Marie-Noelle Marquis (00:07):
Welcome to the AIP Summit Podcast, your go-to resource for taking control of your autoimmune health, presented by AIP Certified Coaches. Hi, I'm Marie-Noelle Marquis.
Jaime Hartman (00:17):
And I'm Jaime Hartman. And we're here to equip you with the tools knowledge and support you need to effectively use the autoimmune protocol.
Marie-Noelle Marquis (00:25):
And today we are going back to the basics with an episode on getting ready to start and succeed with AIP.
Jaime Hartman (00:39):
Today we are bringing you the audio from another session that was presented at the sixth Annual AIP Summit, which was held live in January, 2025. And the speaker you'll be hearing from this time is me.
Marie-Noelle Marquis (00:52):
I am really, really glad that we're sharing this particular session with our podcast listeners, especially for the people listening who are newly diagnosed with an autoimmune disease or who are just thinking about trying the autoimmune protocol. I personally truly wish that I had something like this when I was starting out.
Jaime Hartman (01:09):
Yeah, exactly. I think that's what drives a lot of the things that you and I and many of our fellow AIP Certified Coaches do. We want to help people avoid the mistakes that we made at the beginning out of our own ignorance. So if you are a regular listener of our podcast and not a beginner yourself, you might still find this information, a useful refresher reminder of the basics, or you might want to share this episode with someone you know who could benefit from it.
Marie-Noelle Marquis (01:38):
And as Jaime mentioned, this is the audio from a session that was presented at the six Annual AIP Summit. If you want the full experience of her presentation, including the slides and the q and as that followed it, you can find it on our archives, which all members of the AIP Summit community have unlimited access to. There will be a link in the show notes so you can learn more about how to become a member.
Jaime Hartman (02:01):
That's right, and this episode is going to come out on September 1st, 2025, so if you are listening to it in real time, you should know that this month we are having our final free encore rebroadcast of the whole sixth annual AIP Summit starting on September 9th, and I'll be sure to put a really prominent link in the show notes for that as well.
Marie-Noelle Marquis (02:24):
Awesome. Now let's listen to your presentation.
Jaime Hartman (02:32):
Welcome again. This is the sixth annual AIP Summit. It's 2025 and we are all AIP Certified Coaches who are presenting. In case you didn't know what that means, we'll talk a little bit more about that. The content that I present today in this session and throughout the week, of course, is for informational purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Now the title of this presentation, this session today is Getting Ready for AIP or a Session for Beginners. And so I'm welcoming everybody who is a true beginner here, a beginner at heart, anybody who wants a refresher, this should be a good starting point for you to learn about or relearn or correct your knowledge of any of these basics for getting started with AIP or getting ready to get started for AIP.
(03:32):
Here is a little bit about me, kind of my abbreviated resume here, if you will. My name is Jaime Hartman, as I've said multiple times now, and you can see that on the screen. My education and my professional background, if you skim through this, you notice that I started out in the field of education. I have a master's degree in educational psychology. I taught high school English for nine years and then I worked in the publishing industry, specifically textbooks. And then I also have some postgraduate education in instructional design and in nutrition and a 200 hour yoga teacher training program. That is something that is a deeply held part of me inside of what I do. And I teach one yoga class a week, so that's not a huge part of what I do externally, but internally it definitely is probably most significantly to what we're talking about today.
(04:25):
I am a national board certified health and wellness coach. Now my timeline of how these things happen professionally for me, you can see I started out in the classroom, then worked in the publishing industry. That was a really intense corporate job while I was working in the publishing industry is when I personally found that AIP might be helpful for me. And I started a blog at that point purely just as a personal hobby. I was creating recipes and I wanted more inspiration. I wanted to keep myself motivated to continue and have a creative outlet. And so I started the blog, which I called Gutsy By Nature. I'll tell you why in a moment about the name there with no intention for it to be anything more. But through that blog I met people like Mickey Trescott and many others who were already not only using AIP for themselves but had changed their careers to help other people do the same.
(05:25):
So during this time period, I got some more training and in 2017, I transitioned out of my corporate job to become an AIP Certified Coach and a nutritional therapist. The National Board Health Coaching came a little bit later. In 2020, I hosted the first AIP Summit and in 2023 I launched my signature program Ready Set AIP, which if you're interested in learning more about, I'll give you some more details there. It's easily Googleable and you can use that QR code on the screen if you needed it, and I'll share information about that later as well. Okay, now let me tell you my personal story. That's my resume, my professional story. Let me tell you my personal story, pictures on the screen in case there's anybody who can't see them. There is a picture there of me in 1995, that's my birthday, so I could tell you exactly what day that is or right around there.
(06:17):
I'm not sure if it was on my birthday, but we're celebrating my birthday there. I'm turning 20 and I'm very sick. I don't know if you can tell by the picture I was really working hard to hide that big baggy shirt. Can't tell that I'm very malnourished, skin and bones hair's falling out, but I've got a nice cute cut with the bangs and tied back. Sunglasses are hiding the fact that I'm very bags under my eyes and the happy smile that I plastered on my face. It was around this time that I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease. I don't remember honestly if it was before or after my birthday, but it was that summer for sure. And honestly, at the time that I was diagnosed, I was just really, really relieved to have a name for what was happening to me. I did not then have any expectation that this was something I was going to live with forever.
