Monday, November 3, 2014

Soothing the Gut, pt 2

In Part 1 of this series, I mentioned that my boys were part of the numbers of Spectrum children who experience bowel issues. My older child improved because of holistic interventions we used that helped him to relax and eliminate. My younger son has been a bit more tricky, and I've been using nutrition as the main intervention. Here's what's been working:



Liquified meals:
Pretty much this means exactly what it looks like. Blending meal ingredients to create smoothies in lieu of solid foods which might be more difficult to digest. While we don't do this all the time, he does get 1 to 2 smaller smoothies per day in addition to a lighter solid meal. Some days, all meals are liquefied. I'm thinking that this will work well during these upcoming winter months when soups become the center of most of our meals anyway.

Daily probiotics:
I went and purchased one bottle of probiotics pills, but he's literally had only one tablet. His probiotics are coming from fermented foods, specifically a delicious vanilla yogurt made from coconut instead of regular milk. His breakfast smoothie contains 4 ounces of coconut yogurt, along with fresh fruit, vegetables and nuts.

Specific foods:
I've mentioned coconut yogurt already, which is his favorite. There are also select brands of Greek yogurt - specifically ones that contain only simple ingredients and probiotic strains. There is also daily doses of broccoli and carrots. It was too hard to get him to try to eat this raw, so this was made into a simple blended snack of broccoli/carrot/water with crackers. There's also prunes - don't say Yuck! His breakfast smoothie includes 1 to 2 prunes along with nuts, greens and coconut yogurt. And the nuts themselves are full of magnesium. The nuts of choice are pumpkin seeds and almonds.


The Outcome

So far, these foods have helped tremendously. In the past there was a lot of screaming and crying during movements which were happening once every 4 to 5 days. Since these nutritional interventions started, movements are happening every other day, and there's grunting but no screaming. Also, what was hard and somewhat dry is now softer and smoother. He has more positive energy now. He's much more mellow. Before the more frequent movements, he would get increasingly agitated in the days and hours before the movement, and then be totally drained afterward. He's not experiencing the agitation anymore and his joy is most prominent lately. After bowels, instead of drained, he's refreshed.


Later in this series, I'll talk about physical interventions I use at home that have helped both boys during especially tough movements.



Resource: Seven Ways to Help Your Picky Eater (Autism Speaks)

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