Community GAPS Challange: The Results

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May 2, 2019

Last month, we started doing the GAPS Challenge together. The GAPS challenge is all about getting through the introductory chapter to the GAPS journey. That chapter lasts for 30 days and can be completed using the Intro Diet ebook.

The first 30 days are the hardest because you are suddenly giving up foods that you were used to eating on regular basis. That’s why I feel like having a community that supports one another is so important. But the good thing is that if you decide to continue with GAPS for the next months, it will be so much easier!

Many of you wrote in the comments about how the challenge was going throughout this month. You shared your progress, asked questions, and asked for encouragement when things got hard. Other commentators would always be supportive, even if I wasn’t there to reply to all the comments myself. I never dreamt that I could be capable of building such a loving and supportive online community. Thank you everyone. This month has been a truly moving experience.

I want to remind you all once again that even if you don’t feel particularly better after doing the challenge, it’s perfectly normal. Some people will need more than 30 days to see results. For others, the GAPS might not work at all. That’s what makes us unique! It wouldn’t be fun if we were all the same person, right?

In today’s post, I want to sum up the challenge and see how we all did. Hopefully, we can all have a meaningful conversation and learn something new from one another. Here are the questions that I would like you to answer to begin that conversation:

Did you manage to complete the Intro to GAPS? Why or why not?
Did you feel any negative symptoms when you first started eating only GAPS-friendly foods? How long it took for them to disappear (if they did)?
Did you cheat during the challenge? (It’s ok if you did!). Did you feel better or worse after?
Did you sleep better?
Did you feel more energy? How did your energy level fluctuate throughout the day?
Has your perspective on cooking changed? Do you find making stock to be easier now?
Has the GAPS challenge opened your eyes to any new dietary concepts?
Are you going to continue with the GAPS diet? If not, are you going to keep some elements of it in your daily diet?
Would you recommend doing the GAPS to friends and family? Why or why not?
Did you make any new discoveries about how your body reacts to certain foods and how it digests them?

And of course, if you have anything else to add, please do so! Share your experience in the comments below so that we can all congratulate one another!

Is Relaxing the new Weight Loss Wonder Drug?

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May 2, 2019

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Is Relaxing the new Weight Loss Wonder Drug?

In this post, I want to talk a bit more in-depth about the negative effects of stress. We all know that being constantly stressed out is not good for you, but we are rarely aware of what exactly that entails.

Stress And Its Effects on Your Body

Did you know that stress can actually make you fat? People like to assume that if someone is fat then they must be stuffing themselves with carbs and fats. But that’s not always the case and I am a good example of that.

I have struggled with fat hatred for a long time. For me, even eating clean and cutting out all of these supposedly harmful foods didn’t do the trick, and I still had trouble losing weight. Now I have decided to embrace that and just accept that I need to work first on other aspects of my health. I do not feel self-conscious about my weight anymore but I feel sorry for anyone who does. Skinny privilege is a real thing. Nobody assumes you are unhealthy as long as you are skinny. But you can eat only the right foods, work out regularly, and still be fat. And people will think that it must be your own fault. But I digress, let’s go back to the main topic.

Gaining weight is natural response to stress. That’s because when you are stressed out, your sympathetic nervous system is in overdrive and the body can’t handle that much of the “fight or flight” response. To protect itself from damage, the body begins storing excess fat for protection.

Seek Help and Change Your Habits

I was always easily stressed out. Growing up in abusive household and suffering from PTSD will do that to you. I have healed a lot since then, I worked on myself and my mental health by going to therapy, but still, I think I more prone to stress than most people. Other factors might be important as well. Studying stressed me out and I didn’t get enough sleep when in high school. I was eating a regular American diet for all those years and I was inadvertently exposing myself to all kinds of chemical substances like PUFA. All of that has an effect on how we handle stress.

