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 7 is focused on how to both prioritize your food choices, and make a budget for eating this way that is sustainable longterm. Angie and Mickey share their personal stories of budgeting and managing medical expenses and debt. They also chat with guest Jenny Harris about how to modify AIP for lower budgets, and how to find local assistance for food budgeting concerns.

This is a bit of a tricky topic but we hope sharing our experiences and ideas will help you feel supported wherever you find yourself in your journey. 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. Different levels of budget concerns [2:19 ]

2. Budgeting benefits on AIP [7:13 ]

3. Personal budgeting stories [9:41 ]

4. Benefit of minimalism [15:58 ]

5. An investment in your future health [18:53 ]

6. Introducing our guest, Jenny Harris [23:41 ]

7. Roadblocks and challenges [29:05 ]

8. Finding local assistance [31:05 ]

9. AIP modifications on low-budget [35:44 ]

Mickey Trescott: Hey guys! Mickey here. Welcome back to the Autoimmune Wellness podcast, season 3. How are you doing today, Angie?

Angie Alt: I’m good. Hopefully there won’t be any puppy noise in the background. My puppy is being very naughty today, you guys.

Mickey Trescott: Sometimes it happens. You know, those animals.

Angie Alt: Mm-hmm.

Mickey Trescott: So today we are continuing our discussion related to the topic this season. Real food on a budget. This episode is going to be about how to both prioritize your food choices, and make a budget for eating this way. Today we’re tackling a little bit of a tricky topic, but we hope that sharing some of our experiences and ideas will help you guys feel supported wherever you find yourself in your journey.

1. Different levels of budget concerns [2:19 ]

Mickey Trescott: So first, let’s talk about the three main categories that people find themselves in when we talk about budgeting concerns. The first, of course, are people who are wealthy. They can afford anything. There really aren’t any barriers to getting what they want, because they can go to Whole Foods and get whatever they want. Or they can afford the functional medicine practitioner. Most of us, sadly, don’t find ourselves in this situation.

The middle is actually where most of us are probably at. That’s where people have resources to allocate towards maybe eating better or better medical care, but it means almost always you’re going to have to make some strategic planning. There is flexibility. So there’s a lot of choices sometimes. And maybe going without something so that you can get something else. There are those options to kind of move things around a little bit, and prioritize.

And then lastly there are people who are low income. So those are people who face significant challenges and stress around budgeting for food. And it involves fixed resources without flexibility. So that’s an important distinguishing characteristic between those who truly are low-income. I would say that a lot of people in the middle maybe think they’re a little more low-income than they really are. But the truth is, a lot of us have some flexibility. And that is where a lot of the difficulties come up.

Angie Alt: So in the second segment of t