Marie-Noelle Marquis (00:09):
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 (00:19):
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 (00:27):
And today we're getting personal with Jaime. Jaime, you're a teacher, you're an educator. You've pioneered so many programs and resources for the AIP community. So I'm so excited that we get to dive into your story for our listeners today. So I wanted to start by mentioning you created this fantastic program called Ready Set AIP, and I would love for you to tell us a little bit more about it. And the main question is, what need did you see in the community that prompted you to create it?
Jaime Hartman (01:07):
Honestly, it comes out of a lot of mistakes that I made and that then I saw clients that I was working with having made before they started working with me and realizing that all of those mistakes could be lessons and that I wanted to create something that would encapsulate all of those lessons so that hopefully people in the future who are starting AIP and is an effort to improve their overall wellness, who have autoimmune diseases, we'll have an easier path of it that will avoid those mistakes that will make things go right the first time rather than the second, third, fourth or fifth time if possible. And so it really came out of that need. It also came out of the realization that not everybody has the interest, capacity, resources to really have that in-depth, one-on-one relationship with a practitioner to see somebody every week or every couple of weeks for months on end and have that really personalized focus.
(02:11):
And so I wanted to create something that I could share the wisdom that I had learned over the years and that would be available to more people so that I could help more people and more people could have access to the resources. And I called it specifically ready set AIP, because I view AIP as not the starting point, not that elimination phase that a lot of people think of it as, but as the lifelong path that you get onto once you have gone through the elimination phase and said some reintroductions. And so I wanted to flip around the thinking that a lot of people have about AIP thinking that AIP is when I jump in and do the elimination phase and then I reintroduce foods and then I'm done. But instead to realize that AIP is the autoimmune protocol, it's a lifelong journey of managing your autoimmune by using diet and lifestyle and that we needed some kind of a support system that would help people get ready for that, get set for it, and then actually do it. And by the way, if any of our listeners want to check out the program, they can go to ready set a i p.com. I'll put a link in the show notes and I have a free resource there that you can also download some startup resources. It includes some of the handouts that are part of the first few phases of the program, as well as 10 easy recipes. So I'll make sure that link is in the show notes as well.
Marie-Noelle Marquis (03:34):
So sharing your expertise, your wisdom, as you mentioned. I'm curious, how were you first introduced to AIP?
Jaime Hartman (03:46):
I found AIP after finding some other tools first that worked to some degree. So I started to address my diet first. And I will preempt this by saying I now know that AIP and that this whole thing is about dealing with both diet and lifestyle. But definitely at the time that I started, I wasn't viewing it that way. It was all to me about diet. I had this idea that there must be some way I can change what I'm eating and that would help me feel better and get better control of the autoimmune disease that I was experiencing. And so I was very focused on that and the diet that I originally found and I started looking led me then to AIP. So I have Crohn's disease, which helps understand why I started the way that I did most people Googling like diets for Crohn's disease or however I started that process.
(04:39):
And I stumbled upon what's called the specific carbohydrate diet or SCD. And I'm sure some of our listeners who have inflammatory bowel diseases will be familiar with that. They may have tried it or heard about it. It's been around for a long time. And so I tried that and I had some pretty fast results in some areas where I started to feel better in some ways, but there were other areas that it was definitely impacting me in ways that were not very sustainable. I was really committed to keeping the path going no matter what, but it was getting hard. Namely I lost a bunch of weight that I really couldn't afford to lose. So I started this when I was quite debilitated from Crohn's disease and having had surgery and really had some pretty traumatic experiences and was trying to rebuild my life and my body.
(05:31):
And so losing even more weight was not helpful. And I also found that my mental health really plummeted. I just felt like nothing had brightness anymore. I dunno how else to put it. It was like I was feeling better objectively in my body, and even that wasn't a hundred percent, but at least somewhat better. But I had just emotional deadness and really it started to take a big toll on me. Fortunately, I had already started chronicling my efforts. I'd started a blog. I got pretty excited about the initial results I saw from doing this specific carbohydrate diet, and I'd started to find other people who were doing similar things and I was looking for recipes and found that there were people who were doing paleo and autoimmune paleo at the time, who gave me some inspiration and some new things to consider. And so I transitioned the way I was eating from this specific carbohydrate diet to what was an early iteration of AIP and saw that a lot of those things that had been problems improved, I started to be able to put on some weight, definitely my emotional state improved, and it became clear to me that I was at least on the right path now for the diet that was going to work for me through that.