(07:11):
I don't think so when I got told there's a condition and there are medications, I was just sort of ready to take the medications and fix things, carry on, get back to my life as a college student and have fun. And that did help. Taking the medications did help. I'm not going to tell you it didn't, but I was suffering quite a bit. And again, putting on a good face, my coping strategy for that whole first decade was to just try to avoid it compartmentalize. Now, the other picture on the screen is one of the very few pictures from this timeframe in my life. This is 2007. Pretty sure the only reason we took this picture was because that was the first time the dog and the cat got on the bed at the same time. And I'm in the bed because I spent a lot of time in the bed.
(07:58):
I was very, very sick in 2007. I had needed surgery. I had been developing scar tissue from Crohn's disease. That's a common complication of Crohn's disease when it's not well managed. And the strictures that I had developed were so intense that it was about to cause bowel obstructions. So they wanted to have surgery. They wanted me to have surgery so that we could prevent that. Unfortunately, I had some complications in the healing after the surgery and ended up needing to have a total of seven surgeries between 2007 and 2009. There were periods of that time when I was on disability, when I was on total bowel rest, which means I was eating nothing by mouth. I was getting all of my nutrition through IVs. And part of the reason I think now that that was such a difficult experience for me, why that surgery that was done to prevent a bowel obstruction didn't just kind of happen and I healed from it is partly because I had been so nutritionally depleted that you look at that picture of me in 1995, I was managing the symptoms, I was hiding the symptoms, but I really wasn't getting good nutrition.
(09:08):
And so when I went into surgery in 2007, I might've looked relatively healthy on the surface. I was young and didn't have any other complications, but I was really depleted and I did not heal well. So that's where I was in 2007. And these pictures, by the way, are from my website. You may have seen these before if you've been there in 2013. As I mentioned in my resume slide, I started Gutsy By Nature. I filed for the trademark of it. I was really excited. We took a picture of me with that and that was really a big turning point for me because the reason I started that blog is because I was starting to dabble in nutrition for myself and it was helping. And then that picture on the right hand side says today, it's actually a couple of years ago, I think we still look pretty much the same.
(09:53):
I probably have some more wrinkles. The dog definitely has some more gray hair, but that's still us and that's me showing that I have a very vibrant and active life now. And in fact, I achieved a goal of mine last September, September 15th, 2024 to be exact in that I ran and completed. I trained for, that was the first part of the goal. I trained for, started and completed a half marathon, and it happened to be the DC half marathon. I live in the Washington DC area. My husband took this picture. I'm really excited to see him. And the dog as I was rounding around, we're about two, I think two miles from the finish and we're coming around the backside of the Lincoln Memorial. So if you're familiar with DC you know where that is. And so I'm telling you that not because I want to brag, although it's kind of nice to brag about that, but because I want you to understand where I've been and where I am and that I also understand that this is a constant balancing act.
(10:56):
I actually started training for that half marathon the year prior. I was going to do it in 2023, and I had to abandon those plans when I actually had a flare of my Crohn's disease and recognized that I couldn't just keep pushing through. Something had to give. And so I am also an example of how this isn't ongoing process. You don't do AIP and then you're fixed just like I didn't take the medication and then I was fixed. But I have to constantly be adjusting and maintaining maintenance is a huge part of this. Okay, so that's me. Now let's talk about what AIP is, the letters AIP. I'm going to really just drill down to the basics here that stands for, I know it's weird, it's not three words, but two words, autoimmune protocol. The P is protocol. And what is a protocol? Well, the way we use it, you could look that up in the dictionary and see there's a lot of different ways to define it, but the way that we use it is as a detailed plan of treatment with multiple components.
(12:06):
That multiple components is a key part here. People hear AIP and they automatically think diet. That's oftentimes how it's introduced to people, but it is more than that. The diet is one component. And then just in case you don't know what the word autoimmune refers to, what's meant by that is that an autoimmune disease is what happens when the body's immune system mistakes normal cells for foreign cells. So I won't get into the immunology here of all of that, but that's the essence of autoimmune. Autoimmune. Your immune system is trying to do its job, it's surveilling, it's looking for the foreign cells that it needs to eradicate, neutralize, and it makes mistakes. That's essentially it. Some of the common autoimmune diseases I have listed here, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis, lupus, the thyroid diseases which include Graves disease and Hashimoto's thyroiditis type one diabetes, celiac disease, and then what I have, the inflammatory bowel diseases including Crohn's disease, my specific diagnosis and ulcerative colitis.
(13:19):
And there are others. These are just kind of the most common ones that we have. And I'm looking at the poll right now to see that we've got quite a few of these represented in the people that are attending live. So you already know this, but for anybody who doesn't, thought it would be good to put that up there. And then of course there are also, there's suspected autoimmune diseases too. There are conditions that are not officially classified as autoimmune diseases just because there's more about the human body that this medical establishment does not know than they know and they realize that. And so there are still some conditions that have an unknown origin that are likely in this autoimmune family. So you may have a condition not listed here that may not even be officially an autoimmune disease that could still be helped by using AIP.
