If you have been recently diagnosed with an autoimmune condition and if you are reading this post, you probably understand by now that what you eat plays a huge role in your healing process. The autoimmune protocol or AIP will reduce the inflammation in your guts, heal the lining of your intestines, calm down your immune system and promote healing (as well as reducing or eliminating your symptoms!).
But you might feel overwhelmed at this point, wondering how you are going to manage your special diet while cooking for the rest of the family. In your mind, you picture yourself running a restaurant on a daily basis! It doesn’t have to be that way. If you have been on an airplane before, you have probably heard the preflight safety instructions. Remember the tidbit about the oxygen mask that you have to place on yourself before performing the task on your children? Well, it is the same when you have to adopt a new diet for health reasons.
Before anything else, take care of yourself first and get your health back on track. Do whatever you have to do to start healing your body and alleviate your symptoms. Now how to manage your new dietary adjustments while cooking at the same time for your spouse and children?
The trick is to switch them to the paleo diet while you are healing your body on the autoimmune protocol. AIP is just a version of the paleo diet, more restrictive. With a little bit of planning and by keeping some ingredients off your plate, you can easily prepare one single meal that will be paleo and AIP compliant at the same time. For example, during the summer, I love to prepare grilled meat with a colorful fresh kale salad. This meal is AIP compliant, but I might add some tomatoes for the others and some sugar-free barbecue sauce on their meat. See how you can make it work?
By switching your family to a paleo lifestyle, it will be much easier for you to handle all the cooking, plus in the long run it is much better for their health and well-being!Below you will find some further helpful tips to help you transition your family to the paleo diet.
- Transition your family slowly to paleo foods: I would not recommend switching your family full on to paleo cold turkey! A slow approach will get you better results, with a lot less drama. Start by removing all the processed junk food, high in salt and refined sugar. Then you can swap American standard food for healthier paleo versions (like cauliflower mash instead of mashed potatoes).
- Talk to your kids and family about the numerous benefits of eating paleo: Share the knowledge you have and explain to your family how they will feel and look better by eating fresh nutritious food. Repeat the message over and over again; it will eventually sink in. My teenage girls really got the message when they saw their skin improve and their PMS symptoms alleviated!
- Be a role model yourself: Teach by example. Your children are learning by watching you making the right choices. They see you choose an unsweetened iced green tea at Starbucks instead of a caramel frappuccino! They will follow your lead.
- Be prepared to negotiate and make concessions: You can’t control everything your family is eating outside of the house, especially if you have older kids. That’s ok. Just make sure that everything they eat and drink at home is top notch paleo. With time and some gentle reminders, you will slowly bring them on board of the paleo train, for good.
- Always have healthy snacks on hand at home: When teenage hunger strikes, there is no stopping them from eating! When my girls come back from school, they make a beeline for the fridge every single day. If they don’t find anything there, that’s when they start digging in the cupboards. Does this ring a bell? I find that if I keep healthy snacks on hand and visible on the top shelf of the refrigerator, they will reach for those. Good choices are cold chicken, fruits, carrot and celery sticks, chia seed pudding, apple slices with sunflower seed butter, ham, avocado, beef jerkey.
- Be creative and show your family that eating paleo can be yummy: Adding colorful ingredients to your meals, garnishes and some basic plate styling will go a long way towards winning your family over! Don’t just slap the food on a plate; instead spend some time “behind the scene” to arrange the food nicely on the plates and decorate with a touch of color (some shredded carrots or beets) and some kind of garnish (fresh herbs finely chopped). I keep these add-on ingredients prepared in advance in my fridge as I don’t always have a lot of time to dedicate in the kitchen.
- Recreate your favorite comfort food, paleo style: They are some healthier options out there that will replicate standard comfort food in a paleo version. Some good recipes are noodles (vegetable noodles – you will need a vegetable spiralizer for that), pizza (with a cauliflower crust), chicken nuggets, cauliflower rice, sweet potato fries. These paleo comfort foods will keep your crew happy and satisfied.
