After almost eight years, I finally have a reproducible result. If John eats carbs in the evening, he is going to have a terrible day the next day. There are meals he can eat at lunch, that he dare not eat before bed.
We could never see this pattern before, because he always snuck sugary treats late at night. He was going to have a bad day no matter what we did. Now he is trying his best not to sneak anything, and when he does, he tells me, so I can write it down. Within two weeks the pattern was clear, and I've spent the past month confirming it. (I didn't want to write about it until I knew it was real.) Ten or twenty carbs at 9:30 is bad, and 30 carbs at 8:00 is bad, and 50 carbs at 6:00 is bad. He really shouldn't have any carbs after 7 - that is the new protocol. But 7 isn't an absolute cut-off either. One day he had almost 90 carbs at 5, and the next day was bad. I am gradually constructing a carbs verses time graph that is continuous, but nonlinear, with an inflection point at 6 o'clock.
All this makes perfect sense if you think about it. I should slap myself on the forehead and say, "You idiot! Why didn't you think of this before?" Digestion comes to a virtual standstill when we sleep, but the bacteria never sleep. The carbs just sit there and ferment until morning. Then, after breakfast, the byproducts pass through his colon and into his blood stream, out of his lungs (where we can smell them), and into his brain (where they create insanity). I should have thought of it - but hey, nobody else did either. Atkins, South Beach, Anticandida, SCD, Zone, Macrobiotic - I've read all the books, and nobody suggests a temporal correlation of this magnitude. Yes, the Zone talks about evenly spaced (in time), balanced meals, but they would be shocked at my prescription - a complete lack of carbs and all the protein you want from 6PM to 8AM. Other diets don't address the issue of time or the diurnal cycle at all. So this is new. If you are battling a microbial parasite that thrives on carbs, you might try this approach. Eat about 100 carbs throughout the day, but none in the evening, and absolutely none before bed, which is when most of us crave desserts. This is making a big difference in John's life, and in ours.
Since it has been a couple months, I can look back and laugh at an incident that was frightening at the time, and a bit revealing. We had battled (metaphorically and physically) for two hours, and John was still cursing at us, using his newfound adult vocabulary. "You f**king b**ches, you're just n*gg*r-hating racist pigs. I'm going to call the police and report you for abuse. I'd rather live anywhere than here with you fat smelly ugly fags." And on and on. In need of a break, Wendy goes upstairs. Surprised by this reaction, John screams out, "Hey, where are you going? Don't you know that I love you?" It was so incongruous, Wendy had to laugh through her tears. "No - I didn't know. I must have missed the memo." But he does love us, desperately, and that's the incredible thing. For a moment, he was able to step outside of his chemicals long enough to tell us so.
On another bad day, Wendy got in the car and left. I gave her the nod - she needed to get away, and I could handle John for a while. She was just going to drive around for an hour, to nowhere in particular. While she was gone, John ran out into the garage and found a can of spray paint. I could hear him shaking up the can with its marble inside. I thought he was planning some new and interesting form of vandalism, perhaps "F**k you!" across our brand new, $5,000 aluminum siding. If that is his intention, I won't be able to stop him. But no, the demons are in retreat, and he has something else in mind. "Dad, I'm going to paint Sorry Mom in big white letters on the front lawn. When she comes home, the first thing she'll see is Sorry Mom. I think that will make her feel better." I try to explain to him that painting the grass is probably not a good idea. It's not ecologically sound. Maybe we can think of something else. John finds a flat of flowers, and decides to plant them around the mailbox. This is more than a simple apology. He is trying to set something right - something that has been bothering him for the past three years. He's remembering Mother's Day of 2003, when he tore the flowers out of this very location. Now he's putting them back. "Sorry Mom - don't you know that I love you?"