I can’t believe I am posting this.. there were so many dark hours in which I thought we’d NEVER get here, but I think I can officially say that Jasper’s GI system has made a miraculous turn around.

So I posted before we were doing the NAET treatments specifically for Dairy…

All I had hoped for was that I’d be able to at least have a little half in half in my coffee, or some blue cheese on my salad. I NEVER expected that not only would I be able to eat dairy (6 days in a row now!) without him breaking out into a eczema rash but that his reflux would all but dissapear at the same time.

Even more amazing is that his poop has been yellow and non mucusy for the first time in I don’t even remember how long! (Dear future Jasper, please forgive me for discussing your poop so much on the internet. love mom.)

I can only theorize that because the NAET Dairy treatment includes things like casein, whey but also what NAET calls “milk mix” which includes breast milk, that somehow the treatment completely changed the way his body handles food through my milk.  This despite the fact that we couldn’t properly clear him for breastmilk because doing so would have required him avoiding it for 25 hours.. we tried to give him neocate so that he could formula feed for that time period but he refused it!

Somehow,  it worked anyway.

And I know there are those of you reading this (my husband included) that will say it’s coincidence, or that he just grew out of it.

And I might even agree with you had it happened in a sequence anything other than the way it did (in fact I was ready to throw in the towell before we started treating for Dairy!)

But here’s the thing: Last week I had a tiny bit of half and half which caused an eczema rash on Jasper’s face, blood in his stool as detected by his pedi GI as well as severe gastric distress the following day.  Several NAET treatments for dairy (we had to treat it in combination with acid and also with several emotions) and about a week later I have half and half again and Jasper’s face stays pristine.  And then I notice his reflux is GONE. I even had feta cheese yesterday and still no reaction!

I suppose that he COULD have grown out of his dairy sensitivity one week from the next, but I wouldn’t have expect it to be so sudden in that case.. I would think it might be that he would break out LESS the following week, or stop spitting up so frequently. You would expect a more gradual decline if that were the case.

I’ve always said that I’m agnostic about wacky-how-could-it-possibly-work things like NAET. If they work, I’m a believer, I don’t really need to know WHY it works to believe that it does if I see it with my own eyes.

Well you can now call me a believer.  My little Jasper is GI Jasper no more!

I don’t know if the NAET treatments are finally working or Jasper has just grown out of some of his “issues” but he has been such a good boy lately that you must allow me to brag!

This past Sunday we drove into NYC (about 45 minutes) to have brunch with some friends and he didn’t cry in his car seat the ENTIRE way there OR back! Even at brunch he was really well behaved. Well, other than that he tried to grab my coffee cup off the table..but really, it is such a huge difference from where he was even just a month ago. Even the receptionist at the Pediatrician’s office has noticed the difference. She said he was like a different baby!

Unfortunately he’s traded his hatred for the car seat for a hatred of putting his arms though clothes. It’s the weirdest thing – he just HATES it all the sudden. He used to have no problem getting dressed. I just attribute it to his age and that his likes and dislikes seem to change with the direction of the wind.

Speaking of NAET things have gotten intersting.. we are currently treating for dairy after I had some half and half in my coffee a couple of weeks ago and he got a bad eczema flare up… two days later I had beef and it got even worse! We had a follow up appointment with his Pedi GI and got another occult fecal blood test done and sure enough Jasper tested positive (a very very trace amount though.)

I was upset about the severity of the eczema because before NAET I had consumed both dairy and Beef and the reaction seemed to only be intestinal.  But Kristina (his NAET practitioner) told me that it’s age related so newborns show the symtoms in their digestion, then around 5-6 months it starts migrating to the skin. In older kids it tends to be mood and behavioral.

Interesting.

The NAET treatments have actually been fascinating all around lately as it turns out many of his sensitivities around dairy are on an emotional level. For example what remained of his sensitivity to milk mix (which includes breastmilk) was panic, fear and abandonment stemming from his birth.

It all makes sense considering that a few minutes after he latched on to me for the first time they whisked him off to the special care nursery where he had to spend the next two days pretty much alone except when I came to nurse him. So he was repeatedly going from nursing to being alone (hello abanonment and fear!). I figure the panic stems from the choking episodes he’s had on the breast due to my overactive let down and his swallowing disortder (dysphagia).

