Some tips on Starting your AIP Journey —Random Notes

Healing takes courage, and we all have courage, even if we have to dig a little to find it.—Tori Amos

Start off super simple. I’d suggest that you start with what they call “Meat and two veg” here in the UK. It’s exactly what it says, some sort of compliant protein and some vegetables. This allows you to ease into the diet and not have to make too many choices. When it starts to get really boring, move on to some of the other recipes and meals we suggest.

The good news is that it really easy to make a compliant Sunday Roast. Sweet potatoes for regular potatoes, sautéed dark leafy greens, compliant cauliflower cheese…there are tons of AIP (Autoimmune Protocol) work arounds.

You can have ice cream, bagels, bread…there will be an adapted recipes coming soon.

You’ll be surprised how good some of these recipes taste. We have had house guests during this period, and everyone was happy to play along, and surprised when they tasted the results.

We have spent a lot of time on these recipes, so I’d suggest that you follow the recipe initially and limit the substitutions that you make until you figure out the rules of how these ingredients work. I have had more disasters than just failing at making pancakes.

We fasted for 36 hours once a week. We did this starting Thursday after dinner and ended our fast on Saturday Morning. This helped alleviate some of our decision fatigue. Anecdotally, this also really helped with my wife’s joint pain.

We started out varying our breakfasts. Around the end of the 2^nd week, we decided that the amount of mental effort we were putting in to decide on breakfast was too hard. The key to following this plan is to make it as easy as possible, so we decided that a protein heavy smoothie in the morning was our best option.

We followed a forgiving Time Restricted Eating schedule. We weren’t militant about it, but we did adhere to allowing at least 12 hours between our last meal of the day and the first meal of the following day.

We started the Protocol on the 7^th of December. This meant that we did this Plan through the Holidays and aside from a 24 hour period we stuck to the plan.

We made the choice that Pea Isolate Protein and to some extent Pea Flour was acceptable to us. We both were relatively certain that we could tolerate Peas and based on the limited options for Collagen and the protein requirements we set for our first meal we decided that for us this was an acceptable tradeoff. Yes, it might not be pure AIP, but we made the choice based on information we had available. I encourage you to do the same, flexibility was a key component of keeping us on track.

This is not the Plan we followed but is the plan that I wish I had available when we started. I don’t think that this is the perfect plan for everyone, we all have different tastes and different things we can’t eat, so feel free to play around with this to make it suit your needs.

My wife has an intolerance for mushrooms and garlic, thus there are none in the recipes. Feel free to add these in for variety, they won’t affect the recipes.

My wife and I were both vegetarians when we started. We knew that we would really struggle to meet our dietary needs if we continued to abstain from meat, so we chose to eat pasture-raised animals, line caught fish, and wild game.

Thanks for reading! Please feel free to share this with anyone you think will benefit. Also (due to algorithm considerations) hit like if you did like it. I’d also like to reiterate that this isn’t to be considered medical advice, this is just our individual experience. Some people respond to the diet, some people respond to the medication, and some people respond to both. The idea is that it is YOUR healing journey, I’m just offering up our experiences on our healing journey in the hopes that if you are suffering from anything similar, you’ll take a little bit of inspiration from M as I do on a daily basis.