025 - Food Sensitivities and Intense Behavior - With Elizabeth Yarnell Part 1

Parenting the Intensity · Dec 12, 2023

Transcript

Welcome to Parenting the Intensity, where we'll talk all about how we can drop the general parenting advice that doesn't work with our emotionally intense kids anyway, and let go of the unrealistic expectations society puts on us as parents. Together, we'll find solutions and ideas that work for you and your kids. Chances are, deep down, you know what they need.

But you need a little encouragement to keep going on harder days and permission to do things differently and help you fully trust that you already are a wonderful parent to your exceptional but challenging kids. Today's episode is all about food sensitivities. Which can be one of the causes of emotional intensity. Because when kids are feeling very intensely some discomfort or pain, they can definitely be intense but not necessarily be able to explain it. And to talk with us about that, we'll get Elisabeth Yarnel, who is obsessed with inflammation. The hidden kind is behind almost every symptom of pain, discomfort, emotion and dysfunction. And especially those symptoms that characterize autoimmune and other inflammatory disorders. The kind of chronic inflammation that can be challenging for a medical doctor to understand and or successfully manage. Based on her career as a traditional naturopath and certified food sensitivity therapist, she founded the Inflammation Academy to empower anyone anywhere to reclaim control over how they feel today and tomorrow through non-pharmaceutical lifestyle changes. Her upcoming book explores the connection between chronic inflammation, multiple sclerosis and other chronic conditions. She's an award-winning cookbook author, TEDx speaker and patented inventor who frequently appears in online summits, on podcasts and on live stages. Elisabeth was recently featured in the Strange Pain series alongside luminaries such as Dr.

Tom O'Brien. On the side, she has taught digital storytelling skills to thousands of elementary and middle school students through online and in-person programs. This episode today is a two-part episode. The next part, we will talk more about Elisabeth's book that makes what we'll talk about today doable in our busy life. So welcome. Glad to have you, Elisabeth, today. We'll talk today about some things that can be causing kids being intense and it's food sensitivities. And I know from experience myself and a few friends that can change life when you pinpoint food sensitivities. So I'm really glad to have you over. Would you like to introduce yourself to the podcast community? Absolutely.

Anouk, thanks so much for having me on your podcast and introducing me to your listeners. I'm really excited to be here because this is one of my favorite topics to talk about how food sensitivities and our food choices can affect how our kids act and behave and learn and grow and respond to us. And really, food sensitivities are an overlooked piece of the puzzle when it comes to parenting. And I know we'll get into it even before we started recording. We just couldn't stop talking about this. We'll talk about a lot of things. And one of the things I wanted to make sure I don't forget to hit on is how our parenting and our especially current parenting practices of consequences for behaviors can be really misdirected when it comes to the intense child. For sure, for sure. And if the cause is a food sensitivity, it's just pointless. Because we're basically punishing someone for being sick. For something that they can't control because it's a chemical process that's happening inside their bodies. Definitely. So would you like to share a little bit of why you're doing what you're doing? Yeah.

So let's see. My parenting journey began with my oldest son. And I had this amazing pregnancy that was full of pure whole foods. And I was so excited. And then when I was nine months pregnant, my neighbor threw a baby shower for me. And I wasn't thinking. And I ate a piece of turkey that came from the Honey Baked Ham store. A spiral sliced roll of turkey. And it gave me Listeria. And Listeria is a bacteria that likes to take up residency in the placenta. And it can cross through the umbilical cord. And it causes stillbirth. So I was once I realized what had happened, which was after a recall notice in the newspaper, I went into the hospital and they pumped me full of IV antibiotics four times a day.

They made me they what's it called? I had to move into the hospital for a week basically so that they could flood me with these antibiotics to try to kill the Listeria. And the good thing was that my baby was not a stillbirth. Thank goodness. But he was born and he was really sick from day one. And as a pregnant person in America, you don't get a lot of postnatal care for you as a person. The baby gets lots of visits and vaccinations and things like that. But as the mother, you don't really know what's happening. And nobody, nobody during that time had talked to me about, well, if you flood the baby with antibiotics, you're going to wipe out their microbiome. Maybe we just didn't know about the microbiome back then, the early 2000s. But he was sick from the get go. He did not sleep for longer than 30 to 40 minute stretches at a time for six years. He would vomit.

