Overnight Travel and the GAPS Diet

One of the biggest challenges to doing the GAPS Diet is when you need to be away from home for an extended time.

It is sometimes difficult to explain the complexities of the diet (such as “the only oils we can use right now are homemade ghee, coconut oil, olive oil, or pastured animal fats that we render ourselves…”). It’s also very difficult to go to restaurants (although we managed it once or twice, it’s not really all that enjoyable, because we can’t eat most of what they use to make the food taste good).

Thus, when we decided to all go as a family to MissionFest Edmonton, as part of our job representing AIM, we knew it would require lots of planning and effort if we wanted to stay on the diet while we traveled.

So, we began planning several weeks in advance. I came up with a meal plan, we bought a $20 hot plate, and we started cooking. We cooked most things in advance and froze them (and then used the frozen stuff to keep everything else cold in our cooler). Here is the meal plan that we followed:

Thursday

Leave at naptime (kids sleep in the van). Roll into the city at supper time.
Supper – RESTAURANT (steak and steamed veggies, plain, at a steakhouse)

Saturday

Breakfast – eggs, fruit, sausages (same as yesterday).
Lunch – RESTAURANT (I think we had steak and plain steamed veggies again… that’s pretty well all we could order from the entire menu).
Supper – cowboy stew & chopped chicken salad (we all LOVE cowboy stew, which is a recipe from the GAPS cookbook I ordered that includes beef stock, tomatoes, ground beef, zucchini, peppers, and a chili powder and cumin kind of flavouring, cilantro optional. We paired it with our favourite salad and included some chopped chicken breast on top for extra oomph – the same chicken that we’d eaten the night before for supper – we’d made extra).

Sunday

Breakfast – eggs, fruit, sausages (same as yesterday).
Lunch – butternut squash soup & chopped chicken salad (I made up a seriously yummy recipe for butternut squash soup, which we had made ahead and frozen in large canning jars. They were nicely defrosted by Sunday, at which point we had to add some hotel ice to keep the cooler cold!)
Supper – spaghetti & salad (same as Friday’s lunch)

Monday
Breakfast – eggs, fruit, sausages (same as yesterday, except that sadly, we had accidentally left out the container of the last sausages, so had to throw them out).
Lunch – RESTAURANT (I don’t remember exactly what we had… but I’m pretty sure it was steak and veggies for a third time. I much preferred our hotel ‘bathroom meals’ over the boring plain steak and plain veggies!)

Drive home, arrive by suppertime!

SNACKS:
granola (GAPS-legal: made from nuts, seeds, and raisins), fruit, raisins, homemade nut flour crackers, raw carrots sticks, boiled eggs, homemade beef jerky, herbal tea (plus vitamin D, cod liver oil, and probiotics every day).

SUPPLIES TO BRING
– electric hotplate
– 3 plates, 3 soup bowls, 3 salad bowls, one set of cutlery each, 3 stainless steel cups
– blue water bottle, travel mug
– cloth napkins, dishcloths, dishtowels, dishpan, dish soap, garbage bag
– frying pan (I have to be content with my teflon pan for now… perhaps one day I’ll have one of these), stainless steel saucepan
– flipper, ladle, serving spoon, sharp knife, small mixing bowl
– portable high chair, bibs

Overall, the level of difficulty in cooking (almost) all of our own meals in a little hotel room for 3.5 days was not nearly as high as I’d expected. With all of the preparation we’d done ahead of time, it was quite simple – take out a jar of soup, heat, serve. It would be challenging to travel for any longer periods, as you’d run out of the stuff you’d prepared at home. It would still be possible  to do longer, with access to a grocery store, although I don’t think I’d ideally want to travel on GAPS for more than 3-4 days, maybe a week max. It was quite an adventure, and actually served to demonstrate that if we could pull this off, we can certainly overcome the diet’s challenges on a daily basis (and we are! yay us! :)).

PS: The reason we used the bathroom as our kitchen was because Chris was nervous about setting the smoke alarms off and getting in trouble for using a hot plate in the hotel… the bathroom didn’t have any smoke alarms in it, so that’s where we prepared our meals. One time when he was returning from the booth to the hotel room for lunch which I had been getting ready, he said he could smell it (spaghetti sauce) cooking when he got off the elevator on our floor! We “hid” the evidence whenever we left the room for the day, and thankfully didn’t get into any trouble! I still don’t know if they would have minded or not, but I’m happy to be blissfully unaware :).

{This post is linked to Monday Mania at The Healthy Home Economist}