Judah and the colour issue

Sometime back in May I wrote about the fact that we were doing an experiment with our son, (and the rest of the family), by taking all the artificial colours out of our diet. As easier statement to write than actually execute. Do you realize how many things have artificial colour in them? Neither did I.

All artificial colours are made out of a coal or petrochemical derivative. To be precise there is a lot of oil and coal in our diets. And our son has an intolerance to it.

We made the decision to take it out after a lot of Internet searches, talking to other moms on the playground and a little bit of trial and error. The funny thing is.... it worked.

 

Yep that about explains Judah. Once we got all the dyes out of his system we noticed an improvement in his behaviour. He could have conversations with people, and look them in the eye. He could sit better through church and Sunday School. He would walk beside me from the Sunday School classroom to the sanctuary and didn't dart all around. He would listen to our instructions and follow them a little bit better. And he started sleeping through the night. No more night terrors between 10pm and 1am every night.

 

We kept at it for a few months. I kept track of everything he ate and what his behaviour was. Oh and we went on holidays and messed it up a bit. And there were days I would feed him something and not realize that it had colour in it. Then there were the times that when he did have something he would begin to tell us that his tummy would be upset afterwords.

 

It made enough of a difference that we began to notice that it didn't always make a difference. And when I say that I mean that we began to notice that there were other things that he was eating that would bother him and send him down the rabbit hole and into crazy land. We began to search for what the answer might be to what was still bothering him. And that led us to the Feingold diet. And eating program for children with ADHD, ADD, Autism, OCD, ODD, SPD, Tourettes and a bunch of other alphabet disorders. It is a diet that is based on removing artificials from your diet. Starting with colour and then adding others in. Also removing preservatives and other ingredients which are derived from petrochemicals or made in a lab out of various chemicals. We prayed and debated and took the plunge at the beginning of September. Once we paid the money and got the program material we began to purge our house of all the 'bad' food and try to find replacements for it. It's been a process. I'm still on the hunt for a number of items to replace things in my pantry. And we are only 1 week in. Let's grab on tight and hold on because I think that this may be a rough ride. Especially when they say it could take a while for our bodies to detox all of the bad chemicals out before we start to notice if it is indeed working.