(06:55):
And this is a long, I'm talking about a time span of about nine months between the time that I started until I figured that out. So when you asked that first question, where did my Ready Set AIP program came from, that's one of the things I hope that I can do for people is to help them find their path to that starting point faster than I did, because that was quite a journey to get to that point.
Marie-Noelle Marquis (07:19):
And how long from the moment you were diagnosed to that nine month journey?
Jaime Hartman (07:26):
So this is a very long story to give context to our listeners. I am now, I'm very proud of my age because I'm excited to be turning 50 next year. So I'm almost 50, I'm 49, I'll be 50 in July of this year. We're recording this in 2024. So I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease when I was 19, and it probably had been building for a couple years up until that point. When I think back at sort of what was happening in my life in my late teens, I think it was already there. And it wasn't until I really hit the point where it became obvious that I got diagnosed. I was 19 and I was in college, and I really just wanted to get back to my life. I just really wanted to get back to my regular, having fun, going to classes, living my life in the dorms and then an apartment.
(08:19):
And so when doctors said to me, here's what you have, and there are some medications we can prescribe, I was honestly thrilled. That was just such a relief to find out that these rather embarrassing personal symptoms and painful symptoms had a name and that there was some treatment that they could offer me. So very relieved with that. I do recall asking a doctor at the time, should I change my diet? And he was like, well, if you notice there are foods that don't work for you, that's fine. You don't need to eat them, but really want to make sure you're eating. And there's really no evidence that we have now that tells us that changing your diet would make any difference at all. And I was happy to hear that. That's fine. I didn't really want to change my diet anyway, so I was okay with that answer.
(09:07):
Totally. Okay. And for the next, at least, oh gosh, until I was in my early thirties, so 12 years probably, I really coped with my Crohn's disease mainly by trying to ignore it. I considered every day a success if I just got through it without embarrassing myself, go to sleep, wake up, be really exhausted, whatever I needed, whatever happened was okay with me as long as I had completed the day before and just survived it. And that works for a while when you're young and kind of otherwise healthy. But it was definitely taking a toll on me by the time I reached my early thirties. And one of the ways that it was doing that was developing scar tissue in my large intestine, and there was starting to become a narrowing and so bad that they couldn't do a colonoscopy. It was too narrow that they couldn't get the scope through.
(10:02):
So my doctors were very concerned, my doctor was very concerned, referred me to a surgeon. I put off surgery for another six months. I really didn't want to have surgery. And then ultimately it became pretty clear that that's what I needed to do. And so I had the surgery, and again, it was really just meant to be preventative so that I didn't get a bowel obstruction. The surgery went fine, but there were some complications during the healing process. And so that ended up becoming an odyssey of seven total surgeries over the span of two years. And it included, I was septic, I was on, so I was in ICU for about a month after recovering and going home. And between surgeries, I was on total bowel rest for almost a year, which means no food. So I was getting everything by an iv, and I was also very, very weak and really unable to do a lot of things that I needed to do to take care of myself. And so it was a very, very difficult time. Ultimately, finally for the seventh surgery, traveled to the Cleveland Clinic to work with the best surgeons we could find anywhere to open me back up and put me back together. And I'm so grateful for them because everything is now connected again, and I'm able to have relatively normal bowel function. So I'm very grateful for that. So this was in my early thirties,
Marie-Noelle Marquis (11:30):
Just taking that in, right? Your early thirties, right? This is the time where people, it's like your prime. You've built this career people and their prime busy launch of their life and career time and to be dealing with all of that.
Jaime Hartman (11:47):
And it got worse from there, to be honest with you. I got through the surgery, they put me back together, and I went back to trying to compartmentalize. I also started developing other extraintestinal symptoms, complications, joint pain, back pain. I had pain in my tendons, connective tissue was hurting. I was having a really difficult time, even just moving around space. To your point, I was in my thirties, I felt like I was 80. And it was really hard because many of my peers were having families building their careers, their careers are flourishing, and I was just trying to get through each day. And I also, as I have a tendency to be somewhat of an ambitious, driven person, I'm very goal oriented. I was also really focused on not letting this hold me back. I was really driving forward with my career. My original job, as you mentioned at the beginning, was I was a teacher.
