FAILSAFE diet and ADHD.. any parents with success?

I found the book, " Is your child's brain starving" by Dr. Michael Lyons to be very helpful with my son.

We also went to a naturopath and found out he has several food allergies. Now that we have removed those foods he has much better control over his own behaviour.

I want to address this first: You are NOT a failure! Just the fact that you are trying to help your son makes you stand out from the parents who ignore these issues or (God forbid) punish or spank them for behavior that is out of their control. I have a son (13) that is ADHD. I understand being hesitant about going the medication route, but there ARE some major benefits.

1. If other behavior modifications don't work, and they are not on medication, some of these kids will eventually self medicate (alcohol, drugs etc.)
2. If left untreated, self image is affected, as they begin to see other students and friends pull away due to their aggressive or annoying behavior. Even if no one ever actually speaks it, they begin to feel like a "bad" child, based on the reactions of family, friends, and even teachers.
3. Many of these children are actually quite gifted, but can end up in learning disabled classes because they cannot concentrate.

As a Mom to one of these kids...Don't give up! Help is out there!

I want to address this first: You are NOT a failure! Just the fact that you are trying to help your son makes you stand out from the parents who ignore these issues or (God forbid) punish or spank them for behavior that is out of their control. I have a son (13) that is ADHD. I understand being hesitant about going the medication route, but there ARE some major benefits.

1. If other behavior modifications don't work, and they are not on medication, some of these kids will eventually self medicate (alcohol, drugs etc.)
2. If left untreated, self image is affected, as they begin to see other students and friends pull away due to their aggressive or annoying behavior. Even if no one ever actually speaks it, they begin to feel like a "bad" child, based on the reactions of family, friends, and even teachers.
3. Many of these children are actually quite gifted, but can end up in learning disabled classes because they cannot concentrate.

As a Mom to one of these kids...Don't give up! Help is out there!

^^ Yes, This!!

We have been warned by our Pediatrician that are son will be considered twice exceptional. Meaning he will qualify for services (in public school) for ADHD as well as gifted.

These are the worse two combinations ever!!!!

We like to look at it this way:

One day, my son will be able to accomplish great and mighty things with his need for little sleep and the HIGH amount of energy he has.

ADHD people tend to "think outside the box" much more than others as well as being able to concentrated (once they learn how) on MANY different things at ONE time.

Amazing people these ADHD kids/adults are and I can't WAIT to see how he is when he grows up. (He's 6)

My son is nearly 21. He was diagnosed w/ADHD when he was in kindergarten. We tried everything!! Diet, exercise, PT/OT. Eventually, we found the right mix of counseling (for coping strategies for us and skills for him) and medication. I know you said you want to avoid medication if you can, but don't feel like a failure if you need to go that route. We had to try out a couple different meds & doses to get it just right. I would've preferred he didn't need it, but it truly made the difference at home and school.

My kid is doing well in his 2nd year of college. He gets accommodations for testing & his school work, but otherwise, he's just like the other students. I don't want to mention the school, but it's a big school on the east coast and his major is Civil Engineering. He's pretty smart.

Good luck in finding a plan that works!

Bumping for future reference. My son was recently diagnosed, and I would also like to avoid medication as much as possible.

^^It makes me sad to read things like that but I'm soo glad things have worked out well.

__________________________________________________________

To the OP, don't feel like a failure for having to do meds. Try other things first, we did. We aren't able to eliminate things from his diet because he had a pretty bad medical past and we can't pull things that are helping him gain weight and he will accept orally to eat. (He was tube fed 2.5 years and didn't accept age appropriate foods until around almost 4)

A low dose of meds has certainly helped him alot.

OMG, I'm so glad I opened this thread. My oldest daughter has been struggling so much with math. She reads FAR above grade level and excels in every other subject, but at almost nine she is still struggling with addition and subtraction; don't even get me started on the multiplication tables. It doesn't matter how much we drill or work with her; the numbers just won't stay in her head. I'd never heard of dyscalculia before, but the more I read the more it sounds like her.

