Question for those doing a GFCF diet

[CKJ]

Can anyone recommend a super book or other resource for starting this? I am clueless and not a very good cook so I need something that starts with baby steps and is very simple. Thanks for any suggestions!!

[Sydsmom]

Try www.gfcfdiet.com

 

It seemed to have lots of tips on there.

 

There's a book called Special Diets for Special Kids by Lisa Lewis, Ph.D. I received it from my DAN doctor. Maybe you can google it and see if it comes up where to buy it. Lots of great recipes in there!! Goodluck.

[Giselle]

Hi there, have you already done the IGg (delayed food allergy test) to see if your child needs to go on this diet? I'm wondering because when I first started down this road I decided to try the diet but didn't know my son's particular sensitivities/allergies. I just knew a lot of people had tried it and it had worked. Well I tried it and was religious in it's application. If anything he got a little worse! but without a doubt he didn't improve. When I got his delayed food allergy test back I completely saw the reason why! I had taken gluten and casein/dairy out of his diet but I had replaced the wheat/gluten foods with corn and he was allergic to corn. In fact he is more allergic to corn than gluten (or at least tic wise it sets him off more - and instantly!). Here I had been substituting corn flakes instead of wheat puffs, corn tortillas instead of wheat tortillas, etc. Once I got all three (plus a whole lot more) out he was significantly improved. It was like night and day. Another food one might turn to in response to being on the GFCF diet is potato - it is a huge culprit for many as it is part of the nightshade family. Luckily it's not for Hoyt so we eat a lot of potatos, rice, tapioca, amaranth, and others. Also, at first doing this or any of these diets is HARD - harder than anything I've ever done - I too am not a cook. But after a while, and lots of mistakes, it becomes second nature. And miracle of miracles (my Mom still shakes her head) I have actually become a pretty good cook - when it's your kid you'll do anything! Another tip: Do it for everyone - it makes it sooooo much easier not having the temptations and slip ups "I thought I could eat these cookies!" It takes a while to get used to some of the different tastes but you do and then your child won't feel like such an alien.

 

Good luck,

Giselle

[CKJ]

Hi there, have you already done the IGg (delayed food allergy test) to see if your child needs to go on this diet? I'm wondering because when I first started down this road I decided to try the diet but didn't know my son's particular sensitivities/allergies. I just knew a lot of people had tried it and it had worked. Well I tried it and was religious in it's application. If anything he got a little worse! but without a doubt he didn't improve. When I got his delayed food allergy test back I completely saw the reason why! I had taken gluten and casein/dairy out of his diet but I had replaced the wheat/gluten foods with corn and he was allergic to corn. In fact he is more allergic to corn than gluten (or at least tic wise it sets him off more - and instantly!). Here I had been substituting corn flakes instead of wheat puffs, corn tortillas instead of wheat tortillas, etc. Once I got all three (plus a whole lot more) out he was significantly improved. It was like night and day. Another food one might turn to in response to being on the GFCF diet is potato - it is a huge culprit for many as it is part of the nightshade family. Luckily it's not for Hoyt so we eat a lot of potatos, rice, tapioca, amaranth, and others. Also, at first doing this or any of these diets is HARD - harder than anything I've ever done - I too am not a cook. But after a while, and lots of mistakes, it becomes second nature. And miracle of miracles (my Mom still shakes her head) I have actually become a pretty good cook - when it's your kid you'll do anything! Another tip: Do it for everyone - it makes it sooooo much easier not having the temptations and slip ups "I thought I could eat these cookies!" It takes a while to get used to some of the different tastes but you do and then your child won't feel like such an alien.

 

Good luck,

Giselle

 

Thanks for the info. My daughter is a PANDAS kid and is in the PANDAS research at UF. Her Doctor mentioned that many of her parents had seen an improvement with this diet and mentioned we could try it to see if it made any difference. She told me that if I wanted to try it, to do it for two weeks to see if we noticed any changes, if so we could continue, if not we could go back to normal. Since I am at the point where I would do ANYTHING to help her (we are having terrible rage attacks that are completely abnormal for her), I am going to try to see if it makes a difference. I knew going into this that it would really be a hard and big adjustment for us, I've been researching it online and am a bit overwhelmed but am also commited to see what happens with it. I would LOVE to see a simple guide to getting started (I know it's not "simple" but something easy to follow with plain, straight forward advice and suggestions).

[LisaH]

They have quite a few gfcf diet books at our library. It looks like ones geared toward kids are the easiest, they don't put alot of the extras in the recipes. One I picked up was Feeding your allergic child by Elise Meyer and it had some really easy recipes to get you started. Its not for just gfcf though it leaves out the corn and eggs also.

 

I too have a dd with rage attacks so I know what you mean about trying anything. We are going to try the elimination diet to see if that gives us any clues but its so totally different than the way I cook, we eat lots of everything they eliminate.

 

Good Luck

[Guest]

Hi CKJ,

 

For myself I had to plan out a menu ahead of time and make sure I had any meals prepared ahead of time if there was a chance I was going to be running late getting home and couldn't have meals ready quickly. When I'm hungry and nothings available I cheat a lot more on foods. GFCF seems hard at first, but its really easy once you get into it and a lot easier than GFCF, soy free, and corn free. I'm all four of those now.

 

I posted on another thread about GFCF mixes and recipes which I liked that you can check out here:

http://www.latitudes.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=1762

 

I have a copy of my four week menu when I was just GFCF. Let me know if you'd like a copy of that as I'd be happy to email it to you if you'd like.

 

Carolyn

[Giselle]

Hi again, one other thing that I wanted to mention - I don't think two weeks will be long enough - it will be for the dairy, you'll see improvement with that pretty quickly but Celiac research has found that gluten can stay in the system for up to six months so you might see some improvement early but I think you'd have to try it a bit longer to really get the gains from being GF.

 

Giselle

[Chemar]

there is also a wealth of info on the gluten/celia board at BT2, especially the sticky threads

 

http://forums.braintalk2.org/forumdisplay.php?f=13