May Contain Nuts! : Navigating Life with Severe Food Allergies

Music. With many years experience as an eating disorder and bariatric therapist, I know exactly what it takes to help you break free from your diet history and develop a more healthy relationship with food.

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Well, today we have a guest and her name is Amy Stone. She is an author, a coach, a trained family mediator, and also the host of her own podcast, which is called The Art of Imperfect Adulting, which sounds like something that we probably all need from time to time. So welcome, Amy, and thank you so much for joining me today. I'm really happy to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Well, we're going to talk about something which is important and very important for a lot of people, which is when your relationship with food could ultimately mean life or death. So we're talking about food allergies today. And this is something that you have some experience in, isn't it, with your son who's been through presumably a long journey you both have? Yeah. So for perspective, the son that we're talking about today will turn 19 over the summer.

So he's a young adult, and we've known about his allergy. He's got multiple nuts and seeds. So he's got the very famous—I live in the United States, and we have a lot of people who have developed allergies to peanuts, which are pretty well established. He's got that, the dreaded peanut allergy. He's also allergic to what we call tree nuts. So it's another group of nuts. And then he's allergic to sesame seeds. So he's got those three things that he's got an anaphylactic allergy to.

So versus a sensitivity where he would just get a rush and so on and so forth. So that's what we've been living with since he was a small little munchkin. And how did you find this out? Because presumably it was quite traumatic. It actually wasn't. This is actually a very easygoing story. He is the fourth kid in our family. And we used to have a house with an open kitchen plan and a tile bar with little stools.

And the kids would, it was snack time. And there was celery and peanut butter that the big kids were eating. And he was not even eating solid food at the point. He reached out for it and he grabbed the, as kids do, right? They reach out and they grab things. And he got peanut butter on his skin and broke out in a rash. And because I have all these other kids, we had doctors on tap and I off the cuff mentioned, hey, this happened.

He got this rash. And they were like, oh, probably don't give him any nuts. You know, just stay away. Just stay away and it'll be fine. And so we very loosey-goosey avoided it until he was five, which is when they told us that they would test for the allergy. And we just sort of thought nobody else in the family has a severe food allergy. So we really were just, we were following the instructions, not taking it too seriously.

Luckily, nothing horrible happened because when we tested him when he was five, that's when we got the first news that he was really severely allergic to these things. And I went through. So we had that appointment, which is the skin test in the allergist's office, and it all flames up, which is very emotional and hard to do with a small kid. But we went home, and I had an absolute parental breakdown and ended up back in the doctor's office the next day because I didn't sleep all night long.

And I was like, oh my gosh, how am I going to do this? And all this responsibility, it's huge risk. And the allergy doctor very calmly talked me off the ledge and was like, listen, this didn't just happen yesterday. You just got the results yesterday. Everything that you've been doing for the past five years, we're going to keep doing. It's just that now... I had this whole new framework of the risk that was there.

So did you, in the interim, eliminate everything from the house, everything peanut-related or nut-related? We had sort of done it, but we really ratcheted up the care we were taking. So at the time, the kid that is a little bit older, is three years older, would take peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to preschool. This is a very American product. It's like a frozen sandwich that is completely processed.

And I would put it in the lunchbox, and he would thaw it during the day, and she would eat it during lunch. And so we had stuff like that, and we did have peanut butter. I was making all the food, and so he just ate the things that I gave him, and it was all very fine, but we could have it mixed up. And then I, one day in packing the lunches, put her sandwich into his box, and he didn't eat it. Nothing happened. people saw it and switched it.

But that was when I said, oh my gosh, in order to keep him safe, I need to be much more diligent.

And so since that point, the house where I live is a safe zone for him all the time. So he can always come and he knows that other than we do have a shelf in the pantry where there are sort of bars, like protein bars, like you would eat when you're on the run. And so there are three boxes. There's his nut-free one, and then there's others too, and he just doesn't eat those. He's old enough to know and avoid them. But we have a nut-free house.

