GFCF diets and small kids with autism

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I think GFCF diet could help accompanying gastro-intestinal problems that often come with autism. As for "curing" autism--a food cannot physically change the wiring in a person's brain. A person with a true ASD has a differently wired brain, and they are going to have that brain for the rest of their lives. I demonstrated autistic symptoms before I ever went on solid food (or dairy products), so I don't believe a GFCF diet would change my autistic symptoms.

Ha ha, no you don't sound crazy to me. Not sure how many people on the "mild" end of the spectrum want to be cured though. I don't (assuming I am even on it.)

And for my "flipping on the switch" episode it just happened, I wasn't doing anything special. It was after school and I was just thinking about that Oregon Trail game we used to play.

I'm not looking for a cure either but I sure wish my son could be comfortable in classroom environments. He acts like a monkey. Very cute but very distracting! We are going to try to give him gum to keep him more quiet. Any other suggestions, Guywithas?

i believe glutein and casein may be causing allergies which are similar to sensory issues many on the spectrum face. and i believe there are emotional developmental windows which open and close at certain stages of our lives.

if the child is put on a GFCF diet before the developmental window shuts then the allergies go away and that particular milestone is reached and emotional development continues as normal. if the person is put on a GFCF diet after the developmental window has closed then it will make the person more comfortable since those allergies are gone, but they will be emotionally frozen in the state they were in.

also i believe it is possible to unlock that development, as has happened to me, and wreck-gar. i only know this for the very mildest end of the spectrum though. i'm hopeful that if this is correct that we can use these ideas further down the spectrum. basically what we'd be doing is reverse engineering human emotional development.

i'd suggest you learn about ABA and apply it with your son. obviously ABA is for little kids. but at its core its about learning to reward the right behaviours and encourage more of those, while ignoring the wrong behaviours.

i think a primary reason for the behavioural issues with the mild forms of ASD is due to misunderstanding value.

think of it like this: if you're driving in your car down the street you stay in the lane. you don't drive too far off to the left or too far off to the right. you stay in the middle of the lane. that is where the value is.

when we have some ASD we don't learn how to read body language and all the other social indicators which go along with it. so we get confused as to what value actually is for other people. we just know WE WANT STUFF. we never get to learn that if we help other people GET STUFF then they will help US to get stuff. and that may be surfacing in the bad behaviour in the classroom. it gets attention for your son which is rewarding.

its like we're driving that car but we keep driving out of our lane all the time. and that causes bad social experiences which lowers self esteem, causes depression, etc.

so if you learn ABA you'll have a way to reinforce good behaviors in your son and he'll start to learn what kinds of things he needs to do to make you happy.. and then when he makes you happy, he'll naturally find he gets the STUFF HE WANTS. so its kind of a way to calibrate how he receives value.

if he were older i'd suggest other approaches, but this at least might help for a 10 year old boy. i think it would have made a huge difference if my parents had used it with me.

one note: some people hate ABA -- make sure its always interesting for your son. some people make it work or boring or push people. it should be about rewarding and always be fun or positive. if it isn't, you're not doing it right

My son is a monkey, too, but it involves a LOT more than just perceived appropriate or inappropriate behavior. If you address the behavior without understanding why he does it all you've done is cause new issues.

In my son the combination includes stims (which self-calm, and are needed to keep his brain centered and focused) and getting a sense of where he is in the air. My son has hyper-mobility and hypotonia, the end result of which is that not all the nerve signals sent to his brain actually get there. Thus, he seeks more. Because without that additional information his brain does not know where the feet, hands and so forth are. Our brains seek that anchor. Movement and funny sitting et al give his brain the information it needs to allow him to think about other things.

I would NEVER put my son in ABA to squash that stuff and just make him "present" better. Everything I've learned about AS and have achieved in working with my son tells me that would be counter-productive.

I am sure the research you've done is interesting and has its place, but it sounds to me like there are many issues and pieces you have no concept of. All those moving parts need to be seen and understood, too, and they could alter some of your theories and conclusions.

