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!

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. 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 that into a plan that I can follow. And I’m much less likely to have waste at the end of it.

Angie Alt: Yep. Really the smart way to go. And you can pay attention to what’s in your deep freeze, and what’s in your pantry before you go so that you don’t end up with doubles of things and then some of it going bad because you forgot what you had available. It’s just really the smart way to go in terms of planning.

The next step that kind of goes along with meal planning is batch cooking. Which we’ve talked about before. Mickey does a little more batch cooking than I do. We’re kind of opposite in that way. I do a little more meal planning and a little less batch cooking; she does more batch cooking and less meal planning. But this is kind of the next important step in trying to reduce waste at home.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah. When you batch cook, you’re using a larger quantity of ingredients. So I find if I make a batch of chili I might use one or two whole yellow onions, for example. Where if I’m making like a one-off meal, that’s not a big batch, I might use a quarter or half of an onion. And then that onion is sitting in my fridge.

Or, if I have a bag of carrots, I might use the whole bag of carrots in a batch cook versus a couple of carrots and then having the rest of them potentially go bad. So, through batch cooking you can make a bunch of food. And then whatever you’re not going to eat in the next few days, you can just freeze immediately. So you can really visually see; ok, all of those ingredients that I bought have been turned into meals. Which are perfectly portioned. I can visualize them in the fridge. And then whatever I’m not going to use, I can freeze either immediately or if I get a couple of days in, maybe I unexpectedly eat out and I don’t need one of those meals. Guess what? Pop it in the freezer. You know? It’s a really easy way to kind of get a handle on that whole meal situation.

Angie Alt: Right. The next topic in terms of reducing waste is how you shop, right?

Mickey Trescott: Yeah. And if you meal plan, or batch cook, or both, I think that can really inform your shopping in a way that, like I said before, avoids impulse buys. When I’m doing more meal planning, I’m definitely going right for the things I’m looking for. And I’m buying exactly what I need. So like I was talking about with the carrots; if I only need a couple of carrots for a recipe and I have all my meals planned for the week, I know that that bag of carrots, unless I’m maybe going to want to be eating carrots as a snack with some pate or something, I’m not really going to need that whole bag. So I might just go for the bulk carrots and get a couple.

Same thing with beets. I might get one beet for a chili instead of getting a whole bunch of beets. So I don’t know if you have any experiences like that, but getting exactly what you need is definitely the way to prevent waste from happening.

Angie Alt: Yeah, for sure. In fact; my husband and I always have a little bit of a disagreement here. Because if I send him out to shop, he’s the guy going out to get the bounty for the family, right, and he buys whatever. If I say, buy apples. I’ll say 4, and he’ll buy 8. {laughs}

Mickey Trescott: Just in case.

Angie Alt: Yeah, just getting the most in case. So I really pay close attention to the numbers we need, and what we can go through realistically in a week so that there’s no waste.

Mickey Trescott: Or even if there’s a trip coming up. Something that happens a lot in our household. We’ll go out of town for a few days. Which is, you know, not really long enough to have to completely clear your fridge. But it is long enough to where a lot of things don’t last for a few days. And if we do a shop a couple of days before we go out of town, I have to tell my husband; hey. We need to not buy a huge thing of bananas. {laughs} Those are not going to last. So just thinking ahead a little bit with that shopping is really important.

Angie Alt: Right. I think you had some tips, too, Mickey about fridge organization when you’re bringing home all of those groceries. How do you arrange?

Mickey Trescott: Yeah, so it can be really tempting to put all of that new, fresh stuff kind of throw it right in the front and throw it on top of what’s there. But that’s kind of how things get buried. So, even the way that you organize your fridge and the way that you put your ingredients away can affect how you use them.

Something that I do; I have a very small fridge, so I have to really maximize the way that I use the space. But I only have one drawer, and that’s where I keep all my produce. So what I’ll do is I’ll pull out the drawer, and I’ll put out anything that’s aged in there. And then I’ll put all of the brand new stuff right in the bottom, and I’ll put the stuff that’s older on top so that when I go into the fridge, I see it. And I remember; ok, I need to use those greens up. Or those mushrooms are ready to go. So everything at the top is kind of the priority. And those oldest items are kind of the most visible.

Angie Alt: Right. Super smart.

Mickey Trescott: If you guys have done some reintros, and you’re eating a little bit more of some of the packaged perishables. These might be things like eggs, or yogurt, or things that you’re going to be going through more frequently. There aren’t a lot of those things on the elimination phase. But when you reintroduce foods, that might become an option for you. A good thing is just to make sure that you rotate those.

So like when I buy eggs, I don’t want to put the new eggs on the top. Because then the eggs that are below it might not get eaten in time. So that’s another way to think about it.

Angie Alt: Yeah, I totally do that too. How about using up all the fresh ingredients before you go shopping again? How do you make sure you do this? I know how we approach it in our house. How do you do it in your house, Mickey?

Mickey Trescott: You know, we do kind of a fridge dump soup. And something actually going back to batch cooking; I always have batch cooked meals in the freezer available. So when we end up on that last meal, sometimes it’s not literally the last meal. Sometimes I can do a fridge dump soup, which is basically every vegetable or meat that’s in the fridge. I just figure out how to make a soup with that with some broth and some spices. That’s a way to use up all the perishables. And if we’re not literally going to the store that day, I can get us by one more meal with what I have in the freezer. That’s kind of how we do it, making sure all those perishables are totally eaten through.

And sometimes, it’s like a game. Sometimes it’s really fun to kind of figure out; “What can I make with a sweet potato, some broth, and some leftover chicken.” You know?

