About Amanda Swick

I'm a stay at home mom to two beautiful boys, Josiah (7) and Jaron (5). I am married to Jason who is a campus minister at the University Christian Center. For fun I enjoy gardening, biking, hiking, and camping.

Dealing With Stomach Issues

Wow! It has been way to long since I have posted something on this website. A lot has happened in our life in the past year. We had another baby, Jaron hit the 2 year seizure free mark, was weaned off his diet, and celebrated another year seizure free. I plan on writing about all these events, but for now here is a post that I had been meaning to post a year ago.

It is not unusual for Keto Kids to struggle with stomach pains. My stomach would probably struggle with trying to digest that much fat, too. Jaron started having stomach issues within the first month of being on the diet. But we worked with his dietician and were able to keep it manageable over the past 2 years. If your keto kid is struggling with stomach issues, here are some options you can discuss with your dietician.

  1. Make sure he has regular bowel movements. Jaron’s stomach pain in the first month was due to irregularity. It took us awhile to find the right amount of Miralax to keep things flowing, but not flowing too fast. After a couple of months we found the balance and that helped his stomach out a lot.
  2. Make sure he isn’t getting too many calories. After we got the pooping situation under control, Jaron was still having some pain. The dietician noticed that Jaron was gaining weight too quickly. She suggested go down on his calories to see if the reason for the stomach pain was a belly that was too full. Sure enough after we went down, the stomach pain went away.
  3. Smaller Meals more frequently. After about 6 months, the stomach pains came back. Our dietician suggested giving Jaron smaller meals. The smaller meals would be easier on his stomach to digest. This was more work for me, since I had to make more meal, but it helped his stomach.
  4. Sugar Free Tums. Another 6 months later the stomach issues came back. Dr. Wray suggested Sugar Free Tums as an antacid. We only wanted to give Jaron one a day so we gave it to him in the evening when his stomach was most upset. This helped him sleep better at night. If you get a yummy flavor, this will be a treat for your keto kid.
  5. Probiotic. Jaron was on the Tums for a while when he started having kidney stones. The dietician thought we should discontinue the use of the Tums because maybe Jaron was getting to much calcium which aided him forming kidney stones. To replace the Tums, she told us to give Jaron a probiotic. She suggested the brand Culturelle as it has minimal carbs. After 3 days on this, Jaron’s stomach pain went away and we haven’t had issues since.  I guess his digestive system was running low on good bacteria at this point.

There are many options for helping keto kids deal with stomach discomfort. If yours is struggling, I hope these ideas help you and your dietician come up with a way to ease the pain.

Taking Keto Kids Camping

We just got back from our annual camping trip with friends. We had a lot of fun swimming in the lake, playing with frogs, and watching the annual Perseids meteor shower. Our family has always loved going camping. Both of my kids always slept better as babies in the great outdoors then they did at home. Two years ago, when Jaron started on the diet, we had to make a decision to continue camping or wait until (hopefully) he would come off the diet. The diet is time consuming and you need just the right ingredients to make it work, so taking it to the great outdoors seemed like a daunting task. Jaron loves to camp so we decided it give it a try.

It turned out that most of the hard work was done before and things went very smoothly once we were in the great outdoors. Here are the steps we take when going camping.

  1. Choose a campsite that fits the needs of your keto-kid: If your kid is still having seizures, pick a campground that is flat and doesn’t have a lot of uneven ground so if he falls there aren’t a lot of obstacles for him to hit. You also want to consider what kind of amenities your campground has. You can go rustic with just a water pump or a place with showers. We have camped at both and I must say it is easier to have a place with running water for washing keto dishes. If you have a camper (we tent camp) this may not be an issue.
  2. Choose your menu: We choose meals that can be put on a plate with minimal to no weighing involved. Meals we have taken camping are:
  • -Muffins (Christy has several good ones to choose from on this website)

    Jaron enjoying macadamia  nut and cheddar cracker with ranch dipping sauce and apples.

    Jaron enjoying macadamia nut and cheddar cracker with ranch dipping sauce and apples.

  • -Macadamia nut and cheese crackers (found in The Keto Cookbook by Dawn Marie Martenz)
  • -Pizza (also found in The Keto Cookbook)
  • -Hot dogs, fruit, macadamia nuts, and ranch/mayo dipping sauce
  1. Prep your food before you leave: If you have a camper you may not need to do this because you have a sink and counter space to make the meals.  We tent camp and pulling out all ingredients and utensils to make a meal on an uneven picnic table (if there is even a picnic table) and then having to wash all the dishes seems exhausting and a waste of a good camping trip. So I choose to make my meals ahead of time. I spend a long 4-6 hours before we go camping putting together all the
    20150828_133831

    Here is a small sample of what I made. I put all his food in containers and then in ziplock bags so water from melting ice doesn’t leak into the food causing it to get soggy.

    meals. That’s enough meals to last us 4-5 days. The prep time done before we leave makes feeding a keto kid in the woods stress free. When it is time to eat we just pull out a pre-made meal and lay it on a plate.  The only weighing we do while camping is the heavy whipping cream Jaron needs at breakfast and before bed to take his supplements.

