Following The GAPS Diet

I have been enjoying reading all the great stuff on ThriftyFun lately. I have not written a blog in a while. I have been in the kitchen cooking, cooking, cooking... bone broth, to be exact. Lots of it and even more. As a matter of fact, I am in the market for a large freezer storage for all the stock.

I am following the Gut and Psychology Syndrome introduction Diet (GAPS), but I am getting ahead of myself here. I have been posting a lot of things on about pets and their diet; how grains and corn are not the best for them. Well it seems to be the same for people, oftentimes.

On the other hand, or paw, I have found out that certain foods are not only delicious, but they are healing and actually medicine for our bodies. Boiled chicken is great for pets and we eat a lot of it too. The animals I keep get lots of it along with their regular foods.

Back to people's diets though without going into too much detail. You know the diet the doctors tell you to be on; the low fat, low cholesterol, whole wheat diet? It turns out that that has not been the right diet for us as far as helping our bodies to heal is concerned. So we are doing the opposite of that.

We have been enjoying meaty bone stock, ghee (butter oil or clarified butter), vegetables, lots of the non starch ones, but we go through our share of eating potatoes. We cook them in the microwave with a paper lunch bag, after scrubbing and piercing the potato several times. At four minutes and thirty seconds, this is a wonderful way to eat potatoes. I am trying to get away from the microwave for food other than potatoes and heating up water for tea. The broth is for drinking with each meal, it aids in digestion. Vegetables are eaten with meals, but fruit later, not with the meal.

We have ginger tea made with real ginger and water and unprocessed honey. We use maple syrup, of course the real stuff, not the fake stuff. It is high in manganese and zinc. Honey is an amazing substance, and I make sure to buy the unprocessed kind now.

My daughter would love to be able to eat frozen dinners, and chicken pies and such that come in boxes, but whever she does she has bad symptoms, which I would never have paired up with food. Sometimes we just don't realize that what we put in our body affects our mental activity and our brain.

I never would have guessed that putting wheat cereal in my babies bottle at a young age was a bad idea. Now if I was able to, I would probably have fed meat stock at a young age, the kind you make at home. Breast milk is 60 percent cholestrol. That is the kind of fat facts we need to remember.

I don't think it is wheat being bad for so many of us as it is the way wheat is processed and changed. I read somewhere it is chromosomally different from what it was a long time ago in the day our ancestors would grind it up. Our great grandmothers knew what they were doing. All of our improvements to make things quicker and easier to eat has not always worked out to our benefit.

I can tell you that I have a great sense of power being able to change my daughter's life for the better just by being in the kitchen. I never would have really thought of myself of being that involved in cooking but I am convinced now that it is the way to go.

The first time I was in the produce section of the store, I had this feeling I was on another planet. I couldn't imagine what to do. I saw the produce but rarely really bought any other than a few fruits and lettuce or spinach, etc. Now I put all sorts of vegetable in soups and cook them all. Zucchini and squash, carrots, onions and all this goodness goes into our broths and vegetable dishes. Avocados have the best protein I have found. I am trying to get my kids to eat it without having to hide it in foods. They really do not like it.

I cannot do the raw egg yolk in soups. I can't bring myself to serve it raw because of the obvious danger, but I do cook them slightly. Egg whites are very allergenic. If you think you are sensitive to eggs, it might be to the whites. I have found one of my children does very good on egg yolks only, without the whites. By senstivity to eggs, I mean my daughter has behavioral changes when she eats them. Allergic would be a different thing altogether, possibly lifethreatening.

I asked one of my doctors if eating egg whites alone was good if you had a sensitivity to it, and she said it was not a good idea. She said that it would tend to pull protein out of the body. I have not found any citations on this but I have been too busy trying to figure out the ins and the outs of the GAPS diet. I notice mainstream medicine knows very little about diet. That is where health coaches, can be of benefit.

Anyway, we have bid sugar goodbye except for rare occasions. I have found out that sugar causes calcium to leave the tissues and muscles, and to leave the body via the bloodstream. As if sugar had not had enough of a bad rap, it is the cause of so many problems with body chemistry there would not be enough room on this blog to put all the problems in a list that sugar causes.

I have learned so many things, and I am doing them one at a time, as I find them to work. I am in my kitchen many evenings and mornings, but I feel I am doing a wonderful thing with it. Far more than food, I am making my daughter and indeed the rest of the family, much healthier. But it sure isn't easy and it sure isn't fast.

Have any of you made any food discoveries this past year that have made a big difference? We all have different chemistry, some of us need grains and some of us don't. I am so glad I found out what a difference it made to take them out of my daugher's diet, that along with substituting almond milk for dairy. I would love to hear your comments! I myself could not live without dairy, but to people who can't process it or break it down it can cause huge problems!

Keep up the good work, I will be in the kitchen cooking and many times reading all your tips and recipes on my Kindlefire HDX, making bone broth and vegetables and thinking about all the things I will later write on here for you!

Here is a cute pic of Caroline, in a box. She did this and I had to take a snapshot for ThriftyFun :)