I have a school telling me that my son is now the highest functioning AS child they have ever seen. Well, it wasn't always that way. I really believe in the choices I've made for my child, and the interpretations I've made, because I've got the results to back it up.

i don't have any sensory issues. my focus is the mild end of the spectrum. and i'm only focused on behavioural remedies. which i think is a big part of the problem. i don't know anything about the medical side. IMHO the original diagnosis of aspergers from hans asperger meant people who didn't have any kind of sensory or medical problems. the rest is autism. but i think these terms have been mixed together now. if i'd been at your son's school and he couldn't feel where his feet and hands are and we both have aspergers, we'd be pretty different. because i never had anything like that.

i'm not sure why you think i meant supressing anything, thats certainly not what i was suggesting, especially if you look at my last sentence.

by saying ABA i mean to use the concepts of operant conditioning to reinforce positive behavior. this is actually the book i learned it from: http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Shoot-Dog-Te ... 204&sr=8-1

if you want to misinterpret, you can easily say that because that book is demeaning kids. but its actually one of the original foundational books which a lot of people have used to learn classical operant conditioning and it can be applied everywhere in life.

by ABA what i am saying is look for the good things your kids do and reward them. and make sure you're not inadvertently reinforcing the wrong behaviors. this is an area which gets pretty technical and is really worth understanding well.

and view that the kids can continue to progress -- indefinitely. thats one thing we definitely do agree on. don't view these kids as fixed or having messed up brains or stuck. just view them as having delayed emotional development and keep interacting with them so they continue to move forward as quickly as possible.

My son IS the mild end of the spectrum.

And you seem to have misunderstood what I was talking about with the nerve signals. He can feel his feet, but his brain has trouble knowing where the feet are in relation to everything around him. Thus, he moves more to get that information.

And, no, I don't care for using behavioral remedies or operant conditioning on thinking people. I admit to a bias against it. If you haven't had success controlling your own actions with your conscious brain, I would think you would want to know why you can't reach your own goals first. We are supposed to use our conscious brain to make informed choices. Of course ... What gets interesting with ASDs is that the relationship between the conscious mind, and the unconscious mind, can operate very differently, which would be why ABA does work in certain situations. But I think one has to be very very careful what they chose to apply that type of therapy to. It is not a magic solution.

actually, i firmly believe it *is* a magic solution because it changed everything.

it has been one of the single most powerful things i have used, as a person on the spectrum. but i use it both to read body language, and to interpret how to handle situations. when the emotional brain is screwed up it shows a very clear path forward, and in time intuition ends up taking over and you make the right decision automatically. i have no more meltdowns, never lose my temper and am basically NT now. people love being around me.

people who aren't on the spectrum can't know how powerful this is, but it has been truly amazing.

I love that you've gotten such a great result, but it isn't common. Which makes it interesting to wonder what the difference is, ie the difference in your situation that made this work so well for you.

But without others seeing the same results, it isn't "the" solution all the time or even most of the time. I know it is universally considered helpful, especially with the lower end of the spectrum, and pretty much essential with some non-verbal toddlers, but you are the first person I've seen seen with such stunning results.

I've been on the AS road with my son a long time now. Seven years of reading and talking. I've read and seen a lot of different stories. There are things out there now to try, but nothing that works all the time for everyone. For the most part, we still don't know why some things work sometimes but not others. Picking among the choices, then, all comes down to instinct: what one's heart, and unique knowledge of the unique situation, tells them.

If you can figure out why it worked better for you, that would be good to get into the library. Just keep it in perspective: your experience is unique to you.

thanks. i've taken it a lot further and applied it very differently. i do have a triple diagnosis -- written from the psychiatrist who diagnosed me, informally from a family psychiatrist friend, and by myself. i do not consider myself on the spectrum today though. some quirks are still in there, but they're gradually vanishing.

if there's enough interest from people here i'm happy to explain how i do it

I think time will tell just how compelling the changes are (been on this road too long to never reserve skepticism, sorry) but, still, knowing what you felt worked for you and why could resonate with someone somewhere. I would recommend writing up your experience (briefly) and putting it in your WP blog (you'll need to peruse the WP discussion board to figure out how to keep it formatted), and then you can link it out whenever you see someone who you think it might interest.

no problem, but i'll pass on writing it up. but since you wrote a nice response, i'll quickly show you how i used the fundamentals behind ABA / carrot and stick in this thread.

before i invested the effort in writing this up, i wanted to get some idea on how it might be received. so i decided to use an "intentions test" to see what people's intentions were. in any instance of reading ABA/carrot and stick signals, there are only two possible binary responses. positive or negative, just like carrot/stick or reward/punish. there can be degrees of the response, including no response (which is still stick or punish) or a nice response. but its still a binary outcome.

in this case, i got a feel for your interest, which was stick/punish (very nicely written), which is totally fine! so i just saved myself a bunch of time in not writing anything up. this is how social radar works, and ASD people never learn any of it, so they invest heavily in relationships when they should not and end up getting screwed. so they get into bad situations, lose their temper and get marked as not having empathy.

fortunately the cognitive brain still works well so these rules can be manually taught and we can override the bad signals from our emotional brain which are miswired after so much stress. in time our emotional brain gets rewired and this stuff becomes automatic.

i actually used this a second time in this thread as well, applied differently, but i think i'll leave it there. thanks for the chat, and best of luck with your son.

