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:

1. 
   
2. Digestive function
3. 
   
4. Constipation – 36% to 11% (25% difference)
5. 
   
6. 
   
7. Gas – 61% to 21% (35% difference)
8. 
   
9. 
   
10. Flatulence – 61% to 29% (32% difference)
11. 
    
12. 
    
13. Diarrhea – 29% to 7% (22% difference)
14. 
    
15. 
    
16. Abdominal pain – 29% to 14% (15% difference)
17. 
    
18. 
    
19. 
    
20. Energy
21. 
    
22. Tiredness – 82% to 29% (53% difference)
23. 
    
24. 
    
25. Drowsiness – 64% to 21% (43% difference)
26. 
    
27. 
    
28. Fatigue – 50% to 11% (39% difference)
29. 
    
30. 
    
31. 
    
32. Mental
33. 
    
34. Impaired concentration – 71% to 18% (53% difference)
35. 
    
36. 
    
37. Headaches – 39% to 11% (28% difference)
38. 
    
39. 
    
40. Depression – 29% to 4% (25% difference)
41. 
    
42. 
    
43. 
    
44. Pain
45. 
    
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:

• 
  
• 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
• 
  

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!)
• 
  
• 
  
• AIP Reintroduction Guide
• 
  
• 
  
• 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!)
• 
  

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:

• 
  
• AIP Quick-Start Guide, Core and Modified AIP Food Lists
• 
  
• 
  
• Core AIP Meal Plan and Shopping List
• 
  
• 
  
• Modified AIP Meal Plan and Shopping List
• 
  
• 
  
• 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.

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!

Welcome to The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 2! We’ve created this podcast as a free resource to accompany our book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness.

Season 2 Episode 8 is our final episode of the season! And what an episode to end on. We don’t often hear stories from men in the Hashimoto’s community but today, Angie is interviewing our friend Ryan Monahan who has managed his Hashi’s symptoms in one of the most challenging professional environments: a tour bus.

As a traveling musician, Ryan had to become an expert at thinking ahead and being proactive about his healing. No matter your career, you will definitely find takeaways here. 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 complimentary resource for those on the road to recovery. I’m Mickey Trescott, a nutritional therapy practitioner living well with autoimmune disease in Oregon. I’ve got both Hashimoto’s and celiac disease.

Angie Alt: And I’m Angie Alt, a certified health coach and nutritional therapy consultant, also living well with autoimmune disease in Maryland. I have 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.Autimmune-Paleo.com, where our collective mission is seeking wellness and building community.

Mickey Trescott: This podcast is sponsored by The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook; our co-authored guide to living well with chronic illness. We saw the need for a comprehensive resource that goes beyond nutrition to connect savvy patients just like you to the resources they need to achieve vibrant health. Through the use of self assessments, checklists, handy guides and templates, you get to experience the joy of discovery; finding out which areas to prioritize on your healing journey. Pick up a copy wherever books are sold.

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. On to the podcast!

Topics:
1. Introducing our guest, Ryan, and his diagnosis story [2:30]
2. Learning about holistic treatment [13:17]
3. Treatment with the greatest impact [19:53]
4. AIP on the road and touring [24:54]
5. Biggest dietary impact on symptoms [33:06]
6. Stand-out supporters [36:17]
7. Highest point of the journey [40:11]
8. Final takeaways from Ryan [44:29]

Angie Alt: Hi everyone! Welcome back to the Autoimmune Wellness podcast, season 2. This is Angie, and today I’m interviewing Ryan. He is a Hashi’s warrior, and also a functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner. And additionally, with all of that going on, he’s also a passionate musician who has been in the music industry for 15 years, and member of a regular touring band, Easter Island. We are going to dig into that, you guys; touring and AIP. It can be done.

We’ve gotten a lot of feedback that you guys find it helpful to hear from folks who have taken on the healing journey in real life. So today we will be sharing a little bit of Ryan’s story. Thank you, Ryan, for joining us from Georgia. Are you ready to get started?

Ryan: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on the show. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.

Angie Alt: Yeah. We’re really excited to share a lot of different stories this season. So let’s just dive in with some questions. You know, one of the areas we love to explore with people is diagnosis, and folks’ diagnosis story. Because as you probably know, in the autoimmune community, that can be kind of a harrowing journey. What was the first symptom you noticed of your autoimmune disease?

Ryan: Yeah. So I had really struggled with allergies and asthma my entire life. And just generally symptoms of related to ear, nose, and throat. I was one of those just kind of sick all the time kids. Like, oh he’s on antibiotics; oh, he’s had bronchitis, the croup. You name it. Strep throat, just constantly. And that kind of persisted into my adult life. And then it started getting worse when I was in college. And it was really when I noticed that things were getting really bad was when I was sleeping for 10, 12 hours at a time, and was having trouble waking. So I would set three alarms, and that still wouldn’t wake me up. And I would set an alarm on my stereo system, and it would be shaking the entire room.

Angie Alt: Oh boy! {laughs}

Ryan: Yeah, and I would still just sleep through it and miss classes. It took me a few years to really piece it together. Because at that time, I had just assumed I’m burning the candle at both ends, I’m a busy guy, I’m just exhausted. I’m just kind of burnt out. And you know, that was kind of the narrative I told myself for a while.

Angie Alt: Ok. So it was probably since childhood that you were kind of dealing with some of this stuff, and it sounds like it kind of came into full being in probably your early 20s, in college. I think that happens to a lot of us, actually, in this autoimmune world. And it can be hard to separate it, right? From, is this just regular, like you said, burning the candle at both ends, or not?

Ryan: Absolutely. I think as a society, we’re just kind of accustomed to accepting a really low baseline for health. And when everybody is more or less sick around us, I don’t think. It’s kind of like that quote, “The last thing a fish would ever notice is water.”

Angie Alt: Right.

Ryan: And so I think, yeah, we just kind of assume that because symptoms are common that they’re normal. And we just try to cope with it, and maybe try things here and there. I’ll try some vitamin C, and kind of self-medicate a little bit. But as you know, that only lasts for so long until your symptoms are sort of screaming at you for help.

Angie Alt: Right. So how long did it take you, then, to actually get an official diagnosis from that point when you were kind of like; “Oh, this is not normal. I can’t even get up to my stereo system screaming at me. What’s going on here?”

Ryan: Well. You know, it’s really hard to say. Because I had been dealing with these things most of my life. It was just really in college that they kind of reached a peak. But I would say it’s at least 10 years. I wasn’t...

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!

Welcome to The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 2! We’ve created this podcast as a free resource to accompany our book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness.

Season 2 Episode 7 is our final Q + A episode of the season! This week, Mickey and Angie are focusing on questions about food sensitivities beyond the AIP, and how to tweak the protocol to address unusual symptoms such as protein cravings. They also touch on how to handle discussions about AIP with coworkers, friends and family.

Plus, they start by chatting about how they’ve been managing stress recently, and their personal batch cooking neuroses. 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 complimentary resource for those on the road to recovery. I’m Mickey Trescott, a nutritional therapy practitioner living well with autoimmune disease in Oregon. I’ve got both Hashimoto’s and Celiac disease.

Angie Alt: And I’m Angie Alt, a certified health coach and nutritional therapy consultant, also living well with autoimmune disease in Maryland. I have 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.Autimmune-Paleo.com, where our collective mission is seeking wellness and building community.

Mickey Trescott: This podcast is sponsored by The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook; our co-authored guide to living well with chronic illness. We saw the need for a comprehensive resource that goes beyond nutrition to connect savvy patients, just like you, to the resources they need to achieve vibrant health. Through the use of self assessments, checklists, handy guides and templates, you get to experience the joy of discovery; finding out which areas to prioritize on your healing journey. Pick up a copy wherever books are sold.

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. On to the podcast!

Topics:
1. Mickey and Angie: Question of the week [2:39]
2. Suggesting AIP to friends and family [5:31]
3. Comments about diet and illness from coworkers [10:07]
4. Intolerance to foods on AIP [16:32]
5. Additional food sensitivities on AIP [20:30]
6. White rice after reintroduction [24:44]
7. Epstein-Barr and Hashimoto’s [27:05]
8. Intense protein cravings [34:46]

Mickey Trescott: Hey everybody! Mickey here, and welcome back to the Autoimmune Wellness podcast season 2. Today is our last round of question and answer for this season. Dun, dun, dunnn! How are you doing this week, Angie?

Angie Alt: I’m doing good. It’s been a little crazy. We’ve both been busy with conferences and other work travel and stuff. But it’s good. What about you? How are you doing?

Mickey Trescott: Yeah. Just trying to get control over the schedule and the cooking and the sleeping and the stress managing, and the texting. {laughs}

Angie Alt: {laughs} Yeah. So appropriate.

Mickey Trescott: It’s a lot. It’s a lot.

Angie Alt: Yeah, it’s been a lot. Yesterday; excuse me. Two days ago I cooked all the things. I was like, “oh my god, I have to get on top of the cooking!” and I cooked so much food and now I have too much food. {laughs}

Mickey Trescott: Well that’s not a big problem. Because you can always freeze it!

Angie Alt: Yeah, that’s true.

Mickey Trescott: That’s what I do. But yeah, the first thing I do when things start to get a little crazy is I start batch cooking. It’s like obsessive.

Angie Alt: Mm-hmm. I hear you.

Mickey Trescott: So, before we get onto our regular scheduled listener questions, we’re going to ask each other a question like we’ve been doing this whole series. I know Angie is ready to be done with this format, because she doesn’t like the random questions.

Angie Alt: {laughs}

Mickey Trescott: But Angie, my question for you this week, is what aspect of personal healing are you working your hardest on right now?

Angie Alt: Oh boy. Mickey. You and the can of worms all the time. I would have to say honestly that I am probably in a period where I’m trying to be ok with things being the way they are. I’m trying to kind of let go of focusing a lot on healing, and just let things be kind of crazy, kind of hairy, kind of up and down. And just allow myself to kind of go with the flow. And sometimes the flow isn’t the direction you would hope for. But I’m just trying to be a little Zen about it at the moment. I think that’s where I’m really working, if I’m honest. What about you, Mick. What you do you have going on?

Mickey Trescott: Yeah. You know, the meditation thing. It’s a little in the same vein; just kind of trying to accept the situation that I’m in. The stressors and the physical stuff. I feel like there are a lot of things I don’t have control over right now, so meditation has been very helpful. And I made a goal to meditate every day, and I was on a 68-day streak using the Calm app. Which, you know, you shared that with me and I got super into it. Of course, I’m an Upholder.

Angie Alt: Calm is awesome. Calm is my spirit animal.

Mickey Trescott: It’s the best. And I got really hooked in because I like having a perfect record, and so when it reminded me every day, it’s time to meditate, I would do a little meditation every day. And this week, it just fell off the rails, and I forgot one day. And I kid you not, I woke up at 3 in the morning, and the first thing I thought was, “Oh my gosh, I forgot to meditate yesterday!” And I was so sad I almost cried.

Angie Alt: {laughs}

Mickey Trescott: I was like, “I was on a streak!” And you know what I wanted to do was to do it for a whole year. But I’ll get back on the wagon and keep going.

Angie Alt: Yeah, you’re doing great. You know what. You guys, this is a reason why you know Calm is really, really awesome. Mickey has the Upholder tendency. If you don’t know what we’re talking about, check out Gretchen Rubin and the Four Tendencies. So Mickey has the Upholder tendency, and she feels like she is going to do that internally and externally. She wants the reward of doing that. I am not the Upholder...

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Welcome to The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 2! We’ve created this podcast as a free resource to accompany our book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness.

Season 2 Episode 6‘s interview features one of the most captivating stories of AI recovery we’ve ever heard. Jolaine Weins is recovering from a rare, arthritis-related autoimmune condition called ankylosing spondylitis. Following her initial symptom discovery, Jolaine waited 22 years to receive a diagnosis, all the while visiting countless practitioners and living in debilitating pain and lethargy.

Shockingly, it wasn’t a practitioner but a social media post that finally pointed Jolaine in the right direction. Her story is one of the most powerful testaments to the importance of self-advocacy we’ve ever heard. You’ll want to listen to every fascinating detail! 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 complimentary resource for those on the road to recovery. I’m Mickey Trescott, a nutritional therapy practitioner living well with autoimmune disease in Oregon. I’ve got both Hashimoto’s and Celiac disease.

Angie Alt: And I’m Angie Alt, a certified health coach and nutritional therapy consultant, also living well with autoimmune disease in Maryland. I have 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.Autimmune-Paleo.com, where our collective mission is seeking wellness and building community.

Mickey Trescott: This podcast is sponsored by The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook; our co-authored guide to living well with chronic illness. We saw the need for a comprehensive resource that goes beyond nutrition to connect savvy patients, just like you, to the resources they need to achieve vibrant health. Through the use of self assessments, checklists, handy guides and templates, you get to experience the joy of discovery; finding out which areas to prioritize on your healing journey. Pick up a copy wherever books are sold.

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. Jolaine’s diagnostic journey [2:33]
2. Reaction of friends and family to the diagnosis [16:31]
3. Low points on the journey [21:20]
4. First action step towards health [24:08]
5. Results on AIP [28:42]
6. Lifestyle changes [34:43]
7. Standout supporters [40:04]
8. Takeaway points [43:42]

Mickey Trescott: Hey everyone! Welcome back to the Autoimmune Wellness podcast season two. This is Mickey with you guys today, and I’m interviewing a very special friend of mine. We go way back in the autoimmune wellness journey. I first became aware of her almost, gosh, 6 years ago, through Sarah Ballantyne’s blog and Facebook. She was a very early member of the AIP community. Her name is Jolaine, and she has ankylosing spondylitis.

So, we’ve heard from you guys that you find it really helpful to hear from these people who have taken on this healing journey in real life. I couldn’t think of a better example than someone like Jolaine. She’s been so kind to agree to interview with me to share with you guys a little bit about her story. So thank you so much, Jolaine, for joining us from your home country of Canada. Are you ready to get started?

Jolaine: Thank you Mickey. I am.

Mickey Trescott: Awesome. So, first thing’s first. We know that you have ankylosing spondylitis. But really; what was the first symptom, first thing that you noticed that something was wrong?

Jolaine: I think I first noticed; I was about 21 years old, and I was just at work and I had all of a sudden a really sharp shooting pain at my leg into my pelvis area, and my sacrum joint, which is where the disease kind of starts. And that sort of just continued off and on. I just thought it was something wrong with my back. I used to walk to work, and I remember one day, I couldn’t walk the last block. I had to take the bus for one block. And that was, “Ok, something’s really wrong.”

Mickey Trescott: Whoa. Yeah, that’s pretty debilitating when you can’t walk a block. In that moment, how did you feel having to wait for the bus? Were you like, “I need to call my doctor.” Or what was going through your mind?

Jolaine: You know, I honestly just thought maybe I’m out of shape. {laughs} I don’t know. I really didn’t think that it was something that serious.

Mickey Trescott: Mm-hmm.

Jolaine: You know, I thought maybe I needed a trip to the chiropractor, or maybe I should exercise some more. Probably the normal thoughts that would go through anyone’s head. It never occurred to me it was a disease of any kind.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah, especially when you’re young and you really haven’t had anything happen to you like that. I think our tendency is definitely to just be like; “Well, if I can just get through this, it will go away.” Or something.

Jolaine: Yeah.

Mickey Trescott: So from that first noticing those sharp pains, how long did it take until you actually got your diagnosis in? What was that process like?

Jolaine: It took 22 years.

Mickey Trescott: Oh my gosh!

Jolaine: And that was; yeah.

Mickey Trescott: That’s a long time. That’s probably one of the longer time frames I’ve ever heard.

Jolaine: Yeah. So, that was a good chunk of my life, and it was horrible. It was a horrible 22 years. And oddly enough, the first year after my diagnosis was even worse. So, it was really difficult. I mean, like a lot of people with autoimmune, your doctors, your family, your circle of friends, your coworkers, they just think you’re a hypochondriac. Because, I mean the list of symptoms is so long. And even to hear myself say to somebody, “Well this hurts, and this happens, and this happens.” To myself, I sounded like a little excessive, you know?

Mickey Trescott: Mm-hmm.

Jolaine: It didn’t seem like it was a...

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

Welcome to The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 2! We’ve created this podcast as a free resource to accompany our book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness.

Season 2 Episode 5 takes us back to our Q+A style, where Mickey and Angie answer questions from listeners like you. In this episode, the ladies dig into how to address too much weight loss on AIP, how to navigate pregnancy while on AIP, good carb-y snacks for type 1 diabetics, and coffee replacements.

Plus, they start by chatting about common (and confounding) misconceptions about AIP, and the questions they wish they’d get asked more often. 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 complimentary resource for those on the road to recovery. I’m Mickey Trescott, a nutritional therapy practitioner living well with autoimmune disease in Oregon. I’ve got both Hashimoto’s and Celiac disease.

Angie Alt: And I’m Angie Alt, a certified health coach and nutritional therapy consultant, also living well with autoimmune disease in Maryland. I have 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.Autimmune-Paleo.com, where our collective mission is seeking wellness and building community.

Mickey Trescott: This podcast is sponsored by The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook; our co-authored guide to living well with chronic illness. We saw the need for a comprehensive resource that goes beyond nutrition to connect savvy patients, just like you, to the resources they need to achieve vibrant health. Through the use of self assessments, checklists, handy guides and templates, you get to experience the joy of discovery; finding out which areas to prioritize on your healing journey. Pick up a copy wherever books are sold.