I don't even know several times a day. And this was beyond babyhood. He didn't stop until we figured this out when he was six and a half. So for six years, my son, I still look down to say he's a champion vomitter. He can vomit really anywhere and just kind of move on with his life. And on top of it, he had this terrible constipation, like really painful. Sometimes the poor child would go two weeks between bowel movements and he would just be in continual pain. His stomach always hurt him. He didn't really have the vocabulary as a two year old to tell us what was going on. In fact, it took me years to really put it together that it was acid reflux that was waking him every half hour, 45 minutes. None of the doctors could help us. We took him to pediatric GI clinics. We had his records sent all over the country to gastric specialists. We did an abdominal x-ray to see if maybe there was something physiologically abnormal. There wasn't. We even had his DNA mapped and nothing helped us come to any conclusions. Oh, the other thing that he had that was unusual was he has a lacryma. And that means that he doesn't make tears.

Okay. So your mother, you remember like in the very beginning, the first week or so babies don't really make tears. Yeah, but then they start having tears. Was it just tears or all because I know there's like all fluids in the bodies are like sweat and things like that. There's no fluid at all. Was it that or just tears? Just tears. And when he was 10 months old and we were at a baby play group one day and I noticed all the other babies had like wet faces from their tears. And I'm like, wow, we've never had a wet face. I think I was still waiting for the tears to come in. Yeah. It's your first baby.

You have no idea. And so he has this thing called a lacryma. And later on, I learned that tears are actually formed very late in gestation, like in the ninth month, probably. So that might have been something that was disrupted. From this, these antibiotics, this intervention that I had, I still think, thank God he's alive. Right. He came out alive, but it was very, very tough. These early years, he fell off the height and weight charts. He loved to eat, but he would throw up everything he ate.

So when you're constipated, you don't really want to eat. So he wasn't growing. He wasn't thriving. He had a lot of emotional issues, a lot of temper tantrums. He got in trouble a lot when he started school and preschool. And he was a good kid. He was a sweet kid, but he just couldn't seem, would have times when he just couldn't control what was going on in his body. And I would say to him, you need to stop doing that. And you need to maybe take yourself up to your room.

So until you're ready to come down and interact with people again. And he wouldn't be able to stop. And then about 45 minutes later, he would burst into tears and he would say, Mom, I heard you telling me to stop and I wanted to stop, but I just couldn't. I couldn't stop. I think lots of our listeners will totally relate to that story, that kids try, but they just can't calm down. It's out of their control. Exactly. Yeah, really. Out of their control. And he couldn't figure out, sometimes it would erupt in a rage. And sometimes it would erupt in violence. And other times it would just be what we might characterize as misbehavior or lack of attention in class, things like that. So it was frustrating. But for me, the worst part was realizing that if I have a child who doesn't poop, he is not going to live long. Because if you don't release the toxins from your body, your body becomes toxic and that shortens your lifespan. Oh, I've never heard of that. Okay. Not really encouraging.

No. And definitely troubling when you're a parent and you're trying everything. Clearly you've tried everything. All specialists and nothing works. And it's so disempowering and discouraging when you're faced with a child that is clearly in pain because you cannot not be in pain when you're in that situation. But also I think the relationship between the behaviors and the pain is often overlooked. We don't necessarily make the connection easily that the kids might just be in pain. And that's why they are acting that way. Because young kids don't say, I'm in pain. Right. They don't have the vocabulary and they don't realize what is normal. Other people don't feel like that. So, yes. And it's become so emotionally wrought as a parent to witness your child going through this and realizing that you can't help. I mean, by the time we finally figured out what was going on, the only thing I knew for sure was that he wasn't deficient in Miralax. Yeah. More and more quantities, bigger and bigger amounts of Miralax were not there. And the Miralax were not solving the problem. No, he was not making poop more. Was not making him poop more. And how did you figure out what was causing all of it? Well, finally, after one day when he vomited in the lunch line in kindergarten, and they called me to take him home. And I'm like, I was in the middle of something and I'm thinking to myself, he's fine. He'll vomit. He'll just go back to the class. He vomits all the time. You don't understand. But of course, I went and picked him up and I'm like, this is, and he had this terrible stomach ache. Of course, he hadn't pooped in days. And I'm like, I don't know what to do.

I'm running. I have no more ideas. So I thought, well, I'm going to take him to see a naturopathic doctor. And it was hard to find one in those days. And I found one and I took him in and she said, I really think this maybe sounds like food sensitivities. And I said, but he doesn't have anaphylaxis or hives. And she said, well, those are food allergies. She said, food sensitivities are when foods cause inflammation in the body and it manifests in a lot of different ways. It may not be hives. It may not be anaphylaxis, but a lot of different ways. And some of these ways could be what you're seeing with your son. And I thought, okay, well, it's a little pricey to do this test. Of course, insurance doesn't cover anything like this. But this is my last hope. You're desperate at that point. Anything would do. You're willing to try anything.