(14:12):
Now let's talk about the components since we talked about how a protocol has multiple components, what are the components of our protocol of the AIP? First one at the very top of the list is nutrient sufficiency. So that might surprise you that I didn't start with the word elimination because truly what you eat, what you do eat, that sufficiency of your diet in terms of your nutrient status is going to be the difference between whether this really works for you or it doesn't work for you. And when I say nutrient sufficiency, I'm talking about both macronutrients and micronutrients. I won't get into what those all are today and the definitions of them, but I want you to understand that we look for people when they start AIP to have a balanced diet and we don't have a prescription for what your macronutrient ratios should be because that's going to depend on what your unique needs are.
(15:09):
But generally speaking, you're going to be eating protein, you're going to be eating carbohydrates, and you're going to be eating fats, and then you're going to look at your micronutrient status as well, but you don't have to count all those things because by simply eating the way that we're going to talk about it will happen naturally. So second part, second component is of course the fact that this is an elimination and a reintroduction diet followed by maintenance. So if you look at the words I have on the screen so far here, notice that there's a lot of pieces to this diet element of it, nutrient sufficiency. You do have an elimination part and a reintroduction part, and it's followed by maintenance. So of all those words, elimination is only one of them because that's only one piece. So many people start AIP or Google it or find information about it, and it's just presented as an elimination diet, and that's only one little part. The diet is only one part of the protocol and elimination is only one part of the diet.
(16:13):
Also important to know that other components of AIP are your lifestyle mediators of healing, we call them. Some people will refer to them as the pillars of AIP or the areas of AIP. It doesn't matter what language you use. I know pillars is becoming really popular and I like that especially because it implies that they're holding things up. But there are a total of five lifestyle mediators of healing. One is sleep. We've had sessions already this week on sleep and why that's so important and how to address it. Another is stress or stress management. I think anybody with an autoimmune disease that is characterized by having periods of flare and periods of improvement or even remission can say that there are a lot of times in their life they look back and a stressful time period or a stressful experience seemed to precede a flare.
(17:05):
So that's a known thing and your doctors know that too if you ask them about it. So what do you do? Avoid all stress in your life. We can't make a stress-free life, and I would argue you don't really want to either. A stress-free life would probably not be a joyful life because with the things that give us the most joy, we also get oftentimes a lot of stress at other periods in it. So our goal in talking about AIP and the component of AIP that has to do with stress. We're looking at making you more resilient to stress, giving you the tools that help you get through those stressful periods, but also recognizing that there will be times when stress does impact you and the other components can help get you through and boost you up. I shared that picture of me running that half marathon a few moments ago, and I told you that I'd tried to do it the year before and had to withdraw and defer to the next year.
(18:10):
That had a lot of things were happening in my life, but one of them was I'd had a family emergency. Somebody really dear to me had a very life-threatening experience and it caused us a great deal of stress. And then that no surprise, my disease flared back up and I had to scale back the next point, which is a good one for me to lead into, which is that the third lifestyle media of healing we talk about is movement, exercise, but movement really is the right word and we've got a few sessions talking about fitness and recovery and doing yoga and how do you incorporate this in the right balance in your life because too much movement like training for a half marathon when you're not doing very well with other areas, that's no good, but also being completely sedentary is not going to help you health either.
(19:02):
Then there is the component or the lifestyle mediator of just being connected to nature. We've talked about that as well in sessions, talking about how do you help with your sleep by getting out in nature that helps with stress, these all work together and then connection to others. And it is my sincere hope that this AIP Summit helps you have at least some sense of a community of folks out there who you can be connected to virtually if not in your real life, who understand and who are going through AIP as you are. But it's also important to maintain the connections you have to people who don't get it. It's tempting when you do an elimination diet to withdraw from social settings because it's hard to explain it. So many things center around food, nobody really wants to be in the position where you have to order the special meal or say you can't have something someone prepared.
(19:54):
But I would always encourage people to try to work through that because those connections to other people are going to help you heal as well. Now, this is also an important point here. I mean these are all important, but this one is super important. A component of AIP is medical treatment as needed for specific conditions as needed for specific conditions and specific people. But it's not at all ever even implied or suggested or should not be that the goal of AIP would be to not do medical treatment or that you can't do medical treatment, you have to get off medications or there are even any medications you shouldn't take. That's a critical component of it for many of us, me included. I tried doing it without medication when I, in 2013 when I found it and was doing really well and I see that picture of me with my Gutsy By Nature trademark.
(20:53):
I went through a period where I thought, oh, maybe I don't need my medicines anymore. No, no, no, I definitely still need medical care and that medical care might just be for you monitoring labs and other tests. Perhaps it is just that. Then you don't actually need to take medication. But if you have a diagnosis of an autoimmune disease, you definitely need to continue to stay in contact with a doctor who can monitor you. Super, super important. It might include prescribed medication. That's what it is for me. It might include physical therapy. I've been through physical therapy a couple times. Crohn's disease is a gut condition, but it has affected my joints. I've had enteropathic arthritis that was pretty crippling at various points. And I've also had some other issues where it may not directly be autoimmune related, but physical therapy has been helpful. And in my case, your medical treatment might even include surgery.
