Michael: Hello and welcome to the Natural Evolution produced by Rebel Health Tribe. A radio show focused on providing you with inspiration, education, and tools for true healing and transformation. I’m Michael and I’ll be your guide on this adventure as together we explore the very nature of the healing journey. And we’re live with a double episode this time. I’m pretty excited. I haven’t recorded with either of you before. So Mickey and Angie, thank you so much for joining me and hopping on the podcast.

Angie Alt:

Thanks for having us.

Mickey Trescott:

Yeah. Thanks for having us, Michael.

Michael:

Yeah. This is going to be fun. I was telling them before I went on live that I own a lot of cookbooks and that theirs are my favorites, because they’re the ones that get opened the most and that’s how I gauge that. So, well, I’ll get into that in a minute, but I’m going to forget sometimes that not everyone here knows everybody that I do. So I’m going to give you a little introduction to Mickey and Angie. And then, we’re going to get into all things autoimmune.

Cookbooks, yes, and cooking, yes, but also coaching and in their own journeys. Mickey Trescott is a nutritional therapy practitioner who prides herself in finding creative solutions to preparing, cooking, and succeeding on allergen free diets. She also has the most beautiful pictures of food on Instagram of all the Instagram food accounts that I follow. In 2012, she founded autoimmunewellness.com an award-winning website that serves millions of readers annually with recipes and resources for living well with autoimmune disease and chronic illness.

Mickey’s also the author of the best-selling guide to the autoimmune protocol, The Autoimmune Paleo Cookbook, and her newest release, The Nutrient-Dense Kitchen focuses on nutrient density and often overlooked aspect to deep healing with food.

Angie Alt is also a nutritional therapy practitioner as well as certified health coach and the author of The Alternative Autoimmune Cookbook. She’s also the creator and director of SAD to AIP in SIX, SAS phase 2 and the Living Well Collective. A series of online group, health coaching programs that have helped thousands of people on the path to wellness by teaching them how to transition their diets and lifestyle to autoimmune protocol.

Angie also partners with doctors to conduct medical research. 2017 results were published from the first study showing the efficacy of AIP for inflammatory bowel diseases. 2019 was AIP for autoimmune thyroid. And there’s a third study for psoriasis and eczema. I’ll ask you about that in a second.

You might be wondering why I have them here together and it’s because in 2015, Angie joined Mickey on autoimmunewellness.com and podcast, and together they’ve co-authored The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook. An award-winning whole lifestyle approach to healing with autoimmune disease and created AIP certified coach and advanced training for wellness practitioners of all kinds.

So you work really well as a team. I figured podcast as a team would be a good idea. So thank you for being a good sport and going along with my idea. Did I miss anything there?

Mickey Trescott:

You didn’t miss anything and podcast as a team as we do most things is totally fine with us.

Michael:

Okay. Good. Yeah. And I wasn’t sure. I’m like, “How’s that going to work?” I’m like, “I don’t know. We’ll figure it out.” So much of your work to me as the consumer of a lot of it is kind of interwoven to where I felt this would be the best way to do it. Has that third study, the one with psoriasis and eczema been published?

Mickey Trescott:

Not yet. COVID meant that we have a really long delay as compared to normal for getting a study out, but we’re hoping fingers crossed it’s going to be any minute now.

Michael:

Cool. Well, you’ll have to let me know and I’ll get it out to the audience to let them know when it’s published. So that’s a mouthful of things. That’s a lot of stuff, and between the websites, the coaching programs, coaching clients, writing books, I brought this up before we went on air, but I’d like to ask again, neither of you had it on your agenda growing up to be autoimmune educators, am I correct?

Mickey Trescott:

No. I mean my grandfather was actually a rheumatologist and I remember my mom trying to explain to me the type of clients and patients that he saw and what he did. And she said, “He works with people with joint pain.” But I never knew what an autoimmune disease was until I googled Hashimoto’s disease when I was 26. And this was because I was experiencing the symptoms and I had been to many doctors and struggled to get a diagnosis, but I clicked on the Wikipedia page and it said Hashimoto’s is an autoimmune disease.

And then, I clicked on that and that’s how I learned what it was. So, no, it was not on my agenda.

Michael:

You were 26?

Mickey Trescott:

Yeah.

Michael:

Okay. And Angie, how old were you when this became something in your life?

Angie Alt:

I developed my first autoimmune disease when I was 21. And I’m a little bit older than Mickey, just a little bit on the further side of gen X as compared to millennials. So I figured out what an autoimmune disease was when I looked it up in a medical encyclopedia.

Michael:

Like a physical book?

Angie Alt:

Yes.

Michael:

Weird.

Angie Alt:

Weird.

Michael:

I remember those. So 21 and 26. What was teenage and early 20s, Angie and Mickey, what did you want to do?

Mickey Trescott:

I mean for me I was a competitive equestrian. So I was obsessed with horses since I was a little girl. And I was really lucky to get parents who fostered that love of mine, and basically, just dumped me at the barn after school every day and a big horse girl. So when I was a teen, I was basically at the barn riding horses all the time, trying to figure out how I could get school done in between, but it was the focus of my life.

And honestly, I felt really good. I wasn’t a sick kid. I had asthma, which it turns out later was actually a dairy allergy, but other than that I really wasn’t, didn’t have any major issues. And so, when I entered my 20s and I continued to be active, although I wasn’t really into horseback riding anymore. I was into cycling and rock climbing and running, I was really active. And it hit me pretty hard when I started to feel unwell and not have the energy to do all of the active stuff that I had been doing before.

And since I didn’t know anyone with a chronic illness, I didn’t know anyone with an autoimmune disease, I kept it to myself. And I kind of suffered privately for a really long time before I was able to get a diagnosis.

Angie Alt:

Yeah. I was a lot like Mickey. I didn’t have really sickly teenage years or childhood. I didn’t struggle a lot with my health. I was pretty active and it just really wasn’t on my agenda. In my 20s, early 20s, I thought that I was going to maybe go into fashion merchandising. I had an unplanned, but absolutely welcome pregnancy, and as some people in your audience might know those times for women around hormonal changes like with pregnancy can be really vulnerable to the development of autoimmune disease. And it was after her birth that I developed my first disease.

Michael:

So both celiac, correct? Ended up being diagnosed. Okay. And for those who don’t know celiac disease is related to gluten and wheat. And both Hashimoto’s?

Angie Alt:

No. I don’t have Hashis.

Michael:

No. Just one.

Angie Alt:

Mickey has got the Hashis.

Michael:

All right. Just Mickey has the Hashis. And what were your… Did you have additional diagnoses?

Angie Alt:

I do. I have celiac disease, and then I also have lichen sclerosus, which is a skin disorder, an autoimmune skin disorder, and endometriosis, which is not firmly classified as autoimmune, but it’s kind of quacking like a duck and sort of in that associated list.

