It all started with Isaac

When Isaac was eight years old, he started seeing a new physical therapist. For the previous several years, he’d had physical therapy every week along with speech (3x/week) and occupational therapy (2x/week), all at the same clinic. To streamline services, we decided to transfer his therapies to the clinic attached to his school, only they didn’t provide physical therapy, which he still needed. Todd found a holistic physical therapy clinic near his hospital and set up an initial appointment for me to meet with Dr. Gigi Siton, DPT. 

By that time, I was already accustomed to introducing practitioners to Isaac’s rare genetic diagnosis. But I wasn’t at all prepared for what this practitioner was about to lay on my plate. Before she took Isaac on as a patient, Gigi wanted me to read a book called Gut and Psychology Syndrome, by Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride, a neurologist and nutritionist in the UK who describes how she used food to treat symptoms in her own child who was diagnosed with learning disabilities. I’m not necessarily recommending the book, because it’s not for everyone, but it definitely marked a turning point in how I think about and relate to food. 

I read Gut and Psychology Syndrome (the GAPS diet) in two days and was completely overwhelmed. I told Todd I needed him to read the book, too, so we could decide what to do together. I was tortured, feeling like there was NO WAY we could do this diet on one hand, and on the other hand, NO WAY we couldn’t try it for Isaac after reading what I’d read.

Desperation creates an open mind, and as parents, we have often felt desperate.

The purge

Todd read the book and helped me to get over a few hurdles. He assured me, for example, that we could follow the diet without having to ferment our own vegetables or make our own ketchup. There would be good enough alternatives at Whole Foods and HEB. We did what Gigi, our physical therapist, recommended, and went gluten-free first, a single step in the direction of what the GAPS diet required, but one that felt like a giant leap for our family. We went through every box and package in our entire pantry, refrigerator, and freezer, looking at every ingredient, and tossed or donated well over half of the food we used to eat freely. I went all in and cleaned all of our appliances, too.

Eventually, we did do the GAPS introduction diet, full out, and then transitioned to hard core Paleo–which Todd noted was very similar but easier to follow–for at least six months. I’m not going to lie, for someone who was “raised on pre-packaged meals and high fructose corn syrup with the occasional canned vegetable,” as I mentioned in last week’s post, My Go-to Chicken Broth Recipe, it was HARD. 

But a few things happened along the way that made us believers in the power of food to change our health. And although we are not as militant about many aspects of our eating as we have been at other phases in our process, the way we eat and think about food have fundamentally changed from where we started to where we are today.

Surprising benefits

I’d venture to say that most everyone has heard of the gluten-free (GF)/dairy free (DF) diet which is sometimes recommended for kids with challenges (of many varieties). I was at least tangentially aware of it when Gigi first suggested we go gluten free, enough to hope that Isaac’s behavior would improve. It wasn’t a magic bullet where we saw immediate improvement, but several weeks in, Todd and I realized to our surprise that Isaac wasn’t having problems with asthma anymore.

Isaac had cough-variant asthma, and there was a long stretch of time where he would cough every night until he threw up. We couldn’t explain the connection … all we knew was, we were no longer getting up in the middle of the night to clean up vomit. Isaac had been on medication, breathing treatments, and inhalers for the long haul to control his asthma. But he barely seemed to need any of it once we removed gluten from his diet. At one point we added it back in to test our suspicions, and the asthma returned. There was no going back after that.

Changing Isaac’s diet was a HUGE step forward in helping him feel better and stay better regulated, because it removed one of his primary triggers for acting out, which was not feeling well on a daily basis. And for us, sleeping through the night with a child who wasn’t so sick all the time was a game changer. However difficult it was for us to overhaul the way we ate, we were motivated to keep going because the differences we saw were palpable. 

How food makes us feel

When we changed our eating habits for Isaac, we changed them for ALL of us. I’m a practical person. I wasn’t going to make two different versions of dinner every night. Todd lost 20 pounds and looked chiseled and healthy. I lost a little bit of weight, and my skin looked better (which for me was significant), but otherwise I looked about the same. Go figure. But over time, I can tell you, something bigger happened for me. I felt better. And I noticed, without a doubt, on the rare occasion I would eat gluten, I didn’t like the way I felt. And I’d usually get a blemish within 24 hours, like clockwork. I do not have celiac disease, but I know what people are talking about when they refer to non-celiac gluten sensitivity. I’ve got it, friends, no doubt.

I listened to an interview a couple of years ago with renowned New York chef and restaurateur Marco Canora, founder of Brodo Bone Broth (which is delicious, and the ONLY broth other than my own that I will sip like a drink). One thing he said that really stuck with me is that we often think about how food smells, how it tastes, and even how it looks on the plate, but we forget to consider how it makes us feel after we eat it. Not just in terms of guilt or satiety (the feeling of fullness), mind you, but how our bodies feel and respond. 

Before we made these changes to our diet, which felt almost extreme at times, it never really occurred to me that what I ate could impact how well (or poorly) I slept, or my husband’s back pain, or whether or how frequently my child would become dysregulated. In casual conversation a few years ago with another mom of a child with disabilities, she said something about her own process of discovery, to the effect of, “Imagine that! What we put in our bodies makes a difference for how our bodies feel!” And it was such a simple statement, but it’s so foreign to American food culture that we just can’t seem to wrap our heads around it. It’s like our sweet dog, Murphy, who has a terrible habit of eating socks, which, though “edible,” I guess you could say, offer zero nutrition and really shouldn’t be consumed. But despite multiple visits to the vet to deal with the consequences of his poor eating choices, he just can’t seem to make the connection that what he’s eating is making him feel really, really bad.

Our primary motivations

How we feel physically after we eat and knowing the tremendous impact certain foods have on Isaac’s health are now our primary motivations for the food we choose to purchase and cook for our family. Without going into detail about GAPS or Paleo or many of the other diets we’ve since tried to address specific medical issues, the underlying goal for overall health is to reduce systemic inflammation by removing foods that cause or trigger it. That is why we eat the way we do. 

My husband, Todd, is a weight loss specialist and surgeon. When patients tell him they’re thinking about going vegetarian (which he would support in many cases), he playfully asks: “Twinkie vegetarian, or vegetable vegetarian?” You get the point. Goodness knows we can eat tons of junk that is gluten free, dairy free, vegan, and the like, but the aim should be something far more important: to avoid food that causes inflammation and prioritize food that is nutritious and promotes overall health.

Todd’s love for Isaac and his willingness to explore all different approaches to health has led him to discover a whole new world for helping his patients. For a deeper dive into heath based on how you eat, how you move, how you sleep, and how you manage stress, see his website: www.drtoddworley.com.

There is far more to the story of our family food odyssey (which will trickle out over time, no doubt), but I’ve tried to get to the heart of it here: why we started, why we kept going, and what our goals are now. If you want to chat further about what we do and why or other food-related things we’ve tried, hit me up in the comments. Mealtime calls, as we all know, so I think about this stuff every. single. day.