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Sorry for shouting, but wowee, ghee is delicious!!!

I promised I would update when I made the Indian Ghee, click here to read my review.

Today was a big fail, GAPS-wise.

I guess… it wasn’t such a huge fail. I consider it a fail because I overindulged in honey [affiliate link], had cocoa powder [affiliate link], and I ate 2 tablespoons of ghee, instead of one teaspoon for the day, like I’d intended to do.

We celebrated our oldest son’s birthday today, he turned 23 this past week. I made the Chocolate Cake from Elana Amsterdam’s The Gluten-Free Almond Flour Cookbook which contains cocoa powder (GAPS illegal), and our younger son made the Marshmallow Frosting – I don’t think he made it properly, it was supposed to be cooked 4-8 minutes, but I think he only heated the honey.

I only had one cup of honey and my hubby had gone into town so he picked me up some more. In the meantime I made one layer of the cake. It spilled over the pan – I was supposed to use a 9″ pan, but only had an 8″ pan. I scooped up the spilled over cake and it had a brownie-like consistency. I ate about 1 cup of it. It was very sweet.

I did make me feel like my blood sugar was affected. I haven’t felt that feeling but a couple times since starting on GAPS. And I don’t know how the cocoa is going to affect me.

Dinner was chicken strips, steamed zucchini squash and cauliflower. I had two tablespoons of ghee on my vegetables. So delectable.

Yesterday I finally cooked the baby beef liver I’d bought last week for $3.89 pound. It was deskinned and deveined. At least they got the majority of skin and veins.

The taste is much more tolerable than regular beef liver. I wonder if the regular liver has more nutrients. We are having a hard time buying onions [affiliate link] because we can’t find them for less than 99 cents a pound. So instead of making onions with my liver, I had cabbage.

Cabbage from my garden! I was able to harvest three very small heads. I debated turning them into sauerkraut, but decided to just enjoy them freshly steamed. I think cabbage is a nice substitute for onions.

I had liver yesterday, and also had it for breakfast this morning. It feels like I had more energy yesterday and today. I also worked in my garden about an hour yesterday morning. I have already washed my weekly load of clothes (yesterday), and today I stripped the beds and washed all the bedding. Usually it is very difficult for me to accomplish this task, dreading it, having to force myself to do it.

I haven’t had a detox bath in days, maybe I’ll have one tonight. It is starting to warm up and we have been running both the fans in the bedroom at night, and have had to turn on the air conditioner to cool the house. When it’s warm like this, I have no interest in taking a hot bath. But at least I would end up sweating.

I actually had about 1/2 teaspoon of ghee today when I first made it. No reaction (phlegm in my throat).

But then when the vegetables were done cooking I wanted to try some, and ended up getting a little more and little more until I’d had about two tablespoons. It seems that I have phlegm in my throat. This could be because I had two much too soon. I think I may abstain from ghee tomorrow, and try having only one teaspoon.

Or it could be the cocoa powder.

I also made some vegan ice cream. A concoction of my own design, inspired by a recipe from Breaking the Vicious Cycle: Intestinal Health Through Diet.

I’ve tried really hard to keep the elimination discussion out of my daily reports because I didn’t think it would be conducive to posting recipes and talking about delicious food.

So if talking about elimination makes you queasy, come back tomorrow and just ignore this one, or if you are one of my email subscribers, feel free to hit delete.

My prompting for writing this post, the final straw I should say, is reading a post on the GAPShelp list where a person brand new to GAPS was counseled by someone who has been doing GAPS for two months regarding digestive problems like ulcerative colitis/Crohn’s.

She touched on the dangers of having a colonoscopy, which reminded me of the article I’d read over at Fiber Menace Death by Colonoscopy : Side Effects of Screening.

Two, or maybe it’s been three years ago now, I had to visit my primary care physician. The guy I’d been seeing had moved away, so he was replaced by a woman about my age. Thankfully she was about as overweight as I was, so she couldn’t hassle me about my weight. My husband came with me. The doctor was horrible. I was a basket case for about eight weeks after the visit with that nasty witch. She made fun of me for wanting a complete thyroid panel saying in a really rude tone of voice, “Someone’s been on the Internet too much.” Anyway, during the line of questioning, she asked if I was experiencing any rectal bleeding. I said I was not. My husband said, “What would that mean?”

