GFCF diet advice

[sadminster]

We put ds (2.9 severe language delay, increasing ASD behaviours) on a GFCF diet last week (with extra vitamins & fish oils). He did okay but for the last two days is refusing to eat anything but a tiny amount of cereal with chocolate soya milk on, oh & apple juice - obviously can't continue in the long term.

His behaviour is much worse (whether that's realated or not I don't know) - lots of tantrums, sensory stuff, verbal 'ticks' (goya-goya-goya). He isn't sleeping well (waking & crying out in his sleep), has huge dark rings under his eyes & looks skinny

But he had his first 'normal' poo of his life today!

In light of his poo I'm going to persist with the diet & try to get him eating again but how long realistically should I give it?

the rule of thumb says that the more problematic the behaviour when you first remove foods , the more impressive the ultimate result will be. Children who show a strong withdrawal tend to do best.
So actually the harder it is initially the more important that you continue

And you need to drop the apple juice as soon as you can - gfcf and apple juice do not go.

If you want extra support and help the AiA website is very good here

I'm curious about apple juice too as my son was put on an exclusion diet and he was only allowed apple juice or water

Didn't mean to make everyone anxious!

I used to spend a lot of time on the AiA website and gotto know Marilyn Le Breton who runs the site with Rosemary Kessick and who wrote Diet Intervention and Autism.
The substantial experience on that site was that the children who did well on the gfcf diet very very often had a problem with apple juice. From memory it was something to do with the crushed pips but this was a few years ago.

I was recommended to pull apple juice for a while to see ( that included my soya milk at the time which was sweetened with apple juice.
In common with many others I found that DS2 had another mini withdrawal and then had another improvement surge. This related especially to his sleep and his temperature control ( he was sweaty at night) . His giggling episodes also reduced massively.

My personal experience ( which of course is hardly a scientific certainty but was based on following hundreds of people trying the diet) was that a substantial number of them found their children had problems with apple juice ( and I want to say blackcurrant too but don't wantto upset anyone else)

I have been doing gfcf for ten years now and it has been so common for me to see it that I kind of assumed it was well known.
I really am sorry to have thrown some of you. And must stress it is not always a problem .
Sorry everyone !

Pipimjo

I think DAN often work in order of exclusion - get the worst/most common offenders out first and also work simultaneously to repairthe gut so their approach may mean they either get to this later or seek to repair gut before additional exclusion is needed.

I am sure your DAN is fine ( and knows what they are doing without dimwit pag blundering in on an open forum with her generaliszations )

My son took part in the early research at Sunderland with Paul Shattock ARU HERE