(12:42):
I taught high school English, and during that whole time I was teaching English. I was just trying to ignore Crohn's disease in my twenties. I loved teaching. I loved it very much. And then right around the same time that I realized I needed to address my health, I had another big life change. I got married, and then my husband and I moved to the Washington DC area where I started working for a textbook publishing company. So I was still in education, but now I was on the corporate side, and I did like that job a lot. It gave me a lot of satisfaction. And so when I had to have surgery and I was out for a couple years, I really wanted to get back to it. And that was my goal, was to get back to being able to do that work, to do that job.
(13:23):
I felt that that was what would give me the satisfaction of being a productive member of society again. And that was what I deemed to be success. I was very much focused on success being my career. So just to kind of short circuit this story, that's when I started to change my diet because I had been reflecting on that time period that I was telling you about before where I had had surgeries and for almost a year total in between surgeries, I wasn't eating anything, all my nutrition, all my nourishment was coming in through my veins, through something called TPN. Some of our listeners might be familiar with that. Unfortunately, they may be if they have, especially if they have a bowel disease. And I reflected on the fact that during that time, although I was struggling, I was recovering from surgery, my intestines were pretty stable.
(14:17):
The Crohn's disease didn't really affect me. It wasn't coming back. I had other problems, but I didn't have my intestines flaring up. So I did start to think maybe food could possibly be the answer. And that's when I started looking for solutions. I thought that if I could just change my diet, I could keep everything else in my life the same. I thought I could keep working really hard, I could keep traveling. I could just really focus, really nailing on my diet and everything else would be okay. And that did to some degree work. It helped. I could tell it was helping. And I even went through a period of time where I rejected medication. I didn't want to take medication again after what I'd been through with surgery. I was feeling really disillusioned about my experiences and about the medical care system. And so I did go through a period where I said, no, I don't want to take medication.
(15:11):
Let me just do this with diet alone. And that was, let me say this. We talk about this as my story of healing from Crohn's disease, but it really would be more accurate to say it's my story of living with Crohn's disease. You can't heal Crohn's disease with medication alone. You can't heal Crohn's disease with diet alone or lifestyle alone. You can't heal Crohn's disease with all of those. As far as I'm concerned, as far as I can tell, you need to have a comprehensive program. You need to have all of those pieces that you individually need, and that's true for Crohn's disease, but it's also true for many other autoimmune diseases. And so there was a point there where I was rejecting medication. Part of that came from what I was I think being indoctrinated about in terms of nutrition. The original nutrition training program I went through had very much a western medicine might not be great for you attitude, put that mildly.
(16:11):
And so I thought I could do that myself without any medication, and I was sure that nutrition was the answer. And so that's what led me to change my career, to get some training to start to help people with their nutrition. I was at that point when I started my practice really focused on, I'm going to give people advice about nutrition. I'm going to help them with their diet, and I'm going to do that through AIP because I thought the diet part of AIP was totally the answer. I realized though, from my own life experience that it wasn't just diet. What was happening was that all the pieces were starting to combine, so I needed to get back on some medication that helped calm things down. It took a while. One of the things I experienced was that the medication I had been taking back in my twenties that had worked for me for a while wouldn't work anymore because I'd had that time off of it.
(17:08):
So that was frustrating. Tried a few others that didn't work very well, and finally found one that did. I also found that when I started to step back from my job, that required me to travel and had a ton of external stress that little by little other elements of my health and my health overall improved. So I started to realize that my idea that nutritional alone would do all of it really wasn't accurate because it was only when I added all those other pieces in that I reached the full state of wellbeing that allowed me to really do what I wanted to with my life. I went from that low point, actually, I would say I had multiple low points, low point of recovering from surgery, being really debilitated, not just the surgery, but all of the things that had happened after it. Another low point would've been when I started to develop all those pain body pain symptoms that were preventing me from really being able to even walk with ease to now I am running my business and I have a really active life. I actually ran a half marathon last year, so I never thought that would be possible during those times when I was really suffering. And so I see it now as not necessarily a story of healing, but a story of being honest about all the things that I needed to do in order to manage it and to live well with it.
