Autism-World

Q: My son who has autism has been doing pretty good with the GFCF diet. He is not fighting us too bad and will try what ever we get him. He has been wanting Mcdonalds and begging us for it but we have been able to keep him off that topic.

My daughter on the other hand, the only thing I can feed her is chicken nuggests, french fries, lays potato chips and GFCF speghetti and she loved the GFCF chocolate cake I made. Well after a few weeks of eating the chicken and spaghetti she doesn’t want it anymore. It is a battle to get her to eat. She only eats when she is super hungry and because she is hungry she has been super difficult. I don’t know what to do. My husband got so frusterated he broke and bought her mcdonalds and she scarfed it down . Today she has not been able to focus on a thing and is bouncing all over the place and can’t sit still.

I am frusterated that he gave the kids mcdonalds but I know how difficult she was being and he didn’t know what else to do. It is just is just very frusterating when she refuses to eat and than is difficult all day.

I would like to give her more greens but she hates veggies too. We went to the whole foods store to look for GFCF products we could buy and we had to leave because my daughter was out of control and the entire store was staring at us.

I need help, ideas anything. I don’t want to give up.

Answer:

First of all you may want to try the yahoo groups gfcf group to get ideas. Also, like anyone these kids will get sick of the foods they eat if they eat them day after day. The trick is to always rotate foods, try to stick to two times a week with each food. Because my son has such a limited diet I needed to make a big list of the foods he would eat and then make a daily menu.

Some good transition foods you man not have thought of:

Baby carrots
Fruit
Gluten free pancake mix with maple syrup
Hamburger on gluten free bread
Different kinds of french fries and tater tots to keep it varied, don’t feed same brand all the time
GFCF toast with varied toppings, honey one meal, jam the next.
Eggs
peanuts
gfcf waffles

Also, you can target one food a week to get them to try. Let’s say you wanted her to try peas. Wait until she is very hungry and then say “If you try this pea you can have …” Usually in the beginning I can only get my son to lick it and then I say “Oh! Good job!” After a few times I can usually get him to take a small ant bite. Then later in the week I say “You need to eat half the pea” and maybe cut it in half. By the end of the week you can maybe have her up to a pea or two. The next week you might be able to introduce something else, and keep up with the pea thing. “I need you to eat one peanut and a pea.” They will lick the peanut and eat the one pea. After a month or two of eating a pea or two you can hopefully rotate peas into the diet. It often helps to talk about the food, read pea related books, do internet research together on peas. Grow a pea plant.
It’s so hard but worth it. Good luck.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, December 8th, 2007 at 9:57 pm and is filed under Ask and answer.