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. On to the podcast!

Topics:
1. Mickey and Angie ask each other a question [2:53]
2. Losing too much weight on AIP [8:10]
3. Over-restriction, losing too much weight [13:31]
4. Pregnancy and AIP [17:43]
5. Macronutrients: Cutting down on meat [25:00]
6. Carby snacks for type 1 diabetic [29:07]
7. Replacement for coffee [31:16]

Mickey Trescott: Hey everybody! Mickey here, and welcome back to the Autoimmune Wellness podcast. If you’re here, you know that we are right in the middle of our second season; sharing with you guys a series of Q&A and interview today, because we’ve got both Angie and I on the line. We are doing a Q&A episode. We’re going to answer some of you guys’ questions. But first, I’d love to hear from Angie, how she’s doing this week.

Angie Alt: Hey everybody. I am doing good. I just got done having a little timeout week. I put myself in timeout, and had to do a bunch of regrouping, so that I could keep my head on my shoulders, and figure out how to do all the things that I do. I’m actually feeling a lot better this week, for taking that time. How are you Mickey?

Mickey Trescott: I’m feeling a lot better now that you {laughs} had a timeout.

Angie Alt: Yeah, heads up everybody.

Mickey Trescott: Because I got a timeout, too. It was a really nice reminder that we both needed to slow down. And I wasn’t thinking about slowing down until you were like; I can’t this week. I was like, “You know what? I can’t either.” {laughs}

Angie Alt: Yeah. If you work in partnership; if one of you is losing it, the other one will be impacted. {laughs}

Mickey Trescott: Totally. Totally. So, yeah, I’m feeling pretty good after the weekend.

Angie Alt: Nice.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah, so. Before we get to these listener questions, going on our theme that we started last time we did one of these, we’re going to ask each other a question. So Angie, my question for you this week, is what is one thing that we get asked all the time that sometimes you just can’t wrap your head around where all of the confusion comes from? {laughs}

Angie Alt: {laughs} Ok. Well, there’s probably a couple of areas to explore here. One that comes to the top of my mind right away is kind of the misconception that AIP is a no-sugar protocol. That comes up pretty often. I see it especially in my group program, because there’s high volume of people going through there. I get to be exposed to this really often. And you know, its’ a very low-sugar protocol, for sure. It’s nowhere near what a Standard American Diet has; not even in the same ballpark. Not even on the same continent in terms of sugar intake.

You know, people will say, “I thought I couldn’t eat any fruit, because there’s sugar.” You know. If they see a paleo treat recipe, they’re like, “I thought we couldn’t eat maple syrup!” Of course, we’re not encouraging everybody to go out and drink a gallon of it or anything, but a very small amount of sugar is totally within bounds for the protocol.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah. And don’t you think sometimes when people ask this, they’re angry.

Angie Alt: Yeah.

Mickey Trescott: Like, they have; there are these anti-sugar people. Which, you know, sugar; especially if you’re someone who has a history of the blood sugar thing. We’re not saying sugar is the best thing ever. But sometimes when people write in, they’ll be like, “I am so disappointed. I thought this was sugar free. You should know better!” {laughs}

Angie Alt: Yeah.

Mickey Trescott: And it’s just like; uh, I mean, you know a little treat in moderation after dinner in the context of a balanced meal usually brings a lot of people happiness.

Angie Alt: Right. You know, the point. As always, I think we’ve said this many, many times now. But the point of this protocol is not to burden our hearts and minds; it’s to heal. And if you feel like you can never enjoy a small treat, and have a celebration with your family, or have something special over a holiday. If there is no option for that, it’s not going to be sustainable in real life. And you won’t be able to heal.

Mickey Trescott: Agreed.

Angie Alt: So, a little bit of balance there. Ok, so I have a question for you,...

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

Welcome to The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 2! We’ve created this podcast as a free resource to accompany our book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness.

Season 2 Episode 4 is all about how to start the work and begin healing, even without a diagnosis. It’s our second interview episode of the season and in it, Angie sits down with her friend Stacy Smith to discuss how Stacy has managed an unidentified autoimmune condition for nearly 20 years.

Angie and Stacy dig into how Stacy came to terms with her condition, how she went from vegan fitness competitor to AIPer, how to find your “best fit” doctor, steps toward self-empowerment, and much more. 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 complimentary resource for those on the road to recovery. I’m Mickey Trescott, a nutritional therapy practitioner living well with autoimmune disease in Oregon. I’ve got both Hashimoto’s and Celiac disease.

Angie Alt: And I’m Angie Alt, a certified health coach and nutritional therapy consultant, also living well with autoimmune disease in Maryland. I have 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.Autimmune-Paleo.com, where our collective mission is seeking wellness and building community.

Mickey Trescott: This podcast is sponsored by The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook; our co-authored guide to living well with chronic illness. We saw the need for a comprehensive resource that goes beyond nutrition to connect savvy patients, just like you, to the resources they need to achieve vibrant health. Through the use of self assessments, checklists, handy guides and templates, you get to experience the joy of discovery; finding out which areas to prioritize on your healing journey. Pick up a copy wherever books are sold.

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. Stacy’s diagnosis story [2:35]
2. Coming to terms with the diagnosis [7:30]
3. Support of friends and family [10:38]
4. First discovering it’s autoimmune [12:34]
5. Finding your best fit doctor [15:58]
6. First steps towards self-empowerment [21:36]
7. Greatest dietary and lifestyle impact of AIP [27:52]
8. Lowest and highest points of Stacy’s journey [34:50]
9. Stacy’s present health situation [37:29]
10. Tips for beginning the journey [41:29]

Angie Alt: Hi everyone! Welcome back to Autoimmune Wellness podcast season 2. This is Angie, and today I’m interviewing Stacy Smith of Viridis Wellness, LLC. She is a fellow nutritional therapy consultant, and an Instagrammer extraordinaire. If you are not following her at Viridis Wellness on Instagram; you should definitely pop in there. She shares beautiful, very informative posts on the daily. She’s a much better Instagrammer than I am.

We have gotten a lot of feedback that you guys find it helpful to hear from folks who have taken on the healing journey in real life. So today, we’re going to be sharing a little bit of Stacy’s story. Thank you, Stacy, for joining us from the Midwest. Are you ready to get started?

Stacy Smith: I am. Hey Angie, how’s it going to day?

Angie Alt: It is going pretty good. There’s always way too much to do in life.

Stacy Smith: So true.

Angie Alt: But I am managing it somehow. {laughs}

Stacy Smith: So true.

Angie Alt: So, let’s just jump right in. I think it’s always good for folks to kind of tell their diagnosis story, and to kind of share what that part of the journey was like. One of our first questions that we always ask people is, what was the first symptom you noticed of your autoimmune disease? What was the first thing that popped up that made you go; “Hmm. I better investigate this?”

Stacy Smith: Something’s not right?

Angie Alt: Yeah.

Stacy Smith: Yeah. In my case, that would be harkening all the way back to 1998, when I moved to the Midwest from California. My first symptom was definitely severe fatigue, and that’s the one that I’m still working on today, many years later.

Angie Alt: Ok. Ok. Yeah, there should be a total different word to describe fatigue when it’s autoimmune fatigue. It’s on a whole other level.

Stacy Smith: Absolutely. So that should be the word that we make up this year.

Angie Alt: Right. {laughs}

Stacy Smith: {laughs}

Angie Alt: The word of 2017.

Stacy Smith: That’s right. That’s right. So yes; I went from being very healthy, very active at age 20, to completely debilitated, couldn’t get out of bed, and that was definitely tough at the time.

Angie Alt: Yeah. Ok. How long did it take, from noticing that first system, that really extreme fatigue, until you got an actual diagnosis?

Stacy Smith: You know, I still don’t have a diagnosis to this day. So I would say that that level of fatigue waxed and waned between 1998 and 2013. I would call that my silent autoimmunity period, which was quite long. And in 2013, I had this constellation of events happen in my life all at the same time. I switched jobs, I was working 80 hours a week at a very fast paced finance firm. I had someone in my family with whom I was close pass away. I had some issues in my relationship. I was training to compete in fitness; so I would say I really kind of pulled the trigger on the autoimmunity at that time; became very ill. I saw three different rheumatologists at the time. One told me, “You definitely have lupus.” One said, “You absolutely do not have lupus.” And another said, “You have undifferentiated connective tissue disease, which will probably turn into lupus.”

So with lupus, as with many autoimmune diseases, it’s obviously very common to take an extraordinarily long time to reach a diagnosis, and to receive conflicting information along the way. So, just the past month, I have been seeking out additional information. Decided I was going to find a new rheumatologist; interviewed several, and was told again, by...

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

Welcome to The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 2! We’ve created this podcast as a free resource to accompany our book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness.

Season 2 Episode 3 is our second Q + A episode where we answer questions submitted by AIPers just like you! Angie and Mickey answer eight reader-submitted questions and, as usual, they pack in a lot of information.

Topics discussed include what to do if you don’t receive a diagnosis, how long to wait before beginning reintroductions, determining what a “bad reaction” looks like, how to keep leafy greens interesting, and how to find a natural doctor. 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 complimentary resource for those on the road to recovery. I’m Mickey Trescott, a nutritional therapy practitioner living well with autoimmune disease in Oregon. I’ve got both Hashimoto’s and Celiac disease.

Angie Alt: And I’m Angie Alt, a certified health coach and nutritional therapy consultant, also living well with autoimmune disease in Maryland. I have 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.Autimmune-Paleo.com where our collective mission is seeking wellness and building community.

Mickey Trescott: This podcast is sponsored by The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook; our co-authored guide to living well with chronic illness. We saw the need for a comprehensive resource that goes beyond nutrition to connect savvy patients, just like you, to the resources they need to achieve vibrant health. Through the use of self assessments, checklists, handy guides and templates, you get to experience the joy of discovery; finding out which areas to prioritize on your healing journey. Pick up a copy wherever books are sold.

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. Mickey and Angie answer non-AIP related question [2:48]
2. No diagnosis despite blood work [6:38]
3. Continuing AIP without an exact diagnosis [12:00]
4. How long before reintroductions? [14:14]
5. Determining a detrimental reaction after reintroduction [17:31]
6. Mickey and Angie’s personal experience with elimination and reintroduction [20:44]
7. Adding more greens, keeping them interesting [26:49]
8. Getting in calcium [29:56]
9. Resource for finding natural doctors [32:09]

Mickey Trescott: Hey everyone! Mickey here, and welcome back to the Autoimmune Wellness podcast. We’re in the middle of our season two. Today we’ve got a great question and answer episode for you, and we realize that some of you guys might be new to the podcast, or even to AIP in general. So if some of the questions on these podcasts sound a little bit above your head; kind of gibberish to you, we recommend going way back to the beginning of season one where we take you through every step of living well with autoimmune disease, starting with informing yourself. There is a ton of information there; we don’t want you guys to miss it. Right Angie?

Angie Alt: Yeah, we did a podcast episode for every chapter of our book; both one sharing our personal stories on that particular topic; as well as in-depth interviews with various experts for each of the topics. Trust us, there is a ton of information. What was there; like 18 episodes or something, Mickey?

Mickey Trescott: Yeah, it was a very comprehensive and well-produced season. So if you guys are new, don’t be afraid to go back there and start. We cover a lot of information that we’re actually getting questions about that are in those episodes, so we wanted to send you guys a little reminder. Say, hey, start there if you’re kind of new to this. If you guys have been on the road for a while, then you’re in the right place.

So before we get started with today’s episode, I actually kind of had a little idea. And I think it would be fun, Angie, to ask each other an AIP related question before our reader questions. What do you think?

Angie Alt: Um; well, thanks for springing this on me. {laughs}

Mickey Trescott: {laughs}

Angie Alt: And yeah, I’m into it. Let’s do it.

Mickey Trescott: Ok, cool. So, I want to ask you; what was the most non-AIP you ate or did this week?

Angie Alt: Non-AIP thing I ate or did this week. Well, so my birthday was on Saturday.

Mickey Trescott: Woot, woot!

Angie Alt: Yeah. {laughs} So I went out and had a glass of wine, that was very yummy.

Mickey Trescott: Oh my gosh.

Angie Alt: Yep. And then, yesterday I actually made the fish pie recipe from Russ Crandall’s first cookbook; The Ancestral Table. Russ Crandall goes by The Domestic Man on his blog and social media accounts. And that recipe includes heavy cream, butter, and white potatoes. So I super went into some reintro mode there with that delicious meal.

Mickey Trescott: How did you feel after eating it?

Angie Alt: Pretty good. You know, I’ve been pretty lucky in the dairy department in terms of reintroductions, and I seem to do pretty ok. I don’t eat dairy every single day, by any means. Not even every single week. But if I have it in small amounts; like, the last time I had any dairy was at Christmas time; I seem to do ok.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah, that would probably take it over the edge for me.

Angie Alt: I know; don’t worry, I won’t make it when you’re here. {laughs}

Mickey Trescott: Actually, thinking about it right now is maybe producing a reaction, so let’s move on.

Angie Alt: {laughs} Ok. Don’t start wheezing. Ok, so my question for you; you know, I think folks have the impression that we work a lot; and we do. But we also take breaks, and I’m wondering what kind of vacation plans you have this year.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah, so you know what kind of vacation plans I have this year.

Angie Alt: {laughs}

Mickey Trescott: Because; when we were on book tour in November…

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!

Welcome to The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 2! We’ve created this podcast as a free resource to accompany our book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness.

Season 2 Episode 2 is the first of our interview episodes this season! This week, Mickey sits down with her friend Susan McCauley to discuss Susan’s experience managing an unidentified autoimmune condition for many years. Susan was eventually diagnosed with ulcerative proctitis, but her healing approach has been all about addressing the root causes from the beginning.

Susan and Mickey dig into what it was like for Susan to finally receive a diagnosis, they myriad treatments and tests she underwent, low-dose naltrexone, stress management, and the importance of a support system. 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 complimentary resource for those on the road to recovery. I’m Mickey Trescott, a nutritional therapy practitioner living well with autoimmune disease in Oregon. I’ve got both Hashimoto’s and Celiac disease.

Angie Alt: And I’m Angie Alt, a certified health coach and nutritional therapy consultant, also living well with autoimmune disease in Maryland. I have 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.Autimmune-Paleo.com, where our collective mission is seeking wellness and building community.

Mickey Trescott: This podcast is sponsored by The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook; our co-authored guide to living well with chronic illness. We saw the need for a comprehensive resource that goes beyond nutrition to connect savvy patients, just like you, to the resources they need to achieve vibrant health. Through the use of self assessments, checklists, handy guides and templates, you get to experience the joy of discovery; finding out which areas to prioritize on your healing journey. Pick up a copy wherever books are sold.

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. Introducing our guest, Susan, and her autoimmune wellness story [3:19]
2. Officially a diagnosis [8:14]
3. Varying treatments and testing [18:07]
4. Low-dose naltrexone [24:24]
5. Stress management and sleep [28:31]
6. Having a support system [35:48]
7. Tips for the beginning of your autoimmune journey [40:21]

Mickey Trescott: Hey everyone! Welcome back to the Autoimmune Wellness podcast. We are in season 2 of the podcast. This is Mickey if you guys haven’t figured out the differences between Angie and mine voice yet. Today I am doing a personal interview with my friend Susan; hey Susan.

Susan: Hey Mickey! How’s it going?

Mickey Trescott: Awesome. Susan is one of my AIP and paleo BFFs. We met at PaleoFx; gosh, 3 years ago?

Susan: It was actually AHS.

Mickey Trescott: Oh! AHS, yep. So there we go.

Susan: And it was longer than that.

Mickey Trescott: Four!

Susan: I think it was 4 years ago.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah.

Susan: Yeah, 4 years ago.

Mickey Trescott: I was looking for a ride home from the airport, and Susan had a rental car, and she was also picking up Ben Greenfield, so I got to meet him. So Susan was one of my first paleo friends.

Susan: And Mickey was one of mine. And we had the same shoes on, and it was like; BFFs at first site.

Mickey Trescott: Yep! {laughs}

Susan: {laughs}

Mickey Trescott: Basically. We couldn’t not be friends.

Susan: Yes, exactly. It was meant to be.

Mickey Trescott: So I’m really excited to share a little bit of Susan’s story today because Susan is one of these people who hasn’t had a clear autoimmune diagnosis from the outset, but she has done a really great job at kind of tirelessly working out some of these root causes and kind of still working on some of that; we’ll talk about that. And I think she just has such a great attitude about the healing journey. She’s also a coach, so she has a lot of experience about this stuff. But Susan, thank you so much for being here; joining us from California. You ready to get started?

Susan: Sure; shoot. Go ahead.

Mickey Trescott: Alright. So, I know that this question is a little bit more complicated for you; but tell me a little bit about your autoimmune disease, and what you first noticed when you first realized maybe that’s something you were struggling with.

Susan: Well, I first had symptoms a long time ago. I kind of am the example of what not to do, or how to go about everything backwards. I didn’t come to paleo because I was sick; I came to paleo because I wanted to lose weight, and because I had kind of developed a binge eating disorder from all the yo-yo dieting, so I was trying to change my relationship with food. But my first autoimmune symptoms; I have ulcerative proctitis, which is like the cousin of ulcerative colitis. It’s just less severe, and in the lower part; the distal part of the colon. I had symptoms as early as probably 10 years ago; which I don’t know how much TMI about symptoms is on your podcast {laughs}.

Mickey Trescott: Anything goes. We talk about poop all the time.

