Ready to give up :-( loosing hope

May 26, 2010

I'm sending this message out as a last stitch hope before throwing in the towel on our current regimen. Sorry this is so long but I'm ready to give up unless someone tells me otherwise.

My son, who is almost 4 & has autism, has been gfcfsf for over a year with great success & much progress in speech & behaviors. He still struggles with socialization but we are working on it. We have barely treaded on the biomedical road nearly skimming the surface on the vast amount of treatments & suppliments, as most of the time up till this point we have been treating yeast & gut issues. I feel like I had finally grabbed a hold of his yeast problems with several rounds of different rx antifungals (currently on ketoconozole plus probiotics & basic vitamins) and by putting him on a low-sugar very limited grain diet. His OAT finally came back with levels that were in the normal range! Unfortunately however, my son has always had disgusting bowel movements and still was having them even with the test results showing the yeast was under controll. His poop would look like a melted chocolate bar with penut

butter & lots of oil and seeds from all the berries he was eating :-( it was everywhere & took a full tub of wipes to clean off.

I should mention that this bothered him in no way, only me, the one who would have to tackle these diapers from hell.

So with yeast under controll and behaviors better then they had ever been before (no more opening & closing things & he listened to me & was super sweet & cuddly :-) I decided to look into the SCD diet to help with his bm's. I was under the impression that this was going to be the answer to everything & help take care of my son's bowel & gut issues and that everything would be great. Now this really wasn't that hard of a transition from the diet he was on before. Remember I had him on a anti-yeast diet which means very low sugar & grain, so he was eating lot's of protein, low carb veggies, berries & 11 gfcf kinnikkinnik animal cookies per day as his reward for finishing his meal. To drink I would make a sippy cup with water add 2 tablespoons of blueberry juice & a scoop of stevia. So the new diet basically meant removing the animal cookies and starting from the intro with broiling

meats & cooking all fruit & doing welch's grape juice diluted. This is what I did. We are now on day 21 of the SCD diet and he is eating foods from the intro & stage 1 from pecanbread.com. After 2 weeks into the diet his bowel movements began to form & I got really excited, he is still to this moment having great formed BM's the first time in his life!!!!

Now here is the problem.... his behavior has taken a turn for the worst. He is no longer calm like he used to be, but very hyper & aggressive (pulling my hair & bouncing in place alot) never was like this! He is cranky & irritable 85% of the time he is with me (he goes to preschool from 8-2) and has a definite loss of communication & speech. He no longer will listen to me when I ask him to something simple like wash his hands, everything takes reinforcing & never needed to before. everything is a challenge. This is not die off because I give charcol & nothing changes. I've ramped up epsom salt baths to 2 cups per nite still nothing changes. The only other thing I can think of is that he may be getting too many phenols? But when I think about his diet before, berries are loaded with phenols & he was great. Okay so here is what he is eating now:

Breakfast:

-scrambled egg w/garlic in a little olive oil spray

-1/4 cup avacado

-cooked pear sauce

-2 little jello jigglers (made with knox, 1/2 water, 1/2 welch's white grape juice)