(21:45):
It might also be taking supplements as guided by a qualified practitioner, but our blanket explanation of AIP that you'll get from an AIP Certified Coach, there's no one size fits all approach for supplements. So please don't ever take a list of what other people are taking and think, oh, I should take those supplements too because that isn't how our protocol works. If you need supplements, you would take them. For example, you might need to take some supplemental nutrients. I have my history of bowel surgery means that I don't absorb certain things very well, even though my diet's really good, I need to take some supplements to compensate for those particular specific things. And then there may be other supplements that you're taking. But I always recommend when I'm working with people and they ask them to tell me what supplements they're taking, I'm always going to ask them, were these prescribed for you by a doctor or are you just taking 'em because you heard they're good for you to take?
(22:50):
And when people say, I just heard they're good for me to take, my next question is, are they helping you? And if they can't say yes, I'm really confident that they are, I'm really sure they are helping me. My suggestion, I can't prescribe anything. But my suggestion would be that they consider taking a break from them while we do the elimination and reintroduction process because maybe they don't need those supplements. Maybe those supplements are even having an effect that isn't helpful for them. But supplements can be a piece. They don't have to be a piece, they might not be a piece. Very, very individualized. Your medical treatment might also include alternative or complimentary care. So that can also be a part of this. And that might mean acupuncture. That might mean having chiropractic adjustments. That might mean working with some kind of a naturopath or holistic provider in conjunction with if they aren't qualified to monitor your labs in conjunction with someone who can.
(23:54):
So my ideal situation for people who are working with a holistic or a naturopathic doctor is if that person is operating in a state in a location where they have prescribing capabilities and can order tests, that might be your only person and that might be perfect for you. But if not, then you still need a specialist on your team. Maybe you only see them once a year, but you need to know that they're there because you want to have that relationship with somebody in case they're needed and you want them to be monitoring you so you know how to adjust things. Okay, my soapbox on that. I'll get off of it now. Alright, let's talk about the foods that you include in the diet element of AIP since that's probably where people have the most questions. And then we'll talk about the foods that you eliminate when you're in the elimination phase.
(24:50):
So what you see listed here are foods you would include when you're starting, when you're doing reintroductions, when you're in maintenance, this is like the basis of what you eat. So I didn't put these in. These are not an order of importance with one exception I put the vegetables at the top of the list. They really are non-negotiable. They are the foundation of your plate. And the rule of thumb that I give to my clients when they're just getting started out and they're thinking about how much of whatever do I need to eat, think about an AIP square meal like this. Look at your plate. Imagine it's your plate. Maybe it's even your breakfast plate. This will blow people's mind but have on it green vegetables and do that with every meal. And those green vegetables, that might be something raw, it might be a salad, it might be something cooked.
(25:42):
It might be broccoli, it might be whatever green vegetable you like. Rotating them in variety is good, but that should repeat three times a day. And if you have about a cup of that each time, ballpark serving. So you don't need to worry about being exact there. You're going to hit the targets that you need for those micronutrients that we talked about in nutrient sufficiency and then also have on that plate colorful vegetable of some kind or multiples. So maybe you imagine your plate, you've got your green, you got your or broccoli, and then something colorful that might be sweet potatoes. That's really simple. That's pretty straightforward. Most people eat those foods anyway. Don't repeat that exact same formula at every single meal because again, we're looking for variety, but that should be the idea there. Also, I really encourage fruit. This might surprise you because some people think you have to eat fruit in moderation or limit your fruit, and I don't subscribe to that at all.
(26:39):
Of course, there are exceptions if people have blood sugar regulation issues and there are ways that we can talk about eating fruit in a way that's going to help you keep your blood sugar stable. But for the most part, I do encourage people to eat berries on a regular basis. They're fantastic full of polyphenols, citrus fruits, other fruits that you like, all kinds there, but that's going to not replace your vegetables. I think that's how we find the balance. If we're eating our vegetables, we're getting those six or more cups approximately per day of vegetables, then we can add fruit there and we aren't going to overdo the fruit because we're just going to get full, right? You are also going to eat protein sources, meat, fish, and seafood. There is a possible way you can do AIP as a vegetarian, but I hesitate to encourage that to people who are just starting out.
(27:32):
If you do want to do it as a vegetarian, you don't want to eat meat. If you will eat fish and seafood, if you want to do a pescatarian approach, that's great, but you have to be careful about that. Talk more about that as well. Healthy fats. Bone broth has great healing power. You don't need to find a specific formula for making your bone broth. You can make it however it tastes good for you or you can buy it. Mushrooms. I encourage my clients to eat mushrooms three times a week or more. So don't just lump those in with the vegetables, but think about them as an add-on there. They have a ton of nutritional benefit. Fermented foods a little bit can go a long way. You can eat just like a forkful a couple times a day or a couple times a week, organ meats and other what's called al.
(28:25):
You're going to get some extra nutrients in those. And then there are some starred things here because these are ones that if you are familiar with AIP from before 2023 or you've heard about this idea of core AIP or modified AIP, these are some differences here. But I recommend modified AIP as a starting place for the vast majority of people. So when I'm telling people what I think they should be eating, I'm going to include legumes, rice, and pseudo grains and seeds. Those are the things that the original protocol that I started out with and that so many other people who have been through this AIP process started with, they avoided those foods, but we now have a better understanding of how restrictive we really need to start out with. And so for the vast majority of people, including legumes, especially legumes, if you are thinking you want to eat semi or completely vegetarian, legumes are going to help you.
