Welcome to Fuel Your Family

Well here it is my first post on Fuel Your Family!

You asked for healthy, easy, affordable recipes.  You asked for allergies to be considered.  You asked for lunchbox ideas.  Well the recipe in the next post covers all of that!

But first a little bit about Fuel Your Family.

I am Bronwyn Hudson.  Stay-at-home mummy of 4 gorgeous darlings (currently aged 6, 4, 3 and 1). Wife. Primary school teacher.  Health Coach (trained at the following nutrition school).  Child Development expert.  Organiser.  Control Freak. Happiest Baby on the Block educator.  Wellness enthusiast.  Multiple chemical sensitivity sufferer.  Foodie.  Chocolate lover.

I am all about low-tox living, homemade, vitality, authenticity, reaching potential, creating, intentional parenting, planning and routines, energy, vibrancy, optimal health, affordability and the simple life.  I create true home-cooked meals every day of the week, and loads of healthy snacks.  I make a large percentage of our cleaning and beauty products.  I do my very best to stick to a budget.  I exercise regularly, on my own and with the family – family bike rides with a wee-ride seat and a double trailer, or walks around/up the gorgeous Mount Maunganui or up Papamoa Hills are favourites.

The last 10 years nutrition and wellness strategies have played a very big part in my life, self-researching ways to heal and get optimal health and wellness for those close to me.

It started with my husband, who went from being a professional sportsman, playing top level rugby, to collapsing on the field after a warm up jog and being airlifted to hospital. Tests galore showed up nothing definitive, and eventually he was diagnosed with Over-Training Syndrome – an athletes version of Chronic Fatigue.  He was left not being able to drag himself out of bed without my urging, a walk to the end of the cul-de-sac setting him up for a couple of hour nap, and his career over at just 23, requiring us to return to our homeland of New Zealand. No treatment options were available other than a combination of nutrition, relaxation, regular increasing exercise (starting with 5 mins a day walking!) and a few other lifestyle factors.  I spent hours and hours learning all I could to enable him to return to full health, and trying all sorts of techniques.  It took two years of him focusing on nothing but health before he could return to some part-time work.  To his credit he ended up returning to a high level of fitness and was re-selected for the NZ Sevens Squad 3 years after first getting sick (unfortunately he did end up relapsing and we started the journey again, this time armed with knowledge and the recovery was much faster – he now has a full toolbox of strategies to keep his body in balance and leads a healthy successful life).

Fast-forward to the birth of our first child.  I was so totally unaware before having him that a baby could cry so much.  He started off in that lovely newborn sleepy stage, but ramped it up, screaming whenever he was put down, or whenever I tried to feed him.  He went from being a great little feeder to completely refusing any milk around 7 weeks old.  I am not sure who cried most around this time – him or me.  Thankfully with the help of a friend who had witnessed similar behaviour with her nephew he was diagnosed with severe gastro-oesophageal reflux.  At a very vulnerable stage myself I followed the doctors advice on medication, including a specialist that put him on a highly restricted motility medication on top of the large doses of proton-pump inhibitors he was already taking.  I was told to avoid a large range of foods to be able to continue feeding him, and as I also was launching a pre-school perceptual motor programme when he was a baby (because you know what, before I had a baby I think I thought it would be so super easy, I might even get bored, and that starting a business when he was 4 months old was going to be a great idea!) I found it hard to keep up my milk supply enough to feed him.  With lots of external pressure to discontinue breastfeeding, I tried weaning him to formula at around 6 months.  That ended up being a disaster, and after an allergic reaction we were prescribed the most ridiculously expensive and disgusting prescription-only hypo-allergenic formula.  I decided I wanted to keep breastfeeding rather than trying to force that on him, so I had to remain on a strictly dairy-free diet.  It wasn’t until I made that dietary change that we finally got the reflux under control.  When he was 13 months old he put his hand in a yoghurt tub and had a severe allergic reaction (a “drive straight to the doctor around the corner” reaction) and long story short it turned out that he had a life-threatening cows milk protein allergy.  His life from that point involved not going anywhere without an emergency kit and an allergen-free lunchbox.  After he had reacted to having his lunch made on a chopping board that had just cut cheese we kept our whole house dairy free as the cross-contamination risk was too high. Once again I immersed myself in research and nutritionist appointments and I learnt so much about adapting recipes and eating to ensure he got all the nutrients required on his limited diet.

