GAPS Intro Once Again

While thinking about the contents of this post I thought about this quote from one of my favorite movies, The Princess Bride. “If you haven’t got your health, you haven’t got anything.” Watch it below.

Ok folks here is the deal. My family has been on GAPS for over 3.5 years and we still aren’t healed. Starting a couple of months ago, for the first time, I’m having chronic gut pain that my dr says is inflammation possibly a reaction to a food. One daughter is also having gut pain and one daughter is acting out of control. Time to batten down the hatches and do intro once again. I also keep remembering how Starlene of GAPS diet journey shared that GAPS got rid of her chronic back pain that woke her up after not enough sleep (read it here). I’m now having back pain that keeps me from getting enough sleep! We have very little on the horizon for the rest of this month so I suddenly realized that now is the time to do it. No more waiting and saying I’m too busy or too tired. I know that some of you are saying “Give up already, if GAPS would have worked you would be well by now!” but the fact is that we keep finding more pieces to this healing puzzle and a few of them have only fallen into place recently. We have also tried to add in some non-GAPS foods with less than stellar results. One big step toward healing has been killing off some parasites. We have been working with a local expert to eliminate those parasites and now that he says they are gone, we need to heal up our guts from the damage that those critters have done. (NCM says that if you aren’t seeing progress on GAPS after a year try parasite treatments, we found out about that last fall and have been working on them ever since). We have seen a lot of progress from the parasite treatments. Now it’s time to work hard on gut healing and sealing once again.

I’m going to include some Amazon affiliate links in this post so that you can see exactly what I’m talking about. If you buy through my links I will earn a little bit to offset the cost of sharing this info with you. The price for you will be the same if you use my links or if you don’t use them.

So here we are, starting intro once again. I put together a nice little chart (click to see it) to show the stages. I plan to print it out and put it on my fridge. In most stages there is a progression for that stage. I put those things in order in that section so follow that progression. This is just a guideline. It does not give all the specifics. I am assuming that if you are doing GAPS intro you have the book and are using it for the specifics. TheGaps Guide book is also excellent for anyone going through intro, especially if you are new to GAPS. The chart isn’t exhaustive. Things like coconut aren’t included and there is a lot of debate about what stage to include them so I left them off.

So what do I hope to get out of this? I hope to heal and seal our guts. My family has really slacked off on broth and fermented foods lately and it is showing in how we feel and behave. Also my husband did a gluten trial this spring after finding out that he has the gene for celiac and his health has been worse ever since. (His celiac test came up negative but after how lousy he has felt on gluten he is going to stay off it strictly anyhow.) Of course not feeling so great is my excuse for not being good about broth and fermented foods. It is time to change that and stop dragging my feet. Plus I have a freezer full of meaty bones right now (thanks to that slacking on the broth) and another half beef coming in a couple of weeks so the timing is pretty perfect as far as that goes. I home school my children but we still have a lot of things that happen following a school year type schedule. The good news is that those don’t start till September so we have a bit of a breather this month when many summer activities have ended since the public schools are about to start back up and our fall activities haven’t started yet. The weather is even cooperating with a cooler than normal August (it still isn’t exactly soup weather but I’ll take what I can get).

So here we go! I’m expecting that I’ll be developing some new recipes and modifying old ones but with the extra work of doing intro I won’t promise how much I’ll be sharing. Have you done intro or are you considering it? I’d love to hear how it is going for you!