Keep it simple soup (KISS) and a Valentine's Day tip: don't cheat!

One valuable lesson my father taught me when I was a little girl was Don't Cheat!

Dad had Type 1 diabetes. He wasn't overweight, his pancreas just didn't work. Dad's diabetes was diagnosed in childhood and he'd grown up giving himself insulin shots. But when he became an adult he realized he could control his disease with diet alone. All he had to do was to never eat sugar, and to go very easy on the starches—bread, pasta, potatoes and rice.

The no sugar part was hard for some of his friends to imagine. "Aren't you tempted to cheat, Bob? Don't you want to have a little piece of cake or candy once in a while?"

Dad's answer was always the same: "Of course I'm not tempted to cheat. If I were to eat candy and cake, I would only be cheating myself."

It's hard being on a restricted diet, but it's not impossible. And I don't want to cheat myself! So for me, the trick is to be prepared. To be prepared, I always need to have 3 food elements available:

1) homemade stock or bone broth

2) animal protein (eggs, chicken, fish, etc)

3) safe vegetables

The broth is critical. Homemade soup and stock made from meat or fish are very important gut healing foods for SIBO sufferers. You don't want to be without. So thinking ahead is key.

As I dig into this program, I find I'm developing a system. Every week I make either a roasted chicken or a big pot of chicken soup. Either way, I separate out the cooked meat and use the bones to make bone broth. This helps me keep my freezer fortified with stock and broth so I never run out. (Some people with SIBO need to avoid bone broth because it aggravates their symptoms due to the gelatinous sugars—aka glycosaminoglycans—in cartilage and ligaments. So far I'm okay with it, though.)

I also like to roast my chicken along with with plenty of SIBO safe veggies. Current favorites are peeled carrots and butternut squash.

I'll eat the roasted meat and veggies as is for dinner the first night, and then use the leftovers to mix with stock or broth later. This provides me with all the ingredients I need to assemble fast, practically instant soups for the next several days!

Put all of the above together and you've got soup. Simple and nourishing and gut healing all in one.

For a single serving bowl, I use one cup of stock and a half cup each of chopped chicken and veggies. The fresh greens in this soup are spinach, my number one go-to green. Love it!

Before serving, I like to stir a tablespoon of lacto-fermented Ginger Carrots into my soup. This probiotic food helps to replenish the gut with healthy bacteria, and it adds a nice sweet/sour flavor, too!

Note: Probiotics, especially lacto- strains, are not well-tolerated by everyone with SIBO. For some folks, probiotic foods (24-hour yogurt, fermented veggies) may yield better results than probiotic supplements.

On a personal note, I don't care for cabbage-based ferments like sauerkraut (cabbage is high in FODMAPs) but I really enjoy the Ginger-Carrots pictured above. They are from Real Pickles, a terrific local company based here in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts. Check 'em out!