For those of you like me didn’t realize that “allergies” can be to anything but food or pollen, check out this thread Stephanie emailed me from Ask Moxie. One of the commenters says:

“for some kids it isn’t THE thing, it is how much of it to create irritation – Miss M has a sensitive histamine response, diagnosed by the allergists at a Children’s Hospital, so I’m not making it up… anyway, she reacted with mucous and such to either first instances or excess consumption of ANYTHING. It was like she was allergic to the idea of ‘new’ and the idea of ‘plenty’”

So interesting!

I can tell you that I had cream in my coffee Sunday and J had a great night and his skin didn’t seem to be worse the next day (the eczema from the first round of dairy never totally cleared up.)

So that’s our little update. Hopefully the improvements continue and I’ll be a dairy eatin’ fool this time next week. I’ll keep you posted!

One of the only ways I’m keeping myself sane eating no dairy is by using coconut milk and coconut oil instead of milk and butter – if you haven’t tried Turtle Mountain’s Purely Decadent Coconut Ice Cream you are truly missing something, it absolutely lives up to it’s!  Coconut has numerous health benefits including being heart healthy, easy to digest, has anti yeast/microbial/bacterial properties etc. etc.

I also happen to really love the taste of coconut, so I’ve taken to cooking all of my food in coconut oil (according to NAET Jasper is sensitive to olive oil!) and using coconut milk to cook with and even use it instead of cream in my coffee.

Coconut oil when refrigerated is actually solid, so it can even be used like butter (fabulous on a sweet potato for instance) and I do so in the recipe below. (If you don’t have a problem using real butter you can substitute it for the coconut oil in the pie crust).

Ok, so here’s the recipe – it’s basically the same as the Libby’s pumpkin pie recipe just using coconut milk instead of condensed milk and with one notable addition: Cardamom. The cardamom gives the pie an incredibly rich spiced flavor, totally unexpected but also completely harmonious with the other flavors. You need to try it, trust me on this one!

Without further ado, the recipe:

Nut Pie Crust:

• 1.5 cups of ground pecans
• 1/4 cup of some type of gluten free flour (if you want it GF, otherwise use wheat!) I used rice flour.
• 3 Tablespoons or so of coconut oil – does not have to be exact, it just give the mix some moisture and keeps the nut crust from burning.

Grind all ingredients together in a Cuisinart until finely ground. Press mixture with clean fingers into the bottom and sides of pie plate.

Pie Filling:

• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
• The freshly ground black seeds of two cardamom pods broken open. If you have ground cardamom instead, just use a small pinch – cardamom is strong!
• 2 large eggs
• 1 can (15 oz.) Pure Pumpkin (I use organic canned pumpkin from the health food store)
• 1 can 15 oz can of whole coconut milk (DO NOT use lite, it will be watery and icky!) minus a few tablespoons or so if you want to use it like “whipped cream” as a topping
• 1 unbaked 9-inch (4-cup volume) deep-dish pie shell

Directions:

MIX sugar, cinnamon, salt, ginger, cardamom and cloves in small bowl. Beat eggs in large bowl. Stir in pumpkin and sugar-spice mixture. Gradually stir in coconut milk (it helps to have a kitchen aid or electric mixer because the coconut milk can get lumpy.)

Pour into pie shell.

BAKE in preheated 425° F oven for 15 minutes. Reduce temperature to 350° F; bake for 40 to 50 minutes or until knife inserted near center comes out clean.  Serve immediately or refrigerate. Top with coconut milk like whipped cream or Turtle Mountain’s Purely Decadent Coconut Ice Cream or just enjoy as is! Makes a delicious breakfast too..

I hope this helps anyone else who is breastfeeding an MSPI (Milk/Soy Protein Intolerant) baby feel a little less deprived. Now that the holidays are over and we just have a long dreary 3 months of winter ahead of us, who couldn’t use a little pumpkin-pie-pick-me up??

Let me know how you like it if you try it!

Adults are normally “treated” by holding a vial of the offending substance while the practitioner either does accupuncture or accupressure and then avoiding the substance for 25 hours. Since we are treating an exclusively breastfed baby, I must avoid the substance for 24 hours BEFORE the treatment so that Jasper is not getting it through my breastmilk.