Susan: So basically, bleeding; rectal bleeding, bleeding when you have your bowel movements, and it started when I was doing the yo-yo dieting and the Weight Watchers; and paid attention to conventional wisdom on things like fiber. And I remember one time I ate four Fiber One bars; and I don’t know if you’ve ever had one of those, but they have like; I don’t know how much fiber in them, but they’re like a cookie, you know? And I had a binge eating problem. So one is delicious; four even more delicious. And that’s when the gut problems started.

I went to Kaiser, and they did a sigmoidoscopy; I think that’s what you call it, it’s been so long. And then they gave me some medication and told me not to eat too many vegetables; that was it. You know; it was basically, “take some medication; you have to take it, and you might have ulcerative colitis, right now we’re just going to call it undetermined.”

Mickey Trescott: And you got this

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

Welcome to The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 2! We’ve created this podcast as a free resource to accompany our book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness.

Season 2 Episode 1 Q + A #1 is the first installment of our new Q + A format. In these episodes, we’re answering questions you submitted to us via social media! This season, the podcast will alternate between Q + A episodes like this and interview episodes featuring the voices of real AIPers just like you.

We cover a lot of ground in this first Q + A episode! Topics discussed include thyroid hormone replacement, AIP dogma, our personal reintroduction journeys, balance over perfection, adrenal support, and diet modifications for neurological disorders. 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 complimentary resource for those on the road to recovery. I’m Mickey Trescott, a nutritional therapy practitioner living well with autoimmune disease in Oregon. I’ve got both Hashimoto’s and Celiac disease.

Angie Alt: And I’m Angie Alt, a certified health coach and nutritional therapy consultant, also living well with autoimmune disease in Maryland. I have 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.Autimmune-Paleo.com, where our collective mission is seeking wellness and building community.

Mickey Trescott: This podcast is sponsored by The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook; our co-authored guide to living well with chronic illness. We saw the need for a comprehensive resource that goes beyond nutrition to connect savvy patients, just like you, to the resources they need to achieve vibrant health. Through the use of self assessments, checklists, handy guides and templates, you get to experience the joy of discovery; finding out which areas to prioritize on your healing journey. Pick up a copy wherever books are sold.

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. Thyroid hormone replacement [6:29]
2. Dogmatic AIP; elimination and reintroduction [11:54]
3. Weaning off thyroid hormone replacement [17:21]
4. Mickey and Angie’s personal reintroduction journey [21:37]
5. Iodine supplementation for thyroid [28:13]
6. Balance over perfection [29:32]
7. Non-AIP fillers in medications [33.10]
8. Adrenal support [35:23]
9. AIP and autoimmune neurological disorders [43:11]

Mickey Trescott: Hey everybody! Mickey here, and welcome back to the Autoimmune Wellness podcast, season two. We had some really awesome feedback from you guys; it was really overwhelming on our blog posts, our Instagram accounts, and also the reviews in iTunes. So thank you guys so much for sharing. And we decided to bring things back for another round, since you guys told us that it was so helpful. So we’ve got a little bit of a program ready for you. Angie; should we tell everyone what we’ve been up to since the last season of our podcast ended?

Angie Alt: Yeah, sure. We’re trying not to get too chatty on you guys for this podcast. We’ve had a pretty fun few months, and we wanted to update you. The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook came out in November; woot, woot! And we had a great time on our 5-city book tour. We’re so grateful for everyone’s support; it was a great experience getting to meet so many of you, and hearing your stories, and watching your local communities kind of take shape and seeing you meet each other and sharing stories together at those book signings. Mickey, what was your favorite part of the tour?

Mickey Trescott: I loved the events with the food. So of course, I liked all the events; but enjoying AIP food with an AIP community is such a rare thing, that it was just really fun, those bookend events. So our first event was at Mission Heirloom and they just made this delicious meal for us, which is so fun to hang out with a bunch of other AIP people. I actually think that those two events; so then we did Hu Kitchen in New York City; both of them had almost 100 people, which I’ve never had the experience to hang out with 100 of my friends that eat like me, so that was really powerful.

Angie Alt: {laughs}

Mickey Trescott: And really fun. What about you, Angie?

Angie Alt: Yeah. A big, big thank you to Mission Heirloom and Hu Kitchen; that was amazing. We really appreciated that support for our peeps. I don’t know what my favorite part was. I think getting to hear everybody’s stories, and see the way our work is impacting real live people out there; that’s really exciting. Getting stranded on train tracks was pretty fun; do you remember that, Mickey?

Mickey Trescott: {laughs}

Angie Alt: {laughs}

Mickey Trescott: Yeah, we almost didn’t make it to D. C., but we made it happen.

Angie Alt: Yeah. Let’s see; what else have we been up to since the book tour?

Mickey Trescott: Yeah, so you know, the first thing we did was take a chill period. You know, we spent some time resting and relaxing, taking care of ourselves; because we spent the better part of two years writing that book, and it was a big labor of love, but I think we needed to have a little season of kind of coming down off of that epic workload situation.

Angie Alt: Right. But, we did put in a little bit of work. One of our big projects that we worked on for the beginning of 2017 was relaunching our website under the brand Autoimmune Wellness. Hopefully, you guys are seeing that out there. We just think that the name really suits our mission, and will help us take our message to a more mainstream audience; viva la revolution, people.

Mickey Trescott: Woot, woot!

Angie Alt: We’re really focused on eventually making AIP this mainstream option for folks with autoimmune disease, and we feel like Autoimmune Wellness will help us get there. Let’s see; what else have we been up to, Mickey?

Mickey Trescott: So, we have recently been working on a special project that those of you that are health coaches; so...

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

Welcome to The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 2!

Bonus Ep: Cooking For Life, Multiple Sclerosis, and a research update w/ Dr. Terry Wahls is our second bonus episode, and an introduction to Season 2 of the podcast. In this episode, we interview our personal inspiration, Dr. Terry Wahls, the creator of The Wahls Protocol and the author of the new book, The Wahls Protocol Cooking For Life.

In addition to discussing Dr. Wahls’ new book, topics we cover include how to embrace a healing diet on a budget, approaching your doctor about utilizing nutrition for health, why we believe in templates over recipes, Dr. Wahls’ go-to meal, and much more. This is a juicy and informative episode with one of the most inspirational voices in the chronic illness community. It’s perfect for folks looking for some practical advice on how to sustain a healing lifestyle. 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 complimentary resource for those on the road to recovery. I’m Mickey Trescott, a nutritional therapy practitioner living well with autoimmune disease in Oregon. I’ve got both Hashimoto’s and Celiac disease.

Angie Alt: And I’m Angie Alt, a certified health coach and nutritional therapy consultant, also living well with autoimmune disease in Maryland. I have 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.Autimmune-Paleo.com, where our collective mission is seeking wellness and building community.

Mickey Trescott: This podcast is sponsored by The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook; our co-authored guide to living well with chronic illness. We saw the need for a comprehensive resource that goes beyond nutrition to connect savvy patients, just like you, to the resources they need to achieve vibrant health. Through the use of self assessments, checklists, handy guides and templates, you get to experience the joy of discovery; finding out which areas to prioritize on your healing journey. Pick up a copy wherever books are sold.

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. Introducing our guest, Dr. Terry Wahls [2:20]
2. Utilizing a healing diet on a budget [6:56]
3. The importance of diet shift in the medical community [11:01]
4. Approaching your doctor about utilizing nutrition for health [16:32]
5. Dr. Wahls’ newest book [19:55]
6. Templates, not recipes [23:26]
7. Dr. Wahls’ go-to meal [27:15]
8. Success stories from the Lifestyle Clinic [31:42]
9. Response to the naysayers [34:08]
10. What’s coming up for Dr. Wahls [38:12]

Angie Alt: Hi everyone! Welcome back to the Autoimmune Wellness podcast. Angie here; today we are bringing you the second of our pre-season bonus interview episodes, so you guys are super lucky, these are going to be great. Mickey, how are you doing today?

Mickey Trescott: Super awesome, especially because I am so excited about chatting our guest today. She’s one of our favorite people in the autoimmune world. And we got feedback from you guys last season that you really value these expert interviews, and we didn’t really have any in the can for you guys for season 2; but then we decided we had this incredible opportunity to interview a couple of really awesome people; one of them today. And we got her on the line for you. So, Angie, do you want to tell our listeners about who this super special, amazing person is, who happens to be a total rockstar in our world?

Angie Alt: Yeah, sure I would love to. Our guest today is the amazing Dr. Terry Wahls, a fellow autoimmune warrior, who went from secondary progressive multiple sclerosis that had left her in a wheelchair in 2003, to the vibrant, dancing; more on that in a minute; and world-changing lady we are honored to speak with today. Terry is the author of several books, including The Wahls Protocol, and her latest, The Wahls Protocol Cooking for Life. In addition to over 60 peer-reviewed abstracts, papers, and posters. She also runs a groundbreaking lifestyle clinic in Iowa, and conducts clinical research that is changing how we treat MS and other autoimmune diseases. Additionally, she is behind the Wahls Foundation, a nonprofit created in 2011 whose mission is to replace the epidemic of chronic disease with an epidemic of health; I love that. To say Terry is purpose driven is basically an understatement, you guys. Thanks so much for being on the show today, Terry!

Dr. Terry Wahls: Hey, thank you so much for having me.

Mickey Trescott: Awesome. So Terry, most of our readers are familiar with your story at this point, and your TED Talk. And if anyone listening goes; “Wait a minute; I haven’t heard about that.” You guys should definitely check it out. Just Google Terry Wahls TED Talk and start there; it’s awesome.

So we know; your healing has progressed considerably over time. When I actually met you at the Ancestral Health Symposium a few years ago, you showed the audience that you weren’t able to raise your arms over your head. And last month, Angie and I were hanging out with you at the NTA conference, and you were pulling some dance moves where your hands were definitely over your head.

Dr. Terry Wahls: {laughs}

Mickey Trescott: So, you know, your healing has increased a lot even since you’ve been on this journey. I am always shocked at how you look younger and more vibrant as time goes on. Can you give...

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

Welcome to The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 2!

Bonus Ep: Hashimoto’s Protocol and Thyroid Wellness w/ Dr. Izabella Wentz is our first episode in nearly 6 months (!) and we’re treating it as a little surprise introduction to Season 2. In this episode, we interview our close friend Izabella Wentz, also known as the thyroid pharmacist. We dig into her experience hacking her own thyroid disease, as well as the ways in which she is now giving thyroid disease patients the power to take back their health.

Topics we discuss include the uniqueness of Hashimoto’s in the chronic illness world, the importance of self-care, and most importantly, the multiple root causes of Hashimoto’s (Izabella’s specialty). This is a powerful episode with one of the foremost voices in the Hashimoto’s community, perfect for folks with thyroid disease who are looking for answers. 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 complimentary resource for those on the road to recovery. I’m Mickey Trescott, a nutritional therapy practitioner living well with autoimmune disease in Oregon. I’ve got both Hashimoto’s and Celiac disease.

Angie Alt: And I’m Angie Alt, a certified health coach and nutritional therapy consultant, also living well with autoimmune disease in Maryland. I have 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.Autimmune-Paleo.com, where our collective mission is seeking wellness and building community.

Mickey Trescott: This podcast is sponsored by The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook; our co-authored guide to living well with chronic illness. We saw the need for a comprehensive resource that goes beyond nutrition to connect savvy patients, just like you, to the resources they need to achieve vibrant health. Through the use of self assessments, checklists, handy guides and templates, you get to experience the joy of discovery; finding out which areas to prioritize on your healing journey. Pick up a copy wherever books are sold.

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. Introducing our guest, Dr. Izabella Wentz [2:36]
2. Hashimoto’s Protocol book release [9:58]
3. The uniqueness of Hashimoto’s [16:41]
4. The liver support protocol [19:36]
5. Self-care: You cannot pour from an empty cup [26:20]
6. The multiple root causes of Hashimoto’s [31:09]

Mickey Trescott: Hey everyone! Welcome back to the Autoimmune Wellness podcast. Mickey here, and Angie and I are super excited to be back with you guys. We’ve taken 6 months off from our podcasting adventure. Can you believe it’s been that long, Angie?

Angie Alt: No, it feels like it was just a few weeks ago that we were releasing everything.

Mickey Trescott: Seriously.

Angie Alt: I mean, honestly we don’t really know how podcasters who have regular shows do it; putting all of this content, editing, and all the details. It’s kind of a lot of work, you guys! {laughs} We do much better producing and releasing our podcasts in batches and seasons. And we hope you guys are enjoying the seasonal format, too.

We’ve actually already recorded our entire second season, which we can’t wait to share with you guys. Because the format is going to be a little bit different this time around, we wanted to bring you two pre-season bonus episodes featuring interviews with two incredible women doing great work in our community as a way to whet your appetite for what’s to come. Mickey, do you want to tell your listeners about our first incredible woman?

Mickey Trescott: Yeah; so, our guest today is none other than Dr. Izabella Wentz, also known as the thyroid pharmacist and leader of the root cause rebels. Lest you guys think that is a clever band name; it actually stands for community of people who have successfully hacked their thyroid disease. Izabella has made quite a splash in the thyroid community in the last few years since the release of her bestselling book; Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, Finding and Treating the Root Cause. And the release of The Thyroid Secret documentary series, which you guys, probably, if you’ve been following on our email list or have been on the internet at all in the last 3 months have heard about; hopefully you guys participated in. It was a really incredible experience for everyone. So informative.

And Izabella’s newest book that came out this week; Hashimoto’s Protocol. Izabella is definitely a lady on a mission to spread the word far and wide about healing from thyroid disease, and we feel absolutely blessed to call her a friend and have her in our community. Welcome, Izabella!

Dr. Izabella Wentz: Angie, Mickey, I’m so excited to be here with you ladies today. How are you?

Mickey Trescott: We are awesome.

Angie Alt: We’re great!

Mickey Trescott: Yeah.

Angie Alt: Even better with you on the show. So maybe we’ll just kind of get started. Izabella, you are fresh off the launch of your Thyroid Secret documentary; woot, woot! We promoted it and heard from our followers that it was one of the most thorough and informative resources on thyroid disease they had ever seen. You interviewed literally hundreds of experts as well as patients all over the world; it was really incredible. Can you tell us what inspired you to do a project on such a massive scale?

Dr. Izabella Wentz: Of course, and thank you for being a part of The Thyroid...

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!

We are so grateful for all your positive feedback and interest in our very first podcast season! We created this podcast as a free resource to accompany our new book,The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness.

Episode #18: Encore – The AIP Evolved Manifesto Part II is another fun chat with our AIP blogging community friends from all over the globe. We take a few minutes to chat with ten different bloggers on one point each from our AIP Evolved Manifesto. They share with us how they have lived out that particular tenant in their own healing journeys. Once again, this encore episode is for you if you like “real life” perspectives on AIP and/or you want to virtually be introduced to some of your favorite bloggers.

If you’d like to share how you have lived out a tenant of the manifesto, please share in the comments here. Obviously, we are big fans of learning how folks everywhere are restoring their health using AIP.

If you’d like to have our podcasts sent directly to your device, subscribe on 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!

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:29 Welcome to the encore episode — Part II
  • AIP Evolved Manifesto
  
  
• 3:26 Emma shares on Point #11: Seek help.  
  • Diagnosis: Rheumatoid Arthritis, Chronic Lyme Disease, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
  • Website: The Bacon Mum
  
  
• 8:04 Maria shares on Point #12: Test, don’t guess.
  • Diagnosis: Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis
  • Website: Zesty Paleo
  
  
• 12:48 Sarah shares on Point #13: Be skeptical.
  • Diagnosis: Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, Fibromyalgia, Lichen Planus, Psoriasis
  • Website: The Paleo Mom
  • Podcast: The Paleo View
  • Books: The Paleo Approach, The Paleo Approach Cookbook, The Healing Kitchen
  
  
• 15:36 Sophie shares on Point #14: Strive for balance.
  • Diagnosis: Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis
  • Website: A Squirrel In The Kitchen
  • Book: Simple French Paleo
  
  
• 19:08 Bre’anna shares on Point #15: Support is crucial.
  • Diagnosis: Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis and Celiac
  • Website: He Won’t Know It’s Paleo
  • Books: He Won’t Know It’s Paleo, Holiday On The Autoimmune Protocol  
  
  
• 23:10 Kerry shares on Point #16: Reframe the negatives.
  • Diagnosis: Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis and Celiac
  • Website: Emotional Autoimmunity 
  
  
• 27:34 Jaime shares on Point #17: Practice gratitude.
  • Diagnosis: Crohn’s Disease
  • Website: Gutsy By Nature
  
  
• 31:29 Martine shares on Point #18: Eyes on your own journey.
  • Diagnosis: Crohn’s Disease
  • Website: Eat Heal Thrive
  
  
• 36:30 Alexandra shares on Point #19: Health before image.
  • Diagnosis: Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome
  • Website: Don’t Eat the Spatula
  
  
• 39:45 Rory shares on Point #20: Vibrant health is a lifelong journey.
  • Diagnosis: Rosacea, Occular Rosacea, Small Intestine Bacteria Overgrowth (SIBO)
  • Website: The Paleo PI
  
  
• 44:29 Outro

If you enjoyed the podcast, would you mind leaving us a review in iTunes? This helps introduce our work to a new audience as we climb the ranks in their system.

The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast is a complimentary resource to our new book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness. Support us in our mission to revolutionize how autoimmune disease is viewed and treated by ordering your copy today!

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!

