Calories
The first dietary issue that you need to take into consideration when working with the gluten and dairy free diet, is caloric intake. At first your child may lose weight as they will not eat as much of the new foods that you are serving them because they are unfamiliar with the taste and texture of these foods. However, as they become familiar with the taste and texture of non-dairy and non-wheat recipes, the volume of food they eat will increase. This is when you need to closely monitor how many calories each member of your family is consuming to keep their weight under control.
The age, height and activity level of each person is going to impact how many calories they need. To help you monitor the caloric intake of each member of your family, or at least the people on thegluten free dairy free diet, keep a chart of calories for the ingredients that you use to cook with. Then chart the food amounts and calories on a dry erase board.
Fat Content
Another element of the gluten free and dairy free diet that you will need to chart is fat content. While you will be using lower fat ingredients like soy milk and soy cheese, these products still contain fat. You will especially want to monitor how much hydrogenated fats are in your recipes. This is an unhealthy fat. When possible avoid using products with this type of fat.
Planning School Lunches
One challenge of putting your Autistic child on a gluten free and dairy free diet is dealing with school breakfasts and lunches. The school is not going to be able to cater to this diet so you will need to pack meals for your child to have at school. You will want to include breakfast, a snack and lunch. Variety is going to keep your child from getting bored with the foods you send. Celery sticks with Smart Balance peanut butter and raisins, carrot sticks or baby carrots, fruit snacks, dried fruits and sugar free Jello®, all make great snacks. For breakfast, eggs, turkey sausage or vegan yogurt all work well. For lunch you can include vegetable soup, chicken and rice soup, rice dumplings, turkey hot dogs without the bun, mashed potatoes, and beef stew all make great meals.
Planning Dinners
At home you can be more creative with what you make. You can try your luck working with gluten free breads, however, you're life will be much easier if you just forego bread and switch to rice and potatoes as your primary starches. Homemade stews and soups are going to be the easiest to keep gluten and dairy free. You can transform just about any recipe into a gluten and dairy free recipe by removing noodles and wheat thickeners. You can replace the noodles with rice and/or potatoes and replace wheat thickeners with arrowroot or corn starch.
Asian cuisine also will provide you with a lot of great gluten free and dairy free recipes to work with. However, because of soy sauce and other prepackaged sauces. Many of these pre-bottled sauces have wheat in them.
Again, variety is going to help you keep your kids satisfied with this diet. Try planning a different type of cuisine for each day of the week. For example, you can have Thai on Monday, Mexican on Tuesday, American on Wednesday, etc.
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