Episode 94: Food Nomad — Navigating the Emotional Journey of Autoimmune Disease with Imei Hsu

For many people, changing the way they eat because of autoimmune disease can feel like losing more than food. It can affect family traditions, cultural connection, travel, restaurants, and the simple feeling of belonging around a shared table.

In this episode of the Autoimmune Wellness Podcast, Mickey Trescott is joined by Bernice Imei Hsu, registered nurse, licensed mental health counselor, National Board-Certified Health and Wellness Coach, and AIP Certified Coach, to explore the emotional and cultural journey of living with dietary restrictions.

Five years after writing her Autoimmune Wellness article, "Bringing Culture Back to the Kitchen," Imei reflects on what she has learned about healing, reintroductions, adapting traditional foods, and becoming what she calls a "Food Nomad." Together, Mickey and Imei discuss why healing isn't simply about getting foods back. It's also about finding new ways to reconnect with culture, relationships, travel, and joy.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• What Imei means by becoming a "Food Nomad"
• Why dietary restrictions can affect identity, culture, and belonging
• Why adapting cultural recipes can take years of experimentation
• How reintroducing foods like soy helped Imei reconnect with family traditions
• What Imei learned from experimenting with gluten-free sourdough and other foods
• Why healing and food tolerance can continue evolving long after the elimination phase
• Ways to navigate family gatherings when you can't eat traditional foods
• How to give yourself permission to adapt traditions instead of perfectly recreating them
• What it means to become the "keeper of the food flame"
• Why grief around food and cultural traditions is a normal part of the autoimmune journey
• How to hold onto hope when you're still early in elimination or reintroductions

Resources:

• Bringing Culture Back to the Kitchen – Imei's original 2021 article on Autoimmune Wellness
• Imei Hsu on Instagram: @everydaywithimei

Episode Timeline:

00:00 – Food, identity, belonging, and autoimmune disease

02:34 – Introducing Bernice Imei Hsu

03:39 – What it means to be a "Food Nomad"

06:17 – Revisiting "Bringing Culture Back to the Kitchen"

13:21 – The long game of healing and food reintroductions

18:19 – Gluten-free sourdough baking experiments

25:58 – Bringing culture back into the kitchen

31:48 – Food, belonging, and navigating relationships

37:55 – Giving yourself permission to adapt tradition

42:09 – Becoming the "keeper of the food flame"

46:12 – Encouragement for anyone grieving foods or traditions

48:24 – Wrap-up and where to follow Imei

For many people, starting the autoimmune protocol can feel overwhelming,

not because of the recipes or the meal planning, but because what it seems

to mean for the rest of your life.

Will I ever be able to travel again?

Will I ever be able to eat in a restaurant without stressing?

Will I always have to bring my own food wherever I go?

What about family holidays, cultural traditions, or those recipes that

connect me to the people that I love?

These aren't just questions about food.

They're questions about identity, belonging, and whether life

will ever feel normal again.

Today's guest has spent years thinking deeply about these questions.

She calls herself a ""Food Nomad"", and I think the idea beautifully captures what

so many of us experience as we navigate our new life with autoimmune disease,

not searching for a way back to who we were before, but discovering a new way

of living that allows us to reconnect with food, culture, travel, and joy.

Welcome back to the Autoimmune Wellness Podcast.

I'm your host, Mickey Trescott, and today's episode is one I think

that so many of you need to hear.

Back in 2021, today's guest wrote one of my all-time favorite articles that we

published on the Autoimmune Wellness blog.

It was called "Bringing Culture Back to the Kitchen", and in it, she shared

something I think many people living with autoimmune disease have experienced

but rarely put into words, that changing the way we eat can sometimes

feel like losing a part of ourselves.

She described bringing culture back into the kitchen as a pathway rather than a

destination, and reflected on the grief of stepping away from family recipes,

those shared meals, and foods that connected her to her Chinese heritage.

But she also imagined finding her way back, not necessarily to the exact foods

she once ate, but to a new relationship with food, culture, and community that

could bridge the gap between heritage and what her body needs right now.

And now, five years later, she's lived much of that journey.

Today, we're talking about what happened next, how healing through AIP and

thoughtful reintroductions opened doors that she never expected, and how she's

reconnected with travel, restaurants, and cultural traditions, and why healing

isn't just about expanding that food list.

