• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Crunchy-Chewy Mama

Living naturally, most of the time.

  • About Jessica Claire Haney
  • Contact
  • Holistic Health
  • D.C. Metro
  • The Arts
  • Healthy Eating
  • Activism & Politics
You are here: Home / Healthy Eating / Taking care of myself: GAPS diet update

Taking care of myself: GAPS diet update

April 2, 2011 by Jessica 16 Comments

Spring hasn’t fully registered here in chilly but blossom-filled Northern Virginia, but I think my stomach is finally on the mend.

I started the GAPS diet on February 6, and I am still in a modified introductory stage. I’m only just now even considering trying to eat any raw foods (besides juice, and avocado). It has taken 6 or 7 weeks for my gut to tell me that it’s starting to heal. Bone broth (so far only chicken stock) is and will continue to be a mainstay, and I can eat eggs, meat, nuts and nut butter and most non-starchy vegetables roasted and/or cooked for a long time in broth. Butternut squash never tasted so sweet!

I still have a long way to go, and I don’t anticipate eating grain or anything starchy for months to come. But it sure is nice to not be in pain!

It’s so clear that this diet is what my body needs, and I am 100% committed. But it sure takes a lot of time!

So the blog has been quiet; I didn’t get to Farm Food Voices, and I haven’t been much on Facebook. My friends’ emails often get ignored or replied to well beyond their time.  Even going to the pediatrician is a major ordeal: it’s impossible to be away from the house for more than a few hours. First there are the specifics of what I need to eat, but then there’s also the fact that eating on the go or while stressed seems just about as bad for me as eating problematic food. I can’t always be sure that eating at home will be stress-free; you never know when the baby is going to wake or change her mood! But at least here I can more closely approach mindful, intentional eating.

I’ve had questions of “what are you eating then?” and probably a lot of people wondering why I’m just MIA. This is what my days are looking like of late:

  • Wake between 5:00 and 6:50 a.m. depending on the baby’s antics during the night and morning. I can usually get up and start things moving while she remains in bed, but sometimes she accompanies me downstairs in the Pack N Play or is worn on my back in a carrier.
  • Put tea kettle on for warm water. Drink with added mineral drops.
  • Make breakfast for husband and son (egg, a healthy nitrite-free breakfast meat, some veggies — usually zucchini and spinach, or maybe green pepper and tomato).
  • Make an egg for myself and set aside with sauerkraut, avocado and olive oil
  • Take Bio-Kult probiotic
  • Bring in-process chicken stock (bone broth)from the day before back up to a  boil and then turn down to low. I have a batch going about 65% of the time and have started using the bones for a second round (and ordering necks and backs from my farmer. But I still haven’t gotten to the beef bones!
  • Warm up already-made stock and add onion, celery, spinach, carrot and whatever other veggie I want to let get good and cooked. Add garlic toward the end
  • Juice carrot, celery, romaine lettuce (in my birthday-present Omega masticating juicer) and drink it right away
  • Take my son to school
  • Hope baby transfers asleep when we get home. Or try to get her to sleep if she’s awake. Or give up and have her sit with me while I eat breakfast of broth, egg as noted above, some leftover home-cooked meat and perhaps some leftover “bread” made out of egg, coconut oil and almond flour or pancake of almond butter, egg and zucchini. Take digestive enzyme and Green Pastures cod liver oil
  • At some point have lunch. Hopefully I left myself some broth from this morning to heat up so I don’t have to chop more vegetables. And maybe I have more leftover meat (chicken, salmon, beef, pork, turkey) rather than another egg.
  • At some point maybe have a snack of apple (if I’ve been cooking out the sugar on the stove in water) and ghee, or crispy nuts, or some almond flour “bread” or pancakes with some almond butter or sunflower butter (the only packaged foods I’m eating. Sometimes a nursing mom just needs a spoonful of fat!)

    GAPS diet pancakes of just almond butter and eggs with banana. Right now I'm doing onion and zucchini instead of banana (which was Monica Corrado's adaptation).

