Hooray for fruit!! Or maybe not so much … When we got to Stage 5 of Intro we were so excited to be trying to reintroduce fruit. The GAPS book suggests starting out with homemade applesauce (just apples cooked down). So when we got to this stage, we made a little tiny bit, just with one apple, and tried a few spoonfuls.
It didn’t go over well, tho. 
I immediately got a very fuzzy feeling in my head, and J’s tongue got all tingly, which is usually a sign he’s having some sort of reaction. So we stepped off the fruit train, froze what was left of the little applesauce we had made, and waited.
A week or so later we tried again with the thawed-out leftovers. Same story.
So to make a long story come to a quick conclusion: We never successfully introduced fruit on Intro. Because the cooked fruit didn’t go over well, we decided that we shouldn’t proceed with fresh fruit juices either.
We did eventually introduce fruits, but it was still a while after we had officially declared ourselves finished with intro. And it wasn’t apples — it was in-season fruits like berries, actually, because it was late spring, that we eventually started. And bananas, because we both really like bananas. And it was fresh, and not cooked. And we still haven’t successfully introduced apples! (Although we haven’t tried all that often, with all the other delicious fresh fruit available during the summer.)
Looking back on our Stage 5 fruit experiences, I suspect that a big part of the issue was the apples themselves. Now that I know that apples are on the FODMAPs “avoid” list, and that I have FODMAPs issues, I think that may have been the problem for me. I’m still not sure why J had the tongue tingling. But I suspect if we had introduced a different fruit, like gently simmered blueberries with ghee, we might have had different results.
Stage 5: Additions
- Cooked apple puree, with fat (ghee or otherwise)
- Raw vegetables — peeled cucumber, soft parts of lettuce leaves (which honestly I still don’t get along with all that well!), then carrot, tomato, etc.
- Fresh fruit juices — but not oranges or other citrus
- Wine, for cooking — this was our addition, not the book’s — cooking takes out most of the alcohol, so I figured it wouldn’t be as hard on the liver and could be ok occasionally for a treat.
Some of the new meals and dishes that might be good to introduce in Stage 5:
- Thai cuke “noodle” salad (p. 80 in Internal Bliss
)
- Taco salad (lettuce, ground beef cooked with taco seasoning and extra tallow, salsa, lacto-fermented sour cream, guacamole)
- Cilantro-lime chicken (p. 110 in Internal Bliss
- Coq au vin, made without the flour, and with ghee instead of butter
Photo Credit: judepics on Flickr.
This post is part of Fight Back Friday and Fresh Bites Friday.
We Support FTCLDF!
