Babystepping to GAPS diet

I read about the GAPS diet years ago. I really didn't consider it very much because it completely eliminated so many things including bread and potatoes that my husband and I would be happy to eat three times a day. It just seemed too hard.

Still seems very hard.

But I'm tired. Tired of battling one virus after another. Tired of digestive issues. Tired of focus problems associated with ADHD. Just tired.

And I know part of it is having young children that won't keep their hands off things and out of their mouths. I've told myself it was normal. The average person gets 6-12 colds a year. Multiply that by 7 people. NOT FUN! I don't want to be normal.

GAPS has many applications for autism, ADHD, allergies and more. All those things that we battle as well as the fact that 70% of our immune system is in our gut. I think this may be very beneficial to the whole family.

But it's SO difficult. Maybe not difficult but definitely different from the eating habits we have become accustomed to. Maybe that's the point. Our current eating habits aren't serving us very well. And maybe we should switch to a focus of nourishing and healing our bodies as opposed to eating for pleasure.

One thing that I do like is that the strict portion of the diet only lasts for 1 1/2-2 years. Then starches can be added back to the diet. Hopefully tastes will have changed and we never desire to go back to the Standard American Diet. Temporary might be doable.

Starting the GAPS diet right before the holidays seems a recipe for failure. So I think I will slowly work through adding more GAPS-approved foods and as we run out of regular food replacing it with better options. Then evaluate things in January to see if this is something we can do as a family.

I've been doing more smoothies with water rather than juice or milk. Gonna try to add more probiotics to those. Also look at a few bottles of kefir a week to add more cultures to our guts to begin their healing.

I'm going to look at getting some beef bones but if nothing else, use chicken to make broth. I enjoy drinking broth by itself but we'll make soup at least once a week. Get ourselves in the habit of having broth and soup often since that is one of the backbones of the Introduction diet.

I also need to introduce fermented veggies like sauerkraut to the kids. And reintroduce it to myself. I hated sauerkraut as a kid. My grandparents made it with cut up hotdogs in it. I made the mistake once of thinking I could get away with eating just the hotdogs. Then I had to eat all the sauerkraut by itself. But a lot of things I thought I hated as a kid, I have come to enjoy. Here's hoping!

Babystep #1 Add kefir daily or at least several times a week.

Babystep #2 One batch of broth and subsequently soup a week.

Babystep #3 Introduce fermented veggies.

Hopefully that can begin the path to healing our gut and hopefully reduce the number of bugs we succumb to this fall/winter.