What motivates me to write Rainbow Food Rocks is not my work experience, degree, and areas of study; it is my real-life journey, and the experiences I have had along the way as a mother of three and a first-hand witness to the power of food. It is the illnesses and struggles my family and I have had with food, and all of the knowledge I have gained along the way, that calls me to write this.
When my first daughter, Abigail, was born, I knew she had special needs, but I couldn’t figure out what they were. She would cry for three to four hours at a time, no matter what I did to try to console her. She would wake up from naps crying, and she would run around constantly throwing things, throwing herself on the floor, banging on doors, screaming at me as if I didn’t hear her or as if I were not paying attention, grunting and spitting.
As Abigail became a toddler, she would say strange things in a scary voice, talk to herself about what negative things she was going to do next, act schizophrenic, and often attack objects and/or people, including myself. She was highly intelligent at a young age, and her verbal skills masked a disability, or perhaps one could say “gift”, that she had. By the time she turned four years old, I knew that something was very, very wrong, and I took her to an autism center where we lived to have her evaluated by a nurse practitioner and psychologist. She was then diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Attention Deficit Hyper Disorder.
At the same time, my youngest daughter, Adeline, was exhibiting massive fatigue, had been diagnosed with a gross motor delay, and was screaming in pain from her waist down, especially in her ankles. The local children’s hospital had no explanation for my youngest daughter’s pain, and blood tests only revealed general inflammation, with no answers to the root cause.
Also, at the same time, my infant son, Jeffy, began to break out from what appeared to be a wheat allergy when he started to eat solids and was getting reoccurring staph infections from this allergy.
Trying to manage all of these health conditions, I, too, became unwell. First, I started to have pains in my ankles and calves, purple veins that looked like bruises, heart palpitations, and this feeling of being very irritated. Then, I started to show signs of what looked like asthma, even though I knew I really didn’t have asthma. I started to develop much more severe allergies, including food allergies and food sensitivities. I began to get extremely fatigued and started having trouble getting up and down the stairs.
Under the supervision and guidance of a naturopathic doctor, and due to all of these health conditions with the kids and me at once, the kids and I began to eliminate food from our diets.
At first, we were eliminating foods known to trigger autistic symptoms for Abigail. We started by eliminating dairy, and we started by only eliminating it for Abigail as a test. After just one week of Abigail without dairy, I saw a noticeable difference. After two weeks, an even bigger difference, and by week three, Abigail was 25% better than she had previously been! This was the point where I started to wake up and realize just how much what we eat impacts our mind, body, and soul.
Because Jeffy had been suffering from what we suspected was a wheat allergy, and Abigail was having so much success off of dairy, we decided to do two things: 1) Eliminate dairy now for all of the kids and me; and 2) Eliminate wheat for all of the kids and me.
When we eliminated the wheat, we made the mistake of purchasing lots of products made from corn. We had corn pasta, corn flour, corn chips, etc. We started to notice that when Abigail ate the products with corn, she reverted back to and was, in some cases, even worse than when she would eat wheat and dairy. Because of this observation, I decided to investigate corn, only to learn about GMOs and how corn often has gluten from co-mingling with gluten-containing grains, such as wheat, in the fields. Once I put two-and-two together, I realized corn absolutely needed to be eliminated, and thus, it was removed.
By the time dairy, wheat, and corn were fully taken out of the diet for the kids and me, all three kids were getting better right away. Abigail was 50% better from her autistic symptoms within two weeks; Adeline was starting to gain strength and trying to walk; and Jeffy’s staph infections fully disappeared.
Due to this amazing success, we decided to continue on this path of elimination and remove soy, as well as all artificial flavors and dyes. I then needed to come up with a lot more alternatives for food, as there just wasn’t that much available on the market that was fully compliant. I began to research many recipes and practice converting them into food the kids could eat without having reactions.
