My Top GAPS Diet Mistakes

The body is a complex system and our digestion is the foundation. Messing up our digestion can mess up any number of other body functions. For me, I've suffered intense adrenal depletion, body chemistry changes, emotional stress, lowered immunity, and elimination issues. This affects how I need to do the GAPS diet - particularly the adrenal fatigue. This blog is about the mistakes that I made; they may or may not apply to you. I hope this will be helpful whether you are trying to learn about the GAPS diet or are someone in my life trying to learn more about me.


1. Not enough broth

My first month back on the GAPS diet, I did not notice much effect on my digestion. When I thought back to what I ate, I realized that I was not eating bone broth every day! The recommended broth intake is with every meal. I bumped up my broth/soup consumption to at least twice a day and now I am noticing a difference. A good homemade bone broth is rich in gelatin, healthy fats, and minerals. The gelatin is very soothing and healing to the digestive track. The minerals in the broth are highly absorbable and essential for healing.

Solution: Continuous brew broth.  I have a crockpot going all weekend and just keep making soup and then adding more water. The last batch is usually not very gelatinous, but, it is still beneficial. This method keeps me eating plenty of soup, which is so much more digestible for me.

You can also make lots of broth at once! It makes your house smell, so it can be good get it all done at once.

2. Too much fruit and honey

I am not endorsing eating cats.

Without dairy, grains or sugars, I have been at a loss of what to eat. Smoothies, fresh fruit, applesauce and other treats started filling up my diet, as they are "GAPS legal." But, I've been overdoing it to the point where I feel nauseated from eating too many sweets. The bad bacteria produce alcohol, giving me the symptoms of being hung over. Fruits do have some di-saccharides in them, and they do provide food for bad bacteria. While I wouldn't avoid fruit altogether, I definitely am eating too much. I also believe many fruits may be too acidic for my stomach. I'm not worried about them affecting my body pH - I actually feel like my stomach is burning when I eat them. 

Solution: Eat more soup! I have to keep telling myself, "It's okay to eat soup all day!" I eat boring soups, I eat fun curries with pumpkin.  I have to keep eating every 2-3 hours so my blood sugar doesn't drop. Unfortunately, this means a lot of prep to constantly have soups and non-fruit snacks available. I also juice a lot of veggies instead of fruits.


3. Too low carb 

It's pretty hard to get carbs without grains and fruits! My adrenals are so taxed, that going so low carb makes me almost useless. It's abundantly clear that eating any grains at all makes my gut incredibly inflamed. And fruits make my stomach burn and are possible not good for me to eat a lot.

Solution: Eat a bunch of squash. My favorite is kabocha squash, either steamed/mashed or roasted with coconut oil and salt. Or, I like to roast it and then cut it into cubes to go in Thai curry.  Ultimately, it's better for me to eat something than let my blood sugar crash. My latest favorite is to make curried roasted root veggies.

Recipe for Curried Roasted Root Veggies:
Chop a bunch of beets, carrots or radishes, coat in coconut oil and sprinkle generously with curry powder. Roast on 400F for 45-60 minutes, depending on how small the chunks are.

Grain free bread - not terrible for you in moderation.

4.  Too many baked goods

Baking grain free means baking with coconut or almond flour. I don't seem to digest nuts with ease, although much more easily than grains. I also think that eating a ton of nuts is not part of a well balanced diet.  And, I feel it keeps me from what I should really be eating which is vegetables and broth. I will still eat some baked nut flour treats, but not daily.

Solution: The problem is the solution - baked goods kept me from eating soup. Eat tons of soup!The roasted root veggies can really help satisfy the need for something baked and sweet.

Fermenting purple cabbage and kombucha.

5. Not enough fermented foods

I try to eat fermented foods with each meal. To do this, I need a bunch of plain kraut on hand at all times. Kimchee doesn't go with everything. But, I do like to have kimchee around too, as well as other fun variations on kraut.

Solution: Invest in kraut making kitchen goods and starter cultures. Then you can make tons of fermented veggies cheaper!  Drinking kraut juice or beet kvass can really help keep up the intake of probiotics. Here is a recipe for fermented herbal tea that I want to try!



6. Too much alcohol 

The GAPS diet says some liquor and dry wines are okay "occasionally." What does that even mean? For me, figuring out how much I can drink and not feel negative results has been difficult. Finally, I think I've realized that I cannot really handle any alcohol right now. And what's the point anyway? I am not a glass of wine with dinner kind of person - I rarely only want one glass. Usually I want to drink because I am in a social setting - a wedding, a birthday, etc and so usually I want 2 or 3. But that's definitely too much.