And that's because you want, it's not a nut-free world. He moves through the world having to navigate the fact that it's everywhere all over the place. And this is my one thing that is like, when you come home to mom's house, this is a safe space. And how does he do that? Because as you say, you can't police everybody else. And what is his reaction to sort of a minor level of exposure?

So if he has a minor level of exposure, so nut allergies and seed allergies are often what they call progressive. And so that means that the more exposures you have, the more severe and fast the reaction will be. So they tell you, they're like, your goal is to avoid it, completely avoid it.

And so if he has an ingestion, and we're very lucky, he's only had a couple of accidental exposures in his entire life, and he will get a rash, he gets a flush to the face, a profound sense of anxiety, which is apparently one of those symptoms. And then it will become that he will begin to swell internally and be unable to breathe. And that's when you give epinephrine and that hopefully reverses it. So that's what we're trying to avoid.

The instructions for avoiding it are what's called strict avoidance. And that just means don't eat it. And so he's very careful about what he eats and he'll ask the ingredients. And if he doesn't know or if he's unsure, he skips it. And so that's the plan. That's the plan. That's how we do it. Wow. So how did that, as a young child, how did this affect his overall relationship with food? Was there an element of fear, I suppose, that came into that relationship?

Definitely an element of fear. When he was young, his instructions were to only take food from me. And when I say me, you could extend that out to the other people in the family. He would take food from my husband and his big sister. But when we teach young kids, we teach them to share, right? And we taught him not to share, not to share.

And once at preschool, when the kids were running around after school with bags of snacks, and he had his little bag of cheese crackers, and somebody else asked for them, and he said, no, I don't share. And I got a death stare from the other mom. And I was just like, okay, wait, time out.

Let me explain. There is a reason I've taught him not to share. so it was really very cautious like only take from trusted sources and then as he aged into it he got more and more responsibility so we would go in together and I would work with people to figure out what was safe and what was not and I've always had very much an attitude that it's like I said before it's not a nut-free world so it shouldn't be an inconvenience to everybody else around him.

Like, I'm not going to insist that an entire school or lunchroom or facility be not free because it's not dangerous to other people. It's just dangerous to him. And so we would figure out what was safe and agree on what he was going to do. And then he would be able to manage it with the help of the adults who were there at school.

And he did have some fear. The fear has grown as he gets older and understands more about what can happen. because when he got to be. An adolescent and he was eating out with his friends and eating in more restaurants, that's when we began to have mistakes, which is developmentally when it's going to happen, right? That's exactly when it's going to happen. And then he began to understand and really get afraid.

And last year, he had a couple of accidental exposures and actually got so fearful that he basically stopped eating, which is a thing called ARFID, which is food avoidance. And he lost all our weight. Nobody knew that he was really, he was still eating some. I don't want to, he wasn't like anorexic, but he was not eating in different places and he would go and not eat. And his behavior changed and his sleep changed and we knew something was wrong.

We knew something was very wrong. But what we didn't realize is that he had just been so restrictive and basically eating highly processed food to try and stay safe that he made himself pretty sick. Is there, I mean, I suppose it would be a question to ask him, is there a fear that other foods might trigger it that he's not met before? That's a good question. I haven't asked him about that. It hasn't been a growing, there's been no new foods that are introduced.

It's more of the ever-present fear that there would be something in a food that was offered to you that wasn't labeled correctly or that people make mistakes, specifically in restaurants. When you ask people, hey, what's in this or are there nuts? There's a pretty high risk that they don't know or they might answer incorrectly because they don't understand the severity or they just make a mistake or they're having a bad day or they have the wrong information.

Like there's a million different scenes that that can happen. And so that's the accidental exposure is the thing that makes us the most nervous. And so, you know, it really affects every decision he makes. It's a really kind of scary thing because you have to eat. Cool. Right? You have to eat. And so it's an emotional and mental pressure of like this thing that I need to survive could make me very, very sick and even kill me.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's a big nine. I've been reading up on allergies, which I, to be honest, don't know an awful lot about because I don't have one. But the big nine are milk, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, fish, shellfish, soy, wheat, and sesame. So your son has three of the big nine. He has three of the big nine. Nuts and tree nuts are pretty straightforward and easy to avoid in most places. Sesame can be tricky because it is in spices.