And I just want to stop you for a second. Can you explain just a little bit what inflammation means for people who might not know? So inflammation means what happens when the white blood cells, they are our body's soldiers. Their job, the job of the white blood cells is to circulate through the body and find any foreign invaders, which typically are virus and bacteria, and then eliminate them. And they do this by marshaling the body's resources. And those three resources are antibodies, which are good against bacteria, heat, which causes fever, which kills viruses. Viruses don't live in high heat. And inflammation. And inflammation basically immobilizes the invaders. So inflammation is, we tend to think of inflammation as something visible. For instance, when I twisted my ankle in a jazzercise class and my ankle blew up like a grapefruit. That's a very visible inflammation. And that kind of inflammation is the right kind of inflammation. It comes from an injury. It's intended to immobilize the joint to allow that injury to heal. And then it recedes. And now my ankle is not swollen anymore. But the kind of inflammation I'm talking about is what I call hidden inflammation. It's inflammation inside the body.

It's not visible necessarily to the naked eye, unless you know what you're looking for. But it's mostly lots and lots and lots of people, at least one in every three people are walking around with lots of inflammation in their body. And you wouldn't know it, except for the fact that it causes symptoms. And really all symptoms are due to inflammation at the root. So no matter what your symptom is, whether it's constipation or diarrhea, or it's eczema, or it's asthma, or it's any type of, it's really anything that is negative going on in the body is due to inflammation. And so once I figured this out and learned about this with my son, I started learning more about inflammation. I went back to school. I became a traditional naturopath and really focused my whole career on inflammation. This all kind of to go back a little further, a couple years before, three years before my son was born, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which is an inflammatory condition. All autoimmune conditions are based in inflammation. All symptoms are based in inflammation as well. And that's what got me started on recognizing that inflammation is behind everything. And that if we focused on inflammation rather than the symptoms, then we would have more success because we would be addressing the root of the issue, not just what we see on the top. So instead of giving Miralax, you try to reduce inflammation. Exactly.

Instead of like drowning in Miralax. Right. Especially if it doesn't work. So basically you got a test for your son to figure that out? Yes. Yes. This is what introduced me to the food sensitivity testing world. And today you might see a number of food sensitivity tests, but most of them are looking for antibody creation, which is misleading when we're talking about the customized anti-inflammatory diet. So those are a waste of time and money.

I would never suggest one of those. Is it the one that is done for celiac disease? Something similar. Yes. That's a very specific test. And so one thing that you can think about is that if we're looking for antibody creation in a test, that means you have to have had exposure to that item within a relatively recent time. So for instance, if you were to go and get someone tested for celiac disease, you would have to make sure they were eating wheat in the two weeks leading up to the testing period, or else it might not turn out. You might not be able to see if there's a problem. Yeah. So basically if you want to test for any possible thing, you would need to eat every possible thing in the last two weeks, which is kind of impossible. Totally. And you might feel terrible because maybe you're reactive to a lot of those things. So the test that I use still to this day is the gold standard of food sensitivity testing, and it's called the MRT, the mediator release test. And so it looks for mediators instead of antibodies. Now mediators are released by the blood cells in response to what they deem to be a threat. And the most famous mediator we all know is histamine. We know that if we have a poison IV experience or a bee sting, and we take an anti-histamine like Benadryl, we can experience some relief from the swelling, which is the inflammation that's causing us pain from that encounter. But histamine is only one of 80 or more mediators that can be released by the bloodstream. So we don't want to just focus on histamine. We want to see what triggers those mediators to be released. We don't care really which mediators are being released. They all cause inflammation. They all cause symptoms. So if we can identify, and we can with this MRT test, which foods or substances trigger mediators to be released, or in other words, trigger inflammation in the body, and we can adjust and create a diet that not only doesn't include those items, but only includes items that we know don't trigger inflammation in the body, then we can pretty rapidly, pretty quickly remove inflammation. And it's amazing. For my son, once we got this test done, and we took the results home, and I looked at them, and really still to this day, I've done hundreds of these tests on people. And this is still the worst.