Solution: Avoid drinking situations as much as possible. Ask friend to go to tea, for a walk, to the beach etc. Living in San Francisco, I really enjoy seeing old films at the historic theaters like the Castro theater.


7. Not enough planning
Going on the GAPS diet is a major lifestyle change. It has changed not only what I eat, but how I spend my time, who I hang out with, and just about all parts of my life. I started the GAPS diet several times and couldn't maintain it. There always seem to be a reason to cheat - a wedding, a work trip, stress, etc. Often I don't have enough snacks to keep my blood sugar up.

Solution:  Keep meat and veggies well stocked at all times! Prepare lots of foods in advance. Have at least two different flavors of soup on hand at all times. Have ready to eat protein like salami, cooked shrimp, or cooked sausage (some of these are not recommended for severe GAPS patients). Always have broth cooking or in your fridge. Buy extra broth from butchers who make it from bones. Always bring your own food where-ever you go. See my post on Traveling on the GAPS diet.

It is okay to eat soup for breakfast! Beet kvass makes a great beverage too - sometimes I even crave it!

Making it Through the GAPS Introduction Diet

Hello hello! 

It's been a crazy few months - both starting the GAPS diet and applying for a job. Neither of those may sound like that big of a deal but, they were both were incredibly intense! The job was intense because I had a month to work on the application, and it was very bureaucratic and involved preparing many materials. I then spent the next month preparing a lesson presentation and two rounds of interviews! Thank goodness it is over and hopefully I will get the job. Should be hearing soon! 

But you are probably here to read about the GAPS diet. What horrible timing it was that I started the GAPS Introduction Diet at the same time I heard this job was available. The first few weeks of the Introduction Diet, I was completely lethargic. Fortunately, I have a loving boyfriend who cooked and cleaned for me during this time. He basically did as much as he could for me, because I could barely function. I did make it to work everyday but I was miserable and came home and just laid on the couch all night. After three weeks of being miserable and being stuck on stage 2 because the introduction of nuts caused irritation in my gut, I went to see the doctor. What he told me is really helpful! 

My doctor's guide to going through the GAPS Introduction Diet:
Go through the stages, adding foods as you can. If you react to a food, skip that item but keeping progressing. Try adding skipped items until you can tolerate them. The stages of the Introduction Diet are more like a guideline. The important thing is to at least stick to the full GAPS diet, eating lots of broths and other recommended foods. He said I was going through starvation due to being too low carb, and encouraged me to add fruit to my diet and continue to eat lots of squashes. He emphasized that taking probiotics is essential for regulating the digestion. 


Symptoms on the GAPS Intro Diet:

1. Carb Withdrawls: This is sometimes referred to as the Atkins flu - feeling tired and achy due to an extreme drop in carb intake. Supposedly, it takes your body about a month to switch from relying on carbs to relying on ketones for energy. I was so low carb, without any fruit that I could barely function. Things that helped: 
• Eating GAPS legal squashes as they have some starch, but not too much to overload your body with hard to digest disaccharides. Adding lots of fats such as butter or coconut oil is recommended. I especially liked Kabocha squash with coconut oil and salt. 
• Drinking tea with honey. If fruit is hard to digest, as it was for me the first few weeks (especially raw), honey is a good way to get some carbs in your system. 
2. Bacterial Die Off: As you starve the bacteria from the removal of carbs, the dead bacteria are basically poison that your body has to eliminate. For  me, this meant lethargy, brain fog, and nausea. I find when I don't follow the GAPS diet well enough (drinking too much alcohol, not eating enough fermented foods and broths) that these symptoms flare up again. Things that helped:
• Take lots of probiotics and eat lots of fermented foods! The good bacteria are essentially for removing the dead bad bacteria. I find it helps to eat fermented foods with each meal, but don't always get myself to do this. For supplemental probiotics, you want to take a brand that has at least 10 strains of probiotics, with at least 8 billion organisms in a serving. Read the GAPS book for more on this. 
• Drink lots of water! Flush the suckers out of your body.
3. General detoxifying: As you begin to eat only healing, non-toxic foods, your body will begin to do what I think of as "catching-up" with its house keeping. From what I've been told, once you are not overloading your body with toxins on a daily basis, your body begins releasing old toxins that it was forced to store in fat because it couldn't process them all. I don't fully understand this, because it seems like you would just be processing the maximum amount of toxins until you got them all out, but, apparently it is common to feel worse when you first start detoxifying. For me, I feel lethargic and have brain fog. Sometimes I feel very irritable depending on how intense the detoxing is. Things that helped:
1. Again, drink a lot of water to flush out toxins! 
2. Detoxifying baths or foot baths will help take the burden off your body! I felt that the foot baths helped calm me, and made falling asleep for this life longer insomniac much easier. I felt noticeably better after just a 30 minute foot bath. I usually used Epsom salts with blends of essential oils. I like lavender and ylang-ylang. 
3. Juicing fresh fruits was very helpful for me during the first month of GAPS. I added carrot juice earlier than it arrived in the stages. Fresh juice gives a lot of people diarrhea, but I have the opposite problem, so I added it ASAP. this helps pull out toxins. 