The stupid witch then assumed that I was lying to her, apparently, as she wrote a prescription for me to have a colonoscopy.

I was 43 or 44 years old at the time. Colonoscopies aren’t even recommended as a preventative tool until you turn 50. I told a friend about what the doctor was trying to make me do, and she said it’s wonderful to have a colonoscopy, then I’ll know there is nothing wrong. She said I should go ahead and have one.

But there’s nothing wrong! I had no indication whatsoever, that there was any reason to be examined. The doctor was just making assumptions.

And now I find out how dangerous colonoscopies can be!! Oooh, that just makes me even more annoyed with that stupid doctor.

Now onto another rabbit trail… during intro I was having some constipation. I won’t go into details but I did manage to persuade myself to try the number one recommended solution from GAPS for constipation. Twice. That did seem to help.

But I also started swallowing kefir grains whole. That seemed to have had the affect of making me regular every day. Another thing I was reading over at Fiber Menace (I really want to order Konstantin Monastyrsky’s book) and realized that I was not “allowing” myself to “go”. I was suppressing the urge. The urge which has become very quiet and insignificant since I’m eating a low fiber/low carbohydrate diet, therefore my eliminations are smaller in size! It’s just like the IAMS dog food commercial says – since the dog is eating less filler in its diet, the stools are smaller. Well that makes sense for those of us on GAPS, too.

This page at Fiber Menace will help you learn how to become regular again, if you are having problems with constipation.

This page will help you learn how restore “sensitivity”. Basically, I think when we go to a diet that is lower in fiber we are working with a whole new set of rules. Gone are the larger sized eliminations which scream urgently for a visit to the facilities. If you suppress the urge, the stool dries out and becomes harder to move. It had been suggested on the list to drink a quart of salted water to get things moving. Mr. Monastyrsky says all it takes is one glass of warm water and you have to take a minute to relax. Go to Rule #3 and read how it works.

This next bit has been true for me! At least this has been working well for me in the last week. I’ll let you know if things change. But so far, so good!

Can you think your way “out” of irregularity and constipation the way you can think your way “in”? Absolutely. If your mind can control you, you can control your mind as well. This, in part, is what this information is about: helping you to reprogram your conscious and subconscious mind in order to replace old paradigms with new ones, erase scripts that don’t work, and write new ones that do.

Don’t laugh. Plenty of research points out that an expertly performed hypnosis is as effective for the relief of chronic constipation as laxatives . When it comes to irregularity, mind over fecal matter is indeed a viable reality.

Mr. Monastyrsky does sell a protocol to aid folks in becoming regular, I think these might be in order if you have a chronic problem. I did read through the ingredients on a couple and they contained some GAPS-illegals, which might be worth ignoring if your problem is severe.

Thankfully I never bought into the high fiber hysteria so I don’t think I will need to look into his products. But I do think one of his products might be helpful for my husband.

I think the entire Fiber Menace site is worthy of your perusal. I learned many answers to questions I didn’t even know I had.

One more thing I want to say. I have to say the youngster in me was entertained by Mr. Monastyrsky’s tongue-in-cheek pun-like writing. He makes it entertaining to read his site. I do really want to order his book as I think it would be nice to find everything neatly in chapters all in a row. I think the book also contains more information than the site.

Have you done any research at Fiber Menace?

Sneaking in an update on my lunch break. I just had the best lunch. Leftover roast beef with orange, yellow and red bell peppers sauteed in olive oil, with steamed beet greens (fresh from my garden!) with coconut oil [affiliate link] and sea salt [affiliate link]. And a side of my Cortido (Latin American sauerkraut).

I’m thinking about stopping eating fruit again. I think it’s making me extra tired. I am going to try a few days without fruit to see if I can make a difference.

One more thing. I know I keep saying I don’t want this to be about weight loss, but it’s hard to keep the “diet head” from cropping up… my husband looked at the scale for me, I think it was sometime in January, and he says I weighed 218. He even wrote it down. So then I had my son weigh me the first week in March, and he says I weighed 226. I can’t help but feel a little horrified that I might have been down to 218, then back up to 226. And finally back down to 206.

That means I could easily go up again during this month, as I have decided I will only look at my weight once a month.

I better go for now.