Michael:

And kind of responds similarly to the same interventions.

Angie Alt:

Yes.

Michael:

Okay. And so, the symptoms kick in which for you, Mickey, was fatigue and being unable to do the things that you wanted to do is what first got your attention, right? You’re just tired and didn’t feel well and couldn’t do what you wanted to do.

Mickey Trescott:

Yeah.

Michael:

Any other symptoms that really grabbed your attention when they-

Mickey Trescott:

I mean when you’re young, you’re kind of like, I don’t know if you haven’t really had any health problems before, it’s really easy to dismiss them. And so, in the beginning I would notice things like my fingertips were numb all the time. I was tired, my hair, I used to have really thick hair. It started shedding.

I noticed hair just everywhere coming out in clumps. Started having trouble sleeping. Started to be anxious about things that normally I’d never had anxiety before. And it would come in waves. Sometimes it would be debilitating. Then, it would be okay for a couple weeks. So I just kind of generally had this sense like something’s up, something’s happening. And I kept going to the doctor. Oh, I was very cold, very, very cold all the time. Which is like a really classic hypothyroid symptom, kept going into the doctor.

Doctors said, “We’re testing everything.” And at that time, I didn’t know that much about advocating for myself. I didn’t really know what test to ask for, but I kept saying, “I think there might be something up with my thyroid because I’m always very cold. I’m always very tired.” And they just said, “You’re a healthy weight and we don’t see healthy weight people suffering from thyroid problems.”

And so, I went through six doctors with basically the same dismissal. Some of them thought that maybe I had an eating disorder. Some of them thought that I should get treatment for depression, but I kept telling them, “I’m not depressed. I’m feeding myself, but I’m just really tired and I don’t think that these things are normal.”

And it took a while to basically work up the courage to do my own research, learn about Hashimoto’s. When I saw that Wikipedia page and I read about it, I knew that’s what I had and I cried and started processing. And sure enough, when I found a doctor that actually tested the antibodies. They came back positive, as well as the antibodies for celiac, so I knew that I had both kind of in one fell swoop.

Michael:

You said you cried, was that because you were happy that you found it and you weren’t crazy that you were imagining things or was it just overwhelming looking at a disease and having it named and being like that’s me, I have that?

Mickey Trescott:

I think it’s the second. So I had spent so much time just wondering if I was just going to die randomly, because I think the part of the experience of being chronically sick, especially when you’re young is that you have this intuitive sense that something’s wrong, but nobody else sees it, nobody else believes it, and at the worst cases they tell you that you’re crazy or you’re making it up or you’re trying to get attention.

And so, you feel like you have this secret piece of information that if everybody just knew they maybe would like pay attention or help you or even like I thought about death a lot. Like this just keep getting worse until I eventually die one day. And then, is everybody going to be like, “Oh, wait. She was trying to tell us.” So there’s that vulnerability and fear I think that really came forward when I saw Hashimoto’s. And it was like, “Oh, this is a disease and this is incurable.” And just kind of learning about it in that way was really upsetting to me.

Michael:

The incurable aspect or the this can’t be treated aspect, the conventional response to autoimmune conditions is pretty scary.

Mickey Trescott:

Oh, yeah. It’s terrible. And even in the diagnosis process. So I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s and celiac, and my diagnosis was not a relief, because they did nothing. I was on no treatment. I had already been on a gluten-free diet at the time and I had symptoms that were far worse than the typical presentation.

So with celiac disease, some people can get neurological symptoms and I had all neurological symptoms. I didn’t have very many gut symptoms. And so, for a while they thought maybe I was developing multiple sclerosis or lupus, but all of those specialists said that I needed to have those symptoms for a solid six months before they would consider diagnosing and treating me. And, yeah-

Michael:

Just go over there and suffer and come back if you get sick enough, right?

Mickey Trescott:

Yeah. And then, the treatments when you look up some of those gnarly treatments. It’s really expensive. At the time, I didn’t have health insurance. Part of the reason why I didn’t get a diagnosis of something that was like escalated was partially because the doctors were trying to protect me from having a pre-existing condition on my record, because back then we weren’t protected in the way that we are now.

And so, yeah, the way that the medical system diagnoses autoimmune diseases is really tricky. And it doesn’t set people up for success in having any hope for their future.

Michael:

Tricky is a very kind way to put it.

Mickey Trescott:

Yeah.

Michael:

Angie, what was your symptom into exploration into diagnosis story, was it similar?

Angie Alt:

Are you ready, Michael?

Michael:

I’m ready.

Angie Alt:

My story is a little bit crazy. So it started with lichen sclerosus, which I was diagnosed with shortly after my daughter was born when I was 21.

Michael:

How does that present, like an eczema type thing?

Angie Alt:

It affects the genitals. It’s usually irritation, itching. It can change the appearance and the elasticity of the skin. The skin’s very fragile. And I was noticing those changes and I started looking up those symptoms in the medical encyclopedia. I mean the internet did exist, but it wasn’t like as robust with like the self-diagnosis tools that we have now, right?

Michael:

Yeah. [inaudible 00:14:25] access to medical journal type-

Angie Alt:

Right.

Michael:

… [inaudible 00:14:28].

Angie Alt:

Yeah. So I looked it up and I found lichen sclerosus. And I said, “Oh.” It was like what Mickey just described with the Hashimoto’s as I read it, I knew already that was what was wrong. I didn’t really… I needed the doctor to confirm it, but I knew what was wrong. So I took that information and I went and saw the obstetrician who delivered my daughter and he did an exam. And he said, “Yeah. You’re right. That is what’s wrong.”

And he basically sent me with a steroid cream and said like go on your way. And what I didn’t know. The entry hadn’t included information about it being an autoimmune disease, and my doctor didn’t tell me that that’s what it was. So I didn’t really realize that I might be kind of in the domino chain now and at risk for developing further autoimmune diseases.

And I went on my way and the steroid cream was not very effective. And then, a few months later, I started to develop what I now realize were some of the first symptoms of celiac disease. But at the time, the kind of blanket diagnosis was IBS, and I was told that I must be anxious. And I was a new single mother so I was just under stress. And I kind of just let it go.

It was true. I was a young single mom and I was very busy, and I was really focused on caring for my kid and working and going to school. And the symptoms were not so debilitating that it was like daily kind of disrupting my life. And like Mickey described, it would kind of come and go in terms of how bad it was, which is really normal for autoimmune disease, especially early on.

And then, I got into my early… Well, I got into my late 20s and I met my husband. And we had trouble with fertility. I was experiencing secondary infertility. And then, he works in international development and we left to go live in West Africa for his job. And while we were in West Africa, I kind of like hit rock bottom with symptoms. It kind of all came on at once and it wasn’t intermittent anymore. It was really serious.