It's reactive to fully one third of all the items that we tested. And so at first, I'm like, okay, well, this is going to be Jeremy's shelf in the pantry and his shelf in the fridge, and the rest of the family, we're going to keep eating the way we always have. And let me tell you, that leads very quickly to mom having a nervous breakdown. I'm sure I can just imagine it like, yeah, not going to happen. So just making sure everybody, everything stays there. Just starting with that seems like a nightmare. But then having a child eating completely different things than the rest of the family. And if the rest of the family is eating fun things that the child can eat, that's just not going to happen. Like my work for adults, like I have full sensitivities and I restrict myself, and even I have some trouble not eating things I should not be eating. So a kid's stuff can happen. Exactly. And I always counsel people like, you know what, the best thing to do is decide that the whole family is going to follow this diet in solidarity with the child. So every meal is going to be safe for the child and totally healthy. Nothing's going to be weird. It might be a meal of like broccoli, rice and chicken. If those things are safe for the child. Yeah, it's not the same for everybody. It's really tailored to every person, food sensitivities, like there are specific ones, right? Right. But you know, if the rest of the family isn't in crisis like the child is, they're probably fine with broccoli, rice and chicken. Yeah, for sure.

It's all going to be. Unless it's their trigger, it should work for everybody else. But you know, and that's like a whole other story if you have more than one person in the house that is in crisis, but you'll address them one at a time anyway. Okay. And what would you like, you named a lot of things that your son add. Is there other like maybe the most common thing to look for? Like if parents are wondering, does my child might have food sensitivities? What are the most common or the thing that they should look for and to make them think they should reach out and find more information about that? Yeah, so I think what I see most commonly with kids is constipation. Constipation is so common in our modern world with kids especially. So if your kid isn't pooping every day, and as a parent, I'm going to say it is imperative how frequently your kid poops. There were several years that my son was not allowed to poop without allowing me to look in the toilet before he flushed because he would lie.

Right? Because he knew I wanted him to poop because constipation was his issue. So I had to look and it actually was a great laboratory experience for me to see what poop looks like in a constipated body or in an inflamed body and then how it looks when you come down from that inflammation and then how freely it flows when you're not inflamed. But let me say that not only poop but diarrhea. So if you have a kid who has diarrhea or fluctuates between the two, those are inflammation. Headaches, that's inflammation. Skin issues like eczema, psoriasis. Lots of kids have eczema as the young kids. And would you say like those symptoms need to be there since birth or close or they can appear anytime? Yes, they can appear anytime. As we live on this planet, our gut evolves and our microbiome is constantly changing and depending on our lifestyle and our history and our environment, that will change our gut in many, many ways. Also, parasites are really much more common than we have been led to believe. And I work with lots of people, even moms of toddlers who find worms in their baby snipers, things like that. Yeah, I had that when I was not myself but my sister. When she was young, we had that a few times. It's not fun. Asking for a friend. Yeah, it was not fun and I had to take the same medication as preventive and it was disgusting. Yes. Yeah, I'm aware and there was some at my daughter's daycare recently. So we had to check for it. It's not a fun thing to do.

No, no. So the parasites can be there or they don't have to be there. There can be a lot of things that lead up to it. But I think really the most common cause of these issues is probably our Western diet. It's our over-processed foods. Yeah, there's not lots of natural vegetable and fruits and when they're soft and they've been picked up not ready like they're still. Well, not only that, not only the reduction of nutrients in our foods but our over-processed foods, they're full of chemicals and additives and artificial colors and artificial flavors and artificial sweeteners. All of these things are toxic to the human body. We evolved on this planet to eat and thrive on the foods and animals really that grow here. And evolution never predicted that we would start eating things that we dug up from two miles underneath the Earth's surface, petroleum, and all of these things are based in petroleum. It's definitely like a lot of things that we were not eating 100 years ago for sure.

Right. And if we wonder where a lot of this came from, because it didn't exist really before the Industrial Revolution. Multiple sclerosis really didn't exist before the Industrial Revolution either. Now it's so common and becoming more common every day. Over a million Americans have MS today considering in 1890 there were none. Yeah, and I'm always wondering when we talk about that, is it because they didn't know it existed so they never diagnosed people or was it really not existing at all? It's always something I'm wondering there. Or like kids with food sensitivities were just dying younger so we didn't know. The situation was different or is there a way to test for that in other old data to know now? Well, certainly there were physicians who kept records and they kept records of mysterious symptoms in their patients and that's how we can really know them before the late 1800s. There really weren't records of multiple sclerosis. There were records of things like celiac disease as far back as the pyramids in Egypt. On the walls of the pyramids there were records of them but they didn't know what it was. No. The symptoms were there in the notes but they were you. Okay, that's interesting to see that some of those just appeared at some point in history. It's always... Well, our world radically changed with the Industrial Revolution.

