Eating on a budget: week two

Week Two was harder than week one. Johnny fell of the bandwagon…because of his peanut butter addiction. It turns out that having a Costco size peanut butter container on hand isn't the best idea. We went over the budget a tiny bit, but this week I had 3 weddings and it was my birthday; which made staying within it a lot harder. I also started having my allergies again, my eyes puffed up and started itching in the middle of the week after I had eaten some wheat. I haven't fully tied my allergies to wheat but it's what I'm starting to suspect as a trigger. I tried to cheapen our diet with grains which ended up not working out for me health-wise. 

So…what now!? I can't continue this way, it's proven to me that I need to do more gut healing. For the remainder of the month I am going to switch gears into a diet that speeds gut healing and I will be blogging about that as well as the cost of it. Almost everyone needs gut healing, especially those who haven't been able to afford the best food, so I hope this still remains applicable as well as helpful to my audience. I will also continue to post about different things that pertain to eating on a budget and eating well with a busy schedule. 

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The New Protocol:
GAPS diet: Which stands for Gut and Psychology Syndrome
This diet was developed by Natasha Campbell-Mcbride, who has a Master of Medical Sciences in Neurology and Master of Medical Sciences in Human Nutrition. 

"Dr. Campbell-McBride set up The Cambridge Nutrition Clinic in 1998.  As a parent of a child diagnosed with learning disabilities, she was acutely aware of the difficulties facing other parents like her, and she has devoted much of her time to helping these families.  She realized that nutrition played a critical role in helping children and adults to overcome their disabilities, and has pioneered the use of probiotics in this field.

She believes that the link between learning disabilities, the food and drink that we take, and the condition of our digestive system is absolute, and the results of her work have supported her position on this subject.  In her clinic, parents discuss all aspects of their child's condition, confident in the knowledge that they are not only talking to a professional but to a parent who has lived their experience.  Her deep understanding of the challenges they face puts her advice in a class of its own."

About Natasha from: www.gapsdiet.com 

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The affect of gut health on your psychology is undeniable. But this diet is more than that. It was developed for conditions such as Autism, ADHD, Schizophrenia, Auto-Immunity, Depression and Allergies. The reason it works for these conditions is that a lot of them are affected, if not caused, by leaky gut. You may have heard this term, Leaky Gut, before but might not really know what it is. Well, a short description is:

Because of a plethora of dysfunction, improper chewing, low stomach acid, etc. our food is not properly digested. These undigested particles make it to our small intestine and start destroying the villi on the walls, these walls, which are usually selective about what they let pass out into our blood and our system, become damaged by our undigested food and start taking any nutrients they can get, even at improper sizes. This begins to overwhelm the immune system. Not only that, but the food that continues on through the large intestine and colon begins to damage those systems as well. Because of low stomach acid there can also be parasites that would have normally been killed by the acid that survive and make it through your system. All these things combined lead to the major health issues I mentioned above.

Good news though, there is a way to heal your gut, and the GAPS diet is just what the doctor (actually probably not the doctor) ordered. GAPS starts out really intense at first so you can do major healing, then you slowly start to incorporate more foods. For a full outline of the Introduction see HERE.

A HUGE part of this diet is Bone Broth soups. As mentioned on the GAPS website: 
Homemade meat or fish stock.  
Meat and fish stocks provide building blocks for the rapidly growing cells of the gut lining and they have a soothing effect on any areas of inflammation in the gut.  That is why they aid digestion and have been known for centuries as healing folk remedies for the digestive tract. 

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I didn't intend to end this project so quickly, but my body is asking something of me and I need to listen. I may continue the project after I am done with this part, and I think sharing this experience with ya'll could be just as helpful. We all need some amount of gut healing and I am hopeful that this will be accessible cost wise to everyone.