Are Escalating Food Sensitivities Hampering Your Life? A GAPS Story

You’ve read some of our updates on the GAPS diet, so for another perspective here is another story from a Certified GAPS Practitioner about her patient’s journey to healing. While the patient has seen improvements, she remains on the diet in hopes of one day being completely healed. Only time will tell how it will go, but things are looking promising for her already.

-Jennifer

Are Escalating Food Sensitivities Hampering Your Life? A GAPS Story

By Jennifer Scribner (Bio below)

One of the most urgent reasons people come to me to learn about the GAPS Diet™ is because they have multiple food allergies and sensitivities.

Take Allison (not her real name), a client who was using an EpiPen 2 to 3 times a month for her anaphylactic food allergy reactions. She’d had digestive problems (along with asthma) most of her life, but it wasn’t until a few years ago that she realized they were caused by food sensitivities. Once she figured that out she eliminated those foods and felt better for a couple of weeks. Then she started reacting to new foods that she didn’t have problems with before, so she tried eliminating those too and ended up caught in a vicious cycle. What she reacted to was always rotating and she lived in constant fear of how every food might affect her. Not to mention how terrible she felt all the time, which wasn’t working for her while raising 4 kids and homeschooling.

Allison was one of those rare people who heard about the GAPS Diet, recognized that it might just save her life, and began the Intro Diet right away. Her goal was to eat without fear of how it would hit her later. She said that being able to eat the variety on the Full GAPS Diet would be awesome. Allison’s kids also suffered with asthma, allergies, and eczema, and she planned to start them on GAPS once she felt stable on it.

A week after starting the GAPS Intro, Allison told me that she felt better than she had in years, both digestively and energetically. She was able to stop using her inhaler at night, and eating sauerkraut with every meal helped with the mild stomach-ache she had when she ate. She reacted to egg yolks, so I advised her to leave eggs out and to continue on with the Stages. By week 3 she was able to eat a whole avocado a day and have cashew butter with no problems. I helped her focus on getting in plenty of broth, lots of fats, and beet kvass and sauerkraut to add friendly bacteria. 

She spent the better part of the next month with a head cold, and then prolonged stomach flu, so she went back to Stage 2 for gentle soothing. I let her know that this type of setback is common at 2 or 3 months. As your body gains energy from healing it can actually fight nasty bugs that have been lurking inside you all along, something you’ve dealt with off and on comes back with a vengeance. The good news is that if you beat it without resorting to drugs, it’s usually the last time you’ll have that flare.

Once Allison conquered that old problem, she was able to eat the Stage 5 foods again without issue and keep trying new foods. In less than 3 months, Allison worked her way to the Full GAPS Diet and eats a wide variety of foods with no scary reactions (and no use of the EpiPen) the entire time. Talk about life-changing!

Learn how the #GAPS diet can help heal your food sensitivities. @eczemacompany

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Here’s what I think Allison did sooo right:

• She began her own healing before she started her family on GAPS so she could regain her energy and better handle their ups and downs.
• She was all in. She restructured her life to keep her commitment to follow GAPS for at least a couple of months to give it a fair shot. No complaints about anything.
• She developed a system for her cooking. It wasn’t fancy, or fun, or cute food for her kids. There was soup every day, meat and veggies for another meal, and ferments for everyone. GAPS cooking has become routine for her now.

These things added up to fast improvements for Allison, but she still considers herself to have a long way to go to be cured of her asthma and life-long dairy and wheat allergies. She no longer lives in fear of cross-contamination or worries over every food she puts in her mouth, and she plans to continue following GAPS for about two years in order to fully heal.

Jennifer Scribner is a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner and Certified GAPS™ Practitioner, trained by Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride in September 2011. Her specialty is helping people learn and follow the GAPS Diet to address autism and complex digestive and autoimmune conditions. You can find Jennifer on Facebook and Pinterest

If you’re considering the GAPS Diet, take the overwhelm out of starting by grabbing a copy of her FREE e-book Beginning the GAPS Diet: A Prep Guide for Getting the Best Results.