Angie Alt: Yeah. I actually kind of like that feeling. And it makes my daughter kind of crazy, but we definitely use everything, right down to the very last. My fridge is literally empty. My pantry, other than bulk stuff like maybe some cassava flour is literally empty. We use everything before we go and shop again. And if I have those weird odds and ends, yeah I love the challenge of kind of coming up with that last meal before you shop that’s all the weird stuff. That’s a good feeling to use it up.

I usually will try to make a little bit of a baked something. A little bit of a casserole type thing. Or some kind of a hash with those last bits.

Angie Alt: Another important part of reducing waste is storing food correctly, and I think a lot of people might not know about some of these options. And I think, especially in the US. We probably tend to throw stuff out too soon thinking that it’s gone bad. And really, if we would have taken just a little care with storing the food, it would have lasted for a long time.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah, there are lots of resources online for you guys, if you’re really curious about storing food. I think Angie and I tend to be on the less conservative side. As far as meat and leftovers and stuff, I would totally agree with Angie. I definitely let my leftovers go sometimes up to a week and it’s fine. Sometimes it needs a little refresh with maybe some new spices and add some different flavors, a sauce or something. But I have no problem eating leftovers. Which I know we’ll talk about in a little bit.

But some things that you guys can do to kind of make the food that you buy last longer; a trick that I learned with herbs. Like fresh cilantro, fresh parsley, fresh basil. The best way to keep those is actually to put them in a little glass or jar of water, kind of like you would a flower arrangement. And then cover them with a plastic bag and kind of tie it tight so they both have that water and a little humidity. It will kind of keep them alive. Because you know how quickly those herbs can go wilty and slimy. They’re so flavorful, and so important in AIP cooking, that I just like to snip a little bit to use in a recipe, and then kind of keep the rest of them alive.

Some things that you might not be aware of actually last a lot longer in the refrigerator. So, while avocados you’re going to want to keep on the counter if you’re...

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 with my mom, her sister and her partner. We all actually band together to buy meat. And my brother actually lives a few hours away in Seattle. So between the four different families, we’ll buy a whole cow every year, and then split it into quarters. If we were just buying a quarter of a cow, the price is higher than if you buy the whole thing. So even your family can work like a buying club.

Angie Alt: Right. What about co-ops? Let’s explain and talk about co-ops.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah, co-ops are an awesome business model for like a grocery store. There can also be more informal co-ops that don’t have a storefront. But basically, they function differently from a corporation because they are member or employee owned. So this means if you have a local food co-op, they might ask you to pay a member fee. It might be a one-time fee up front.

I think when I lived in California, I paid $75 once to be a member, and that gets you a share. So you can actually vote on leadership, and then you get discounts on all the food they buy. Sometimes they have you pay per year. Sometimes you don’t even have to pay, but it just means that the store is actually owned by the employees and the people that run it.

So there’s a few different models. But really, the point of a co-op is to get the highest quality food at a price that is lower than normal. So by paying into the co-op system, you know that that money, that profit that the store is making, isn’t actually going to some shareholder’s pockets. It’s actually going to reinvest in the business and keep the price down for the people that shop there. So co-ops can be a really fun option, also.

Angie Alt: Yeah. It’s a great way to really get engaged with your community and good quality food providers. Here’s an interesting set up. And I actually don’t do this as an adult. But when I was a kid, my mom and aunt and grandmother belonged to Azure Standard. Can you tell us about Azure Standard?

Mickey Trescott: Yeah; actually, I didn’t know that about your family, Angie, but I actually used them a lot about 5 or 6 years ago when I first started getting into real food. Especially with the online buying. So they’re a little bit of a hybrid.

They are a major real food distributor in the United States. They have an online store. But instead of shipping directly to you; which I think they do now. But they didn’t in the past, 5 or 6 years ago. What you had to do, was it was a buying club. They had no fee to join. You sign up, you join what’s called a drop.

Which is, basically someone in your community who has arranged an area where a semi can come drop off some orders. So everyone that is a member of that drop; they order all their food online. I think each drop has like a $500 minimum from the company. And then a truck shows up at, usually a church parking lot or some area that’s easily accessible to a lot of people.

Our drop in Seattle had about 20 or 30 families that would then show up, meet the truck. It would be the same time every couple of weeks or every month. And they would just get their order that literally came straight off a palate. And you can get some amazing bulk goods for crazy, crazy low prices.

So I would get things like gallons of coconut oil, apple cider vinegar, some of the flours. And actually, Azure standard has an organic farm here in Oregon, and they grow a lot of herbs, and spices. And they even have pastured meat and lamb. So I was ordering a lot of frozen meat from them.

Angie Alt: You know, Azure Standard has been around for a really long time. I mean, way back when my family was doing when I was a kid, they didn’t even offer non-GMO products, because there wasn’t GMO yet.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah.

Angie Alt: They were always kind of the number one place to go if you wanted really high quality, organic food that was really inexpensive. And you know, my aunt and my mom and my grandma would band together and get these big orders. My family and my aunt and uncle’s family both had four kids, so they were trying to feed 8 kids on really good quality food. We would use the food we got there to supplement the hunting and fishing that my dad and uncle were doing. And the garden that we grew.

My grandma was really into herbal and medicinal teas, and she could get big bulk orders of that from Azure Standard. It was really great.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah, it’s like Christmas. Meeting the truck, and having all your bulk groceries.

Angie Alt: Yeah!

Mickey Trescott: And they actually have a lot of stuff that, if anyone lives rurally, maybe you’re on a farm or you have some animals. They have a lot of goods that are really good for animals. So back when I lived in Seattle and had chickens, they had the only non-GMO soy-free chicken feed at a price that I could afford. So I ordered our chicken feed from them, and all that kind of stuff.

They even sold like root vegetables, and pantry storage foods. So I would get a lot of onions. Things that we’ve talked about this before; not really worrying too much if there’s a blemish on your veggies. It’s totally normal, and especially with those root veggies. It does not matter. So you can get an amazing price on that stuff from them.

