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Someone called me picky at my job today. The lady who did it is a fairly new employee… actually she’s the one who took my son’s place as cook. She wasn’t saying it to be mean, I think she was kind of teasing. My boss was there and I said to my boss, “I didn’t used to be picky, did I?” My boss said, “No, you used to be fun to cook for.” Then I said, “Yeah, that’s when I was FAT.” 🙂

I was always known as being a good eater. The new lady doesn’t really understand GAPS and she’ll ask me if I’m vegan, or if my food tastes good. Of course it tastes good! That’s the best thing about being on GAPS! I am hardly ever hungry, and it is so nice to be able to go without eating for a while without getting that nervous or shaky feeling which happened to me for years and years before GAPS.

It used to be that as soon as I felt hungry, I had to get something to eat. But now I can be so hungry that my stomach can be growling and if I don’t eat right away it just stops growling and I’m okay. I don’t have those same irritable, uncomfortable feelings when hungry like I used to before I started GAPS.

Even though it’s okay for me to go without eating right away, I try not to make myself wait too long to eat. Because eventually I will get the nervous and shaky feeling, it just takes a lot longer. I’d say it’s possible for me to wait as long as 2-3 hours once I feel hungry, and that is so liberating! I used to feel tied to food.

Today in the kitchen I was talking to another coworker and we were realizing Christmas is not too far away and soon we’ll be having our staff Christmas potluck party. I already know that I won’t be able to eat 95% of the food which will be brought for sharing, so I am going to have to plan for the occasion and bring food that I can eat. I think this year I will bring chili in a crockpot. That is always a favorite and I won’t seem like a weirdo for bringing it. 🙂  Then I will have to make sure there are some vegetables and I will probably bring some kind of almond flour [affiliate link] baked good. I would also like to bring some kind of nut “candies” made with honey [affiliate link]. My coworker said she was going to bring something I could eat, and she started saying the things she can’t bring. She teases me sometimes, asking me if I want a slice of cake. She is so proud of me every time I say No when she asks me. Anyway, she usually always brings salsa, so she asked me if I could eat salsa. I said I could, and then I said she should be sure to bring a big spoon because I will have to eat it like soup since I can’t eat it with chips.

I have been very good on my fruit fast. Actually this week I had one tiny section of mandarin orange, but that is it. I think I also had a piece of fruit at the beginning of the month, but I forget.

Tomorrow I will be halfway through this month. I was thinking about going off my fruit fast for the conference I am attending the last week of the month because my food selection is so limited. But I am now thinking I should just stay off the fruit.

My renewed effort is in fact due in part to the book I mentioned a couple of nights ago, the one called Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, and Survival by T. S. Wiley. I think I already mentioned that she says we should avoid eating fruit in the winter because it causes us to gain weight. I like it when I read books that confirm my own findings. And I really like it when they explain it in terms that I can understand.

Well, my weekend is here again. I wish the weather would stay cooled down! It has been back up to over one hundred degrees and while it is not horrible, it would be a lot nicer if it would cool down already!

Are you doing GAPS? I hope you will leave me a comment if you are and let me know how things are going for you today.

I am so glad that it is finally beginning to cool down a little bit. The mornings are almost nippy, well, at least they are when I’m out there milking at four o’clock in the morning. At least it’s not 110°F during the day. I can almost tolerate my drive home since my car’s air conditioning broke several weeks ago.

It’s hard to eat hot soups during the summer, so I always look forward to the cooler weather because then I actually crave soup. My husband made his Best Chili last night. This time he put London Broil through the grinder and it really came out great. He also made cornbread for him and our boys, since I’m the only one doing GAPS here.

I love cornbread.

Chili just isn’t the same without it. I’ve always had some type of carbohydrate/starch/bread type food with chili, like flour tortillas, cornbread or saltine crackers. But those are all not GAPS friendly,  so I decided to make myself some almond flour [affiliate link] biscuits. They turned out fairly good. At least I had something to go with my chili.

To update you on my thumbs. Yesterday is the best day I have had with them since they began hurting. I am taking the supplements twice a day. There is two kinds of pain with this problem. First of all, my thumbs were just aching when I was doing nothing at all. Then there was the pain while trying to do something, like open a doorknob, turn off the water faucet, use a can opener or open a jar. I can’t believe I may be reduced to buying one of those jar openers. No matter the size, I’m in trouble when it comes to opening jars.

You know, growing old or rather, having pain, really has an effect of humbling a person. I have thought in my life, “How lazy that someone would need a jar opener. Come on. It’s not that hard to open a jar!” Never once taking into consideration that the person might have arthritis or pain in their hands.

I’m usually horrible at taking supplements, but the fear of my thumbs hurting any worse is keeping me on task.

I am doing well on my fruit fast.