It's about reclaiming parts of your life that might have felt lost along the way.

Bernice Imei Hsu is a registered nurse, licensed mental health counselor,

and National Board-Certified Health and Wellness Coach who provides

telehealth counseling and coaching through her private practice.

Her own journey with autoimmune disease began in 2014 when she

was diagnosed with celiac disease and dermatitis herpetiformis.

After experiencing the transformative impact of the Autoimmune Protocol,

she completed the AIP Certified Coach Program in 2020 to better support

people navigating both autoimmune disease and the emotional challenges

that often accompany chronic illness.

Today, Imei specializes in helping clients living with autoimmune disease

and chronic illness build resilience, reconnect with themselves, and navigate

the many psychological and social changes that come with long-term healing.

She's also a referred provider for the Center for Chronic Illness in Seattle,

Washington, and serves as a clinical supervisor for counselors-in-training.

Imei, welcome to the Autoimmune Wellness Podcast.

Thank you so much for having me.

So I absolutely love this phrase that you have coined that

you call yourself a "Food Nomad".

Before we dive into your story, can you tell us what that term means to

you and how it became such an important part of your own healing journey?

It started because even in my own town, I live very close

to Seattle, Washington, there's lots of food that you can get.

I mean, basically walk out into any street not very far from

your own home, and there's all kinds of eating, drinking places.

But as many of us know, once we've been on the AIP and identified foods

that we need to restrict for a certain amount of time and then see what we're

still reacting to, that, that lots and lots of foods are off the list.

And I remember one time being invited to a, I think it was a Seahawks watch, watch

party, and they had all this food that was produced for it and a pretty big-ticket

item that somebody gifted to me and said, "You know, I'll pay for your ticket."

So I go in there, and staying on the AIP at that time was, was pretty rough.

And I walked away with a plate that had a carrot and a piece of lettuce on it,

and I took a picture of it kind of as a joke of like, if I were strictly doing

this, this is what I would have, because everything else that they provided

was not something that I could have.

This idea of "Food Nomad" meant that not only were the foods that were

there not representative of my culture, and I didn't expect it to be, but

that that's probably I would just see more of the same everywhere else.

And the only choice I felt I had was to remember what it is that I liked and

keep this idea that I could go elsewhere.

I can travel for it if I need to, or in sort of a reverse nomadism, which would

be diaspora, bring it back with me.

So that was that, bringing that culture back into the kitchen.

And that sort of sparked both the, the, the, the angry point, the thing

that made me go off on a rant and then come back and say, "I think I

have an idea of what I'd like to do."

Go out there, bring pieces of it back, and then also wait to see what

happens to my immune system over time.

That because of the way the introductions work, this is

not something you do forever.

It's for a time.

So then I know I had an idea.

It's not a destination I'm heading for.

It's going to be a pathway.

I love that so much.

And really, I think back in 2021 when you wrote this article, and you guys,

I'm gonna link it in the show notes 'cause I think it's a great companion

to this discussion we're having today.

It was called Bringing Culture Back Into the Kitchen, and you wrote

about that journey as a pathway, not as a destination, which is

exactly what you're describing here.

back five years later, tell us about how that journey unfolded

in ways that you didn't expect.

One of the things that I, I didn't expect would happen

is how long the journey has been.

Like, if you had a specific thing that you wanted to get back into your eating

repertoire, and it's complicated.

So I'm now speaking to, say, those who are in the Southeast Asian community

and might have some very particular generationally handed down foods and

those recipes that need a lot of altering.

I don't think it's fair to say, "Do these easy substitutions, and

voila, it's, it's exactly what

you want." Instead, it will evolve over time, and what surprised

me is how much time it took.

So when I started first to make something called jiaozi, it's a dumpling.

It can be fried or steamed.

I thought the steaming would be the best one, and if you read the, the

original article, that is one of the things that I tried to make, and it

turned into this gloppy, gooey mess that basically kind of melted into the paper.

And I dumped it.

I threw it into the bin because it was inedible.

It took another three years of experImeinting and trying different

things because my restrictions were different from someone else's.

So even if somebody else had a recipe that said, "This will work," it

still had ingredients that did make it work for what they were trying to

do, but I couldn't have it because they still made me kind of ill.

And it could be the simplest of things.

I love that there's so many available recipes that have,

for example, cassava in it.

I'm sensitive to cassava for some reason.