It is used as a thickener in Indian food. it is it comes under other ingredients like tahini i don't know if that's still called the same thing okay so tahini so it can be other things and so he's like never had hummus.

Right that's straightforward he's never had hummus but and also the thing that led to these accidental exposures was they just added the night they just added sesame on before it was eight and so bizarrely a lot of people started adding sesame into places and the labels weren't caught up. And so we had that. And then it's also become, we had a solid laugh because Mexican food used to be generally fairly safe.

And about six months ago, he's like, it used to be really safe for me to have Mexican food. Now they're using black sesame seeds as an ornamental, bougie thing. And this was my safe space and now I can't count on them. And so you just got, it's a really, really, he cooks a lot. He eats at home and he makes his own food. And that's one of the big ways he does it. Yeah, yeah. And they do. I mean, they look pretty, to be honest.

There's black and white seeds on the top of things, and they're being used as a garnish quite often. I think I had them a couple of days ago. We went to a cafe, and I had an avocado toast. And again, the sesame seeds were all over the top of it. So it looked lovely. Right, it looks lovely. And one of the things for the mindset for he and I, as he navigates through this, is the general awareness that we always have to

be the ones that are on guard and never assume that anybody else understands it. People are... It's generally very helpful when we bring it up, as long as they understand that we're just trying to stay safe, right? So sometimes, so we were at a family party, a big family party that was catered, and I asked to speak to the catering staff. And initially, they came out to sort of guard up. They knew I was going to talk to them about allergies, and they were sort of defensive about the things.

And I said, oh, no, wait, I just need to know. Like, we're just going to go through this and you're going to tell me if there's stuff that he can eat. And then he's just going to choose the stuff that you say is safe. I'm not asking for you to do anything extra or challenge in your kitchen or anything. And if there's nothing here, that's okay. Then we just don't eat. And we're not upset about it. We might be hungry, but we're not upset about it. Yeah.

So allergies have, I mean, I know you say it's not a nut-free world, but it's becoming more so because of the increase in nat allergies, something which. Were not unheard of, certainly when I was a child, but I don't actually remember anybody at school having a nat allergy. I've got some figures on that. Apparently, I've got a UK figure, which I found was really interesting. Between 1995 and 2016, there was a five-fold increase in peanut allergies just in the UK.

And I presume that's replicated across the world. But what we do know is there's much lower rates of allergies in developing countries. Have you got a theory around that? It's not my theory necessarily, but the allergist that she's since retired, but the allergist that we worked with when he was a child, she really thought it was related to the institutionalization of how we package food.

She just really thought that it had to be, that when you look just in a big sort of thing, it's like when we go back to, I was born in 73, in the 70s and 80s, food was produced much more locally to where we ate it. It wasn't going through as many big factories. It wasn't going through all these things. And she really thought that that had to somehow be a component to why so many people widespread were having these, just so many more kids were reacting.

And she also had the hope that in his lifetime, they will fix it and be able to do things, which they are making progress. And so we're hopeful for that. It is wild how prevalent it is, and it's very confusing. Well, there's also something that they're calling the hygiene hypothesis, the idea that we are all now too clean and our kids aren't exposed to things that can, I suppose, make them immune or build up an immunity to other bacterias and things. And the instructions apparently have changed.

So when my kids were young, I guess we were not supposed to feed them things in the first six months or two years of honey and nuts. They're now walking that back in the United States. They're saying, go ahead and try and introduce those to try and build up, you know, if there might be a sensitivity. I don't know that I was abstaining. I don't have any memory of it. I had all these other kids and there was peanut butter in the house.

