Digestive Health: Our Menu

Going on the GAPS diet can be so overwhelming. This is frustrating to me. Not so much because it's frustrating to me but because I would hate to see others forgo doing the diet because of how overwhelming it can be.

The diet has you start off doing 6 steps before jumping into the full GAPS regimen. If a person thought the full GAPS diet was strict - the intro. portion of it is even more strict. This isn't a bad thing but it does add to the overwhelming aspect of it.

Here's the roundabout way we're going about it: we're jumping into full GAPS. Seeing how we do there. Then, if we feel we need to, we'll do the intro. diet and continue on with the full GAPS diet.

One thing that has helped us start out comfortably is doing the exact same meal plan every day. There are so many wonderful GAPS recipes out there but just the array of them can be overwhelming in and of itself.

We're going to stick to the same daily meal plan making GAPS friendly meals that are the most simple and familiar to us. Once we're comfortable there we'll venture off making and trying other GAPS recipes.

As for now here's the menu plan we're excited to start:

Breakfast: 

Vegetable Juice (carrot, celery, apple, kale) mixed with a probiotic pill.

Eggs with turkey sausage. (or the eggs and sausage muffins)

Muffin (apple spice or chocolate banana)

Small glass of stock (without the meat).

Lunch:

Salad bar.

Kefir.

Dinnner:

Chicken stock soup.

Almond bread spread with "jam".

Dessert. (Kids pick from the fridge or freezer.)

(and occassionally - salmon.)

Bedtime:

Lemon drink mixed with probiotic.

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The desserts my kids get to pick from are as follows:

Coconut Balls

Fruit Shish Kabob

Apple Spice or Chocolate Banana Muffin

Fudge

Banana-wiches

Coconut and Mango Popsicles (with probiotic)

Egg Custard

Snacks are:

Eggs (fried, boiled, etc.) with fermented salsa

Nuts

Salad

Yogurt with fruit

Carrots / celery

Meatballs (with sauerkraut)

Meat sandwich (using almond bread, chicken from stock, lettuce, etc.)

This plan has simplified it greatly and makes it feel quite do-able to us. In fact, I'm really excited to have something so simple and consistent ... especially knowing its healing our bodies.

We will stay away from sugar - completely. This means no gorging on treats at grandma's house. However, to help make up for that, I've decided to take some of our own desserts along with us as we make these visits and when they see all their cousins downing those sugary treats, they can go to our own stash and have a healthy, yet delicious, treat of their own.
Image credit.