Marie-Noelle Marquis (18:39):
I love that you're learning that AIP is more than a diet. Was this in a way accidental and really positive, instead of being like I thought I figured it out, then I got really, really sick, and then I added the sleep, the Oh wow. Adding this to my life, how healing it is, what a beautiful gift and experience.
Jaime Hartman (18:58):
Yeah. And that's what motivated me to go back to school again, because now, although I still had that experience with my original nutrition training, I realized that it was the lifestyle pieces that were so hard for me to integrate, and I was doing it, but I was devoting my entire life to it. It was my vocation and avocation and I realized that the vast majority of people out there are not going to be doing that. They have stressful jobs, they have families they have to take care of. And so how do they figure out how to fit the lifestyle pieces in to all of that without the benefit of being able to devote their entire life and career to it? So that motivated me to become a health coach. I went to the Duke University program to become a health and wellness coach, and then I completed the requirements to get national board certified as a health and wellness coach.
(19:57):
And what that means is pretty exciting because although at this moment in time when we're recording this, it is not something that insurance policies in the United States will reimburse for, but we're moving in that direction. And one thing that we have in place now is that in many circumstances, you can actually use your health savings account or flexible spending account dollars if that's a part of your insurance policy, to pay for services from a national board certified health coach. Because the world, the insurance industry and healthcare industry is starting to realize that those lifestyle pieces are really important and are really, really hard. So they're coming around to recognizing that there can be some value in that to help people live well with their health conditions.
Marie-Noelle Marquis (20:52):
So did you experience struggles going from the SCD diet to the AIP? Was that change difficult? Did you have specific things that you found challenging or were you just like, no, I'm doing this is good, moving through it?
Jaime Hartman (21:05):
I did not actually find that very challenging because it was so freeing. In a way, the specific carbohydrate diet has a lot of language around it that I found it very stifling. It talks about legal and illegal foods, and I always felt that was a terrible way to talk about foods. Even at that point I was like, no, they aren't illegal. They're not bad foods. They're just foods that are excluded. The other thing that SCD did was that it doesn't have a reintroduction portion to it. It's really like, do this, do it for at least a year, maybe two, and then maybe you can add foods back in, but probably not. And so while I was excited to be feeling better as my emotions and my mental health was tanking, that was really hard to accept that this is just how I'm going to feel now.
(21:55):
And to be clear, I don't know why I felt that emotional deadness and what I might even call depression, but I suspect some of it had to do with the fact that it was a relatively low carbohydrate diet, hence the name specific carbohydrate diet. Because when I started transitioning to AIP, the first time I ate a sweet potato, I remember feeling like life had just filled me up. It was like brightness, sweet potatoes, nice, bright and orange. It's like everything got more colorful when I ate that. So I'm not going to say that I know exactly what was happening with me at the time. I really just moved forward and felt so much better. I also think that the community around AIP was so much more positive, and I'm a big believer in focusing on that as a key part of it. Instead of being all about you can't have this food's illegal, do this forever, be very rigid to let's focus on what you can have.
(22:50):
And even in those days when we didn't quite know how we were going to do reintroductions, I still felt like there was much more of a positive and outlook on the fact that that could be part of your life. So when I think about what I try to do in communicating AIP to people, again, to really focus on the fact that this is going to be an expansive experience, the ultimate goal of it is to get to the point where you know exactly what foods you should eat and what foods you should stay away from. And you is the key word there. You as an individual are going to figure that out for yourself through the process. And there's a community of people around you that are going through their own journeys at the same time and can help you out. But we're not all eating a rigidly defined diet exactly the same way, but instead finding our own paths with support.
Marie-Noelle Marquis (23:42):
What was your experience with reintroductions? Were you able to bring that on right away? You mentioned something that initially that wasn't something that it was talked about in AIP.