And I started having a lot of symptoms that seemed unrelated, but that I now realize were related to malnutrition, because my small intestine was very damaged by that point from celiac disease. And we were in a context with really limited medical care. And so, that made getting help and diagnosis really difficult. And also, the way the medical system there works is really to think about pathogenic issues and tropical diseases.

And so, I got evacuated several times to neighboring countries and eventually to Europe to try to get help and misdiagnosed with things like cerebral malaria. And finally, through that kind of process in my early 20s, I finally got the celiac diagnosis. And I also got a diagnosis of endometriosis, which has to be done with a surgery. So I eventually was in the United States and had surgery for that diagnosis. But I mean I spent time in a tropical diseases hospital in Belgium. I spent time in hospitals in Senegal, because the countries I lived in had even less medical care than Senegal. It was just a very confusing process.

In the end, by the time I got all three of my diagnosis firmly and kind of understood what was happening, I had seen doctors on three continents and probably 25 different kinds of doctors. At one point in the United States, I was told I should probably admit myself for a short stay in a psychiatric facility, because they could not pin down what was wrong and they thought that maybe I had a mental health issue.

And I was struggling some with my mental and emotional health. Like Mickey was saying, you are struggling with some of that-

Michael:

That’s pretty natural.

Angie Alt:

Yeah. It wasn’t because that was the main root issue, it was because I was very physically ill and I couldn’t get help.

Michael:

Yeah. And it’s scary like I’ve gotten a crash course on this the last few years with my wife’s autoimmunity. And it’s scary. When you’re young and sick and in pain and nobody can tell you what’s going on and nothing has helped, like it’s very alone.

Angie Alt:

Yeah. That’s a really great word to bring up. I would describe a lot of that process as having been very lonely. It felt like I heard everything from cerebral malaria to possibility of MS, possibility of leukemia at one point they were telling us. I mean it is scary. And it feels like who do you… You know something’s wrong, but you don’t know what the name of that thing is so you can’t really take effective action.

Michael:

Yeah. That’s really frustrating. It took us two flares to get a diagnosis, but multiple diagnosis, which we don’t even know are accurate at this point. So it’s still a mess. And that’s a whole another issue. We could talk about the diagnosis situation in the medical community of autoimmune conditions for a whole another hour, I’m sure.

So both of you are in 20s dealing with these conditions, learning that you have this or that, reading the books, getting the diagnosis. Well, one book, other internet. And did either of you have a background or a connection to, or something in like what would now be considered functional medicine or integrative health or natural approaches to things or was the first step rheumatology?

Mickey Trescott:

So I actually had a job just out of college working as a chef’s assistant, and the chef that I was assisting was actually a Chinese medical doctor, acupuncture very knowledgeable, and he was working with food, cooking for people. And so, I would do shopping for him and help him prep and cook.

And what’s really interesting is I was vegan for 10 years before I got my diagnoses and before I got super sick. And in that time, I had only been vegan for maybe two or three years when I met him. His name is Jason. And he told me like plant-based diets are great, vegan is great, but you really need the nutrients in meat. I’ve known a lot of people who are sick who are vegan and vegetarian and he had all his Chinese medicine ways of talking about the energy and the nourishment, but it’s like the iron, the zinc, the fats from the cold water fatty fish.

And I kept brushing them off like, “You know I feel great so this is working for me, whatever.” And so, that seed was planted. Eight years later when I actually got sick, I asked all my doctors like, “Hey, I’m vegan. Can you let me know if this is a problem? Could this be why I have neurological problems and why I have this numbness in my fingertips? I read about B vitamins, I read about B12, I know that some of this stuff could be symptoms of deficiency.”

And when I was tested I didn’t come, the lab work didn’t show that I was deficient in B12. Of course, now we know that you can have a functional deficiency that’s not caught by those early screens, but everyone told me, all my medical providers said that the vegan diet was fine. It wasn’t until I had hit the rock bottom. I was told that I needed to wait six months for a diagnosis of MS, lupus or both.

I was bedridden, walking down and up the stairs every day once was about all the energy that I had, couldn’t leave the house. And I was just like, “Nobody’s got anything for me so I’m going to have to do something for myself.” And that’s when I started questioning the veganism. That’s when I started to look into nutrient density. And it was all because of that influence that my friend Jason had, he wasn’t telling me you’re going to get sick someday, but he did plant that seed of like, “Hey, there’s some nutrients in animal foods and fish that you should think about.”

So that’s kind of where that I got that idea. And then, the internet, of course, when I started researching nutrient density and autoimmune disease and inflammatory foods. I made the connection that there was a big mismatch between all of the grains and the legumes that I was basing my vegan and vegetarian diet on with the animal foods and all the nutrients that I wasn’t getting so.

Michael:

And that’s a tough step for people to take. I’ve also encountered a lot of people that had to make transitions from a vegan vegetarian diet to including fish or animal foods and sometimes it’s, “Oh, I need this. I’m going to eat this.” But oftentimes it’s not that simple, but it sounds like you kind of had a blessing in disguise being around this guy. The chef that was doing that.

Mickey Trescott:

Yeah. And honestly, it took a long time. For anybody that’s there just know that it wasn’t like one day I decided I was going to eat me and it was fine. There were a lot of tears. There was a lot of sourcing. I had very strict idea, rules about where I wanted to source the animal foods.

And then, also I wanted to really prioritize that nutrient density. So I had the experience of eating red meat and feeling really warm and really good for the first time in a really long time. And that was a really good positive feedback that the nutrients in it, obviously, the B vitamins and iron were what my body wanted. And so, it was easier to continue going with the next step of incorporating the animal foods.

Michael:

So Mickey went from vegan to learning nutrient deficiencies and was lucky enough to be, you were lucky enough to be working with a chef that was well versed in some of this stuff, and that probably also led to your cookbook adventures, but we can get to that in a minute. But Angie, what was your discovery process like, like figuring out how to work with these things? Now, you were in a different place. You were in West Africa, you’re all over the place, this probably didn’t start till you got back to the US, I’m guessing.

Angie Alt:

Well, I kind of had a little bit of an early tip off in a similar way as Mickey. Before we left the United States when we were kind of dealing with our infertility diagnosis and not quite sure what to do about that. There was a natural medicine college just down the road from us, and they had like reduced pricing if you came in and saw students. And I went in and saw one of their students and same background, acupuncture and Chinese medicine.

And she put me on what she called a detoxification diet that she thought might help address some of the fertility concerns. And it included removing a number of things including wheat. And I felt much better while I was on that diet, but then we got our first orders to go overseas and my husband got his first post. And so, we had it overseas.