After the visit with my doctor, I backed off nuts for awhile, but tried other foods on stage 3. By that time, I was so bored with the foods in the first few stages, I basically just started eating everything I could tolerate on the full diet. I immediately got my energy back and felt better than ever! After a week or so, I tried nuts again. I seemed to be able to tolerate them in smaller doses, but not when binging on tons of nut products. My favorite things to eat are nut based muffins or cupcakes and bananas with peanut butter. I've been taking 50-100 billion probiotic organisms a day, and my gut and whole body are feeling much better. 

A Helpful GAPS Introduction Resource: 

One helpful resource for getting started with the GAPS Introduction Diet is an e-book put together by a mother who helped her family heal on GAPS. She lays out meal plans for each stage of the diet, so for those who feel overwhelmed, it's nice to follow. I got ideas from her book, but did not follow it exactly. From her book, I was inspired to take foot baths (not having a bath tub), and I found those very helpful! My favorite food idea I got from her was making meatballs, to which I added some liver for extra health benefits! My one criticism of the book is that it is written by a stay at home mom, so it doesn't always work well for a busy working professional doing the diet for herself (me). For example, she recommended when you go through carb withdrawals to drink some juice and take a nap. I don't always have that luxury while at work, though I wish I did! I fully support stay at home moms, I'm just saying that my work routine doesn't quite work with advice like that. 

Music That Helps Me Get Through It:
Camera Obscura's new album Desire Lines makes for great cooking music! It's mellow, atmospheric, and charming as per usual for this band. On the first few listens, I don't have any favorite songs and don't love it the way I loved some of their past music, however, it's a solid album for some easy going listening. 

Stuck on Stage 2 (of the GAPS diet)

Breakfast on this beautiful spring morning was a Japanese inspired kale, carrot and ginger soup with an egg poached in it. I also added fermented veggie juice, which always adds a refreshingly tangy dimension, I think. 

I've grown to love the sour flavor of fermented veggies and their juice. My body must know it's good for me! I can already feel good things happening - my gut is activated rather than sluggish.  This is progress!

I did try to move on to stage 3 a few days ago. This was exciting because it introduced "pancakes" made of squash,  eggs and either ground nuts or nut butter. However,  my body reacted badly with intense abdominal pain in more than one organ.  I tried baking the batter instead of frying it but still had gut aches. Alas, the only thing to do is to go back to stage 2 until the pain and inflammation subside.

Stage 2 doesn't add a whole lot more from stage 1: egg yolks, fermented veggies, and ghee. After trying the ghee  I decided to wait to eat it until my constipation is lessened;  dairy can make constipation worse and I'm still worried about having a serious dairy intolerance or even a straight-up allergy.  I did decide to add the white of the egg, in addition to the yolk, since I'm pretty sure I don't have an egg allergy (most people are allergic to the whites and not the yolks apparently).

I can't wait to eat nuts as well as fried and baked foods. Eating only boiled foods is quite boring, especially for a food lover like me. This diet is both necessary healing and torture. Still, as my boyfriend pointed out, if I didn't encounter any issues along the way, how would I know I was doing the introduction diet right? If I just sailed through it, I might have worried I hadn't quite done it right. 

For now, stage 2 until my the daily gut pain goes away, or until my doctor tells me otherwise. Like anything in life, this diet doesn't have to be completely prescriptive. We are all unique individuals, with different guts, gut flora et cetera. I've been drinking some carrot juice here and there even though it's not supposed to be added until a later stage. We've got to use some intuition, experiment and also it's very important to CONSULT A DOCTOR. I just want to stress to everyone that I am working with a doctor on this. It's a very intense diet, and it needs to be done carefully, and with a lot of support.