New Year, New Site, New Diet!

Hi Everyone!  Happy New Year! I have officially changed my site to this new one with my own domain name! Yay! It took me a while to decide on the name. I hope you like it!

With the New Year I also decided to begin a new gut healing diet. Over the years, my diet has become more and more limited, as I become increasingly intolerant to more and more foods. I won’t bore you with my months of research prior to this. The gist of a gut healing diet is that by eating foods that are gentle on the digestive tract, you allow it time to rebuild and heal itself. Once it is healed, hopefully, you can begin to eat small amounts of the foods that you are currently intolerant or sensitive to. Big warning – even if the diet is successful, you should NEVER go back to eating a bunch of junk food. If you do, your gut will start malfunctioning again and you will be right back to where you started. My goal in this is only to not have to worry so much and be so particular when I go out to dinner with friends or for work.  Seriously, I am going across country to a week-long conference in a few months and I’m terrified I might get “glutened” and have to miss some of it.

Anyway, I have dieted for about 3 weeks now. I began the New Year on the GAPS diet. The GAPS diet didn’t last long (1 week) for me, because you have to suddenly cut out so many addictive things: Sugar, caffeine, alcohol, pain killers. Also the “intro” GAPS diet is nothing but soup, ALL DAY. By the end of the first week, I seriously considered having my boss take me to the hospital because I almost passed out at work. Obviously, it isn’t something you should do if you have to leave home, especially if you are active. Also, I got wicked heartburn and you aren’t supposed to take antacids. And yes, to those who have had GAPS success stories, I understand a lot of those terrible feelings are from candida die-off toxins. However, I needed a diet more suited to me.

After much more research,  I came upon the Body Ecology Diet.  It is a sort of blend of several different diets I have heard of before. It follows the same general structure as the GAPS diet (so I really didn’t do so badly starting on that one), but adds in elements of the acid-alkaline diet and the blood type diet too. Basically each person can have their own custom diet, based on their wishes (has a vegetarian/vegan option) and their blood type. Unfortunately, this makes it difficult to find recipes to use. I will be posting some of mine along the way to help anyone who wants to try it out.

Some Pros:

• You can eat as much (in quantity) of the approved foods as you want, with the stipulation that 80% of whatever you eat is veggies, while the other 20% is meat, starch, or eventually other non-approved foods.
• It is a healthy whole foods diet.
• I am losing a little weight! Not guaranteed, though.
• You don’t have to buy all the expensive Body Ecology branded merchandise or meal plans to be on the diet. Much of it can also be DIY. I only purchased the book ($2 for kindle edition) to understand the diet. You can get most of the info online, but it can be difficult to navigate.
• You get to learn creative new ways to prepare foods.
• You can use stevia and monkfruit sweetener to help with sugar cravings.
• Coconut aminos are okay too, so you have a good soy sauce replacement.

Some cons:

• It is a fairly long process, with a minimum of 3 months on basic diet, before trying to add in more difficult to digest foods.
• They recommend never eating sugary baked goods, non-cultured dairy, or drinking alcohol ever again (yeah, right! I will definitely cut it way down, but not completely out).
• At least in the beginning, you have to cook and shop all the time! You have to cook or prepare every meal. I seriously go to the store every other day. I simply don’t have the fridge/freezer storage to hold it all. My pantry is practically bare though. There are very few pre-pack and dry goods on this diet. I also recommend making big meals, portioning them out and refrigerating/freezing some for later. I have spent the last several weekends cooking to stock up for the work week.
• It is crazy expensive. My grocery budget has nearly doubled, though my smaller dine-out budget got halved too. Everything should be organic or local. Bonus for both. Many products can only be found at Whole Foods (most notably coconut kefir/probiotics). However, I have found quite a few staples at Costco: organic beef, chicken, quinoa, etc.
• All of my medications (even OTCs) to control my various issues are banned on this diet, as they feed the problem. The diet promises to eventually clear up those problems in time, but I apparently have to suffer in between. While this is more of an inconvenience for me, I worry more about those on the banned medications that ward off dangerous problems like heart attack and stroke.
• It would be pretty much impossible to do this diet if you are allergic to coconut/treenuts. Staples include, coconut kefir, coconut oil, coconut yogurt,  and coconut aminos.

Sorry, I know this is basically a novel, but I felt it needed to be said. I will keep you posted on my progress and recipes!