S3 E8 – Money-Saving Tips From The AIP Community

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 8 is our final episode of the season! In this episode, we’re giving the floor to five members of the autoimmune community to hear their number one piece of advice when it comes to saving money on the AIP.

Since these recommendations can be so individual, we wanted to see what was getting the AIP community actual mileage when they put it into practice. 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. Mitch Hankins, Instinctual Wellbeing [3:46]

2. Sophie Van Tiggelen of A Squirrel in the Kitchen [8:43]

3. Anne Marie Garland from Grass-fed Salsa [15:51]

4. Samantha Jo Teague of the Unskilled Cavewoman [20:56]

5. Kerry Jeffery of Emotional Autoimmunity [24:27]

Angie Alt: Hi everyone! Angie here. Welcome back to the Autoimmune Wellness podcast, season 3. How are you doing, Mickey?

Mickey Trescott: I’m feeling a little bit sad because we’re almost done with this podcast series, and it’s been really fun.

Angie Alt: I know. This was a really new topic for us to explore so in-depth. And it’s been pretty rewarding to talk to all these folks.

Mickey Trescott: I agree.

Angie Alt: So today we have a really fun episode for you guys. As you know, with this season of the podcast we’ve been on a mission to dig into the nitty gritty of how to make eating a nourishing, real foods diet both affordable and sustainable.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah. If you guys haven’t been following along, we covered the following topics in our previous episodes. We talked about sourcing affordable, highest quality meats, vegetables, and fats. Tips and tricks for effective meal planning, batch cooking, and minimizing food waste. Creative food sourcing options, like buying clubs and online shopping. How to minimize waste and reimagine leftovers. Creating a food budget and prioritizing your food spending. And also how to do AIP on an extremely low budget, like fixed income or food stamps.

I think we’ve done a really good job covering these bases. If you guys haven’t heard any of the episodes in this series, make sure to go back and listen to them. There’s a ton of really great info there. Info that I think is new territory for our movement our community. It’s been really fun.

Angie Alt: Right. We hope there’s something there for everybody. So, if there has been one recurring message this season, it has been that not every one of these recommendations is going to work for everyone, obviously. We’re all at different places with our health, our finances, our support systems and even our access based on the areas where we live. We thought it would be a good idea to round out this season of the podcast by devoting a whole episode to chatting with some of the members of the AIP blogging community about their number one money saving tip.

Since these recommendations can be so individual, we wanted to see what was getting the AIP community actual mileage when they put it into practice.

1. Mitch Hankins, Instinctual Wellbeing [3:46]

Mickey Trescott: Alright. So let’s move on and talk to our first guest.

So you guys; the first community member that we’re going to chat with today is Mitch Hankins from the blog Instinctual Wellbeing. Mitch, what is your number one tip for saving money on AIP?

Mitch Hankins: There are so many good ones. When my wife and I were kind of going through financial stuff a few years ago, we definitely had to get creative with sticking to an AIP and whole foods diet on a very limited budget. And very quickly, I think the thing we realized that was most helpful was not being afraid to grocery shop hop; or grocery store hop.

Basically, what we ended up doing is just taking note of maybe two or even three grocery stores in our area, and what products did we regularly use from each of those, and finding which store had the best prices for that particular item. Maybe we’d get a certain percentage of things from Whole Foods. And then for us, we’d drive down the road and hit up Trader Joe’s for 30 minutes and grab some things there. Sometimes we’d go to the Asian mart to pick up a few items there, like coconut milk and even some sweet potato noodles and things of that nature.

So, really just learning where we could get the best deals. And then taking advantage of that. One thing I would say; we did live in a pretty large metropolitan area, and I know some people don’t. So one thing you could do if you live in a more rural or smaller town, could be to do that same thing, but online.

I know there’s lots of great shops nowadays online where you can buy AIP products, and even meats....