I was reading some of a book last night that I’ve had for a while: Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, and Survival by T. S. Wiley. The chapter I flipped to was talking about not eating fruit during the winter because most places have a time of the year where fruit doesn’t grow. The book suggested an appropriate diet, which seems very GAPS-like actually. I checked my Amazon account and found that I bought this book in April 2006! Back then, I probably saw the “diet” and couldn’t read anymore, because back then I couldn’t diet. I am pretty sure I bought the book because it is about getting enough sleep, and back in 2006 I was not getting enough – due to my back stiffening up after seven hours, which as you know stopped after I’d been on GAPS for less than two weeks. I am going to have to read this book again and see how it reads through my GAPS lens.

The weather. It is starting to cool down finally, and that always means soup! Thankfully most of my favorite soups are GAPS legal, and I love to experiment so I’m hoping to come up with some new recipes to post here soon!

I found this foodie blog (not GAPS friendly) and she showed a picture of an apple and apple sauce peanut butter spread that she’d recently tried. This reminded me of last week, before I went on my fruit fast, one of our volunteers at work shared one of her favorite snacks with me at lunch… apple dipped in peanut butter [affiliate link]. It was yummy. And suddenly I was tempted.

I said to my 21 year old son, “I’m supposed to be staying off fruit this month, but this picture of an apple and peanut butter looks really good.” He replied nonchalantly, after glancing at the photo, “No, it doesn’t.”

And that was helpful. In spite of his constant joyfulness at the thought that I’m on a D.I.E.T. he knows how to help his momma stay on track.

And as much as I hate to admit it, so far it does seem like staying off fruit is helping my energy level. For the last month it has felt difficult getting anything done. As I mentioned earlier this week I’d stopped making my bed, was no longer folding my clothes… to me these are signs that I’m having low energy.

But today I felt better. I got a good night’s sleep and was up at 4:30. Early for me on a day I don’t need to work. Going to bed at 8pm helps. I didn’t need a nap today. And I got quite a bit of chores done around the house. Here’s what I did: swept and mopped the kitchen floor, washed three sink loads of dishes, put away two, folded two baskets of my clothing and put those away, picked up and vacuumed the living room floor, scooped the cat litter box, made taco salad for dinner. I’m not feeling exhausted right now either.

My thumbs are doing better, too. I am now taking a different kind of glucosamine chondroitin, and I’ve been applying arnica gel at night. The arnica gel is in a metal toothpaste type tube and it is nearly empty and it hurts my thumbs to squeeze it out. I need to buy another tube soon because I think it is helping. It doesn’t smell very nice. My thumbs are not 100% pain free, but they are better and I am glad for that. It’s not fun having pain and not being able to open door knobs or turn off water faucets properly, open jars, bottles of water, use a can opener or garlic press. Thank God I live in a household with three strong men.

I’ve also been taking my cod liver oil, and a Vitamin C supplement, along with a Vitamin B Complex supplement. It is so hard to remember to take my vitamins, but the pain in my thumbs is definitely a great motivator. The pain was several times worse before the glucosamine chondroitin. My mom says it works for her and her arthritis pain.

So I guess my sister that read the GAPS book does not see any reason for her to do GAPS. I guess that makes me wish I hadn’t been fooling around eating fruit on and off these last months because weight loss speaks louder than anything, unfortunately.

Well, it is now just a few minutes after 7, but I am feeling tired. I think I will go to bed and hope for another productive day tomorrow.

Thanks for reading along with me. Oh, by the way, I passed my 10 month anniversary for being on GAPS on the 6th. It is so hard to believe that it’s been almost one year. Amazing. That’s a very long time for me to stay committed to anything.

Good night for now.

What’s helping, you ask?

Going off fruit. Yes. Five days into my fruit fast, I am feeling a difference in my mood. I woke up feeling much lighter this morning. I got eight hours of sleep, so I’m sure that helped a lot. But the dark mood that I’ve been feeling for the last month or so seems to have lifted.

I am interested to see how I feel on the coming weekend. Will I have more energy? I hope so, everything is going to heck in a handbag around here! I stopped making my bed, I’ve stopped folding my clothes, my room is in disarray, it’s so obvious for me having had some energy to see what happens when my energy level drops.

I actually did have one small piece of fruit today… one of the volunteers at my job walked by me with this little white paper bag. I asked her what she had, and she asked me if I like figs? I LOVE figs. She gave me a small one about the size of a walnut. She said she had helped to pick figs in California visiting some friends for the weekend. I didn’t even think about the fact that I was on a fruit fast, until I ate the last bite. It was a purple fig, with a reddish color inside. Very delicious and tasty.

Now sometimes when a person falls off the diet, they figure just go all out for the rest of the day, but I was good and stopped at the one fig.

One of my snacks at work sometimes is to walk to the convenience store on the corner and get a bag of walnuts [affiliate link], a bottle of Perrier and a banana. By the way, Perrier is not GAPS legal to my knowledge. It is one of my periodic cheats. How bad can water be? The carbonation is not good for the digestive system, apparently. Anyway, there were the bananas. They sell them for twenty cents each. And some of them had pretty brown spots. Perfectly ripe and the way we’re supposed to eat bananas on GAPS. A bite of banana, and a bite of cashews are so delicious together.

