Part II.

> My question I guess is, I believe in the paleo diet, but at what cost? Do
> you lose your health and sanity over trying to force a 5 year old child to
> eat salmon and vegetables in the morning, when he knows his brother and
> sister are having toast and jelly and bacon? Do you wash three loads of
> dishes every day? [Does anyone realize how much processed food saves on
> labor, and how accustomed some of us were to these foods, esp us working moms?]

My answer is: Do the best you can.  I get gluten-free cereal for
my son, and gluten-free rice or soy milk to pour on it.  He likes
bacon, so I give him some.  He eats chicken and turkey and beef,
so I give him them, with rice on the side, sometimes with butter,
sometimes with coconut oil.  He'll eat a few fruits, such as
apples.  He misses things like cookies, but it's not hard to make
gluten free cookies, with fructose instead of sucrose.

If you lose your health and sanity over this, *everybody* loses.
If you attempt to force your other kids to go paleo because it's
good for your autistic son, that will only add to the burden that
they already carry for having an autistic sibling.  Their lives
have already been rearranged in many ways to accommodate their
brother's idiosyncracies.

> Do you become a recluse, unable to leave your home (my son has reacted to
> beef and is off pemmican right now)? Do you not celebrate thankgiving or
> other holidays with your family(they think your diet is absolutely crazy,
> "of course wheat is good for a child")

In my opinion, going to this extent is the dietary equivalent of
Michael Jackson going around with a surgical mask over his face
to avoid germs.  I make every attempt to eat the right foods, but
sometimes they are just not there.  When that happens I just
shrug and eat what *is* there.  Nothing terrible happens.  I
don't want to turn my life into an obsession with getting the
"correct" foods, nor do I want to teach that to my children.  If
I am a guest at somebody's house, I am not going to make a big
production out of rejecting their food.  So if they serve breaded
chicken cutlets with pasta, I just eat the damn things and eat as
little of the pasta as possible, but I have a lot of salad.  No
big deal.

I don't think it is healthy to cultivate the attitude that
occasional lapses in one's nutritional program are disastrous.  I
don't want to be a paleo-neurotic.  Most of the time it is
surprisingly easy to stay within the boundaries of the diet, but
when it isn't it definitely isn't.  Then we have to choose
between chanting, "I can't eat that, I can't eat that" or just
making the best of the situation.  I choose the latter.  If I'm
going to have some Forbidden Fruit, I'm damn well going to enjoy
it.

I'll tell you one thing that I have learned from having an
autistic kid:  He is extremely empathic.  The more nervous,
stressed-out, or irritable I am, the more difficult he becomes.
He's like a mirror.  If I make myself agitated trying to force
certain foods into him, I'll get that agitation back from him,
with interest.  Maybe you've had a similar experience.  So I try
to find foods that he is happy with that don't seem too
destructive, and we both are happier.

> The g/f diet helped but I have seen further gains in socialization with
> paleo, more interest in friends which was not there before. However, the
> bowel problems are still there!

Don't assume that those gains will be lost because he eats some
rice once in a while!  You don't know what caused them in the
first place.

> >My autistic son has made gains comparable to your son's, and I
> >attribute much of that to his gluten-free diet.
>
> What is his level of functioning, precisely?

He will be 7 next month.  He attends a private school with
typically developing children, and has an aide with him.  The
aide, however, doesn't have much work to do anymore.  He is quite
verbal, although still not as fluent as other kids his age.  He
plays with the other kids some of the time, by himself at other
times.  He is learning to read and write along with the other
kids.  He still has some odd behaviors but as he gets older he
recognizes their oddness and can control them.  Somebody
observing his class would still be able to identify him as the
autistic kid, but it would take longer.  When he was 3 he was
almost non-verbal and had a full set of autistic characteristics.

> One other concern I have about the g/f is just this, when I gave him the
> rice bread and cashew butter, he was like a little carb addict, would
> promptly eat nothing else, I felt it was refined food all over again, felt
> really guilty.In other words, he loves it too much, like an addict eating
> chocolate cake, it just was not healthy. It seems the foods he resists most,
> are the best for him. Like chicken soup is so digestible and healthy, he
> resists it.

I know the drill.  But he is old enough now that you can
negotiate a bit.  If you eat this you can have some of this, etc.

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