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, time in nature, and making room for rest, relaxation and enjoyment 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 chronic stress can affect your immune system, sleep, digestion and many other aspects of your health? Without getting into a bunch of science about cortisol, adrenaline, hormones and more (I’ll leave that to the experts), simply know that prolonged stress puts your body under pressure and can make it harder for your body to maintain its normal balance.

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 healthy immune function, good sleep and overall well-being. 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, or making time for healthy self-care activities like yoga or gentle exercise. For others, more may be involved, and you may need to seek the support and guidance of a professional to help deal with past or present trauma, personality traits or difficult situations.

And remember, stress isn’t always psychological. Lack of sleep, physical exertion, environmental factors and the everyday demands of life can all contribute to your overall stress load. Sometimes managing stress means looking at the bigger picture and finding ways to balance the demands on your body with adequate time for recovery.

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. 

Activity

We all know that movement is 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?