Our site promotes good quality natural food without breaking the bank, proving that it is possible to eat well, heal the body and be on a budget. We don't go in for flamboyant expensive equipment and ingredients, or complicated recipes - we eat real... real food, with real appetites, prepared quickly with the best quality food we can afford. Practical food for feeding a hungry family! We give practical, realistic advice!
I trained as a teacher and specialise in helping children with special needs to learn to read. My reading programme can be found at:
www.readingmadesimple.weebly.com
Hence I am not a doctor and all advice concerning health is given from practical experience, or from personal reading and research.
A member of the medical profession should always be consulted regarding all matters relating to your health.
We hope you stay and enjoy the recipes on our site.
I trained as a teacher and specialise in helping children with special needs to learn to read. My reading programme can be found at:
www.readingmadesimple.weebly.com
Hence I am not a doctor and all advice concerning health is given from practical experience, or from personal reading and research.
A member of the medical profession should always be consulted regarding all matters relating to your health.
We hope you stay and enjoy the recipes on our site.
Read the practical implications of starting the GAPS diet here.
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We started the GAPS diet in Feburary 2016 and to Dec. 2023 still mainly eat GAPs, but have added sourdough and potatoes.
Husband
Husband was diagnosed with Graves disease - an auto-immune condition, August 2015. He is on medication to control his over-active thyroid. The medics were keen to give him radioactive treatment to zap his thyroid as it was not responding to treatment very well. Husband was keen to try a natural approach, if not to put it into remission, to help restore the health of his gut and health in general. He has responded amazingly to the diet - the hospital struck him off their list in disgust, when he refused their help and said he would be back soon for help. Thankfully we have a helpful GP. Eight years on he feels well, has reduced his medication to one small dose pill per week under medical supervision, and hopes to come off them entirely one day.
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Me - wife
I have an under-active thyroid and also suffered symptoms of i.b.s. on and off. Have suffered badly from anxiety. Also had migraines.
The i.b.s has now gone, The anxiety only slightly evident when I'm tired, but reduced to an easily manageablt level - i.e. go to bed and sleep and wake up feeling refreshed! The migraines disappeared once I came off of gluten. I have been through menopause - not entirely without trouble, but minimal and am now reducing my thyroid meditaion further, with the help of my doctor. |
One day, many years ago, I was telling my friend that one of my sons was anaemic and she gave me a copy of 'Nourishing Traditions'. I read it and must admit I thought it the weirdest cookbook I'd ever read, If you've never heard of it, it is a book calling us back to traditional ways of preparing food and advocating not using refined sugar and white flour due to the harm they do to our bodies. It also stresses that our bodies need natural saturated animal fats, like butter, in high quantities - so flying in the face of 'politically correct nutrition and the diet dictocrats' (Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon).
It made sense, but I'd never heard of soaking grains, or fermenting vegetables! We liked the idea of cream and butter though, so we ditched the margarine and semi-skimmed milk. It was rather hard to cut out sugar, but we did reduce the amount. I stopped buying 'Ribena' and 'from concentrate' juices and switched to letting them have a centimetre of freshly pressed pasteurised juice in a glass of water once a day. Husband has always been happy drinking water, so they were happy to copy him. We also stopped having boxed cereals and started soaking our breakfast grains. Husband loved his with LOTS of cream! I was given a bread maker and started making my own wholemeal bread.
I began to suspect that my son was not absorbing his food as he should as we ate plenty of iron-rich foods. A couple of years later he was vitamin D deficient too, and then anaemic again and this continued on and off. I did lots of research on the web to see if anything would help him, and did find the GAPS diet. I read all about it, but realised the chances of my family ever coming off their chocolate and cakes was very slim, so resigned to forget the idea and carry on doing my best to help him.
Every now and then I would pick up Nourishing Traditions and have another look. Gradually I replaced more and more foods with home-made alternatives. But sourdough and fermented vegetables still seemed rather extreme. I did try experimenting with soaked bread, but never found a suitable recipe until very recently on the Weston Price Website.
Fast forward to finding GNOWFGLINS http://gnowfglins.com/ and here was a wealth of practical help! Thank you Wardee, you have so blessed our family. I was so taken up with trying recipes and learning new skills - yes soaked grains became the norm and now I dabbled with fermented vegetables! I have even got to grips with sourdough, though sadly it had to be put in the bin while we did GAPS, but it is back in for most of the family now, adn we have plentiful exciting recipes ot explore. Just by making this small change, my son's anaemia vanished, I had tons more energy and no longer woke with a tired dragging feeling behind the eyes. The asthma went and my husbnad and I have very slowly beeen able toreduce our thyroid medication. Note the word slowly - you can only do this slowly or the body panics feeling that something is being withdrawn and you have to raise the dose once more to reduce it more slowly - think more of a period of years. Husband took 8 years to get down to one small dose pill a week, continuing to reduce even after we ended full GAPs and introduced sourdough and potatoes to our diet - yes one small dose pill per week. I am sill reducing - but with menopause in the middle it has taken ne longer. But I am reducing and feel better.
So we know that the food we eat has a big impact on our health and can see and feel the difference that eating more nutritionally brings.