Jaime Hartman (23:54):
Yeah. So I was doing AIP in 2013, 2014 when there wasn't a lot yet being said or written about, talked about reintroductions. Many of us who were doing AIP early in those days were having such great success with it that caution seemed like a good idea. We didn't know if we could reintroduce foods. So nobody had done this before us to know whether or not you could maintain the wellbeing that you were experiencing if you did test these foods and expand them. There's already people talking about it. I don't want to say that anybody was claiming you couldn't, but I think everybody at the time who was doing it and writing about it on blogs or talking about it publicly was definitely approaching this with a lot of caution. So I was as well. So when people ask me, how long did you do the elimination phase before you started reintroductions?
(24:45):
I never want to tell them the number because it was a different world. I didn't know. So it took a while before I started and it took a few false starts. There were many times, many things that I added back into my diet. I really wanted to, and then took back out again to see if things were really working for me or not, and then tried again and did a lot of back and forth, which is another thing that I try to provide resources for. So people maybe are not doing that as much. I don't think that's a great way to approach it, although there will always be some degree of that happening naturally in people's lives where you try adding a food in live with that for a while and then reassess whether that food is working for you or not, and maybe go back to taking it out so you can compare.
(25:31):
So I don't want to say that's wrong, but you don't have to do it as much as I think I did. So you asked the question about how did they go for me at this point now what, 11, 12 years after I started this journey. I'm at a point now where I have a really clear understanding of which foods I can eat and which ones I can't. So I've been able to reintroduce a lot of things. I would say right now you might describe my diet as broadly gluten free, dairy free with a few other very personalized instances of things that I've recognized that don't work well for me, and they're very personal to me. The one that is probably the most specific to me is that I have discovered through multiple trials that chocolate just doesn't work for me. I am kind of surprised by that, and I'm surprised by to the degree that I'm just fine with that.
(26:30):
It feels good to just know it and feel good, but I've experienced trying to eat chocolate in various different forms, and I've had everything from feeling like I've got the flu to actually triggering a flare of my Crohn's disease from it. And then when I got back to a point where I wasn't consuming it, things settled back down. So that's very, very personal to me. And I only discovered that really through repeated experiments of narrowing that down, figuring out what that was, and then the area of nightshades. I have found that with tomatoes, I can eat them generally once in a while if I make a big batch of something with tomatoes and think I'm going to eat it, it was really delicious going to eat it for leftovers. And again, the next day or two or three days, after a few days, I will start to feel joint pain.
(27:21):
And so I've sort of figured out that for me, that's something that I need to be somewhat cautious of and not have tomatoes every day. So I limit that to when I know they're going to be really delicious. And if I do make a big batch of it, it's most of it's going to go in the freezer so I can have the rest of it later and not put myself into that situation where my pain and my body starts coming back in. But beyond that, I am very happy with the diet that I eat now because I know exactly what I need to do to take care of myself, and that is the gift of doing all of this work so that you can know what's going to work for you. And that's really what it's all about.
Marie-Noelle Marquis (27:58):
You have your blog, you have so many other resources that you created. Let's take the AIP Summit presented by AIP Certified Coaches. What was the trigger for that?
Jaime Hartman (28:14):
The AIP Summit was born in 2019, and my original idea was that it might just be a one-time event. So it was actually first called the 2020 AIP Summit. We were all gearing up for 2020 and thinking, what a cool year. That sounds like it's going to be a great year.
(28:30):
So that was my vision in 2019, was that it was going to be this one time big thing. We'll see how it goes. And I came up with the idea because I was about two years into my solo practice at that point as an AIP Certified Coach. I know for our listeners, if you've listened to our previous episodes, we had Mickey Trescott on one of our episodes coupled back, and she talked about the AIP Certified Coach Practitioner Training Program, and that it started in 2017. So I had done that in 2017. And about two years into that, I realized, okay, this is great. I'm working with clients and I'm helping people, but here are all these other coaches who've done the same training program and we're all out here kind of individually trying to help the people that we can reach. What if we pulled some of our knowledge, maybe we could reach more people and we could really achieve more by working together.
(29:26):
And so that was where that idea had come from. Take all these graduates from the last two years of the program who are now practicing as AIP Certified Coaches, see amongst them who might want to share some of their expertise, put a session together, and then have that happen in the second week of January of 2020 so that people could learn from it. So that was what it was all about, just how we can collaborate together. That event was a success. I'm very pleased to say it actually blew away my expectations of how many people wanted that information and we're excited about it. And from there, then it started to grow, particularly in 2021 when we were in the middle of covid and lockdowns and a lot of people were working from home and really looking for ways to better support their health. Maybe they also have an autoimmune disease and they're dealing with this concern about what's happening with health around them.
