How the GAPS Diet Helped this Woman Heal Lyme Disease

Carley Smith goes by the moniker “The Fairy Gutmother,” but she doesn’t just make others’ health dreams come true — the Colorado-based Nutritional Therapy Practitioner also used her magic to turn around her own health. After Smith unknowingly contracted Lyme disease, she encountered a series of health challenges and misguided advice from doctors, which ended up harming her physical and mental health and quality of life. It was only when she discovered the Gut and Psychology Syndrome diet (the GAPS diet for short) that she was able to completely transform her life. Read on to learn more about the GAPS diet, why it’s the best diet for Lyme disease, and more. 

*This is a short clip from Smith’s full interview— click here to watch the whole thing.*

You can also listen to an audio version of this interview on The WellBe Podcast.

Mysterious Symptoms, Endless Medications, and (Finally) a Diagnosis 

It took Smith a long time to figure out that she had contracted Lyme disease. As she explained, Lyme affected her a bit differently than it affects most people, settling primarily in her endocrine system. This threw her hormones completely out of whack, and she found herself with a period that lasted four months straight. She went from doctor to doctor trying to figure out what was going on with her body, but the only thing they suggested was to go on birth control pills and “lay in bed with your feet up.”

The constant bleeding eventually led to a bacterial infection in her uterus, for which doctors prescribed a heavy dose of antibiotics. “That’s when I had a really terrible reaction to the antibiotics,” Smith says. She experienced nausea, fever, headache, and body aches, as well as loss of cognitive function. “I forgot where I lived driving home from work,” she recalls. Her doctor chalked all this up to an allergic reaction to the antibiotics, but a friend of hers said that it sounded like a Herx reaction, which is a common phenomenon among Lyme patients who take antibiotics. The friend suggested that Smith get tested for Lyme disease, and the results came back positive. 

With her diagnosis came more antibiotics. While they helped initially — for the first month or so — but soon began to feel that they were doing more harm than good on her body. They caused her to break out in tiny bumps all over her back and her stomach to become swollen, and doctors prescribed yet more medications for those side effects. Smith recalls thinking, “‘I’m not even taking Lyme medications anymore. Now I’m just taking more medications for other things that the other medications [caused.] This is ridiculous!’” Smith recalled to WellBe. “It’s like antibiotics for your antibiotics. It’s a spiral effect.”

Finding the Best Diet for Lyme Disease

To stop the spiral, Smith decided to stop taking all medication and start doing her own research. It was then that she learned about the connection between the immune system and the gut (70-80% of the immune system is located in the gut), and this discovery shaped her path forward. Your gut health, of course, is deeply affected by what you eat, and so she set out to discover the most effective diet for Lyme disease. 

In her research, she came across something called the Gut and Psychology Syndrome diet, or the GAPS diet. The GAPS diet centers around the idea of a leaky gut, and states that if your gut lining allows toxins to enter your bloodstream, it can cause a whole host of symptoms, including brain fog and other cognitive issues. Since brain fog is a huge issue for those with Lyme, that makes the GAPS protocol a compelling diet for Lyme disease sufferers. “The idea is that if we can heal our gut, we can boost our immune system and help fight off whatever it is that we have going on,” Smith explains. 

After just a few weeks of the GAPS diet, Smith’s cognitive function returned. She ended up sticking to the GAPS diet for a full two years, at the end of which, all of her Lyme symptoms had been healed. She felt so empowered as a result that she decided to completely change her career path. She went back to school and became a nutritional therapist with the goal of spreading the information that she learned and helping others heal. Today, she’s a Certified GAPS Practitioner and works one-on-one with patients to help them implement a diet for Lyme disease or other issues. 

What Is the GAPS Diet? Breaking Down the Gut and Psychology Syndrome Protocol

So what is the GAPS diet, exactly? As Smith explains, it’s an elimination diet intended to seal the gut lining and then repopulate the gut with beneficial bacteria. It does that by eliminating foods that are harmful to your gut and body, and replacing them with nourishing foods that can help heal a leaky gut. 

The GAPS diet involves eliminating processed foods, dairy, grains, and starchy vegetables, among other things, and incorporating foods that are known to be healing and sealing to the gut lining. That includes things like:

• Bone broth
• Fermented foods (sauerkraut, kimchi, kombucha, etc)
• Cultured dairy
• Collagen
• Whole fats (fats from whole foods, like avocados or nuts)

According to Smith, bone broth is the most important part of the GAPS diet because it helps heal and seal the gut lining. “If you have a permeable gut lining, toxins can leak into your [bloodstream] and cause autoimmune attacks and various other issues,” she said. Specifically, the collagen from bones, which gets extracted in the bone broth-making process, helps rebuild the gut lining, and vitamins and minerals support optimal gut health. Additionally, bone broth can help with digestion and hydration, she said. 

Smith explains that the GAPS diet isn’t very complicated, but the fact that it requires eliminating so many foods can make it challenging. She says that most people have the hardest time in the beginning phases, which is the most restrictive, but that it becomes easier as you slowly reintroduce foods. As foods are reintroduced, it’s important to pay close attention to how your body responds, as this will provide a clue into what is compromising your immune system.

The GAPS diet also involves making sure that the balance of bacteria in your gut is optimal. That means reducing stress (which is a driver of bad gut bacteria), as well as taking probiotics, prebiotics, or other gut health supplements (see a full list of gut-boosting supplements in our gut health guide). 

Today, Smith is symptom-free and medication-free, thanks to the GAPS diet, and has dedicated her life to helping others achieve the same thing. “It’s important for me to get the message across to people that there are alternative therapies out there for healing,” she says. “We get sick, we go to the doctor, and we just do what the doctor says. But, what happens when the doctor says doesn’t make you better?”

Have you ever tried an elimination diet to heal a chronic health issue? How did it go? Let us know in the comments below!

Watch the full WellBe interview with Smith for more from our conversation, including why she used milk intended for baby cows (known as Bovine Colostrum Therapy) to heal her gut, why she recommends that people continue to drink bone broth even if they’re not on the GAPS diet, how she dealt with pushback from her doctors, and more. 

You can also listen to the full interview on The WellBe Podcast.

Citations:

1. Dhakal A, Sbar E. Jarisch Herxheimer Reaction. [Updated 2021 Nov 23]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2022 Jan-.
2. Wiertsema SP, et al. The Interplay between the Gut Microbiome and the Immune System in the Context of Infectious Diseases throughout Life and the Role of Nutrition in Optimizing Treatment Strategies. Nutrients. 2021 Mar 9;13(3):886. 
3. Madison, A et al. “Stress, depression, diet, and the gut microbiota: human-bacteria interactions at the core of psychoneuroimmunology and nutrition.” Current opinion in behavioral sciences vol. 28 (2019): 105-110.

The recovery story above is anecdotal and specific to this particular individual. Please note that this is not medical advice, and that not all treatments and approaches mentioned will work for everyone.

Carley Smith, also known as the Fairy Gutmother, is a Certified Nutritional Therapy Practitioner (NTP) by the Nutritional Therapy Association, Certified Gut and Psychology Syndrome (GAPS) Practitioner by Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride’s GAPS Training Program, as well as a yoga instructor in Grand Junction, Colorado.

More from WellBe:

Chronic Lyme Disease Sent Ally Hilfiger to the Psych Ward

Why Your Body Needs Prebiotics, Too

Can a Nutrition Expert Help You Heal?