~ AUTISM ROUND TWO ~

I’ve thought long and hard about what that “one thing” is I would like to share. But that is tricky, because as we all know, none of this is a simple matter.

If I were to sum up everything I have learned over the last 20+ years, it would be this–you must work to understand the big picture of your child’s health. Change your perspective to look at the BIG PICTURE.

Does that sound overly simplistic? It’s not. In the autism world, we have spent 20 years looking for the “magic pill” that would fix our kids. The probiotic that would fix their gut. The supplement that would stop their stimming. The protocol that would enable sleep–even for one night.

But there is no magic pill. One of the major turning points in my own autism journey happened while I was reading a nutrition book from the earlier part of the 1900. The author of this book made a very important point–if a person is deficient in one vitamin or mineral, he will most certainly be deficient in many, even most, of them. He encouraged his readers to move beyond supplementation to fixing the diet overall. Up until this point, I had been adding supplement after supplement, and taking out a wide variety of foods that tested as allergic on my son’s ELISA test. Reading that book was my wake-up call. I had totally missed the big picture.

Growing a child is a lot like growing a garden. A plant does not just require soil. It also requires light, and water. And it doesn’t just need soil–it needs GOOD soil. And not just light, but the right amount of light. And not just water, but the right amount. We must keep out weeds, and fend off pests and disease. And all of these things must be worked on consistently, every day.

Again, that may sound simple, but we are dealing with a very complex situation. The world has changed over the last 100 years, and it is not ever changing back to what it was. We need to fix our problems while living in our NEW world–while using commercially prepared foods, while participating in many activities, and probably, while mom works. We have a hundred new stressors in our child’s environment, many of them designed to encourage dependency, if not outright addiction. And an additional piece that many are not looking at is genetics. I am not talking about the genetic anomalies that many in the autism community are looking for, but the multi-generational decline that the nutritionists from 100 years ago were tracking, and about which they had grave concerns. It often takes three or four generations for a compromised genetic line to fully collapse, and it’s possible that our most affected children are the third, and even fourth generation of health-compromised people in our genetic line. More about that later.

But we have lots of good news! We are beginning to understand. We are beginning to accept that yes, it’s possible that media addiction has been a big contributor to our problems. There has been a major shift in our young people towards simple, nutritious food. The excessive consumerism that was the hallmark of the last 50+ years has run its course; our young people are turning away from an obsession with stuff and are instead working toward building balanced, meaningful lives.

And unlike me 25 years ago, you have tools. Back then we were still fighting about the cause, and what might effect a cure. Was a cure even possible? Was the problem in the food? Was the answer therapy? Way back then, I only recall ONE person who suggested that media might be a problem–an excellent therapist who carried us through the first years of our fight.

The way I see it, my generation fought the first round in the autism fight. And my biggest learning was that our fix would come from NOT just the food, NOT just therapy, but from evaluating and fixing the way we lived our life. I had to step back and look at the big picture, and get back to basics. But first, I had to learn what those basics were. Now, let’s get down to business.

Some 60 years ago, football coach Vince Lombardi stood silently for several seconds before speaking to his team. The year before, the Green Bay Packers had narrowly lost the NFL Championship, squandering their early lead late in the game.

But this was a new year, and a new opportunity. Coach Lombardi, as he faced his seasoned team of 38 players, held up a pig skin and said, “Gentlemen, this is a football.”

The coach proceeded to go back to the beginning. They studied the playbook, starting from page 1. They reviewed the basics of blocking and tackling. And six months later, the Green Bay Packers beat the New York Giants 37-0 to win the NFL Championship.

In his best-selling book, When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi, author David Maraniss discusses this quote that was to become one of the most repeated in the world of sports.

He took nothing for granted. He began a tradition of starting from scratch, assuming that the players were blank slates who carried over no knowledge from the year before… He began with the most elemental statement of all. “Gentlemen, this is a football.”

We too have lost site of the basics as we look for our answers to autism. After many years special diets and supplements, I was fortunate to stumble across some old medical texts on nutrition, texts that focused on the basics. And that is when I began to make real progress. Like Coach Lombardi, we need to go back to the basics to understand how to make our kids strong and healthy.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is a child. This is where we begin.

For 20 years, I have spent every waking minute working on the failing health of my family.  We were 100% gluten and casein-free for over 10 years.  I’ve implemented every “autism” diet ever developed, and even designed some of my own. I’ve grown wheat grass on my patio, and made my own yogurt from probiotic strains you had to order through the mail. And like many of you, I have a huge cupboard full of supplements that I hoped would be our miracle–and all these years later, most of the bottles sit half-used on a shelf, too expensive to throw away.

I was a corporate trainer by trade, and I feel there’s a need for someone who has walked this path in all its difficulty to help you all sort through the mess of information about autism.  The medical community has come a long, long way, to be sure, but I believe it’s the moms who have done the work who will benefit you the most.  And so I’m going to throw my hat in the ring.

I am not a doctor.  I will not be giving any of my own opinions about medical issues.  What I will do is bring you great research no one else is talking about.  Really, some of the most effective tools I’ve found came from outside of the autism community, and often from research done many years ago.

But something else I will do is share with you what worked for us here–and not just for my son, but for my whole family.  Changing the way you eat, and cook, and live is HARD.  There were some interventions that we tried that helped a lot, but were unsustainable for the long-term.  And as my son grew and got better, and was involved in life outside of our home, it became unreasonable to expect him to stay with the complicated protocols that we had in place.

Today, my son is away at college.  What once were severe health issues now look more like chronic fatigue, and possibly ADD. And unfortunately, sometimes like depression.  While in some ways I feel like I’ve “won” this fight, if I’d known 15 years ago what I know now, my son–and my whole family–would be in a much better place today.  And it wouldn’t have been so HARD!!

Whether you are just beginning, or years down your biomed road–or even if you are later in the game, like me, I invite you to revisit some of the research, and maybe rethink your strategy a bit.  Let’s take advantage of the 20 years of research we have behind us,

It is my hope that those of you with children now will be the generation to crack the code on this mystery we call autism.