Why did we call our site Mind the Gaps?' Simply because when we started out, it felt as it there were going to literally be many gaps in our diet - things we loved that we had to leave out. Not all unhealthy - things like potatoes and parsnips, but we would miss them neverthrless. However, once our bodies were fd real food, adn we started to feel the benefits fo healing, we no longer missed them so much.
We hope our journal is valuable to someone. We have certainly valued other peoples experiences that they have so kindly shared, especially Cara Comini at Health, Home and Happiness http://www.healthhomeandhappiness.com/ and Jennifer Scribner http://bodywisdomnutrition.com and Melanie Christner at Honest Body. http://www.honestbody.com/
Thank you to you all!
It made sense, but I'd never heard of soaking grains, or fermenting vegetables! We liked the idea of cream and butter though, so we ditched the margarine and semi-skimmed milk. It was rather hard to cut out sugar, but we did reduce the amount. I stopped buying 'Ribena' and 'from concentrate' juices and switched to letting them have a centimetre of freshly pressed pasteurised juice in a glass of water once a day. Husband has always been happy drinking water, so they were happy to copy him. We also stopped having boxed cereals and started soaking our breakfast grains. Husband loved his with LOTS of cream! I was given a bread maker and started making my own wholemeal bread.
I began to suspect that my son was not absorbing his food as he should as we ate plenty of iron-rich foods. A couple of years later he was vitamin D deficient too, and then anaemic again and this continued on and off. I did lots of research on the web to see if anything would help him, and did find the GAPS diet. I read all about it, but realised the chances of my family ever coming off their chocolate and cakes was very slim, so resigned to forget the idea and carry on doing my best to help him.
Every now and then I would pick up Nourishing Traditions and have another look. Gradually I replaced more and more foods with home-made alternatives. But sourdough and fermented vegetables still seemed rather extreme. I did try experimenting with soaked bread, but never found a suitable recipe until very recently on the Weston Price Website.
Fast forward to finding GNOWFGLINS http://gnowfglins.com/ and here was a wealth of practical help! Thank you Wardee, you have so blessed our family. I was so taken up with trying recipes and learning new skills - yes soaked grains became the norm and now I dabbled with fermented vegetables! I have even got to grips with sourdough, though sadly it had to be put in the bin while we did GAPS, but it is back in for most of the family now, adn we have plentiful exciting recipes ot explore. Just by making this small change, my son's anaemia vanished, I had tons more energy and no longer woke with a tired dragging feeling behind the eyes. The asthma went and my husbnad and I have very slowly beeen able toreduce our thyroid medication. Note the word slowly - you can only do this slowly or the body panics feeling that something is being withdrawn and you have to raise the dose once more to reduce it more slowly - think more of a period of years. Husband took 8 years to get down to one small dose pill a week, continuing to reduce even after we ended full GAPs and introduced sourdough and potatoes to our diet - yes one small dose pill per week. I am sill reducing - but with menopause in the middle it has taken ne longer. But I am reducing and feel better.
So we know that the food we eat has a big impact on our health and can see and feel the difference that eating more nutritionally brings.
Why did we call our site Mind the Gaps?' Simply because when we started out, it felt as it there were going to literally be many gaps in our diet - things we loved that we had to leave out. Not all unhealthy - things like potatoes and parsnips, but we would miss them neverthrless. However, once our bodies were fd real food, adn we started to feel the benefits fo healing, we no longer missed them so much.
We hope our journal is valuable to someone. We have certainly valued other peoples experiences that they have so kindly shared, especially Cara Comini at Health, Home and Happiness http://www.healthhomeandhappiness.com/ and Jennifer Scribner http://bodywisdomnutrition.com and Melanie Christner at Honest Body. http://www.honestbody.com/
Thank you to you all!
Read the practical implications of starting the GAPS diet here.
The GAPS diet
If you don't already know, GAPS stands for Gut and Psychology Syndrome, by Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride, a diet to not just deal with the symptoms of many diseases and allergies, but to heal the gut and by so doing heal the body of the effects of the disease. The gut gets damaged through a diet of mainly processed foods, stress, the use of medicines and antibiotics etc.. etc... It is an adaptation of the SCD diet which has been around for many years. She formed it out of her desire to help her own autistic son. There are many gut healing programmes, but this one is particularly written with autistic, depressed, ADD, ADHD, dyslexic and dyspraxic youngsters in mind, including those who have eating disorders. It gives hope where doctors have failed. The author also has much expereince with autoimmune diseases. She addresses how to help fussy eaters too, an important aspect as many of these youngsters are very sensitive to new foods and tend to limit their diet to just a few carbohydrates and their parents think they will never get them to eat according to the GAPs diet. Help is at hand!
In the case of auto-immune diseases, there is no cure as such, but they can be put into re-mission so that the symptoms are not felt. Healing from an auto-immune disease is a bit like doing a jig-saw puzzle. There are many aspects to put right including making changes to the life-style (sleep, eating, stress etc... ) and environment (removing as many harmful toxins in the home, e.g. chemicals in household cleaning products and personal products), but none of these will help if the gut still remains damaged. It can be tricky finding the bit of the puzzle that is missing (or that has triggered the auto-immune response). But the fact we have auto-immune disease means our health is somewhat compromised, so we are doing the diet to at least get the 'core' of the body back in shape. The rest we leave in the Lord's hands. To find out more see: http://www.gapsdiet.com/ |