You know, telling people you've been trying to psychoanalyze them and have reached a negative conclusion does NOT go over very well. You've just told me you've been playing a version of mind games. That is not socially acceptable.

So instead of allowing you to incorrectly continue to read between the lines, I think I need to be blunt with what I've been thinking this entire thread, that I was tactfully choosing not to post.

I think your theories are off base and you don't perceive nearly as much as you would like to think you do. I do applaud that you have made great progress, but you haven't quite figured it all out yet. I didn't want to say that because I didn't want to discourage you, and some of your ideas when fully formed could be quite interesting. I really do think its great that you have found things that have helped you and you want to share with others. But you lack nuance and a sense of all the other variables out there, and you don't want to have that sense, which is the real problem in my eyes. Which I get, that makes everything complicated, but, still, it means that you are not quite in the position to advise and analyze others that you wish to believe you are. The right process is to suggest directions, share information, and let people find their own answers.

I've been involved with these discussions for 7 years. I know I don't have all the answers, and I also know that I don't always mange to write what I mean; I am under a lot of real life stress right now and it negatively affects my posts; I know that; but I also think I've made some very positive contributions that have made something better for someone. You ... you are still new to it all. Time is going to change your views on many things. You need to give it that time.

I wouldn't have had you write anything down for me. I know we don't connect. But I am open minded enough to realize that you have ideas that might connect for someone else. So either you believe you might someday be able to help that someone else, or you don't. And those who offer advice have pretty much all discovered that they have to repeat themselves over and over, and wish they could easily find that post they wrote a few months ago. That is the image I was seeing when I made the blog suggestion: you encountering multiple situations where you wanted to share the same story, and wishing you didn't have to retype it twenty times. Hey, if I'm off base about where you want to go posting on these boards, ignore that suggestion. But if I was correct, the suggestion still stands.

i'm not psychoanalyzing anyone. i was just getting a feel for if i should invest my time, via your feelings towards me. and it confirms i was correct, given the amount of negativity revealed in your subsequent post.

i just explained how i reached my conclusion. in a normal situation i would not have mentioned it, signed off politely and all would have been well with the world. i'm not perfect, i've only really understood this stuff in the last few months and am still recalibrating myself. its going to take a long time.

in this situation you're a socially calibrated NT female. i'm an aspie guy. yet i figured out whether i should invest more time very easily. i'm not trying to trick anyone. in autism, there are no winners.

but the loser is going to be your son.. when he has some girl he really likes and pursues her endlessly.. meanwhile she uses him all she can without remorse. or he's trying to get a job and can't figure out why they won't hire him. from both cases he's going to be stressed and upset and angry and difficult to be around.

instead he could be using simple techniques which, when cognitively taught, allow a person to see another person's interests and intentions. the reality is that this is what NT's do anyways. you say "it didn't feel right". but when what you do is actually its written down its called "manipulation".

i don't know how to teach this stuff in a way people like to hear it. maybe there is no way, because maybe NT's prefer to say "oh there poor ASD boy, its such a shame you can't figure out anyone's intentions ever and keep getting frustrated. we'll find a magic pill you can take someday, meanwhile have some more antidepressants"

You over assess my social abilities. I'm not perfectly NT; do you even read sigs? And, if I were, that still wouldn't guarantee I was, to your term, socially calibrated. Making that assumption about people is going to cause you a new set of problems.

You misread me over and over and then had the gall to post a conclusion based on that. it pissed me off and forced me into feeling I had to defend myself.

It really is better to just say, "we aren't connecting."

I actually came on planning to edit my post, because I figured being blunt was probably counter productive. I don't want to stop the journey you are on, or hurt you in any way, but I do feel I have a duty to lurking readers to offer the differing viewpoint when I disagree with what is being posted. This board is a resource, and it needs to be as broad a resource as possible. I could have provided that without making it personal to you, and for that I apologize.

Same vein, you could have repeated that you find ABA positive without turning into an attack on my parenting. Next time, remember that.

Yeah, you've done a good job of making me angry. And probably vice a versa. Maybe it's time to open the virtual bar and pour us some drinks?