And so I've always, I don't have any, and there's no other allergy in our, in our family. So I, I don't have a solid memory to know whether or not I did that. And for us, My emphasis, my focus as a person who's living with someone with it, I spend my mental energy hoping for a cure and a treatment rather than like reverse diagnosing, you know, how this happened to him. So with food allergies, I think it's important to note that an allergy is different to intolerance.

That's one of the most important things that I like to share with people. So food allergies involve the immune system and can cause, obviously, reactions that can be life-threatening, as opposed to the digestive system's difficulty with processing certain foods. Right. And intolerances. Sorry, go on. No. And you can be wildly uncomfortable if you have an intolerance.

I would never want to be disrespectful. respectful but we we when we go places sometimes you know like people have a gluten intolerance and then there are people who have a gluten allergy which is celiac disease and they're different they're different and and not that we shouldn't respect all of them for all the people all of the time but when somebody when somebody says they have an allergy and maybe they don't they just have an intolerance and then they throw a tantrum

in a restaurant and make everybody angry with them. And then I come in behind with a life-threatening allergy and I'm trying to very graciously ask for an exception or can I please talk to the chef? You know, I just sometimes say the most ridiculous thing I ever said was I had a discussion with a school team and a teacher said, she said, I don't understand why this is so important. I've been making a curriculum for 20 years and nobody's had a problem with this.

And she made all these food-based things. And I I said, I'm just trying to keep my kid alive. I really don't think that these things should be in conflict. Like, I don't have anything to do with your curriculum. I just want him to be alive, you know, anything else, you know. Exactly. And there is knowledge as well that a lot of people that say they have intolerances, actually, if they were tested, do not have intolerances.

It's about half, apparently, about 50% of people who, I've got the exact figure somewhere. I was looking There was a study that found that 19% of participants reported having a food allergy. Only 10.8% were confirmed to have one. Oh, really? That's so, yeah. So, does that... Cause problems for people who have a legitimate food allergy when there is almost a little bit like the sesame seeds, they've become fashionable.

I think I see it a lot in my work, people, it's almost become fashionable to be intolerant to things. And a lot of times when people come along to me and they say, oh, you know, I'm allergic to this or I'm intolerant to that. My next question is always, okay, when was this diagnosed? Who diagnosed that? And I asked respectfully because sometimes they do come back and they go, oh, okay, this is my doctor. This is how it was done.

But other times they've just visited Dr. Google and say, I feel so much better when I don't eat this thing. Therefore, I must have an allergy. So the self-diagnosis is fairly rampant out there, I would imagine.

I think so. And I would never be a person who would try and call somebody out on the validity of what they want to eat and what they don't want to eat. I do think, I think in the food service industry, like so in catering and group dining and school environments and restaurants and all of those places. The separation, it becomes unmanageable on a large scale.

And it must be very frustrating if you're feeding 300 people and 85 of them come and it's like, I can't have onion and I can't have garlic and I can't have this, I can't have that. That has got to be really hard. And so I'm very thankful, and so is my son, when people are helpful and when they are realistic and when they are supportive. And we just try and go through it. But we do run into sort of fatigue where people are just the minute we open our mouth, they're like, oh,

my God, are you for real? It's like, sorry. Well, I encountered it from the other side years ago. I used to run education courses, which were a week long, and they were teaching health professionals about eating disorders. And mainly the people that came along were psychologists and dieticians and GPs. So all different, a wide range of health professionals. And we used to provide, not we, but the venue used to provide catering.

So of course, as part of the admin, we used to say, you know please notify us of any food requests and we would get maybe 30 people on the course and something like 28 food requests would come in and it got crazy for us the these trying to negotiate as you said before this person can't have this this person only eats fish this person will eat chicken but not pork and and it just became unmanageable that is yes and i want to be sensitive to that when we come into a place. So we.