We are so grateful for all your positive feedback and interest in our very first podcast season! We created this podcast as a free resource to accompany our new book,The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness.

Episode #17: Encore – The AIP Evolved Manifesto Part I is a fun chat with our AIP blogging community friends from all over the globe. We take a few minutes to chat with ten different bloggers on one point each from our AIP Evolved Manifesto. They share with us how they have lived out that particular tenant in their own healing journeys. This encore episode is for you if you like “real life” perspectives on AIP and/or you want to virtually be introduced to some of your favorite bloggers.

If you’d like to share how you have lived out a tenant of the manifesto, please share in the comments here. Obviously, we are big fans of learning how folks everywhere are restoring their health using AIP.

If you’d like to have our podcasts sent directly to your device, subscribe on 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!

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:20 Welcome to the encore episode-Part I
  • AIP Evolved Manifesto
  
  
• 5:09 Alaena shares on Point #1: Trust your intuition.  
  • Diagnosis: Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis
  • Website: Grazed and Enthused
  • Book: The Healing Kitchen
  
  
• 9:03 Joanna shares on Point #2: Embrace the template.
  • Diagnosis: Hidradenitus Suppurativa
  • Website: Joanna Frankham
  
  
• 15:03 Eileen shares on Point #3: Information is power.
  • Diagnosis: Rheumatoid Arthritis
  • Website: Phoenix Helix
  • Podcast: Phoenix Helix Podcast
  • Book: A Simple Guide to the Paleo Autoimmune Protocol
  
  
• 19:16 Erin shares on Point #4: Start simple.
  • Diagnosis: Psoriasis, Psoriatic Arthritis and Raynaud’s Disease
  • Website: Enjoying This Journey
  
  
• 23:55 Astrid shares on Point #5: Take it slow.
  • Diagnosis: Ulcerative Colitis
  • Website: Heal Me In The Kitchen
  
  
• 27:30 Dora shares on Point #6: Food is your friend.
  • Diagnosis: Grave’s Disease
  • Website: Provincial Paleo
  • Ebook: The Little Cookbook of Gluten-Free Waffles
  
  
• 30:49 Bethany shares on Point #7: Set yourself up for success.
  • Diagnosis: Uveitis, Spondyloarthritis, Endometriosis
  • Website: Adventures in Partaking
  • Ebook: AIP Safari
  
  
• 33:23 Kate shares on Point #8: Be a nutrient-seeker.
  • Diagnosis: Hypothyroidism and Raynaud’s Disease
  • Website: Healing Family Eats
  
  
• 36:54 Jo shares on Point #9: Food over supplements.
  • Diagnosis: Psoriasis
  • Website: Comfort Bites
  • Ebooks: Simple Autoimmune Paleo Comfort Food and Spice
  
  
• 40:04 Kat shares on Point #10: Don’t diet “harder.”
  • Diagnosis: Psoriasis, Psoriatic Arthritis, and Endometriosis
  • Website: The Primordial Table
  
  
• 43:20 Outro

If you enjoyed the podcast, would you mind leaving us a review in iTunes? This helps introduce our work to a new audience as we climb the ranks in their system.

The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast is a complimentary resource to our new book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness. Support us in our mission to revolutionize how autoimmune disease is viewed and treated by ordering your copy today!

Since inception in 2011, the Autoimmune Protocol (AIP) has not undergone any major updates or changes and has existed as originally conceived by experts and used by the autoimmune community.

Today, that is changing with the announcement of a new option: Modified AIP Elimination. This post serves to provide the rationale behind this change as well as provide links for learning more about the new protocol.

First, let’s discuss some AIP history and what led to these changes. Originally, Sarah Ballantyne, PhD. wrote extensively about and refined the protocol on her blog and in her books, which formed the foundations of the AIP protocol and movement. These foundations led to collaboration between leaders in the AIP community in the creation of the AIP Certified Coach Practitioner Training, serving to educate healthcare providers in best practices for using AIP with their clients and patients.

Additionally, Sarah’s research and writing sparked interest from the medical community to formally study the efficacy of AIP for various autoimmune conditions, including Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, rheumatoid arthritis, and psoriasis. While medical research into the efficacy of AIP is still in its infancy, early results have shown promise at helping those with autoimmune disease achieve a higher quality of life, less symptom burden, and need less medication (you can read a review of all the results here).

Now that there is an emerging body of research into the efficacy of AIP, as well as a large group of practitioners with many collective years of expertise in AIP implementation and customization, it is time for analysis to see what is working and what could be made better for the next wave of individuals looking to embark on the protocol. Here are the major reasons why the Autoimmune Protocol is being updated now:

In each of the AIP medical studies, a 6-week, gradual transition was used to ease patients into the elimination phase, which was then maintained for 4 more weeks. In the AIP IBD Study, 73% of patients achieved clinical remission at week 5, which was 1 week before the full elimination was complete. In this study, all of these patients then maintained clinical remission throughout the duration of the study and no additional patients reached clinical remission after this point. What this tells us is that it is likely the earliest eliminations, specifically, that were most responsible for the favorable results and that the full elimination phase may not have been necessary for all of them.

The Autoimmune Protocol has now been in widespread use in the practitioner community for many years through AIP Certified Coach. Nearly 1,000 healthcare providers from all types of backgrounds and specialties have been trained and certified to implement AIP in their work. In surveying the graduate community, AIP Certified Coaches have told us that they often find the original protocol is more restrictive than necessary and they are often modifying the list of eliminations to suit their clients’ and patients’ needs. They also report that they continue to see good results using a modified or less restricted elimination protocol.

When AIP was conceived there was very little research into the efficacy of elimination diets to help manage autoimmune disease, especially conducted directly with humans. In the last decade, this has changed and many studies have been published using different elimination protocols for specific autoimmune conditions, especially gluten-free and dairy-free diets. The promising results from studies using fewer eliminations shows that for some patients and conditions, progress can be made with a simpler approach.

Food access and budget have always been major barriers to individuals implementing the Autoimmune Protocol, both on their own or in working with a coach. Some patients are simply not able to source or afford the ingredients needed to implement a full elimination, and others don’t have the time to prepare the entirety of their meals from scratch. In this case, we’ve long recommended modifying the protocol to accommodate those facing these barriers, but providing an official version of the protocol that is more budget-friendly and accessible will allow even more people to find healing through AIP.

Updating AIP in 2024 has come out of consultation with many key players in the AIP community over the course of a few months. We interviewed researchers who performed the AIP medical studies and research in other similar areas, as well as experts and writers in the area of autoimmune health. We also surveyed and interviewed key members of the AIP Certified Coach community who predominantly work with autoimmune patients or clients. Lastly, we considered recent scientific evidence for elimination diets, food allergies/sensitivities, and reintroduction protocols in the new approach.

What we learned from this exploration was two-fold: first, that the original protocol still had high value and efficacy in both research and practice. And second, that many researchers and AIP Certified Coaches were confident that some patients would be best served by a less-restrictive option. This led to the creation of two separate options for the elimination phase which are detailed below.

Going forward, there are now two versions of the Elimination Phase, to be known as AIP Core Elimination and AIP Modified Elimination.

The original protocol, as used in the AIP medical studies and original AIP literature is not changing and will now be known as AIP Core Elimination. The intention is to preserve the original protocol for research comparison and to use with patients or clients who either need a stricter approach or can implement it easily (due to support, finances, or time).

The new protocol, a less-strict and more accessible version will be known as AIP Modified Elimination. This new protocol incorporates what we’ve learned about foods that are well-tolerated in the autoimmune community, and is simplified for ease of implementation, budget, and accessibility.

You can read more about which foods are included and avoided in both Core AIP and Modified AIP Elimination protocols at the updated Definitive Guide to AIP.

This then leads to the question of which protocol a person should choose when they embark on the Autoimmune Protocol. That depends!

The goal of AIP has always been to discover the least-restrictive dietary approach that produces the best health for each person. With this in mind, Modified AIP is an ideal starting point for most people as it is more affordable, accessible, takes less time to implement, and still removes the most potentially-problematic foods. Ideally, modified AIP produces the desired result and then a person can move on to the reintroduction phase, sparing them a drawn-out elimination and reintroduction process.

There are a few reasons why a person would choose Core AIP to begin with. They may have a condition, like IBD, where research indicates that the elimination phase has a good chance of producing results quickly. Or they may have another condition that is potentially serious and are highly motivated to transition and implement to find relief. Lastly, they may not experience some of the barriers that make Core AIP difficult to implement – like a lack of cooking skill, financial flexibility, or support at home.

If you are looking for resources to start Core or Modified AIP, click here or on the image below to get our AIP Quicklstart Guide sent to your inbox, including food lists, meal plans, and more!

Is anything changing about the original AIP protocol?

No, the original protocol is now simply known as “Core AIP” for differentiation. All of the foods eliminated, included, timeline, and reintroduction procedure remain the same. See the updated

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That’s right folks… our book baby makes her entrance, and we couldn’t be more excited!

Today, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook is available everywhere books are sold. If you pre-ordered online, it might even be in your mailbox right now… If you hit your local bookstore, it will probably be on the shelves. We are over here pinching ourselves!

We know many of you aren’t able to make it out to the book tour we are embarking on this week, so we wanted to celebrate by holding a virtual launch party and Q + A session on Facebook Live! Click here to see the replay!

All you need to do is navigate over to our Facebook page at 1PM PST and click on the live video of us. You can then leave comments and ask questions. We can’t wait to hang out with you guys!

For those of you that live in the Bay Area, Seattle, Denver, NYC or DC, we look forward to seeing you this week at our book signing events!

The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook was written on the foundation that the way we view and treat autoimmune disease is undergoing a revolution. Our purpose with this book is to help fuel that major shift.

We are hoping that this book helps you live out the seven key steps to living well with autoimmune disease — inform, collaborate, nourish, rest, breathe, and connect. This is an empowered, actionable book!

Just to recap, here is what you’ll find inside:

• A chapter on each of the seven key steps to wellness; Inform, Collaborate, Nourish, Rest, Breathe, Move, and Connect.
• Information on how to be a proactive patient, from receiving a diagnosis to partnering with a doctor who can help you achieve wellness.
• Self-assessments, checklists, and infographics for every chapter to help you define where you are and decide where to apply your energy. Everyone’s journey is different!
• 30 exclusive recipes, compliant with the Autoimmune Protocol. We want you to heal and enjoy your life!
• A 4-week meal plan and shopping list for the elimination diet. The mantra is “set yourself up for success!”.
• A 90-day lifestyle plan to ease you into better rest, stress management, exercise, and connection, without making you feel burnt out! We know that making small, incremental changes will make this doable!

We believe that in order to live well with chronic illness, you need to become a new kind of patient, one who is savvy enough to know that a whole-body and whole-life approach is necessary. The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook helps you achieve that with information-rich resources, self-assessments, checklists, and guides.

We recorded a short little podcast episode about launch day, as well as to make a call for questions for a season 2 of the podcast. Listen below:

Lastly, thank you to everyone who has supported us by pre-ordering the book, listening to the podcast, and sharing your stories and feedback about the autoimmune wellness journey. We are thrilled to share this with you and hope it helps your healing reach new heights.

Have you received your copy of the handbook yet? Tell us what you think in the comments, and if you have a chance, consider leaving us a review on Amazon!

The post The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook Launches! appeared first on Autoimmune Wellness.

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

Welcome to The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 1! We’ve created this podcast as a free resource to accompany our upcoming book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness.

Episode #16: Putting Together the Steps of The Autoimmune Wellness Journey starts with a look at how our personal healing timelines unfolded. We discuss how long each of the seven steps; inform, collaborate, nourish, rest, breathe, move, and connect, took us to implement as we sought wellness. The second half of this episode is about the “big idea” we are hoping to convey with the book and podcast series, the ebb and flow nature of a healing with autoimmune disease, ditching perfectionism, and shifting what we see as “normal” in order to focus on health. The very best part of this episode comes in the last 15 minutes where we share loads of inspiration on joining the community.

If you’d like to go more in-depth, check out the “Conclusion” section at the end of The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook. It will help solidify this exciting, renewing process for you and add depth to our chat during this episode.

If you’d like to have our podcasts sent directly to your device, subscribe on 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!

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:30 Welcome to the final episode
• 2:57 We talk about “healing timelines”
• 3:29 Mickey shares how long the Inform step took her
  • One year
  
  
• 5:14 Angie shares how long the Inform step took her
  • 11 years (She had a complex situation.)
  
  
• 6:36 Angie shares how long the Collaborate step took her
  • One-two years
  
  
• 7:44 Mickey shares how long the Collaborate step took her
  • She’s still working this step
  
  
• 10:22 Mickey shares how long the Nourish step took her
  • Three-six months
  
  
• 11:28 Angie shares how long the Nourish step took her
  • Overnight
  
  
• 12:32 Angie shares how long the Rest step took her
  • Roughly one year, but there were big improvements immediately with dietary changes
  
  
• 13:37 Mickey shares how long the Rest step took her
  • Roughly a couple months with a breakthrough following some neurotransmitter testing and supplementation
  • Has required continual maintenance
  
  
• 15:31 Mickey shares how long the Breathe step took her
  • She’s still working this step
  
  
• 16:13 Angie shares how long the Breathe step took her
  • She’s still working this step, but there were big improvements immediately with diagnosis, because unexplained illness was a major source of stress
  
  
• 17:50 Mickey shares how long the Move step took her
  • She had a routine within one month, but it took longer for her to transition the way she thought of it
  
  
• 19:21 Angie shares how long the Move step took her
  • She’s still working on this step
  
  
• 20:33 Angie shares how long the Connect step took her
  • She was able to dial in this step immediately
  
  
• 21:44 Mickey shares how long the Connect step took her
  • She had some initial stumbles with her friends around socializing
  
  
• 23:40 The big idea of this episode is that the process takes time and looks different for every individual
• 24:30 The Autoimmune Wellness Journey is a journey of ebbing and flowing
• 25:05 Mickey shares personal examples of ebb and flow
• 26:33 Angie shares personal examples of ebb and flow
  • Over time we can learn to proactively use the protocol to support ourselves through things we recognize as likely health challenges
  
  
• 29:29 Learning to spot “engine trouble”
• 30:20 Perfectionism has no place in the Autoimmune Wellness Journey
• 32:20 Being open to shifting what we see as “normal”
• 34:08 Joining the Autoimmune Wellness community
  • Community groups
  • Online groups
  • Social media (hashtags: #autoimmunepaleo #autoimmunewellness #totesaip #bonebrothheals and specific disease tags, like #celiac)
  • Consider starting a blog or social media account to share your story and inspire the next person to change their life
  • Talk to your doctor about your diet and lifestyle
  
  
• 45:10 Our hopes for your healing journey
  • Empowerment
  • Action
  • Wellness
  • Vitality
  
  
• 47:15 Outro

If you enjoyed the podcast, would you mind leaving us a review in iTunes? This helps introduce our work to a new audience as we climb the ranks in their system.

The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast is a complimentary resource to our forthcoming book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness. Support us in our mission to revolutionize how autoimmune disease is viewed and treated by pre-ordering your copy today!

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!

Welcome to The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 1! We’ve created this podcast as a free resource to accompany our upcoming book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness.

Episode #15: Step 7: In-Depth with Angelo Coppola is an episode with a popular, and very unique voice, in the wider Paleo community about how connection with others and nature deeply impacts not just our wellness, but our whole lives. Angelo discusses leaving his high-powered career to focus on family and his place in the natural world, his philosophy of “humans are not broken,” and exploring how removing some things from his life actually expanded it greatly. He also talks with us about a really refreshing view he has about not seeing our bodies, especially those with autoimmune disease, as broken, but seeing disease as warning signs of environmental inputs that need to change. Angelo also explores with us the relationship humans have to the natural world (his take is that we are nature) and his ideas about “ambient anxiety.” This is a great episode for anyone who wants to think about connection in a whole new light.

If you want to explore some of our conversation more, take a look at the “How to Start Connecting with Nature” section in Chapter 7. This section provides ideas on getting started with simple connection to nature.

If you’d like to have our podcasts sent directly to your device, subscribe on 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!

• 0:00 Intro
• 2:00 Introducing Angelo
  • Angelo’s Bio
  • Angelo’s Website
  • Latest In Paleo Podcast
  
  
• 2:30 Angelo shares about how his connections changed after he left his high-powered career
  • He feels those connections actually helped him connect more to himself
  
  
• 6:09 What it felt like when Angelo made the decision to shift his lifestyle
  • He is always focused on “tweaking in the right direction,” rather than perfectionism in his life
  
  
• 10:00 What is Angelo’s philosophy “humans are not broken?”
  • Be careful of the often used marketing idea that you are inadequate
  • Explore the idea that you may need to reduce, rather than increase in life
  
  
• 14:30 Angelo discusses how we can reject the idea that our bodies are broken, but instead consider environmental inputs that may be negative
• 16:00 Angelo shares his view that humans and nature are not in relationship
  • He believes we are the same as nature
  • He shares his great quote, “Our modern lives are a dumbing down of nature.”
  
  
• 22:20 The key components that Angelo sees as contributing to autoimmune disease
  • Diet
  • Lack of “baked right in” natural experiences
  
  
• 28:08 “Ambient Anxiety” and whether or not we should look for an anxiety to it?
  • Angelo suggests seeing stress/anxiety as a pain response pointing to a root cause
  
  
• 36:00 Outro

If you enjoyed the podcast, would you mind leaving us a review in iTunes? This helps introduce our work to a new audience as we climb the ranks in their system.