And it wasn’t really realistic to continue that diet there and I didn’t make the connection that it had to do with the food. I thought it was more about the overall detoxification effects. And so, overseas, I didn’t really make that connection. And then, when we came back to the United States, I did grow up in a family with a grandmother who is really like natural medicine minded, and my grandfather was a member of a Native American tribe.

And so, it was kind of accepted in my family that there might be alternatives outside of the conventional medical system. And I definitely wasn’t getting help in the conventional system. I had a doctor right before my celiac diagnosis tell me that I was so thin because I was a very stressed woman and I should eat all the pizza, pasta, and cookies I could stand, which would have killed me at the time.

So after I realized that I was kind of getting to the kind of the end of what the conventional system was going to be able to offer me, I started asking around to friends, and seeing if anybody had any thoughts on or ideas on what I could do. I felt pretty desperate, honestly. And I had a friend who had a friend who worked in a natural food store, and she wrote me an email. And she said, “Hey, I’ve been doing some reading. There’s this new stuff out there and I think you should research anything to do with lectins.”

And this was right after Robb Wolf published his first book. And so, I started doing a little bit of research online by that point, and I came across Robb’s book. And I picked it up. And he had like one sentence about how you might change your diet if you had an autoimmune disease and kind of go a little bit further than the paleo template.

And then, that led me to Sarah Valentine’s site, which was brand new. I mean she had like a couple blog posts up on that site, but I thought, “Oh, the autoimmune protocol probably means me. I have now three diagnosis. This is what I’m going to have to do.” But thankfully, I felt pretty adept in the kitchen. I had been overseas for three years, cooking in a really… It’s not like you could run out for fast food or anything. So it was easy for me to make the transition and I pretty much did it overnight into the autoimmune protocol. And I had very marked improvement in three days.

Michael:

Wow. Compliance is easy when it happens that fast I’m sure-

Angie Alt:

Well, yeah. Definitely.

Michael:

… [crosstalk 00:28:30] shifts and it’s like, “Okay. This is something. I should stick with this.”

Angie Alt:

Yeah. Definitely. It was easy to get my family’s buy-in. My husband was definitely on board. Then, he saw that it was definitely working. But also compliance is easy when you’re very desperate.

Michael:

That’s true.

Angie Alt:

And I was at a point where I had started developing anaphylaxis reactions to foods. I was in the ER a lot. We had to go and see a nurse who taught my daughter how to use an EpiPen on me. It was horrifying. So I was willing to make a really big change.

Michael:

That’s pretty severe and that was just your immune system getting further and further-

Angie Alt:

Yeah.

Michael:

Yeah. Both of you kind of… It seems there’s a seed planted on both ends luckily by someone, because there’s so many people, that’s what it takes. It takes someone or something or somebody’s sending you an article or talking to somebody or being open. And I think more and more people are open now, because, frankly, I think that shortcomings of the conventional approach to treating chronic illness is just more of a common knowledge.

I don’t know. I see a lot of comments even from people outside of our functional medicine bubble that crack jokes about they can’t do anything for this or won’t do anything for that. So I think there’s also more awareness. Like just the stuff I would teach clients 10 years ago that would blow their minds when I would bring it up. Now, I think is, a lot of it is just in the lexicon. I think a lot of it is just, terms like organic and gluten-free and grass-fed and those kind of things.

I remember teaching those in workshops 10 years ago and everyone would be sitting there with their eyes wide and like this was astonishing new information. And now every single thing possible has like sections at my local grocery store. So I think people are at a little bit advantage now versus 15, 20 years ago getting these little hits from the universe or these seeds planted by someone they run into or something like that.

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So you had a fast improvement, probably not everything, but some marked improvement. Mickey, did your system respond pretty well immediately?

Mickey Trescott:

So it was really slow actually for me. I remember, so I was really into journaling back then because when you have a disease that manifests in a really nebulous way like Hashimoto’s, it’s really hard to track one day to the next how you feel, because so many other things can also affect the same things like energy and moods and stuff like that. So I remember, I think from my third month in the change from the beginning to the end of the month was just that I felt like when I sat up and got up to go to the bathroom, because I was still mostly in bed all day.

I just felt a little bit less like I had to pass out, but I still had that feeling. And so, I used a lot of number scales to rate things 1 to 10, 10 being the worst. Like energy and moods and that kind of thing, so I could look back a month ago. Because when you track it every day, you can compare it to the day before or whatever. When you look back a month, you might be surprised. Like, “Oh, I was consistently, my fatigue was an eight and now it’s gone down to a seven or a six.” So that’s the type of progress I saw. It was really slow.

Eating meat was really interesting, because it was immediate. The first time I had red meat, my cheeks got pink. I actually took my body temperature. So when I was at my sickest, I routinely had 93 and 94 degree body temperatures. A lot of people-

Michael:

Oh, that’s as cold as I’ve ever heard.

Mickey Trescott:

I know. People say like, “How did your doctors not think that was hypothyroidism?” But six doctors I routinely would go in and I would tempt that low and they would still test my thyroid and say that I didn’t need treatment, which I think is wild. But that day that I had me, I took my temperature and it was 97. So still not normal, but I knew that warm feeling that I felt the color that came back to my cheeks, the temperature going up, that’s probably about as quick of a feeling as I ever got.

Everything was very, very slow. Weeks if not months before things resolved and some things, even that numbness in my fingertips, took two years. I thought that would be with me… There was a point when all my symptoms went away and just that numbness and my fingertips was there and I thought that I had damaged the nerves and it wouldn’t come back. But eventually it did so.

Michael:

Was that an all the time numbness or was it like [crosstalk 00:34:01] all the time?

Mickey Trescott:

Oh, yeah. All my pads, mostly on my last. The pads of all my fingers I had no feeling.

Michael:

Wow. Okay. And so, the meat right away with some symptoms, but everything else was pretty slow going and the fatigue and everything. And then, you had some immediate response, Angie, which was encouraging and I’m sure some lingering things.

Angie Alt:

Yeah. I mentioned earlier that I was struggling a lot with some mental and emotional health issues. I was having really severe anxiety and panic attacks pretty regularly. And that was the first thing that improved. By like 72 hours I actually wanted to smile. I was having a moment of relaxation. I wasn’t having anxiety. I didn’t have a panic attack for a 24 hour period. And that was noticeable even to my husband and daughter. They were like…

I hadn’t smiled in probably two years, because I felt so terrible and was just struggling in that way. And that was kind of the tip off to us that we were on the right track. Other symptoms took longer to resolve. I also had some numbness issues. I had a lot of really deep bone pain, especially in my rib cage. That took a while to kind of heal and feel better. But encouragingly, it wasn’t just mental and emotional health improvement that was pretty rapid. The other thing that was really rapid was that even though I had been on a gluten-free diet, but not full AIP to that point, I had not had any change in my celiac, my gluten antibodies.

