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!

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Full Transcript:

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 ]

1. The benefits of meal planning [1:40 ]

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 Rea