The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast is a complimentary resource to our forthcoming book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness. Support us in our mission to revolutionize how autoimmune disease is viewed and treated by pre-ordering your copy today!

Check out the previous episode, Episode #14: Step 7: Connect – Our Stories, and the next episode, Episode #16: Putting Together All the Steps of The Autoimmune Wellness Journey. For the full podcast archive, click here.

The post The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Episode #15: Step 7: In-Depth with Angelo Coppola appeared first on Autoimmune Wellness.

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

Welcome to The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 1! We’ve created this podcast as a free resource to accompany our upcoming book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness.

Episode #14: Step 7: Connect – Our Stories is an episode all about an often unexplored, but vitally important, piece of the healing process, connection. In this episode we talk not only about connection with other people and its role in healing, but connection with the natural world. We start with a chat about how our illnesses initially impacted our support networks, how things changed after diagnosis and when realization that this was chronic set-in. We address the awkward, depressing, and often stressful truth behind trying to articulate the experience of autoimmune disease to those close to us, plus how the experience can expose weaknesses in our connections with others. We also talk about transitioning our social lives to support healing, finding new connections through online support, and avoiding the trap of adopting illness as an identity. Next we move on to exploring the role connection with nature had in our recoveries and wrap up with ways to experience the benefits of that connection even when you can’t get out in the woods regularly. This episode is a great match for listeners that are wondering if the strain illness has taken on their “people” connections is normal or what they can do to enhance their nature connections.

If you want to dig in check-out the ideas in the “Building a Support Network” section in Chapter 7. This is a good place to help you get the gears turning about forming or strengthening relationships, if it feels like this area could use some attention for you.

If you’d like to have our podcasts sent directly to your device, subscribe on 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!

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:31 Introducing the Connect topic
  • How Healthy Relationships Make Us Healthy
  
  
• 2:26 Angie shares about what her support network was like early in her journey
  • Strong, but confused
  
  
• 5:26 Mickey shares about what her support network was like early in her journey
  • Strong, but tense
  
  
• 7:50 Mickey talks about key relationships that were under stress due to her illness
• 9:17 We don’t have rituals for acknowledging chronic illness in our society
• 10:18 The awkward and depressing side of discussing your autoimmune disease
• 11:18 The importance of adding people who “get it” on a personal level to your support network
• 12:29 Mickey’s social life now
• 13:26 Angie shares about transitioning her social life to support healing
  • Working to inspire others to support her choices by projecting confidence about her journey
  
  
• 15:54 Mickey shares about avoiding long explanations with all but the most important people
• 17:48 Mickey shares about connections she found online
  • She was looking for empowered people
  
  
• 19:30 Angie shares about connections she found online
  • Her virtual relationships turned into real world connections
  
  
• 21:25 How to avoid adopting illness as our identities
  • Consider ways autoimmune disease has expanded your life
  • Consider how it could actually shut you off from connection with others
  • Consider meeting new people and letting your illness take a backseat in how you define yourself to them
  
  
• 25:00 The powerful role connection with nature can play in healing
  • Three Reasons You Need More Time in the Forest
  
  
• 25:38 Angie shares about her experience with nature and healing
  • It gave her a renewed energy
  
  
• 27:00 Mickey shares about her experience with nature and healing
  • She had a similar sense of drawing energy
  
  
• 28:20 The inescapable connection we have to the natural world
• 28:52 How Angie connects with nature now
  • Walking
  
  
• 30:05 How Mickey connects with nature now
  • She moved to a farm
  
  
• 31:30 Experiencing the elements of nature when we can’t get out
  • House plants
  • Nature sounds recordings
  • Diffusing essential oils
  • Bright light exposure
  
  
• 34:14 Your homework for Step 7, Connect!
  • Try out the “Support Network Evaluation” tool in Chapter 7 of The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook to assess the strength of your connections with others.
  
  
• 34:34 Outro

If you enjoyed the podcast, would you mind leaving us a review in iTunes? This helps introduce our work to a new audience as we climb the ranks in their system.

The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast is a complimentary resource to our forthcoming book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness. Support us in our mission to revolutionize how autoimmune disease is viewed and treated by pre-ordering your copy today!

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!

Welcome to The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 1! We’ve created this podcast as a free resource to accompany our upcoming book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness.

Episode #13: Step 6: In-Depth with Noelle Tarr, NTP, Certified Personal Trainer is an episode about fitness and wellness recovery with a personal trainer who has dedicated her work to approaching movement with a balanced perspective. Noelle discusses what inspired her to combine a career in both fitness and nutrition. She also chats with us about how both under- and overdoing it with movement can be a problem and ways to tackle “too much” and “too little” struggles. Noelle takes time to chat with us about getting away from “fitspo” and finding realistic sources of fitness inspiration. We also get into the best place to restart a fitness routine while dealing with autoimmune disease and how to assess how much recovery time is necessary. This is an episode for those that love to move and those that are struggling with it after years of illness. Noelle’s professional experience shines as she helps us navigate what can be a tricky area of recovery for those on the autoimmune wellness journey.

If you want to explore some our conversation more, take a look at the “Fitspo and Shame” section in Chapter 6. This section digs into the highlight of our conversation with Noelle on the harmful side of the fitness world and the emotional toll it can take.

If you’d like to have our podcasts sent directly to your device, subscribe on 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!

• 0:00 Intro
• 2:04 Introducing Noelle
  • Noelle’s Bio
  • Noelle’s Website
  • The Paleo Women Podcast
  
  
• 2:40 Noelle shares what inspired her combined career of fitness and nutrition
• 4:55 Where does Noelle see the fine line with exercise and autoimmune disease?
• Too Much Movement
  • Don’t push through pain
  • Remember your worth is not related to your ability to workout
  • Practice “intuitive fitness”
  • Feeling sore or fatigued after working out and in the presence of chronic illness is a sign to rest (When Exercise Recovery Becomes Harder to Handle)
  
  
• Too Little Movement
  • This may be a struggle with motivation
  • Create an environment and system that make it easy
  • Add accountability
  
  
• 14:11 Noelle discusses how we can find more realistic fitness inspiration
  • The problems with “fitspo” culture
  • Don’t expose yourself to social media personalities that make you feel bad about yourself
  • Engage with body positive messages
  
  
• 20:48 Noelle talks about the best place to start a fitness routine for those with autoimmune disease
  • The Benefits of a Regular Walking Routine
  • Consider adding resistance bands to your workout  
  • Noelle’s free home workout guide
  
  
• 26:47 Assessing recovery time needs with autoimmune disease
  • Tracking via a workout calendar
  • Taking time to listen to your body
  • Three days/week is enough
  
  
• 37:07 Outro

If you enjoyed the podcast, would you mind leaving us a review in iTunes? This helps introduce our work to a new audience as we climb the ranks in their system.

The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast is a complimentary resource to our forthcoming book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness. Support us in our mission to revolutionize how autoimmune disease is viewed and treated by pre-ordering your copy today!

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!

Welcome to The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 1! We’ve created this podcast as a free resource to accompany our upcoming book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness.

Episode #12: Step 6: Move – Our Stories is an episode dedicated to talking about our histories with exercise, as well as, where we are today in this area of our lives. We start with discussion of what it was like when we first realized we were losing physical ability as our autoimmune struggles deepened. Next we move on to exploring the two ends of the movement spectrum, too little and too much, and where each of were pre-diagnosis versus where we are today. We also chat about our movement routines before we got sick and our routines now. We wrap up with a look at why we believe walking is ideal for those with autoimmune disease and how we gauge if we are under or overdoing it with movement. This episode is a chance for listeners to understand totally opposite sides of the movement conundrum that those with autoimmune disease face.

If you want to know more about why exactly the balance with exercise and autoimmune disease is such a fine one, check out the section, “Why Is Exercise Difficult for Those with Autoimmune Disease” in Chapter 6. This section adds a little science background to this issue.

If you’d like to have our podcasts sent directly to your device, subscribe on 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!

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:29 Opening the Move topic
• 2:25 Angie shares what it was like to realize she was losing physical ability due to illness
  • She recognized her body no longer had additional energy reserves for workout routines.
  • Experienced a lot of shame with not being able to keep up with others.
  
  
• 4:58 Mickey shares what it was like to realize she was losing physical ability due to illness
  • She noticed herself becoming weaker, rather than stronger, despite training hard.
  • More of Mickey’s struggle and recovery.
  
  
• 6:58 Both Mickey and Angie describe the fear that came with muscle wasting
• 8:08 Mickey talks about exercise obsession pre-diagnosis
  • This was the result of her lacking other more appropriate stress management tools.
  
  
• 10:30 Angie’s struggle with moving too little
• There are complex barriers for those who move too little with autoimmune disease:
  • Fears/Shame
  • Incorrect intensity level
  • Fatigue
  • Injury
  • Pain
  • Overwhelm
  
  
• 13:30 Mickey’s exercise routine pre-diagnosis
  • Biking over 100 miles/week
  • Running/gym/yoga 3x/week
  • Multiple routines per day
  • Cardio-obsession
  • She feels she used this to “numb” herself.
  
  
• 15:58 Angie’s exercise routine pre-diagnosis
  • Hiking
  • Backpacking
  
  
• 16:42 Angie’s exercise routine now
  • Walking
  
  
• 17:18 Mickey’s exercise routine now
  • Walking
  • Horseback riding
  • Yoga
  • Touching on the negative cultural messages about how intense exercise needs to be
  
  
• 19:24 Why walking is so great for those with autoimmune disease?
  • The benefits of walking
  
  
• 27:23 How we assess where the “line” is for physical activity
  • Troubleshooting routines
  
  
• 30:20 Your homework for Step 6, Move!
  • Try out the “Where Are You on the Movement Spectrum” self-test in Chapter 6 of The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook to assess how much attention this area of your healing journey needs.
  
  
• 31:15 Outro

If you enjoyed the podcast, would you mind leaving us a review in iTunes? This helps introduce our work to a new audience as we climb the ranks in their system.

The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast is a complimentary resource to our forthcoming book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness. Support us in our mission to revolutionize how autoimmune disease is viewed and treated by pre-ordering your copy today!

Check out the previous episode, Episode #11: Jason Handler, Lac. on Stress Management, and the next episode, Episode #13: Noelle Tarr, NTP on Autoimmune-Friendly Movement. For the full podcast archive, click here.

The post

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!

Welcome to The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 1! We’ve created this podcast as a free resource to accompany our upcoming book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness.

Episode #11: Step 5: In-Depth with Jason Handler, L.Ac is an episode about managing stress with a board-certified Acupuncturist and Chinese Medicinal Herbalist. Jason discusses his approach to managing stress with a very unique approach of seeing it as simply the raw material for a journey towards reaching our greatest potential. Jason chats with us about his philosophy of “cultivating a daily practice,” approaching wellness as an investigation, and how mindset affects biology. We also get into a surprising discussion about where Jason starts when teaching his patients to manage stress, as well as his tips for managing the stress of chronic illness itself. This is a deep episode with a deep guy!

If you want to go deeper, take a look at the “What Can You Do to Manage Your Stress” section in Chapter 5. This section touches on many of the approaches raised by Jason during our discussion, specifically the steps of “practice” and “reframe.”

If you’d like to have our podcasts sent directly to your device, subscribe on 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!

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:59 Introducing Jason
  • Jason’s Bio 
  • Jason’s website
  
  
• 2:54 Jason’s experience with chronic illness
  • Collapse of his health first year after college
  • Eventually met a healer, who became his teacher, and told him, “Patients transform into students. Students transform into teachers,” which lead to his career.
  
  
• 6:40 The unique perspective illness at a young age imparts
  • Jason sees it as humbling and an opportunity to understand your relationship to suffering.
  
  
• 8:26 Jason explains his philosophy of “cultivating a daily practice”
  • Qigong
  • Importance of repetition
  
  
• 12:10 Jason discusses keeping things simple and focusing on just starting
• 12:42 Jason’s definition of self-care and why it’s important
  • He approaches it as an investigation
  
  
• 14:16 Approaching wellness without a sense of desperation
• 15:30 How our mindsets affect our biology
• 16:53 Jason talks about the Nanjing (a classical Chinese medical text) and it’s steps toward treating illness
  • Intention
  • Cultivation
  • Technique
  • Diagnosis
  
  
• 17:40 Jason’s unique approach to teaching beginner’s to manage stress
  • Define the stress
  • “Mindcare” (Jason’s term for focusing on the ideal frame of mind and physical feelings)
  • Awareness of breath
  
  
• 20:38 Importance of placing parameters on our mind
  • Talking back to our thoughts with “yes” or “no”
  • Thought training
  
  
• 24:02 Mickey shares the tips Jason gave to her at her sickest point
  • Concentrate on lymph flow
  • Qigong standing meditation
  
  
• 24:48 Jason shares his transformative experience with “stance training”
  • Stillness in the body helps create stillness in the mind.
  
  
• 26:47 Tips for managing the stress of chronic illness itself
  • Seek support from inspiring people
  • Eat nutrient-dense foods
  • Focus on gratitude
  • Frame the experience as an opportunity for growth
  
  
• 30:00 Angie shares how the depths of illness turned out to be one of the most incredible periods of personal growth she’s experienced
• 31:00 Jason discusses commitment to small steps
• 32:15 Staying in touch with Jason
• 33:08 Outro

If you enjoyed the podcast, would you mind leaving us a review in iTunes? This helps introduce our work to a new audience as we climb the ranks in their system.

The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast is a complimentary resource to our forthcoming book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness. Support us in our mission to revolutionize how autoimmune disease is viewed and treated by pre-ordering your copy today!

Check out the previous episode, Episode #10: Step 5: Breathe – Our Stories, and the next episode, Episode #12: Step 6: Move – Our Stories. For the full podcast archive, click here.

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

Welcome to The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 1! We’ve created this podcast as a free resource to accompany our upcoming book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness.

Episode #10: Step 5: Breathe – Our Stories is an episode all about our real experiences with stress, from how things look when stress is seriously mismanaged to the impact of our ideal routines. We talk about how autoimmune disease itself is a source of stress that cannot be changed and how we’ve approached that, as well as “good” stress like parenting or running a successful business. We both share the things we do that are most effective in our efforts to control stress and give tips for you to try out in your own stress management process. This episode is a great match for listeners who want to know if we are zen masters or real human beings!

If you aren’t sure if Step 5: Breathe, needs your attention, check out the “Where Are You on the Stress-Management Spectrum” self-test in Chapter 5. This test will help you identify if this is a low, moderate, or high-priority area. Moderate and high-priority scores means this area needs your action.

If you’d like to have our podcasts sent directly to your device, subscribe on 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!

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:51 The importance of Breathe
• 2:23 Angie shares what happens when she mismanages stress
• 4:03 Mickey shares what happens when she mismanages stress
• 5:30 Physical illness as the result of run-away stress
  • Angie shares about coming down with Mono
  
  
• 9:13 Parenting and other sources of “good” stress
• 11:23 Mickey’s stress management routine
  • Prioritization
  • Choices
  • Calendaring
  
  
• 14:51 Angie’s stress management routine
  • Prioritization
  • Scheduling
  • Connecting
  • Practicing Gratitude (public expressions of appreciation)
  • Praying/Meditating
  
  
• 17:23 Angie talks about finding ways to disconnect even as a business owner
  • Taking personal breaks results in professional rewards
  
  
• 19:06 Mickey talks about finding great joy in work with boundaries
• 20:04 “The Friday Feeling” (you guys know what we’re talking about!)
• 21:41 Specific stress management steps mentioned in The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook that have meant to most for us
  • Identify
  • Eliminate
  • Reframe (and the positive impact on dealing with autoimmune disease)
  
  
• 24:56 The power of reframing for managing stress that cannot be changed
• 25:24 Self-care is not selfish (specifically for mothers)
  • Angie discusses “The Plane Crash” scenario
  
  
• 27:40 Daily/Weekly/Monthly/Yearly habits to cultivate for stress management
• 32:00 The importance of vacations, both short and longer breaks
• 35:00 Your homework for Step 5, Breathe!
  • Try out the “Mindfulness Tips” in Chapter 5 of The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook to try out ways to bring your mind into greater awareness of your present experiences.
  
  
• 35:21 Outro

If you enjoyed the podcast, would you mind leaving us a review in iTunes? This helps introduce our work to a new audience as we climb the ranks in their system.

The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast is a complimentary resource to our forthcoming book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness. Support us in our mission to revolutionize how autoimmune disease is viewed and treated by pre-ordering your copy today!

Check out the previous episode, Episode #9: Dan Pardi on Sleeping Optimally, and the next episode, Episode #11: Jason Handler, Lac. on Stress Management. For the full podcast archive, click here.

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

Welcome to The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 1! We’ve created this podcast as a free resource to accompany our upcoming book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness.

Episode #9: Step 4: In-Depth with Dan Pardi, M.S. is an episode with some truly mind-blowing information about sleep from a well-known sleep researcher in the Ancestral Health community. We’ve been following Dan for a long time and were lucky enough to have him as a guest to chat all things sleep. Dan discusses how he found himself steeped in sleep research, his basic recommendations for good sleep, and then he gets into some fascinating detail on everything from our internal “master clocks” to how sleep hormones directly impact the bacteria in our gut. This episode is for those who want to learn new and very interesting things when it comes to sleep!

If you want to understand more of what Dan talks about in this episode, but in “non-scientist speak,” check out the “How Does Sleep Work?” section in Chapter 4. It offers a simple, but thorough explanation of cycles and biological processes that work to produce sleep.

