It’s my last day, day 5, of the FMD and I’m looking forward to tomorrow.
It’s not been too bad, but next time I’m definitely going to approach it differently. I’ve noticed some symptoms that I now recognize as an electrolyte imbalance. I think I’ve been dehydrated, although I thought I was drinking enough. I don’t think I’ve done enough to keep my electrolytes balanced.
My symptoms were fairly mild, but noticeable. It started with a headache during day two. Mild but annoying enough. After that, on day 3, day 4 and also this morning, I woke up with a headache. It was easily ignored and dismissed because after my morning coffee (which was probably not the best idea in hindsight) and my usual water (with added Himalayan salt) the headache disappeared.
I did take various supplements, incl. magnesium and potassium, which would also help with this, but I guess it wasn’t quite enough. This morning I noticed muscle cramps and since yesterday I also have very dry eyes. Neither of those are things I generally experience.
So today I’m focusing on electrolytes and see if these symptoms disappear and tomorrow I will start re-feeding.
Yesterday I started a five day Fasting Mimicking Diet (FMD). I’ve done this kind of thing before and I always seem to feel energised from it, even before the five days are over.
FMD was developed by dr Valter Longo, an Italian-American Cell Biologist and Biogerontologist. It is basically tricking your body into believing that your fasting. The idea is that you eat only a percentage of your normal daily calorie intake for five days. It’s important that the food that you eat is nutrient dense and stays under a certain amount of calories.
I was fairly motivated when I started. However during the day this motivation lowered a little and my mind started thinking about ways to not finish the five days. However, I already informed some people that I was doing this, so I also felt I couldn’t just stop. Last night I decided to just go to bed really early, so the day would be a bit shorter. This sort of worked. Until I woke up during the night and couldn’t sleep again until about 3 hrs later. A broken night. Not ideal, but I wasn’t hungry.
This morning I woke up and felt surprisingly ok. A bit tired, but not too bad and still not particularly hungry. Today I’m only eating twice, so not being hungry is helpful. It’s too early to say I’m energised but I do feel quite positive. I have decided to join my son in the gym later on to do some treadmill action.
Am I the only person who cringes when reading or hearing the words ‘early intervention’?
Early intervention; It seems to be the most common approach (i.e. treatment) when a young child gets an autism diagnosis.
This morning I read a question online from a neurotypical mother of an autistic child asking for the best intervention for her son, because since he started school this year he had been behaving inappropriately. He had stopped talking, been screaming and banging his head etc. But only in school. At home he was a happy and cooperative child.
To me, it’s clear that the child in question is very stressed in this school environment. I would think that it’s the school, not the child that is the issue here. But (to me) she was clearly looking to change something in the child’s behaviour to make it easier for the school to deal with, hence the question for intervention.
Early intervention: A treatment for autism. 😱
Autism doesn’t require treatment. It requires support. Unfortunately it’s labeled as a disorder, but what it really is, is a difference from the norm. Just like homosexuality used to be labeled as an illness. It’s simply NOT the correct!
And as it isn’t an illness or a disorder, it can’t nor does it need to be fixed and/or cured. Autistic people want just what everybody else wants: have the space to be their authentic selves. If you don’t understand what that means, then that’s ok. You don’t need to.
If you are a decent human being, you just have to be kind and respectful and stop assuming you understand and/or know better. Just like you do with anyone else (I hope).
Stop the prejudice.
Love the diversity. 🌈
.
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurodiversity: “Neurodiversity advocates denounce the framing of neurodevelopmental disorders as requiring medical intervention to “cure” or “fix” them, and instead promote support systems such as inclusion-focused services, accommodations, communication and assistive technologies, occupational training, and independent living support. The intention is for individuals to receive support that honours authentic forms of human diversity, self-expression, and being, rather than treatment which coerces or forces them to adopt normative ideas of normality, or to conform to a clinical ideal.”
Today our youngest and I had planned to meet up with a couple of home ed families, to fill up our social buckets. The plan was that he could play some video games with the other teenagers and I would have chats with their mums. We were both very much looking forward to this.
We’re still very much working on recreating a network of friends here in Ireland and because of my medical issues we had to cancel a few meet ups already. Luckily I’m back being active again now, so we had our first teen meet up last Saturday. Which was great.
Today we had been invited to meet up again, but this morning I was asked to cancel it. My son is struggling with sleep issues, which makes that his sleep shifts his day and night. We already know that melatonin is a common issue in autistic people but this feels like a circadian rhythm issue.
Of course we’ve tried everything that is usually advised to make kids have a good night sleep, good sleep hygiene, winding down, soft lights, no screens before bed, we kept a schedule waking him up at the same time every morning, we even tried giving him melatonin, but nothing really works for him. When we tried, the only difference was that now he had turned into a very grumpy sleep deprived little person, which then affected his food intake and ability to concentrate.