This avoidance is easier said than done, particularly because the first treatments are to things like calcium and vitamins.. which are in so many foods!

The first treatment we did was to egg, which is always the first treatment because the egg protein is similar to many proteins found in the human body and protein is an essential building block.  Egg is also symbolic of new beginnings and birth, so many babies that had a traumatic birth experience, either phsycially or emotionally are sensitive to egg.

In Jasper’s case, his birth and first few days were definitely traumatic physically.  The day he was born is also an emotionally charged day as he was born on the day of my father’s birth, but also on the day of Jeff’s mother’s death.. his sensitivity to egg as a result of his birth existed on more than one level and we spent quite some time clearing him on both levels.

Egg itself wasn’t hard to avoid (I hadn’t been eating it anyway because I’d heard it causes fussiness in infants) but you must also avoid anything “egg” related, including chicken or feathers. This meant that we had to remove our down comforter and pillows and I had to wear a wool coat instead of a down coat so that Jasper wouldn’t be within 5 feet of feathers for the 25 hours.

But the egg avoidance was easy compared to the next treatment for calcium.  Calcium is in pretty much everything. The instructions say not to eat chicken or fish, so I ended up eating Beef evey though Jasper tested weak for it. I had to have some protein to function (and produce milk!)

After your treatment you test the substance again at your next appointment to make sure you’ve “cleared” it. If not, you have to repeat the process.

I have to say I have seen a definite improvement in jasper just since doing these treatments. He still wakes up in pain like clockwork at 1:30 and 4 am ish with bad gas pains, but he is sleeping MUCH more fitfully inbetween those times.  He has also been so much less fussy during the day.

In fact, Friday was perhaps Jasper’s best day ever! He was a complete joy. Nothing seemed to bother him and he was a smiley happy little ball of joy. So much so that we even dared to go out to dinner with him.. and he was on his best behavior even when he woke up half way through our meal (which normally means we have to ask for our check and a to-go box!)

We haven’t eaten out since before I started TED, so it’s been over a month. I had a desperate craving for sushi. The problem is that Jasper tested weak for soy. Sushi without soy sauce.. ick!

Then I rememered what our NAET practitioner said about trying to eat the foods Jasper tested weak for at least once a week and decided to go for it and have the soy sauce…

Bad decision.

Jasper was a complete whiny fussy mess ALL day Saturday. The contrast between Saturday and Friday was just so unbelievable. You wouldn’t even believe it was the same child!  I will definitely NOT be eat soy again until Jasper is cleared for it.

The other thing I wanted to mention is that I think I’ve identified the one food that causes Jasper to break out with an ezcema rash: Lemon.  I shouldn’t be too surprised by this one because my paternal grandmother breaks out into hives when she has citrus. But I was a little shocked because Lemon is one of the three foods that the medical intuitive told us would be Jasper’s ‘lifelong remedies!’  Hah.

But then I made a timeline of events:

11-3 Went off Dairy and Soy
11-11 Started elimination diet
11-22 started prevacid in combination with zantac
11-28 went off elimination diet
11-29 drank mother’s milk tea
11-30 rash on cheeks appears. horrible night –cramping and screaming all night.
11-31 another horrible night.
12-1 stopped zantac and Jasper had a great night!
12-2 pretty good/ok night.
12-3 night HORRIBLE.
12-4 rash is back on cheeks and terrible red burn like rash after BM

Looking at this timeline, it’s pretty clear from the sequence of events that the most likely cause of Jasper’s rash and behavior is me going off TED.

But how could going OFF it cause such a negative reaction when going ON it didn’t cause much positive effect?  I had a long email exchange with an experience reflux and allergy mommy Stephanie and she wrote:

If you keep giving up dairy and reintroducing it, the symptoms will keep
coming back. Also, it takes about a week for all traces of dairy to be gone
from your breast milk, so it will often take two or three weeks to see a big
difference because the baby is still getting traces of dairy for about a
week after you give it up, and then it will take a week or two for his
skin/gut to heal from the irritation of the allergen. So a lot of moms give
up too soon – they say “It’s been a week and I don’t see any difference.”
In fact, with babies with serious milk and soy allergies (about a third of
babies allergic to dairy are also allergic to soy) who end up having to go
on elemental formulas (allergen-free by prescription only) they advise
waiting an entire month to see results.

