GAPs Update

I've been plugging along on the GAPs diet. About two weeks ago, I felt it was time to move from the GAPs Intro diet onto the full GAPs diet. Once you get to Phase 6, there really isn't much difference between the two anyway.

The psoriasis is finally starting to clear up on my hands, and the patches around my eyes are gone. Today however, after having my morning glass of mineral water, I started having an itching sensation where the rash patches normal reside around my eyes. This has been consistently happening every week-on Thursdays oddly enough- and I'm not sure what's causing it. In an effort to try and find the reason (if any) I'll be starting a food journal. Yes, I know I probably should have been doing that from the beginning, but it's annoying to document everything you eat.  I think it might possibly just be my body working toxins out. I don't know. Only time will tell.

On the upside, an unintended side effect of going on GAPs is that I'm easily down 10 lbs. I haven't weighed myself in about a week and a half (I'll be doing that again soon), but that last time I was on a scale it was 144 lbs, and that was after having some mineral water. I didn't go on GAPs to lose weight, I went on it to cure my food sensitivities and psoriasis, but I'll take it.

Myself in August 2012 at a family event.

144 lbs in January 2013.

Day 12

Everything is going well on the introductory diet. I'm loving the fresh juice. Fresh carrot juice tasted really good, but when I could finally introduce apple juice, wow. It's amazing! So sweet! I just kinda ran out of apples and carrots, and that is a sorry day. I'll be headed to Costco tomorrow to stock up on some organic carrots and apples.

I'm going to be trying some almond bread today. I'm a little worried that I'll scrape up my food processor bowl, but I need the flour. I'll get over it. At some point. I like to keep my kitchen gadgets pretty, if you couldn't tell.

Today is the first day in a while that the red around my eyes is really a lot lighter. It seems to finally be healing. I'm hoping that after that goes away then the rest will start to disappear.

The other plus side...I weighed 146.4 lbs. yesterday. I haven't weighed that since college. I'm completely okay with that.

All in all, the cravings have subsided, my skin is clearing, and I weigh less. I can't really complain at this point.

I'm in phase 5, pretty soon I'll be moving to phase 6. After that I'll be on GAPs proper. I can't wait to have some coconut flour blueberry muffins.

Artichoke Soup and Carrot Juice

I am continuing on in my GAPs introductory diet, and am doing well. I was feeling really good with tons of energy, and then I upped my probiotic increase. That predictably caused more die off, which is leaving me tired and the psoriasis spots redder, but it must be done!

On the plus side, I made a really delicious soup that my mom told me how to make. It's a creamed artichoke soup. I made it as follows (it was to the best of my recollection):

3 cans of artichokes (drained of liquid)
2 quarts of chicken stock
1 large garlic clove
Ghee

I put the garlic clove through a garlic press, and then sauteed it in ghee. Then I added the canned artichoke and chicken stock. I let that simmer for about 15 minutes and then pureed it. It was awesome! I'm going to be making it again, and this time I'll be trying it with fresh artichokes.

I also made some carrot juice with my new juicer. Wow! Did it taste good! I used organic carrots and they are very sweet. I could only enjoy 2 tsps. per the GAPs diet introduction. Tomorrow I should be able to enjoy more.

I'm on Day 4

As per usual, it's been a while since I last blogged. That's how I roll apparently.

Well, since the last time I blogged there isn't anything terribly new and exciting. My psoriasis never really went into full remission except for the week I was on a Bermudan cruise, go figure. Since the cruise (in May) I started to develop more food sensitivities, and after messing around with avoiding salicylates (a phenol found in 80% of all foods, and the compound that makes food good). I had some slight success, but never any full remission. So, after doing some research and reading/listening to some interviews with Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride, the author of Gut and Psychology Syndrome, I've decided to go on the GAPs protocol.

The reason for this decision is because no matter what restrictive diet I could put myself on, I would eventually have less and less food that I could eat. This would be the case because at the root of all my problems is a leaky gut and bad gut flora. The GAPs protocol is designed to heal the gut, and GI tract.