And that was really frustrating. I knew how to read labels. I knew how to cook and handle my kitchen. It wasn’t really like I was accidentally exposing myself over and over, but it wasn’t enough in that kind of debilitated state. And it wasn’t moving the numbers. And six weeks after I started the autoimmune protocol, I had another blood a draw and my gluten antibodies had dropped by half. So that really told us that we were on the right track.

I also had other nutrient deficiencies that started to kind of correct and I would say, I did deal… I had SIBO was an underlying health condition that I needed to have treated and that kind of prevented some progress in some ways, but by six months, it was in a lot of ways like having a new body. I had a lot more energy. My skin was healthier. My hair was starting to get healthier. My resilience in terms of stress and things like that was a lot higher. And by a year, I mean it was so slow, but by a year, I changed every aspect of my life to teach other people how to do this, because I was like, “This works.”

Michael:

Yeah. And I want people to hear these time frames we’re talking about here, because you said six months, a year. Mickey’s recovery energy-wise and things were slow and this was months, this was a year. I remember… I haven’t worked one-on-one with health clients in a while, but there was commonly like, “Will I feel better in a few weeks? Am I going to feel better in this?”

And like, “Yes, and…” Some stuff maybe, yes, and how long did it take you to get into this state? And that these are, this doesn’t… We’re not peddling a quick fix here. This is a lifestyle change that gradually over time. You said you started to feel like you had a new body. Mickey’s body temperature came back to that of the living. And I’m sure that you could relate to feeling kind of like you had a new body or a new source of energy over time, but these things took time.

And both of you decided after going through this process and shifting your own stuff and feeling better that this was something you wanted to help other people with. You just said that yes, Angie, Mickey was that a quick decision for you too to being like this worked for me, I want to make cookbooks, I want to help people or-

Mickey Trescott:

Yeah. So I spent a lot of time, when I was sick I lost my job and I was unable to work. And so, I had a lot of time to think about when I went back to work what I wanted to do. Which I think a lot of people in their 20s, you’re just starting your life. I had been newly married. We were just trying to figure out what we were going to do, even like we were in a relatively new city wondering if we were going to stay there. So there’s a lot of big decisions you’re making, but usually it’s easy to stick with a job that maybe isn’t ideal for a little longer just because you’re seeing where life takes you.

And that’s kind of where I was when I got sick. Being sick really gave me a big perspective to understand how limited time can be and how I really wanted to do something that I found fulfilling and brought me joy. And the best job I’d ever had was that cooking job. And so, I wanted to go back to work as a cook. And I also wanted to be in the kind of adjacent to maybe people that had chronic illness. So specifically, I wasn’t… I didn’t set out to become a health coach, but I ended up cooking for a family that had kids that were disabled and they had a lot of really unique dietary needs, which I really connected with because I had that as well.

And so, that’s how I got back on my feet after recovering a little bit. And when I went to work, I went to work for this family just part time. And it was I got myself healthy to the point where I could do the 15 to 20 hours a week work at their house, cooking for them, and being with their kids, but then I would come home and it was a 100% recovery so that I would be okay to work.

So it wasn’t like I got better, and then I was able to just take on a job. When I started working I actually took a few steps back, because the stress of actually working was right at my limit. And then, when I felt like I had recovered more. So this was maybe a year, even a year and a half into my whole healing journey, that’s when I started to think about NTA. Because I realized that maybe coaching different people on the different elements of elimination diets and health would be more fulfilling than just literally being the person preparing food for one family. I thought about the impact that I could make with more people.

And then, of course, from that the cookbook came out of just sensing that there was this community developing of people that cared about allergen free food who were doing AIP. I connected to Angie around that time. Sarah and just noticing how many people were out there that were looking for recipes and there were none. So kind of that all happened at the same time that I was living proof that it was working and all my friends that were online.

Angie and Sarah were, is working for them too. And we were just like, “We’re on to something. Let’s share about it.”

Michael:

Yeah. So it was just kind of a natural transition. Your time as a cook, you understand what goes into it. This is not a simple fast thing and we, in our house had the benefit of I was already in this field. I knew autoimmune paleo. I knew of both of your books and the website and others which now exist. And there’s tons of resources. And I still as the one who was shopping and cooking and doing all the things when she was sick was overwhelmed at times, just with the scope of it.

And I like all of, both of your recipes, because they’re not, they don’t take me four hours to make. I think you designed your recipes in a way that people could make them because of your experience as a cook and as a chef is… Like working with a family that you saw and struggling with food preparation. It was like, “Man, if I give them a recipe like that, that’s going to take somebody four hours to make, whereas this is something simple, can I actually find these ingredients?”

Because some autoimmune recipes I’ve stumbled upon they include like three of the most obscure ingredients I’ve ever heard. And then, I have to spend like days trying to track down this one thing. And so, the simplicity of it. I think maybe having that experience with that family that struggled with food preparation-

Mickey Trescott:

Yeah. Actually, Michael, my job was I had five hour shifts. I worked three days a week and I would show up, take stock of what was in the kitchen. So look in the fridge, look in the pantry, make a meal plan, go to the store, buy all the food, bring it back, and then batch cook all the food. And they wanted basically lunch and dinner for the whole family with tons of food allergies and-

Michael:

Sounds like my life for nine months last year.

Mickey Trescott:

… [crosstalk 00:43:03], and so it was like a puzzle. I loved it. Because it was trying to work with what they had, also what I could source at the same store. And then, time, time management. I also had to clean everything up. So just figuring out how to do one pot things, how to make the most of different [crosstalk 00:43:21]-

Michael:

Because what would work in that setting would work for [crosstalk 00:43:24]-

Mickey Trescott:

Totally. It’s batch cooking. It’s batch cooking. It’s just really efficient batch cooking. So-

Michael:

My life without batch cooking would be a nightmare. People always like, “How do you cook all your meals?” I said, “I do it twice a week, that’s how.” Because if I did it every single lunch and every single day, it would never-

Mickey Trescott:

Well, in my first job as a chef that’s actually more the model they had, because they had people who, multiple people who were cooking and cleaning, and it was like a whole operation every single day to make the menu. And then, somebody would go out, and then multiple people would cook, and then multiple people would clean up and that’s Downton Abbey type of situation. People don’t have a staff. You know what I mean?

And in order to have a unique meal that is freshly prepared for every single meal that’s what it takes, and nobody’s doing that.

Michael:

No. That’s perfect. And Angie, you said you cooked a lot, obviously, living abroad. I don’t know where in West Africa, what country were you in?

Angie Alt:

I lived in Guinea and Sierra Leone.

Michael:

Okay. So not many fast food and casual dining restaurants in there.

