The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

Good news! The Autoimmune Protocol (AIP), an elimination and reintroduction protocol aimed at helping those with autoimmune disease identify food sensitivities and increase nutrient-density, continues to be the focus of medical research investigating its efficacy for specific autoimmune conditions. While AIP has been widely used in the autoimmune community since 2011 (see the

History of the AIP Movement), medical research into its efficacy began around 2015, with results of the first pilot study published in 2017. Since then, studies have been conducted using AIP as an intervention for inflammatory bowel disease (Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis), Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, rheumatoid arthritis, eczema, and psoriasis. If you’d like to learn more about previous studies, including what interventions were used and the results, check out the AIP Medical Research Review.

Today I’ll be highlighting the newest AIP medical study, Effects of Autoimmune Protocol (AIP) diet on changes in thyroid parameters in Hashimoto’s disease by a research team from Poland, Paulina Ihnatowicz, Jerzy Gębski, and Małgorzata Ewa Drywień [1]. This is the second study that has been conducted so far using AIP as an intervention to manage Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and certainly adds to our knowledge base of how to use the protocol for managing it [2]. Hashimoto’s is not only the most common autoimmune disease, but conventional treatment is rarely successful as many patients find that they continue to have symptoms even though their hormone levels have been “treated to target” [3].

For this study, 28 patients with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis were enrolled, with 20 of them completing the study. The average age was 35, with patients between 23-55 years old. Patients underwent initial testing, surveys, and dietary analysis, and then were prescribed individualized, 12-week dietary plans compliant with Core AIP Elimination. It should be noted that in contrast to prior studies using AIP, there was no use of a transition phase–participants made immediate transitions to the elimination diet [2].

In terms of testing completed at baseline and completion of the study, patients had their height and weight measured in a clinic, had lab draws for thyroid hormones (TSH, total and free hormones) and thyroid antibodies, an ultrasound of the thyroid, and they also completed surveys to capture symptom burden. Prior dietary intake was captured using a survey for analysis and comparison of prescribed AIP meal plans.

After initial testing, each participant was prescribed an individualized, 12-week Core AIP meal plan based on their anthropometrics (height and weight). They were instructed to continue all prescribed medications and supplements as before, and no adjustments were made to doses. Support was offered via monthly group coaching calls.

Energy and macronutrient intake

A comparison of prior diet and prescribed AIP diet showed that energy intake (calories) was roughly the same before and after the study (2,067 to 1,997 calories). In terms of macronutrient intake, protein increased from 16.77% to 24.9% of total calories, which is an increase of roughly 85 to 125 grams per day (based on a 2,000 calorie intake). The increase in protein came primarily from decreased fat intake.

Micronutrient intake

Analysis of nutrient intake via prescribed AIP diet showed there was a broad increase in nutrient density during the intervention. Specific nutrient intake increases included Beta-carotene (550%), fiber (162%), folates (198%), long-chain fatty acids (262%), potassium (196%), vitamin A (341%), vitamin C (886%), with other nutrients like B vitamins, iron, zinc, and magnesium with considerable increases. The authors noted that analysis of some nutrients was complicated by supplementation, specifically magnesium, vitamin C, and potassium.

Biochemical thyroid changes

Blood test analysis showed Thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) significantly decreased from a mean of 3.72 to 2.69. Free T3 and T4 significantly decreased, although both stayed within reference ranges (3.31 to 2.88; 1.36 to 1.20). Mean anti-TPO antibodies increased (210 to 293) and anti-Tg decreased (317 to 300), although these results did not meet statistical significance.

Physical thyroid changes

A comparison of thyroid ultrasounds before and after intervention showed the right lobe volume decreased by 5% and the left lobe volume decreased by 6%.

Weight and body composition changes

Anthropometric measurements taken before and after intervention showed that mean weight decreased from 69 kg to 65.5 kg (152 lbs to 144 lbs). Mean body fat percentage decreased from 33% to 29.5%, indicating that twice as much weight was lost from fat than muscle.

Symptom burden

Analysis of questionnaires showed a broad improvement of symptoms commonly reported by Hashimoto’s thyroiditis patients. The largest decreases were seen in the following areas:

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2. Digestive function
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4. Constipation – 36% to 11% (25% difference)
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6. 
   
7. Gas – 61% to 21% (35% difference)
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9. 
   
10. Flatulence – 61% to 29% (32% difference)
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13. Diarrhea – 29% to 7% (22% difference)
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16. Abdominal pain – 29% to 14% (15% difference)
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18. 
    
19. 
    
20. Energy
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22. Tiredness – 82% to 29% (53% difference)
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25. Drowsiness – 64% to 21% (43% difference)
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27. 
    
28. Fatigue – 50% to 11% (39% difference)
29. 
    
30. 
    
31. 
    
32. Mental
33. 
    
34. Impaired concentration – 71% to 18% (53% difference)
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36. 
    
37. Headaches – 39% to 11% (28% difference)
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39. 
    
40. Depression – 29% to 4% (25% difference)
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44. Pain
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46. Muscle cramps

In January, a new option for the elimination phase of the Autoimmune Protocol (AIP) was announced:

Modified AIP Elimination. If you are looking for the exact details of which foods are included and avoided in both Core and Modified AIP, don’t miss What is AIP: The Definitive Guide which has been completely updated.

A quick summary of the reasons why Modified AIP was added as an elimination option:

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• Many patients in the AIP medical studies saw results before reaching a full elimination
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• AIP Certified Coaches reported seeing good results without a full elimination using a modified protocol in their practices
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• Recent elimination diet research indicates that stricter does not always produce better results
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• Increasing accessibility, affordability, and sustainability can widen the reach and application of AIP
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If you’d like to read more about why AIP was updated, the research process behind making the update, be sure to read Announcing Modified AIP: A 2024 Update to the Autoimmune Protocol.

