Cabbage!

Pardon me, I'm having a Delicious Dish moment here. (Yummy! Good times!)

On the whole, the elimination diet experience has been illuminating. She has resumed falling asleep easily by herself. She is mostly in control of herself emotionally during they day - to an age appropriate degree, I mean. No more threats of suicide or random violence. Lily's skin never quite reached baseline, but we know for sure that she has an emotional trigger for itching. When she gets tired, or angry, or irritated, or frustrated, or overwhelmed, she starts absent-mindedly itching. So, when she got to the point of no open scabs, no oozes, no pimply rash, we decided to start trials.

We have four criteria for whether to keep a food in or set it aside again.

One, skin: if it cracks, hives, rashes, bumps, bleeds or oozes, it's a fail. If it's just red, dry and generally itchy, that's just life as we know it, sadly.

Two, sleep: if she stops being able to fall asleep in a reasonable amount of time, or starts waking incoherent again, we'll know that something is amiss.

Three, behavior: if she starts issuing ultimatums or starts threatening to kill herself, fail. If she starts picking things up and chucking them across the room at the slightest provocation, fail.

Four, digestion: if she starts having - otherwise unexplained - pain upon urination or elimination, fail. If she starts having mucous or blood in her stool, fail.

Per these criteria, we've introduced safflower oil and cabbage to non-immediately disastrous results. This brings our current "safe" list up to: pastured turkey, peeled golden or red delicious apples, acorn squash, maple syrup, safflower oil, palm shortening, pastured beef, sea salt, saffron, chives, cabbage, napa cabbage. Next up include: brussels sprouts and green onions!

Stay tuned for my musings on further allergy testing for she and/or I... Writing this here to remind myself. Also, I know I never came back and posted about the Vit K debate, but honestly, I'm still not sure exactly what's going on with that, scientifically. All I know is we are doing K2 supplementation combined with LOD and things seem to be going well.