Because of this and the fact that he is not in a system (like school) where he had no choice but get up at a particular time in the morning, we decided that the most important thing was that he got enough sleep. No matter what time of day this was going to be. We saw that this worked. At least now he slept enough.
However, this does mean that there are challenges with appointments that we make. He has some control, but that’s only control about being awake. And that doesn’t mean he can sleep more later, which of course deprives him of sleep all over again and/or makes the day-night shift even more messed up.
It’s complicated.
For example: yesterday, he only woke up at about 5pm, so he’s been awake all through the night. He came to me this morning at about 8.30am asking me to cancel our meeting this afternoon because he felt he could push himself to stay awake until the afternoon. He really needed to sleep. He clearly felt really bad about it, but this is not a choice. We wish it was. He had been really looking forward to meeting up with his new friends, but he’s just not able to.
Fortunately, his friends are very supportive. And we will be invited again.
It was when we had the second autism diagnosis in our family that I started to seriously wonder if maybe I could also be autistic. This was about 8 years ago now. I recognized a lot of our children’s characteristics, that were now labeled as autistic traits, in me.
I started doing more research online and had various chats with autistic adults, who seemed not surprised in the slightest by me wondering about myself being autistic. I now understand that to autistic people it might have been quite obvious.
Some of the things I recognized specifically was how hard I always find it to make friends. I always waited for someone else to reach out to me and that then followed by me potentially overdoing it and claiming them. I recognize now that this is a sign of my social skills not being neurotypical. I find it hard because I realize that whenever people say something, they might mean something else. It might not be meant literal and if I do take it that way, I’d be wrong. I’ve realised that when this happens, I am being laughed at, so I’ve learned to mask and turn it around as if I meant to make this ‘joke’ and all is good with the world again. You don’t have to explain anything and people just take it as funny. Nothing more and nothing less. This works for me in the moment, but doesn’t make me any wiser.
I clearly do not communicate the same way as neurotypical people. I’d like to believe that I don’t care about that, but I don’t think that’s quite true. Like everyone else, I’d like to belong and I do like to be liked. So I mask.
I’ve also created, quite early on, an image for myself that acts like a protective shield. In the past I’ve been described as someone who did their own thing and didn’t care about what others thought. This was SO not the case. I was desperately trying to fit in and sometimes it got too much. I wasn’t very good at regulating my emotions and would come across and very catty sometimes. Catty because I didn’t know how else to communicate my strong feelings. Feelings that weren’t understood, I felt.
So I tried to adjust to what others deemed acceptable. From a very young age I’ve been observing others and I’ve been learning to copy their behaviour. Subconsciously I took this as ‘normal’ or ‘the right way to behave’, so that I could fit in.
It annoys me that I’m still doing it, because now I know that somewhere along the line I lost myself. I now find it quite hard to reclaim ‘me’ again, because who am I? Where is the little girl who was genuine in her expression.
I guess I’ve always had some sort of outlet in my art, a place where I can be truly myself. However that only works if I’m not looking at other people’s work and I don’t hear any opinions before I’m finished, because then I jump straight into ‘I must not do it right’ and get back to ‘normal’ art. This is not me. I like the unique weirdness. The stuff that nobody would come up with.
I even have this with responding to people. Even on social media, when I feel some post require a compliment or a congratulations, I simply cannot respond with something that’s been said before. When I do, I feel like I’m copying and therefore the other person might think I’m insincere. This is never (!) the case because if I didn’t mean to respond, I wouldn’t.
Another point is probably that I find it quite hard to keep my chats (or blogposts for that matter) small and/or to the point. It just cannot be done. Not effectively anyway.
This makes me come back to what I wanted to say. After two of our kids were diagnosed with autism, I decided I wanted to find out about myself. So I started the ball rolling and this was a very slow ball I have to say… but eventually I got to see a psychologist for an initial assessment. We met and I was asked loads of questions. In the end he said that the second and official assessment would require another waiting list (we’re talking years here!) and if I’d be still interested to go ahead with it as it wouldn’t change anything. A bit odd I thought, because what would have made me lose interest? Anyway, I was put on the next waiting list. Before I left I asked him if he thought that I might be autistic.
His answer: I’d be very surprised if the assessment would show that you weren’t autistic.
After this, we’ve moved house and I would have to start the whole lot again, because I moved out of their area. So I left it there.
Way later I read that a lot of autistic adults do actually self diagnose and that an official diagnosis is only deemed necessary if it helps with getting support services. But for me, I’m good. I know enough. And even though, I have felt like a fraud for a while, I can now honestly say that there’s no doubt:
Brainwaffling 