So, there's a part of the GAPs diet that is called the GAPs Introduction Diet. It really helps to speed up the healing in the gut. This is because the diet is pretty restrictive, but it doesn't last indefinitely. I am currently on Phase 3 of the Introduction diet. I have been on this diet for 4 days. I'm not going to lie. It has been really really hard. I thought "oh soup stock, boiled meat, I can do that." I had no idea how I would be feeling by doing this. I stayed on Phase one for 3 days. That was really hard. I essentially had chicken soup, boiled cauliflower, and stock. I had to deviate from the diet by using coconut oil in my soup to help to satisfy my hunger. The only fat that's allowed in the first few phases is duck fat, but since we are a one car family, I had to do what I had to do.

The other awesome mistake I've made is started probiotics on day one of Phase one. Apparently from what I've read since then, you are supposed to start probiotics on Phase four to help control the die off. Well, since I didn't do that, I'm having some die off. With all the die off, I do see some improvement in the psoriasis on my knee and my hand.

I can honestly say, that getting to Phase three really makes this introductory diet do able. Below is the summary of what you can eat in the different phases. As you'll see, the first two phases are pretty depressing, but once I was able to start having scrambled eggs and trying out the "pancakes" (I actually made them into muffins b/c it was easier), this has become much more doable, and I feel a lot more optimistic.

You can eat on stage 1:
• Meat or fish stock
• Well boiled broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, onions, leeks
• Squash, winter and summer
• Boiled meat
• Sea salt,
• 1-2 teaspoons a day of sauerkraut juice
Stage 2
You can eat on Stage 2:
• Meat or fish stock
• Well boiled GAPS-legal vegetables (no starchy root vegetables)
• Squash, winter and summer
• Boiled meat
• Sea salt
• Fresh herbs
• Fermented vegetables; sauerkraut, kimchi, pickles
• Fermented fish
• Egg yolk, organic, carefully separated from the white
• Homemade ghee
• Stews and casseroles made with meat and vegetables
Stage 3
You can eat on Stage 3:
• Meat or fish stock
• Well boiled GAPS-legal vegetables (no starchy root vegetables)
• Squash, winter and summer
• Boiled meat
• Sea salt
• Fresh herbs
• Fermented vegetables; saurkraut, kimchi, pickles
• Fermented fish
• Egg yolk, organic, carefully separated from the white
• Homemade ghee
• Stews and casseroles made with meat and vegetables
• Ripe avocado mashed into soups, starting with 1-3 teaspoons a day
• Pancakes made with nutbutter, squash, and eggs- fried in fat or ghee, start with one a day
• Scrambled eggs made with ghee and served with avocado if tolerated and cooked vegetables.
Stage 4
You can eat on Stage 4:
• Meat or fish stock
• Well boiled GAPS-legal vegetables (no starchy root vegetables)
• Squash, winter and summer
• Boiled, roasted, or grilled meat (not burned)
• Sea salt
• Fresh herbs
• Cold pressed olive oil
• Fermented vegetables; saurkraut, kimchi, pickles
• Fermented fish
• Egg yolk, organic, carefully separated from the white
• Homemade ghee
• Stews and casseroles made with meat and vegetables
• Ripe avocado mashed into soups, starting with 1-3 teaspoons a day
• Pancakes made with nutbutter, squash, and eggs- fried in fat or ghee, start with one a day
• Scrambled eggs made with ghee and served with avocado if tolerated and cooked vegetables.
• Freshly pressed juices, start with a few tablespoons of carrot juice
• Bread made with nut flour, eggs, squash, tolerated fat, salt
You can eat on Stage 5:
• Meat or fish stock
• Raw legal vegetables, peeled
• Squash, winter and summer
• Peeled, cooked apple, pureed
• Honey, up to a couple tablespoons a day
• Boiled, roasted, or grilled meat (not burned)
• Sea salt
• Fresh herbs
• Cold pressed olive oil
• Fermented vegetables; saurkraut, kimchi, pickles
• Fermented fish
• Egg yolk, organic, carefully separated from the white
• Homemade ghee
• Stews and casseroles made with meat and vegetables
• Ripe avocado mashed into soups, starting with 1-3 teaspoons a day
• Pancakes made with nutbutter, squash, and eggs- fried in fat or ghee, start with one a day
• Scrambled eggs made with ghee and served with avocado if tolerated and cooked vegetables.
• Freshly pressed juices, carrot, mint, cabbage, lettuce, apple, pineapple, mango
• Bread made with nut flour, eggs, squash, tolerated fat, salt
Stage 6
You can eat on Stage 6:
• Meat or fish stock
• Raw legal vegetables, peeled
• Squash, winter and summer
• Peeled, raw apple
• Other fruits, raw, introduce slowly
• Honey, up to a couple tablespoons a day
• Boiled, roasted, or grilled meat (not burned)
• Sea salt
• Fresh herbs
• Cold pressed olive oil
• Fermented vegetables; saurkraut, kimchi, pickles
• Fermented fish
• Egg yolk, organic, carefully separated from the white
• Homemade ghee
• Stews and casseroles made with meat and vegetables
• Ripe avocado mashed into soups, starting with 1-3 teaspoons a day
• Pancakes made with nutbutter, squash, and eggs- fried in fat or ghee, start with one a day
• Scrambled eggs made with ghee and served with avocado if tolerated and cooked vegetables.
• Freshly pressed juices, carrot, mint, cabbage, lettuce, apple, pineapple, mango
• Bread made with nut flour, eggs, squash, tolerated fat, salt- use dates and dried fruit to sweeten.

