PHASE THREE
MAINTAIN AND RESTORE WITH FOOD

Once you’ve completed the four-week elemental diet and restored and rebalanced your gut bacteria with natural antibiotics and antimicrobials, your gut will have experienced a well-needed rest, and repaired and recovered from permeable holes and inflammation in your digestive tract. Your gut lining will now be able to provide a safe “home” for your gut bacteria to survive, thrive and fight against any bad guys that may make their way into your gut.

After working on your gut lining and starving and eliminating the bad bacteria, you’ll now need to create and feed healthy communities of gut flora to boost your immune system, regulate hormones and improve brain function. There are many foods and supplements you can now begin to include to build this healthy community. Think of your gut as a garden that can only thrive when the soil is healthy. Healthy soil requires healthy foods and nutrients that will allow the “good guys” to flourish.

But first you need to make a small lifelong commitment to gut health and maintenance. Health cannot be attained through a quick-fix diet or a convenient pill; it requires you to make healthy choices every single day. After completing your four-week gut-healing protocol and cleanse and sweep, over the next four weeks (or when it feels right for you) you can do several things to ensure your gut health continues to improve.

Based on everything we know about the effect of gluten on intestinal permeability (see here), it’s safe to say it’s something you should avoid if you want to continue to restore the health of your gut. Instead of consuming gluten-filled grains, stick to unrefined gluten-free grains such as buckwheat, quinoa and brown rice.

2. GO EASY ON THE SUGAR

Too much research points to the damage sugar is causing our health. Bad bacteria adore an abundance of sugar to feast on, and this includes overindulgence in fruit. Avoid all refined white sugar, as this is the worst kind. Stevia is a wonderful sugar-free alternative or, where you would use sugar in small amounts, opt for rice malt syrup, or try using fruit to bring out the sweetness in your food. When eating fruit, eat a maximum of one piece a day, or choose to eat low-fructose options, such as berries, lemons, limes and grapefruit.

3. GO CRAZY WITH VEGETABLES

Your gut just loves easy-to-digest foods, and plant foods are gentle on the stomach. Eat an abundance of chlorophyll-rich greens, vegetable juices, and earthy vegetarian soups made from prebiotic-rich root vegetables, to ensure your good bacteria are nourished with lots of antioxidants, enzymes and nutrients for healthy digestion.

4. EAT FERMENTED FOODS DAILY

Once your gut lining is healed and only when you’re ready, you can start to incorporate one cultured food such as Cultured Vegetables, Easy-to-make Sauerkraut, Kimchi, Coconut Kefir or Homemade Kombucha to colonize your gut with healthy flora and boost your inner ecosystem. When starting out with fermented foods, only have a quarter of the recommended amount per serving or start with just 1 teaspoon and work your way up. Eating a range of different fermented foods will contribute a variety of bacterial strains, which will bring the diversity needed for a healthy microbiota. There are loads of blogs and websites dedicated to fermented foods where you can find great recipes, and Part Three includes some easy-peasy recipes in “Fermented foods for when your gut is strong”.

5. DRINK LOTS OF PURE, FILTERED WATER

Water is vital to your gut health as it helps flush out toxins, but conventional tap water contains fluoride and chlorine, both of which are damaging to microflora. Choose to invest in a good water filter and drink at least eight glasses a day. Adding lemon juice or apple cider vinegar to your water will aid your digestion and break up mucus in the body, freeing up your lymphatic system and boosting your immune response.

6. WHEN IN DOUBT, REMEMBER WHOLE FOODS

Based on all that I’ve shared, it’s clear that the way to achieve optimal health is to choose foods in their closest state to nature. The more nature is disrupted in your food, the less likely it is that your gut bacteria will know how to handle it. Eat things that are natural and unprocessed. Go organic and chemical-free wherever possible. Eat grass-fed meat and animal products in an amount that would be naturally available if mass meat production didn’t exist. Choose to nourish your body with an abundance of plant foods. Eating in this way will provide you with all the nutrients your digestive system needs to function at its best, delivering healing nutrients to all the systems of your body.

For the initial phases of the protocol, you’ve had a nutritional blueprint to follow, knowing what to eat and when, how to get organized and what to do to navigate detoxing. But now it’s time to reintroduce food, you might be starting to wonder what you should be eating or whether your symptoms will return the moment you go back to regular eating. I hear you.