Angie Alt:

No. Almost none. So, yeah. I already was really familiar with needing to cook everything from scratch and kind of make do with the ingredients that were available, kind of make it happen. But even before that, I was a pretty adapt home cook. I didn’t cook the same types of foods. I definitely cooked a standard American style, but I was really familiar with cooking it for myself and had spent a lot of time in the kitchen with my grandmother as a kid.

And I said to Mickey a lot in the beginning as I started to coach more and more volume with my group program, and she was working on her cookbooks and everything. I would say to her, “Mickey, the problem is that people don’t know the Home Ec basics. You need to teach them the Home Ec basics.”

Michael:

That’s so true. We don’t learn those things anymore.

Angie Alt:

Right. I mean it’s kind of like the cure is in our kitchens, but a lot of us don’t know how to use our kitchens anymore. So teaching those basics was pretty important. And I think if I hadn’t had that background, it would have been a lot harder for me.

Michael:

How did you two end up? Where you in a website together? How did you end up connecting and deciding to work together?

Mickey Trescott:

Well, there were six people that we knew of that were doing AIP at the same time and we all connected. And there may have been more, but I’m pretty sure that if they were blogging or like, and Facebook groups like they were disease centered, we would have found out about them. So there were six women. We created our own private Facebook group back in 2012-ish.

Michael:

Do I know any of the other ones?

Mickey Trescott:

Yeah.

Angie Alt:

So Sarah Valentine is one of them.

Mickey Trescott:

Eileen Laird is another one. Christina Feindel, I don’t know if she blogs anymore. Whitney Gray, and we all had different autoimmune diseases and we all had our respective blogs where we were just kind of sharing what was working for us. And I think, Angie, I first heard about you when you guest posted for Sarah’s blog. And I think you replied to a comment, or I replied to an article that you wrote about traveling, and then I think Sarah connected us over email.

Angie Alt:

Yes. I think that’s what happened. My husband was getting-

Michael:

This is the paleo mom website, yeah?

Angie Alt:

Yes. This is her paleo mom website which was much smaller and much different than it is now, but my husband was getting transferred to the East Coast from a West Coast job after we had returned from Africa. And I was having to travel with him while we looked for a house and everything and still keep AIP up and keep it up in a little tiny efficiency kitchen in a hotel room and Sarah-

Michael:

So degree of difficulty [inaudible 00:47:23]

Angie Alt:

Yeah. Exactly. It was like I was getting more and more difficulty, steeper and steeper challenge, and I was writing about it and Sarah was like, “Write it up for my blog. This is amazing. I can’t believe you’re doing it and traveling.” And I was like, “Yeah. I’m doing it. It’s working.” So I wrote about it, and then Mickey and I kind of connected over that.

And, yeah, we were in this small group together, because to our knowledge, visibly, we were the only six people literally in the world doing this and telling the public how we were doing it and how it was working for us, and that really gave us something to share.

Michael:

That’s pretty cool. It was like a underground food club.

Angie Alt:

Yes.

Michael:

AIP club. Don’t talk about AIP club. That’s pretty cool. And I’ve done a bit while traveling too, the Instant Pot has been indispensable in that regards. I’ve done it in hotel rooms and that’s been the tool that’s been the most helpful there. Before that thing I don’t know what would have happened.

Angie Alt:

Michael, we’ve been doing this before the Instant Pot.

Mickey Trescott:

Yeah. We did it before we the Instant Pot.

Michael:

I don’t know how that would have happened-

Angie Alt:

Like we did it before like EPIC Bars came out-

Mickey Trescott:

Before HotLogic came out.

Angie Alt:

There were no plantain chips.

Michael:

Yeah. Now, plantain chips, cassava chips, there’s that new company that has all the little cassava chips. We love those. I forget what they’re called, plant-

Mickey Trescott:

There were no convenience foods.

Angie Alt:

There was no… Yeah. None of the convenience [crosstalk 00:48:50]-

Mickey Trescott:

It was like an apple.

Angie Alt:

And going on a plane I remember thinking like, “Whoa. You’re going to get on a plane?”

Michael:

Yeah. That takes some dedication. I know the work that it takes that it took me to get into all of it in the recent years with a lot of those things. Now, there’s been even more advancements in the last couple years like from [inaudible 00:49:17] one to [inaudible 00:49:18] three, Siete started to exist and we could do cassava tortillas, and that changed the game quite a bit, not having to make those from scratch and just shout out to a few of our favorite brands.

Discovering japchae, sweet potato noodles was something that flipped the game a little. So our round one of it was much more challenging than round three, and that’s only in the last few years. And so, I’m sure that’s been kind of an exponential, because they’re seeing there’s a market for it. Companies are seeing there’s a market for it so a lot of the things that you can buy at the store now, were things that you would either make from scratch or just weren’t, didn’t exist and your diet was more simple.

Angie Alt:

Yeah. Definitely. It was a lot more simplified. In some ways it was much more challenging. In other ways, Mickey and I have talked about this a lot. In other ways, it was kind of easier, because along with any processed foods, even foods that are directed at a healing community, they’re maybe not going to be the best foods for you. They’re probably going to be higher in sugar. There’s a lot more temptation now to not focus on the nutrient density.

And we had no choice but to focus on the nutrient density because all of our foods really were whole fresh foods. There wasn’t any of the products that exist now. And I mean not to say that I’m not super happy that all of that happened compared to 2012 when we began, it’s like an explosion.

Mickey Trescott:

Angie, I was just going to say like I was just at the Whole Foods two blocks from my house before we got on here. And there are literally paleo cookies from Jack’s Paleo Cookies that are labeled as AIP and to go from like within 10 years to be six people doing this protocol to having cookies for it in a grocery store with a label right by your house, it’s just… It’s wild how far the movement has come. It’s really cool. Yeah.

Michael:

I just remembered your nutrient dense cookbook is in that stack right there on my table right now. Yeah. And that it goes [inaudible 00:51:26] AIP is a step further, but with gluten-free things, it’s the same thing. I’ve seen so many people like, “I’m going to go gluten-free.” And then, it’s just nothing but cookies and cupcakes and crackers [crosstalk 00:51:35] whatever.

And they’re like, “I don’t feel good still.” And I’m like, “Yeah, you ate two boxes of cookies yesterday.”

Mickey Trescott:

Right.

Michael:

But, yeah, you guys were kind of forced into the nutrient-dense version of it, because there wasn’t all the other convenience options and things. So that started… So it started as blogs and kind of like I need to get this information out there. And then, both went to NTA. NTA is Nutrition Therapy Association. They teach NTPs, nutrition therapy practitioners.

I think I know more NTPs than any other certification or training out of all of them that are out there and always give it a thumbs up. And so, did you go through that together or separate?

Angie Alt:

We went separate. Mickey did her training first.