The founding mission here at Autoimmune Wellness has been to provide free resources for anyone who wants to embark on AIP. Since 2012, we’ve been delivering a resource library with food lists, meal plans, and other materials as a part of our AIP Quick Start Guide email series. Since inception, over 200,000 of you have downloaded these materials!

With the 2024 update to the Autoimmune Protocol, it was a prime opportunity to take a look at this resource library and give it a comprehensive update. Not only have all of the prior resources been edited and redesigned, but new materials have been added for the new Modified AIP elimination (including dedicated food lists, a meal plan, and reintroduction materials).

Here is a list of what is included in the updated Autoimmune Wellness Resource Library:

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• AIP Quick-Start Guide
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• Core AIP Foods to Include
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• Core AIP Foods to Avoid
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• Modified AIP Foods to Include (NEW!)
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• Modified AIP Foods to Avoid (NEW!)
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• Core AIP Meal Plan & Shopping List
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• Modified AIP Meal Plan & Shopping List (NEW!)
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• AIP Reintroduction Guide
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• Core AIP Reintroduction Stages
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• Modified AIP Reintroduction Stages (NEW!)
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• Food Reaction Checklist
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• AIP Medical Research Review (NEW!)
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All of these materials are presented as beautifully-designed .pdf files that you can read on your computer, e-reader, or other digital device. They can also be printed at home.

1. If you are a subscriber to the Autoimmune Wellness newsletter, you should have an email in your inbox with download links to each resource in the library.

2. If you are not yet a subscriber, you can sign up here and receive the AIP Quick Start email series, in which you will be sent the resources in a series of emails over the course of 6 days.

3. If you only want specific resources, you can sign up to receive them individually by opting in using the following links:

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• AIP Quick-Start Guide, Core and Modified AIP Food Lists
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• Core AIP Meal Plan and Shopping List
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• Modified AIP Meal Plan and Shopping List
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• AIP Reintroduction Guide, Core and Modified AIP Reintroduction Stages, and Food Reaction Checklist
• 
  

Are you a practitioner that uses AIP in your practice and would like an extended library of AIP resources to use with your patients or clients? Be sure to consider taking the AIP Certified Coach Practitioner Training Program, where you can learn best practices for implementing and personalizing AIP for the population you serve. Graduates are granted a license to use a collection of 50+ handouts directly with their clients, including assessments, journals, troubleshooting materials, and more.

If you’d like to hear me talk through these materials, listen to the podcast below:

Thank you for being a member of the Autoimmune Wellness community, and I sincerely hope these resources help you, your friends, or your loved ones embark on AIP easily and successfully!

The post Core & Modified AIP: An Updated AIP Resource Library! appeared first on Autoimmune Wellness.

Welcome to

The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 3: Real Food on a Budget. We’re dedicating this season to discussing an aspect of natural healing that often gets left out of the conversation: affordability. We’ll be chatting with experts and peers from the AIP community about how to best balance money with your health priorities.

This season is brought to you by our title sponsor, The Nutritional Therapy Association (NTA), a holistic nutrition school that trains and certifies nutritional therapy practitioners and consultants with an emphasis on bioindividual nutrition. Learn more about them by visiting NutritionalTherapy.com, or read about our experiences going through their NTP and NTC programs in our comparison article.

Season 3 Episode 5 is all about buying clubs and online markets that will help you strategically stretch your budget and adopt the AIP sustainably for the long term. We discuss the pros and cons of local buying clubs, co-ops, membership programs, and bulk meat sources, as well as our favorite online shopping portals.

Our hope is that this episode will help you best leverage all of these resources so you can stretch your budget as far as it will go. Scroll down for the full episode transcript!

If you’d like to have our podcasts sent directly to your device, subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher!

If you’d like to download the .mp3, you can do so by following this link.

If you’d like to play the episode right now in your browser, use the player below!

Mickey Trescott: Welcome to the Autoimmune Wellness podcast, a resource for those seeking to live well with chronic illness. I’m Mickey Trescott, a nutritional therapy practitioner living well with autoimmune disease in Oregon. I’m the author of The Autoimmune Paleo Cookbook, and I’m using diet and lifestyle to best manage both Hashimoto’s and Celiac disease.

Angie Alt: And I’m Angie Alt. I’m a certified health coach and nutritional therapy consultant, also living well with autoimmune disease in Maryland. I’m the author of The Alternative Autoimmune Cookbook, and I’m using diet and lifestyle to best manage my endometriosis, lichen sclerosis, and Celiac disease.

After recovering our health by combining the best of conventional medicine with effective and natural dietary and lifestyle interventions, Mickey and I started blogging at www.AutoimmuneWellness.com, where our collective mission is seeking wellness and building community.

We also wrote a book called The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook together that serves as a do-it-yourself guidebook to living well with chronic illness.

Mickey Trescott: If you’re looking for more information about the autoimmune protocol, make sure to sign up for our newsletter at autoimmunewellness.com, so we can send you our free quick start guide. It contains printable AIP food lists, a 2-week food plan, a 90-minute batch cooking video, a mindset video, and food reintroduction guides.

This season of the podcast, real food on a budget is brought to you by our title sponsor, The Nutritional Therapy Association.

Angie Alt: A quick disclaimer: The content in this podcast is intended as general information only, and is not to be substituted for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Onto the podcast!

Topics:

1. Local buying clubs and food co-ops [2:45]

2. A hybrid option [7:04]

3. Bulk membership stores [11:39]

4. Online buying options [16:34]

5. Buying meat online [31:32]

Mickey Trescott: Hey, everybody! Mickey here. Welcome back to the Autoimmune Wellness podcast, season 3. How’s it going over there in DC, Angie?

