a constant supply of dairy which caused more allergic issues like fever due to infected sinuses, fevers along with constipation. Food should not be used as a reward or to show love and affection. Love and affection are a standalone requirement of being human and should be limitless and unconditional. Once William began using the bathroom all by himself I lost track on when and how often he was going and by the time he was 6 years old he went to the toilet to poop every 3 days. This was his normal. Regrettably I have no idea how long this had gone on for because I was committed to my own interests and William did not appear to need me as he was quite independent in his needs and wants. Everything was routine and repetitive. This played perfectly into my life because he never asked for anything other than cheese, Thomas the Tank engine toys and television which was almost always Thomas the Tank too. He would put on his own DVDs and re-enact the scene with his own little toy train set. The only language he was using at the time was mumbling the words as best he could. At this time I can now identify that at four years of age William had been able to finally first join three words to make the sentence “Where’s the ball?” He communicated in other ways which used expressive sounds with arm actions and I filled in the blanks and spoke for him. I had no idea that I had become his interpreter. William had been attending a private school for pre-prep schooling and the teachers had indicated he was well behind in his milestones and a few behavioural issues were presenting but he was never naughty or a problem. He was in fact withdrawn and quiet, and needed no interaction and often preferred that anyway. A series of night terrors occurred for William that lasted hours and occurred over a period of weeks. We also witnessed some extreme meltdowns in public places where we had no other choice but to leave the shops and this caused us to start keeping a food journal again. We had been preservative free since William started rocking and banging his head into the tiled floor as a toddler when he was stressed, tired or sick. We had attributed these sensory issues, along with his fear of loud noises, with sulphites in dried fruit and cheap bread. We always upheld these ideas in our home but never considered that there would have been preservatives in takeaway meals. Ignorance for convenience. One of our most disastrous events was on a snorkelling trip when William assumed that he would have been able to snorkel without instruction and lost it completely. He screamed for an hour and a half making nonsense words and his outburst completely destroyed the family trip for us and many of the other people out there in the middle of the ocean on a boat. We had nowhere to hide and no way of explaining his issue to the other passengers on the trip. Other passengers tried to bribe him with sodas and lollies but at this point he didn’t even recognise us as being there to hug him. Upon reflection after getting home I realised that I was the cause of his outburst because I had fed him poorly in the days leading up to our trip and while we were away. I spoiled him by allowing him to eat all his favourite things at the buffet which included dairy, bread and fruit, takeaway food and packet food while traveling. It took us weeks to get William back to his calm normal after our trip away and I refocused on my own interests which at the time was millinery (hat making). Lessons Learnt: With a person experiencing delayed emptying or constipation the faecal matter begins to build up on the inside of the bowel and back up into other areas of the digestive system. The issue with this is two things. Firstly the poo is the perfect environment to harbour more bacteria and allow further colonisation of pathogenic populations. It also creates issues with toxins released as the matter breaks down and rots further in the body. The waste can create gas and bloating, tightness in the stomach even a distended belly that is disproportionate to the stomach cavity itself. It stretches out the membranes that line the digestive system and can damages vital receptors along the colon that signal that it is time to empty the bowel. Sometimes this eventuated as ‘sneaky poo’ where it comes out before the person is aware that they need to go to the toilet at all. In the case of the repetitious behaviours, William felt a sense of safety in doing tasks that he could easily accomplish because he had achieved it before. There is a line over which crossing into new activity causes great anxiety in children with autism. This type of change-anxiety crosses through many diseases and conditions. It is also the nature of our society to pigeonhole people and label them so we can better understand them more quickly. It’s like compartmentalising people or sorting them into their assorted field to reduce the fear of not understanding them. Just look at any religion, food movement, football code, or even in most basic principles of male or female. We reinforce this concept at schools from an early age thinking that it’s appropriate to define things in this way but essentially we are labelling because of fear or lack of understanding. A label gives us rules of how to act but we need to recognize that fear of the inner self is created at this point in a child’s development part of a survival mechanism requiring us to make assumptions quickly to assess safety or danger when approaching a situation with other tribes, animals, and also environments. It means that we rely less on our immediate intuition and we end up not trying to overcome or experience something because of fear of failure. In the case of our William, food directly affected him because of the pathogenic bacterial overgrowth and because of his leaky gut issues. The head banging, meltdowns, anxiety and constant runny infected nose settled down when we removed preservatives. This one action gave us enough improvement to lull us into a false belief that it was just about the food rather than being anything more serious.