- Don’t ask for perfection. Paleo is a process: For most of us, going on the paleo diet or AIP diet didn’t happen overnight. Sometimes it is a long process with even some backward steps. You have been there yourself. Don’t despair or get angry if your children eat a muffin over at a friend’s house. The most important is to get them back on track at home and continue to serve them fresh, nutrient-dense and wholesome paleo meals on a regular basis.
- Your family will come to realize by themselves the difference between fresh whole food and junk food: After a while, the benefits of eating healthy, unprocessed, nutrient dense food will become evident for your family. Inevitably, your children will notice the difference between the school cafeteria food and the delicious and colorful meals they get at home; it tastes better and it makes them feel (and look) better!
- Give encouragements and praises to your children for their good choices: Take the time to notice when your children are demonstrating healthy food awareness and give them positive reinforcement. “You made a good decision by choosing the apple over the potato chips after school!” or “I noticed that you ate all your vegetables on your plate for dinner, that’s awesome!”.
Looking into eating clean, found out I’m gluten free and now I need to stay away from dairy and nuts. I feel like so much is being taken away from me, so now I’m looking to find new ways to cook for myself. Any recipes or suggestions you can send my way would be very helpful. Thank you.
The first few days, weeks can be quite brutal indeed. One does feel like everything is taken away and we wonder what on earth we are going to eat! My best suggestion at this point would be to change the way you look at this: clean up your fridge and pantry and keep only what you can eat. Go shopping for fresh produce, fruits and meats. Once you are done shopping, look at the big pile of food you have. Everything you have in front of you is AIP compliant and safe to eat. That is what you are going to play with in your kitchen. Use your imagination to create new combinations that you wouldn’t have taught of before. And for each meal, I like to follow these guidelines: protein (fish or meat), lots of low starch vegetables (leafy greens, cucumber, broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, chard, collard greens, zucchini) and 1 higher starch vegetable (like sweet potatoes, yams). I am working on a “how-to” post to show how I am quickly putting healthy meals together. There will be a lot of pictures and step-by-step instructions. If you receive my newsletter, you won’t miss it! And thank you for stopping by and leaving a comment.
Love to have your recipes as a disease I had 30 years ago is starting to come back…….Graves disease which is an overactive thyroid. I’m not sure but I think it may be an autoimmune disease (?). I would like to handle this naturally but will have to make the changes slowly. We love our bread, rice and pasta.
Wholegrain of course.
Thanks for your help. ☺
Hello Julie!
Thanks for leaving a comment! Yes Graves disease is autoimmune. Is there a functional medicine practitioner who could help you with this? You know to run some basic tests and give advice on which supplements you might need?
I would love to get some advice on how to eat this way when your budget is very restricted. My four kids and I live pretty much on child support, and I don’t see how I can afford grass-fed beef (for example). Can you give some hints for eating well, on a strict budget, from your local grocery store? What are the absolute basic pantry items that you would recommend?
Hello Renee 🙂
– The first thing I would say is that you don’t have to buy organic and grass-fed meat to follow the AIP diet. It is better, yes, but only if you can afford it! It is much more important to remove all the junk food, processed food from your diet, and this will save you money as well.
– Buy local and seasonal as much as you can. For example, don’t buy raspberries in the middle of winter!
– Buy in bulk and look for sales. If you can stock up on pantry items (like coconut milk) when there is a promotion, or a buy one get one free, take advantage of it.
– Shop at Costco if you have one nearby.
– Save all your bones to make bone broth! You can freeze them and put them directly in your crock pot when you have enough to fill up your crock pot.
My recommendations for pantry items are: coconut milk (in cans), olive oil, coconut oil, sea salt, and some herbs and spices to give flavor to your dishes.
All the rest is nonessential.
I hope this helps! Good luck 🙂
Thanks, Sophie! I’ll post this on my fridge as a reminder of how to shop. 🙂
We’ve found that simply limiting the options from the start, the little ones are excited about healthy foods. We get them to eat less appealing chicken dinners for the “dessert” of strawberries. It’s amazing!
Thank you for your feedback Joe! – Sophie