Growing up in the schools, in the little schools where they would do treats and parties, I would always provide a stash of snacks. So it was just like, don't ever give him anything that anybody else brings, but here's what he can have so that they didn't have to make the judgment call. It's a huge amount of pressure when I have my kid in the custody of somebody else, like a school scenario or a camp. That's a lot of pressure on somebody else to make that judgment call.

So I wanted to be always receptive to that. And I also just told them, he knows that if you just say, I don't know if it's safe, he just won't eat it. You know, the whole thing is just don't give him something you're not sure of. And so that's the way we went through that. But if we went into a place, and when we go to catered events, I always have meal bars and we check for places.

I either bring food, which is horribly rude, but I like to tell people, you know, just please don't be offended if you offer us something that he can't eat. For a birthday party, he's never had birthday cake that I haven't made. You know, like, so if we go to a birthday party and somebody offers him a piece of cake, please don't be offended if we don't eat it. We love you. And this cake looks delicious. He just can't eat it.

Yeah. Yeah. And what about your level of anxiety on those occasions where he did go to camp or he did go to somebody else's house? Did you sit there pacing? Oh, yeah. So the entire year of his first year of school, I was in the lunchroom every single day. I just worked with the staff. If there had been other people to oversee it, they would have done it. But it was a big, busy lunchroom.

And so I just went and I was always there. I opened a lot of milk containers and helped everybody that was around because they need a lot of help at that age, right? They need a lot of help. And I didn't feel like it was fair to ask somebody else to be the judge of this, right? So he's the one at risk. I didn't feel like that was reasonable. I was very, very nervous when he was young. And then we went through a period, you know, where it was on a routine and it seemed like most things were okay.

And then we had about six months of a lot of stress with the sesame exposures that was just terrifying. And it is one of those things. And you learn how to manage stress and try and walk them through.

And one of the things that's so interesting about so I'm managing my stress as his helper I'm managing my stress in knowing that he's going to go out into the world on his own and do this on his own for better or worse and then I'm also trying to teach him tools not just me but with other people teach him tools and how to lower his stress level and make good decisions and I learned with this that a lot of the techniques that we give people to manage stress like breathing and so on and so forth,

those were really not effective for him because he's trying to figure out what is actually happening in his body. So, you know, he's, you say somebody breathe slowly, you know, focus on your breath. And he's trying to figure out if his breath is altered and his stress is, his anxiety is exponentially multiplied. And I'm going back to our team and I'm like, we need a different tool. I don't know what tool we need, but this one is not working.

Because at a time when, yes, ordinarily you'd be told to relax, he has to be hypervigilant and make decisions. He has to be hypervigilant. It's also, it's really funny because he was struggling to eat, and yet when we would work with the allergy team, they were praising his response. They were like, you are doing the right thing. You are avoiding the food. That is what you need to do.

And so it's it's it's two steps forward and and figuring out your own your own things yeah it's it's a process so you mentioned an allergy team but did you have any level of kind of community support did you manage to to meet other parents in the same position as yourself so we did know when we were in elementary school and middle school we've always known other people who who had allergies we don't have a dramatic group there's a group called Fair, Food Allergy, something, something.

I forget what the other letters stand for. And that's the big organization. And we don't have a local group that does that. Our main team was our pediatrician, our family doctor, the allergist, and then the administrations in the schools and the camps that we were working with. We did absolutely have friends. We've always been so thankful for friends that were able to organize and handle it. He was always much more comfortable and people over to our house.

I cooked every family meal for a long time, like all the holidays, because, you know, we just don't, you don't want to, you don't want to, it's very, it's a big downer on a big family celebration when it's like, well, why isn't he eating? We're not sure what's in what you cooked. Exactly. So the responsibility was yours to provide food for everybody, I guess. Yes. I just, I just, I'm not sure that's the best way to do it, but that is the way I did it.