Homemade Pancake Syrup

This recipe is so simple! It has only three ingredients, and can be made in less then five minutes.

Ingredients:
2 cups of sugar
1 3/4 cups of water
1 T of maple flavoring (also known as mapleine)

Directions:
Put sugar into pan and cover with water. Stir. Bring to boil and boil for 1 minute. Turn off the stove and mix in maple flavoring. Serve hot off the stove.

Cost to make homemade pancake syrup:

Sugar (1 lb):            $.75
Maple Flavoring:       $.50
Water:                   $0.00
Total:                    $1.25

This is a great alternative to pancake syrup from the store from a budget and nutrition perspective. Enjoy!

A few notes:


You can use as much as 3 cups of sugar, and you can also let the simple syrup boil for longer for a thicker pancake syrup. Also, you can start with 2 teaspoons of maple flavoring and see if that tastes mapley enough for you (3 teaspoons = 1 tablespoon). Since you are making it you can customize it to the tastes of your family!

Boiling the simple syrup.

After the maple flavoring is mixed in.

Maple Syrup vs. Imitation Syrup

True confession time: I was raised on Log Cabin, Mrs. Buttersworth, and Aunt Jemima's Syrup (and the generic equivalent). I believed it was maple syrup. Then I met my husband, who was shocked that I not only ate and enjoyed Mrs. Buttersworth, but that I also thought that real maple syrup was too sweet. During the course of our dating, I saw the error of my ways and slowly retrained my taste buds to accept what real maple syrup tasted like.

So what is the difference between maple syrup and imitation maple syrup?


What we call fake or imitation maple syrup actually has a name- pancake syrup, waffle syrup, table syrup, or just syrup. This type of syrup is not allowed to have the word maple in the name because it does not contain any amount of maple in it. 

The ingredients found in real maple syrup is simply maple sap. Maple sap is simply water, sugar, and trace amounts of minerals (good ones like magnesium, zinc, and calcium).

On the other hand, the popular brands of pancake syrup usually contain the following ingredients: corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, water, cellulose gum, caramel color, salt, sodium benzoate and sorbic acid (preservatives), artificial and natural flavors, sodium hexametaphosphate. Yikes! That's a lot of ingredients, most of which were developed in a laboratory.