Stress is not only making your mind stressed, it’s making your whole body stressed. All of your organs are working in stress mode which disables their proper functioning. Similarly, when you relax after a stressful day at work, your body relaxes too. Having a tasty snack, getting a good night’s sleep, or even orgasming are all good ways to help you relax because these actions lower your stress levels.

Your Parasympathetic Nervous System

By relaxing, we are indicating to our parasympathetic nervous system that we are feeling good and that there are no worrying situations going on. In turn, we don’t get cold feet and hands because blood circulation is working as intended, our gut is properly digesting food, and we have more energy because our metabolism is improved.

Do you remember my other post about stress and the sympathetic nervous system? Both the parasympathetic nervous system and the sympathetic nervous system regulate our body’s functioning. But while the sympathetic nervous system deals more with handling stressful situations (the fight or flight response), the parasympathetic nervous system is all about relaxation. They work together to help you survive.

The parasympathetic nervous system is triggered whenever you feel relaxed. It’s best described by the term SLUDD which stands for Salivation, Lacrimation (crying), Urination, Digestion, Defecation.

So, what does it have to do with body weight? Everything.

Diet Recovery

I feel like we are still heavily ignoring the role metabolism plays in our health. It is most commonly associated with fast digestion and being skinny but it’s more important than that. It affects all of our bodily functions. Here is what Matt Stone has to say on the topic in Diet Recovery:

“Yeah, I know. Eating pretty much any overly restricted diet will do these things to you. Throw some “healthy” exercise in there with it and you’ve got a recipe for shutting down your entire system. It’s all caused by a drop in metabolic rate, which, in today’s day and age, is more significant than ever because metabolic rate, collectively, is already at an all-time low.

The Role of Metabolism

This of course sucks because your metabolism controls, well, everything. No seriously. EVERYTHING. Metabolic rate controls the rate at which every single cell in your body produces energy. In turn this controls how much testosterone you produce as a male, or how much progesterone – the primary fertility, sex drive, and youth hormone you produce if you are a woman. It controls the speed at which food travels through your digestive tract (the lower the metabolism, the more you have excess gas, bloating, constipation, or even irritation and resultant IBS-like symptoms).

Metabolism controls how many of those happy neurotransmitters you produce too. When metabolism is low you sort of live, perpetually, in that state that people get in when they haven’t eaten in several hours – somewhere between depressed, spaced-out, and angry at the world.”

Having a good metabolism is the key to not only losing weight, but also to being healthy overall. And one of the ways we can improve our metabolism is to utilize the parasympathetic nervous system. So yes, relaxation and getting our stress levels under control is how we can lose weight.

The Ultimate Guide to Fat and Why You Should Not be Avoiding it

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May 2, 2019

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The Ultimate Guide to Fat and Why You Should Not be Avoiding it

Today I want to talk about fat. Specifically, about different kinds of fat.

Fat is often what takes the most blame for high obesity rates in our country. It’s up there on the top of the list together with carbs, grains, and sugar. But we rarely stop to think what is the term “fat” entails exactly. Is a stick of grass-fed butter just as bad as the trans fats we find in fast foods? Logically thinking, that doesn’t seem likely, right? So why do we still cling to the idea that fat = bad?

Types of fat

Just like sugars, proteins, and other nutrients, fats can be of worse or better quality. They are not all equal. Let’s take butter for example.

If you go to a grocery store, you will see sticks of pale butter lining the refrigerated shelves. But if you go to a locally-supplied health store and search for grass-fed butter, that grass-fed butter will have a much more yellow coloring than the regular commercial butter. Although technically, they are both butters.

The yellow color is indicative of vitamin K2 content. When cows eat grass and use that grass to produce milk, it creates vitamin K. Vitamin K from the grass converts to vitamin K2 in the milk. And vitamin K2 is particularly important for our health because it’s one of the vitamins responsible for proper nutrient absorption. It also plays a big role in keeping our bones and teeth healthy.