Angie Alt: It’s going pretty well. I’m sad to report that it’s still winter. But we seem to be getting closer to spring, so that is making me a little bit happier.

Mickey Trescott: Yay for sunshine coming!

Angie Alt: Yay for sunshine! Vitamin D please.

Mickey Trescott: I know. Today we are continuing our discussion related to the topic this season. If you guys haven’t been paying attention, we are talking about real food on a budget. Which is really an important concept to a lot of us, if we want to be able to be eating this way long-term, right?

This episode is going to be about buying clubs and online markets. And how we can best leverage these resources to strategically help out with our sourcing needs and stretching our budgets. It can be super easy to overdo it with either of these options; I mean, hello. Amazon Prime, we’re looking at you!

But we hope that this episode will give you guys some great ideas about how you can use online shopping to your advantage.

Angie Alt: So, maybe we can start with buying clubs. Mick, do you want to talk about that first?

Mickey Trescott: So a buying club is just any time you band together with either community members, or a company, and you get bulk pricing on foods and home goods. So when you go to a grocery store and you buy one unit of something. Like one apple, or one little six-ounce applesauce or something. You’re getting actually the highest price for that, because you’re buying it in the smallest quantity.

So the grocery store, obviously they have a wholesale account. They’re able to buy food from distributors or farmers at a really good price. And their service is that they’re bringing it in, sorting it, putting it out for you, and you’re able to buy it in a really small quantity.

If you kind of reverse that, and you figure out how to band with other people in order to buy the biggest quantity of something, you can get a really good deal. So this might take the form of, say, a local Facebook group. So I’m the member of a local real food buying club on Facebook in my local area. It has over a couple of thousand members. And there are certain people in the community that will coordinate with local farmers to engage in bulk buys. So this might look like, you know, maybe they’re buying a cow and they want to split it with a few families. That would be kind of like a small share.

Sometimes they’ll even go to a honey vender, and they’ll get 100 jars of honey and everyone will split it. They do charge $20 a year to be a member. I know there are some groups out there that are nonprofits or free. Sometimes it’s just collections of neighbors. But this is definitely something to look into, especially if you live somewhere like I do. Where there’s a lot of food production locally. It’s hard for me to actually get that high-quality food in the store.

I think some of you guys in rural area will understand that disconnect. You think that living in an area where all the food is produced, you have great access to it. But it’s actually the other way around. My local grocery store is the equivalent of a Walmart. So these local food buying clubs can really help get that high-quality food at a better cost.

Angie Alt: I don’t belong to a formal group like Mickey does, through Facebook. But I have informally joined groups in the past where, for instance, I got maple syrup that was bought in bulk from the producer. And sometimes I do this with fish. I’ve done it to get salmon from Alaska.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah. Banding together, guys, can definitely save you some money. And honestly it doesn’t have to be a formal Facebook group. It can even be your family. So, something that I do because I live on property...

Welcome to

The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 3: Real Food on a Budget. We’re dedicating this season to discussing an aspect of natural healing that often gets left out of the conversation: affordability. We’ll be chatting with experts and peers from the AIP community about how to best balance money with your health priorities.

This season is brought to you by our title sponsor, The Nutritional Therapy Association (NTA), a holistic nutrition school that trains and certifies nutritional therapy practitioners and consultants with an emphasis on bioindividual nutrition. Learn more about them by visiting NutritionalTherapy.com, or read about our experiences going through their NTP and NTC programs in our comparison article.

Season 3 Episode 4 is all about the best ways to source produce — veggies and fruit — with budget in mind. This is a deep dive into all things produce sourcing! We cover our personal sourcing tips and how we personally save money, and we chat with our guest, Tyler Boggs of Heart2Heart Farms, about the benefits of CSAs and how to source your fruits and veggies if you can’t afford organic. Scroll down for the full episode transcript!

If you’d like to have our podcasts sent directly to your device, subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher!

If you’d like to download the .mp3, you can do so by following this link.

If you’d like to play the episode right now in your browser, use the player below!

Mickey Trescott: Welcome to the Autoimmune Wellness podcast, a resource for those seeking to live well with chronic illness. I’m Mickey Trescott, a nutritional therapy practitioner living well with autoimmune disease in Oregon. I’m the author of The Autoimmune Paleo Cookbook, and I’m using diet and lifestyle to best manage both Hashimoto’s and Celiac disease.

Angie Alt: And I’m Angie Alt. I’m a certified health coach and nutritional therapy consultant, also living well with autoimmune disease in Maryland. I’m the author of The Alternative Autoimmune Cookbook, and I’m using diet and lifestyle to best manage my endometriosis, lichen sclerosis, and Celiac disease.

After recovering our health by combining the best of conventional medicine with effective and natural dietary and lifestyle interventions, Mickey and I started blogging at www.AutoimmuneWellness.com, where our collective mission is seeking wellness and building community.

We also wrote a book called The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook together that serves as a do-it-yourself guidebook to living well with chronic illness.

Mickey Trescott: If you’re looking for more information about the autoimmune protocol, make sure to sign up for our newsletter at autoimmunewellness.com, so we can send you our free quick start guide. It contains printable AIP food lists, a 2-week food plan, a 90-minute batch cooking video, a mindset video, and food reintroduction guides.

This season of the podcast, real food on a budget is brought to you by our title sponsor, The Nutritional Therapy Association.

Angie Alt: A quick disclaimer: The content in this podcast is intended as general information only, and is not to be substituted for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Onto the podcast!

Topics:

1. Budget friendly sourcing of produce [2:14]

2. Personal sourcing tips from Mickey and Angie [8:40]

3. Guest interview with Tyler Boggs of Heart2Heart Farms [14:22]

4. Personal approach to budgeting for produce [18:54]

5. Produce scoring stories [24:24]

6. Sourcing when you can’t afford organic [29:45]

7. Benefits of a CSA [34:01]

Angie Alt: Hi everyone! Angie here. Welcome back to the Autoimmune Wellness podcast season 3. How are you doing, Mickey?