While we were having a lot more success with the kids, and Abigail was now 75% better with her autistic symptoms and Jeffy 100% better with his staph infections, there was still something lingering that we hadn’t quite figured out with Adeline. She was still having pains from her hips down and fatigue, even though she had finally started to walk. She was scrunching her feet in pain, and she was only able to walk a hundred feet before she needed the stroller and was too tired to continue to walk. We had a local children’s hospital put her under anesthesia for an MRI, searching for possible spina bifida, only to find out that wasn’t the cause. We then went to our wonderful naturopathic doctor, who ran all the blood tests she could think of, only to verify that there wasn’t anything overtly wrong with Adeline’s health. She then offered and did an IgG allergy test, which tests over 100 foods for allergic reactions. This was the icing on the cake!
By doing the IgG allergy test, we learned two major things: 1) The elimination of dairy, wheat, corn, and soy were spot-on for Adeline, because she was indeed having reactions to these food allergens; 2) She was also highly reacting to eggs, even more than the other allergens! This IgG test not only provided relief to me, but it gave me the most important piece of Adeline’s pain puzzle that I was missing: EGGS! I had no idea that eggs could cause so much harm, but after enough research, it turns out these eggs can cause a lot of problems for a lot of people with all kinds of health conditions! We thus eliminated eggs for all of the kids and me. Adeline’s mystery illness, pain, fatigue, and everything, then went away, FINALLY! And, Abigail became 90% better with her autistic symptoms.
To prove to my husband and myself that all this trial-and-error of eliminating foods was spot-on, I then ordered an IgG allergy test for Abigail and myself. The results were astonishing, and yet not surprising! Even with the elimination of wheat, dairy, corn, soy, and eventually eggs, from what the kids and I were eating, the results still showed that we could not tolerate these food items. The test was done only after all this trial-and-error of eliminating foods, and yet it clearly proved that what I was doing was absolutely necessary for the well-being of my kids and me. We all were reacting to wheat, dairy, corn, soy, and eggs!
As the kids’ health improved, my health unfortunately got worse. It looked as if I were developing Relapsing Remitting Multiple Sclerosis, and I became quite frightened that I would permanently lose my abilities. I started going to a chiropractor, only to learn that there was now a defect in my spine, and my left shoulder was raised as if I had been in a car accident. My neck and shoulders started to hurt at this time, and my right hip was suddenly out of alignment. I was in enormous hours of inexplicable pain, losing the ability to walk randomly and then being fine and very capable. It became very hard to do the activities I used to love doing, and I eventually had to stop homeschooling my children, because I didn’t know from one day to the next if I would be able to get up and down the stairs quickly enough to keep up with them.
By this time, I had tried the Paleo diet, the GAPs diet, the Wahl’s diet, and even the FODMAPs diet on myself. None of these were working, even with keeping the elimination of the same foods my kids had eliminated. Out of despair, I had many blood tests done to see if anything would tell me what was wrong. My naturopathic doctor was the one to finally find that I had something called the re-activation of the Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV), which I had never heard of previously.
Wanting to know more about the reactivation of the EBV, I decided to do an internet search. This lead me to Anthony Williams’ book, Medical Medium. After reading his book, I realized that he was talking about doing exactly what I was doing for my kids’ health, only I had gone through doing all of this the more difficult route through trial-and-error, without being handed this information on a silver platter. Furthermore, he talked about reducing, if not eliminating, the amount of meat I was consuming.
Removing meat from my diet and adopting a plant-based, almost vegan, way of eating, was a real game-changer for me. I am proud to say that I am now very fit, very healthy, and I do not have the same ailments that plagued me.
My kids’ health has been my inspiration to create recipes that are wheat, gluten, dairy, corn, soy, peanut, and egg-free, and my health journey has resulted in these recipes being plant-based, vegetarian and vegan compliant. Rainbow Food Rocks is the title Abigail chose for the recipe book. I wrote the book to honor her.
For more details about my journey healing my three kids and myself, please subscribe to Rainbow Food Rocks and Rainbow Healing and Wellness on YouTube.