AIP – Beyond Food
As you probably know by now, the Autoimmune Protocol is about far more than food. While diet plays a powerful part, long-term healing on the AIP requires a broader, more holistic approach.
To be truly support your journey to autoimmune wellness, it’s important to look beyond what’s on your plate and consider lifestyle factors that influence immune function, gut health, and hormone balance. Things like sleep, stress, movement, connection, and mindset play a much bigger role than most people expect — and they can either support your healing… or quietly hold it back.
If you’re newer to this concept, you may find it helpful to read The New Autoimmune Protocol, which expands on the lifestyle foundations that go hand-in-hand with the dietary side of AIP and explains why they matter so much.
Below are a few additional resources that build on these ideas and can help you put the “beyond food” pieces of the AIP into practice in a way that feels realistic and sustainable.
Sleep
This is HUGE! Are you getting enough? What’s right for one might not be enough for another.
Did you know that not getting enough sleep causes inflammation and increased susceptibility to infection – even in healthy people! Studies show that one night of poor sleep causes higher insulin resistance than six months of bad diet! In fact, scientific studies show that sleep may be even more important for our health than diet! Now, if that’s not enough to make you take a serious look at your sleep routine, I don’t know what is! Check out my expanded post on Sleep Struggles – Click Here.
It’s recommended that we get to bed by 10 pm for optimal rest and recovery, and that we get 7 to 10 hours of sleep per night (for autoimmune sufferers it might be 9-10 hours or even 12 hours every night to heal).
Stress Management
Did you know that for every five minutes of upset it takes your body six to eight hours to calm down biochemically! Those numbers are staggering. Imagine what long-term, chronic stress is doing to your body. Without getting into a bunch of science about cortisol, adrenaline, hormones and more (I’ll leave that to the experts – check out this article from Dr. Ballantyne – How Stress Undermines Health), simply know that when under stress, your body misuses its precious resources leaving your immune system weak and your body vulnerable to disease.
Finding effective ways to reduce and manage stress is imperative for our healing journeys – it’s been one of my biggest challenges, and I still need regular reminders. It’s essential for maintaining a healthy gut, normal immune function and balanced hormones. Each of us will need to find effective ways to deal with our individual stressors. For some it may be as simple as learning to slow down, scheduling deep breathing exercises and meditation, healthy self-care activities like yoga or gentle autoimmune safe exercise (see below). For others, more may be involved and you may need to seek the support an guidance of a professional to help deal with past or present traumas, personality traits or difficult situations. If you’re looking for a motivation on this, join me on Instagram.
Activity
Everyone knows that exercise and activity are good for our health, but what should you do when you’re faced with chronic illness and you often don’t have the energy to do much more than get out of bed in the morning?
Not surprising then that the most commonly avoided part of the autoimmune protocol is exercise.
There are lots of ways to incorporate light activity into your day. For some it might be just a reminder by way of a timer on your phone to get up and stretch or move around a little. Short walks, yoga, rebounding and stretching might be as much as you can achieve, while others may feel they’re capable of more but are unsure of how to approach an exercise program safely so they don’t face setbacks.
