GAPS Diet Intro Day

Today was our first day testing out the GAPS Diet Introduction Phase.  We officially start Stage 1 tomorrow!  Today was filled with making both chicken and beef broth and tons of butternut squash.

 I also made about 50 lemon/honey gummies for snacking over the next few weeks. For dinner, I spiced things up by using cookie cutters on the butternut squash to make snowmen and then dinosaurs for the kids.

So why Stage 1 now?  We are tired of trying to figure out what foods Genevieve can eat and what she can't eat.  It's time for an elimination type diet and GAPS helps you do this in a systematic way.  For a while now I have wondered if Genevieve may be suffering from Histamine Intolerance.  She can't even look at a pickle without her face turning red and swelling.  She also seems to react to foods that aren't even terribly high in histamine but still contain it like green peas.  I had no idea green peas were even a histamine food since I hadn't seen it on the few lists I've looked at.  After eating peas as a snack with nothing else today her face became red and itchy.  I investigated histamine foods some more and found the following very detailed list which includes a histamine number for all major foods.  Peas are only a 1 on a scale of 0-3 however they were enough to cause a reaction. So at this point we have to eliminate all high histamine foods as we go through the GAPS introduction.  One thing that makes things difficult is that fact that leftovers are high in histamine.  With little ones its nearly impossible make all foods fresh.  I am hoping by eliminating all of the trigger foods this won't matter as much.

In addition to helping Genevieve, we know that both Colin and I can use more healing. We have improved a lot over the past year with all of our diet changes but I would really like to be able to eat whatever we want with little side effects.  I am hopeful after all this we can eat rice and bread with no ill effects and maybe even have dessert after dinner and still fall asleep at a decent time.

I'm hoping our first official day goes well tomorrow!