(30:23):
2021 was even bigger. We had even more people who wanted to be part of it, both as presenters and as attendees. And from there then gradually added the monthly webinars because we realized at that point that once a year is not enough. We need to get information out to people on a regular, ongoing basis. So that's continued to grow. And then in 2024, we had our fifth annual AIP Summit, and now it is transitioned into being more of a community with a year round presence. So it is grown from my idea way back thinking like, oh, maybe we could just do this one week to being something now that happens every single day that I'm really excited to be able to be a part of. And now we've launched this podcast in the last couple of months as an outgrowth of that, to find another way to find people wherever they are, to give them the information about AIP in a way that's reliable.
(31:22):
I think that's the biggest thing that I see as the challenge for AIP now and in the future, is that it is not owned by any one person. This is not a trademarked program, so there aren't clear gatekeepers as to whether information is valid or not. People are out there discovering it, seeing a TikTok, hearing it mentioned on a podcast, reading about it on a message board, and they just have to kind of trust that information they were given about what it is, what it's not, how to do it is accurate, and they're left on their own to figure out how to judge that. And so I'm really focused on trying to find ways to provide information that's coming from people who've gone through some training, who have the accurate, reliable information that you can trust so you aren't second guessing and wondering if this is true, if this is something that is the right information for me to use. So I'm really pushing that now into the future, trying to break through the noise, trying to make sure that there are ways that we get heard by the people that need to hear it, who have the right information about what AIP is and aren't falling into traps of myths and mistakes.
Marie-Noelle Marquis (32:40):
I love your passion for teaching and educating people, and it's such a gift and it's such an incredibly selfless vocation. It's so needed. I'm so grateful that you're doing that. When you decided to become a teacher, did you envision that you'd be reaching tens of thousands of people at this point?
Jaime Hartman (33:01):
Oh wow. That's a great question. Of course not. No. When I decided to become a teacher, I remember the day that I decided to apply to the School of Education. So I went to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, go Badgers, at that time. Anyway, in the nineties, the School of Education was actually very selective. It was hard to get into, so you had to do this application process in your sophomore year to even be considered for a spot. I remember the day that I submitted my application and thought, I don't know if I'll get accepted, but if I do, this is very exciting. I'm going to teach people to love books and write and literature and all that stuff. Yeah, I don't like you do when you're that age, you don't really look beyond that. I had no vision of what it would be like when I was pushing 50. But it's exciting because when I left the classroom, I remember feeling sad about leaving behind that idea of being a teacher in that traditional sense. I had no idea what was going to come in the future and all the ways that I would be able to be teaching people well beyond that and at a bigger scale and about something that's so important,
Marie-Noelle Marquis (34:16):
If you could do it all over again or now with all the knowledge that you have, what's something you would tell your younger self when you got that diagnosis?
Jaime Hartman (34:30):
That's such an interesting question because if I had done it right, would I be here today doing work that I love? Well, maybe I'd be doing something else that I love. So on the one hand, I want to say I wouldn't change anything because don't want to risk my life having gone on a different path. But I think it probably would've been helpful if when I was 19 and I was diagnosed with this, if I had recognized that my desire to compartmentalize it and ignore it was not necessarily necessary that I could actually, that there even would be a day when I would tell people I have Crohn's disease and I had seven surgeries and all of that. That means I was definitely not going to tell anybody that at that point. At the same time though, I've now realized that although that is a huge part of why I do what I do on a regular daily basis, it's not actually that big of a part of how I feel and how I function. And so there's somewhere paths crossed, I guess, where it became less of me just compartmentalizing that and ignoring it whenever I could to not needing to anymore. And somewhere that happened, and it would've been great if that had happened earlier, that would've been great for my physical health. And as well, my mental and emotional health
Marie-Noelle Marquis (36:00):
Not being defined by our diagnosis is such a key moment I think. And I feel like coming from when you start feeling better and you start bringing that life back into your life and that joy back, and then suddenly it's like, oh, I'm not just confined to this boundaries of I am this diagnosis and this is it. In your practice, what would you say is the advice that you give the most? We call you signature advice, but something that is the one point that you advocate for the most with your clients?
