Why I started the GAPS diet | What is the GAPS diet? Gut and Psychology Syndrome | Stage 1 and 2

Hi guys, my name is Begay with the blog WilsonHomestead.com and today I'm going to talk to you guys about why I started the GAPS diet and how it's going. So if you don't know what the GAPS diet is, it stands for Gut and Psychology Syndrome. So this is basically a diet to heal your gut microbiome. And everything about your health stems from your gut microbiome for the most part. So it affects so many different things, autoimmune diseases, mental health issues. So it's something that would be beneficial for just anyone to do. And especially since I have a few different health problems that I'm trying to work through, I thought it would be a really good thing for me to try it also. So let's get right into this video. So there's basically two ways to do the GAPS diet. You can go through the intro diet. It has six stages where you start with a really limited amount of food and you add in each stage, you add in a few more new foods. And then you eventually get to what's called the full GAPS diet. And you can start with just the full GAPS diet if you don't have as many problems. It will take longer if you don't do the intro diet to fix your health problems or different things. So when you start on stage one, you basically can have soups that are made with meat and vegetables and that's boiled for a long time. You want to make soups that have been boiled for about three hours. You want them long and slowly cooked. So you don't want to have any fried or roasted, anything like that yet. At this point you can have soups. You can have meat stock that you can drink. You can have peppermint, ginger, or chamomile tea with just a little bit of raw honey. You are supposed to start with adding in about a teaspoon or so of sauerkraut juice. I have a batch of sauerkraut that's fermenting over here and I have the last batch in the refrigerator. You add about a teaspoon of just the juice at first, not the actual cabbage, into your soup. But you want to make sure it's not too hot. You can have kombucha in the first stage. Of course you want to start with just a tiny little bit at once and build up just like the same with sauerkraut. So it's like super, super limited in the first stage. I am in the second stage now, which is like so exciting when all you can really eat is soup and tea. It's like so exciting to add in any little thing. So the second stage, you add in a raw egg yolk to your bowl of soup. I added in homemade raw milk yogurt. I probably could have added that in the first stage, but I waited at least a few days. And then I also added in homemade ghee. So I think that's all for the second stage. The third stage is when you really are able to add in some exciting things, like some pancakes that are made with squash and peanut butter. And you can have the whole sauerkraut, all the juice and the cabbage. So the third stage is a lot more exciting. So what you're doing is you're basically taking out any foods that are rough on your stomach. You are only eating very easy to digest foods, which is the soups that have been cooked a long time. And the meat stock is so good. It's full of gelatin and collagen. So what you're basically doing is your gut lining is built, basically think of it like bricks. So the strong lining of your gut is bricks. And then in between the bricks, you want gelatin and collagen to fill in in between all the bricks and make it seal so that you don't have any leaking through your gut. So a lot of health problems stem from leaky gut, which is basically your gut so irritated that there's no more lining in between the bricks in your gut and food is just going into your bloodstream, which is not something your body wants at all. So then it'll set off warning signals and some health problem will flare up and start causing problems. And it can be any number of random things. And then the other thing you're doing is having a lot of probiotic foods, like the sauerkraut juice and the homemade raw milk yogurt and the kombucha. And then you're building your microbiome. You're building your gut microbiome. So you're having easy to digest foods with collagen and gelatin and probiotic foods. So that's the two main things. So the health problems that I've been having that I'm hoping to see some improvement with this are mostly, I have gravesties, which is hyperthyroid. I've had this for years and it's an autoimmune disease, which can be caused by gut issues. So I'm hoping that with healing my gut, it can hopefully help regulate my thyroid a little bit better. So the high thyroid, I've also developed kidney stones that were actually, they were partly from high thyroid, partly from breastfeeding. Those are two things that can cause kidney stones. So I'm hoping to get rid of my kidney stones. I've had chronic bladder infections for a while and that is, I think it's partly caused by the kidney stones. That's a symptom of kidney stones a lot of times. I'm hoping to get rid of that. That's probably the most annoying symptom. And then obviously just having more energy. I have three little kids to keep up with, three-year-old and almost two-year-old, a five-month-old. So I need a lot of energy to keep up with them. So I'm hoping that going on this diet will help me have a lot more energy. So I've been documenting on Instagram my journey of starting the GAPS diet and a lot of different foods that I make and just a lot of information about it. So if you want to see my journey right from the beginning, go over to my Instagram, it's WilsonFamilyCompton and I have a story highlight that's called GAPS. So you can go check that out. And if you guys want to see any more videos about the GAPS diet, if you want me to go into more detail about each stage, what foods you add in, if you want me to go into more detail about why you do the GAPS diet or what health problems it can help fix or any GAPS recipes. So if you're wondering what certain recipes you can have in each stage, let me know and I will try to make some videos for you guys because so far I am about a week and a half in and I've been feeling a lot better. So I had a really hard time not having coffee. That was my main thing. I had kind of a coffee addiction. So the first few days were really rough. I really craved coffee and I'm still having some cravings for coffee. The other thing I've been craving is chocolate cake, which is really weird because we almost never have chocolate cake. But the first three days especially are so hard. You really just have to push through those first three days and you'll start feeling some results and it'll be a lot more encouraging. I know when I'm ready to switch to a new stage, when my stomach feels good and when my bowel movements are normal. So for the first few days, I started having some stomach pains from taking all that food out and only having these certain foods. I had had like probably stomach, like upset stomach pains. And then I was having some loose stool. So I waited until I was having no more stomach pains and my bowel movements were normal. And then I added in stuff from the second stage. So now I'm having just a tiny little bit of stomach upset. No bowel irregularities. So I think I'm almost ready to add in some things from the third stage. So it just really depends on your body. You want to go by your symptoms. It's not a certain length of time for each stage. It's based on how long it takes for your body to heal before you're ready to add in new things to your gut. So I hope this video was interesting for you guys. And I'm excited to bring you along on this journey. And I hope that it really fixes some of these different health problems I'm having. Thank you for watching this video. And I will see you next time. Bye.