The GAPS Diet Does a Body Good

I’ve been slowly, and when I say slowly I mean EVER so slowly been transitioning to the GAPS Diet. I thought like a smarty pants, I could just skip over the Introduction part of the diet and just go Full GAPS, but I was wrong.

The first thing I did was to cut out all fast and pre-prepared foods. I was going to give it a little while before removing something else from my diet. When I removed the processed foods from my diet, I replaced the junk food with kefir and yogurt. That was both a big mistake and at the same time a wake up call as to how toxic my body actually is! It was the kefir and yogurt that started the detoxification process and I believe caused my face to swell up like a balloon and made me look like Jabba the Hut. Yes it was that bad. On top of my face being blown out of proportion, I had two huge pimple eruptions. According to Ann Wigmore, anytime there is an eruption on the face near the sinus area, that represents something going on in the lungs. I would have to say that’s true since there is a lot of wheezing, hacking and coughing and sneezing. Am I allergic to kefir and yogurt? No, this is a cleansing process that was kick started by those two products.

I don’t have any food allergies at all. Food allergies are complicated and can be life threatening. One way that Dr. Campbell suggests testing to see if you have an allergy to a particular food is to put a few dabs of the food on your wrist before bed time. If the wrist area is raised, red and angry and itchy, you should avoid that food. That never happened to me, so its safe to say that I’m just very toxic. I had heard from others that jumping to Full GAPS is better than the intro diet since its more gentle, but I’m not so sure of that now. I’m considering just drinking the bone broths for a while, as well as taking a probiotic, fermented cod liver oil, fermented skate liver oil and high vitamin butter oil. Healing and sealing my gut is an important first step in the GAPS Diet. We’ve been making kefir for a few days now and while its very good, I’ve noticed that it starts the process of detox up again. The way to control the detox process according to Dr. Campbell is to start with a teaspoon of yogurt or kefir. I know I’m not ready for that now.

I’m determined to get this right! I also hope this diet will help me come off my thyroid medication. Right now if I deviate and drop even two grains of my medication, my blood pressure starts to rise and get out of control. Yes, the thyroid medication actually keeps my high blood pressure in check. Who knew right? Last year when I came out of the hospital it was thought that my high blood pressure was due to having pneumonia, and I was put on a very toxic blood pressure medication. After a little research, I took matters into my own hands and bumped up the amount of thyroid I take. As I slowly increased my dosage, my blood pressure came down. I decreased the amount of blood pressure meds and POOF! it was gone. I did a little experiment a few months later, decreasing the amount of thyroid I took, and within days my blood pressure started to rise again. I’m hoping that the GAPS Diet will actually help my thyroid. Only time will tell. I’m very scared to deviate from my medication even one grain, for fear that my blood pressure will start to rise again.

Since we have an abundance of duck and chicken eggs now, I may add one yolk to each cup of broth I drink. The last big amount of bone broth I made was frozen last week. This week, Dom got lots of knuckle pieces from the butcher so we’ll see how this batch tastes. I’ll be taking a mug of hot bone broth and putting a couple of frozen broth ice cubes (the frozen broth was really concentrated before freezing) to cool down the broth and raise the flavor.

Simone continues to do well. She has gone full force into pretending to prepare and serve food. She’ll source out her favorite socks (clean socks) roll them up into little balls, put them onto her little pink tea plates and serve us “cookies and cake.” She wants us to taste them and drink her pretend tea. It is the sweetest thing to see. I love walking into her room in the morning and see her blanket spread out like a picnic with all her pretend delicacies carefully placed in position. “Here, try it! Yum, the cake is good…have some!” she’ll exclaim to me full of excitement.

Simone is also starting to repeat more words, talk in longer more complete sentences and engage us. Her attention span continues to improve and her ability to reason and understand what we say is also growing. She still is drinking rice milk, but she does enjoy fresh apple and carrot juice. I made pumpkin seed milk the other day, and I’ll be adding a small amount of pumpkin seed milk to her rice milk until she’s used to the flavor. Its very hard to trick Simone with tastes. She’s extremely detail oriented when it comes to visual, scents and texture of the food she eats and drinks. She has already been through a number of “die-off’s” with the worst being her behavior. Other than that, she’s doing very well on GAPS…it really does the body good!

Meet the Author- Angela aka Farmer Jane

has written 323 posts on The High Desert Chronicles.

• View all posts by Angela aka Farmer Jane →
• Blog

Thanks for reading! I love comments and feedback so talk to me!

Tagged as: die off symptoms, fermented cod liver oil, fermented skate liver oil, GAPS Diet, GAPS Intro diet, high blood pressure, high blood pressure medication, high vitamin butter oil, hypothyroid, probiotics, thyroid medication