My GAPS Healing Story

The road to wellness is not always smooth-sailing, nor is it a one-size-fits-all roadmap. There are numerous healing modalities out there, and we are all individuals with a unique set of symptoms and circumstances to navigate. I am grateful to have found the GAPS Nutritional Protocol, and the profound impact it has had on my family's overall health. I had no idea just how much GAPS would change the trajectory of our lives forever, and in the best way. This is our story:

I wasn't always interested in health. I grew up eating the typical "Standard American Diet": highly processed, packaged food products, sugary treats, soda, artificial cheeses and spreads, as well as fast food multiple times a week. This "food" lacked nutrients, and for as long as I can remember I suffered from digestive and female complaints, allergies of all sorts, and frequent infections that were treated with multiple rounds of antibiotics. I never really felt good in my body. I was a newlywed in my early 20s the first time I ever heard someone explain that food could be used as medicine, as a dear friend shared his story of beating a cancer diagnosis with nutrition and natural protocols. I thought, if food can do that for something like cancer, maybe dietary changes could help alleviate some of mine and my husband's health issues?

We discovered our local farmer's market and I got my hands on the book 'Nourishing Traditions', by Sally Fallon Morell, which revolutionized the way I thought about nutrition and what it means to be healthy. I was immediately intrigued by the fact that it is the complete OPPOSITE of what we had been taught to believe about health, and yet it made sense because it considered what cultures around the world have done throughout history for good health. I decided that I wanted to apply this way of eating, especially when it came time to feed our own future family. My husband and I began to make some dietary changes and noticed that we began to feel better, however we weren't fully invested, and still ate fast food pretty regularly.

It wasn't until I became a mother that the fire was lit beneath me to take health seriously. I was now responsible for this little precious life, and I wanted the best for my child. In her first few months of life, I could tell something was not right. She wasn't growing well despite breastfeeding on demand, and when we introduced solid food, our entire life changed. Over the next few years we were up to our necks navigating life with multiple/complex food allergies, FPIES, vaccine injury, failure to thrive, behavioral/sensory issues, digestive distress, eczema, and the impact chronic health issues can have on your social life. Life was really hard! As our family grew, we faced even more challenges, and I felt completely overwhelmed with trying to meet the most basic of needs of everyone: how to feed them.

The mainstream model of care for food allergies looks like this: avoiding exposure to triggers, carrying an Epi Pen for emergencies, blood tests, skin tests, medical formula (sometimes for life), and trialing foods one by one at home and in a clinical setting to determine what is "safe". As a mom, this looks like extreme hypervigilance which really does a number on one's nervous system. We did well managing for a few years, until a hospital food challenge ended in a reaction where my child nearly died. Thankfully, she was stabilized, but this horrible moment became a key turning point for my family's future.

Over the next few days after the reaction, my child's health was declining. Our medical team was dismissive of my concerns, chalking it up to a virus. My intuition told me otherwise, so I turned to the only other place I knew...I dropped to my knees and prayed the most desperate mother's plea: "God, PLEASE show me how to take care of my child." What happened next was, I suppose you could say supernatural...and as clear as anything. One word was given to me- not in my ear, but a strong impression on my heart. That word was "BROTH", and somehow I knew that it meant homemade, and not a store-bought variety. Perhaps it was a seed planted within me from Nourishing Traditions, or that conversation with my friend years prior. Either way, this was 2016, long before bone broth was widely known in the mainstream health world, so I did what any modern person would do...I Googled it to learn why.

"Health benefits of broth" was what I typed into Google, and I began reading articles about how soothing broth is for the gut, important for good digestion, as well as helpful for repairing a "leaky gut" due to the collagen content. Leaky Gut sounded a lot like allergies and FPIES to me. Broth is a nutritional powerhouse full of amino acids and minerals, easily digested and absorbed by the body. Furthermore, I kept repeatedly seeing "GAPS Diet" mentioned in articles and blogs that talked about gut healing. I clicked on a link to read about the GAPS Diet, and for the first time ever in the course of managing my child's chronic health issue, I found HOPE.

GAPS stands for Gut and Psychology Syndrome™, a book written by Dr Natasha Campbell-McBride. It is a food and lifestyle-based protocol that addresses the common denominator of all chronic health concerns: damaged or unhealthy gut flora. Our digestive system houses 70-80% of our immune system, so it is vital that it functions well. Damage can occur from many things: environmental and toxic exposures, nutrient deficiency, antibiotic usage, and more. Dr McBride's book contains clear instructions on how to build up a healthy digestive system, information on how the body works and why certain foods are helpful or harmful. There are also clear instructions for nursing mothers and weaning infants, food lists, recipes, and clean living. Meat stock and probiotic foods are the foundation to give the body proper tools for healing itself, and gentle detoxification is the way the body cleans itself. When the gut flora is restored to a healthy balance, immune function improves, and chronic symptoms begin to diminish or disappear altogether. The GAPS Nutritional Protocol is designed to be temporary, and many who come off GAPS move on to a Nourishing Traditions way of eating: real, ancestral, properly prepared foods.

I distinctly remember standing in my kitchen with a frozen chicken in one hand, and can of medical formula in the other. Both provided the nutrients my child needed, but one was a real food and the other was made in a lab. Real food made more sense to me, and I didn't look back. We committed to the GAPS protocol for 3 years. I watched in amazement as we added more and more safe foods daily, and saw every single one of the complex labels and diagnoses given to my child fall away completely, and she healed. I praise God for leading me to take action, and find it quite funny that we healed her food allergies...with food! Quite the opposite of how we initially "managed" her health. But it wasn't just my daughter who healed. We did the GAPS diet as a family. My second-born child who was at weaning age also had symptoms that pointed to digestive problems. She healed, too, and so did I. Even my husband, who was not 100% on GAPS, saw many health improvements.

This experience gave us our life back as we no longer had to micromanage symptoms, avoid triggers, subject our children to tests, use medical formula, or spend countless hours in a clinic. GAPS dramatically changed our family's lifestyle, and I fully committed to providing real food, embrace natural living, stewarding our bodies well, and sharing these valuable skills with others. As a family, we have learned how to listen to our bodies, and become more in-tune with how we are designed to function. We have overcome all of the food allergy symptoms I listed in the beginning of my story, as well as chronic constipation, lead poisoning, seasonal allergies, poor impulse control, low thyroid function, indigestion, and chronic infections and inflammation. My pregnancies and children that were born into our family after this shift have been strong and healthy, and our first two children (who are teenagers now) continue to thrive, and make good choices for themselves. GAPS takes commitment and a willingness to change your habits, but it has been such a gift of healing, restoration, and HOPE for my family. I remember in those early days of "mainstream symptom management" saying I would have paid a million dollars for a word of hope. Despite having a whole team of medical specialists, not once did anyone even suggest a probiotic! I received that word of hope through the words "broth" and "GAPS", and through other moms who were brave to share their stories of healing through the GAPS Nutritional Protocol. Real food can truly be our best medicine, and it doesn't require paying a million dollars to learn that. I hope that our story can inspire hope in you!

May you be blessed with good health!

-Kyla