Why GAPS? Why now?

So, now that we have chronicled our experiences with GFCF and SCD in regards to Curly Girl, I want to focus in on why I’ve chosen the GAPS protocol.

How I found GAPS

I am, at the core of my very being, a foodie.  I love food.  More than just eating it, I love looking at pictures of food, and reading recipes, and talking about food.  As my cooking skills have matured, so has my love for food and it’s many uses.  Over the years, as we began to eat healthier, I started reading food blogs.  I mainly read blogs about gluten-free food (to help Curly Girl) and traditional food (Nourishing Traditions style).  Many times there was a crossover between the two and those were usually my favorites.

The term GAPS started showing up on my foodie blogs about 18 months ago.  I looked it up, read the food list, and said, “It’s just like SCD!  I can’t do that!  It’s too restrictive!”  Then I had to give up my foodie blog addiction for awhile while we moved, had a baby and generally had an insane life.  When I came back, GAPS was everywhere!!  And these blogs made it sound… doable.  The idea of changing our eating habits again started to nibble away at the back of my noggin.

Why Now?

In March 2011, just 2 months ago, I attended a seminar at the local health club called “Is Your Stomach Killing You?”  It was presented by a chiropractor, so I wasn’t sure what to expect.  I knew a lot about the gut already, but there is always more to learn.  It was free, so I went.  I did learn a few things, but what it really did was put our diet in the spotlight.  It made me think deeply about the foods we were eating and how that was affecting our health.  The speaker talked extensively about leaky gut and about how the health of the gut controlled the health of the entire body.  He had a checklist/quiz thingy, and if you scored high, you most likely had problems with a leaky gut.  Radio Dad & I both scored quite high, and I could see my children and their issues in the list as well.  I knew I needed to do something.  It was time for some drastic action.

Shortly after that seminar, this post by Health, Home & Happiness showed up on my facebook feed.  I read through it, then I read it to Radio Dad.  We were astonished!  Yes!  That description fits our families, fits us, perfectly!  We are a GAPS family!  That sealed the deal.  I started studying GAPS in earnest.

Why GAPS?

You may be thinking, Why this diet?  What is so special about this one to make it worth all this trouble?

Well, because it made sense.  As I read the book, Gut and Psychology Syndrome, it just makes perfect sense.  It explains the why’s of our family’s health issues.  Why Curly Girl is the one who ended up with autism.  Why Radio Dad hurts.  Why I struggle with depression.  Why Zanna Banana can’t handle loud noises!  It seems the further I read, the more of our weirdness is explained.  It’s easy to get behind a diet change when you really understand how it works.  The author has done a phenomenal job of explaining things, right down to the molecular level!  I read the book and know making these changes will help.  I KNOW IT!  And that knowledge gives me hope for our future.

One More Thing…

There’s one more detail to explain why GAPS, why now.  I feel like the blog posts and the seminar were placed in my path on purpose, that God was leading me to this change.  I was dead-set against GAPS 18 months ago.  I remembered the frustrations of SCD and I did not want to go there again.  But over and over I was led back to the leaky gut, back to GAPS, back to our need to change.  I really feel that it was orchestrated by the Almighty.

And the timing makes sense.  Five years ago when we tried SCD, I didn’t have the cooking skills, the creativity, the knowledge of food, that I have today.  I couldn’t make it work then because I didn’t know how.  As I have learned new skills, I have been well prepared for GAPS cooking.  Once again, God’s timing is perfect.

Next time, we’ll look at how our family has started to implement GAPS and what results we’ve seen so far.  See ya then!

Introducing… Curly Girl! (Part 2)

Curly Girl, age 4 1/2

In our last episode, Curly Girl was diagnosed with autism and we placed her on the gluten-free, casein-free diet (GFCF).   After our confirmation that the diet was working (the couch incident) we began to see small improvements.  Therapists from Birth to 3 began working with her at this time also.  At the age of 33 months, Curly Girl made her very first stack of blocks.  Shortly after her third birthday, she started speaking.  (I cannot for the life of me remember her first word.  I really should write this stuff down.)  She started attending Early Childhood classes at the local public school, and we made slow progress.

At this point, I feel like I should mention some of the mistakes we made in the early days of GFCF.  I knew that wheat & dairy were off limits, but I figured anything else was fine.  Curly Girl ate a whole lot of potato chips, popcorn, jello, marshmallows and equally junky food.  But it didn’t have wheat or dairy!  It also had zero nutrition.  And all that sugar and starch just fed the yeast & pathogens in her gut, making her leaky gut even worse.  Couple that with a continued string of antibiotics for various illnesses… I shudder to think of what we did to her poor gut.  Still, GFCF was enough to keep her moving forward.

Curly Girl did continue to make progress.  Her speech improved, her behaviors improved, she began to draw & write.  She taught herself to read one summer by watching phonics videos!  She began to allow us into her world just a little.  But there were still some things missing. 

When she was around 5 years old, our family doctor (who is also a DAN! doc) suggested we try the Specific Carbohydrate Diet.  He said we didn’t have to, but it was an option that some families were having success with.  Well, if GFCF was hard to implement, SCD looked nearly impossible.  No sugar?  No potatoes?  No corn?  No rice?  Again I found myself asking, what will my child eat??  Still, I wanted to do the most I could for my daughter.  So we decided to try it.

Again, we saw tremendous improvement!  Curly Girl made enormous leaps and bounds during the time on SCD.  Her speech, eye contact, and ability to attend to a task all improved.  She also had improvement in bowel movements.  (Sorry it’s gross, but BM’s are a big indicator of gut health!)  On GFCF she frequently had unformed, almost diarrhea type stool, and on SCD they became nicely formed and regular.  It looked like SCD was working.

But we still had a problem.  Between the limitations of the diet and Curly Girl’s self-limiting, she was down to just a handful of foods she could/would eat, and a couple of those were “compromise” foods.  Eggs, bacon, applesauce, orange & grape juice, and hot dogs (definitely a compromise food!)  As she became more aware of others around her, she also became aware of all the food she couldn’t have.  She started asking for other foods.  At the time, I didn’t have the knowledge, the creativity or the energy to figure out how to create those foods and make them fit within her diet.  She also started to lose weight.  She was a skinny thing to begin with, so that was a big deal.

We had been on SCD for about a year.  I knew her gut had healed somewhat.  We decided to try a “regular” diet for a while and see how it went.  Not GFCF, but regular food like the rest of us ate.  That was a bad idea.  I don’t know what I was thinking.  I wanted her to be normal, and I wasn’t being realistic.  She did okay for a couple of weeks and then things got ugly.  It was obvious that we needed to go back to a special diet.  Instead of returning to SCD, we went with GFCF again.  It was less restrictive, more familiar, and GFCF food had become more accesible in our area.

Again, I need to point out some mistakes I made when implementing SCD.  For one, we never did the intro part of the diet.  I tried, but she wouldn’t eat the intro foods.  So I just let her eat anything on the allowed list.  I also failed to introduce probiotics.  This is a biggie.  SCD works by starving the bad bacteria in the gut, but you have to introduce good bacteria to take its place!  I didn’t do that, and I really should have.  Lastly, I allowed too many compromises.  To really work, one needs “fanatical adherance” to the diet.  I wasn’t able to provide that.

So, there we were… I was tired of being the food police.  Curly Girl was happy to have french fries again.  And that is how we continued forward…

(Stay tuned for Part 3!)