Many circumstances played in my decision to go on the GAPS diet.  I have arthritis, and have it in every limb (and it seems) every joint in my body.  I’ve already had 2 surgeries to remove bone spurs in various parts of my body.  It just seems to me that if I can’t find the cause of why my body displaces calcium (which is what bone spurs are), then I’m bound for plenty more surgeries in my life.  A thought I don’t really relish…..Especially joint surgeries.  Every time I’ve had a joint surgery I’ve had 2-3 months of physical therapy afterwards to make sure you regain full motion of the joint.

Several years ago I started researching the words “anti-inflammatory diet”.  Those words ran through my head for quite a while before I Googled them and found out that there was indeed such thing as an anti-inflammatory diet.  I bought a book and started being more selective in what I ate.  It seemed like it helped for a while, but then I either got side-tract or something because before I knew it I wasn’t paying much attention anymore.  I was just eating whatever I wanted and counting calories more than paying attention to the quality of food.  I was on a mission to lose weight and I DID lose about 40 pounds, which I kept off, but I needed to lose a whole lot more.

Another couple of years went by and I wasn’t feeling any better….in fact a lot of times I was feeling worse.  I was waking up in the middle of the night with my hips aching, my back hurting……when I went up and down stairs my knees hurt etc.  Continuous pain is wearing….it makes you tired, and distracted and sometimes grumpy.  I tend to isolate and shut down when I’m feeling crummy because I don’t want to be grumpy.  I don’t like to hear constant complaining from others, so I refuse to do it myself.  And I refuse to start taking medications to get rid of pain.  I’ve read too much about the side effects and I don’t want to add more complications to my body just because of pain.  So, for the most part I just try to ignore it.

So, more research, more reading, more experimenting.  I started reading about how your PH level could affect what your body does with calcium.  If your body is too acidic, which most people in the west are because of our high grain and fast food diets and such, then your body leaches calcium from your bones to buffer your acidic system.  Basically, your body will do whatever it needs to do to sustain itself.  Being too acidic will kill you.  Since your body goes into survival mode to stay alive, it will do damage to itself for survival.  Thus….leaching calcium to buffer your PH…robbing Peter to pay Paul…  I started being interested in Kombucha, Kefir and fermented vegetables.  I looked up how to double ferment Kombucha and Kefir water to make yummy tasting pro-biotic drinks….they also lower your Acidotic system and bring it back into balance.

I did that for about 6 months, in the mean time going to a  natural path in St. Clair for some deeper evaluation.  She verified that I was indeed acidic, (I’m sure I was much worse before the Kombucha) but there were more issues, my liver was toxic, meaning I wasn’t detoxing well.  My cellular debris level was almost off the charts which meant I had cells dying off faster than they were renewing….ugh…..  That was rather discouraging.  I had basically considered myself healthier than most, but certainly not in the top categories.  I knew being overweight was keeping my unhealthy. I mean, I was eating greens like they were going out of style, my dietary intake, in my opinion was pretty darn good.  I wasn’t eating fast food any more.  I was buying organic and grass-fed beef, and raw, unpasteurized milk.  I was making an effort to regain health.  I don’t want to be a senior one of these days that is unhealthy and barely getting around. 

So she put me on some supplements, which I religiously took for the month, then on my next visit she suggested we do some food allergy testing.  I was SHOCKED at what the results were.  I was showing an allergic (or inflammatory) response to the grass-fed beef that I’d bought (I had almost half a cows worth in my freezer).  That was discouraging….then I showed an inflammatory response to the raw milk that I was making an effort to drink.  But the craziest part was an inflammatory response to all the greens.  The Chard, the Kale, the lettuces……she had never seen anyone showing a response to greens.  Basically, when it came down to it, my system was so messed up that I was having a response to basically everything I ate.  It didn’t matter that it was organic, or raw or locally and sustainably grown…..  Believe me, I was frustrated!

Her suggestion was to take out all foods (which was just about everything) and then give my body a chance to simmer down.  Then add things back into my diet, one at a time.  But in the meantime, I had been doing a LOT more reading about the GAPS diet.  Here are a couple of links that really made a LOT of sense to me.

http://products.mercola.com/gaps-diet/

This article also opened my eyes (and gave me hope that I could regain some health)

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/03/18/mcbride-and-barringer-interview.aspx

I have Osteoarthritis…and it was on the list of auto-immune disorders listed.  I was beginning to see that there was hope of stopping my body from attacking itself.  I thought about it for a few months and decided that my body needed a reset.  I was going to start the GAPS diet, going through all the introductory steps to give my gut lining as much opportunity to heal as possible.  That meant giving up my latte every morning (man……that was tough!!  I think my morning coffee was a ritual close to being an idol….I did NOT want to give it up, but I did.  I haven’t had one of my yummy latte’s for almost a month now.

http://gapsdiet.com/INTRODUCTION_DIET.html

If you read this, you can see that in the beginning, it’s rather restrictive.  There is a reason for this…it’s to give your gut lining a chance to heal and seal.  I believe, for me anyway, that I had leaky gut syndrome.  I’d had a chiropractor tell me that some years back.  i just didn’t realize what that really meant until I started doing all the reading.

An interesting thing happened a few years back and it just came to mind the other day….one of those God “Ah Ha” moments.  When we were going to the Vineyard Church in St. Louis I went up for prayer one Sunday morning for God’s wisdom about my health and the joint pain etc.  I really wanted to make changes to help my body heal.  A man named Andy had a word for me that morning.  It didn’t make a whole lot of sense at the time, but the Lord brought it back to mind just the other day.  His word was, “Let food be your medicine”.  That was it, nothing more…..no expounding….nothing.  Just, “Let food be your medicine”.  I left that morning believing I’d heard from the Lord but didn’t really know how to apply it.  It dawned on me the other day that the GAPS diet is just that.  Food is my medicine.  I’m using organic meats to make healing and nourishing bone broth that I drink with every meal.  I’m using fermented foods to neutralize my acidic system and replenish my gut flora.  This diet is exactly that.  Using certain foods to be medicine for my sick system.  I am amazed at that and encouraged that in time I am going to see a difference in my health.

Right now, I’m still in the introductory stages.  I’m somewhere between 3 and 4 out of 6 stages before I enter into the full GAPS diet.  But I’m content……  It’s only been a month and I haven’t seen much change in my pain level yet, but I haven’t had heart burn one time since I started this lifestyle.  Not once, and before it was a regular.  I’ve added some detox measures to my regiment.  My chiropractor thinks I’m still not detoxing well, and that seems right to me as well, so I’ve added a liver detox to my day.  I’ve lost some weight…not as much as I’d hoped, but weight is a secondary measure to this…..like a wonderful side benefit.  My first goal is to regain health, and I believe this is going to work.  I’m letting food be my medicine, and God doesn’t lie, so I will be patient and wait expectantly for the manifestations outwardly of what is going on inside.  And I believe it’s good…..  🙂