The July Challenge, GAPS Week 2 Concludes, and Adding Sprouted Lentils

Aaaaaaand we're off!

Courtesy of the State Library of Queensland,
Flickr Creative Commons

In case you're wondering, yes, my Crossfit box does have frequent nutrition challenges - and yes, I did just finish one at the end of May in the form of a whole30. I'm grateful for the frequency of these challenges, too, because my regular dates with our nutrition gal's scale and skin calipers keeps me accountable to my fellow Crossfitters in a unique way. (Not that everyone knows my numbers - more that they see me every day and that adds a positive dose of peer pressure to not backslide.) It's a great motivator for me to continue to chip away at those last body fat percentage points.

Today starts our July partner nutrition challenge - one more level of accountability! I have a wonderful partner who is also a stay at home mom of two young kiddoes - who, like me, landed in a whole food paleo style diet before she started Crossfitting. (Usually it happens the other way around!) I can't wait to see what we can do with this challenge!

And yes, GAPS soldiers on at our house. In addition to the meats, bone broths, and select vegetables, we've added in eggs in the last few days. Next on our list will probably be raw cashews, and maybe some avocado, but it will be a while yet. We're going ultra slow with the food reintroductions.

Fortunately for me, as mentioned, GAPS is overall very compatible with a paleo style outlook. That means I basically can eat what my GAPS patient is eating on the stage 1-2 food list, and add in a few "Full GAPS" items for myself.

This one more place my paleo experience gets tailored to suit. I'm going to try out sprouted fermented lentils this month. There are a several reasons I have, but one is making sure that I'm getting a good, regular, natural source of folate. Folate is very available on a paleo style diet in organ meats, particularly grass fed beef liver. While I continue to try and add liver in more regularly - as in chili, and burgers, and meatballs, it's still a challenge to find and cook appetizing liver dishes at the generally recommended frequency of a couple of times per week. Fermented lentils are permitted on full GAPS, though, so I'm going to try some recipes, and let lentils be some of my post-workout carbs this month - we're permitted 1 cup of starchy carbs post workout on days that we do exercise. I also think that lentils have good low-reward potential - I don't anticipate that they'll stoke cravings or make me want to nomnomnom excessively on them the way other paleo carbs like sweet potato sometimes do. The bonus is that if I have them precooked they won't be hard to scoop a cup into some warm bone broth with some added leftover meat and an egg or two for a fast, rehydrating, high protein, moderate carb post workout breakfast. My choice of lentils for the first try is TruRoots sprouted organic lentils trio, which is a gluten free blend. The qualification of "sprouted" means that they've already been allowed to soak and germinate, so that mitigates to some extent a lot of antinutrient concerns. I'll give them a try and see how things go!

~

This post contains Amazon affiliate links. Shopping Amazon through Primal Kitchen affiliate links supports Primal Kitchen at no additional cost to you, so thank you!!