  • Take care of the baby when she’s awake or try to nurse her back to sleep again. Maybe take a walk. Maybe get some housework done.
  • Pick up my son at 3:00 (three days a week. The days I pick him up at noon have a whole other layer to them!)
  • If we have nothing going on that afternoon, work on dinner in between giving him attention and trying to keep the baby happy. Wear her on my back in a carrier through much of dinner prep.
  • If we have a playdate or a class after school, I’d better hope I spent some of the morning chopping vegetables to make a stew in the crock pot or that there is something else ready as a leftover to have for dinner!
  • Hope my husband gets home in time for us to all eat at least part of our dinner together by 6:00. But sometimes I need to feed my son closer to 5:00 and let him eat a second time when his dad gets home.
  • Hope the baby will make it until 6:30 so she can see her dad before I put her to bed. On a good day, she’s napped enough that she can happily sit at the table with us. So far she’s tried a little broth and some very mushed veggies (tiny pieces). She seems to really love the lemon-flavored cod liver oil!
  • Emerge from darkness around 7:00 or 7:30 to clean kitchen, prepare my son’s lunch for school, and then prepare whatever is necessary for tomorrow’s food — maybe strain and jar the stock if it’s done, or make a “loaf” of almond flour bread or a batch of pancakes, or simmer some apple, or soak the nuts, or get the nuts out of the dehydrator.
  • Check email, do laundry (diapers every other day, regular clothes most other days).
  • Collapse.
  • Or, go back up to nurse the baby and then decide that since I probably two or three quiet hours ahead of me, work on the computer or on the house until way too late. Then feel hungover the next day, especially if she’s up every 90 minutes from midnight until 6 a.m. when she decides to sleep soundly after I’ve gotten out of bed.

So there you go. And it took me two days to get this post up. There are a ton of other things I want to write, but right now — especially the week after my son’s fifth birthday brought with it cleaning, rearranging, buying, baking, and more cleaning — I just am going to need to be rather than reflect in pixels, as much as it hurts to keep my fingers off the keyboard.

Filed Under: Healthy Eating, Holistic Health, Uncategorized Tagged With: digestion, family, food, GAPS, gluten, health, home, mental health, nutrition, postpartum, priorities, real food, wellness

Previous Post: « Advocate for local food at Farm Food Voices 2011!
Next Post: Food dyes: FDA misses the opportunity to help children »

Reader Interactions

Trackbacks

  1. Crunchy Chewy Mama » Blog Archive » Wordful Wednesday: Today I looked at my daughter says:
    May 4, 2011 at 5:31 pm

    […] Or when it’s just us girls at home, using awake time to chop vegetables to take care of my complicated healing diet or fold laundry or do some other house-related project. Or I’m reading or typing while […]

  2. Crunchy Chewy Mama » Blog Archive » Liver pate and grain-free almond “bread” says:
    May 11, 2011 at 3:20 pm

    […] I have been doing most components of the GAPS diet for almost 4 months, I had not been eating organ meats until recently. When Dr. Celena Hadlock asked about my organ […]

  3. Crunchy Chewy Mama » Blog Archive » 10-day yoga challenge: Day Two — “Let your bottom blossom” says:
    May 31, 2011 at 1:43 pm

    […] Music is another type of beauty I’ve let slip through my fingers in the daily scramble to make healthy food and do all those worldly things like volunteering, signing up for nature center classes, planting […]

  4. Crunchy Chewy Mama » Blog Archive » 10-Day Yoga Challenge: Day Ten: “Party in the pose” says:
    June 7, 2011 at 4:10 pm

    […] What does not feel great is the sense that, while both yoga and writing practices are incredibly healing for me, it’s nearly impossible to do them both and also live in the real world of my house with two children and a husband, a lot of irons in the fire in terms of work (volunteer and otherwise), and a special diet. […]

  5. Crunchy Chewy Mama » Blog Archive » The transition begins: Waldorf to public school says:
    June 12, 2011 at 2:20 am

    […] I will have next to zero time to do much for me, let alone house chores or preparing food for my high-maintenance diet. I expect we’d devolve into my staying up late and stressing my adrenals ever […]