Jaime Hartman (36:34):
The one point that I probably advocate the most for with my clients is that the variety that they have in their diet will serve them well. But I know I see a lot of people who come to me in my private practice, one-on-one working with me who find me because they've already been doing AIP for quite a while, and because I'm relatively public in this sphere, they come to me looking for support, troubleshooting after they've been trying it on their own for a while. And what a lot of people are doing that I think is not helpful for them is that they've severely limited their diet. They're either doing that because they're afraid or because it's easier to just eat the same things over and over again. Either way, it's not ideal. I understand the comfort level that can be in finding, I figured out what works, what keeps me from being able to function, and I'm just going to keep doing that.
(37:33):
But for many people, that is going to set them up for perhaps nutritional deficiencies. That's one thing that it could do, even if what you're eating is all like AIP compliant, if it's the same exact template every day, like the same exact meal over and over, over time you might be missing something. But it also is going to set it up so that whenever life circumstances intervene and you can't actually eat that comfort rigid meal that you have figured out for yourself or pattern of eating, you will have a hard time coping with that. And so getting both an elimination phase approach started that is diverse, expansive, that includes lots of different types of vegetables and lots of different types of protein and different templates of meals, different ways of preparing your meals, different flavors, different tastes. Doing that right away from the elimination phase onward is going to help prevent that.
(38:29):
And then thinking about dietary expansion. So what you do eat is more important than what you don't eat as far as I'm concerned. And that's true for all phases of AIP. So yes, we need to know what our triggers are and we need to avoid them. So when I was talking about my diet, I can't have gluten, I can't have dairy. I'm careful about tomatoes and I don't eat chocolate, but that's only one tiny sliver of what defines what I need to eat to stay healthy. So I need to also look at am I getting all the variety of different types of super foods we might say in there? So it's not a simple statement to kind of boil down a signature advice, but it's probably the thing that I'm focused on the most with clients when I start working with them. One-on-one is looking at what are you eating and what are you not eating and why are you not eating that? And let's see if we can get some more foods from the not eating list onto the eating list and see how that helps you.
Marie-Noelle Marquis (39:23):
Yeah, I love that. It is so key. And again, bringing that plentiful feeling, I feel it does translate into, it trickles into your lifestyle and your mental wellbeing and enriches. So as a fellow autoimmune person who first discovered you through the resources you created, I just want to say thank you for sharing your knowledge, your expertise with us, and you're doing it in the way that is both inspiring and approachable. And I'm very grateful for that. And I'm sure our listeners will agree, and it's just amazing the impact that we can have. Just you sharing that wisdom going through your life and everything you've learned, it's impacted so many lives and it's impacted my life. So I'm just want to say thank you. I'm grateful for that.
Jaime Hartman (40:09):
Well, thank you. I need to remember that this is a great example of my husband being right about something and me being wrong because I remember it was him who encouraged me after the surgeries experience that I've described there and starting to change my diet and getting to feeling better. It was he who encouraged me to start that first blog to start to share my story. He said, you don't know who you're going to help. You need to start to be open about it and share and see what happens. And it's a great example of he was right. He told me that there would be good things to come of it, and I wasn't sure, but for some reason I decided to give it a shot and I was willing to share. And it has absolutely been one of the best decisions I've ever made in my life.
Marie-Noelle Marquis (40:58):
That sounds like a great partner to share your journey with you. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story today, Jaime. It served as a good reminder to a point that we try to make with every episode, which is that AIP is a protocol with multiple branches, multiple ways it can be approached in order to achieve the best result. It's bio individual, it's about the you in it. That is the real key. So for listeners, remember that this podcast is intended to guide you through this process and bring you resources so that while you can do AIP on your own, you don't have to do it alone.
Jaime Hartman (41:32):
And thank you for the great questions, Marie-Noelle. Listeners will be back with another 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 (41:42):
If you'd like to leave us a rating and a review, that would help others find this podcast where we're committed to helping you use the power of the Autoimmune Protocol to elevate your wellness journey to new heights.
Jaime Hartman (41:58):
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.