If you’d like to have our podcasts sent directly to your device, subscribe on 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!

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:53 Introducing Dan
  • Dan’s Bio
  • Dan’s Plan (soon-to-be Human OS)
  
  
• 2:45 Dan’s personal experience with sleep disturbance
  • Narcolepsy (an autoimmune disorder)
  • Circadian Rhythm 
  
  
• 6:15 Dan’s path into sleep research
  • Dan mentions the term “social jet lag,” which is a syndrome that occurs when our internal clocks and our sleep schedules are not aligned.
  
  
• 7:29 Dan describes how he recognized his research could help others
  • Dan uses the term “orphan disorder,” which is a term describing very rare diseases (and sometimes more common, but ignored diseases) that aren’t well researched due to lack of financial incentive for drug development.
  
  
• 10:57 The power of going from a bystander to a participant in your health
• 14:03 Why tracking helps improve health outcomes
• 16:15 Dan’s basic recommendations for good sleep
  • Start with an aspiration (“I want to wake refreshed.”)
  • Timing (this is about consistency)
  • Intensity
  • Duration
  
  
• 20:50 What is the maximum variation we can shift our sleep schedules with the minimal effects?
  • Dan’s Answer? Three hours.
  
  
• 24:51 Sleep consistency vs. other concerns with other areas of sleep and/or social concerns
  • There is a time to say “yes” to special occasions, despite the sleep schedule disruption.
  
  
• 27:50 Dan shares an interesting tidbit about the consequences to siesta cultures as they lose the daytime nap in the competitive modern economy, but continue the nighttime socializing.
• 28:35 Light and sleep
  • Dan uses the word, “suprachiasmatic nucleus,” which is our body’s master clock.
  • Loss of sleep eventually effects the immune system, leading to inflammation, and in time can lead to autoimmune disease.
  • We need light to act as an anchor to our circadian rhythm.
  • Melatonin directly impacts our gut health.
  • Blue light exposure 
  • Amber glasses 
  
  
• 38:47 Wrapping up with Dan (including some interesting research he shares on drinking champagne . . . we recommend going slow in the AIP community!)
• 40:26 Outro

If you enjoyed the podcast, would you mind leaving us a review in iTunes? This helps introduce our work to a new audience as we climb the ranks in their system.

The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast is a complimentary resource to our forthcoming book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness. Support us in our mission to revolutionize how autoimmune disease is viewed and treated by pre-ordering your copy today!

Check out the previous episode, Episode #8: Step 4: Rest – Our Stories, and the next episode, 

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!

Welcome to The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 1! We’ve created this podcast as a free resource to accompany our upcoming book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness.

Episode #8: Step 4: Rest – Our Stories is an episode focused on our early sleep struggles, breakthroughs that helped us sleep more and speed healing, and what our sleep routines are like now. We also talk about autoimmune disease symptoms and the intimate role they can play in disrupting much needed sleep and how we tackle prioritizing sleep in a culture that seriously undervalues it. This episode is for you if you’d like insider deets on troubleshooting steps that paid big dividends for us when we were first working to improve our sleep or if you are looking for tips on staying on track with your sleep routine once it’s in place.

If you aren’t sure how much energy you need to put into Step 4: Rest, check out the “Where Are You on the Sleep-Quality Spectrum” self-test in Chapter 4. This test will help you identify if this is a low, moderate, or high-priority area. If you score low-priority, high-five! You’ve already got this area dialed in!

If you’d like to have our podcasts sent directly to your device, subscribe on 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!

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:51 The importance of Rest
• 2:42 Mickey’s early sleep struggles
  • She worked as a barista for years and had to be up by 3:15 AM!
  
  
• 4:42 Angie’s early sleep struggles
  • Panic attacks and anxiety plagued her sleep
  
  
• 6:54 When autoimmune symptoms create sleep disturbances
  • Peripheral neuropathy
  • Blood pressure irregularity
  • Pain
  
  
• 8:44 Mickey’s first sleep troubleshooting steps and breakthroughs
  • Neurotransmitter testing
  • Lifestyle adjustments  
  
  
• 11:26 Angie’s first sleep troubleshooting steps and breakthroughs
  • Blood sugar regulation (This blog post has great tips on blood sugar balance)
  
  
• 13:00 Angie’s sleep now and struggles
  • Blue light exposure 
  • Amber glasses
  • Snuggling (and the positive effects of oxytocin on sleep!)
  • How long did the elimination phase last for Angie?
  
  
• 15:30 Sleep schedule with a family
• 17:30 Mickey’s sleep now and struggles
  • Stress-driven insomnia
  • Meditation
  
  
• 23:27 Dealing with the cultural message of “sleep can wait”
  • Mickey on social pressures
  • Angie on professional pressures
  
  
• 27:33 Tips for staying on track with sleep routines
  • Phone zone
  • End of work day boundaries
  • Beginning of work day boundaries
  
  
• 29:44 Your homework for Step 4, Rest!
  • Take a look at the “Sleep Troubleshooting Checklist” in Chapter 4 of The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook to help you evaluate if you are taking all the traditional steps for improving sleep and if there are any remaining areas to explore.
  
  
• 30:49 Outro

If you enjoyed the podcast, would you mind leaving us a review in iTunes? This helps introduce our work to a new audience as we climb the ranks in their system.

The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast is a complimentary resource to our forthcoming book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness. Support us in our mission to revolutionize how autoimmune disease is viewed and treated by pre-ordering your copy today!

Check out the previous episode, Episode #7: Aglaee Jacob, RD on Nourishing Diets, and the next episode, Episode #9: Dan Pardi on Sleeping Optimally. For the full podcast archive,

Hi Everyone! 

Mickey here… I hope this post finds you enjoying a peaceful and healthy New Year holiday! I wanted to take a moment to give you a heads up about an event coming up that is relevant to the AIP community as well as make an announcement about AIP Certified Coach.

First… The 2023 AIP Summit is scheduled for January 9-15! 

If you are looking to learn more about healing with the Autoimmune Protocol, directly from AIP Certified Coaches, the AIP Summit is for you! 

Each day starts at 10AM EST with a live welcome and then attendees can watch the day’s prepared presentations in any order and at whatever time works in their schedule for the following 24 hours. Each of the presentations features at least one AIP Certified Coach and the topic aligns with that coach’s expertise. 

So what types of presentations will you find at the AIP Summit? There are cooking demonstrations, deep dives into science or specific conditions, discussions about the impact of lifestyle factors, best practices for integrating AIP into life in the real world, and more. Additionally, attendees can submit questions after watching the presentations to be answered live during a Q&A panel the following day.

Since 2020, the AIP Summit has served over 15,000 people looking to learn more about AIP. Whether you are new to the protocol, or a seasoned traveler on the autoimmune journey, you are sure to learn some tips to help support your best health, straight from the experts! 

>> Sign up here to attend the AIP Summit! 

Second… a big announcement regarding AIP Certified Coach! 

I am honored to announce that Jaime Hartman, FNTP will be taking over as co-teacher and collaborator for AIP Certified Coach, the practitioner training program we founded in 2017 to help all types of healthcare providers integrate AIP into the work they do. 

This partnership should come as no surprise, since Jaime has been a pillar of the AIP community since the very beginning, was a part of the first cohort of AIP Certified Coach, and brings her rich clinical experience and educational background to the program. 

Together, Jaime and I are engaged in a ground-up remodel of the AIP Certified Coach, to be launched in time for the usual Spring enrollment in 2023. While the Autoimmune Protocol itself has not changed meaningfully since the program was created, we are re-writing and delivering all lectures to incorporate new information (like medical study results!) and additional perspectives we’ve gained. 

If you are a healthcare practitioner of any kind (we train health coaches, nutritional therapists, nutritionists, dietitians, physical therapists, fitness professionals, bodyworkers, nurses, physician’s assistants, medical doctors, naturopathic doctors, and more!), we would love to have you join us in the 2023 class, enrolling February 15 for a March 6 start date. 

>> Sign up to be notified of the details and enrollment opening for AIP Certified Coach here! 

In health, 

Mickey

The post AIP in 2023: An Announcement & an Invitation! 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!

Welcome to The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 1! We’ve created this podcast as a free resource to accompany our upcoming book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness.

Episode #7: Step 3: In-Depth with Aglaée Jacob, MS, RD is an episode dedicated to chatting with a well-known registered dietician in the “Real Foods” community. We greatly respect Aglaée’s work and asked her to join us in a conversation covering the deeper details of dietary healing, especially how to further modify AIP if healing is not as expected. Aglaée talks about FODMAP intolerance, starch intolerance, and histamine intolerance, all issues that can be uncovered while on AIP and may require specific modifications to help control uncomfortable symptoms. She also explores adding nutrient density with us and outlines new nutrition research she’s most interested in right now. One of the best parts of this episode is in the beginning, where Aglaée tells us about the powerful process she went through on the road to becoming a “Real Food” RD and the shift she sees happening years later in her profession. This episode is excellent if suspect that gut trouble is hindering your healing progress and need concrete details about tackling it.

If you’d like to go more in-depth on Step 3: Nourish, check out the “Nutrient Density” section in Chapter 3. This section gives even more detail on the nutrient density guidance that Aglaée shares in this episode.

If you’d like to have our podcasts sent directly to your device, subscribe on 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!

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:58 Introducing Aglaeée
  • Aglaée’s Bio
  • Aglaée’s practice: Radicata Nutrition
  • Aglaee’s podcast: Real Food Mamas
  • Aglaée’s books: Digestive Health with Real Food and Digestive Health with Real Food Cookbook
  
  
• 2:35 Aglaée shares about her experience with illness and how it inspired her work
  • A South American parasite helped her develop a new compassion for her patient’s struggles!
  
  
• 5:40 How Aglaée discovered “Real Food” as an RD
  • The lack of results she saw following conventional guidelines with her patients made her start questioning the approach she’d been taught.
  
  
• 9:38 Aglaée discusses the shift she sees other RDs making toward “Real Food”
  • Paleo RDs Network
  
  
• 10:45 Aglaée talks AIP
• 13:20 What are some specific modifications for gut dysbiosis?
  • Aglaée shares her positive mindset approach to elimination diets, “The goal of an elimination diet is not about the food, but to eliminate symptoms!”
  • FODMAP stands for Fermentable, Oligo-, Di-, Mono-saccharides And Polyols
  
  
• 17:33 Should people remove additional foods if they suspect a FODMAP intolerance?
  • Aglaée’s advice is that it is best to work with a practitioner.
  
  
• 19:40 What causes FODMAP intolerance?
  • Just eliminating foods is not a long-term solution to FODMAP intolerance, as it indicates an underlying imbalance.
  • SIBO stands for Small Intestine Bacterial Overgrowth
  
  
• 21:10 Angie gives a special thanks to Aglaée for her awesome FODMAP guide
• 21:45 What are some other dietary modifications to help with uncomfortable symptoms?
  • Low Starch
  • Low Histamine
  
  
• 26:02 Tips for focusing on nutrient density
  • Homemade Bone Broth 
  • Organ Meats 
  • Cold-water Fatty Fish (like salmon) 
  
  
• 29:44 Aglaée shares new nutrition research she is exploring right now
  • Why Eating a Low-FODMAP Diet (for too long) is not Good for Your Gut 
  
  
• 34:20 Outro

If you enjoyed the podcast, would you mind leaving us a review in iTunes? This helps introduce our work to a new audience as we climb the ranks in their system.

The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast is a complimentary resource to our forthcoming book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness. Support us in our mission to revolutionize how autoimmune disease is viewed and treated by pre-ordering your copy today!

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!

Welcome to The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 1! We’ve created this podcast as a free resource to accompany our upcoming book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness.

Episode #6: Step 3: Nourish – Our Stories is all about what the real-life process of using the elimination and reintroduction format of the Autoimmune Protocol has looked like for us. Although we started the journey close to five years ago, the actual process, beginning with those first steps, is still very fresh in our minds. We share how we found AIP (at a time when the abundant resources and large support community did not exist), what we really ate before adopting AIP (one of us was a junk-food junky!), and what transitioning was like. We also discuss how we approached the reintroduction process, what has and has not worked, and how we were able to discern reactions that can seem confusing to spot. If you’ve ever wondered what we honestly eat and whether or not this was ever tough for us too, this episode is for you!

If you’ve already tried AIP and would like to go more in-depth on Step 3: Nourish, check out the “Troubleshooting” section in Chapter 3 for ideas on underlying issues that could be preventing progress. This section is packed with valuable details, including food guidance to help ease symptoms of common roadblocks.

If you’d like to have our podcasts sent directly to your device, subscribe on 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!

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:51 The first concrete step toward wellness, Nourish
• 2:48 How did Mickey find AIP?
  • Chris Kresser
  • Dr. Datis Kharrazian
  • Robb Wolf
  
  
• 4:56 How did Angie find AIP?
  • What are lectins?
  • The Paleo Solution
  
  
• 7:55 Mickey’s diet pre-AIP
  • Vegan background
  • The challenge of reintroducing meat
  • AIP as a template
  
  
• 10:55 Angie’s diet pre-AIP
• 13:41 Angie’s transition to AIP
  • The cold-turkey approach
  
  
• 14:46 How long did the elimination phase last for Angie?
• 15:15 Mickey’s transition and elimination phase length
  • The slow and steady approach
  
  
• 17:36 A note of being aware of positive progress
• 18:10 What changes made the biggest differences for Mickey?
  • The argument for nutrient density
  
  
• 19:44 What changes made the biggest differences for Angie?
• 20:32 Angie’s reintroduction experience and foods that produced reactions
  • Egg
  • White potato
  • Cumin
  
  
• 23:18 Mickey’s reintroduction experience and foods that produced reactions
  • Nightshades
  • Eggs
  • Sesame Seed
  • Soy
  
  
• 27:00 Balance with the AIP process
  • AIP Is Not A Religion
  
  
• 28:14 Angie’s diet now
• 29:40 Mickey’s diet now
• 31:33 Noting the issue of “thresholds” with reintroduced foods overtime
• 31:49 Bio-individuality in reintroduction (despite shared diagnosis)
• 34:13 Your homework for Step 3, Nourish!
  • Take a look at the “Which Way Will Work for You” quiz in Chapter 3 of The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook to help you identify the transitioning style that is best for you if you want to take the plunge with AIP and use the handy guides after the quiz to show you how to get the ball rolling in a way best matched to your style.
  
  
• 35:24 Outro

If you enjoyed the podcast, would you mind leaving us a review in iTunes? This helps introduce our work to a new audience as we climb the ranks in their system.

The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast is a complimentary resource to our forthcoming book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness. Support us in our mission to revolutionize how autoimmune disease is viewed and treated by pre-ordering your copy today!

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!

Welcome to The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 1! We’ve created this podcast as a free resource to accompany our upcoming book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness.

Episode #5: Step 2: In-Depth with Dr. Titus Chiu is a conversation with award-winning professor, chiropractic neurologist, and functional medicine expert on practical collaboration and the overall collaborative spirit when it comes to healthcare. Titus talks with us about the specifics of collaboration between conventional and natural practitioners, including why the breakdowns in communication often occur. He also shares why he believes there is a new and positive future for a more collaborative healthcare environment. The best part of this episode comes at the end, when Titus talks about the deep root of meaningful collaboration (we wish every doctor approached communication like this!). This episode is awesome for insight into the healthcare experience from the “other side” of the exam table.

If you’d like to go more in-depth on Step 2: Collaborate, check out the “How Do You Build A Collaborative Team” section in Chapter 2. This section is very relevant to the guidance Titus shares in this episode.

If you’d like to have our podcasts sent directly to your device, subscribe on 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!

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:50 Introducing Titus
  • Titus’s Bio
  • Titus and Dr. Fallahi’s Practice: KOBA Family Wellness Center
  
  
• 3:20 Titus shares about his experience with illness and injury bringing him to healthcare
  • He was hit by a car in Japan and that changed everything!
  
  
• 5:50 Titus tells us what an ideal patient looks like to a physician
  • Educated
  • Motivated
  • Enthusiastic
  
  
• 9:23 Achieving deeper healing by facing our “demons” on the wellness journey
• 10:03 What does collaboration with doctors in the conventional system look like?
  • Titus shares that this most often just looks like referrals
  
  
• 11:38 How does practical communication occur between conventional and natural practitioners?
  • Titus reveals that it is a combination of sending reports on a patient’s progress and relaying information through the patient (this reinforces that we need to be the leaders of our healthcare teams!).
  
  
• 14:53 Why is there a breakdown in communication between the two systems according to Titus?
  • Language
  • Goals
  • Approach
  
  
• 16:20 Titus talks about why he believes there is a positive future for collaborative healthcare based on three points:
  • More open doctors
  • More open patients
  • Technology advances
  
  
• 20:23 How should a patient handle a non-collaborative doctor?
• 22:30 How can you effectively communicate your own knowledge when initiating a collaborative relationship with your doctor?
  • Titus talks about his very special, caring approach to patients who are overwhelming in their personal health research
  
  
• 31:20 Outro

If you enjoyed the podcast, would you mind leaving us a review in iTunes? This helps introduce our work to a new audience as we climb the ranks in their system.

The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast is a complimentary resource to our forthcoming book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness. Support us in our mission to revolutionize how autoimmune disease is viewed and treated by pre-ordering your copy today!

Check out the previous episode, Episode #4: Step 2: Collaborate – Our Stories, and the next episode, Episode #6: Step 3: Nourish – Our Stories. For the full podcast archive, click here.