    1. Experience Tip 1: Make the entire meal in one plastic container. Use silicone cups to separate the wet ingredients. Then make sure you lay them flat in your cooler so they don’t spill onto the dry food.
    2. Tip 2: We put our plastic containers in zip lock bags so they were extra protected from the melting ice water that could leak in and ruin a meal. This happened once. It made an unhappy keto kid.
    3. Tip 3: Make an extra day’s worth of food so you can focus on cleaning up the camping gear and getting back into the swing of things before having to keto cook again.

If you are considering taking your kid camping, I hope this post helps you make that dream possible.

Hospital Initiation

Hello everyone!! My name is Amanda Swick. In an earlier post, Christy introduced you to our family but I thought I would share a little more about us. I am a stay at home to two beautiful boys.  Josiah is 7 and Jaron is 5. Jason is a Christian minister who works with college students at Oregon State University. Jaron was diagnosed with Doose Syndrome in 2013 and was put on the ketogenic diet. He is currently 17 months seizure free. You can read Jaron’s full story here. Our family enjoys hiking, camping, riding bikes, going to the beach, playing board games and going to the library. Jason and I are excited to be able to encourage and help others on the ketogenic diet journey. Ted and Christy were a big help for us when we first got started and our hope is we can return the favor to others.

As I was thinking about what our first post would be, I decided I would just start at the beginning, with Jaron’s initiation on the diet. Nora was eased onto the diet from home, but Jaron went through a hospital initiation. If you are considering a hospital initiation, here is snapshot of what one is like.

We arrived at the hospital Sunday with Jaron having drop seizures every 3-5 minutes. We spent the rest of the day get labs done and getting settled into a safe environment for Jaron. Monday morning was an EEG and the neurologist diagnosing Jaron with Doose Syndrome.  I immediately asked about putting Jaron on the Ketogenic Diet. He was already on two antiepileptic drugs and they weren’t working, so the odds of another drug working were very low.  The diet had a greater chance of helping Jaron than another drug. The doctor agreed this was a good choice for Jaron and would have the dietician come in later that day to get us started.

The dietician and I first talked about whether the ketogenic diet was a good fit for our family. She described what was needed to make the diet work: lots of hours and loads of tears from all of us.  She didn’t do this to deter us, but to be realistic about what it would take to make it work.  She wanted me to commit to at least 6 months on the diet before I could give up. At that point, I was willing to commit to anything because Jaron was falling and hurting himself so much.

Next, we talked about what ratio to start Jaron at. We decided a high ratio of 3:1 was a good place to start since we wanted to get some seizure control quickly. Starting at a high ratio was only possible as a hospital initiation. At a 3:1, Jaron needed to be monitored closely for the first couple of days to make sure his body (possible kidney and liver distress) could handle the diet.

Finally, we had to decide what foods the hospital had that Jaron would eat for his first keto meal. I was under the impression from my research that Jaron would have to fast for 2 days before starting the diet. Since they discovered that easing into the diet is just as effective as starting the diet as a fast, they no longer required a fast. Instead they would start his first meal at ½ of his target calorie range and increase his calories over 24 hours.

We decided Jaron’s first meal would consist of turkey, lettuce, red peppers, mayo, and cream. Jaron loved the turkey, lettuce and red peppers. He tolerated me putting mayo on his lettuce, but it wasn’t his favorite. He HATED the cream. Jaron liked milk but he didn’t like cream. It took a lot of coercing to get him to drink it all. That was hard, but the worst part was getting him to take his medicine (he was on Keppra and Depakote at the time). The hospital’s way of giving him adult medicine that he can’t swallow was to crush it up, mix it with water, and feed it to him with a syringe.  Yuck!! Through a lot of encouraging and bribing we would get it all into him. He was such a trooper.

After 24 hours on the diet, Jaron began to go into ketosis. They wanted to monitor him for another day to make sure his body was handling the change in diet well. During that day, we had to make sure he was drinking enough water and counted seizures for any change.

Even though his body was handling the diet well, there was no initial change in seizure count after a few days so they upped the Depakote, which would help for a few weeks, and sent us home. It would be a few weeks before we started seeing the seizure count go down due to the diet.  It would be three months and an increase to 4:1 before we started seeing seizure free days.

Looking back at our experience with hospital initiation, there were things that I liked about the experience and things I didn’t. I liked the hospital initiation because I had daily contact with the dietitian. We sat down for an hour the first day and she showed me how to use the Ketocalculator. As I began making Jaron his meals at the hospital I had her there through the whole process. As I made meals on the Ketocalculator I could ask questions and gain confidence.

Also, being in the hospital forced me to only focus on figuring out how to administer the diet without the distractions of everyday life. This made the transition to the diet at home much easier. While we had issues with Jaron taking his medicine and eating all the food in the hospital, I was prepared to head home with ideas on how to address some of the obstacles we faced while in the hospital.

The tough things about the hospital initiation all revolved around the uncomfortableness of being in a hospital. Our food choices were limited which made it hard to find meals that were appetizing. We didn’t sleep well because we weren’t in our own beds. And there is the cost of staying in a hospital.

From Jaron’s perspective, the process wasn’t bad. We were at a children’s hospital so there was always something fun to do. People came in and sang songs with him. He could go to the play room and play with the toys. He never begged to go home and he seemed content most of the time. The only thing he didn’t like was the morning blood draws and the nasty medicine.

Overall I am glad we did a hospital initiation as it helped to arrive home prepared, confident and mostly ready for the days to come.