And I I think that that's one of the reasons that he had such a long season of no exposure. There is a chance, some people outgrow these. So he first we knew when he was a baby, and he's had every few years they retest him with different levels of things. And, you know, you cross your fingers. So he's to the point where they're like, no, this is never going away. You're going to have to live with it. Mm-hmm. So, I mean, is there a possibility that he will one day,

I don't know, in his 30s or 40s, grow out of this? Or that a cure will be found? There is definitely a chance that a cure will be found. They have come up with, there's a new medication that we're going to talk to the doctors about actually this summer that is designed to reduce the risk of accidental exposure. I don't know how it works. It sounds like magic to me. So we haven't had that meeting, but we're going to talk to them about that. They have several plans.

There are many people who have done exposure therapy for single nut allergies, and they're having great response. So then they have much less risk. He has not been a candidate for that because he has a three. But you'd think that very quickly they would be able to roll out a different protocol.

And the more they figure these things out, I just, I mean, I do hope that there'll be a time where he will either have something that is a way that he can mitigate it, where he's on a prescription that will keep him safe for accidental exposure or some miracle thing that'll just flip the switch and it's like, oh, ta-da, you can eat it. Yeah, yeah, you would hope so. Because there's a whole world of food out there. There's a whole world of food. He's missing out delicious food.

And, you know, he doesn't know that within, this was a funny conversation I observed, like the kids on the couch were talking and somebody said, well, do you like the flavor of this? And he's just, I was like, I have no idea. I have no idea what it tastes like. I've never had it. What about travel for him? Has he been overseas? He has been overseas. We've done a lot of travel. He spent a summer in Australia and New Zealand and Fiji where he had a card translated.

We get very good at asking for things, and we've had pretty good success. One of the toughest places we went was actually Germany. When in germany, we just we had the hardest time figuring out what was in the flower So that was that was one of the biggest challenges.

He has not been to asia. I don't think that he's going to ask to go, Well, that's what came to my mind, because a lot of the Asian countries, yeah, obviously the cooking is, I presume, loads of different nut oils and sesame oils and all sorts of things. And the oils are tricky. So if the oil is well-made, so the allergy to the nuts and the seeds is in the protein that is in the food. And if an oil is really pure, there's no protein in it. But you are making a gamble about the quality of the oil.

When you make that risk, like if you're going to fry in peanut oil and then sesame oil in so many Asian cuisines is like, is, is, is in everything. So yeah, so he, he has, he has not eaten Chinese food and he, I do not think as much as he would love to go to those countries, he just, you know, he's like, I think that might kill me.

Yeah. Oh, that breaks my heart. Chinese food, Thai food, all those gorgeous things to eat so yeah so we've done i made pho i learned how to make pho so we've made that and i make indian at home and we actually have a local indian restaurant where we made friends with the the staff and so we can order from there and they know it's his and they make it safe so there are things we're just step by step fantastic it is a game changer though.

I recently found out, and I'm not, I don't have an allergy, but I recently found out, I did one of those hair test things that shows sensitivities to food. And the thing that I came up that I was most sensitive to was something I have every single day, and it was olive oil, which is something I just cook with all the time. And I eliminated olive oil completely. So I've been exploring all these different oils, avocado oil, macadamia oil.

What else have I got in the kitchen? All sorts of things, because I'm trying to find different things to cook with to bring the olive oil completely out. But of course, every time you go out to anywhere, pretty much, they throw out olive oil in salads and things like that. And my digestive system isn't fond, I've discovered. So you've noticed it. You've noticed the difference. I noticed a huge difference when I cut out of oil.

Absolutely. And then you're very motivated. Yeah, you're very motivated. And that's the thing. Once he became aware of the risk, his motivation is so strong to follow the instructions.

That's how we, you know, and that's how we, that's the, so when he was younger, I would put the EpiPens in his backpack and I would put them in the office and I would tell him he needed to carry them and he would ignore me because he was just a kid. And he, I mean, not maliciously, but he was a kid who couldn't, you know, remember anything. And now he does a much better job. But that used to stress me out all the time. He'd be out on his bike or whatever and I was just like, oh gosh.