Michael:

Okay. And so, then it went to clients and the blog and cookbooks. And then, where was the idea to start training practitioners?

Mickey Trescott:

I think when we were really booked up really quickly and there was a lot of demand. And actually, at one point we created a company with Sarah Valentine, because she’s a researcher, PhD level researcher, but she’s not qualified to work one-on-one. So we were thinking that we would bring on even more coaches and kind of train them in our method of basically implementing AIP, but it was really clear that even with 5 or 6 or 10 or 20 coaches, it was not even going to start to meet the demand of the people that wanted to work one-on-one with coaches that knew about AIP-

Michael:

Six people can’t teach 100 million autoimmune patients.

Mickey Trescott:

Yeah. Exactly. It’s the math, you could do the math and it’s like [crosstalk 00:53:20]-

Michael:

Each person just needs 52,000 clients.

Mickey Trescott:

Exactly. And if anybody listening is like, “Should I become a health coach? There are lots of health coaches out there.” Yes. We need everybody.

Angie Alt:

Yeah. We need an army.

Mickey Trescott:

Of course, if it’s a thing that you are matched, you’re going to find fulfillment and it’s a good career for you, but jump in. But, yeah, there’s definitely an overwhelming number. We noticed there were an overwhelming number of people that wanted to work with AIP, wanted to work with us.

And so, we developed a training program that basically synthesized all of our experience working with clients that there is this kind of by the book AIP, which Sarah Valentine, of course, wrote that book with 2000 scientific references. It was basically her best guess based on the literature on best process forward, and for people that want to do AIP and it’s very detailed, very thought out, but there are some areas where coaches then can bring in the expertise of specific imbalances.

And so, digestive imbalances are really common, environmental, advocating and working within conventional specialties. So a lot of people with autoimmune disease need to work with their providers in order to troubleshoot. Sometimes they need medication or surgery. It doesn’t mean that they failed on AIP. We see a lot of people have their actual best health by combining both natural and conventional treatments.

So all of that and put it into a program that is for all kinds of practitioners. So we’ve had doctors, we’ve had healthcare advocates, we’ve got therapists, nurses. So lots of conventional providers all the way up to doctors. Lots of natural providers like naturopathic doctors and herbalists. And it’s a great community of practitioners that all network with each other and share clients with each other, refer. But all have a really good foundation in AIP that they can apply to whatever modality they’re trained in doing. So that’s basically [crosstalk 00:55:32]-

Angie Alt:

We kind of took Sarah’s deep science side of things and we combined it with what we knew about actual implementation. And so, we’re training our practitioners to have both of those sides of the equation and be able to actually utilize it. And I mean at the end of this week, we’re going to graduate… We’ve had 600 people go through the process now. So we’re building an army, Michael.

Michael:

600 practitioners?

Angie Alt:

Yes.

Michael:

Wow. That’s a lot.

Angie Alt:

Yes.

Michael:

If you multiply that by how many people each practitioner can work with, you only have to train like 6000 more practitioners and we’ll get to everybody. That’s pretty amazing. I was working with clients, and then I met Joe, who I found at Rebel Health Tribe with and we started to do large scale educational stuff and master classes and webinar series, and those kind of things.

And we realized we could reach 20,000 people at once. And so, we started to do those and we did a film series a few years ago that we hit a couple hundred thousand people with, and now I’m working on another platform that’s large scale, and exponential reach shifts there. And there’s something to one-on-one work that isn’t, there’s nothing that’s quite like it. There’s a really unique experience there, but I see, I have the same desire to be like, “Okay, how can I scale this to impact more people faster, sooner, quicker?” Because there’s a lot of people… I mean autoimmune numbers are staggering and growing.

Angie Alt:

And growing.

Michael:

And when I first started 12 years ago, 13 years ago my master’s program, mine’s in exercise physiology so I started exercise, then nutrition, then functional medicine, and there was 70 known autoimmune conditions. And then, now I know there’s over 100 that have been acknowledged. And it’s not that these conditions are just appearing, necessarily, it’s just they’re being figured out a little bit more.

Putting all this antibody with this organ, with this system, with this thing, and there’s more than that, I’m sure. And we need more practitioners that are literate in these things. So it’s amazing what you’re both doing. And the last question I wanted to ask is how has this impacted you both? Not only your own healing, and I’m sure that there’s a lot there too that we could talk about how’d your life shift after you were feeling better and getting those glimmers of hope.

I think what you did with that hope was create something else and created the blogs, created the cookbooks, created the trainings, and now you’ve seen that same light switch go on and tons of people probably between clients, between people and group programs, and even the practitioners probably when they get ahas or come back to you and tell you about a client they worked with or something like, what has it been like to see those results and those changes and the impact that this work has had on individuals who are suffering with various autoimmune conditions?

Mickey Trescott:

So I think the biggest thing is that Angie and I both connected over the idea that we really wanted to make it easier for the next person. So bringing it back to how we felt when we were diagnosed and we were looking for answers that just completely dismissed, that epically vulnerable, and nobody saw us and nobody knew what it felt like, and just channeling that into creating a system and sharing information so that nobody has to feel that way again.

Honestly, that’s my goal is like we’re in this to change the way that autoimmune disease is viewed and treated. And initially, I would have said like, “In the United States.” But now we have people translating all of this information into different languages and developing recipes for different cultures so it can spread throughout the world. But I think that really comes forward when we think about the medical studies.

So again, to be 10 years from 6 women doing a crazy thing they read about in a sentence of the book, and on the internet together to 10 years later having it be validated in not just one, not just two, but hopefully, now spoiler alert, maybe three medical studies. It’s a drop in the bucket of kind of I think where it’s going to go in the research, but that’s how actually things change in doctor’s office.

So my hope is now when somebody goes to their gastroenterologist and maybe that gastroenterologist is reading the most current journals and has read about AIP, they might not dismiss their patients. They might say, “Actually, there’s a couple diets. Here’s one of them. Maybe here’s a brochure or maybe look at this website.”

I mean if that spares somebody the suffering that Angie and I went through for years of our life. That’s one thing, but then the second thing is all the people that are finding out maybe word of mouth, from friends, from family. I mean I think that’s the most common way the word is out that everything is out there for free. Everything’s out there on our blog. We don’t keep anything behind a paywall.

The podcast, we really believe in sharing this far and wide. So I don’t know, Angie, if you have anything to add to that, but I think we’re both really mission driven people and we’re not playing small so.

Angie Alt:

Yeah. I mean, honestly, it’s hard for me to add, usually, because I’m a very passionate person and I will get emotional to the point of not being able to speak probably. I get pretty tearful. But, yeah, that’s it. I mean autoimmune disease is complex and we need a nuanced solution. And the conventional method alone is not working and this does seem to be working. And we are proving it in studies.