(29:22):
So legumes are pulses, so those are going to be beans. Those are going to help you make up the protein deficit that would be there if you didn't otherwise eat meat. Alright? And then herbs and most spices because we want our food to be flavorful, we want it to have that benefit. Now here are the foods that you avoid for at least 30 days. Now if you are taking some notes, that's fine. You don't need to worry about writing all these down. If you're a member of the community, the AIP Summit community, we've got a food list that you can download in the download section, in the resources section in the community. You could also go to my website, ReadySet AIP. I've got a free startup guide there. You can go to mickey trescott website, autoimmune wellness.com. You can get these lists there. Those are the sources where you can trust the list.
(30:11):
So there's some not great information out there. So if it's from one of us, you can count on it being accurate. But again, so you don't need to write all this down, but I wanted to share it on a screen to talk about. So these are the foods that you avoid for at least 30 days. This is the first thing that is important to make sure I'm really crystal clear on. This is not a list of bad foods to avoid forever. This is your starting point. These are the foods to avoid for a minimum of 30 days, knowing that there will be the chance later on to test these individually and reintroduce them. But these are the big categories. So one is what's called cereal grains. So grains. Now I've starred here the grains that are probably for most people the most important to be aware of, and that is the ones that contain gluten.
(31:08):
So most people come to AIP with already some familiarity of the idea of a gluten-free diet. You can't really avoid knowing about gluten these days. Grocery stores thankfully have big gluten-free sections, but just being gluten-free is not being AIP. Gluten-free is not grain-free either because in addition to the starred things that contain gluten, there are some other grains that don't contain gluten, but we're still going to avoid in the elimination phase. And then see how you do if you choose to reintroduce them. So wheat, barley, rye, pharaoh spelt, and there are others that contain gluten by the way. Those are just the ones that kind of come up the most that I see that people need to know about. If you see anything called an ancient grain, assume it's a true grain and you need to stay away from it. That's kind of a catchall term.
(31:55):
It's not really well defined, but I put that on there. Sorghum, millet corn, which is also known as maize and oats and there are others, but these are the big ones that I know most people see. You're going to avoid dairy for at least 30 days, milk, cheese, cream, et cetera, and all forms of all animals. So sometimes people will ask, well, can I have goat's milk, sheep's milk, buffalo milk? For the purposes of your elimination, you're going to cut all forms out. Soy is a common allergen. That's why we're avoiding that. You might reintroduce it. I've reintroduced soy happily. It works very well for me. So don't start thinking these are bad foods that nobody's going to ever reintroduce because it's just a matter of eliminating, seeing how do and then seeing if you can reintroduce them nuts, including peanuts. So I know people will quibble about peanuts. They're not really nuts, but for our purposes we're going to call them nuts and we're going to avoid all of them. Again, common allergens. Eggs are also a common allergen in a common food sensitivity that people don't know about. They don't recognize they're having a reaction to eggs until they cut them out. They can be a common one for people with autoimmune disease. And so eggs are on that list. Now, what's left here that I haven't talked about yet?
(33:16):
The kind of tricky ones, right? So alcohol, you're going to for at least 30 days avoid alcohol. And the reason for that is not because we're trying to be a puritan about alcohol, you might decide that you want to continue to avoid alcohol for life after the experience of not having any, if you feel better, alcohol has the effect of opening up the tight junctions in your gut. We talk about leaky gut and so consuming alcohol can make it so that you might not be able to eat certain foods that you would otherwise be able to eat food if you didn't have the alcohol at the same time. So we're going to say you should avoid alcohol for 30 days and then it's a case by case personal basis, whether you decide to reintroduce it in moderate amounts or not. Refined sugar is also a tricky thing because it's not necessarily the sugar that's a problem really, if you were to do your AIP elimination and eat, say, dried cranberries that had some sugar sweetener to make them a little bit more palatable.
(34:19):
Have you deviated from AIP? Technically, yes, but that refined sugar, that's part of that sweetening process is not really having an autoimmune type reaction or potential autoimmune type reaction in your body. It's not the same as if you are sensitive to a dairy product and you eat that accidentally. We want to do our best to avoid sugar, and we definitely want to eat nutrient dense foods which sugar, refined sugar is not. So that's one reason there, but you don't have to feel like if you had a little bit of something with some sweetener that it's all done. That's not the most important part of this. And I'll talk more about that on a later slide. Slide nightshades, I'm going to talk about that also a little bit later on a later slide. But that's a big area that's really the unique part of AIP. So if you were to do an elimination diet where you're just avoiding all the common allergens and maybe going grain free, maybe you do like a paleo kind of diet, all of this is encompassed in that.
(35:30):
And then nighsthades are the special thing because that's the one family of foods that we seem to be learning about more and more has as an interaction with the immune system. So you avoid all of those for least 30 days and then see how you do with reintroductions. And then finally, this last category of processed food additives. Basically this just boils down to we're trying to eat whole foods. So it's not that any one of these is the deal breaker, but that anything that contains them is not going to be doing you any favors and we're trying to eat the most nutrient sufficient and most nutrient dense as well foods that we can and avoid things that might be potential gut irritants, potential irritants and triggers in your immune system. So one category that is tricky but is really I think quite important in my personal experience and with my clients is the emulsifiers that are added to packaged foods in a lot of cases.