The post The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Episode #5: Step 2: In-Depth with Dr. Titus Chiu 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!

Welcome to The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 1! We’ve created this podcast as a free resource to accompany our upcoming book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness.

Episode #4: Step 2: Collaborate – Our Stories is centered on what collaboration with your healthcare team should look like and how that has realistically played out for us in our own journeys (hint: it was messy!). We discuss the types of healthcare practitioners out there and what it means to take responsibility for leading the collaborative effort in your own care. We even chat about nitty-gritty topics that aren’t often touch-on, like firing a provider, recognizing the need for medications or surgery, and the toll that medical debt can take on a person with chronic illness. Again, this is a personal episode, but meant to help our listeners be able to see this step on the wellness journey through an honest lens.

If you’d like to go more in-depth on Step 2: Collaborate, check out the “Evaluating Potential Providers Checklist” or the “Prioritizing Action Infographic,” both in Chapter 2. The checklist can help you ask the right questions as you seek to build a collaborative healthcare team, while the infographic helps you look at all the suggestions from Chapters 1 and 2 and then logically move forward on only those areas that are high priority for you.

If you’d like to have our podcasts sent directly to your device, subscribe on 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!

• 0:00 Intro
• 3:00 What is Collaborate?
• 3:56 Mickey shares when she recognized collaborative care was necessary
  • The term “key player” is mentioned here, for more detail see the “How Do You Build A Collaborative Team” section of Chapter 2.
  
  
• 6:30 Taking responsibility for leading collaboration in your care
• 8:10 Describing the types of practitioners (understanding this allows you to choose the right people for the job, more detail can be found in Chapter 2)
  • Licensed Conventional Medical
  • Licensed Natural Medical
  • Licensed Complementary-Care
  • Non-medical, Non-Licensed
  
  
• 10:00 Angie talks about her experience integrating care
• 11:50 Patient lead open communication with providers
• 13:50 Mickey talks about firing practitioners
• 17:55 The need for medication and/or surgery and our experiences
  • Where Medication Fits on a Healing Diet
  
  
• 21:40 How to navigate healthcare spending
• 25:15 Mickey shares about the toll medical debt took on her and her family
• 29:00 Angie explains how medical debt stirred her to action in her journey
• 31:20 Realistic look at transitioning a budget to focus on food/self-care
• 34:13 Your homework for Step 2, Collaborate!
  • Take a look at the “Prioritizing Action Infographic” in Chapter 2 of The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook to prioritize areas explored in Chapter 1 and 2, before moving on to the next steps in the wellness journey.
  
  
• 35:34 Outro

If you enjoyed the podcast, would you mind leaving us a review in iTunes? This helps introduce our work to a new audience as we climb the ranks in their system.

The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast is a complimentary resource to our forthcoming book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness. Support us in our mission to revolutionize how autoimmune disease is viewed and treated by pre-ordering your copy today!

Check out the previous episode, Episode #3: Sarah Ballantyne, PhD on Getting Informed, and the next episode, Episode #5: Titus Chiu, DC on Practitioner Collaboration. For the full podcast archive, click here.

The post The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Episode #4: Step 2: Collaborate – Our Stories 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!

Welcome to The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 1! We’ve created this podcast as a free resource to accompany our upcoming book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness. 

Episode #3: Step 1: In-Depth with Sarah Ballantyne, Ph.D. is a conversation with the AIP expert covering everything from the basics of immune system function to prevention, testing, and treatment for autoimmune disease. In this great discussion, Sarah talks specifics about who is at risk for developing autoimmune disease, including the “accidents” of antibody formation. Very interestingly, she spoke with us about how our immune systems are “nutrient hogs” and how that applies to the healing approach of AIP. And yes, we all shared a little emotional moment to reflect on the ripple effect of Sarah’s work. This is a great episode for taking those first steps in truly informing yourself about autoimmune disease.

If you’d like to go more in-depth on Step 1: Inform, check out the “Confirmed, Suspected, and Related-Autoimmune Diseases” list or the “Learn About Your Disease” section, both in Chapter 1. These sections add detail to the information shared by Sarah in this episode.

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!

• 0:00 Introduction
• 1:50 Introducing Sarah
  • Sarah’s bio
  • Sarah’s books – The Paleo Approach, The Paleo Approach Cookbook, The Healing Kitchen
  
  
• 3:00 How the immune system works and autoimmune disease develops
• 6:20 How many autoimmune diseases are there?
• 7:50 Sarah’s experience with informing herself about her autoimmune diagnoses
• 9:42 Who is at risk for autoimmune disease?
• 10:55 The risk for developing multiple autoimmune diseases and the role of antibody formation
• 14:09 Common primary autoimmune diseases
• 14:30 The role of nutrient deficiency in autoimmune disease
• 15:50 Prevention of autoimmune disease
  • Diet
  • Sleep
  • Stress Management
  • Movement
  
  
• 23:25 Testing and treatment for autoimmune disease in the conventional and alternative system
• 28:00 Sarah talks about how to have a conversation with your doctor
• 30:30 Sarah’s unique research background and how she used it to create AIP as it stands today
• 34:12 Our gratitude for Sarah’s work and sharing a few heartfelt tears
• 36:54 Outro

If you enjoyed the podcast, would you mind leaving us a review in iTunes? This helps introduce our work to a new audience as we climb the ranks in their system.

The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast is a complimentary resource to our forthcoming book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness. Support us in our mission to revolutionize how autoimmune disease is viewed and treated by pre-ordering your copy today, using the links provided below!

Check out the previous episode, Episode #2: Step 1: Inform – Our Stories, and the next episode, Episode #4: Step 2: Collaborate – Our Stories. For the full podcast archive, click here.

The post The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Episode #3: Step 1: In-Depth with Sarah Ballantyne, Ph.D. 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!

Welcome to The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 1! We’ve created this podcast as a free resource to accompany our upcoming book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness.

Episode #2: Step 1: Inform – Our Stories is focused on the process we went through in getting diagnosis and then educating ourselves about testing, treatment, and prognosis. This episode is very personal, but we felt that revealing to our listeners what our early struggles were like was a valuable way to demonstrate that you can “figure it all out” and achieve wellness. We explain how informing ourselves, though daunting, was crucial to facing autoimmune disease with far less fear.

If you’d like to go more in-depth on Step 1: Inform, check out the “Where Are You On The Spectrum – Autoimmune Status Self-Test” or the “Practicing Resilience” section in Chapter 1 of our book. The self-test can help inform you on the next logical steps to take with chronic illness you might be facing and the resilience guide offers positive ways to cope with diagnosis (something that can be a low point emotionally).

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!

• 0:00 Introduction
• 1:45 What is Inform?
• 3:34 How information results in less fear
• 3:30 Taking responsibility for getting informed
• 4:18 When Angie knew it was time to “get informed”
• 5:06 When Mickey knew it was time to “get informed”
• 6:14 Mickey’s diagnosis story
  • Hashimoto’s and celiac disease
  • Also see her blog series on the topic here.
  
  
• 10:24 Angie’s diagnosis story
  • Lichen sclerosis, endometriosis, and celiac disease
  
  
• 14:00 Misdiagnosis setbacks
• 16:10 The power in the correct “label”
• 17:26 How Mickey coped with her diagnosis
• 21:40 How Angie coped with her diagnosis
• 23:40 The value of having a diagnosis vs. not being able to get one
• 24:50 Angie’s experience with testing and treatment for her autoimmune diseases
• 27:30 Mickey’s method of gathering and storing medical information
• 30:00 Angie’s method of gathering and storing medical information
• 31:40 Your homework for step 1, Inform!
  • Take a look at the “Autoimmune Status Self-Test” on p. 9 of The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook to inform you about where to move next in terms of diagnosis, treatment, and lifestyle changes to manage your autoimmune disease.
  
  
• 33:55 Outro

If you enjoyed the podcast, would you mind leaving us a review in iTunes? This helps introduce our work to a new audience as we climb the ranks in their system.

The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast is a complimentary resource to our forthcoming book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness. Support us in our mission to revolutionize how autoimmune disease is viewed and treated by pre-ordering your copy today, using the links provided below!

Check out the previous episode, 

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

In order to support our blogging activities, we may receive monetary compensation or other types or remuneration for our endorsement, recommendation, testimonial, and/or link to any products or services from this blog.

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

We are so excited to introduce our audience to our very first podcast… welcome to

The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 1! We’ve created this podcast as a free resource to accompany our upcoming book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness.

Episode #1: What is the Autoimmune Wellness Journey? is all about our mission with the book and podcast series to spark a major shift in how autoimmune disease is viewed and treated all over the globe. We chat about our goals and give a series overview, briefly detailing each of the seven steps on the autoimmune wellness journey. This first episode will give you an idea about the format of the series and a significant dose of empowerment.

If you’d like to go more in-depth, check out the “Introduction,” “Why We Wrote This Book,” and “The Manifesto” sections at the beginning of The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook. We know that most people skim or even completely skip the introductory material in books like ours, but we assure these three short sections are overflowing with inspiration. You can get a little insight on just what lights our fires!

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!

• 
  
• 0:00 Introduction
• 
  
• 
  
• 1:53 Angie introduces herself
• 
  
• Angie is the author of The Alternative Autoimmune Cookbook and creator of the group coaching program SAD to AIP in SIX.
• 
  
• 
  
• 
  
• 3:34 Mickey introduces herself
• 
  
• Mickey is the author of The Autoimmune Paleo Cookbook and creator of the online cooking program AIP Batch Cook.
• 
  
• 
  
• 
  
• 5:30 Our goal with The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast
• 
  
• 
  
• 7:09 An overview of the seven steps on the Autoimmune Wellness Journey
• 
  
• Inform
• 
  
• 
  
• Collaborate
• 
  
• 
  
• Nourish
• 
  
• 
  
• Rest
• 
  
• 
  
• Breathe
• 
  
• 
  
• Move
• 
  
• 
  
• Connect
• 
  
• 
  
• 
  
• 16:50 Empowerment for a personalized journey
• 
  
• 
  
• 18:49 What to expect in future episodes
• 
  
• One episode on every “step” covered in the handbook dedicated to Mickey and Angie’s personal experiences
• 
  
• 
  
• One episode on every “step” covered in the handbook dedicated to interviewing an expert or thinker to delve a little deeper on the topic
• 
  
• 
  
• 
  
• 20:16 All about The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook
• 
  
• 
  
• 20:31 Call to action — your homework!
• 
  
• 
  
• 21:55 Pioneering a new era in the management of autoimmune disease
• 
  
• 
  
• 22:35 Outro
• 
  

If you enjoyed the podcast, would you mind leaving us a review in iTunes? This helps introduce our work to a new audience as we climb the ranks in their system.

The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast is a complimentary resource to our forthcoming book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness. Support us in our mission to revolutionize how autoimmune disease is viewed and treated by pre-ordering your copy today, using the links provided below!

Check out the next episode, Episode #2: Step 1: Inform – Our Stories. For the full podcast archive, click here.

The post The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Episode #1: What is The Autoimmune Wellness Journey? appeared first on Autoimmune Wellness.

Today I’m sharing that after 10 years helping build and lead this movement and seven years at Autoimmune Welln­­­ess and AIP Certified Coach with Mickey, I have decided to step away from my work in the AIP space.

In a general sense, I am making this decision because I believe that slowing down and practicing community care are the next right things for me. I am so proud of everything Mickey and I have built and all the ways we’ve been able to serve the AIP community, but I don’t believe that my leadership in this space is the most valuable way I can contribute at this point.

To clarify, I still believe AIP is an incredibly powerful tool in the autoimmune management toolbox. I think that the future of AIP is bright and has already changed the standard of healthcare for autoimmune patients. After a decade of this work, I’d love to contribute to different conversations about health and wellness and support new voices ready to lead with fresh approaches to the AIP movement and new takes on the autoimmune healing journey.

My personal vision for the work I did in the AIP community was always to empower others so they could courageously contribute their voices to a revolutionary shift in the standard of autoimmune healthcare. And it’s right in our tagline here at Autoimmune Wellness that together, Mickey and I had a vision to build community. There are many, many voices now and the community is thriving. I think those visions are realized and now I’m making space for new visions.

I’m not entirely certain about all the details of my next steps, but if you’d like to follow my writing or learn a little more about the personal aspects of the decision to step away, you can find me here on Substack.

After I shared my decision with Mickey this past summer, we started to consider the best way forward for Autoimmune Wellness. We decided that turning it into an archive was the right path.

As an archive, all the current Autoimmune Wellness content, from groundbreaking research to definitive guides on the AIP basics, from practical how-to articles to hopeful stories of recovery, from the podcast to the hundreds of recipes, will continue to exist as a kind of dependable digital library to serve the autoimmune community. The resources on the site itself and the email auto-responder which offers free downloadable tools will be available to anyone looking for support in their healing journey.

New content will be limited and focused on opportunities to leverage the site and subscriber list to amplify the work of others in the Autoimmune Protocol space or share new and relevant events or research for those utilizing nutrition and lifestyle approaches in their autoimmune disease management.

Autoimmune Wellness social media accounts will also continue but will be used to amplify information and events important to the AIP community, share the work of other AIP recipe creators, spotlight AIP Certified Coach alumni, or to occasionally broadcast live interviews with autoimmune experts.

In particular, Mickey is looking forward to ramping up on the AIP research front and will serve as curator and steward of the Autoimmune Wellness archive and social media presence going forward.

Mickey will continue to teach AIP Certified Coach and train new AIP coaches from across the health and wellness spectrum. Angie will be stepping away, but a dynamic new partnership is in the works and will be announced soon. If you are an AIP Certified Coach alum, look for emails with more details from Mickey soon.

If you are a provider interested in training, join the interest list here. If you are looking for AIP coaching support, find a coach at the directory here.

We had no idea what would happen when we started, but our intuition said to go for it. Thank you for also believing there was something here worth growing. We are deeply, sincerely grateful to all of you for being our readers and cheerleaders. For literally supporting us by clicking on this blog, buying our books, enrolling in our programs, and helping spread AIP.

We also want to acknowledge, with the deepest sense of gratitude, the team who helped grow and sustain Autoimmune Wellness over the years: Grace Heerman, Alicia Green, and Jordan Taylor.

We have also had an amazing core recipe and article team over the years who took the site to new levels with their contributions: Dr. Rob Abbott, Sarah Kolman, Sophie Van Tiggelen, Christina Feindel, Kate Jay, Alaena Haber, Kelsey McReynolds, Wendi Washington-Hunt, Beth Chen, Indira Pullidath, Kris King, and Erin Shearer.

It’s a privilege to have come this far and have a platform that now has long-term value for our fellow autoimmune patients. We know the legacy of our work represented in this archive, only possible because of your support and the work of our team, will continue to benefit and sustain the AIP movement well into the future.

If you’d like to listen to us discuss this decision, we uploaded a short episode of The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast that you can listen to below: 

The post A Special Message From Angie appeared first on Autoimmune Wellness.

This post contains affiliate links. Click here to see what that means!In order to support our blogging activities, we may receive monetary compensation or other types or remuneration for our endorsement, recommendation, testimonial, and/or link to any products or services from this blog. 

I have HUGE news today–I’m coming out with a brand-new AIP cookbook!

It’s called The Nutrient-Dense Kitchen and it releases March 2019 (details below on how you can order a signed, pre-release copy!).

Angie and I both know from personal experience that being successful on AIP is much more than simply eliminating foods. Healing is both quickened and deepened when you ensure that in addition to avoiding your food triggers, your make an effort to maximize nutrient density in the diet.

But what exactly is nutrient density? Simply put, it is the amount of micronutrients a food contains relative to the energy it provides. Not only does my new book teach you about getting good nutrition in an approachable way, but I have developed all of the recipes so you’ll be maximizing nutrient density with every bite.

• 125 Autoimmune Protocol compliant recipes (free from gluten, grains, dairy, eggs, nuts, seeds, and nightshades)
• Recipes that satisfy low-FODMAP, low-carb, or coconut-free diets
• Recipes that take 45 minutes (or less) to prepare, can be made in one pot, or can be made in an Instant Pot
• 5 meal plan and shopping list combinations, including budget and two-person options

In order to create a book I believe in and maintain complete control over the content, I am self-publishing The Nutrient-Dense Kitchen. By pre-ordering your copy directly from me, you get some awesome perks!

• A signed copy of the first hardcover printing
• Early delivery of the book (up to a month before traditional release)
• Membership to a private insider FB group (Dec-Feb)
• Access to pre-release recipes from the book

Be one of the first to get your hands on The Nutrient-Dense Kitchen! Only a limited number of books are available for pre-order so reserve your copy now!

The post Announcing The Nutrient-Dense Kitchen by Mickey Trescott! 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 8 is our final episode of the season! In this episode, we’re giving the floor to five members of the autoimmune community to hear their number one piece of advice when it comes to saving money on the AIP.

Since these recommendations can be so individual, we wanted to see what was getting the AIP community actual mileage when they put it into practice. 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. Mitch Hankins, Instinctual Wellbeing [3:46]

2. Sophie Van Tiggelen of A Squirrel in the Kitchen [8:43]

3. Anne Marie Garland from Grass-fed Salsa [15:51]

4. Samantha Jo Teague of the Unskilled Cavewoman [20:56]

5. Kerry Jeffery of Emotional Autoimmunity [24:27]

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

Mickey Trescott: I’m feeling a little bit sad because we’re almost done with this podcast series, and it’s been really fun.

