You probably noticed in my last post that I mentioned that horrid byword GAPS. Sigh. It’s been a few years since I first began reading GAPS anecdotes. I wondered if my children, who, as you know, have a long and horrible history with food allergies, would benefit from this sort of diet, but I pushed it to the back of my mind.
No, no, NO!
No more special diets! I am determined that we be as normal as possible {whatever that means}.
But then problems began to pop up, and fixing them began to look expensive and my children, after all, do have a history of responding well to special diets.
And then I had the most horrible summer. I felt terrible all the time and was having trouble putting one foot in front of the other when a blood test finally revealed a B-12 deficiency serious enough that I was headed toward pernicious anemia. {Yes, I’m supplementing now and beginning to feel better.}
I’m not going to give the long list of health complaints for my children because they are things I’m sure they’d rather me not share publicly. But I can tell you that when I did a bunch of research on the most common causes of B-12 deficiency, they were both digestive in nature.
Which brought me back to the GAPS diet. I began reading the book, Gut and Psychology Syndrome by Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride, and I felt like I was encountering at least one person in our family on each page. I’ll share some quotes in the future, for sure.
I talked with my husband and he thought we should do it. This time of year is our longest stretch without any holidays or birthdays; the goal is to try to be as “done” as possible by Thanksgiving.
If you’re familiar with the diet, then you know that there are two phases: Introduction and Full. The Introduction Phase has six stages.
What is the GAPS diet? It is a special diet based upon the Specific-Carbohydrate Diet, but emphasizing certain gut-healing foods and supplements {think bone broths, sauerkraut, and probiotics}. What I like about it, when compared with other special diets out there, is that it isn’t intended to be forever. The goal is healing and then slowly going back to eating normal, healthy foods. As long as you don’t have a severe problem or a true, anaphylactic-type food allergy, the goal is to live normally. I mean, yes, you might not ever be able to eat tons of sugar or even dine in restaurants, but normal, home cooked foods {including bread and dessert!} should eventually be fine.
I also like that unlike other special diets I’ve encountered, there doesn’t seem to be the temptation to call what God said was good, bad. Everywhere you turn out there, someone is calling part of creation bad: wheat is bad, meat is bad, dairy products are bad, cooked vegetables are bad, “unclean” meat is bad. It’s like people don’t even read the book of Galatians anymore. Foodism is the new religion, you know? We love the Law or, at the very least, we love to make our own laws.
None of that sort of attitude fits with my theology of food.
But here we say the diet is therapeutic. The goal is healing. These foods only bother us because we are broken, not because certain foods are evil.
Actually, specific foods don’t bother us at all. The concern is various signs of generalized poor digestion and yeast overgrowth, of a weak gut.
In weeks to come, I’ll probably write a little about our GAPS journey, and share some resources {like the super-powered probiotic supplement we chose–it’s clinically proven, by the way}, which is why I’m writing about this today. Have any of you done GAPS or considered GAPS?
19 Comments