(36:30):
So that's going to be the gums, but also there are other emulsifiers, less a thin ragin. Just avoiding all of those for at least 30 days and perhaps longer if you realize they really have impacted you, is going to make a huge difference in how your gut functions. For a lot of people, some people tolerate them fine, but for the most part we want to try to avoid those. Anytime you see flavors, natural flavors or artificial flavors, we don't really know what that means. So we need to stay away from that because we're trying to do this elimination diet, and so we need to make sure that we are not accidentally consuming something that we should be avoiding. So ingredient labels that say flavors, that's not for you. Same thing with colors. We don't really know what that is. And then the whole category of non-nutritive sweeteners, which I'll talk more about in a moment.
(37:22):
Okay, I feel like I talked about this a lot, but I think that's really important. Now I'm at the point now where I can say if you have questions about any of this, those of you who are watching live, if you want to put them into the q and a, I think I'll have some time to see if we can answer some of those questions, but I'm going to clarify a few more points here. So it could be that I'll answer your question anyway. I want to talk about some of the tricky categories. First of all, there's this whole concept of a pseudo grain, and this is one of these things that we've had to really start talking about more now because of modified AIP. Before we made updates and had this idea of a modified AIP, we just said, no grains, no pseudo grains, just avoid all of them and have realized over time that that's probably not, and one, it's not necessary for healing and it might even be counterproductive.
(38:09):
So I now personally encourage people to consume what's called pseudo grains, and then nightshades are tricky because sometimes it's hard to know what a nightshade is. So I want to talk about each of those. First of all, on this slide here for grains trying to keep things really clear, the red X is not. Again, to imply these are bad foods, just so it's really, really clear that the red X means we're not eating that during the elimination phase. The green CH means you are eating it during the elimination phase. So cereal, grains, cereals are grasses in the, I don't know how to say that in Latin family that produce edible grains, and this is the same list you saw in the previous slide and the same starred ones with our gluten containing wheat, barley, rye, Pharaoh spelled ancient grains, sorghum, millet corn or maize and oats.
(39:03):
And the exception though is that you can have rice. So I'll let you in on a little bitty secret here. When we were working on our update to come up with the modified AIP list, there was some conversation about whether we really needed to have people be grain-free, definitely gluten-free. We knew that you need to avoid gluten. We have so much evidence that the vast, vast majority of people who have success on AIP don't reintroduce gluten. In some cases they never try, and that's okay too. We don't always know for sure if people are gluten sensitive if they didn't have a confirmed celiac diagnosis. But nevertheless, and ultimately what we decided is that we do need to continue to have people eliminate cereal grains, including the non-gluten containing ones because there is a high degree of people who have a difficulty with corn and with oats probably there is some degree of people with difficulty with sorghum and millet, although those aren't so widely consumed that we don't know for sure.
(40:13):
But we do have a lot of confidence to say that for most people, rice is well tolerated and in fact can be a really important component of your overall diet, especially if you are thinking in terms of how do I sustain this? How do I do this long enough to see the results and not blow my budget? How do I make sure that we have enough food to eat simply like stretching meals and feeding a family and traveling and rice just doesn't seem to have any negative impact on the vast majority of people, so why not include it? It's sort of the unique grain here. And this for purposes of being just simplifying our communication, we're seeing any form of rice. People will want to know what kind of basmati rice or jasmine rice or I heard this kind of rice, or you can have any kind of rice.
(41:03):
Of course you might find that personally your gut does better with various types and that's fine, but overall you can have rice when you're in the elimination phase. Now the pseudo grains are also something you can have in the elimination phase. And again, as I alluded to before, these are things that I encourage my clients to consume. I really am trying to be more of an evangelist about them because they do provide so much benefit and they include, well, first of all, pseudo greens seeds. Actually they're not actually grains. They're eaten like grains, but they're not botanically related to the cereal grains. And so that includes quinoa, buckwheat, amreth, which is related to quinoa, chia, which we think of as sometimes as a seed. So whether you think of it as a seed or a pseudo grain, those little chia seeds and wild rice, which I probably don't need to say if I told you you could have any kind of rice, you may have already thought of that, but just so you know, wild rice is not actually botanically related to rice, but you can have it either way.
(42:08):
Okay, nightshades. Now this gets confusing again for people new to this concept. If you're navigating the grocery store, a nightshade is something produced from a flowering plant in the, again, I'm not sure how to say this in Latin family, so I think that might be close. And these are not bad foods, but they often are foods that people with autoimmune disease will find our triggers for them or that are something they can eat after they've gone through that whole process on an infrequent basis and be okay or in certain quantities or in certain combinations and be okay, or they might never, ever eat again. We don't know where you're going to be, but for the elimination phase, you're going to cut all of these out. So at the top of that list is the one people think of I think right away usually, and that is tomatoes, and I get that that can cause a lot of grief.
(43:04):
I also, like many people like to garden and growing tomatoes is really satisfying, especially in the summer to have when they're harvested, they're really delicious. My husband is half Italian. We've eaten a lot of pasta and tomato sauce and stuff over our lifetime together, and so it was definitely a hard one to say, honey, I'm not going to eat tomatoes, but I can tell you there's potential good news on the other side. I personally have been able to reintroduce tomatoes. It took quite a while before I felt really good about that. And I also know that I don't do great. I start to get my guts a little weird. Sometimes I'll get a little joint achy if I'm eating tomatoes a lot in the summer when they're coming in the garden and we're having 'em multiple times a day or I've made a huge batch of something really delicious and there's leftovers, so I know I need to be moderate about it, but I only figured that out by going through the process.