Mickey Trescott: I’m doing great, how about you Angie?

Angie Alt: I’m good. I’ve been flying around to the West Coast a bunch, but I am home today and ready to chat about our next topic.

Mickey Trescott: I know, Angie’s been like a little ping-pong ball, back and forth.

Angie Alt: It’s been kind of crazy. I just traveled out to the West three times in three weeks, you guys. But I’m ready to do it. Anything for the cause. {laughs}

Mickey Trescott: {laughs}

Angie Alt: Ok, so today we’re continuing our discussion related to the topic this season, real food on a budget. This episode is going to be about how to source produce. From veggies to fruit with a budget in mind.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah, so we really wanted to take a deep dive into all things produce sourcing. Because there’s kind of a lot of nuance here. So if you guys have the Autoimmune Wellness Handbook, you will be familiar with the concept of good, better, and best that we talk about when it comes to food sourcing in general. But we kind of wanted to go over it in terms of produce.

So what this means is that you have a few different layers of quality that you can choose to buy your produce. So instead of saying everybody needs to buy the highest level, and this is the only way to heal. We’re kind of presenting a variety of ways that you guys can plan your sourcing. So that you can make the most use of the resources that you have.

So first category is good. This is for those of you who can’t get all organic fruits and vegetables. What we recommend doing is to start with the Environmental Working Groups list of dirtiest and cleanest produce. If you guys do a quick Google, type in EWG dirty dozen, and clean 15, you’ll come up with a cute little chart where the Environmental Working Group has tested all the fruits and vegetables in production in the US, and they’ve identified the ones that have the highest chemical residue of pesticides and stuff.

So, this is a really great way to kind of prioritize your fruit and veggie choices, right Angie?

Angie Alt: Yeah. Well, this is a way for you to kind of get the max out of the foods that you can afford to buy organic, and kind of be really strategic about those purchases, so you’re not having to spend so much money on totally organic and utilizing the research to do that.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah. So the 2017 dirty dozen list; I have it pulled up here. They don’t have the 2018 list out yet. I think it’s coming out soon. But the dirty dozen. These are the fruits and vegetables with the highest amount of pesticides. Strawberries, apples, nectarines, peaches, celery, grapes, cherries, spinach, tomatoes, sweet bell peppers, cherry tomatoes, and cucumbers. We know you guys are probably not eating tomatoes and sweet bell peppers, if you’re on AIP. But those are going to be foods that have the highest pesticides. And you know, some of those are pretty surprising to me. Like cucumbers, I maybe wouldn’t have thought. But you know, those are the ones that were tested.

The clean 15 list has avocados, sweet corn, pineapple, cabbage, sweet peas, onions, mangos, asparagus, papaya, kiwi, eggplant, honeydew, grapefruit, cantaloupe, and cauliflower. So these were the vegetables that were shown to have the least amount of pesticides. So they might be ok for you to get conventional.

So some things like cauliflower, or cabbage, or onions. These are vegetables that are AIP friendly. Avocado. I buy conventional avocados a lot just because they’re on the top of the clean 15 list, they don’t have a lot of pesticides, and also...

Welcome to

The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 3: Real Food on a Budget. We’re dedicating this season to discussing an aspect of natural healing that often gets left out of the conversation: affordability. We’ll be chatting with experts and peers from the AIP community about how to best balance money with your health priorities.

This season is brought to you by our title sponsor, The Nutritional Therapy Association (NTA), a holistic nutrition school that trains and certifies nutritional therapy practitioners and consultants with an emphasis on bioindividual nutrition. Learn more about them by visiting NutritionalTherapy.com, or read about our experiences going through their NTP and NTC programs in our comparison article.

Season 3 Episode 3 is all about options for sourcing high-quality meat. We start by discussing the concept of “good, better, and best” when it comes to meat quality, and share how we source our meat.

Then, we interview Diana Rodgers, the creator of the new documentary Kale vs. Cow, about how to best source protein other than beef, and what we can all do to become more sustainable. Scroll down for the full episode transcript!

If you’d like to have our podcasts sent directly to your device, subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher!

If you’d like to download the .mp3, you can do so by following this link.

If you’d like to play the episode right now in your browser, use the player below!

Mickey Trescott: Welcome to the Autoimmune Wellness podcast, a resource for those seeking to live well with chronic illness. I’m Mickey Trescott, a nutritional therapy practitioner living well with autoimmune disease in Oregon. I’m the author of The Autoimmune Paleo Cookbook, and I’m using diet and lifestyle to best manage both Hashimoto’s and Celiac disease.

Angie Alt: And I’m Angie Alt. I’m a certified health coach and nutritional therapy consultant, also living well with autoimmune disease in Maryland. I’m the author of The Alternative Autoimmune Cookbook, and I’m using diet and lifestyle to best manage my endometriosis, lichen sclerosis, and Celiac disease.

After recovering our health by combining the best of conventional medicine with effective and natural dietary and lifestyle interventions, Mickey and I started blogging at www.AutoimmuneWellness.com, where our collective mission is seeking wellness and building community.

We also wrote a book called The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook together that serves as a do-it-yourself guidebook to living well with chronic illness.

Mickey Trescott: If you’re looking for more information about the autoimmune protocol, make sure to sign up for our newsletter at autoimmunewellness.com, so we can send you our free quick start guide. It contains printable AIP food lists, a 2-week food plan, a 90-minute batch cooking video, a mindset video, and food reintroduction guides.

This season of the podcast, real food on a budget is brought to you by our title sponsor, The Nutritional Therapy Association.