We are severely lacking vitamin K2 in our diets compared to our ancestors. Drinking grass-fed milk and eating dairy products made from that milk is how we can supply our bodies with vitamin K2 again. Grass-fed dairy tends to be more expensive but I don’t think it’s worth it to save money on our health. Besides, you will spend less in the long run because your bones will be stronger and your teeth won’t deteriorate. Make your own butter and buttermilk to ensure you’re getting vitamin K2.

But grass-fed butter is only one of the many other traditional types of fat that can make our bodies healthier. Here are some of them:

coconut oil (both virgin and expeller-pressed)
pastured lard and bacon fat
pastured chicken and goose fat
duck fat
beef and lamb tallow
ghee
raw cream and raw cheese
organic palm oil and palm shortening
unrefined extra virgin olive oil
fermented cod liver oil
high vitamin butter oil
cocoa butter
pastured egg yolks
grass-fed meats
flaxseed and flaxseed oil
macadamia nuts

What about cholesterol and heart disease?

Many of the fats I listed are saturated fats. They generally stay solid at room temperature and have high smoke points, making them a good choice for cooking at high heat (but there are exceptions! For example, butter burns easily because it has leftover milk solids inside).

We may have heard that saturated fats are bad for us because they cause cardiovascular diseases. The same myth has been perpetuated by most leading health organizations and not many dare to put that statement under scrutiny. But as hard as it might be to believe, saturated fats do not give people heart disease.

Cholesterol and saturated fats have a very close association because they often appear in the same types of foods. And just like saturated fats, cholesterol has been villainized to an extreme point. Just like fats, there is both good and bad cholesterol. But that’s not the point of this post.

Matt Stone, an expert on nutrition and the author of Diet Recovery and Eat For Heat, says this about cholesterol and heart disease:

“Cholesterol levels are a pitiful indicator of heart disease risk to the point where they are really no indication at all. Mean serum cholesterol levels in France for example are almost identical to that of Americans, yet their heart disease risk is but a fifth of what America endures. This is just one of literally dozens of striking contradictions.”

The key takeaway

Our ancestors have lived their whole lives eating plenty of traditional saturated animal fats. Their foods were full of cholesterol. And their bodies were often much stronger than ours are right now because we have been weakened with years of eating processed foods that wreck our immune systems. Our ancestors kept eating saturated fats and didn’t all die from cardiovascular diseases. What does that tell us?

It tells us that we should embrace the traditional way of living and all the foods it contains. Yes, even saturated fats. Eating processed foods is what is going to kill us, not eating butter or coconut oil. So let’s stop clinging to the idea that fat is bad and unhealthy. Let’s choose what we eat in a mindful and responsible way, stopping to think on our own and not just accept whatever the media decides to feed us this time without questioning. I will stuff myself with grass-fed butter over drinking a spoonful of canola oil any day and I hope you can see why.

How to Make All-Purpose Yogurt Dough

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May 2, 2019

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I love this recipe for yogurt dough because of its versatility. It’s easy to make and it can be turned into so many different types of foods. I have made pizza with this dough. I have made whole grain crackers and fruit pies with flaky crusts. It also works beautifully as quiches. This is what I call all-purpose!

This is a very solid foundation that can help you begin the journey of cooking with real foods and real foods only. The true basic of natural dieting. You can use this recipe as a base for plenty of other meals you want to try and you’ll know that it will turn out delicious every time! I feel like having a reliable base like this makes all the difference. It definitely makes the transition to real food much easier!

I hope that I will be able to introduce you to more recipes like this. Recipes that rely solely on whole foods and do so without sacrificing any flavor.

I especially like the fact that this dough is made with soaked flour instead of just sprouted flour. I find that grains are easier to digest when they have a chance to soak overnight. That’s because the phytic acid in the flour becomes more neutralized. Of course, if you don’t have the time you can still make this dough with sprouted flour.