Angie Alt: Right. And it’s a really good chance to meet your kind of local real food advocate community. I remember when we would go to the semi to pick up the foods. There would be all these other people that were kind of into that same health conscious lifestyle.

Mickey Trescott: You’re kind of like; “What did you get?” {laughs}

Angie Alt: Right.

Mickey Trescott: Like swapping stories of what they’re getting and what they’re doing with it. It’s really fun.

Angie Alt: Right. I remember I used to love; even when I was a kid, I used to love to browse their catalog. Which I don’t even know if they put out a catalog, anymore. Maybe you just order everything on their online site. But yeah; great resource, you guys.

Mickey Trescott: And it’s pretty cool that it’s been around so long. So www.AzureStandard.com is their website if you guys want to check it out. And they have some videos online. Trust us; it’s not scary to join a drop. I remember the first time I did it, I was like; who are these people, and how does this work? They explain everything on the website. And the prices are probably in line with the cheapest you can get for some of these high-quality foods. So they do a really great service for our community.

Angie Alt: Ok, so another possibility, which is kind of the opposite of Azure Standards in terms of everybody knowing about it, is Costco. Costco is a members-only, big box, discount retailer. You have to pay a membership fee every year. But there is quite a bit of benefit to having that Costco membership.

The standard membership is just $60 per year. It let’s you purchase products for your home and family at Costco locations and on their website. And the prices are greatly reduced, because again they’re buying these such huge bulk quantities. And then you can get an executive membership for $120 per year. And that membership gives you a 2% reward, up to $1000. So you can kind of earn money a little bit, as your spending money.

The Paleo Mom has a guide on her website to AIP Costco shopping that is a very helpful resource.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah; are you a Costco shopper, Angie? What’s been your experience with them?

Angie Alt: Well, so this is interesting. We used to be Costco members, but my husband is kind of a Costco fanatic. {laughs}

Mickey Trescott: {laughs}

Angie Alt: So, it didn’t really work that well for us. Because he’d be like; “Oh, look at this, a 2-gallon jar of pickled eggs!”

Mickey Trescott: Oh my gosh.

Angie Alt: And I would be like; “We do not need this.” So we have a small family, and we don’t live close to our extended family. So sharing all of that with other people didn’t really make sense for us in the long-term. But I know that for families that are a little bit bigger, or have an extended family around them, Costco can be an enormous win. How about you?

Mickey Trescott: Yeah, we don’t have a Costco membership. But both my mom and my dad have Costco memberships, and I will kind of tag along with them when they go. Maybe once or twice a year just to pick up a few things.

I’ve actually been really impressed, as the years have gone on, at their selection of more real food options. So things that I see really frequently are some high-quality cooking oil. So things like gallons of coconut oil, avocado oil. Sometimes they have good olive oil, but you know, you’ve got to kind of do your research on the supplier there.

As far as meat, I’ve heard that they have a lot more grass-fed meat. It’s pretty...

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 they have a nice thick skin. And organic avocados; super expensive.

Angie Alt: Super expensive. Yeah, I do totally the same thing. One thing I didn’t realize, though. I hadn’t realized that cauliflower was on the clean 15 list, and I’ve been buying organic. So I’ll probably switch up. Because I like to use a lot of different cauliflower in my cooking.

Mickey Trescott: Yep. Yeah, so in addition to the dirty dozen and the clean 15 and kind of being able to prioritize there; something else you can do is watch for some sales on organic local in-season produce. So it’s usually way more economical to buy this way and checking out frozen vegetables. A lot of times freezing preserves nutrients, and is also lower cost. So if you guys are just getting started with upping the quality of your food, some of those recommendations might work for you.

Angie Alt: Right. So moving onto the better category. So this is the next step up in terms of budgeting and sourcing. If you can avoid some organic produce, you can focus on organic versions of those on the dirty dozen list. And round out a variety with the non-organic fruits and vegetables from that clean 15 list that we talked about. And you can shop at your local farmer’s market, and look for great deals on organic local produce.

If you focus on the local produce, the idea here is that you might find that your budget actually accommodates more of the organic. Because you won’t have the shipping cost as part of the premium you’re paying at the store.

Mickey Trescott: And then the best. So if you’re going to go all out and get the best produce you possibly can, which we recommend over the long term the more you can shift that budget to kind of up the food quality all across the board, you would be getting all, or as much of your produce as possible, organic, local, and in season. A great way to do this is by joining a CSA, which stands for community supported agriculture. This is when you pay the share of a farmer’s produce at the beginning of the season, and then the farmer has that money to invest and creating that harvest. And then you pick it up weekly. Sometimes they’ll deliver it to you. And then filling in whatever you’re not getting there with a variety at the farmer’s market co-op, natural food store.

I would also add her that the very, very best is actually growing your own. Right? So if you have complete control over all aspects of producing your food, that’s the most sustainable and it’s going to be the freshest. It’s going to be, obviously, the most in-season because you don’t have all the tricks that all the industrial even organic food growers have up their sleeves. And it’s going to be really convenient; it’s going to be right at home.

Angie Alt: Right. So great option if you can do that. So maybe we should talk about how we source our produce, Mickey.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah. So I live in Willamette Valley in Oregon. I live in an area where I can grow a lot. And actually something that I am striving to do better every single year is to become more self-reliant and grow my own food. So, we have a big herb garden that we use year-round. I grow lots of greens like kale, chard, lettuces, and zucchini.