  6. Crunchy Chewy Mama » Blog Archive » 10-Day Yoga Challenge: Day Eight: “Expose your heart” says:
    June 12, 2011 at 2:17 pm

    […] the day, including my preparing all the food I will need to eat all day to accommodate my special grain-free, starch-free GAPS diet. My friends and family need a nourished, rested mama, and that is already a little […]

  7. Crunchy Chewy Mama » Blog Archive » Gluten-free expo showcases products galore says:
    July 14, 2011 at 1:02 am

    […] I smelled when I walked in the door of the D.C. Gluten-Free expo. But alas, I’m still on a grain-free and starch-free diet as I have been since February. So what will not be included here are reviews of the many goodies […]

  8. Crunchy Chewy Mama » Blog Archive » On the road again says:
    August 4, 2011 at 5:26 pm

    […] Once upon a time, I could go on a road trip without making all my own unprocessed, organic, starch-free food. […]

  9. Author of new ‘Yoga Bitch’ memoir gets audience laughing | YogaHelpZone.com says:
    September 1, 2011 at 10:31 am

    […] can’t keep up, it’s all we can do around here to keep ourselves fed. A special dairy-free and grain-free diet takes a lot of work in order to prepare everything from scratch. Six months ago, tummy troubles […]

  10. Author of new ‘Yoga Bitch’ memoir gets audience laughing | Iodide Plus says:
    September 13, 2011 at 10:45 pm

    […] can’t keep up, it’s all we can do around here to keep ourselves fed. A special dairy-free and grain-free diet takes a lot of work in order to prepare everything from scratch. Six months ago, tummy troubles […]

  11. Crunchy Chewy Mama » Blog Archive » Money could buy me … a clone? says:
    October 11, 2011 at 1:11 pm

    […] place I couldn’t cut corners has been with food: I will literally get sick if I don’t make all my food from scratch. A mama who has to plunk her baby in the pack n play while she sits on the potty is not exactly […]

  12. Crunchy Chewy Mama » Blog Archive » A tale of two conferences says:
    October 23, 2011 at 2:08 am

    […] have a baby who nurses through the night, and I live only nine miles away. I also have an extremely restricted diet and feel a whole lot better if I cook my own food. So I’ve spent mornings and evenings here […]

  13. Crunchy-Chewy Mama » Blog Archive » Kids in the kitchen (better late than never!) says:
    November 9, 2011 at 1:36 pm

    […] It’s all I can do to keep the baby out of harm’s way and get a meal (all from scratch, by necessity!) made before […]

  14. Crunchy-Chewy Mama » Blog Archive » On eating, blogging, and parenting says:
    November 11, 2011 at 10:49 pm

    […] or wine, or even about fruit or raw veggies, which I still can’t tolerate after nine months on the GAPS diet. Real Food blogger panel at the Weston A. Price Foundation Wise Traditions […]

  15. Crunchy-Chewy Mama » Blog Archive » My gut, she leaks says:
    January 8, 2012 at 12:52 pm

    […] been 11 months since I went on the GAPS diet, which has helped immensely with IBS symptoms. But I’ve had to stay on a modified version of […]

  16. Crunchy-Chewy Mama » Blog Archive » Let them eat lunch, from home says:
    February 20, 2012 at 10:27 pm

    […] getting off all grains and starches — and even raw veggies — ended months of cramping and irritable bowel, I came to […]

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Primary Sidebar

Welcome to Crunchy-Chewy Mama, where the wilderness meets the sidewalk. Around here, I do my best to live as healthfully as possible. But compromises abound.

I also publish the resource blog Mindful Healthy Life of Metro DC. To learn about my writing and appearances and for details about the writing, editing and consulting services I offer, visit JessicaClaireHaney.com.

Follow Crunchy Chewy Mama

  • Instagram
  • Facebook
  • X

Follow Jessica Claire Haney

  • Facebook

Follow Mindful Healthy Life

  • Instagram
  • Facebook
  • X

Copyright © 2025 · Foodie Pro Theme by Shay Bocks · Built on the Genesis Framework · Powered by WordPress