Angie Alt: A quick disclaimer: The content in this podcast is intended as general information only, and is not to be substituted for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Onto the podcast!

Topics:

1. Quality of meat on a scale [3:29]

2. How Mickey and Angie source their meat [8:22]

3. Interview with Diana Rodgers [20:45]

4. Sourcing protein other than beef [26:23]

5. Joining the sustainability movement [29:07]

6. Kale Versus Cow documentary [36:57]

Mickey Trescott: Hey everybody! Mickey here. Welcome back to the Autoimmune Wellness podcast, season 3. How’s it going today, Angie?

Angie Alt: It’s going well. I’m excited to talk about this topic. I know it’s kind of weird, but I’m sort of into it.

Mickey Trescott: So, today, we’re continuing our discussion related to the topic of the season; real food on a budget. Today’s episode is going to be about options for sourcing high-quality meat. So this is one of the important parts of the autoimmune protocol diet, whether or not you’re on the elimination diet or you’ve done some reintroductions. Making sure that you have some high-quality meat on your plate is definitely important.

So first, let’s have a chat about this concept of good, better, and best. Angie, do you want to kind of give a little overview of what we mean by that?

Angie Alt: Yeah. It’s basically a scale that we like to use when we’re comparing food quality. I think we first developed it when we wrote our book. Is that right, Mickey?

Mickey Trescott: Yeah.

Angie Alt: When we wrote The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook, we kind of developed this scale. Because we really wanted folks to understand that just going for it in terms of making a dietary change for healing is worthwhile. Even if it can’t be perfect. We wanted to kind of dispel this perfectionism myth, and help folks understand that there’s a scale here. And how to best use that scale for whatever your budget and your sourcing abilities are.

Mickey Trescott: Yep. And I think that’s really important that you highlighted two reasons why it might be different. So, budget and accessibility. Sometimes people have barriers in both those areas. Sometimes one and not the other. So just because you can afford something doesn’t mean you can always find it, and vice versa.

Angie Alt: Yeah. So let’s start at the far end of the scale. Let’s start with good. When we say good, in terms of meat quality, we’re talking about if you can’t afford or source grass-fed, or pastured meats, or wild-caught seafood. You can focus on buying leaner cuts of conventionally raised meats. You can still try to make sure they’re at least hormone free. They should be. There are regulations around this stuff. But you can work on adding more organ meats and fish to your diet.

Conventionally raised organ meat is inexpensive, and it’s still very nutrient dense. And farmed fish is better for you than no fish at all. I know there’s a lot of folks that there that are going to balk at that, but you can even check in with the Paleo Mom. She’s done the research here. It’s better to get some fish in, no matter what.

You can also consider wild-caught canned salmon, tuna, or sardines. Which are relatively cheap, but they’re still packed with nutritional value. Be sure to look for canned fish that’s free of soy and spices, though, if you’re following the autoimmune protocol.

And then, you can limit how much conventionally raised poultry you eat, since it does have the lowest value in terms of nutrition. What we mean by buying leaner cuts of other kinds of meat is; looking for less fat. The toxins that kind of accumulate in an animal that’s been fed a less than healthy diet tends to be in the fat. So if you bought conventionally raised pork, you’d trim off the fat on those pork chops. If you had to buy conventionally raised beef, you’d trim off the fat there. That’s what we mean by leaner.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah. And that kind of goes a little bit against what we normally recommend with AIP. Which is to eat the fat. And that’s

Welcome to

The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 3: Real Food on a Budget. We’re dedicating this season to discussing an aspect of natural healing that often gets left out of the conversation: affordability. We’ll be chatting with experts and peers from the AIP community about how to best balance money with your health priorities.

This season is brought to you by our title sponsor, The Nutritional Therapy Association (NTA), a holistic nutrition school that trains and certifies nutritional therapy practitioners and consultants with an emphasis on bioindividual nutrition. Learn more about them by visiting NutritionalTherapy.com, or read about our experiences going through their NTP and NTC programs in our comparison article.

Season 3 Episode 2 is all about how to implement some kitchen hacks to help you save money on food. We discuss our personal best practices when it comes to getting food on the table affordably, the first of which is meal planning. Some of you have heard us chat about these topics before, but just stick with us, because you may not have looked at the benefits from this angle before.

Then, we chat with Alaena Haber of Grazed and Enthused about her favorite AIP kitchen tools and how she sets herself up for success in an AIP kitchen. Scroll down for the full episode transcript!

If you’d like to have our podcasts sent directly to your device, subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher!

If you’d like to download the .mp3, you can do so by following this link.

If you’d like to play the episode right now in your browser, use the player below!

Mickey Trescott: Welcome to the Autoimmune Wellness podcast, a resource for those seeking to live well with chronic illness. I’m Mickey Trescott, a nutritional therapy practitioner living well with autoimmune disease in Oregon. I’m the author of The Autoimmune Paleo Cookbook, and I’m using diet and lifestyle to best manage both Hashimoto’s and Celiac disease.

Angie Alt: And I’m Angie Alt. I’m a certified health coach and nutritional therapy consultant, also living well with autoimmune disease in Maryland. I’m the author of The Alternative Autoimmune Cookbook, and I’m using diet and lifestyle to best manage my endometriosis, lichen sclerosis, and Celiac disease.

After recovering our health by combining the best of conventional medicine with effective and natural dietary and lifestyle interventions, Mickey and I started blogging at www.AutoimmuneWellness.com, where our collective mission is seeking wellness and building community.

We also wrote a book called The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook together that serves as a do-it-yourself guidebook to living well with chronic illness.

Mickey Trescott: If you’re looking for more information about the autoimmune protocol, make sure to sign up for our newsletter at autoimmunewellness.com, so we can send you our free quick start guide. It contains printable AIP food lists, a 2-week food plan, a 90-minute batch cooking video, a mindset video, and food reintroduction guides.