Something that I learned, even when I lived in Seattle in the city when I really didn’t have a lot of food budget for good produce, was I actually found a chart online that said the most expensive produce per ounce from high to low. And actually, the highest cost that we pay in the store is actually herbs and greens. So things like cilantro, rosemary, thyme. And then the greens like the baby lettuces, spinach, kale, chard. And those are actually the easiest things to grow and they take the smallest amount of room. They don’t need a super deep bed. A lot of them can be grown in pots. So those are things that I prioritize growing just because of cost.

Another thing that I do is I pick my own in the summer. In the summer, there’s a crazy bounty of things like berries. My husband and I will go to the farm and we’ll pick pounds and pounds of blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, and then we’ll freeze them. And like right now, it’s the middle of winter, and we still have a bunch of frozen berries from the summer. Something else we do is we harvest persimmons from a persimmon tree in the winter, and so kind of the flip side.

And then I have different produce sourcing depending on if it’s summer or if it’s winter. Because even though we live somewhere that food grows, it’s not totally year-round. So in the summer, that’s when it’s amazing bounty all the time. I like to go to the farmer’s market. I haven’t been doing a CSA the last couple of years because I’ve been traveling so much that it’s a little complicated trying to figure out what to do with that food. I’m considering it this year because I’m not traveling as much.

In the winter, I fill in the gaps with like a Fred Myers, which for those of you who don’t live in the Northwest, it’s kind of like a Walmart. I don’t actually have a great specialty grocer where I live. I don’t have a Whole Foods, or even a Sprouts or Trader Joe’s. So actually surprisingly, they have a pretty good selection of organic produce in the winter. It’s the same industrial organic stuff that you find at Whole Foods. Honestly, it’s a lot cheaper because it’s not in a fancy store. But that’s where I kind of round out my produce when I have to.

Angie Alt: Awesome. So, I also have a mix, depending on the season. In the summertime, I get 100% organic CSA from my local farmer. The same farmer that I get most of my meat from. And she grows a bunch of different herbs, greens, onions, some fruits. Honestly, there’s a lot of nightshades in that CSA, but my husband and daughter can enjoy some of that. or we share it with neighbors or friends.

Even when I travel, I like having the weekly CSA. I usually arrange with a friend of mine who also enjoys this quality of food and have her pick up my CSA, and basically share it with her family. Like a little gift to her when I’m traveling.

And then in the winter, I mostly use Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods, and I get a combination of organic and non-organic fruits and vegetables. Usually based on that Environmental Working Groups guide. I don’t grow a lot of my own, because I live in a pretty urban/suburban area and I don’t really have a space for that. I have done a little bit of pot gardening in the past. Growing some greens in pots and stuff on our balcony. Mostly I stick to purchasing from my local farms, or the Trader Joe’s/Whole Foods combo. So that’s it. That’s my produce sourcing.

Mickey Trescott: Awesome. I think it’s good to just share with people the different ways that we get our hands on this stuff. I am blessed to live kind of in farm country, but I also don’t have a good grocery store right by me. So by necessity, I’m forced to be a little more self-reliant. And Angie, I know you have a lot of options as far as stores around you, and you can actually leverage that and shop around. It’s more convenient for you to kind of see where you can get for the best price.

Angie Alt: Right. Right. Ok, so that’s it for the first half of this episode, you guys. We’ll be back after the break with a guest who is going to help us expand these ideas. He’s kind of amazing. We can’t wait to share.

Mickey Trescott: A quick word from our title sponsor this season, the Nutritional Therapy Association. The NTA empowers it’s graduates to source, prepare, and integrate a variety of well-sourced plant foods as part of a nutrient dense diet. For example, did you know that the betaine in beets aids digestion? Chromium in romaine lettuce can help regulate blood sugar? And that brussels sprouts have been found to boost beneficial gut bacteria? Through their nutritional therapy practitioner training program, which I took in 2012, and the nutritional therapy consultant program, which Angie took in 2015, the NTA teaches students to use foods therapeutically and focuses on building foundational health by integrating customized diets based on everybody’s unique needs.

For more information on the NTA’s nutritional therapy programs, and to access their free 7-day 101 course, check out their website at www.NutritionalTherapy.com.

Mickey Trescott: Alright guys, onto our interview for today. It’s just Mickey for this segment. Today we are speaking with Tyler Boggs, one half of the duo behind the incredible Heart2Heart Farms here in Oregon, with his wife, Elizabeth. Tyler and Elizabeth started raising animals and growing food after they converted to a real food lifestyle, but found that it was difficult to afford it. Not only did they start their farm to produce food for themselves, but they passionately developed a barter and work-trade systems to allow those in need to feed those they love.

A few short years later, Tyler has never been happier, sharing what he has and providing a sanctuary where people can nourish their bodies, minds, hearts, and souls. Other than being a good husband and father, there is no higher caller in the world to him than that. Thank you

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 because we are advocating for eating higher quality meat. But it’s totally ok, and there is no shame, if you can only afford conventionally raised meat. Just be cautious with that fat content.

And a lot of people actually ask about the organ meats. They think that maybe because it’s conventionally raised, that those are a no-go. But actually organ meats are very lean, and conventionally raised organ meats are still ok. And they’re very, very affordable.

The next level up is what we call better. So kind of one step above good is if you can afford or source some organic grass-fed or pastured meats. Or even that wild-caught seafood. Focus on buying those fatty cuts. So this is where you can kind of play with the boundary between the different food qualities that you have available to you.

Like we said, that fat is really good for you. It’s also where a lot of the toxins are stored. So if you can afford a little bit of that higher quality stuff, think those fatty roasts. Maybe some salmon filets. You might even be able to find some high-quality ground meat on sale from time to time. So you can stock up and freeze that. So that’s kind of how you can use both of those categories to your advantage if you have a little bit in your budget for a little bit higher quality meat.