But I didn’t buy the banana. I didn’t let it tempt me. I just ate the cashews and drank my Perrier.

Lunch was leftover roast, spinach, onions [affiliate link] and carrots from last week. I brought Wednesday’s dinner leftovers to work last Thursday – I brought twice as much as I usually eat – on purpose, because I knew I’d be staying late for the evening event. But I never did make it back to the kitchen. I was a little nervous about eating food that was so many days old, but it had been refrigerated well and tasted just fine.

Dinner tonight was hamburger patties with sauteed bell peppers and onions, and steamed spinach. Oh my goodness, so delicious. I had enough left over to take to lunch tomorrow.

I was thinking today, it is going to be interesting to see how I do during the holidays.

I know one thing… it is such a wonderful feeling to not overfill my stomach like I used to. I have probably said this before, but I think what used to happen is the food would bloat up in my stomach after half an hour or so. Maybe I would have eaten a small enough portion to not feel stuffed, but then after the food bloated up I felt miserable.

The other night, when my son had his birthday party food, that would have been one of those nights when I would have pigged out on the sub sandwiches, pizza and ice cream cake. I would have eaten too much, and felt miserable afterwards, and would have been asking myself why was I doing that to myself. It’s so nice to not have to feel that way.

Here’s to a better day tomorrow! How are you doing on your GAPS journey?

As I mentioned in my previous post, I need to get off fruit again so I’ve decided to go off fruit for the month of October (okay, actually the first three weeks) and we’ll see what it does.

For one thing, I know when I eat fruit it makes me hungrier, and I end up not losing much weight, and last month I actually gained one pound. I already figured that out several months ago. Still that’s not too bad, considering I made those carrot cake muffins and ate almost the entire batch alone! I was thinking I really need to figure out how to convert that recipe into much smaller portions. Like maybe if I baked only two muffins at one time, instead of the full batch of eighteen, then I wouldn’t be able to eat all eighteen!

It finally occurred to me if one pill a day wasn’t doing anything,  why not try more? So on Saturday morning I decided to take two glucosamine chondroitin tablets. Of the same expired bottle. And guess what? My thumbs seemed to feel a little bit better. But I didn’t want to get my hopes up. I told my mom, and she said she takes the 1000mg tablets, one daily. This bottle has only 500mg in each tablet.

I decided to take two in the morning, and two at night. Eight tablets later, my thumbs are feeling much, much better! And it’s not only been my thumb joints, but the carpal tunnels in my wrists,  as well as extending to the tendons near my elbows. Here is a cool website which tells you the names of all the bones in your hands.

Now here’s the other thing. I was also wondering if eating fruit had been making my thumbs hurt… since they started hurting right around the time I started eating fruit regularly again. But they also started to hurt a couple of weeks after stopping my asthma medication. So it could have been the fruit. And today it my third day without fruit.

Fruit is in the house. My husband feels like he needs to have it for a quick snack. There are red and black grapes, and apples, and a pineapple. It’s not been too hard to avoid eating it.

My youngest son asked to have his birthday “party” early, and all he wanted was submarine sandwiches, pizza and an ice cream cake. So my dh and I went into town and bought all those things. And we drove them home, and I didn’t touch any of it. I was a little bit wishful for the submarine sandwiches, those looked and smelled delicious.

Also, did I tell you last weekend I actually made my son a loaf of home baked bread in our breadmaker? I think that means I have really come a long way since starting on GAPS. I remember how difficult it was at first, how I felt so sad and mourned not being able to eat those foods. But having been off them for such a long time it’s not so difficult.

Thankfully. I was just talking to my coworkers on the day of the event and they were trying to hide the crackers from me that they’d bought, thinking it would be torturous for me. I told them I could still LOOK at crackers, and indeed, I even ended up arranging them on plates for our guests. Wow. I didn’t realize until I just wrote that, that I touched those crackers and arranged them and didn’t have a single thought or care about not being able to eat them. That’s progress!

On Wednesday it will be 10 months since I started on GAPS.

I know I’ve said this before, but I’m so grateful that I decided to give GAPS a chance. I was so dead against ever dieting again. It’s such a relief to not be gaining and gaining and gaining weight like I did for so many years. I was so disgusted with myself.

I’m hoping to stay off fruit until the last week of the month when I have a conference to attend. Another big event to attend where I don’t know what I’ll be able to eat. But luckily I did find a hotel right close to where the convention is being held where I’ll have my own little kitchenette. I’m happy about that. Now I just need to think about a menu for while I’m there.

OH, I just realized, I never posted about what I ate while we were in Washington, DC! I have the post mostly put together so I will try to get that posted soon.

And I’ll try to do better at making daily reports this coming week. I was just extra busy after work every day last week and tired on top of that. I’m hoping going off the fruit will help my energy to perk up again.

Best,

Starlene