Necessary equipment:

a large mixing bowl
measuring cups
a wooden spoon
a dish towel
a rolling pin
a pizza cutter
optional: a dehydrator

Ingredients:

1 cup of natural yogurt (how to make yogurt)
3 1/2 cup of freshly ground flour (how to prepare grains)
1 cup (2 sticks) of softened butter (how to make butter)
1 t. of sea salt

Instructions:

Combine yogurt and butter in a large mixing bowl using a wooden spoon.
Add in the flour and salt. Keep combining until clumps form.
Use your fingers to knead the dough further. Continue until the surface of the dough is smooth to touch.
Cover the mixing bowl with a dish towel. This will keep any dirt out while still allowing the dough to breathe.
Leave to rest in a warm place overnight or for at least 12 hours. You can use a dehydrator for this or the oven with the inside light turned on.
Once 12 hours have passed, take out the dough and roll it out on a surface sprinkled with sprouted flour or arrowroot powder. Use a rolling pin to give it the desired shape and thickness:

crackers: The dough should be about 1/8 inch thick. Cut it into cracker shape using a pizza cutter or a similar tool and bake for 15 to 20 minutes at 350 degrees. A delicious substitute for store-bought cheese crackers!
pie crust: Cover the dough with aluminum foil and put something on top to weigh it down. Bake for 8 minutes at 450 degrees. Remove the weights and aluminum foil and bake for another 6 minutes or so.
pizza crust: Bake for 15 minutes at 375 degrees so that it hardens but doesn’t turn brown yet. Cover the crust with your desired pizza sauce and toppings. Bake for another few minutes until the crust becomes slightly browned.

I told you it’s easy!

Pumpkin Seven Layer Bars

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May 2, 2019

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Ever since I began making my own sweetened condensed milk, I have been searching for different recipes to try it out in. Not everything that I have tried worked as I would like it to have but some recipes turned out just too good not to share!

The seven layer bars are something that I always wanted to learn how to make but could never get them to taste right. At least not until I tried making them with my homemade sweetened condensed milk. It was a real game changer for me.

The layers I use in this recipe are as follows: graham crackers, pumpkin puree with spices, cream cheese, chocolate chips, pecan nuts, shredded coconut, and sweetened condensed milk. As you can probably imagine, those are not really seven distinctive layers and they kind of combine together as you make the bars but the point is that together, they simply taste amazing. These bars are so good and perfect for the fall season. The pumpkin, the cinnamon, the baked coconut – that’s the ultimate combination for a perfect fall snack. The rich flavors are amazing on their own but the scent that will be coming out of your kitchen will make you feel truly cozy and warm.

The only thing not perfect about this recipe are the store-bought graham crackers but that’s because I still haven’t figured out how to make them on my own. So I use store-bought in the meantime but I’m always careful to choose ones made from sprouted grains.

Pumpkin Seven Layer Bars

Necessary equipment:

measuring cups
a small saucepan
a plastic bag, preferably sealed
a rolling pin
a wooden spoon
a large mixing bowl
a hand mixer
a large baking pan
a spatula
a knife

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cup of graham cracker
1/2 cup (about 1 stick) of grass-fed butter (how to make butter)
1 3/4 cup of pumpkin puree
1/2 cup of softened cream cheese
1/2 cup of whole cane sugar
1 t. of powdered cinnamon
1 cup of chocolate chips (how to make chocolate chips)
1/2 cup of chopped pecan nuts (how to soak and dehydrate nuts)
1 1/2 cup of shredded coconut
1 cup of sweetened condensed milk (how to make sweetened condensed milk)