Angie Alt: Right. And then the next step up. This is other far end of the scale. This is what we call best; we refer to as best. That’s getting all your meat and seafood organic grass-fed or pastured, and wild caught. That’s the ideal that we hope we’re all aiming for. Our budget and our sourcing is able to meet both of these.

This is like finding farmers or fishmongers from whom you can buy directly in bulk in order to save the most money while still getting the highest quality. You can ask the farmers about buying beef, pork, or lamb in wholes, halves, or quarters. This is buying the whole animal, half the animal, quarter of the animal, to save money.

You might be able to share meat with a group of friends if you don’t have enough freezer space or you don’t need to have such large quantities of meat. Buying in bulk keeps the cost down, but you may not have a need for all of that. So sharing is one way to deal with it. It gives you the advantage of the lower bulk price and the higher quality meat.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah. And I really think at this best level, we’re not really saying that this is food sourced from a grocery store. But actually at the highest level, ideally you’re working directly with a farmer that is local to you. So for some people, they don’t have local farms around them. You might be ordering meat online from different sources that maybe ship you frozen meat or something.

But ideally, everyone should have; in a perfect world, we all have local farms that are raising sustainable and healthy meat that we can actually work directly. And then you can actually go kind of see what the animals are eating. How they’re being treated. And all of that is kind of another add-on to that.

Angie Alt: So maybe, Mickey, we could talk about how each of us sources our own protein. Because we have different approaches.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah, for sure. We live on opposite sides of the country. Our local food systems are a little bit different. And kind of our life stages and living situations are a little different, too. So, I live on a farm. Although we don’t raise a lot of animals for meat here, but I live in a farming community. So access to quality meat is actually pretty easy for me.

One of my neighbors raises a few cattle every year just for the neighborhood on grass. So I buy a cow from my neighbor, and we have it frozen. We buy half and my mom and my sister buy the other half. So we split it. And I keep it in the deep freezer. And that lasts us about a year.

For salmon, we have a CSA. Because I live in the Pacific Northwest, so there are a lot of salmon CSAs where a company will go up to Alaska in the summer and they will fish for salmon and then freeze everything on the boat and then bring it back and you buy it in 10/20-pound boxes. So we get a couple of boxes in the summer, and that lasts us for the whole year.

And then chicken is actually hardest for me to source, just because it’s very seasonal in my area. So I do have some great farms that raise chicken. But not only is it very expensive, but they’ll raise a group of chickens, and they will harvest all of them. And then when you buy them, I’ll usually buy maybe 12 to 15 chickens. It takes up a lot of room. And that’s the one I have a harder time planning with.

So ideally I get them in whole chickens, bulk from a local farm. But I do supplement that with some of the maybe better quality Whole Foods chicken. And then pork, I have got sourced pork locally from different farms by the half. But this year we’re actually raising our own pigs for the first time. So that’s kind of exciting.

In the past, though. Now I’ve kind of maybe got it pretty figured out, because I lived on a farm and it’s a lot easier for me than a lot of other people to source meat. But I will say I have lived in the city before I lived out here in the country, and I have had to have some pretty creative sourcing ideas to get really good meat on the table.

So some things that I did when I lived in Seattle, first off I had a deep freezer when I had a living situation that wasn’t really ideal for a deep freezer. So I really prioritized that. I bought a little one. It wasn’t giant by any means. But I realized early on that being able to store meat long-term in a freezer was going to help me get more affordable meat. So that was great.

I did a CSA for a while in Seattle, where they would deliver me monthly. So I think it was something like 10 or 15 pounds of meat they would deliver in a cooler to the neighborhood. Then you’d go to the house and kind of pick up your order. And that was really handy, because that was before I had the deep freezer.

Another thing that I did, just as far as affordability. There was a local farm that I liked to buy organ meat at the farmer’s market. Because their prices, I couldn’t afford for the muscle meat. But I was buying organ meat from them because it was like $3-4 a pound for a heart, liver, or kidney.

And I asked them one day; “Do you guys ever end up with a bunch of leftover, freezer burned meat at the end of the season?” And they were like, “Yeah, we have a freezer full of that.” I was like, “What if I bought a quarter of a cow, but just in freezer burned meat. Would you give me a deal?” And they were like; “Actually, we’ll charge you for a quarter of a cow, but we’ll give you half a cow. But we’ll just give you all of the old stuff.” And I was like, heck yeah. That’s amazing.

So, all I had to do was slice off that little freezer burned piece, and it really wasn’t that big of a deal. And I got really high-quality meat. And it was really cheap. I actually shared it with my brother, who was trying to eat healthier. So that was one thing I did.

Another thing that we did when we lived in Seattle was we had a friend who had some lambs that they offered to sell us one. And my husband wanted to learn how to harvest them. So they were like; if you come out to the farm for a day and help us harvest some of the lambs, then we’ll give you one. So we did that.

My husband has kind of been into hunting and fishing throughout the year, so that’s been another kind of alternative way of getting some, obviously, wild meat.

Angie Alt: Awesome options there. I love hunting and fishing!

Mickey Trescott: I know. It’s not always a guarantee.

Angie Alt: Yeah, not always a guarantee.

Mickey Trescott: It’s a little more fun than useful. But it’s nice when it works out.

Angie Alt: Yeah, right. So I grew up with a lot of hunting and fishing, but that’s not really a good option for me anymore. I live halfway between DC and Baltimore, basically, in a very, very urban/suburban area. And that’s not really a reality of my life right now.

What I do in terms of beef, pork, and lamb is get through a local farmer and my friend through a quarterly CSA. So we pay every 3 months for 20-22 pounds of meat for the following three months. And we just pick it up from the farm monthly. And it’s just kind of a selection of the three. It’s all 100% grass-fed, pasture raised, non-GMO. She kind of goes out of her way to adopt all the best practices for raising meat of this kind. So it’s really high quality.