Yeah. Yeah. Stressful time as a parent. And I think that that's what I think a lot of people don't consider is as a parent, when you've got a child in that position that you have a hundred percent responsibility for, it becomes your allergy. Absolutely. I, I, when I'm on vacation and in a different place and somebody will offer me a nut and I will eat the nut, I feel like I'm cheating on my son. And then I, and I also very much like I had a walnut and I was like, oh my God, this is so delicious.

But I also had a wave of guilt that I was cheating on my son, even though he was thousands of miles away, he was not at risk. And so there is that. I think, I try to be very sensitive that it's just one of the situations that you can't be responsible for something that you don't even know exists. And so a person who does not live with food allergies is not going to be aware of or design their life or be able to accommodate our situation. And it's not their responsibility.

They don't know about it. They've never experienced it. It's not a part of their life. Yeah. And now he's an adult and presumably off doing his own thing. Do you still subtly check menus and check labeling and things, even if he's not there? Well, we agreed that for his peace of mind, we talked about it. I was like, no, I'm not going to bring nuts into the house while you're gone.

So that if he comes home suddenly, it's not like i have to clean or get stuff out of the kitchen and we did that to remove his peace of mind, i don't it is i can sort of i can sort of turn it off and turn it on like if i'm at a restaurant and i'm ordering for myself i'm not thinking about him but i do i'm much more the part i'm much more diligent about it with leading labels and looking at ingredients than ever and that i never kind of turn that off it's just like a way of of going through life,

Yeah. It's fascinating because it's something I genuinely haven't encountered. I found this intolerance to me recently, which I found really, really interesting. And funnily enough, sesame came up for me as well as being something that my digestive system might not welcome. But that's as serious as it is, obviously nothing life-threatening. And that brings a whole new level of anxiety into the picture.

And it's something that you've given a really good description today of how that feels and how that would affect anybody's relationship with food. Because I sit here a lot and talk about, you know, ideal world scenarios, I suppose, of how we need to deal with our relationship with food without thinking that a near-death experience is obviously going to cloud that. It's fascinating. And at the same time, it's, you know, and food touches everything.

Like, so food is community and food is connection and so many relationship points are there. But really when it comes down to it, if you treat it with compassion and the conversation with kindness, I think that it really does work out pretty well. And that's something that most of the time you can do, the sensitivity of, we're going to do the best we can. We're going to be honest. We're not going to, you know, we're going to do this.

I think that we had very few, we've had a few, like ridiculous sort of experiences where we just were not able to manage. I went, there was a new restaurant, burgers, fries, and milkshakes. And we went in and he was there with us and we were asking about the allergies and we were going through the menu and everything was failing, like everything. And I finally said to the person, I said, is there anything like a soda, you know, popsicle, is there anything that you would give him that would be

safe? And they're like, no. And I was like, oh, okay, well, unfortunately, we'll go. Thank you. And so then she got very upset. And she said, well, why would you leave? And I was like, oh, I don't want you to be upset. I'm not mad. But if we can't order for one of the people at the table, why would we stay? We need to go to another place where he can actually be a part of this.

And so that was really strange. On the flip side, so you'd think that big operations would be good at dealing with this and small operations would be more risky.

Sometimes that's true and sometimes it's not. And so that restaurant could not figure it out, could not give us a safe thing to eat. But then we were in a sporting arena and there was a kiosk, a pop-up kiosk. And I went up and I said, hey, could you make a smoothie for this kid and be confident that it has not been anywhere near the nut? And she was like, absolutely. The nuts are only over there. That's the only place we ever put them.

So here's this little tiny little stand and she's got a system and it works and it was fine. She had a different sink for it, the whole thing, versus a restaurant that was like, nope, you're on your own. It's just hit or miss. You just have to ask and always be able to ask and be comfortable with that. Yeah. I wonder if she had any personal experience though, because maybe that's made her vigilant.

I know I've got friends where two members of the family a celiac and there's a different toaster for their toast than there is for the family toast. There's a different shelf for their bread than there is, you know, everything is separated out. And I must admit, you know, visiting that house, I was kind of bewildered by it. I was thinking, wow, this is strange.