That definitely sounds like dyscalculia. Unfortunately it's not as well known as dyslexia. It's sometimes informally known as "maths dyslexia". IMO dyscalculia should be considered a possibility in anyone who's excelling at every area while struggling in maths. It may not be in every case, there are people who just hate maths, but when someone's trying 10 times as hard as everyone else and still can't do something that to other people is a lot easier than other stuff they can learn easily, then IMO a specific learning disability should be considered a possibility.

Not sure how you'd go about getting help for her if you're in the USA (I'm from the UK, so only familiar with the UK systems) but there are internet forums for dyscalculia where maybe you can get advice.

Bump.

I knew my daughter was ADHD by the age of 4. I tried behavior modification with a therapist (to channel that hyperactivity into something productive, to learn ways to focus when focus wanes) and that didn't help. I tried changing her diet drastically (Feingold diet). It was HARD and EXPENSIVE but I gave it a go and saw a very slight change, but not enough to deal with our BIG problem. Finally, half way through her 1st grade year, I took her to the doc and she was formally diagnosed and given metadate (generic: Ritalin). We started at 10mg. Not enough. Moved to 20 mg. Not enough. Now we are on 30 mg (nearing the end of her 2nd grade year) and it wears off within a few hours still. Not sure what my next move is. When it's active within her, she is focused and happy (she is a happy child, in general) and productive. When it wears off, she is scattered, can't pay attention, and will sometimes go rogue and defiant. (She also has ODD - oppositional defiance disorder.)

During all this, I have given her Reliv for Kids. It's a nutritional supplement with amazing amounts of vitamins and nutrients. It's a powder (mix the chocolate powder with organic white milk, and VOILA! breakfast!), so less is lost through the body. (Pills don't put out but about 20% or so of their contents in the body before being naturally "evacuated".)

I tried EVERYTHING and read SO MANY BOOKS and spend SO MUCH TIME reading into ways to control and navigate her ADHD without meds, but in the end, the meds work for her (short term.... only a year in, so we are still adjusting doses and will be forever), and my ADHD child is so much happier with her meds. She loves them. She can tell you she can focus better and loves it.

I have ADHD, and was not diagnosed until I was 16. I'm now 23. I've tried medications, but they only make matters worse. They make me focus, but create chaos in other aspects. I notice major improvements with eating well - so I applaud you for wanting to help your son the natural way.

Awhile back, I read that food coloring allergies can have major effects on a child's behavior, as well as other sensitivities. Might be something worth reading into.

My 12 year old daughter was diagnosed with add when she was 5. The meds (4 kinds) didn't work. They made her crazy. And so unhappy. I decided that I was going to put in my best effort to help her holistically. First thing I dis was get her on omega 3 fish oils and increase our intake of fish. Twice weekly at least. I also give her a multi vitamin to make sure she was not suffering from a nutritional deficiency.

The one weird thing I noticed that worked was tae bo, over other forms of workouts. I think the counting while working helped very much. This is much harder to get her to comply with as she gets older. She doesn't wanna... And I am not fighting it.

Lastly I give her a high protein breakfast and a hot cocoa with caffeine in it first thing.

Add she gets older I see that she is growing out of it. I truly believe feeding her brain helped.

This.
I also agree with fish oil. I cut out all artificial sweeteners too. Trampellining, or 'bouncing' helps my son a lot.

