The GAPS Diet comes in two main stages: Intro and Full. It's assumed that when you're starting out, your gut is a total mess. You could be eating the most healthful food in the world, but if your gut is so screwed up that it can't absorb that nutrition, then it's not doing you any good. In order to heal the gut enough to start absorbing foods properly, the introductory diet takes you through 6 stages that focus primarily on broth, soups, and some fermented foods in the beginning and slowly widens out to a greater selection of foods. There's a constant animal fat focus (from meat and dairy) because these fats contain important pieces of nutrition that a GAPS person is often lacking, and they're easily absorbed into the body. (Dr. Natasha goes into detail about why fats aren't the horrible, evil heart killers that people think they are. If you're interested, she focused on that topic in her book, Put Your Heart in Your Mouth. She also briefly covers it in the GAPS book.)

I've been having a hard time getting my head around what exactly you're allowed to eat during each stage of the introductory diet. So I thought I'd reread through the book and type it up in list form. I'm also not clear on when you move from one stage to the other. So I'll make notes on that as well.

Stage One
• Homemade meat or fish stock. (Do not use bouillon cubes!) Include joints and bones when making.
• Unprocessed salt (such as Real Salt from Utah)
• Peppercorns (roughly crushed into soup but later removed)
• Homemade soups using that homemade meat or fish stock.
• Veggies: Onions, carrots, broccoli, leeks, cauliflower, zucchini, squash, pumpkin, etc. Avoid fibrous vegetables such as cabbage and celery. Also to avoid fiber remove skin and seeds from squash and don't include stalks of broccoli and cauliflower. Cook vegetables well until they're very soft.
• Garlic (cooked for much less time than the veggies)
• Probiotic foods: in this stage, only include the juice from homemade sauerkraut, fermented vegetables or vegetable medley. Don't include the vegetables themselves yet. Only add probiotic juice after food has cooled slightly so you don't kill off the good bacteria.
• If there is no reaction to dairy then include whey, sour cream, yoghurt and kefir (all should be homemade so the probiotics haven't been pasteurized out), especially for those suffering from diarrhea. Caution should be taken, however, with people suffering from constipation. They should focus on the probiotic vegetable juices and avoid the dairy sourced probiotics.
• Ginger tea, mint or camomile tea with a little honey between meals. Use fresh or frozen ginger root.

Transition point: As best I can tell, the transition point from stage one to stage two is when diarrhea or constipation is gone. So I'm not sure what that means for the person going into stage one without either problem. I did read in one blog that you shouldn't stay in stage one for longer than a week. It sounds like many people spend less time than that in stage one.

Stage Two - Anything that you were able to eat in stage one, plus the following...
• Raw organic egg  yolks carefully separated from the egg white. Start with one a day and eventually add to every bowl of soup and every cup of meat stock. Once raw egg yolk is well tolerated, add soft boiled eggs to soups (whites cooked, yolks runny).
• Stews and casseroles made with meats and vegetables.
• Fresh herbs
• Keep increasing amounts of probiotics (sauerkraut juice, whey, etc.) daily
• Introduce fermented fish (Swedish gravlax) starting with one small piece a day.
• Introduce homemade ghee (or use Purity Farms Organic Ghee which can be bought in stores). Even if you are unable to tolerate other dairy at this point, it is likely that ghee will be tolerated.

Transition point: I guess it's whenever you feel like you're ready to move on - that your digestive system is doing OK with what you've eaten so far and it feels OK to try some new things.

Stage Three - Anything that you were able to eat in stages one and two, plus the following...
• Ripe avocado - starting with a small amount and increasing as it's well tolerated
• Pancakes (Do a little dance of joy at this point! No more soup for breakfast!) Start with one pancake a day and gradually increase the number. The pancakes should be made with organic nut butters, eggs, and squash (with seeds removed). There's a recipe for this type of pancakes at the end of this post by Erin, of Plan to Eat, on stage three of the GAPS diet (which was her fourth week of the intro diet).
• Eggs scrambled with plenty of ghee or goose or pork or duck fat. Serve with avocado and cooked veggies.
• Cooked onion cooked in ghee or animal fat. Cook for 20-30 minutes on very low heat until translucent.
• Sauerkraut and fermented veggies. Start small and increase amounts.

Stage Four - Anything that you were able to eat in stages one, two, and three, plus the following...
• Roasted or grilled meats. (Remember that everything before this point has been boiled in soup or broth.) This does not mean BBQ'd or deep fried. Avoid burned or overly browned bits.
• Cold pressed olive oil added to every meal. Start with a few drops per meal and work your way up to 1 - 2 tablespoons per meal. Don't cook with the olive oil. Just sprinkle it right on top of your food.
• Freshly pressed juices. Start with a few spoonfuls of carrot juice, filtered and diluted with warm water. Gradually increase to a cup a day. Once a full cup of carrot juice is well tolerated, begin to add celery, cabbage, lettuce and fresh mint leaves. Juice should be drunk on an empty stomach.
• Bread made from ground almonds or any other ground nuts and/or seeds. The recipe should include nut flour, eggs, squash (deseeded) and some natural fat (ghee, animal fat or coconut oil) and salt to taste. Start with a small piece a day and gradually increase.