(44:01):
So speaking to beginners, start out just no tomatoes for at least 30 days. Also in that same family are peppers, whether we're talking about bell peppers, so sweet peppers or spicy peppers, botanically, they're all nightshades. Eggplant are also nightshades. Potatoes are nightshades. Potatoes are interesting though because if you think about it, we're eating not the flowering, the fruiting body of a tomato plant. We're eating the, and so that might explain why. There are a lot of people who will report, I've been able to reintroduce potatoes. They might still be having a reaction when they try tomatoes and peppers and others, but they can have potatoes, and I think that might be the explanation is because of the part of the plant that you're eating, but again, you're cut them out for the elimination phase. Tomatillos are on this list. Now, if you're not familiar with it, a tomatillo looks like it's got a papery husk around it and ground cherries might not be something you're familiar with or you might know them by a different name, but they look similar.
(45:04):
So they have that papery husk around them that's kind of that giveaway that they're related and they're nightshades. So just to give you that because there's a lot of different words for some of these foods, but these are the ones I see people eating the most. Now, in your spice cabinet, you want to be avoiding nightshade spices, and that can be tricky. This is why we can't have anything that just says spices on the ingredient list. When we're in the elimination phase, we don't know what that is, but specifically you're going to think like red spices. So paprika, cayenne, if you have a blend like a chili blend, a curry blend that might have nightshades in it, you're going to avoid those two goji berries I put on this list. They throw people by surprise because they don't know that they're nightshades and they're kind of touted as being healthy, but they actually are in the nightshade family.
(45:57):
So if you like goji berries, if you were eating goji berries, note don't until you see if you can reintroduce them. And then finally the last one listed there is ashwagandha, not a food, but often a supplement. So I wanted to put that on there because it's something that a lot of people are not aware of. First of all, when they start out and they might already be taking an ashwagandha supplement, especially if they have a thyroid condition, maybe they've found it on their own or somebody's recommended it to them when actually it is a nightshade. So it doesn't mean that you can't ever use it. It may be beneficial for you, but our recommendation would be that if you're taking it and you've just chosen to do this on your own, just stop taking it. If a doctor has recommended it to you, talk to them about an alternative, and I have an alternative listed on the green check side of the slide under not nightshades, and that is rhodiola, so that's a good one-to-one option.
(46:54):
I've had a lot of clients who maybe their naturopath has said, here's this supplement, it has ashwagandha in it, and then they go to their naturopath or their doctor and they say, I'm going to do AIP, and ashwagandha is a nightshade. What is an alternative? My AIP Certified Coaches suggested I ask you about rhodiola and that might work for them. Other things in that not nightshade list are sweet potatoes. This gets confusing because it's just naming, but sweet potatoes are not related at all. Botanically to nightshades, black pepper or peppercorns, that's also not related to pepper. And this also will be confusing because in the core AIP version we would say no pepper because of the fact that it's like a berry with seeds in it, but the minute amounts of it, we generally will say, you can include that. You don't need to worry about avoiding it.
(47:51):
That said, I do know there are people who through that process of AIP have realized black pepper, even though you said I could have it, it did actually trigger things for me. Not a huge trigger usually, but something to consider. Sometimes people get bad information about what nightshades are, so I want you to know that squash all varieties, not nightshades, stone fruits, apples, broccoli, kale, other brassicas, garlic, ginger, not nightshades, those are all things that you would consider including in your diet. Sweeteners. Let me talk about sweeteners for a few minutes. As I said before on the foods to avoid list is refined sugar. Also on that list are non-nutritive sweeteners. Now I put that in the category of processed food additives, but you can lump it together in your mind. So you do want to be avoiding white sugar, brown sugar, powdered sugar, like the traditional refined sugars.
(48:49):
And the reason primarily is because they provide no nutrition beyond just the sugar, the carbohydrates, they provide energy and we need energy, but we probably don't need it to displace the ways we can get energy in other sources. We also want to avoid corn syrup and we want to avoid what are called non-nutritive sweeteners that don't provide any calories and just taste sweet. And there are a variety of reasons. I will not go into all these now, but I just want you to know, yes, stevia is something we avoid and there's some debate about that. Some practitioners will say, oh, stevia is probably fine, but our tendency is to err on the side of let's try to avoid all the things that could potentially be problems, ose, allulose, anything with that os at the end you're going to avoid the sugar, alcohol, xylitol and sorbitol, avoid those saccharin aspartame, avoid those.
(49:49):
So those artificial sweeteners, natural sweetener, natural sugar like honey, maple syrup, coconut sugar, molasses, state syrup, you can have those but in moderation because at some point our body doesn't, a really high sugar diet's not going to be great for us, whether that sugar is white sugar and corn syrup or honey and maple syrup and molasses that at some level that's still going to hold back your ability to heal. So this is a tricky area I know, but it's helpful to just know that there can be some room for nuance in it. How do you know when you're ready for reintroductions? You need to have done at least 30 days of consistent compliance with the elimination phase and have measurable improvements in your symptoms or other markers of wellbeing. The reintroduction process goes like this. First you would select a food and prepare it in a manner that suits your taste and preference.