This season of the podcast, real food on a budget is brought to you by our title sponsor, The Nutritional Therapy Association.

Angie Alt: A quick disclaimer: The content in this podcast is intended as general information only, and is not to be substituted for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Onto the podcast!

Topics:

1. The benefits of meal planning [1:40]

2. All about batch cooking [14:59]

3. How Mickey and Angie implement meal planning and batch cooking [26:20]

4. Guest interview, Alaena Haber: AIP kitchen tools [33:14]

5. Setting up your AIP kitchen [40:15]

6. Alaena’s favorite batch cooked AIP recipes [43:10]

7. Myth busting about an AIP blogger’s pantry [45:37]

8. How cooking changed with a baby [50:15]

Angie Alt: Hi everyone! Angie here. Welcome back to the Autoimmune Wellness podcast, season 3. How are you doing today, Mickey?

Mickey Trescott: I’m doing great. How about you, Angie?

Angie Alt: I’m good. I’m excited to talk about this topic. Today we’re continuing our discussion related to the topic this season, which is real food on a budget. This episode is going to be about how to implement some kitchen hacks to help you save money on food.

Before we even get into sourcing food, we wanted to take a little detour and discuss about some of the best practices that, when used effectively, will really help you in the kitchen. Some of you have heard us chat about these topics before, but just stick with us, because you may not have looked at the benefits from this angle before.

Mickey, there’s a couple of topics here. Let’s start with a biggie; what is meal planning?

Mickey Trescott: Yeah. So meal planning is something that we talk about a lot, but it’s because it really solves a lot of problems. But meal planning is really the act of just sitting down with a pen and paper, or with some software, which we’ll maybe talk about later. Maybe an app on your phone, maybe calendar. And just writing down what you’re going to eat and when.

It maybe for some people seems a little bit obsessive, and a little bit like too much. But honestly, meal planning is something that is going to help you a lot. And we’ll talk about all the benefits to it. But some different ways that you can meal plan are, like I said, you could just sit down with a sheet of paper and you could say; ok, for Monday dinner I’m going to make a roast chicken. For Tuesday dinner, I’m going to make a roast beef. For Wednesday, maybe I’ll try to work in some seafood.

So it can be something really simple, like just planning the major protein and then kind of letting the vegetables fill in as you find certain deals at the farmer’s market, or the grocery store. Or you can actually literally plan every single breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack through your meal planning exercise.

So you can use different apps to do this. We are really big fans of a service called Real Plans. Which is an online software-based solution that actually has all of our AIP recipes in our books and on our blog as part of their membership plan. And it’s really affordable. And what they do, you plug in kind of all the things that you’re avoiding, or that you’re eating. And then it will kind of randomly generate you a bunch of recipes that you can then plug into different slots. So that’s the most high-tech version of meal planning.

And then the most low tech, which is actually more along the lines of what I do, is just using a pen and paper. Maybe on a calendar. I actually do it often on my calendar on my computer that I use for all my work and my personal things. And then I’ll just have, at the end of the day, roast that chicken. Just so I know; ok, later today, this is what I’m going to do. So logistically, that’s how someone would meal plan. Do you have anything to add about that, Angie?

Angie Alt: Not too much. You kind of covered all the bases. I’m like you at this point. I’ve been meal planning for a really, really long time. Even before I got into the AIP lifestyle. And I just do it super low tech. Pen and paper, kind of boring.

Sometimes I use

Welcome to

The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 3: Real Food on a Budget. We’re dedicating this season to discussing an aspect of natural healing that often gets left out of the conversation: affordability. We’ll be chatting with experts and peers from the AIP community about how to best balance money with your health priorities.

This season is brought to you by our title sponsor, The Nutritional Therapy Association (NTA), a holistic nutrition school that trains and certifies nutritional therapy practitioners and consultants with an emphasis on bioindividual nutrition. Learn more about them by visiting NutritionalTherapy.com, or read about our experiences going through their NTP and NTC programs in our comparison article.

Season 3 Episode 1 features an interview with our friend and role model, Dr. Terry Wahls, who is a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Iowa. Dr. Wahls successfully recovered from multiple sclerosis using diet and lifestyle strategies, and currently studies the interplay between diet, lifestyle, functional medicine, and autoimmune disease.

As a medical doctor, Terry has a lot to share in regards to the high cost of medical testing, lower cost approaches, and whether a “real food” approach is elitist. Scroll down for the full episode transcript!

If you’d like to have our podcasts sent directly to your device, subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher!

If you’d like to download the .mp3, you can do so by following this link.

If you’d like to play the episode right now in your browser, use the player below!

Mickey Trescott: Welcome to the Autoimmune Wellness podcast, a resource for those seeking to live well with chronic illness. I’m Mickey Trescott, a nutritional therapy practitioner living well with autoimmune disease in Oregon. I’m the author of The Autoimmune Paleo Cookbook, and I’m using diet and lifestyle to best manage both Hashimoto’s and Celiac disease.

Angie Alt: And I’m Angie Alt. I’m a certified health coach and nutritional therapy consultant, also living well with autoimmune disease in Maryland. I’m the author of The Alternative Autoimmune Cookbook, and I’m using diet and lifestyle to best manage my endometriosis, lichen sclerosis, and Celiac disease.

After recovering our health by combining the best of conventional medicine with effective and natural dietary and lifestyle interventions, Mickey and I started blogging at www.AutoimmuneWellness.com, where our collective mission is seeking wellness and building community.

We also wrote a book called The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook together that serves as a do-it-yourself guidebook to living well with chronic illness.