Yeah, definitely. We started polluting in ways that never happened before. Our pollution used to be cow poop and now all of a sudden it's smoke and particulates in the air. In the water supply and that we're breathing, that we're eating and then as soon as we started adding it to our foods, which is really horrific to think about who started doing that, food dyes when they were first brought up before the fledgling FDA in the 1930s, they were sourced from coal. We used coal to color foods and now they're sourced from petroleum and they've really never been adequately tested for their effect on human health, especially in the amounts that our kids are getting them. Can you think of... I just always think of Froot Loops because what is a food that has every food dye in it? I think the new ones I saw recently, they are natural dyes now. They changed their color. They're not the same color they used to be when I was a kid. They're much more pale and now it's natural food dye. I don't know exactly what that's supposed to mean. There's a whole loophole in the food world where you can call something natural, something like natural flavors. You can say, oh, look, there's this carbonated water and the only ingredients in it are water and natural flavors. It must be better for me than soda pop, except for those natural flavors likely have 30 chemicals inside mixed in this natural flavors label. Sometimes it's better, but really there's so many examples in so many places everywhere that we're getting food dyes in from our vitamins, from our drinks, from our foods that we're eating. In things you wouldn't even think of, ketchup and mustard have food dyes and food artificial flavors in them. Just down to the basics of the foods that we're eating, yogurt, I can't even tell you the artificial sweeteners and artificial flavors and colors in a regular, typical cup of yogurt. Something that should be healthy. We generally think of yogurt as something healthy to give our children as a snack or as a dessert compared to ice cream, for example. Exactly. I think a lot of those are the culprits of what's going on in our food supply. I think a big first step is to try to return to a whole foods based diet because if you're eating whole foods, and by a whole food I mean a food that is in the same form as it was picked off the tree or out of the ground or even off the animal, hasn't been processed, then you have a better chance of staying away from all of these artificial additives and preservatives that are added into our foods. Yeah, they help me. I think that's a... We'll circle back to that because the first thing that comes to my mind when we think about that is the time that it takes to cook from those ingredients when we have little times we are overwhelmed with everything's going on. But I think you have a resource for that, so we'll circle back to that later.

Excellent. I just wanted to ask, do you see most common food sensitivities? We hear often about gluten and lactose to be the most common one. Is it something that you see in your practice also that if parents are wondering, they could start testing those, for example? Or do you think it's not worth doing that? When my son was suffering, I thought, okay, well, let me see what if I take out wheat or dairy or corn or soy from his life, would he get better? I would do that for a week or two and there wouldn't be any radical changes. I think, oh, well, it must not be that. But when the truth was there were just so many other things that were causing him issues. Some of his favorite foods were causing inflammation in his body, like broccoli, lemon, and garlic, things that we think are so healthy and that we were so proud of him. His favorite food at six years old was broccoli. But it turned out when he ate broccoli, he got constipated, which is kind of the opposite of what you would assume would happen with broccoli. Yeah, there's a lot of fiber in broccoli. So what I've learned is that constipation really has nothing to do with fiber. It really doesn't have anything to do with hydration. The things that we think and that we're told are solutions for constipation. If it's a food sensitivity issue and there's inflammation going on in the colon, it's not going to be solved with more fiber. So fiber would be the answer for someone who would not have a balanced diet and not enough fiber, basically.

But not with... I don't think extra fiber is ever the answer. I think the answer is whole foods, not extra fiber. Again, we did not evolve. Our ancestors did not have to eat extra fiber to poop. We shouldn't have to eat extra fiber to poop either. What I've realized is that when there's constipation, it's because there's inflammation in the colon. If you think about the colon, it's like this long tube. If you think about a tube that we take in a swimming pool, that maybe we might blow up an inflatable tube. When we blow it up, the outside of the tube gets thicker as the air gets in it. There's still a hole in the center, like a donut. But as you blow it more and more and more, that hole gets smaller and smaller and smaller because it's so puffy on the walls. That is what happens in our colon. When we reduce the inflammation, those walls deflate and become more normal size. Now you have a hole that poop can come through. But when they're inflamed and they're so puffed up with inflammation, you can't fit anything through there. It doesn't matter how much fiber you have. Once I had given my six-year-old six x-lacs, and he still didn't poop.

