This article just kept growing, so I’ve decided to break it up into its 3 parts. Part 1 covers how I made the GAPS diet work for me while vending at Emerald City Comicon, a Seattle comic book convention with 60,000+ attendees.
Last weekend at Emerald City Comicon I tested out three new ideas in order to improve sales: bringing GAPS diet foods convenient for working a convention, shifting my focus to my customers instead of my products, and using more effective body language.
A few months ago I started following the GAPS diet suggested by my Fibromyalgia specialist. I am still working my way through the introductory portion of the diet, which includes lots of soups, meat stocks, and fermented vegetables. Although fine when I’m at home, it is inconvenient to travel or vend at shows with those foods. ECCC is also a very busy show, so I wasn’t sure if I would be able to actually sit and eat my meals. I always bring 2 meals with me because I burn through so much energy being an introvert with chronic fatigue (double whammy!). My goal was to come up with several convenient, balanced snacks to bring that were as close to “on diet” as possible and could replace my meals if necessary. After doing some research on what was available from Amazon Fresh* and what I already had on hand, I decided to bring:
- Organic Valley raw milk jack cheese
- Organic raw cashews
- Organic banana
- Organic pear
- Made in Nature organic dried apricots
- Made in Nature organic prunes
- Organic white mushrooms with cold-pressed EVOO
- Santa Barbara Olive Co. canned black olives (no chemical preservatives)
- SunSpire semi-sweet organic chocolate chips (only no-no is the sugar)
I am very pleased with how effective this combination of snacks was for maintaining my energy levels throughout the 3-day weekend. I did have time to eat my meals, but found that I needed the assistance of the snacks too. I did not eat all of the snacks every day (that would have been way too much!), but it was nice to be able to pick from whatever I thought would work best or sounded yummiest.
The biggest winners were the cheese, cashews, and dried fruits. They were easy to pop in my mouth between shoppers and were very satisfying. From now on, this is going to be my standard snack list for every show I do!
–Amy 🙂
*There is so much more cooking involved in the GAPS diet that we decided to switch to ordering our groceries online. By ordering online, we’ve traded the time spent driving around getting groceries for more time to cook.
