Hi, and welcome back to the Clutterbug podcast. I'm so excited today. We have Ann Dunnington here with us. I've been following you for a while. I love your YouTube channel.

So I'm so excited to introduce you to my listeners. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Great. Thank you so much, Cass. I'm so excited to be here. And I too have been a followout of yours for such a long time. We did. We did a collab along about seven years ago.

With Catherine from Do It On A Dime. It's been a long time. So I think we need to do another one. I think we do too. Yeah, absolutely. So I have been doing the YouTube thing since March of 2010. I believe is how long it's been now. And then of course Instagram and TikTok at this point too.

And over the course of the last maybe 10 or 15 years, I've gotten really into natural health and wellness and being able to help support our bodies to heal our bodies in the way they are meant to heal, which is the right tools. And we actually encountered that first hand with my husband's story.

He has recovered from autoimmune back in 2016. He's been in remission ever since literally by making lifestyle choices. So that's become such a big focus for us, because we've seen at work firsthand. And it's really a cool thing. When we let the body do what it's supposed to do. It knows what it's supposed to do.

I love that. So I have an autoimmune disease. I have Hashimoto's and I was diagnosed in 2014, but it started right after my son was born. And going to the doctors, they gave me pills that kind of helped with the symptoms. And they were like, I don't know. Something's wrong with your body. Here's some pills. It's because you had a baby.

And I'm like, but there's got to be something else going on. Right. So I've tried a lot of things, but making a huge lifestyle change like that is is difficult for me. So I I've been not so great at it. But I would love to hear what you'd recommend or what's really working in your family. And maybe you can share with our listeners.

Easy ways to dip their toe in the water and gradually build up. I found I did go into a mission when I stopped eating carbohydrates and sugar. But I also found that so restricting that I wasn't able to maintain that. And so as soon as I started eating that way again, my Hashimoto's came right back.

Right. When my husband was diagnosed in 2016, the doctor that he saw was a very good like with diagnostic, you know, he said, okay, we think this is Crohn's is what we, you know, the what he was given.

But he didn't say it was autoimmune. We didn't know until after we got home and I started doing a bunch of research and I actually have a friend who has Crohn's as well.

And she just happened to mention in passing that Crohn's is autoimmune. She was talking about how he may be able to work from home or, you know, because it's covered by the Americans with disabilities act because it's autoimmune.

And as soon as she said autoimmune in my head, I thought, okay, paleo autoimmune protocol. So three years or four years prior to that, we were gluten free.

And I was getting a whole bunch of gluten free cookbooks. And one of them was a paleo cookbook. And the girl who wrote that just happened to mention, oh, these are a part of the paleo autoimmune protocol.

And I just put that in my roll of decks in my head because I didn't know, you know, if I would ever need that or whatever. And so then all comes rushing back to me as soon as my friends said it's autoimmune.

I asked my husband, I said, okay, I know there's this thing called paleo autoimmune protocol. It's a diet. People have had really good experience with that getting into a rich remission. He was desperate. And so he's like, let's try it.

So cold turkey. We went paleo autoimmune protocol. And so basically what that is, it's a way of eating that does eliminate sugar grains and dairy.

It eliminates other things too, like nuts and seeds and nightshades and various things that can be inflammatory for some people when they're in that heightened immune state.

And so it was pretty immediate with his recovery within the first round of blood work he had after the hospital release.

He started to see his numbers get better and better and better. The thing that was kind of the most frustrating part with that though is we would go back to see his doctor for six weeks, check ups and things like that. And his doctor at the time didn't think diet had anything to do with how well you would feel with an autoimmune disease.

The diet wasn't any part of it. His suggestion was to eat a low residue diet, which is not very nutritious. It's like white bread and baby food and things that just kind of pass right through. Yeah, right, but it doesn't really offer a lot of nutrition.

So that was kind of the first eye opening thing to where we knew that we needed to kind of think more holistically in his healing because the traditional Western medicine methods.

I didn't feel we're going to cut it. So that's why we started with that.

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