He just got senapoisoning. Yeah, that's not good. That was before I realized what was going on. And you said that some of his favorite food, basically you had to take out of his diet. How did that go? So this is one of the strategies I teach in my clinic when I work with kids, is make a deal with your kid, depending on how old your kid is. If your kid is three, they're just going to eat whatever food you have in the house and you give them, present them with. They can't go out and buy their own pop tarts or anything. But if they're older than like my six-year-old, then you can negotiate with them and reason with them. And so I always suggest making a deal with your kids. Making a deal. Look, we're going to try this for, and I look ahead and see what holiday is coming up in about a month or two. We're going to try this through Thanksgiving. And if by the time Thanksgiving rolls around, you're the same as you are now, then we're going to say this didn't work and we're going to have a huge feast and we're going to eat all the foods that you haven't been able to eat. And we'll figure it out by then. And if we're just going to make it to Thanksgiving. And then I also believe very strongly in bribery. I'll buy you this video game and you're going to agree to eat. Definitely not inside. I always prom motivation from inside, but for something like that, there's no motivating a child from themselves. It's not something that they will be motivated to do. Well, they don't know. Yeah, exactly.

They cannot understand it. Even like I can say that I've been, I know for, I've been known for a lot of time that my older one is sensitive to dairy. That for me, that's clear. And he's used to when he's sick, we take dairy out of his diet and it helps. So that's been easy, but I'm pretty sure gluten is a problem too now, but that's another story. It's a deal and he doesn't want to try and take that out of his diet. Yeah. So the other, the other strategy is you have to provide a good replacement, something that is delicious and a worthwhile substitute. So that, that might mean that you have to do some experimental baking and cooking. I have a whole database that I use with in my clinic and I offer my clients that have cookies and cake and pies and, and treats because first of all, a life without treats is a sad life. Yeah. Right.

I want to have a cookie too. And I know I can't eat the wheat and I don't want to go through my life feeling like I could never have a cookie again, but I can whip up a batch of my hazelnut flour cookies and they're delicious and they're cookies and they're all safe for me. They don't cause me inflammation because I know exactly what's in them because I made them. Yeah. So the idea is not to take everything out of the diet, but to replace with some things that are safe, basically. Exactly. Exactly. Because I certainly don't want to raise a generation of children who feel deprived all the time because if you feel deprived, then you binge when you have exposure. The diet culture that we have, it's people like are depriving themselves and then they eat too much. So it's a cycle that never ends. And that's not what we want with the kids, especially if they're going to binge things that make them sick. Right. And then rewards are great too because even for myself, if I've put on some weight and then I take it off, I might reward myself with a new dress. Makes sense. Kids are the same, right? There's nothing wrong with rewards and there's nothing wrong with incentives and honestly bribery too can help.

Yeah, definitely. It's a motivation. You can have the broccoli that you love so much. Not sure lots of parents would say that, but... And did you find that kids crave the food they're sensitive to or not necessarily? You know, sometimes kids will crave the things they love. Sometimes they'll hate the things they're sensitive to and they've been forced to eat it or they're just assumed that this is what they should eat. But it's very hard on your own to make correlations between what you eat and how it made you feel, especially because food sensitivity reactions can take up to four days to manifest. So sometimes it's not what you ate this morning. It's not what you ate yesterday. It's what you ate the day before yesterday. Oh, interesting. Really interesting. So that can be kind of tough without some guidance and support to figure that out. And certainly impossible for a kid to make that connection. No, that's for sure. And did you find that once kids are on that diet and it makes them feel better for a little while, is it easier to keep them on those diets? Yeah, because once you... The hardest part is the beginning when you're trying to figure out, okay, well, is this safe for my kid or now it's my whole family, right? Is this food item safe? And you'll read all the way through all the ingredients and you'll get to the last one. You're like, oh, but it has that one thing that we can't have. Like, okay, well, I guess this isn't okay. But once you figure that out and you figure out the brands and you figure out the stores where you can purchase those brands, it becomes easier and less time consuming. And then there's all kinds of shortcuts that you can do. You can bake things in batches and freeze them so that you don't have to bake cookies every week, but you can pull out a batch of frozen ones. Because nobody has time for that. I'm so glad you joined me today and took that time out of your intense life to focus on finding a new way to parent that works for you and your kids. To get the episodes as soon as they drop, make sure to subscribe to the podcast and please leave everything in review so other parents can find it too. Also, check out all the free resources on my website at familymoments.ca so you can take action on what's the most important for you right now. And take a deep breath, keep going. We're all in this together.