Hi. Your comment was so amazing! My daughter is possibly reacting to detergent; could I get your recipe?

Hi Betsy, thank you so much for your kind comment. I’m so glad to hear this series has helped you and your family. I know when we were going through the diet I couldn’t read enough of other people’s experiences; it was very reassuring to me. Best wishes to you and your family in your journey. <3

Hi Adina! Thanks so much for your comment! That is good to know. I never tried enzymes but I wish I had. Yes, milk kefir is AMAZING!! It changed my life too. Many blessings to you, and here’s to your continually improving health! <3

Hi! I found you through pinterest – your carrot fermenting recipe and then saw you did
gaps which i am now doing. I just wanted to comment on the only meat thing: I happened to be reading the FAQ on the gapsdiet.com page yesterday, Dr. Campbell McBride actually addresses that specifically saying that it is perfectly healthy to do so and that some with severe cases will actually do a meat only gaps diet for 5 or 6 months until they heal their bellies enough to add veggies 🙂 I myself am doing regular intro and have found that taking digestive enzymes with meals is huge for me (i use a pill form from NOW) and even more spectacular has been kefir milk!! oh my it is changing my life 😀 I have been sick for 5 years and I finally have this little miracle. I am so grateful for gaps. And I thank god every day for helping to keep me on track with it and for his continued grace and healing 🙂

WOW April. Wow. I don’t understand that at all – no vegetables??? Although of course I’m not a practitioner. It seems like you are all going to be really constipated! Am I missing something? I don’t see how that is sustainable at all. Hm. Well, I just hope everything works out. Does she have you on l-glutamine? Just wondering. I will try to post the update soon, it might not be what you are hoping for, but I will be honest in my update. Hugs, April! There is hope and a light at the end of this tunnel. <3

Actually, it means A LOT to me that you know exactly how I feel and that our journeys are so similar. This week our practitioner removed ALL VEGGIES from our diet. All of them. I call it stage 0 (bc you can’t get any lower than this). We can have meat, fat, eggs, small amounts of ferments, and dairy (though half of us react to dairy, so that is out). She wants us to stay this way indefinitely. That will never happen. Today is day 6 of it. It is so hard to come up with meals to eat. Especially bc we are foodies. And we love veggies. My youngest will put down a pound of broccoli in one meal. I love to garden. We love fresh veggies from my garden. She doesn’t understand why I’m so upset about this. I think we can get some high-speed healing by doing this short-term, but long-term is out of the question. It’s not sustainable. How on earth would we eat while traveling? My husband really wants to go somewhere with the kids for spring break next week. We’ve been at this for 5 weeks. She talks about us like we are the sickest people out there. I disagree. I think we are more middle of the spectrum. We won’t fly through like some people, but we aren’t dealing with any autoimmune disorders or neurological disorders. Just some food allergies. Anyway, I’m really looking forward to the update. Thanks for the support.

Wow April, thanks for your comment. Reading through your journey brings back so many memories. I mean, our stories are so very similar. I don’t know if it means anything to you, but please let me say – I know exactly how you feel. When I was going through our journey, I needed to hear this.

I have been meaning to write a GAPS update for several months now, and it just keeps getting pushed back. I promise I will update soon! But for now, please know I know how you are feeling. I’m sending mega prayers your way. Hang in there, Mama. Listen to your gut (healed or not 😉 ) and only do what you can, when you can. <3 Love and hugs, Danielle

We are kind of on stage 5, but I may back us up to stage 3 again. I also was given the impression that we would breeze through intro and full GAPS in a matter of months bc of all the supplements my practitioner has us on. My kids also have life-threatening allergies to peanuts and tree nuts, except almonds for some reason. Two of my kids also have dairy allergies that manifest themselves through sinus infections and congestion. My barely 5 year old keeps reacting to avocado. She has tantrums and meltdowns and cries a lot if she eats more than 1/4 of an avocado. Carrying around 6 epi-pens everywhere I go and having to vet every food they have is such a weight. Educating teachers on how to use an epi-pen, making them promise not to give my kids anything to eat that I didn’t provide is exhausting. The worrying is exhausting.

Today I re-read your whole journey bc I needed the encouragement. I felt like I was reading letters from myself from further down the road. It was encouraging and discouraging at the same time because I have a feeling our journey on intro will be similarly long. Really I need us to be done with intro by Memorial Day when we go on a cross-country trip to visit my family for 3 weeks. Our intro diet has been complicated by no dairy and no honey bc of candida. No juicing, no introducing fruit yet bc of candida. That has been super frustrating. And I have to keep my daughter off avocado. She LOVES avocado. Her birthday was a couple of weeks ago, and since we couldn’t have cake, I stuck a candle in half an avocado, and she loved it.

I really would love to hear about your transition off of GAPS, what you eat now, how your kids have healed. We have experienced some amazing healing. My kids and I were either chronically constipated or diarrhea, and now we are all pretty regular. That is amazing. When my daughter doesn’t have avocado, she is her sweet self I remember from two years ago. I have eyebrows again, which is awesome. I lost half my hair when my youngest was born 22 months ago, and it is finally starting to grow back in. I have shorties all over my head. My energy is way better. My moods are more even. I feel like my skin is getting softer and more hydrated. My kids all had super stinky noxious disgusting gas all the time. I mean it was putrid and constant, and now they rarely toot, and it doesn’t make your eyes water if they do. I was having chronic tummy aches and bloating no matter what I ate. I’d wake up with a flat tummy, and no matter what I ate, I’d get a dull tummy ache and bloating. That is gone. It came back when we introduced almond flour (commercial), so I took it out for a while. My health had deteriorated dramatically over the last few years, and my doctor finally said I wasn’t digesting my food or absorbing nutrients and I needed to heal my gut. I feel like I’m getting access to nutrition for the first time in a long time, despite a fairly healthy diet before.

Yhis is mentally, emotionally and physically exhausting. I mentally quit every single day. I don’t currently have any allies. My wonderful husband is getting very concerned bc it is taking a toll on me to some degree, and he doesn’t want all of the fun sucked out of our lives forever, and he doesn’t want me chained to the kitchen for life, even though I cooked most things from scratch to begin with. He had misgivings when I started, and though he agrees the improvements we’ve seen are good, he’s not sure they are worth the price. He’s not doing it with us. In front of the kids he supports me, but we have lots of conversations about it after they are in bed. He wants answers I can’t give. “How long?” I wish I knew.

One of my boys was allergic to wheat and eggs when he was younger, and after 3 years of eliminating them from our diet, he outgrew it. He and one of his brothers had eczema. Eliminating their trigger foods helped, but one of them was allergic to grass. If the grass was active, it didn’t matter if I dressed him in a snowsuit, if he went out in the yard, he would immediately break out in these huge welts and hives and bleeding eczema. When the grass was dormant he was fine. What finally made a big difference for him and really cleared them both up was when I started making my own laundry detergent. For some reason he stopped reacting to the grass. I had tried every detergent on the market. A few years later I kind of forgot why I was making it (other than to avoid chemicals, which was the original reason I tried it), and when we went on our annual pilgrimage to visit my parents for a month, I didn’t take any. After washing their clothes in my mom’s store-bought detergent, immediately he reacted to the grass. Bleeding eczema again. When I rewashed everything in my stuff, it healed. I don’t understand it, I just know there is somehow a link for them.

Thanks for sharing your journey. I needed the boost and dose of reality today. And I needed to vent. Please write an update. It’s like my crystal ball.