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!

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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. 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 long-term for myself. But in the beginning, it’s really tough to walk that line.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah. If some people are going through some really important medical procedures or medical treatments or seeing certain doctors that they really need to see, they literally might not be able to start with the food to the extent. We have some ideas for you guys later, but they might not be able to do it at the current time.

Another issue that people have is that, maybe they try AIP for a short period of time. Which is what we advocate. You guys know at this point, AIP is not forever. But maybe they experience some success in the very beginning, but then they find it too expensive to maintain. Right Angie?

Angie Alt: Yep. I see this a lot. I get a special view of this because of my group programs. I see people at the very beginning giving this a big shot and really dedicating a lot of their financial resources to it. And then maybe the financial resources kind of burn out at some point, and they go; how do I maintain this? I’m not quite there where I need to be, in terms of my healing, but I don’t know if I can stretch my budget further. So we’re going to dive into that some, too, over the next few episodes.

What about a really tough on, Mickey. Integrating a healing diet while needing to be on social welfare programs, like food stamps. That can be really challenging, because there are limitations on what you can buy with some of those programs.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah. This is something that we haven’t had an onslaught of people writing to us. But through the years, I have had some especially thoughtful blog comments and emails from people that say; this is my issue. I’m on this government program. I have a fixed income, and I really want to try AIP. How can I make it work for me?

We’ve got some ideas for you guys. We’re actually going to be interviewing a social worker later on in this podcast series. And hopefully give you guys some ideas about prioritizing. Because that’s actually something that I don’t think anyone in our community has started talking about yet.

Angie Alt: No, and we’re excited to talk. I have a lot of personal feeling about this, and I’m really excited to help figure out ways to make this successful for everybody. Even those on the lowest incomes.

Ok. And finally, another big one. Confusion about how to make smart compromises in food quality or budget priority. I think it feels like there’s only one way to do AIP, and I need to go buy everything at Whole Foods. And people aren’t quite sure about doing that.

Mickey Trescott: Mm-hmm. If people don’t know that this is a struggle for them, it will become apparent. There may be a misconception for a lot of you guys that you need to be drinking a $5 bottle of kombucha every day. Or buying that organic grass-fed meat at Whole Foods, or whatever. And not really understanding how to make those compromises to kind of sustain this long-term. So hopefully we’re going to clear some of that up for you guys.

There may be some other things that you guys are feeling. Hopefully in 8 episodes dedicated completely to this, we’ll cover it for you guys. So, Angie, you want to dive into why this topic is personally important to us?

Angie Alt: Yeah. You know, we wanted you guys to understand that this isn’t just motivated by what we’ve learned from all of you and what the community has been asking for. Mickey and I are not independently wealthy, either. And we recognize that the process of shifting your budget to focus on high quality foods that fuel healing is by no means an easy undertaking. When we first began AIP ourselves, it was difficult to figure out where the money to eat like this was going to come from, or how to source the best foods at the lowest prices.

Not only that, but we have personal experience living very low income. Mickey lived paycheck to paycheck when she was first diagnosed. And when I first got ill, I was a single parent, and I was on welfare at that time. I was working a job, and going to school, and needing some additional support. And it was really tough. Those experiences left really powerful impressions on us, and they played a really big role in our efforts to address this issue with this podcast season.

We don’t believe that healing food only belongs to the rich. And we want to figure out ways to make this successful for everybody. So what can they expect this podcast series, Mickey?

Mickey Trescott: First, we’re going to do an episode on every facet of food sourcing and kind of break that down for you guys. All your options. Everything from purchasing meat and fat to vegetables and pantry items. There are so many options. There’s just this huge spectrum of everything from going to the farmer’s market, to buying things online, to buying clubs that we’re really going to dive in and give you guys some really creative ideas. I’m sure a lot of them you’ve never even heard or considered before. That might help you guys solve some problems.

Some of these things are going to be great ah-ha moments for some of you. And some of them might not be applicable. But our hope is that there is going to be something here for everybody.

We’ll also be talking about some tricks that help you stretch your food budget. So things like meal planning and batch cooking, and minimizing waste. So, you guys are probably sick of hearing us talk about meal planning and batch cooking. But there are more benefits to it than just saving you some time. And it’s not just about what you buy and where. So how you’re using these ingredients. How you’re stretching them. Especially that waste piece, we haven’t talked about a lot in our community. But just to maximize that, and get the most value and healing out of it.

And then we’ll also be addressing how to create and prioritize your food budget. As well as have a conversation like Angie said about even those on the lowest incomes. So things like food stamps, WIC, using food pantries, and some creative ways that if that’s you, how you can still make healing changes in your diet. There are definitely options for you.

Along the way, we’ll be interviewing some people who have a specific expertise on the topic of the episode, which will help us go much deeper than our own experiences, into the range of options. And we’re going to be learning along with you guys. There are some areas that I feel like Angie and I are very strong in, and then there are some areas where especially we’re bringing in a few experts that we have some great questions for them, and I think we personally stand to learn a lot from them. So we’re excited about that.

And then lastly, we will be interviewing members of our AIP community to share their number one money saving tip, and how they’ve hacked eating this way over the long-term. So this way, we can get a broader perspective of what’s working for a variety of people living in different areas on different budgets. For instance, someone living in San Francisco. They might have a different tip on what saves them money than someone living in rural Oklahoma. Sourcing might vary really widely from New York City to St. Louis.

So, the good news is that we know people hacking AIP literally all over the world. So wherever you find yourself, know that there are options for you. It might take a little thinking outside the box. And through sharing some of these experiences of our community, we can really hone in on kind of taking stock of that landscape and seeing what’s out there.

Angie Alt: This is going to be a good season, guys. That’s it for our first half of this episode. We’ll be back after the break with a guest who will help us take stock of exactly what we are up against in tackling this problem. We’ll be right back.

Angie Alt: We wanted to introduce you guys to our title sponsor this season of the podcast, The Nutritional Therapy Association. The NTA is a holistic nutrition school that reconnects people to healing foods and vibrant health. They provide practical and affordable nutrition education through their courses, empowering individuals to launch new careers, and heal themselves, their communities, and the world.

The NTA trains and certified nutritional therapy practitioners and consultants with an emphasis on bioindividual nutrition.

Mickey Trescott: I personally discovered the NTP program in 2012 when I was in the middle of my own healing journey with AIP. I was actually sitting on my kitchen counter, looking at the local community college class list that I got in the mail, and I saw the program. When I looked it up online, and found that it was based on real food and ancestral perspectives, I knew that it would be a perfect fit to my personal chef work, and a major piece to shifting my career. And while I was going through the program, I actually wrote the first iteration of the Autoimmune Paleo Cookbook as my community project. And the rest is history.

Angie Alt: After becoming a certified health coach in 2014, I was excited but knew that I wanted to dive much, much deeper into nutrition. And Mickey, obviously, had glowing things to say about NTA. After I looked over the program...