In terms of fish, salmon especially, occasionally I get that through bulk shares with friends who are connected to Alaskan fishermen. So they have connections with them. And we buy a whole bunch at once. And then it gets shipped her after it’s been frozen on the boat. And we split it up and all share it.

But more often, I have to do it through the grocery store. Sometimes I can get really high quality, wild caught, on sale. And sometimes I use farmed salmon, you guys. Like we were talking about earlier. Eating seafood is better for me than eating none. So sometimes that’s what I do. I also, of course, use canned salmon, canned tuna, those kinds of things so I can get the best quality for a little cheaper.

And then, like Mickey said, chicken is very hard to...

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 Real Plans, because it’s a cool tool and I like playing around with it from time to time. But I usually keep it pretty simple.

Mickey Trescott: When I was first getting started, I was doing more of that meal planning every single meal, every single snack. Just making sure I had all my bases covered. Because of course when something is new, it’s a lot harder to trouble shoot and make decisions in the moment. When you have everything planned out, you just know what you’re going to eat and you know when to cook and it just works out. I would have loved to have Real Plans in the beginning. Because I definitely was meal planning to that level back then.

Angie, let’s talk a little bit about how meal planning helps people save money.

Angie Alt: Mickey just touched on a biggie, and I do the same thing that she does. You plan meals around that main protein, and select that based on your budget and sourcing. You’ll know that you have the protein that you need for the day. And we all know that protein is the most expensive item on the menu, so kind of starting there is really smart. I do exactly what Mickey does. I start with whatever is going to be the main protein for my meal.

And by doing the whole meal plan at once, I also help make sure that we rotate our proteins and get the different vitamins and minerals and nutrition that comes from those different sources. And not overeat one kind of protein over another. Especially poultry, with those omega-6 fats. So this way, I make sure that my family gets a little bit of grass-fed beef. A little bit of pastured pork. A little bit of chicken, but not too much. And a couple of servings of seafood a week.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah, you can also pick whatever protein is most affordable to you, and put it on your menu more often. I mean, if you leave it up to whim, and kind of what you feel like you want to eat in terms of flavor, you might be finding; “I want to make those scallops! Or I want to make that tri-tip!” or something that’s a little bit more expensive. You might be able to just be like; no, actually we’re going to have a lot of meat balls and meat loaf, and chicken thighs. That kind of thing.

Angie Alt: Mickey, there’s another biggie. Maybe you can dive into this one a little bit. Meal planning reduces waste.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah. So by planning out your meals, one of the best things is actually that you avoid having too much food. So when you make a meal plan, then you make a shopping list from your meal plan. And then you make what you intend to. You’re not going to end up with a bunch of extra food that you just bought on a whim, thinking, “How much do I need to buy for a weeks’ worth of groceries?”

How many of us have gone to the grocery store without a plan, put whatever looked good into our cart, and then maybe 5 or 6 days later realized half of our vegetables are kind of wilty and looking sad in the back of the fridge because we didn’t have a plan to eat them? And that is, for me at least, the biggest way to reduce waste in my kitchen. Is actually to have a plan for using all the produce, especially if I buy.

If I don’t have a plan, then I find that even when I am really excited about something, I’m notorious with salad greens for this. Especially if I ever buy boxed salad greens, which I only do rarely. Because I have this problem. What ends up happening is they go bad so fast that I just kind of forgot about them, and that’s not good. We want to save money by using everything we buy.

Angie Alt: Right, exactly. I have to say that even back before my AIP days, when I was still a menu planner even then. This was the biggest reason I did it. Because I was really trying to reduce waste in our family. So making a plan helped me stick with it.

I also find, and you kind of just touched on this Mickey, it reduces impulse buying. If you’re just kind of not sure what’s going to be on the table every night, and you just run out to the store and buy whatever is kind of convenient at that time, you’re going to end up having a very expensive grocery bill.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah! For sure. When I’m meal planning, I’m finding that I spend most of my time in the produce aisle, getting all those fresh fruits and vegetables. Which we all know a lot, depending on the variety, fruits and vegetables, especially organic, can be pretty expensive. But let me tell you, when you’re walking down the gluten free snack aisle, {laughs} that’s even more per ounce.

It’s tricky, because a lot of those products are in little bags. And it’s $3 or $4; and you kind of go; “Oh, 3-4 bucks isn’t really that much.” But when you think how many carrots can you get for $3 or $4, it really becomes obvious when you look at things that way. And when you fill your cart with things you actually have a plan for. And you know that you’re going to have enough food, you’re not going to be like; “I need those snacky things!” You’re going to be like; “Oh, I’m going to have leftover of this stew, or whatever I’m making.” So you’re going to be fine.

Angie Alt: Mm-hmm.

Mickey Trescott: Another benefit to meal planning is simply that it reduces eating out. Most of us know that eating outside the home; at a restaurant or even a fast food, fast-ish food. There’s even more clean fast food type places. Those places are going to be more expensive every single time the way that we eat on AIP and even with reintros than when compared to cooking and eating your food at home.

So having a plan for home cooked meals is definitely going to reduce how much you eat out. Which can get super expensive. Especially when you think of things like lunches at work, even. Brown-bagging it. I know a lot of people go out to lunch at their work, or near their work. And just simply bringing your own food, while that food, a lot of the cost that went into getting those ingredients, and sourcing them high quality might be higher than what you expect. That savings that you’re getting from actually not going to the restaurant around the corner or something is a big deal.

Angie Alt: Yeah. This is a really big deal. We noticed it a lot recently. A new restaurant opened up near us that’s sort of like a Mediterranean version of Chipotle. And it has some pretty clean options. And with a few reintroductions, I can eat there safely. And we kind of over did it over the Christmas holiday, eating out a few too many times. Going as a family and getting some Mediterranean bowls at this restaurant.