And I was very strictly told like, no, leave the kitchen because you might be wandering around with things and putting them in the wrong places. It didn't even occur to me. And that's the reason we just don't have any nuts in the house. So I don't have to give people like, don't touch this once you've eaten it.

It's just like, there's nothing here. And when people come over for things and they sometimes bring charcuterie boards that have nuts on them and things like that, it's not an emergency because it's not going to leap out and get him. Like the exposure to the gluten, the gluten can like, you know, bread dust and stuff like that is a little trickier. I mean, with that, you know, the nuts and the seeds are, they're complicated, but there are others that are more complicated.

Egg, soy, milk. Oh my gosh. Those are really hard to avoid. Soy is in everything. Soy is in everything. So I'm happy that, you know, that ours, well, I mean, I'm not happy, but I think you learn how to manage it and move through it and then you go through it from there. Yeah. Of all the allergies he had, that was hopefully a better one. More easily avoided. We, one time he had a classmate who was allergic to corn.

And so we were, they put us together in a meeting and I was the only time I've ever felt like I was a low-maintenance parent in this conversation. I was like, wow, I'm the easy one? Okay. Exactly. Bliss.

Well, look, thank you so much for giving us a little bit of insight today into your life and how life is when you're dealing with an allergy. How can people get in contact with you? I know you have your own podcast. Tell us a little bit about that. So the name of my show, as you so kindly said, is The Art of Imperfect Adulting. I talk to people on. I share the stories of choices they've made, changes they've gone through, pivots they've gone through, where they were before,

all of those things. Real people, real experiences. That podcast is on all the podcast platforms and YouTube, and there's a website, imperfectadulting.com. So the best way to connect with me, there's social media channels. All of it is Imperfect Adulting. You can message me. You can leave a comment. The easiest way is to sign on to the email list, and then you're a part of my email community. I'll send you information about all the things I do.

Fantastic. And also, it's worth pointing out, you're more than just food allergies. This is just part of your life. This isn't the entirety of your life. There's a lot more going on in your podcast and in the work that you do. True. Yes. No, the scope of imperfect adulting is all things, not food allergies. And that's one of the reasons that that is there. So, So it is just a part of my life. And there's so many things about life that are like that.

Your hobbies are a part of your life, but they're not your whole life. Your job is a part of your life, but it's not your whole life. And so bringing those into one big space is one of the things that we do there. Well, I love the title that you've got, The Imperfect Adulting. I love it too. Because it's something, I mean, are any of us actually perfect adults? I know I've got a daughter, she's just turned 30, and she constantly sends me messages about, oh, I hate adulting.

Every time she has to pay a bill or renew the registration on her car or anything to do with that, she always wants to be a child again and be free from those responsibilities. 100%. And that's one of the things, the reason for sharing the stories, right, about the mistakes and the changes and letting people hear about them is that, yes, none of us are perfect, right?

But also you find yourself, when you are going through those challenges of learning how to do those things, looking for an adult to your adult. It's like, who's done this? Who can show me how, like, what do I do if I forgot to pay my electric bill? Like, who do I call? How do I fix it? You know, all of this. Yeah, searching for a proper adult to teach us. Proper adult, exactly. Proper. Proper.

And we've all had those moments, too, where people are looking at you for advice, and you're like, wait a minute, am I the person who's supposed to know this? You know, I'm still a child, even if I'm 51, I'm still the kid. That's a worry when you are actually the most responsible person in the room. It is unnerving. No matter how old I get, sometimes it's very unnerving. Absolutely. Well, look, it's been lovely to talk to you. This morning, your evening, I believe.

So you can relax now. Your work is done. Thank you so much. And I encourage anybody who loves podcasts, and I presume you do because you're listening to mine, to also listen to Amy's podcast and see what she's up to. Thank you so much, Amy. It's been lovely to talk to you. Thank you. Music.