That really made sense to me. So even though Jasper didn’t show huge improvement while OFF the offending foods, when I went back to eating a whole bunch of foods he was allergic to it flooded his system with allergens and caused the rash and gas pains.

Not wanting to start TED again blindly, I decided to try NAET.

The best description I found of NAET is on this blog:

NAET stands for Nambudripad’s Allergy Elimination Techniques. Here’s what the website says:

“a non-invasive, drug free, natural solution to eliminate allergies of all types and intensities using a blend of selective energy balancing, testing and treatment procedures from acupuncture/acupressure, allopathy, chiropractic, nutritional, and kinesiological disciplines of medicine.”

That’s about as clear as mud, right?

The technique claims that through muscle testing and acupressure, you can identify allergies and then desensitize the body to the identified allergens so that they no longer cause problems. Ever.

I know, it sounds too good to be true.

Other than the obvious upside of not just having to avoid allergens for the duration of breatsfeeding but to actually CURE the allergy, I also knew that NAET cured my mom of her horrible dust allergies.

So on December 5th after poor Jasper’s rash reappeared with a vengance I brought him for our first NAET appointment.

At the first appointment they test you for allergies to many major food groups, environmental allergies (mold, dust) and also organ weaknesses. They use MRT (muscle response testing) which is where you hold your arm up and the practitioner tries to push it down when asking if you are weak to a substance. If your arm goes down easily you have a weekness. If it stays strong and is not easily pushed down you are “strong” to that substance.

(Before you pronounce me mad and click the x on your browser window, check out this study in which MRT identified 19 allergies that were then later confirmed by blood tests.)

Obviously you can’t muscle test a baby, so everything is done with a surrogate, which would normally be me except she had to use the office manager instead of me because we were “incompatible” for treatment. Dr. W said this happens often when mom’s have been through the wringer with their babes and there is a  lot of emotional intaglement. So we had to be “treated” to each other almost as if it were an allergy so that I could be Jasper’s surrogate in the future treatments.

The results were pretty eye opening..

Unfortunately, Jasper tested weak for pretty much EVERYTHING including Gluten, Soy, Dairy, Corn, Beef, Eggs, Shellfish and most interestingly TURKEY! Yes, turkey, the very thing that I had been gorging on during TED.

For the organ testing he tested weak for intestines (surprise surprise) and spleen.

Here’s where it got intersting.. each organ has a corresponding meridian (like in accupuncture) and time of day. The intestines time of day is 4am-6am, the exact time that Jasper suffers the absolute MOST from gas!

Then we looked at a body meridian chart she had hanging on the wall and both the spleen and intestines have meridians around the esophagus perhaps explaining J’s reflux issues. It made me hopeful that once his allergies are under control he may be able to be weaned off of the prevacid.

She also tested him for zantac vs. prevacid and he was strong for prevacid and weak for zantac. That is the exact opposite of what I would have thought. I was actually about to take him off the prevacid and put him back on zantac!

One other weird thing was that she said her tests showed his nighttime crying was related to mold and asked if we had a mold problem where Jasper sleeps.  I couln’t think of how there could be mold in our bedroom until that night when we got home I went to turn on the humidifier (!!) that we’d been running every night and hadn’t cleaned since we borrowed it from my parents months ago. That night I didn’t run it and even though Jasper had a really bad cold he slept a hundred times better than he had been previously.

I mentioned in my previous post that I am an agnostic when it comes to things like alternative medicine, psychics etc. I believe that some people are truly psychic, but you have to tell me something that will convince me.  Nothing that the medical intuitive we consulted led me to believe she was the real thing.. there was no “aha!” moment like there was during our first NAET session.

So for now, I’m a believer, but that may change if we don’t start seeing postive results from the treatments.

I’ll explain the treatments in my next post as that is a whole topic in and of itself!

The day after thanksgiving (oh the irony!!) after 2.5 weeks I gave up on TED, the Dr. Sears recommended Total Elimination Diet.

One reason was that I just wasn’t seeing the kind of improvement that justified the threat to my milk supply and the lack of calcium and overall good nutrition.  The second reason was that I consulted a medical intuitive.