And it was delicious, but it was costing us between $50 and $60 for the whole family every time we went. And it’s like a Chipotle level restaurant. So it should be kind of inexpensive in comparison. But with $50 or $60, I can feed my family full meals for at least two dinners. And those dinners translate into leftovers that feed me and my husband during our work day. And it’s like; oh my gosh, I can’t believe I’m spending this much on one meal.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah. That planning is really, really important. And a lot of times, that perceived convenience doesn’t really outweigh some of the other benefits.

Angie Alt: Right. The other thing about meal planning is that if you do it in this really super savvy way, you can use your weekly sales ads. Or pay attention to what’s on sale in the store, and be really strategic and save actually a lot of money.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah, is this something that you’ve done in the past, Angie?

Angie Alt: Yes, it is. This is why I brought up this point. Even before I went AIP, when I would meal plan, what I would do was sit down with my local grocery stores weekly sales ad. I would look at the different vegetables and fruits that were going to be on sale that week. And the different meats. And I would plan my meals to incorporate those sale items. And it made a big difference in our grocery budget.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah, I bet. I, in all honesty, have not gone here. But I see the ads, and actually how I use them is I’ll stock up on bulk things. Because I’m way more of a bulk opportunist. So if I see, for instance, whole chickens on sale at Whole Foods, I will go home with 10 or 15 of them and throw them in the freezer. {laughs}

Angie Alt: Right. That’s another way you can use those sales ads really smartly. If you’ve got the freezer space to do this. Or a larger family that might go through those bulk items. That’s really smart.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah, and I’d say, too, for people that maybe don’t have a deep freezer that this strategy of going week by week, and seeing what the store has on sale is actually more useful to you. Maybe you live in an apartment in New York City, and you don’t have a deep freezer. That’s kind of part of why we’re giving you guys all these options, because we realize that everyone’s lives are a lot different. And what’s going to work for you is maybe not going to work for someone else.

Angie Alt: Ok, so a final point about meal planning and how it can save you. It reduced the amount of trips you have to make to the store, which equals fuel savings, which is...

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 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...

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.

Let’s take a look at some numbers. We know the AIP movement is large and continues to grow, but this becomes more clear as we look at the stats. Here is some information we’ve gleaned from our website and social media channels that helps depict the size of our movement:

This year, the AIP community got a huge piece of validating news in the results of the first-ever medical study of the diet for those with IBD (inflammatory bowel disease). While tens of thousands of us already knew that the protocol works, having the data legitimize the efforts we’d been putting in for years and helped us open new conversations with healthcare teams. Even though the study was restricted to those with IBD, our anecdotal experience as a community says that we are likely to find similar results with other autoimmune disease types if we are lucky enough to see future studies. Here is a summary of the study results:

The AIP community showed their collective creative and fundraising capacity through a successful launch of The Complete AIP Resource Library in August and November.

This year Mickey, Angie and Sarah graduated the first 100 AIP Certified Coaches. In 2016, the three of us recognized the need to train others in this approach and started developing a certification program for those in both the natural and conventional health care systems. This year we enrolled, taught, and graduated our very first class!

This year the SAD to AIP in SIX program graduates neared the 2,000-member mark. In addition to being successfully used in the first medical study to evaluate the effectiveness of AIP, it has become recognized as the most affordable, gentle, and sustainable way to transition to the protocol and achieve wellness.

Phew! No wonder we are a little tired this season ;).

If you are just joining our movement now, it might not be readily apparent how much has changed. Here are some of the biggest things we notice:

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:

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 diagnosed with Hashimoto’s until I was 28. And this is kind of insane, but I actually had visited over 40 doctors before I received a diagnosis.

Angie Alt: I actually don’t think that’s insane. I totally hear you brother! {laughs} I’ve been there too.

Ryan: Yeah.

Angie Alt: But yeah, it feels insane in comparison to a lot of other people. But you’re just searching and searching. Do you think that in part being a male was a barrier to getting a Hashi’s diagnosis, because it’s so commonly women?

Ryan: Absolutely. I think doctors just didn’t think to check with the sort of constellation of symptoms that I was experiencing. Although, those are more commonly associated with women, I think I got overlooked by the traditional medical system. And no one had ever thought to look for those kinds of markers for the thyroid. Because it’s, what, 8 times, is that correct? About 8 times more likely in women than in men?

Angie Alt: Boy, I don’t know the exact percentages. But yes, it’s much, much more common in women. But it does happen. I know of a lot of other men actually out there in our community, too, dealing with Hashi’s. It’s too bad that it’s not on more doctor’s radars.

Ryan: it also makes me wonder how many men are just not seeking the kind of medical help or advice. I suspect that maybe they wouldn’t be as inclined to visit the doctor if they were experiencing the same symptoms that a woman would be.

Angie Alt: Right. Yeah.

Ryan: So there might be; in other words, there might be a little bit of male pride kind of issue going on there.

Angie Alt: Yeah, maybe some male pride. And then the combination of the doctor’s kind of overlooking it. And it makes it tough for somebody like you to get a diagnosis. When you got the diagnosis, how did you handle it?

Ryan: When I got the diagnosis, I was sort of a combination of scared and confused. And also really thrilled.

Angie Alt: Yeah.

Ryan: Like, this weight had been lifted off of my shoulders. Like, I didn’t even really know what the thyroid was or what it’s function was. But I was also just really extremely excited to have a diagnosis, and to know that I wasn’t crazy and that this wasn’t all in my head. I now had something concrete to work on.

Angie Alt: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I totally relate to that feeling. For me, I kind of relate it; it was sort of like naming my enemy. And now I could actually fight effectively. Before that, I had no idea. It was kind of like being in the dark and sort of hoping that I could figure it out. So I really relate to that. How did your friends and family handle your diagnosis?