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Melt the butter in a saucepan.
Put the graham crackers in a plastic bag. Try to remove as much air as possible.
Use a rolling pin to crush the crackers until they form fine crumbs.
Combine the crumbs with melted butter so that you will have a wet sand-like consistency.
Transfer the crumbs mixture to the bottom of your baking pan in an even layer. This will be your crust.
Bake for 10 minutes and set the baking pan aside for now.
Combine the pumpkin puree, cream cheese, whole cane sugar, and cinnamon in a large mixing bowl. Use a hand mixer to make the mixture completely smooth.
Spread the pumpkin cream cheese mixture over the baked crust in your baking pan. Make it an even layer as much as possible.
Now sprinkle the chocolate chips, the chopped pecans, and the shredded coconut on top of the previous layer.
Drizzle the top with homemade sweetened condensed milk. Be careful not to cover all of the bars with milk, it should be just a light drizzle. Otherwise, the sweetened condensed milk will harden on top and become crusty. The chocolate chips, the chopped pecans, and the shredded coconut should still be visible.
Bake in the oven for about 40 minutes. You should be able to tell when it’s ready because baked coconut gives off a very aromatic scent.
Take out of the oven and let cool for at least 30 minutes.
Cut your bars into the desired shape. I prefer to cut them in tiny squares because they’re packed with many wonderful flavors and eating too much at once can be overpowering.

How to Make Chicken Stock

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May 2, 2019

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Ultimate GAPS-friendly warming comfort food? The answer is simple. It’s chicken stock.

There is nothing better than lounging on the couch while watching fall turn to winter outside and sipping a mug of delicious homemade chicken stock. Full of nourishing fat, chicken stock is a great method of fulfilling all my savory cravings.

Chicken Stock and Good Fat

I used to avoid fat at all costs, and I suspect many other people were, or are, the same. Our society has turned fat into the sole culprit behind rising obesity rates and cardiovascular diseases. I believed that too for a long time and denied myself any kind of fat, whether it was a cheeseburger or a piece of grilled salmon. But it didn’t make me lose weight nor become happy with my body. So, I searched for answers.

That’s when I learned that there is nothing wrong with fat if it comes from a healthy source. I learned that our bodies need fat to function properly and that fat can be nourishing too. My worldview was turned upside down and I accepted that fat should have a place in my diet too. Now I eat butter (grass-fed) and coconut oil and fish and many other healthy fats. I have since lost weight and my energy levels are up.

Of course, chicken stock is great in general, not only for people who are on GAPS. I mentioned GAPS because I am currently doing it and have a restricted selection of foods I can eat. If you haven’t heard about GAPS, it’s a special healing diet (temporary!) that heals your gut from previous destructive eating habits so that you can enjoy all kinds of real foods once more (like grains, gluten, dairy, and so on). Stocks are heavily utilized on GAPS due to their nutritional value. I am currently having stock three times a day.

And even if I weren’t doing GAPS, I am sure I would be drinking chicken stock frequently. The fall season is that time of the year where all I want to do is baked cinnamon goods, eat pumpkin meals, and drink chicken stock.

Chicken Stock’s Nutrition

The Weston A. Price website says the following about broth:

“Science validates what our grandmothers knew. Rich homemade chicken broths help cure colds. Stock contains minerals in a form the body can absorb easily—not just calcium but also magnesium, phosphorus, silicon, sulphur and trace minerals. It contains the broken-down material from cartilage and tendons–stuff like chondroitin sulphates and glucosamine, now sold as expensive supplements for arthritis and joint pain.”

Sometimes you can see how chicken stock solidifies when cooled. That’s the sign of gelatin presence that came from chicken bones. The longer you simmer your chicken stock, the less likely it is to solidify (but it will still contain plenty of gelatin and minerals inside). I prefer to simmer my stock for an overnight at least so that I can make sure I get everything possible out of the bones. In the colder months, the overnight simmering keeps my house just a little bit warmer. On the other hand, if I am making stock in the summer and don’t my house to get all hot, I simmer it in a slow cooker in the backyard.

How to Make Homemade Chicken Stock

There isn’t anything complicated about making chicken stock. All you need is a quality pastured chicken (with bones) and vegetables with just a splash of apple cider vinegar to make a delicious chicken stock. You don’t even need to peel or cut vegetables because they will be strained out later! If you use quality ingredients then you will get a flavorful batch of chicken stock that will last you for a long time. It can also be used as a base for other dishes. Add some tomatoes and you will get a great traditional tomato soup. Put some of the stock in any sauce to give it some more depth. Reduce gravy with it. Or just drink it on its own, like I do!