Hello Again & Health Update/1.75 Years on GAPS

Double Rainbow, Khuvsgal Province, Mongolia, July 2014

Well, it has been forever since I've had time to post any updates. Life has been full these past months.

We've had moves, job changes, and overseas travel. Yes! We actually travelled overseas this past summer, something that I never would have been strong enough to do just a year and a half ago. We visited my family in Mongolia, where I grew up, and we had a wonderful time. Thankfully, the predominant diet in Mongolia is grass fed meat and broths! We had to "cheat" a little bit while we were there, but for the most part, with some careful planning, we were able to maintain our dietary needs during the trip. I've interspersed some photos from our trip in my post.

So, you ask, how is our health after one and three-quarters years on GAPS?

Before GAPS

After 1.75 Years of GAPS

Well, after being diagnosed with an unspecified protein-losing gastroenteropathy two years ago, my health is 75% improved, I would say. I still have to pace my activity and stress level, and I don't think I'll ever return to my former occupation of emergency room nursing; but I generally feel good. I rarely experience severe fatigue. I rarely have episodes of adrenal stress or anxiety (still occasionally, and I know what my triggers are and how to manage them). I can go for six or more hours without eating during the day and still feel fine. No shakiness, no weakness. I can fast for 12-16 hours at night without feeling anything. I can eat just two meals per day with plenty of healthy fats and veggies and some animal protein and fermented foods, and feel great. I can sleep, usually for ten hours straight; although I occasionally still have interrupted nights and still require a lot of sleep to function well. I can go for ten mile hikes (yes, I said ten). For someone who could barely walk around the block a year and a half ago, that is nothing short of amazing! I have much improved emotional resilience, and much improved ability to handle life stressors. My brain fog is still there, but it is better. I can work part-time in addition to spending about twenty-five hours per week in kitchen and household tasks and several other hours in gardening and yard work. So, yes, I am greatly improved, and very thankful for the health that I have been given to steward. Healing the body after being so low can take many many years, so I am very satisfied with the improvements I've made on GAPS the past one and three-quarters years. Take a look at these comparison photos of me here. You can see the improvement. 

My husband is a bit of a different story. From the beginning, his symptoms were different from mine. He was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, and he didn't feel as bad generally. But he had the chronic loose bloody stools and weight loss. He improved greatly on GAPS for the first eight months or so. His stools decreased to 1-2 per day and to formed consistency. He gained some weight and looked healthier. Then, for unknown reasons, around the one year mark on GAPS, he flared up again, and we have not been able to get him back in full control. He has been consistent with the full GAPS diet, and we even removed some of the full diet foods and regressed him a bit, but with no changes. I was (and truth be told, still am) feeling a little frustrated and concerned. The GAPS dietary protocols and probiotics alone do not seem to be cutting it for him. I consulted Dr. Natasha's FAQ's page and found out that UC can be very stubborn. For patients with difficulty healing, she recommends returning to the introduction diet and eating animal proteins only until improvement is seen. She says it can sometimes take a year of a meat and broth and eggs diet for healing to take place. After a year

and a half of working through the intro diet and strictly following the full GAPS diet, you can imagine this was pretty discouraging news for my husband to hear. But he's persevering with this nutritional healing thing. So about a couple months ago, we put him on an animal protein diet with plenty of broths. We took out eggs for now, unsure if he had developed a sensitivity to them. So he's just doing meats and broths. He has seen some improvement in the past couple months.

I have been doing other research as well, and reading about the use of activated charcoal for UC. I plan to start him on that in the next week. Listen to Your Gut) little book, Natural Treatments for Gut Infection, which discusses the possible infectious component of IBD, and outlines her protocol for treating this with wild oregano oil and probiotic enemas. Since she believes in many of the basic GAPS concepts, her protocol can easily be

incorporated into our GAPS routine. She has an interesting perspective on certain things that Dr. Natasha doesn't address as directly. Such as research that shows an association between Crohn's and specific pathogenic microorganisms, for which she recommends using wild oregano oil in a cyclical pattern for several months at a time over the course of a couple years. Also, she discusses research
Also, I recently read Jini Patel Thompson's (recovered Crohn's patient and author of
that indicates that Crohn's and UC patients may have intolerances to specific strains of probiotic bacteria, and should start by taking one strain at a time to see how it is tolerated, gradually building up to a multi-strain probiotic. She also advocates the use of probiotic retention enemas (an enema that is not expelled, but retained until it is completely absorbed). I hope to try these things for my husband, and will report back on whether we have success.

Khuvsgal Lake, Khuvsgal province, Mongolia, July 2014