The transition can be tricky, and it’s very tempting to return to unhealthy habits as soon as you feel better. Of course, it’s not convenient to stay on a liquid diet forever, but you can’t dive straight back into your old ways of eating either. You should navigate the transition period of reintroducing food slowly and steadily, so that the improvements you’ve made on the program are durable and you can go on living the healthy, full life you’re meant to live with a repaired and replenished gut.

The next few weeks are critical, because your gut is still vulnerable, and when you go back to normal eating you’ll need to take things slowly and listen attentively to what your body is telling you. But first, it’s important to define what “normal eating” is.

I’m unaware, of course, of what your eating patterns were like before you started reading this book, but I myself never realized how food affected my body until I got really sick. After I completed the elemental diet, I gained so much awareness about the effect of food on my body – both positive and negative – that it changed the way I looked at food and nutrition forever. I now limit gluten, sugar and dairy, and that’s what works for me, but everyone is different.

I’m not advising that you eat exactly the way I do, but I encourage you to be curious and open to trying new foods, experimenting with new recipes and fresh habits, and seeing how your body feels.

Consuming healthy, gut-friendly food as a new way of eating doesn’t have to be boring, bland, expensive or time-consuming. You don’t need exceptional cooking skills, pricey equipment or a personal chef. Once you start playing around with a few recipes and get a bit more familiar with the ingredients, you’ll find that healthy food can be fun and delicious! Eating natural wholefoods is the cornerstone of a healthy gut and a healthy body, but that doesn’t mean you can never indulge.

In my life I follow the 80/20 rule. I choose healthy, gut-friendly food 80 percent of the time and I indulge in my favorite treats 20 percent of the time. Remember that you are what you do consistently, not what you do once in a while. Nowadays, my treats are mainly healthy ones, like my homemade chocolate and muffins – but I also love gelato!

When it comes to reintroducing food, if you’re craving your grandmother’s famous carrot cake or you’ve been invited to a dinner party and can’t resist that slice of pizza, go ahead and have it! But remember to enjoy it. Savor every bite and enjoy it mindfully. And most importantly: Don’t. Feel. Guilty. Guilt triggers stress reactions in your body that are worse for your gut than the gluten in the pizza or the sugar in the carrot cake! It’s really okay to indulge in treats and enjoy them.

And after some time, when nourishing your body with wholesome foods has become a habit, you’ll feel so amazing that you won’t even want that slice of cake or pizza. But before you get to the stage where you can indulge in your favorite treats once in a while, you’ll need to reintroduce food very slowly and pay close attention to your body’s response.

This can be the perfect time to do an elimination diet. This basically means that you eliminate certain foods for a period of time, usually three or four weeks, then slowly reintroduce specific foods one by one and monitor your symptoms. There are many variants of the elimination diet, but they usually all advise removing gluten, dairy, soy, eggs and corn. Other common offending foods you might want to eliminate are pork, beans and lentils, coffee, nuts and seeds, and nightshade vegetables (tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, eggplants, chili peppers and goji berries).

At the end of the elimination period, pick one food you cut out – such as gluten, or dairy – only one, and eat it (but don’t overindulge). Notice how you feel over the next 48 hours. If you have no reaction after two days, eat that same food again and look out for any reactions. From there, based on how you feel, you can decide if you want to reintroduce that food into your diet on a regular basis.

Then, pick another food and follow the same steps. Throughout the diet and the reintroduction process, you need to pay very close attention to how you’re feeling and track any physical, mental or emotional symptoms. Keep a food journal and monitor your sleep, mood, energy levels, digestion and skin. Note, for example, if you suffer insomnia, fatigue, joint pain, skin breakouts or rashes, headaches, changes in your bowel movements, bloating, brain fog or sinus issues.

The whole process will take between five and eight weeks depending on how many foods you’ve eliminated, but at the end of the experiment you’ll have learned much about how your body responds to different foods. It’s a very empowering tool, to become your own health investigator and figure out what’s right for your body.