Angie Alt: I know. This was a really new topic for us to explore so in-depth. And it’s been pretty rewarding to talk to all these folks.

Mickey Trescott: I agree.

Angie Alt: So today we have a really fun episode for you guys. As you know, with this season of the podcast we’ve been on a mission to dig into the nitty gritty of how to make eating a nourishing, real foods diet both affordable and sustainable.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah. If you guys haven’t been following along, we covered the following topics in our previous episodes. We talked about sourcing affordable, highest quality meats, vegetables, and fats. Tips and tricks for effective meal planning, batch cooking, and minimizing food waste. Creative food sourcing options, like buying clubs and online shopping. How to minimize waste and reimagine leftovers. Creating a food budget and prioritizing your food spending. And also how to do AIP on an extremely low budget, like fixed income or food stamps.

I think we’ve done a really good job covering these bases. If you guys haven’t heard any of the episodes in this series, make sure to go back and listen to them. There’s a ton of really great info there. Info that I think is new territory for our movement our community. It’s been really fun.

Angie Alt: Right. We hope there’s something there for everybody. So, if there has been one recurring message this season, it has been that not every one of these recommendations is going to work for everyone, obviously. We’re all at different places with our health, our finances, our support systems and even our access based on the areas where we live. We thought it would be a good idea to round out this season of the podcast by devoting a whole episode to chatting with some of the members of the AIP blogging community about their number one money saving tip.

Since these recommendations can be so individual, we wanted to see what was getting the AIP community actual mileage when they put it into practice.

Mickey Trescott: Alright. So let’s move on and talk to our first guest.

So you guys; the first community member that we’re going to chat with today is Mitch Hankins from the blog Instinctual Wellbeing. Mitch, what is your number one tip for saving money on AIP?

Mitch Hankins: There are so many good ones. When my wife and I were kind of going through financial stuff a few years ago, we definitely had to get creative with sticking to an AIP and whole foods diet on a very limited budget. And very quickly, I think the thing we realized that was most helpful was not being afraid to grocery shop hop; or grocery store hop.

Basically, what we ended up doing is just taking note of maybe two or even three grocery stores in our area, and what products did we regularly use from each of those, and finding which store had the best prices for that particular item. Maybe we’d get a certain percentage of things from Whole Foods. And then for us, we’d drive down the road and hit up Trader Joe’s for 30 minutes and grab some things there. Sometimes we’d go to the Asian mart to pick up a few items there, like coconut milk and even some sweet potato noodles and things of that nature.

So, really just learning where we could get the best deals. And then taking advantage of that. One thing I would say; we did live in a pretty large metropolitan area, and I know some people don’t. So one thing you could do if you live in a more rural or smaller town, could be to do that same thing, but online.

I know there’s lots of great shops nowadays online where you can buy AIP products, and even meats....

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 7 is focused on how to both prioritize your food choices, and make a budget for eating this way that is sustainable longterm. Angie and Mickey share their personal stories of budgeting and managing medical expenses and debt. They also chat with guest Jenny Harris about how to modify AIP for lower budgets, and how to find local assistance for food budgeting concerns.

This is a bit of a tricky topic but we hope sharing our experiences and ideas will help you feel supported wherever you find yourself in your journey. 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. Different levels of budget concerns [2:19]

2. Budgeting benefits on AIP [7:13]

3. Personal budgeting stories [9:41]

4. Benefit of minimalism [15:58]

5. An investment in your future health [18:53]

6. Introducing our guest, Jenny Harris [23:41]

7. Roadblocks and challenges [29:05]

8. Finding local assistance [31:05]

9. AIP modifications on low-budget [35:44]

Mickey Trescott: Hey guys! Mickey here. Welcome back to the Autoimmune Wellness podcast, season 3. How are you doing today, Angie?

Angie Alt: I’m good. Hopefully there won’t be any puppy noise in the background. My puppy is being very naughty today, you guys.

Mickey Trescott: Sometimes it happens. You know, those animals.

Angie Alt: Mm-hmm.

Mickey Trescott: So today we are continuing our discussion related to the topic this season. Real food on a budget. This episode is going to be about how to both prioritize your food choices, and make a budget for eating this way. Today we’re tackling a little bit of a tricky topic, but we hope that sharing some of our experiences and ideas will help you guys feel supported wherever you find yourself in your journey.

Mickey Trescott: So first, let’s talk about the three main categories that people find themselves in when we talk about budgeting concerns. The first, of course, are people who are wealthy. They can afford anything. There really aren’t any barriers to getting what they want, because they can go to Whole Foods and get whatever they want. Or they can afford the functional medicine practitioner. Most of us, sadly, don’t find ourselves in this situation.

The middle is actually where most of us are probably at. That’s where people have resources to allocate towards maybe eating better or better medical care, but it means almost always you’re going to have to make some strategic planning. There is flexibility. So there’s a lot of choices sometimes. And maybe going without something so that you can get something else. There are those options to kind of move things around a little bit, and prioritize.

And then lastly there are people who are low income. So those are people who face significant challenges and stress around budgeting for food. And it involves fixed resources without flexibility. So that’s an important distinguishing characteristic between those who truly are low-income. I would say that a lot of people in the middle maybe think they’re a little more low-income than they really are. But the truth is, a lot of us have some flexibility. And that is where a lot of the difficulties come up.

Angie Alt: So in the second segment of the podcast, we’ll be talking a lot more about those in the lowest income group, and some strategies that they can use. We really believe everyone should have access to healing foods. And we want to talk about the ways to make that reality for those in that challenging circumstance.

But in this first segment, we want to focus on the middle category of folks. Because probably most of you guys listening to this podcast find yourselves here. It’s where Mickey and I ourselves land. So we just want to kind of take a stab at the topic that is probably most of us are facing.

We also want to acknowledge that having a chronic illness alone can be limiting to the budget. It’s expensive to be sick. And we totally get that.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah. The different ways even just having an autoimmune disease before you get into some of the diet and lifestyle stuff that you might want to do. I mean, medical bills and medications are expensive. So a lot of that, if you’re someone who has just gone through a diagnosis, you know how front loaded those costs can be. So all at once, you might be going to see different doctors and specialists. Burning through maybe a high deductible, or something. Which is sadly very common these days. Getting through all of that testing, and some of those initial...

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 6 is not just about a clever way to maximize your food budget, but one of the biggest struggles our culture faces when it comes to sustainable food production: reducing food waste.

We are discussing how to make the most of all the ingredients we’ve talked about sourcing in the previous episodes so you can best minimize waste and reuse leftovers. Our guest is Rachael Bryant from the blog Meatified, who shares some excellent advice and personal experience around creating a low-waste kitchen. Scroll down for the full episode transcript!

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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. Ways to reduce waste [4:23]

2. Food storage methods [12:52]

3. Our guest, Rachael Bryant from Meatified [22:44]

4. Reimagining leftovers [29:30]

5. Using food “scraps” [39:23]

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. Cozied up here on kind of a cool day. Ready for some warmer weather in the Pacific Northwest.

Angie Alt: Oh, gosh. Me too. I feel like it’s the longest winter. Which is ridiculous, because it really hasn’t been that bad. But I’m really ready for the sun.

Mickey Trescott: Me too.

Angie Alt: Ok. 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 make the most out of all of the ingredients we’ve talked about sourcing in the previous episodes. It’s all about minimizing waste, and reusing leftovers.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah. So after we figured out how to get our hands on all of these really well-sourced, healthy, nutrient dense, and sometimes a little bit expensive ingredients, depending on kind of how we’ve sourced. We have to figure out how we’re going to maximize them, and use every last bit.

So, you guys. We as a culture have a really massive problem with food waste. I looked up a couple of stats, and globally we waste 1.3 trillion tons of food per year. Which, that is just insane. And it’s estimated that up to 50% of food that’s produced; that’s either meat that’s raised or produce that’s grown, or processed food that’s made, is not even eaten. So, I don’t know how that makes you guys feel, but I feel kind of disgusted by that.

Angie Alt: Yeah, it makes mew ant to cry, to be honest. Especially; my experience living in developing countries and everything and seeing this problem. In the United States we have a particularly bad problem with food waste. So much so that our government even has an initiative to try to reduce it by the year 2020, I believe. I have to check in on that and read that again.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah, I think it’s 30% by 2030.

Angie Alt: 30% by 2030. Ok. Yeah, when I reflect on all of that, it’s literally heart breaking for me. And I kind of have a little bit of a problem about it.

Mickey Trescott: Part of it is within the food system. Part of that food isn’t even being purchased. So a lot of it is wasted in the field. Maybe because of the timing of harvesting, or the market, or in the factory where they process food, or whatever. But we have a lot of angles to tackle this. And the on that we are most poised to handle is actually in our own homes, and our kitchens, and how we waste food through the course of planning and cooking our meals every day.

Angie Alt: Right. We could make a big impact. If we each did that, it would be huge!

Mickey Trescott: Today we’re going to talk in this first segment of this episode about some ways that we can reduce waste. And so the first one; we’re going to sound like a broken record, guys. But planning. Planning is really key. Right Angie?

Angie Alt: Yep. Meal planning all the way. I know we’ve talked about it like 800 times this season, you guys. But it’s absolutely key.

Mickey Trescott: You know, meal planning; Angie’s a little more of a meal planner than I am. But I do know that when I make a meal plan, what I tend to do is take inventory of what I have and when it expires. How I can use it up before it goes bad. And then also making a list of what to buy. I’m not just wandering around the grocery store being like; oh, these Brussel sprouts look good. I have a list, and I know exactly the quantities that I need. And that first act of meal planning; it organizes all of...

After a pause, the Autoimmune Wellness Podcast is back—and this episode marks the beginning of a new chapter. In Episode 50, Mickey officially relaunches the podcast and shares a clear, compassionate update on the current state of the Autoimmune Protocol as we head into 2026.

Mickey reflects on how AIP has evolved from a grassroots, patient-led experiment into a mature, research-informed framework used by patients and practitioners around the world. She also explains why this moment matters, what’s changed in recent years, and how the podcast will support the autoimmune community moving forward.

This episode sets the stage for the AIP Deep Dive series and offers grounding, context, and direction for anyone navigating autoimmune disease—whether you’re brand new to AIP or have been part of this community for years.

1. Why the Autoimmune Wellness Podcast is being relaunched now
2. How AIP has entered a new “maturity” stage
3. What’s changed in the AIP landscape since 2022
4. Why Modified AIP has been a game-changer for sustainability and access
5. The current state of AIP research and what’s coming next
6. How the AIP Certified Coach community has grown globally
7. What the AIP community looks like today
8. What to expect from upcoming podcast episodes and series

1. AIP Foundation Series – Free 5-day email course with over 60 pages of resources, food lists, and beginner guides.
2. AIP Certified Coach Program & Practitioner Directory – Learn more about becoming certified or find an AIP-trained provider.

Subscribe to the Autoimmune Wellness Podcast to stay up to date with the AIP Deep Dive series, research-focused episodes, and community conversations.

00:00 – Welcome back & podcast relaunch

01:48 – About Mickey & the Autoimmune Wellness Podcast

04:37 – The State of AIP in 2026

05:30 – AIP enters its “maturity” stage

08:48 – Why Modified AIP has been a game-changer

10:23 – Research momentum and what’s ahead

11:21 – Growth of the AIP Certified Coach community

12:41 – The AIP community today

13:54 – What’s coming on the podcast

14:13 – January: AIP Deep Dive Month

15:59 – Personal health update preview

17:02 – February: Science Month

17:56 – Introducing “Small Bites”

18:48 – Looking ahead: mixed formats & community input

20:09 – AIP Foundation Series & wrap-up

In the early days of the Autoimmune Protocol, there was no Transition Phase—you simply jumped straight into elimination. For many people, that approach was overwhelming and unsustainable. In this episode, Mickey explains why preparation, not willpower, is the biggest predictor of success with AIP.

As part of the AIP Deep Dive series, this episode focuses on Phase 1 of the updated Autoimmune Protocol: the Transition Phase. Mickey walks through why this phase was added, what’s changed in the updated framework, and how thoughtful preparation can reduce burnout, increase confidence, and make AIP work in real life.

This episode lays the groundwork for the Elimination Phase by helping you slow down, build supportive systems, and approach AIP as a sustainable learning process—not an all-or-nothing challenge.

1. Why the original “jump straight into elimination” approach often led to burnout
2. What the AIP Transition Phase is and why it’s now considered essential
3. How preparation—not discipline—determines long-term success
4. The five steps of the AIP Transition Phase
5. How to track baseline symptoms and why it matters
6. How to create a personal health vision that supports motivation
7. What a confidence assessment is and how it helps you plan realistically
8. How to choose the right start date for elimination
9. Common Transition Phase pitfalls and how to avoid them

1. AIP Foundation Series – Free 5-day email course with printable food lists, meal plans, and beginner resources.
2. AIP Certified Coach Program & Practitioner Directory – Advanced training for licensed healthcare providers and a worldwide directory to find AIP-trained support.

00:00 – Why the Transition Phase was created

02:33 – The Transition Phase explained in five steps

04:14 – Step 1: Track your baseline symptoms

07:47 – Step 2: Create your personal health vision

10:09 – Step 3: Perform a confidence assessment

14:58 – Step 4: Choose your start date

18:32 – Step 5: Take action on preparation tasks

24:04 – Common Transition Phase pitfalls

26:42 – Wrap-up & AIP Foundation Series

There’s a lot of confusion about the Autoimmune Protocol—what it is, what it isn’t, and whether it actually works. In this episode, Mickey cuts through the noise to share the real story behind AIP and how it’s evolved in 2026.

As someone who’s been part of the AIP movement since the very beginning, Mickey explains how AIP grew from a grassroots experiment into a research-backed framework used worldwide to support people living with autoimmune disease. She also breaks down the major 2024 update to AIP, including the introduction of Core AIP and Modified AIP, and how to decide which approach is right for you.

This episode kicks off the AIP Deep Dive series and lays the foundation for using AIP as a temporary, educational process—not a lifelong restrictive diet.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

1. What the Autoimmune Protocol really is (and what it’s not)
2. How AIP evolved from patient experimentation to published research
3. The three phases of AIP: Transition, Elimination, and Reintroduction
4. The difference between Core AIP and Modified AIP
5. How AIP supports gut health, immune regulation, and inflammation
6. What the science says about AIP and autoimmune disease
7. Common myths and misconceptions about AIP
8. How to know if AIP is the right tool for you

Resources:

AIP Foundation Series – Free 5-day email course with printable food lists, meal plans, and reintroduction guides.

AIP Certified Coach Program – Advanced training for licensed healthcare providers who want to use AIP safely and effectively in clinical practice, or find a coach in the worldwide directory.

Episode Timeline:

00:00 – Introduction: Why AIP is misunderstood

02:45 – Autoimmune disease overview & Mickey’s story

05:06 – The origins of the Autoimmune Protocol

07:06 – What AIP is and how it works

08:01 – Phase 1: The Transition Phase

10:32 – Phase 2: Elimination (Core AIP vs. Modified AIP)

16:45 – Phase 3: Reintroduction

19:49 – How AIP supports gut health, immunity, and inflammation

22:29 – Recovery stories & medical research

25:10 – The 2024 update: Core vs. Modified AIP

27:32 – Myths and controversies about AIP

29:51 – Is AIP right for you?

30:15 – Wrap-up & what’s coming next

For many people, the Elimination Phase is what comes to mind when they think about the Autoimmune Protocol—but it’s also the most misunderstood part. Conflicting food lists, outdated advice, and fear of restriction have left many people unsure how to approach elimination in a way that’s effective and sustainable. In this episode, Mickey clarifies what the Elimination Phase actually looks like today, following the 2024 update to the Autoimmune Protocol.

As part of the AIP Deep Dive series, this episode focuses on Phase 2 of the updated framework: the Elimination Phase. Mickey explains why elimination is meant to be temporary, how it fits into the larger AIP process, and how the introduction of Core AIP and Modified AIP makes the protocol more accessible without compromising its effectiveness.

This episode provides a clear, practical roadmap for navigating elimination with confidence—covering what to remove, what to include, how long to stay in this phase, and how to troubleshoot common challenges—so you can move forward without overwhelm or guesswork.

1. What the AIP Elimination Phase is—and what it isn’t
2. Why elimination is a temporary learning phase, not a lifelong diet
3. How Core AIP and Modified AIP differ and why both exist
4. Which foods are avoided on Core AIP
5. Which foods are included on Modified AIP and why
6. What foods to focus on adding for nutrient density and healing
7. How long the Elimination Phase typically lasts
8. How to troubleshoot fatigue, cravings, digestive changes, and overwhelm
9. Practical meal planning and batch cooking strategies to make elimination easier

1. AIP Foundation Series – Free 5-day email course with printable food lists, meal plans, and beginner resources.
2. AIP Certified Coach Program & Practitioner Directory – Advanced training for licensed healthcare providers and a worldwide directory to find AIP-trained support.

00:00 – Introduction to the Elimination Phase and AIP updates

02:38 – What the Elimination Phase is—and isn’t

04:18 – Core AIP vs. Modified AIP explained

06:20 – Foods to avoid on Core AIP

11:05 – Foods included on Modified AIP

15:29 – Foods to include on both Core and Modified AIP

20:17 – How long to stay in the Elimination Phase

23:32 – Troubleshooting symptoms during elimination

27:57 – Meal planning and batch cooking strategies

32:18 – Wrap-up & AIP Foundation Series