(50:40):
Then you want to make sure that before you start to eat it, you kind of calmed your nervous system. So we want to be in rest and digest state and then you eat a small portion as part of a regular meal and you don't eat any more of it for at least two or three hours looking for an immediate reaction. And that immediate might be immediate or it might be an hour or two or three later. So you just kind of give yourself that chance of having a small portion, see what your body does. If you do not notice anything unusual that could indicate that immediate reaction, then you proceed to the next step, which is to eat a medium portion as part of a regular meal. And then you don't eat any more of it for at least three days because now we're looking for delayed reactions and if you don't see any delayed reactions, you can bring it back to your daily diet as desired and then you could try reintroducing another food until you've reintroduced all of the foods that you'd like to reintroduce.
(51:34):
And so there's not really a when am I done and I just go back to eating the old way, but an ongoing process of fine tuning your diet through reintroductions and expanding as suits you or identifying foods that you're like, wow, I really know I can't have that food anymore. Definitely obvious reaction. I will avoid that. It's not always that easy of course, but that's not really the topic for today because we're just talking about getting started now. What is the goal of all of this? The goal, first of all, is to experience a decreased symptom burden to improve your quality of life and your overall wellbeing and to have knowledge of what foods allow you to maintain that over the long term. And probably in big letters because it's really important to me, it's to allow you to determine and to achieve what your personal health vision shows is good health.
(52:26):
So it's about what you want to do with your health, not about somebody else's definition of it or some other standard before you start. Before you start. Here are my tips. One, talk to your healthcare provider. I know we want to skip that step, but it really is important even if it's just to check in and let 'em know what you're going to do and get some baseline labs or to make sure that are there anything, is there anything I should know if I change my diet, if you're taking a medication, is there anything I have to be careful about increasing too much? Is there anything that I should be aware of in terms of my anatomy? I speak specifically as somebody who had a bowel or a near bowel obstruction that you may need to talk to that provider about what's going to happen if I eat a lot more vegetables than I'm eating now?
(53:15):
So talk to your health care provider. Second, decide what your personal health vision is. I don't have time to get into the details on that, but it's really worth taking time to do that and ask yourself how confident you are in your ability to be successful. Again before you start and if you don't feel a hundred percent confident, what would make you feel more confident and try doing some of those things to start with. Maybe you need to practice a few recipes first, and then this is really important too. You want to spend a little time. Seven days is ideal. Getting a baseline by tracking your symptoms. We all think we'll remember and we don't really want to track our symptoms when they're really bad because I don't want to think about it, but it really is worth getting out a notebook and tracking every day where you are doing some kind of a rating scale so that you know when you're ready for reintroductions. Because remember, you're ready for reintroductions when you have some improvement over your symptoms. And so if you don't track, it's really hard to know.
(54:19):
Real quick, I just, I'm going to pop these all up here at once because I've talked about all this stuff before, but just my reminders that optimizing success on AIP, you want to consider all this stuff. You want to eat an overall nutrient diet, you need to get adequate sleep, maintain your connections, all that. I'm not going to repeat that. Okay? So if you wanted to learn more about me, you can work with me. I have a lot of things that I do, so I do take only a limited number of clients and that's by application only. You can go to my website Gutsy By Nature to find the link to that application. I don't mean application to say I'm going to turn you down, I just want to screen you first to make sure that we'd be a good fit. And then we have a small conversation to decide if working together makes sense.
(55:00):
But I also work with lots of people through my signature program. Again, that's called Ready Set AIP and it provides a supportive experience with structured coaching. Some of it is prepared ahead of time. Some of it is you reach out to me and I'm there through my portal to answer your questions and it expands 12 weeks. So it's really about getting you ready. The first five weeks are all about just getting ready to do it, then getting you set, doing your set portion, which is the elimination phase, and then starting reintroductions. And obviously you aren't going to be done with all of your reintroductions at that point, but you've started and I've helped you get started. If you are interested in learning more, go to my website. I also have a free quick start guide there with food lists, so you'll see that right away when you go to Ready Set AIP, and you can just go ahead and request that and download that. Alright, I'll see you at our next session. Bye for now everyone. Thanks for being here.
Marie-Noelle Marquis (55:59):
We hope that Jamie's presentation has again made it clear that AIP is not just a diet, it is a protocol with multiple branches and there are multiple ways to approach it. Through this podcast, AIP Certified Coaches bring you resources so that you can feel confident about doing AIP on your own, but with the knowledge that you are not doing AIP alone.
Jaime Hartman (56:20):
If you liked what you heard today, we hope you'll check out the fall Encore rebroadcast of the entire sixth annual AIP Summit. Starting on September 9th, or consider becoming a member of the AIP Summit Community where you can access our entire archives. We'll be back with another podcast episode in two weeks. So make sure you subscribe to the AIP Summit Podcast in your favorite podcast player if you haven't already,
Marie-Noelle Marquis (56:45):
And if you would like to leave us a rating and review, it will help others find this podcast where we are committed to helping you use the power of the Autoimmune protocol to elevate your wellness journey to new heights.
Jaime Hartman (57:02):
The AIP Summit Podcast is a Gutsy By Nature production. Content presented is for informational purposes only, and is not intended to be a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.