If you don’t want to do an elimination diet, the best way to reintroduce solid food after being on the elemental diet is to start with steamed vegetables and soft foods such as casseroles, slow-cooked dishes, and steamed fish or chicken served with brown rice, buckwheat or quinoa.

Include easy-to-digest foods so your gut can slowly readapt to digesting solid food. I recommend keeping two days a week where you eat only liquid food or partake in an intermittent fast. This is especially helpful during the first few weeks while you’re settling into eating solid food again.

Reintroduce raw foods very slowly. They require more work for your digestive system to process, so give your body plenty of time to get used to digesting them again.

As you can see, I’m not giving you a strict diet to follow or a ten-page list of foods to avoid, because we’re all different. You might thrive on dairy products while someone else might get terrible symptoms from a single glass of milk! I encourage you to be your own leader and find out for yourself what works for your body. It’s a trial-and-error process, so be patient. But it’s also very rewarding and empowering.

Instead of taking questionable prebiotic supplements, it’s really important to eat a wide range of fiber-rich vegetables to provide your body with prebiotics. Garlic, for example, is a wonderful prebiotic food, as it’s not only a killer of bad bacteria, but also contains dietary fructins, prebiotics that feed specific strains of bacteria that are important for your health.

Foods high in soluble fiber are broken down in the large intestine into a gelatinous, viscous by-product that produces acids and gases promoting the growth of good bacteria. Foods high in soluble fiber are wonderful prebiotics and include sweet potatoes, brussels sprouts, asparagus, turnips, mangoes, avocados, strawberries and apricots.

Resistant starches are starches that remain undigested until they get as far as the large intestine, where they undergo the same process as soluble and insoluble fibers. Foods containing resistant starch include potatoes, lentils, nuts and seeds. Remember to reintroduce these foods to your diet at a snail’s pace and see how your belly reacts to them.

Once your gut lining is healed, eating fermented foods is one of the most important things you can do to improve your health. Fermentation increases the beneficial bacteria, enzymes and vitamins in food, and makes their nutrients more bioavailable. This is no new trend. Almost all traditional cultures have included fermented foods in their diet.

Fermented foods can either be bought or made at home, and include yogurt (made using goat’s milk, sheep’s milk, coconut milk or coconut water), sauerkraut, kimchi, milk kefir, water kefir, kombucha and beet kvass.

There are hundreds of resources and recipes online to help you source cultures and learn to make these foods at home. Try my simple Coconut Kefir or coconut Kefir Yogurt or go to the fermented foods section (see here) and make Cultured Vegetables, Sauerkraut, Kimchi or delicious Fermented Salsa.

Consuming fermented foods and beverages like these alongside other foods will also help your body digest everything more effectively. Combining both prebiotic-rich foods and probiotics in your daily diet will provide you with the best chance of creating a healthy community of gut flora. A warning, though, to go slow with introducing fermented foods into your diet, as not everyone can handle them. When I was healing my gut I would get terrible symptoms from fermented foods and still have to eat them in moderation now.

If you’re not ready for fermented foods and natural probiotics, you can supplement with a probiotic capsule. Look for a dairy-free, non-synthetic powdered probiotic with a healthy number of different strains. Ask your naturopath or nutritionist to conduct a stool test so you can find out which strains you need to be taking for maximum benefit. The best time to take probiotics is in the evening before bed, so they can work through your digestive system as you sleep.

A TYPICAL HEALING DAY, PHASE THREE

UPON RISING: Start with dry skin brushing followed by a hot shower. While you’re in the shower, use extra virgin coconut oil to oil pull.

EARLY MORNING: Enjoy a glass of hot water with lemon.

BREAKFAST: Munch on cranberry and walnut granola or a delicious breakfast bowl and Supercharged Shake.

MORNING TEA: Enjoy a natural probiotic food with a Cleanse and Renew Smoothie or Coconut Kefir.

LUNCH: Savor a Cauliflower Crust Pizza (see my website) and a side of Cultured Vegetables.

AFTERNOON TEA: Sip on a Choc Mint Hot Chocolate or a Spiced Almond Chai.

DINNER: Enjoy Buckwheat Pasta with Flaked Trout, slow-cooked lamb shanks (both on my website) and a side of Cultured Vegetables.

BEFORE BED: Take two probiotic capsules. Count your blessings.