Mickey Trescott: If you’re looking for more information about the autoimmune protocol, make sure to sign up for our newsletter at autoimmunewellness.com, so we can send you our free quick start guide. It contains printable AIP food lists, a 2-week food plan, a 90-minute batch cooking video, a mindset video, and food reintroduction guides.

This season of the podcast, real food on a budget is brought to you by our title sponsor, The Nutritional Therapy Association.

Angie Alt: A quick disclaimer: The content in this podcast is intended as general information only, and is not to be substituted for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Onto the podcast!

Topics:

1. Welcome back to season 3 [1:40]

2. A little bit about the upcoming season [8:49]

3. Conversation with Dr. Wahls about food on a budget [15:06]

Mickey Trescott: Hey everyone! Mickey here. Welcome back to the Autoimmune Wellness podcast. We are in our third season. How are you doing today, Angie?

Angie Alt: I’m good. I’m kind of in shock that we have been doing this for three seasons now.

Mickey Trescott: I know. It’s been a lot of fun putting everything together. And I think we would go through these long breaks where we’re like; we’d forget about the podcast. We’re like; yeah, we don’t have a podcast. And then we’d start thinking about doing it again, and we’re like; oh yeah, that’s a lot of work.

Angie Alt: Oh yeah, I do a podcast.

Mickey Trescott: We’ve been getting fired up, and we’re really excited to introduce our topic for this season. It’s one that we have been thinking about for probably years now, huh Angie?

Angie Alt: Yeah, we’ve been talking about this a long time.

Mickey Trescott: We’ve been talking about it for a while. And it is Real Food on a Budget. {dun-dun-dun!} We really want to dig in how to make nutrient dense, healing foods accessible for everyone. So Angie, you want to talk a little bit about how we came up with this topic?

Angie Alt: Yeah. I mean, we’ve long been hearing kind of the rumblings from the autoimmune community, the AIP community, that finding a way to make these dietary changes affordable is this big barrier to adopting the protocol over the long term. And those rumblings were pretty much confirmed at the beginning of this year when we ran our giant reader survey. Seriously; thank you to everyone who participated and gave us your feedback. That was very valuable to us.

But no big surprise; you guys pinpointed affordability and accessibility to high quality, healing foods as one of your biggest challenges. So we kind of knew that that was something that was out there all along.

Mickey Trescott: Yep. And some of the specific challenges that we’ve both personally been through at different points in our journey, and things we’ve heard from you guys in comments on the blog and in social media, and in the survey, are things like people that can’t get started just because they literally can’t afford it. They don’t have the current budget for it. Right?

Angie Alt: Right. I mean, it’s hard. It’s a big budgetary move. We definitely felt that in the beginning of our journeys when we kind of shifted our families’ budgets to focus on that. My husband and I sit down and do kind of a big overview of our spending at the beginning of every year from the previous year, and we saw it again this year. Whoa; that food budget. It’s a biggie. It’s hard to adjust all those other areas of your life to focus on that priority.

We also hear a lot about people not being able to find high quality food in their area.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah, not being able to afford them, so people don’t have access to a quality grocery store that sells high quality food. Or, if they do, maybe those foods are exorbitantly expensive. Because as we’ve seen a rise in organic and grass-fed and even the convenience foods that weren’t around when we started AIP; a lot of these things now are infiltrating into maybe even more rural and more food desert-y areas. But the price tag goes way up because those retailers know that they have something nobody else does, and they want their customers to pay for it. So that’s really frustrating.

Angie Alt: Yeah. Another area is people saying that affording the high-quality food and the medical care that they might need at the same time together is a challenge.

Mickey Trescott: This is a huge one.

Angie Alt: Yeah, it is. It really is. It’s a hard one to get around, right? You just have to kind of believe that focusing on diet and lifestyle is eventually going to help you bring those medical care costs down. I’ve definitely seen that over...

The AIP community has changed… a lot! Since our humble beginnings in approximately 2011, our movement has grown exponentially. This growth has been overwhelmingly positive, but there have been some downsides to it as well. Considering all the growth and change, we’ve decided to start 2018 with a “State of AIP Address” here at Autoimmune Wellness.

We’d like to have a discussion about the roots of AIP, where we are at now, and where we think things are heading. Most importantly, with that longview in mind, we want you, our community, to help us focus our energy.

We believe in the concept of servant leadership and want to find out how we can continue to strengthen and refine the AIP movement from your perspectives. We are poised to see AIP move into the mainstream and we want to make sure it arrives there with your needs out front.

This is a long post! If you’d rather listen to the content in podcast form, you can do so below. But don’t forget to fill out our survey when you’re done.

• The earliest threads of AIP began to take form in 2011 when some early-adopters (us!) were introduced to the idea of eating an autoimmune-specific elimination diet through the work of Robb Wolf, Chris Kresser, Loren Cordain, and Datis Kharrazian.

• In 2012, Sarah Ballantyne started blogging about her experience with Paleo and began to research and refine the elimination diet, providing the first comprehensive guidance on elimination and reintroduction of foods.
• Later in 2012, a few early-adopters started blogging about their personal experiences on the elimination diet and connected to form the beginnings of the AIP community. The first year or so, there were six of us: Mickey (Autoimmune Paleo), Angie (Alt-Ternative Autoimmune), Eileen (Phoenix Helix), Sarah (The Paleo Mom), Whitney (Nutrisclerosis), and Christina (A Clean Plate). At the time we were all very much in the middle of our healing journeys with diverse autoimmune diseases, but we connected on the idea that diet was key.

• 2013 was a time of grassroots growth for AIP. In April, Mickey released the first ebook about AIP, The Autoimmune Paleo E-Cookbook. This was the year Sarah Ballantyne was heavily researching the protocol and publishing more in-depth articles about the “why’s,” nutrient density, and reintroductions. It was also the year that we started to consider the lifestyle piece in managing our conditions. Our group was still small, but this year another dozen or so bloggers started sharing their stories and recipes with the burgeoning community.