Stage Five - You know the routine. All the old stuff plus this new stuff...
• Cooked apple - pureed. Peal first. Add ghee or animal fat. As always, start slow and gradually increase amounts. If the apples are too sour, you can add a bit of honey.
• Add raw veggies starting with the soft bits of lettuce and peeled cucumber. If those go well, add carrots, tomatoes, onions, cabbage, etc. If diarrhea returns, you're not ready for this step.
• Fruit juice - if the veggie juice is being tolerated, try a bit of apple, pineapple or mango juice. Avoid citrus.

Stage Six - This is the transition stage where you move into the Full GAPS diet.
• Peeled raw apple. Gradually introduce raw fruit and more honey.
• Gradually introduce baked cakes and other sweet things that are allowed on the full diet. Use dried fruit as a sweetener when baking.

Transition Information - Ah ha! After the 6th stage Dr. Natasha gives a better sense of when to transition from one stage to another. She says, "Most indicative are abdominal pain and the stool changes: let the pain and diarrhoea start clearing before moving to the next stage." I guess that means that as long as you don't have abdominal pain and poopy issues, you're ready to level up. She also warns that people with constipation problems may actually get worse on this diet without fiber, so she recommends "regular enemas or colonic irrigation." ... I think if I suggest to one of my teenagers that they receive an enema or colonic irrigation, they'll run away from home. We might just want to run through the diet a little faster in order to get back to fiber-land.

Soups and meat stocks should be happening every day throughout the introductory diet and even once you're into the full diet, there's supposed to be at least one serving a day. (Oh yay. ...says my vegetarian self who is very much not looking forward to such a meatful diet. *sigh*)

According to pages like this one in Journey to Food that Gives Life, tomatoes, mushrooms, and honey are legal from the beginning. I don't see that in the part of Natasha's book that describes the introductory diet, but perhaps it's been gleaned from other parts of the book that I haven't gotten to yet.

(The photo at the top is of veggies that my father-in-law is fermenting.)

I've found another helpful list of what you can eat when on the GAPS Intro diet from the Well Fed Homestead. 

I got this recipe from Mommypotamus. It was originally a chocolate chip cookie recipe, but when I tried replacing chocolate with raisins in one batch and the kids loved it, I decided I'd rather lean towards the dried fruit. I also added a little coconut flour to make them a wee bit more chewy. And I removed the vanilla (mostly because I rarely use vanilla. It's expensive and doesn't add enough flavor boost, in my opinion, to warrant addition. I think people are just used to desserts containing the stuff so they add it as part of a cooking tradition. If you like adding vanilla to your cookies, by all means, throw a teaspoon in to the mix.)

This recipe will make about 2 dozen cookies. Because there are no eggs, you can feel free to nibble on the dough.


Ingredients:

1 ½ almond flour
¼ cup coconut flour
¼ cup honey
¼ cup butter or coconut oil (softened)
½ tsp unrefined sea salt (I use Real Salt from Utah. That way it doesn't have to use as much gasoline to get to my house. I often hear folks recommending Celtic Sea Salt, but the Celts are pretty darn far away from where I live in Colorado.)
½ tsp baking soda
¾ cup raisins (I used golden raisins.)

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Mix all ingredients together excepting the raisins. Once the butter or coconut oil is well mixed in, add the raisins.

I used a small OXO cookie scoop to make my cookies. Cookie scoops are really handy. But you could use your hands and roll the dough into small balls, or flattened cookies shapes, or whatever you want, just as well. Packing the dough together in some way helps keep the cookies all together, so do something that involves some smooshing one way or another.  

Bake for 7 minutes. Once you see a bit of brown along the bottom edge, the cookies are done. If you wait till they're brown on top as well, the bottoms will probably be burnt. 

Although my sister had been using some of Dr. Natasha's principals and had told me about them, I hadn't heard of Dr. Natasha herself until my son's doctor sent us the link to this video.

I'm a systems person. That means I'm not very good at taking in or processing data in a vacuum. It makes much more sense to me, and fits together better in my head, when data comes with a context. That's what I feel Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride provides in this video. She doesn't just explain the connection between gut health and psychological health (which is brilliant in its own right) but backs the story even further out to explain how our guts got into the state they're currently in, going back several generations.

I feel like many nutrition discussions devolve into X causes Y. As we started to face health issues in our family, the chief comment I got from people was, it must be gluten because gluten causes such and such. But there seemed to be a wider range of issues we were facing (including runny nose, hives, trouble sleeping, and depression) and X causes Y didn't seem to capture our story. What Dr. Natasha brings out is that there are many factors - antibiotics, GMOs, processed foods, high carb diets, yeast overgrowths, generational dysbiosis, etc - and they all played a part. And the outcomes weren't the same for everyone. Just as there wasn't just one X, there's also not just one Y. Symptoms manifested differently, not just in different people, but in the same person it seems like they change over time, probably based on the health of the gut at that point in time and what pathogens and toxins are escaping out to the rest of the body.

I had studied a lot about allergies, yeast overgrowths, anorexia, autism, and several other issues, but nothing tied all the pieces together as neatly as Natasha's description in this video. It's long, but it's worth the listen. 

This is a story that begins in medias res. It comes after several dramas, a hospital stay, several trips to the vice-principal's office, and many, many tears and frustrations. It comes after reading through websites, magazines, and books trying to find solutions. It starts at what I hope is the beginning of the end. We've tried the spotty approach. Now we're gearing up to try a long haul effort at fighting back at the bad guys in our tummies by strengthening the good guys. We're in pursuit of healthy gut flora.

(I got this great photo from Green Mom.)