My daughter has always had bad eczema. Sometimes it would heal a little bit, the creams from the doctor would help some, but it would not ever totally go away. Which would not really be a problem if it were just a small rash on her leg. But it takes over her elbows, thighs, knees, and legs. And it keeps her up at night scratching… and, therefore, keeps us parents up at night too.
Enter: the GAPS diet.
Everything you would ever want to know about the GAPS diet is in this book, “Gut and Psychology Syndrome.” I will summarize below.
If you’ve read any of my recipes, you know that we try to eat healthy and follow the Weston A. Price dietary guidelines as much as possible already. But the GAPS diet will definitely be more strict than what we are used to.
The whole point of the GAPS diet is that your gut is very much connected to every other part of your body in the sense that if your gut is not working properly, it is most likely causing other parts of your body to work improperly.
The doctor who invented this diet saw wonderful results with her son who had learning delays when he started on this diet. Katie Wells, another mom blogger that I like, also had great results with her children’s allergies once they started this diet. (You can read her story here.)
So, after researching and reading and trying many different things to help with my daughter’s eczema I’ve decided to try the GAPS diet. It really is not that far off from what we eat already. But the first stages of the diet, where you give your gut a chance to renew and heal, will be a little challenging.
How the GAPS Diet Works.
Simply put, the diet is meant to help heal your gut of whatever may be ailing it and therefore causing other problems in your body and immune system. With this in mind, the diet starts out very basic and then directs you to add in vegetables and other food slowly so that you give your gut enough time to heal and renew.
*Let me just pause here and say that I am no doctor or nutritionist and this post is just meant to summarize and let you come along this journey with me.
So in stage 1, you begin by only eating homemade bone broth, some vegetables, meat cooked in broth, and fermented veggie juice. See? A little different than what we eat everyday!
Depending on how your body (and, in my case, my daughter’s body) reacts to this transition, you can begin adding in more and more food until you have added in all the recommended food items from the list in Dr. Natasha’s book.
Once you get to where you can eat all the items on the list, it really is not that different than what we try to follow as a family anyway. (It is very similar to the foods that would be allowed if you followed the dietary guidelines from the Weston A. Price foundation.)
Many people who have done the GAPS diet have even been able to occasionally eat things that are not on those lists and still function properly because their gut has healed that much.
Conclusion
I will stop here because I do not want to get ahead of myself. That is a short summary of what we will be doing over the next couple of months. Be sure to check out the book for more information. If you want to follow along day-by-day head over to my Instagram account where I am sure I will post more about how this diet goes!
Also, this diet is not meant to help you lose weight (although you certainly could!). Rather, it is focused on naturally healing your gut so that you can digest food properly and therefore not cause other problems to your body.
Want to join me? Grab a copy of Dr. Natasha’s book and let me know!
I am excited to see how this helps my daughter’s eczema and if it changes my own lifestyle too. We shall see what the Lord has in store with this new change!
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