And when I started my group program in 2014, I said, “If this could be kind of like the standard of care in 20 years, I would feel like Mickey and I had been very successful.” We had made it easier for that next person. And there years ago, I realized that we were going to do it in 10 and we’re just about there. And that’s an incredible feeling. And she’s right. I get up every day and I think, “How are we going to make this easier today?”

Michael:

Are we supposed to grumble that somebody has it easier than us? And then, we walked six miles up the hill both ways to school and they need to suffer like we suffered… No.

Mickey Trescott:

I mean here’s the thing. When you email us-

Michael:

I’m poking fun in something otherwise-

Mickey Trescott:

When you email us and you’re like upset because you can’t have cassava flour, and there’s too many cassava flour desserts, it’s hard for me to take some of the problems that current AIPs have. I want to be like, “Hey, let me tell you how it was in the way back. We didn’t even have cassava flour.”

Michael:

Nobody knew what a cassava was.

Angie Alt:

Yeah.

Mickey Trescott:

And unless you grew up in Central America-

Michael:

Yeah.

Mickey Trescott:

… like sorry.

Michael:

And those cultures have been a godsend to the AIP.

Angie Alt:

Yes.

Michael:

Really between plantains and cassava and yucca that’s… Cassava and yucca the same thing sort of kind of, but-

Angie Alt:

We owe a debt of gratitude to the foundation that they laid with their ancestral foods. That’s definitely true. But, yeah, I mean when we’re talking about kind of the-

Michael:

First world AIP problems [crosstalk 01:03:22]

Angie Alt:

Yes. The first world AIP problems, sure. That’s the kind of stuff that can make Mickey and I a little bit annoyed. But when we’re talking about the large scale thing, yeah, we definitely want to make it easier.

Michael:

Yeah. No. I know. I know. So do I. I get it. I was just cracking a joke that it’s a thing I see all the time that everything should be hard-

Angie Alt:

I know.

Michael:

… because it was hard for me.

Angie Alt:

Because it was hard for me. Yeah.

Michael:

Yeah. No. That’s backwards to reality. So I’m kind of glad that-

Mickey Trescott:

Yeah. Michael, I think I like the analogy that it’s like when you find an open door, it’s like you can shut it or you can hold it open for everyone else. And I think we’re just trying to get, take some dynamite, blast open the door. We’re like, “Come in here with us, everybody. Come on.” Because there’s so much power. And when you think about what that does to our society.

I mean we haven’t even talked about what that means. One person feeling better the ripple effect that has on their family [crosstalk 01:04:24]-

Michael:

Every one in their life.

Mickey Trescott:

I mean it’s just, it’s wild. So it’s really important work.

Michael:

I don’t know if I would have understood that a few years ago like I do now. And I know what happens in our life when Mira’s in a flare, and the ripple that has going outwards on everybody that I am… I work… Like that I engage with, that she engages with too and it’s exponential and how it impacts lives, and especially those with kids too.

A few of our guests in the season got very ill when they had small children and couldn’t participate in life in a way that mothers feel they need to participate. And so, then there’s a whole other layer on top of it. And so, then it impacts the kids, then it impacts the husband, then it impacts the family, and all these other things.

So it’s not just for the individuals with autoimmune disease that this is a gift, it’s for everybody that they touch. And ultimately, from a societal standpoint in our mass failures with conventional medicine’s approach to autoimmune disease, and the exponential cost that it costs in our health care system when millions and millions of people have autoimmune diseases, each person that takes this route and ends up not having to go to a doctor, not having to have a surgery, not having to have whatever expensive pills or drugs or things.

And we’re not making medical claims or promises right here, but that is happening and that’s untold amounts of money as well, because we all know how affordable medical care in the United States is.

Angie Alt:

Yeah. I mean we could go on about that. I mean… And even if it means a person is going to have less surgeries or their medication is going to work more effectively, because their baseline health is better and they’re going to need less medication. I mean it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. There’s still so much room to save, so much money and just-

Michael:

Even one surgery is like $1.1 bazillion dollars, so each little increment is chipping away at it. I think there’s more hope for people now with autoimmune conditions that they can manage them in a way that is healthy and have some of their life back in a way that is possible to do and sustainable.

I think that possibility exists now more than it ever has. I know that definitely that I’ve seen. It’s been a gradual increase largely because of all the ladies in the chat room with the blogs. And so, I think I came across it shortly after that, because I remember when Sarah’s website was really new, and when it was small, and now it is not small. And her book that is also not small, but there’s been that book, oh my, that’s a book.

That’s a serious book if you guys want to check out a book out there, but do you still talk to her? Do you guys still all communicate?

Angie Alt:

Yeah. She’s our partner with AIP certified coach.

Michael:

With the practitioner training?

Angie Alt:

Right. She handles the science. She teaches the folks the deep dive on the science and we teach implementation.

Michael:

Perfect. Well, I apologize to Sarah if she’s out there for leaving her out of the bio. She’s the third partner on the training for the practitioners. But I would actually like to… This just came to a head and I could have talked to you about this after, but I’m going to say it right now. I’d like to get some info on that. Do we have a lot of practitioners in our audience?

So I’ll gather it from you guys and we’ll put links below to pretty much everything that we talked about. So don’t worry about trying to memorize names or links or anything while you’re listening to this, I’ll get all the links from them that are relevant, but if you’re a practitioner, we’ll have that down there below too to go get information. If you want to become very autoimmune literate and be able to effectively work with autoimmune patients and clients. I think that every health practitioner at this point should be trained in such a thing, because I think my last 12 or 13 clients before I stopped working one-on-one with clients, every single one of them had autoimmune conditions.

And even before that, the ones who weren’t diagnosed probably had autoimmune conditions. So thank you so much for sharing your journey here and sharing your story here. But more so than my little podcast for doing all of these huge things that are blowing those doors open and giving people a way forward that they didn’t have before. And it was grueling to get there. I’m sure like figuring all these things out and doing them, especially traveling in hotel rooms pre-convenience AIP foods, I can’t even imagine trying to do that.

No Instant Pot, my life doesn’t exist. I don’t know what that would be. So thank you for doing the hard work. And then, making it easier for everybody else. And I’m sure the benefits have already reached many, many people. So thank you so much both of you.

Mickey Trescott:

No problem.

Michael:

And this brings us to the end of today’s episode. Head on over to rebelhealthtribe.com/kit to access the RHT quick start bundle, which includes four full-length presentations from our RHT master classes, two downloadable PDF guides, and a 15% off coupon which you can use in our retail shop. If you’re on Facebook, come join our Rebel Health Tribe group over there. And finally, if you like the show, please subscribe. Leave a review and share with your friends. Thanks for joining us. We’ll see you again soon.