
To organize our GAPS journey, I took a binder and basically made myself a cookbook. I had tabs for all six stages of the intro diet, and another for full GAPS. On each tabbed page, I placed a sheet I had printed off that detailed everything I needed to know for that stage. All of the recipes I gathered, then, I categorized by stage, and when I printed them all off, they went into the appropriate sections of my binder, and ta-da! Instant cook book. I keep it in my kitchen and use it 5 million times per day.
Or something like that.
I’ve been collecting recipes for a while. Below is an index of direct links. If I find new ones, they’ll be added to my Stage 1 pinboard on Pinterest, so you might want to follow that. I can’t promise that I’ll come back here. Not all of this list is on Pinterest, however, because some of these links do not have graphics and therefore cannot be pinned. These are recipes I keep coming back to; I just add the new things we are allowed. I’ll top it with raw avocado, dribble beet kvas in it, add a scoop of sauerkraut–whatever works. The purred vegetarian soups serve as wonderful side dishes when you are in later stages that allow roasted meats; I use them they way I used to use side salads, but we’re actually eating a lot more vegetables this way.
If you are sensitive to spices, you might have to take some out of these recipes (spices really aren’t on Stage 1, but I didn’t eliminate them). Generally speaking, though, these recipes should all be fine for Stage 1.
- Chicken “Noodle” Soup
- Simple Chicken Enchilada Soup
- Creamy Cauliflower Soup
- Chicken Ginger Soup
- Fish Soup
- Another Fish Soup
- Intense Beef and Winter Veggie Soup
- Summer Garden Soup with Turkey Meatballs (hurry before your garden dies!!)
- Another Chicken “Noodle” Soup
- Carrot Soup
- Creamy Cauliflower Meatball Soup
- Spaghetti Soup (this is a favorite and reminds me of minestrone)
- Butternut Squash Soup
The only thing I would add is that you need to add a lot of saturated fat to these dishes, even if it’s not on the recipe. If you have trouble digesting fats, try taking bile salts rather than skimping on the fat. This is the only way to get those necessary fat-soluble vitamins, so important for healing your gut! You cannot absorb fat-soluble vitamins without…fat. (Shocking, I know.) I like grass-fed tallow. Kerrygold butter is not only wonderfully yellow (from the Vitamin A–not beta carotene, A’s inferior cousin) but it tastes fabulous. Grassfed organic ghee is better, though, if you have serious dairy issues. Coconut oil is always a good option. And, of course, cooking your meat into your soup will save all the drippings for consumption.
I used to buy cheap butter most of the time, and Kerrygold was a treat. We don’t do it this way on GAPS. We are using Kerrygold most of the time, because this is a healing protocol. I can’t afford to buy everything organic, but good fat is one of the keys to the diet, so we don’t compromise on this.
These are wonderful recipes, but I still suggest getting to Stage 3 as fast as humanly possible. The ability to have “real” breakfast foods, rather than soup all day long, makes GAPS much more bearable. At least, it did for us.

More on my Intro Binder:
- The GAPS Binder: Intro Diet Recipes (Stage 1) ← you are here
- The GAPS Binder: Intro Diet Recipes (Stage 2)
- The GAPS Binder: Intro Diet Recipes (Stage 3)
- The GAPS Binder: Intro Diet Recipes (Stage 4)
- The GAPS Binder: Intro Diet Recipes (Stage 5)
- The GAPS Binder: Intro Diet Recipes (Stage 6)
16 Comments
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None of these links work…. they all send me to a home page with no recipe. 🙁
Must be because it’s such an old post! I just updated the links. I had to take a couple off because the sites have disappeared over the years, but what there is should work for you now. 🙂
Thank you so much for sharing your work, it is stressful enough to deal wh leaky gut …and to find your way into a new diet puts more pressure ( which doesn’t help the leaky gut…).
Be blessed and much appreciated!
I hope you find GAPS helpful, Mirela! ♥
My daughter is allergic to dairy and egg and fish. This limits us quite a bit on the gaps protocol. What concerns might you have with this being an issue? Do you have any suggestions?
Hi Christy!
If I were you, I would join the GAPS Help Yahoo Group. There you should be able to find other people dealing with these same allergies that can help you find allergies and share what they have done. 🙂
[…] ideas: Raia’s Recipes, GAPS for T2, Journey to Food that Gives Life, Afterthoughts Blog, What Can I Eat Now […]
Brandy, thank you so much for writing this all out. My question is have you found a good sourse for when to move on from phase 1? I have read everything I can find about moving through the phases, but our current DAN doctor said we shouldn’t introduce dairy for 6 months and the first dairy introduction is stage 2 (ghee)!! Isn’t the purpose to heal the allergy so do we stay on stage 1 for 6 months?
Well, to be honest, I planned in advance to do a very SHORT introduction phase, with intention to go back to it if necessary. Some GAPS groups I’ve listened in on advise starting with full GAPS and going back to the introduction phase later {for children}, but I wanted to start with intro and so we just did a short one, which was 2 days per phase.
Now, granted, we were dealing with guts that had already done some major healing prior to GAPS. However, I think that with children we do have to be careful because we can overwhelm their systems, plus the very low sugar/carb intake makes them lethargic. For us, the key to moving on was to start adding foods, but be willing to go to the next stage without something as well. So, for example, if dairy is a problem, go on to stage 2 but leave out the dairy. So we kept moving up stages, but leaving out whatever was a problem along the way. Does that make sense? My goal was to get them to full GAPS as soon as possible, but minus whatever foods were issues for them. This became especially important as I realized that my two littlest ones were very low appetite on such a small variety. Once we had a broader range of foods in our diet, they began to eat much more. But neither of them could take the weight loss that was occurring in the beginning, which meant adding in more and more palatable foods was important.
I hope this helps!
I’m curious if there’s a reason you buy the huge thing of beef tallow instead of rendering your own? I’d like to have a lard on hand for things like homemade tortillas, but not enough to commit to a $100 5 gallon bucket. 🙂
Really, it came down to a financial decision. I can’t afford for all of my meat to be pastured, organic, perfect yada yada yada, so I have to pick and choose. Since a lot of toxins are stored in the fat, and since the Omega 3:6 balance is superior in grassfed when compared to grain-finished, it made sense. Most of our beef is conventional.
But if you have tips on how to cheaply acquire grassfed beef and render, I am all ears. 🙂
I will call around and find out if I can buy the fat from a butcher. We live in an area with lots of local raised beef (both conventional and grassfed), so sources aren’t hard to find. I wish I had thought about it or known about it when we got our whole cow. It appears that if I had asked, I probably could have gotten the fat from it! But I didn’t know and it wasn’t brought up as an option. I have no idea what prices would be on buying just fat from a butcher, but I might as well make a few calls and find out. 🙂
That is wonderful! I live in the land of CAFOs and there are very few sources here. I have actually considered buying a feeder pig…so far Si has put his foot down. 🙂
Brandy,
Did you have any one that you consulted with to do this diet? There seem to be so many factors and even after reading the book, I am not entirely sure what supplements (bile, HCI, etc.) that we would take to compliment the diet.
Curious what you guys did!
Thanks!
Julie
I have talked with our chiropractor, but I would say that as a general rule, 2 HCl per main meal and then probiotics {working up to the therapeutic dose, which she gives in the book} are the main thing. The bile salts would be for people with a history of gallbladder problems ONLY, and I think that people who need magnesium {like one of our daughters} usually know who they are because they have a history of muscle cramps that are easily treated with magnesium.
It *is* hard to juggle everything at first! Email me. I have something I will send you…