Here is a detailed list of what can be eaten on Stage 1 (my condensed version and interpretation from gapsdiet.com) :
Homemade meat or fish broth
Chicken broth (very gentle on the stomach)
Natural unprocessed salt
Black peppercorns
Meats and Fish
Soft tissues from the bones
Bone marrow
Warm meat or fish broth as a drink
Fat in the broth and off the bones
Homemade soup (with your homemade meat or fish broth).
Vegetables cooked in broth: onions, carrots, broccoli, leeks, cauliflower, zucchini, most squash
(avoid very fibrous vegetables- such as all varieties of cabbage and celery, beans and legumes, artichokes, peas, brussels sprouts)
All particularly fibrous parts of vegetables need to be removed, such as skin and seeds on pumpkins and squashes, stalk of broccoli and cauliflower and any other parts that look too fibrous.
Garlic
Boiled meat, fish and other soft tissues off the bones
Probiotic foods.
Homemade yogurt or kefir (if tolerated)
Juice from your homemade sauerkraut, fermented vegetables or vegetable medley
Ginger tea with a little honey between meals.
Fresh ginger root (grated, in tea)
Honey (in small amounts in tea)
The real key to this stage is resetting the gut. It is damaged, and needs to have extreme measures taken, but ones that will be gentle and gradual. I really suggest you journal through the entire Introduction Diet, but if nothing else, at least the first stage. Everything is new, your body is going to be going through changes (for healing) and with all the work to do in the kitchen, your brain is going to have a hard time remembering when you did what, and what vegetables you have tried.
When my whole family first started GAPS in 2011 we kept a "Poop Journal". It was getting really hard to track all three kids' bowel movements, cook all day, and stay sane. My husband printed this picture out, taped it to the front of a spiral notebook and I would draw lines on the pages to separate each person. Kind of like this but by hand:
I would write the day number as I went, but I did this one in excel, so used the handy "fill" tool. The blank boxes under names is where I would write each person name. Under their name, beside the date I would write a number representing the bowel moment they had (if they had one, multiple numbers were written in if they had more than one).
Enter Bristol Stool Chart. If you think about it, this journal could be really disgusting. And at first, it really was. All manner of descriptive words were used to help my husband and I pin point what was going on in our children's guts (there, now you know why I am not afraid to talk about poop). My kids coined the phrase, "Mommy, I pooped," but it was not said so nicely back then. It was more of a, "Mommyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I pooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooped!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" (I like to text it to my mother when I am feeling feisty.)
My husband saved the day. Just when I thought I could not take writing the description of my son's poop one more time, he found this handy chart!
In the beginning I had three copies of this chart; one in each bathroom and one taped inside the cover of the poop journal. We quickly memorized them though. The only real problem with the chart that we had was my husband and my inability to agree on just what number a poop was, or what a poop actually meant by "soft" or "fluffy". But I will not gross you out with the details. THANK YOU, LORD, that part of the diet is over. We are officially on to "if you have a bad poop go find mom and tell her" stage. It is wonderful. Now the only time I hear, "Mommyyyyyyyyyyy, I pooooooped!!!!!!!!!!!" is from the toddler.
Back to what one can eat on Stage 1. (What, you're not hungry any more?) When we started trying new things, I added a notes column at the end. I would write down what we tried, if we tried anything new, so that it was easy to back track if someone had a bad poop. Apparently Dr. McBride says you can react to food up to three days. This through us off a bit, until I realized it. Someone would have a bad poop and I would think back over the day, and maybe even yesterday and could not figure it out. But when I took into account two more days back, it started making a bit more sense. I think this is another reason Dr. McBride suggests two day minimum spent on each stage.
Another thing to remember, it could very well be impossible to track your whole family if you allow some to move on with out the others. We chose to hold everyone back until everyone was ready to move on. It just made sense. First, it would be horrible for the ones not doing well to have to watch those who were doing better eat something they could not, and second, it would be very difficult to keep it all straight. This was hard to do, at times, but looking back, I would not have done it differently.
Well, this is day five for me, and looking over that list was a bit of a refresher. I thought I knew what I could eat....oops. The oven cooked chicken might not be a good idea. The crispy, delicious skin is probably not doing me any favors right now. Bummer.
Which leads me to my final thought for today, taking short cuts. There were a couple of times, on our GAPS journey, that we could not figure out what was causing us problems. Several times we would ponder and ponder why we were stuck on Stage 1, still (the second time we went through Intro we were on Stage 1 for 6 months). Looking back I wish I would have known the things I know now; I think it would have saved us a lot of time on Stage 1. Not doing our research about something may have saved time in the beginning, but it added time to the end.
One of those things was salt. We used a lot of salt, it was our only real seasoning. We thought salt was salt. We assumed buying pure salt, with no caking agents would be enough. After all, it does not get any more organic than pure salt. This was not our first hiccup on the road to recovery, but it was a huge one. Like I always did when we felt stuck in a rut, I would open up my Gut And Psychology Syndrome Diet book and start reading again. My husband would read over my shoulder and give his interpretation on it. We would discuss it, quite intensely sometimes, and come to a conclusion, and make a change. On one of these occasions I happened to catch something on salt. This led my husband to get is mad awesome google-ing skills on. At the end of it all, we decided that we thought the salt was giving us problems. We switched to natural sea salt, and it made a huge difference.
I wish I could say that was it, and we moved on after that, but I can not. There were many more of these hiccups that kept us on Stage 1 a lot longer than I think we really needed to be. For example, probiotic (or fermented foods). It never occurred to me to cool the soup down to a temperature in range of supporting the good bacteria's life. All that yogurt and sauerkraut juice wasted. What was I thinking.
Just those to hiccups alone could have saved us months. But that is the story of my life, learning how not to do things. Hopefully this information can help someone else not take six months on Intro. I can hope, anyway.
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