Ryan: Well, I think everyone was just relieved to see me get better. I remember a good friend of mine seeing me only a week after I had been on Synthroid. And he said, “What did you do with Ryan?”

Angie Alt: {laughs}

Ryan: Because I just had this pep in my step all of a sudden. And my face physically looked different. I lost this sort of puffiness in my face. And my voice changed. It was kind of freaky. So people kind of looked at me funny at first. But I think everyone was relieved. Everyone kind of knew something was up, but nobody really knew what it was.

Angie Alt: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I can totally understand that. Do you think that; this is a pretty common experience, but not everyone shares it in the community. Do you think that some of your friends and family kind of doubted that there was something really there? Did you ever feel like you were kind of desperately trying to make people believe that something really was wrong?

Ryan: Yeah, 100%. And I won’t name names.

Angie Alt: Yeah, I get it. {laughs}

Ryan: But I think a lot of my friends and family thought I was a little bit of a hypochondriac, that it was in my head. Or some of the things that I had expressed to them that I was going through, I think they maybe overlooked, or had just kind of passed off as, oh that’s normal. You’re getting older. And it’s like, but wait a minute! I’m in my early or mid-20s. I shouldn’t be sleeping 12 hours a day, I shouldn’t be this depressed. I shouldn’t be this fatigued all the time. So it was really hard for that reason. I feel like I had to sort of internalize it. And kind of internalize the suffering, to an extent. In the sort of darkest hour, I remember feeling like I thought I was dying, and had no idea what was going on. And then I would beat myself up. Like, “Oh, you’re being so dramatic. You’re not dying.” And you know, I maybe wasn’t that far from it. Because when I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s, my TSH was above 150.

Angie Alt: Wow.

Ryan: And for those of you who don’t know, optimal thyroid range is maybe between 0.5 and 1.5. So my TSH was actually above the detectible lab limit. So it was somewhere above 150; the lab couldn’t even detect it that high.

Angie Alt: Wow.

Ryan: But I remember my doctor saying, “I don’t even know how you were able to get up in the morning,” for years, potentially, that I was dealing with this without having any diagnosis.

Angie Alt: Right. So you’re at the extreme end of experiencing, to that point, this undiagnosed autoimmune disease. And you’re unable to find answers. You’re seeing upwards of 40 doctors at this point trying to get those answers. And the people around you are beginning to doubt the validity of the problem. And yeah, you’re right. Of course you’re going to internalize all that. So then getting a diagnosis, in some ways, I think sometimes, maybe outside of our autoimmune community it can sound like we’re a little kooky, being a little thrilled or relieved to be given a diagnosis of having a chronic illness. {laughs}

Ryan: Yeah.

Angie Alt: But it’s actually really validating when you’re in that terrible spot for so many years.

Ryan: Yeah. It’s incredibly validating. Because you realize that you didn’t have to beat yourself up so much over your diagnosis, you know. And I think sometimes even people get into the more psychospiritual aspect of their condition. And think, maybe it’s karma. Maybe I deserve this for some reason. I think you can get kind of deep into blaming yourself for your illness. And once you realize that it has a physiological root to it, I think that’s incredibly relieving. Because you can kind off cast aside that narrative that it’s your fault.

Angie Alt: Mm-hmm. Right. So, how long after receiving the Hashi’s diagnosis did you start to dive in and learn about autoimmune disease itself, and start to kind of understand that process? Were you somebody who really wanted to kind of gather as much knowledge as you could, or did you feel a little fearful or tentative about getting some of that information?

Ryan: It was a pretty gradual process. I would say the first 9 months I really didn’t understand much about what was going on, and I just sort of trusted the advice of my endocrinologist at the time. Which was just to take the Synthroid, there’s nothing you can do about it. And I kind of left it at that.

Then, like many people experienced, the Synthroid only had a positive effect for so long. And a lot of my symptoms started popping up again. And that’s really when I started taking things into my own hands. Because I started to question. Ok, so my thyroid is malfunctioning. I get that. I get that my immune system is attacking my thyroid. But I wanted to know why, you know? I’ve never been the type of person to just kind of lie over and accept something. And that’s when I started to really kind of try to reverse engineer what was going on, and to do my own research and become my own health advocate. And at that point, I had started to do some internet research, and I came across Izabella Wentz’ book, which for many people is the thyroid/Hashimoto’s bible.

Angie Alt: Right.

Ryan: And you know, that was the first thing I had read that had opened me up to what functional medicine is, and what it could offer. And this whole concept of looking for root causes, and looking for nutrient deficiencies, and hormone imbalances, and gut infections, and even things like metal toxicity. All these things were just not on my radar until I had discovered her book. So that was really a game-changer for me. Because it provided a road map to how to manage the condition. And in some cases, people are even able to successfully put it into remission through implementing some of these strategies.

So shortly after discovering her book, I came across Mickey’s website. Which, at the time, had her Autoimmune Paleo Cookbook, which was just an eBook at the time. So this was kind of really at the beginning stages of things.

Angie Alt: That was back in the way back. {laughs}

Ryan: Way back, yeah. And I can’t even say I remember how I found her website. But I did somehow. And I really resonated with her story, because I felt like we had a lot in common in the sense that we both had Hashimoto’s, we were both former vegans, we both had gluten intolerance, we both had an MTHFR mutation, all these different things. And just through that kind of connection, even though I hadn’t met her yet, it had really led me to want to find out more about, what’s the whole autoimmune paleo thing? That’s when I kind of dipped my toes into making dietary and lifestyle changes.

Angie Alt: Ok. So it sounds like kind of your first initial reaction was to kind of go with the conventional approach, and you gave yourself a little bit of time to, at least let the hormone...