Fast forward again to my eldest daughter.  From about age 2 she had always complained of sore tummies.  Around that time my doctor recommended I trial a gluten-free diet for her, but with the dietary restrictions in my house and my reluctance to cut out a food group without any definite evidence of the need to I simply kept the advice in the back of my mind but left it at that.  By the time she was four the sore tummies were getting more and more frequent, sometimes resulting in her being sick (often actually), and she was always so tired and lethargic. Finally we took the plunge and put her on a strictly gluten-free diet trial.  After weeks on the diet we had a completely different child – the sore tummies had COMPLETELY disappeared and her energy levels were hugely improved.  It just goes to show that Hippocrates really was on to something when he said

let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food

Child number 3: an intra-partum bleed made delivering her an rather frightening experience and one where I lost a lot of blood.  We were both lucky that I was already in hospital when I went into labour or the outcome may have been different.  We seemed to both be doing okay, although left rather drained after that delivery.  Then when she was just under 3 months old she went unconscious in my husbands arms, and although breathing (just) she remained completely unresponsive while we waited for the ambulance to make it all the way out to us.  It was the scariest 20 minutes of my life, holding our grey, lifeless baby.  She regained consciousness with the paramedics, but dropped off twice more in my arms on the trip to hospital.  By the time we arrived she had her colour back and seemed to be doing okay.  The next few days in hospital were spent having every test under the sun, visiting specialists from Starship (NZ’s children’s hospital), EEG’s, ECG’s, scans, x-rays, bloods, whooping cough testing (oh that was horrible!), and being hooked up to many machines.  No definitive explanation has ever been given, apart from high blood pressure (which is now resolved) and abnormal ECG’s (which are improving, now aged 3 1/2).  She spent the next 9 months, until around her first birthday, with a breathing/apnoea monitor strapped to her tummy.  She had to be within earshot at all times, with a 10 second response time from us.  She had these Apparent Life Threatining Events (ALTE’s) 18 times in her first year, and we lived in a constant state of alertness which did who knows what to our cortisol levels.  Also weakened after the delivery, and now exhausted I ended up with infection after infection, antibiotics and antibiotics, minor surgeries to drain infections…We employed a nanny to try and help get us through that year, but both my husband and I struggled.  He took time off work every time I was back in hospital, neither of us slept in a deep restorative sleep as we were always alert listening for breathing and ready to respond to an apnoea alarm.  It was a year that took a toll on both of us, and was the start of a systemic candida issue for me.

More recently I have had some allergy flare-ups of my own and spent some time on a very strict elimination diet.  Getting creative on an 8-ingredient diet was a big learning curve to begin with, but after a week I had so many different ways of enjoying them and have kept a catalogue of my recipes to be able to help anyone that has to go through a similar experience.  I am forever thankful of my husband who is quite creative in the kitchen and devised many of the recipes for me (okay not forever thankful, on the rare occasion that his experimenting is a disaster I am not thankful at all!).  After a bad gut infection (NOT from my hubby’s cooking!) I am now eating a very alkalizing diet, including fermented foods, and slowly healing my gut.  I am prioritising my health as I am still breastfeeding, and have been pregnant or breastfeeding for the last 7 1/2 years consecutively now.

These experiences have influenced the way we eat in our family, with 6 mouths to feed, one income, dietary requirements and a desire for us all to be in absolute optimum health.  It seemed like all the movements and significant people in my nutrition interests had one way or another crossed paths with IIN,  so the next logical step for me was to enrol in their Certified Health Coach programme!  I am sooooooooo excited!  I will start seeing clients in November 2013, holding Healthy Chocolate courses, 6 month support programmes, supermarket tours and pantry make-overs, so watch this space…

After requests from friends to share my nutrition and lifestyle tips, recipes and advice, I have started two initial ways of getting the information out there.  First I started a Fuel Your Family facebook page to create a community of people interested in the health and wellness of themselves and their families.  In the 48 hours since it started it is already proving to be a great way of asking and answering questions, sharing tips, and for me to learn what you are looking for.  I love it!  The limitation is that it is really for sharing quick little snippets and questions, and I needed somewhere to share lengthier posts, such as recipes.  So here it is: the Fuel Your Family blog!

My goal is to completely absorb myself in my study (sorry in advance for those social occasions that I will have to turn down at times in the next year) to learn all I possibly can and share it with you.  I wish to heal myself, optimise my families health and inspire others to make healthier choices, both in the food they put on their plates and the lifestyle choices they make.  Thanks for being on this journey with me.  Please make comments, ask questions and share your own knowledge on this journey!