Yes, desperate times call for desperate measures!!

Now I don’t know where you fall on the skeptic vs. believer scale about psychics etc, but as you will see from this and my soon to be published posts about NAET I am an agnostic. If it works, I believe it.

This particular woman came highly recommended by our cranial sacral therapist who I trust very much so I was SOOO excited before our phone call.. finally there was someone who could just tell me what foods were bothering Jasper and even tell me which reflux meds he should be on..

HA! Biggest waste of $125 ever. And I don’t say that because I’m a skeptic (I once studied to be an astrologer, so I’m definitely open minded) but rather because she turned out to be so wrong it’s almost comical.

According to the psychic lady (whom I will refer to by her initials JW) Jasper’s entire problem is a candida overgrowth caused by the antibiotics he was given at birth.

Ok, it doesn’t take a medical genius to know that was a possibility which is why i’d been giving him probiotics (with no improvement) since he was about 3 weeks old. BUT, it sort of made sense to me because there was one weekend I deviated from TED because I was afraid my milk supply was dying.. the things I ate had none of the 8 major food allergens but they were sweet.  And he did seem to get a bit worse after that, so I thought maybe she could be on to something.

When I asked her about his reflux meds she said that he would react better to zantac and zegerid better than prevacid.

She also said that lifelong Jasper’s three “remedies” would be yogurt (full fat so that there is little milk sugar to feed the candida yeasties), parsley and lemon which supposedly keeps the yeasties at bay.

She  then there was no particular food that Jasper couldn’t tolerate. In fact, she said that I should be eating a huge variety of foods, particularly goat cheese. (This would later raise some red flags).

Yes, I was free to eat dairy again at last!!

The following day I went of TED with gusto.  I also started drinking mother’s milk tea to get my supply up to where it had been. But something was bothering me..

If all of Jasper’s problems were yeast/candida related, why did they not improve with probiotics? Why haven’t we ever had thrush? And why would she say it’s ok to eat cheese which is a big no no on candida erradication diets etc.?

Then, two nights after being of TED, Jasper had his worst night EVER.

Writhing, screaming in pain all night long.  He woke up and pooped and I saw a burn like red rash on his butt in a circle which I knew was an “allergy ring.” Hi also developed this eczema patch on his right cheek:

These were the first outward physical signs of what I had been suspecting all along. Jasper DOES have a food allergy! But to what.. ?

Was it the mother’s milk tea I had been drinking a bunch of to get my supply back up (fenugreek has been known to cause gassiness in babies)? Was it that we had started him on prevacid about a week ago?  I still didn’t want to believe it could be anything I’d eliminated on TED because why would his symptoms not be gone on TED then?

Still desperate I called up my pediatrician’s wife who is a NAET practitioner and decided to bring Jasper in for testing.  Our journey into NAET is the subject of my next post, but for now, I want to post the answer to a question I received from Jessica who asked

“What did your typical daily diet look like on TED?”

Even though TED didn’t work for us, I’m happy to help others get through it. It’s not as bad as it sounds really, my indecisive nature actually enjoyed not having to decide what to make for dinner each night or what grocery items to shop for! The other benefit is the weight loss.. which can be profound.

So to answer your question Jessica, my typical diet was:

Breakfast: Rice & Shine cereal with Rice Milk and cane sugar or Erewhon Crispy Brown Rice (the Gluten Free one) cereal with Rice Milk.

Lunch: Leftover’s from Dinner

Dinner: My favorite dinner was Sheltons ground turkey (found in the freezer section of my health food store) sauteed in olive oil. When the turkey is brown I would put in one chopped zucchini and one chopped yellow squash in the same pan so it gets the turkey grease.

In a separate pot I boiled some white potatoes and mashed them in that same pot. I would add some olive oil, salt and some plain flavored rice milk. On top of the mashed potatoes put your turkey and them moisten the turkey with the rice milk as well. Top off with zucchini and squash.

It’s surprisingly yummy, like a crustless pot pie!

The other staples were turkey hot dogs, burgers and lots of potato chips and rice rice rice and the occasional yam and/or bakes squash.

I hope that helps anyone about to embark on TED. There is a recipe thread here that also has some ideas and particularly this post here that got me started.

Good luck, I hope it works better for you than it did for us!