Unlike the ingredients found in pancake syrup, the ingredients found in maple syrup don't require a Google search to know what you are eating. In case you were wondering that sodium hexablahblah is used as an ingredient in water softeners and detergents, which makes me as the question "Is that really safe to eat?" I think it's pretty safe to say that pancake syrup is not something you want to feed your family.

So, now that we know what's in these two syrups, let's look at how they are made.  I honestly wish I could find pictures of how pancake syrup is made, but like most of the science experiment food from large companies, there are none to be found. It's probably a two fold reason. The first is because there are trade secrets that they don't want to divulge, and the second is probably because nobody would want to eat it if they saw what it looked like before it came in the pretty little bottle.

We do know the process of how real maple syrup is made. It is first gathered from maple trees beginning in late February and lasts for about six weeks. In order for the sap to come out of the tree there needs to be a very specific temperature range: roughly 40 degrees during the day and 20 degrees at night. The temperature plays an important role in the movement of the sap within the tree.

The maple trees are tapped in the trunk with a spout to allow the syrup to drip into a container.  The syrup can be contained in a bucket, a jar, or even a plastic bag as seen below.

Sap dripping into a container. Taken in Holmes County, Ohio.

The maple sap then gets collected and put into an evaporator, where the water is boiled off and the sap is reduced into the syrup we know and love. It does need to get filtered to remove the sugar sand before it is finished and bottled.

Evaporator used in the production of maple syrup.

Here's a picture of a sugarbush along the road.

The choice is simple, maple syrup is superior in both taste and nutrition. There is however a drawback to the real stuff- price. Because of the limited area and time frame from which maple syrup can be harvested and the energy expenses incurred in the reduction process, it is noticeably more expensive then pancake syrup. It's probably at least double the cost, unless you buy it at Costco, Sam's, or BJ's.

For those on a more restricted budget, I have a recipe for homemade pancake syrup that has far less ingredients (and far scarier too!), which I will be sharing in a separate post.

Also, please note that the ingredients listed above for pancake syrup came directly from the Aunt Jemima website. Additionally, Log Cabin does have a pancake syrup made with no High Fructose Corn Syrup, but it still probably has the other scary ingredients in there.

Psoriasis Update

It's been a little more then month ago when I first talked about my psoriasis.  I figured it was time for an update.

Beginning February 1st, I began going to a tanning salon.  There are a whole host of studies that have been done showing the benefits of tanning to psoriasis. Tanning beds (with UVB lights) help the body to metabolize vitamin D, which helps to promote proper skin function. Vitamin D deficiency can also be linked to over 100 diseases (Tanning Truth). Real vitamin D is very important for our bodies.

The UV has been shown to kill T-Cells. The T-cells circulate the body looking for foreign antigens to attack. In the case of psoriasis they attack the body's own skin cells, and end up in the areas they are attacking (National Psoriasis Foundation). That is why psoriasis spots are very red. Exposing the T-Cells to UV rays not only reduces the redness significantly, but also slows down the growth of the scaling skin cells (International Eczema and Psoriasis Foundation) (Pathol 2008) (Pathol 2011).

This is not to say that tanning beds are the a silver bullet treatment or the answer to all of life's problems. There are always risks and concerns with things, and tanning beds are not exempt from that. Tanning beds have a risk of causing potential eye damage (that of course is if you look at the lights without protective eye wear), and links to melanoma. As far as the melanoma connection, there are just as many studies disproving links to UV exposure as there are proving them (Tanning Truth).

Here's the pictures from January 24, 2012. This was after switching my diet and using the topical lotions prescribed by the doctor. This also included taking vitamin D3 every morning orally:

 And here are the pictures from today. This is doing everything I was doing in January plus the tanning salon. I went twice a week for the month of February:

As you can see, there is a marked improvement in the visual appearance of my psoriasis on my hands. I had patches on the inside of both my elbows, a patch on my left shoulder, and some under my right arm. All those patches disappeared during the month of February.

As far as I am concerned, the positives of indoor tanning far outweigh the negatives.