The Weekend + Day 1 on the Candida Diet

Saturday - I spent part of the day trying to bake a few different things for Jeannette to eat for her new diet.  I made bread, brownies, and fudge.  I spent the other part of the day on-line researching sites and trying to find things for kids with Candida.  It’s next to impossible.  There just isn’t that much stuff out there and the stuff I was finding was dated back to 1997, and some of those links listed weren’t even accessible.  It’s been quite frustrating.  I did find some recipes, so I printed a bunch out so that I could take them w/ me to Wegman’s.  

I went to Wegman’s and just wandered around to look for some of these ingredients.  I spent at least an hour there and had to ask about a few things that I had no clue what they were.  Ingredients like vegetable glycerin, coconut oil, flax gel, vitamin C crystals, arrowroot, almond flour, quinoa flour, brown rice flour, and carob powder, just to name a few.  The little container of Stevia I bought was $12 for a jar.  Ouch!


This is completely a whole new world for me.  I never thought I would be that person who has to buy all these gluten free, peanut free, dairy free foods, but here I am.  I feel like I’m at the worst of the spectrum.  Now no yeast. That is so hard.  The only thing I can say is that thank goodness there is so many more things available to people these days that are forced to be on these diets.  If this was 10 years ago, I wouldn’t be able to find half this stuff.  The downer is the cost of these foods.  I spent $162 on top of what I already spent the other day.

Sunday - I spent most of the day experimenting with different recipes and made a bunch of different things so that Jeannette would have some things to eat today.  Jeannette was up before me and got herself some cheerios and milk for breakfast.  Not the right thing to be eating on day one of her new diet.  She did try some of the foods that I had made on Saturday.  Most of them were a bust, but some of them she liked.  I'll have to get creative with some of the things she didn't like.  She didn't like the bread, the brownies were okay, and she liked the fudge.  She liked the brownies even better with the fudge on top of the brownies.

She tried some other things today.  She tried coconut milk.  She didn't like it.  I think that was because I bought cultured coconut milk.  It's much thicker than non cultured coconut milk.  I had no idea.  When it came pouring out of the bottle in a gelatinous manner, I knew something wasn't right.  The look on Jeannette's face as I was pouring it was priceless.  It was a "what the heck is that" look, and "don't make me drink that."  After the coconut milk, she tried the brown rice cereal I had found.  She said it was okay.  For lunch she tried the bread I made the day before with some soy nut butter on it.  She didn't like it.  She licked the soy nut butter off the bread and left the bread behind.  I then made some bacon, so that it could last her for the upcoming week.  Next we tried deli ham.  I had purchased the Hormel, nitrate/nitrite, preservative free lunch meat.  I thought it would be okay for her to eat.  She rolled it up, ate it and said she liked it.  While she was eating it, I read the ingredients on the back more closely and it contained sugar.  No wonder why she liked it.  She then had a slice of Kraft American Cheese (processed).  I know I need to find something better than that.  

For dinner we grilled some chicken.  I made brown rice, and the Chebe dinner rolls I found at Wegmans.  She had raspberries and yogurt with her probiotic in it.  I tried one of the rolls and it was edible, but had this funky texture in the center.  It was almost gel like.  Jeannette said they were okay as long as she put the dairy free butter on it.  She did eat the chicken, but used regular ketchup (no high fructose corn syrup).  I know it still has some sugar in it and I know she shouldn't have eaten it, but she did.  She had the almond/chocolate milk that I was able to put  her vitamin A in.  For dessert, Jeannette had the fudge.  

All-in-all it wasn't a horrible day.  She didn't keep telling me that she was hungry every hour like she normally does.  I'm just going to have to take it one day at a time.  I'm most concerned as to what I'm going to pack for lunches and what she can have for snacks.  I read somewhere that popcorn was okay, but it will have to be plain with no butter.  

I just don't know how Jeannette is going to handle this.  She understands what has to happen and that she's having to be on this diet and eat different things.  How do you try to explain to a 7 year old about why she has to eat these things.  Even though today wasn't so horrible, there are going to be some painful days ahead.   When her body really starts going through sugar withdraw, I'm afraid to see what will happen.  This is a horrible analogy, but it's all I could think of.  This diet to Jeannette is like taking heroine away from an addict.  Jeannette's addiction is the sugar.  The body craves it until it's fed. The yeast in her body is craving and wanted to be fed the sugar.  For a girl who has been eating carbs since she was 2, this is going to be an uphill battle.

After speaking to my sister about this new diet of Jeannette's, she made an excellent point.  My kids have a very limited palette.  All I need to do is come up with 5 or 6 different things that I can get her to eat and just keep rotating them around during the week.  My kids don't have high expectations when it comes to food and they are used to eating the same things on a rotation basis as it is.  Why should this be any different?