Day 1

Mike and I started intro yesterday. Here's what I ate.

• Breakfast: Liverwurst and chicken broth with pickle juice (from homemade LF pickles)
• Mid-Morning Snack: Mug of broth with pickle juice. Realize that it tastes really good.  
• Lunch: Celeriac-Apple Soup with Pork Patties (cooked for a while, til the meat was softened)
• Afternoon Snack: Same as lunch.
• Dinner: Same as lunch, plus I added a leftover beef patty and some duck prosciutto to the soup. I made a batch of applesauce and we all enjoyed that immensely.
• Before bed, I had a cup of chamomile tea. 

When I quit eating gluten in July 2010, I almost immediately felt much better. My brain fog lifted, my aches and pains diminished, the bloat I hadn't even previously recognized went away, my energy increased, the reflux disappeared, but I also went from having normal, formed BMs to constantly loose stools. After months of this, my doctor ordered a stool analysis, which revealed the presence of helicobacter pylori. She gave me some supplements to take, but unfortunately, I constantly forgot to take them and nothing changed. A month or two later, she finally mailed me the report from the company that performed the analysis, and I saw that an important piece of the puzzle had been missing. My doctor had neglected to mention that I also have an overgrowth of candida albicans.

Doing more research on my own, I found that H. pylori resides in the stomach and causes stomach ulcers, not diarrhea. It's also protective against reflux, which I find interesting since I used to have reflux. Perhaps my body allowed it to grow to protect itself? C. albicans, on the other hand, can go just about anywhere in the body, causing a myriad of symptoms, in fact, nearly every single symptom I have. I wish my doctor had told me about the yeast. I'm not sure that I would have been ready to do anything about it any sooner than now, but maybe. (Here's a list of another GAPS person's symptoms, mine is virtually the same, except for the constipation and eye matter. I'll write up my own list of symptoms presently.)

Caffeine could also be a culprit. I didn't have any coffee yesterday and I definitely have noticed in the past that I have to "go" soon after drinking coffee. I also always drink coffee with milk or cream, so that too could be a problem. For now, I'm sticking with the GAPS Intro protocol, albeit interpreted somewhat loosely. Perhaps I should not be eating liverwurst, for instance. It's not in the list of foods for Phase 1, but it's well ground and well cooked meat. And gosh it's good!

I feared that I would be stuck doing the Intro protocol for weeks or more, but I think we'll progress quickly. I already have noticed very minor improvement in my digestion after just one day (trying to find a balance here between TMI and keeping a good record of my progress). I prepared a meal plan for the week, based on Phase 1, but we added raw eggs and ghee to our broth this morning and I think we'll continue with that. So delicious! I'm having a bit of duck broth with raw egg yolk, pickle juice and duck fat now, trying to imagine the cafe that would serve such a beverage. There should be such a place, no?