typical school work can pose serious difficulties for ADHD people. the problem is that to do a typical worksheet or page in a typical school workbook, takes a lot more mental processing than it does for other people. I've given my daughter work from worksheets or workbooks that in terms of the actual maths, reading or intellectual content of the task, she should be able to do it easily. However, she struggles so much with basic things like copying something from one line to another, which most people find easy, that she ends up being unable to do the task without a lot of help from me. And all the help is with the practical things that others find easy, not the intellectual content of the task. I was the same when i was a kid, and it's a really bad combination for killing your motivation, because you have a task that's intellectually too easy and boring, but requires an extreme amount of concentration and mental processing to do the actual task. It's things like copying from one line to another, or tracking from one side of the page to the other (e.g. going from the question in a list on the left, to the correct place to write the answer on the right) - things that people who don't have these disabilities wouldn't dream would be difficult. But they are extremely difficult for us. So on a lot of school work, all your mental processing is used to try to do these practical things that no-one else even finds difficult.... which for some tasks leaves no mental processing space left for the intellectual part of the task. the teacher ends up either thinking you're totally lazy, or that you can't do the intellectual part of the task, when in fact that's the easiest part. For the child, everything is back to front, they struggle with things everyone else finds easy, while the things everyone else finds difficult, they find too easy. That pretty much sums up my entire experience at school. When no-one understands what's going on, it's seen as laziness and lack of effort.

Another thing that makes life difficult is teachers insisting on neat handwriting all the time. I can do neat handwriting, in fact it can be very neat, if the *only* thing I have to concentrate on is neat handwriting. However, as soon as I have to think about something else at the same time, my neat handwriting goes out of the window, and all my mental effort goes onto getting my thoughts on paper (which is a struggle when your mind words at 100 thoughts per minute (very typical of ADHD) and your hand writes at about ten painstaking words per minute) and you also have to think very carefully and put a lot of effort into how to spell the words then on top of that each letter needs to be written correctly and neatly, first time you write it (too many crossings out is frowned upon)..... simple writing tasks become very difficult from a practical point of view, but if you were asked to do the same task orally, you'd give the best answer in the class. Teachers typically see this as being "bright but lazy" and are completely unaware of how much of a struggle it is to get our thoughts down on paper.

What's helped me the most (as an adult) is that I taught myself to touch type at 90 words a minute, plus I have a spell checker, so I can get all my thoughts down, then go back and correct it afterwards. For longer writing tasks like essays, I even use cut and paste to better organise my thoughts and paragraphs, as they don't always come out in a logical order first time around. At university, not only was it acceptable to do all your written work on a word processor, handwritten assignments were frowned upon (though allowed) as being old fashioned. I was doing human sciences so the way we were expected to hand in assignments was how scientific journals expect research to be submitted, and they don't like handwritten work either. Unfortunately, a lot of school teachers see typed work as being "lazy" or as evidence that the child can't really write or whatever. In any case, it's sometimes not easy for a child who struggles with basic literacy to be allowed to use a word processor and be taught to touch type instead of being expected to hand all their work in in obsessively neat handwriting. Schools absolutely should teach handwriting, and kids should learn how to handwrite well, I'm not against that at all, just that they should have equal emphasis on using a word processor, and enable students who struggle with literacy to use a word processor to hand in essays in science, geography, history etc, where the student's intellectual ability could be dragged down by difficulties in getting their thoughts down on paper. Presentation of work is important, hence why teachers insist on neat handwriting, but in today's world, properly presented work is typed, not handwritten 99% of the time.

If you want to show my posts to your son's teacher, please go ahead. This kind of thing is often not covered in teacher training, in spite of the fact that it's common enough for there to be several kids in each year group who suffer specific learning disabilities, and for some of those kids to be twice exceptional. Even when it is covered in teacher training, it barely goes beyond understanding what those conditions are, and not much on how to help children who have them. Unfortunately even when teachers are sympathetic, they often see the only solution as referral to an educational psychologist (or whoever the child would be referred to in the child's country) rather than knowing of practical ways the child could be helped in class. Simple things like allowing the child to complete tasks in a different way (e.g. no copying from a board or another book, breaking a big task down into several smaller tasks, allowing the child to type and print work rather than handwrite, and other small things like that can make a huge difference, with or without a formal diagnosis)

ETA: woah, long post!! I wasn't kidding about typing 90 words per minute and ADHD people thinking at about 100 thoughts a minute or even a lot faster than that....

bump for later.....