• 2014 was the breakout year for AIP. In January, Sarah Ballantyne’s complete guide to AIP was released, The Paleo Approach, and went on to become a New York Times Bestseller later that summer. In March, the print version of The Autoimmune Paleo Cookbook came out. And later on in the year we got The Paleo Approach Cookbook, a second offering from Sarah Ballantyne, and Angie Alt’s The Alternative Autoimmune Cookbook, along with a few other fantastic AIP ebooks. SAD to AIP in SIX had its first enrollment guiding 25 members through a phased transition to AIP. In these early days, the community was looking for recipes and support, and the offerings this year definitely answered that call! At the end of 2014, the very first AIP restaurant, Mission: Heirloom opened its doors in Berkeley, California, and the first AIP podcast, The Phoenix Helix Podcast joined the airwaves!

• January 2015, Angie and Mickey announced that they would be joining forces and blogging together, along with community voices, at autoimmune-paleo.com. At this point, the community had grown to tens of thousands of people, as evidenced by the movement’s exponential growth, engagement, and connection on our site and across all social media platforms (especially Instagram!). The movement was now large enough to support big in-person gatherings, with many meetup groups springing up, authors holding book tours, classes being given, and speaking at conferences about the protocol. This was the year that we started overhearing folks in the grocery store talking about AIP, and we had a large enough base of people who had experience with the protocol to start featuring success stories other than our own on our site. By the end of 2015, there were over 15 books and programs for people following AIP!

• 2016 AIP started infiltrating progressive doctors’ offices and went global. In the early days, people found out about AIP from reading online or picking up a copy of our books. This year, the functional and alternative medicine communities started hearing about AIP and we heard more and more from both our followers and clients that their doctors were recommending this approach. A GI doctor reached out to us about the positive results one of her IBD patients had with AIP, and that discussion turned into a full-blown medical study using AIP, later that year.
• Also in 2016, it became clear to us that our movement was no longer US-based, as both international readership and membership in the blogging community grew exponentially. The AIP movement began to grow in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South America, Europe, and even the Middle East. Our discussions also shifted to encompass the lifestyle changes, implementation, and patient advocacy. We released our co-authored book,

This post contains affiliate links. Click here to see what that means!

That being said, we only promote authors, products, and services that we wholeheartedly stand by!

This is a special bonus series of The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast where we are sharing in long, conversational format our personal healing stories. In each of these episodes, we are joined by our Content Manager, Grace Heerman, who interviews us individually about our experiences with illness.

If you are new to our podcast, we recommend starting at the very beginning of Season 1, where we take a deep look into the seven steps to living well with autoimmune disease, as outlined in our co-authored book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook. In season 2 we expanded the format to include Q and A episodes as well as interviews with those who have used AIP to successfully heal from chronic illness.

Welcome back to The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast! We are in the middle of producing a third season for you all to enjoy, and we believe it will be our most actionable and best season yet. In the meantime, we are sharing long-format interviews on our personal healing journeys, lead by our amazing content director Grace.

Today you’ll hear Grace interview Mickey in-depth about her healing story, including what it was like to experience a healing crisis in her twenties having been newly married, without health insurance, and with a very limited understanding from her friends and family.

We’ll be back around the New Year with an update about what we have in store for you guys both on the blog and for the podcast.

Thank you Grace, for facilitating these interviews for us! Enjoy everyone!

If you’d like to have our podcasts sent directly to your device, subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher!

If you’d like to download the .mp3, you can do so by following this link.

If you’d like to play the episode right now in your browser, use the player below!

The post Bonus Episode #2: Deep Dive w/ Mickey appeared first on Autoimmune Wellness.

This post contains affiliate links. Click here to see what that means!

That being said, we only promote authors, products, and services that we wholeheartedly stand by!

This is a special bonus series of The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast where we are sharing in long, conversational format our personal healing stories. In each of these episodes, we are joined by our Content Manager, Grace Heerman, who interviews us individually about our experiences with illness.

If you are new to our podcast, we recommend starting at the very beginning of Season 1, where we take a deep look into the seven steps to living well with autoimmune disease, as outlined in our co-authored book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook. In season 2 we expanded the format to include Q and A episodes as well as interviews with those who have used AIP to successfully heal from chronic illness.

Welcome back to The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast! We’re sorry that it has been so long since we’ve released any episodes; the truth is that we have spent a good part of this year working on training our AIP Certified Coaches, and now that our first class has graduated, we’re back to focusing on developing some new podcast content for you guys to enjoy. We can’t wait to share with you what we’ve been up to!

In the meantime, we do have a couple of special bonus episodes to share with you guys. We’re going to give you a little backstory about how this came about, because it was definitely not something we’ve been planning. Our content director, Grace, interviewed Angie for some writing she was doing on the site.

Now, at the time, neither Angie or Grace knew how deep and personal the interview would be, and they recorded it so that Grace could revisit some of the events Angie spoke about. None of us knew how moving and powerful this long, conversational interview would be, and when we all gave it a listen, we thought that we needed to share it in some way, and that some of you might find it helpful to hear our personal healing stories in this format. This conversation includes the full details of Angie’s 11-year struggle with obtaining her autoimmune diagnosis, much of which took place while living overseas in Africa.

Thank you Grace, for facilitating these interviews for us! Enjoy everyone!

If you’d like to have our podcasts sent directly to your device, subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher!

If you’d like to download the .mp3, you can do so by following this link.

If you’d like to play the episode right now in your browser, use the player below!

The post Bonus Episode #1: Deep-Dive w/ Angie appeared first on Autoimmune Wellness.