Monday, June 6, 2011

Finding balance with fruit

Day 47

Since we re-introduced fruit last week I've been exploring what fruits work for us and in what amounts. For example, Ellie is fine having one or two ripe strawberries, but five or six is too many. Half of a peeled green apple is fine, but it has to be with nut butter. If she eats it by itself we head straight to fussy town. Last week I baked some almond muffins that were sweetened with very ripe bananas (no honey) and those too were fine in moderation.

I got a little cocky with all this success and last night had half of a banana and this morning had another half, and Ellie had half a banana with her breakfast. I'm trying to search for words to describe what happened next ... it wasn't pretty.

I completely lost my patience with Ellie and lost my temper several times over the course of the morning. Simple toddler boundary-pushing, which I can normally adroitly maneuver, became unbearably irritating. This is not helped by the fact that when I have too much sugar I get a short temper, and when Ellie has too much sugar she becomes whiny and uncooperative.

At lunchtime I took my probiotic and it was crazy - within minutes it was like a cloud lifting and I could see my wonderful, sweet toddler clearly again and I could see how terribly I had been behaving. I got on my knees and told her how much I loved her and that I was sorry that mama had yelled. 

This is one of the main reasons why I decided to do intro without honey. I was probably only able to so quickly identify what was going on because we had lived without these symptoms for the past 46 days.

The nutrition counselor we're working with suggested last week that we limit ourselves to green apples and blueberries for now (both are low-sugar fruits). Keeping this blog is really forcing me to take a look at what a difficult time I have following instructions!!! How many times have I not followed the  GAPS Intro protocol? I am apparently fond of pushing boundaries. I really wanted bananas to be OK because they are just such a convenient snack. Oh well. Peeled raw apples it is for now. I am grateful to have those. Before we did intro, Ellie and I were having the symptoms I described above with any amount of fruit or honey, so I know we are better off now than we were then.

2 comments:

  1. hi Annie - have you read Deep Nutrition by Catherine Shanahan? I'm just half way through it. It's brilliant. Consistent with Weston Price. More pieces of the puzzle i'm sure in it for us. Good stuff to say about fruit/sugar. Julia

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  2. Hey Julia - I haven't heard of that book. Will definitely check it out - thanks!

    ~Annie

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