It just doesn't agree with me, and I don't fight it anymore.

So I've had to work with what will work.

I've also had a many-year sensitivity to, to gums or emulsifiers, so xanthan

gum was off the table, but yeast was not.

So if I could make things that had yeast in it and I could

get it to rise, that's one.

Later on for breads, for example, and there are some breads in the

Chinese repertoire of things.

They come more from the northern part of China and then as my family made

it to Taiwan, there's all kinds of baked goods that are made of wheat.

Being able to adapt those, using things like brown rice or sorghum

flours took a lot of experImeintation.

I can't say that they look and that they act exactly like the

originals, but they get pretty close.

But doing that experImeintation just took a lot longer than I thought it would.

And then the other thing that it took was a shift in mindset

that was really surprising to me.

I had to de-center mainstream food.

And I say that because I was born in the US, and my parents had our family

quickly acclimate in one ways to things that weren't normative around us.

So we grew up in a neighborhood that had a lot of Spanish-speaking

people in it, but it also had a lot of your sort of mainstream,

middle America kind of people in it.

And then the Chinese families sort of clumped together.

So we'd have Chinese food on the weekends, and we'd try to eat as

everybody else did on the weekdays, especially with school, so that you

didn't feel like you didn't belong.

But that had to give way.

If, if that was like I centered my food and eating culture around what was

normal, then it, it would automatically decenter my Chinese culture away,

and that didn't quite fit right for what our family's trying to do and

the preservation of our heritage.

And so I found myself shifting and decentering that beginning

sort of part and moving towards something that was a hybrid.

If you could imagine deciding who owns these recipes, who, who gets to

change them, and for what reasons?

Because you could otherwise look at, say, what, what happens on the internet

when you get a sensation who's outside of that culture making those foods.

Like, who gets to say what Chinese fried rice looks like and tastes like?

Who gets to say when you add the soy sauce, or in my case, the tamari,

and for a long time, I couldn't even have tamari 'cause I was sensitive

to soy, so then it was coconut aminos and it was… Who gets to do that?

Who, who's gonna be okay with that?

And so it was decentering off of these authoritative, people and celebrities

and the, the broader culture and the recipes from the past and saying,

"I, I'm gonna have to take charge here," and say, "Start with me first.

This is okay for me." And then for others who are curious about that

to, to try and see if they might like that too, and giving them

sort of transferring some of that.

And you can too if you like.

Do this, and it's okay.

Wow.

You really have helped me reconceptualize how I think of some of these recipes

as a recipe developer myself, but also recognizing that for each person, we

do have our own lenses of our cultural backgrounds and the foods that we

enjoy eating, the foods that we grew up eating, the foods that give us joy

and nourishment and all those things.

And I love that you've given people permission to start with themselves

instead of looking for somebody else who has just figured out exactly what they

want, which I think as a recipe developer, I get both ends, which is people who have

their expectations of exactly what they need, especially with food sensitivities.

It's like, oh, wait, you didn't develop this recipe that is Core or

Modified AIP, but it includes coconut or cassava or something that an

individual person is also sensitive to.

I feel so bad for those people, but also there is some aspect of it as an

individual where you can be curious and, and try to apply those filters,

and that cultural filter is one that you've just educated us a lot on.

So, thank you so much for that.

One thing that I hope people take away is that, from our conversation, is that

healing doesn't stop after elimination or reintroductions, and I know your

story really can attest to that.

Can you share some of the milestones that you have experienced over the years being

a "Food Nomad", whether that's bringing back soy, like you talked about, having

to do some coconut aminos, and then being able to tolerate tamari, maybe learning

to bake with gluten-free sourdough, tolerating ingredients you haven't before,

or just feeling more free around food?

Okay.

Yes.

One of the things that does come to mind since you brought it up

also is this thing about soy.

Now, I recognize in the United States, some people look like, if

you can't eat soy, no big deal.

You have so many other choices, and maybe it's not all that

good for you in high quantities.

But we're talking about culture now, and there are so many recipes

that involve things like tofu: fried tofu, boiled tofu in soups, miso.

My family, part of them grew up under the Japanese occupation of Taiwan, and so

Japanese food is just as common as Chinese food in, in our household growing up.

So to lose those things actually felt like a, a bigger loss than what other people

outside of having to do restrictions like this for a time until the body shifts.

It was, it was a bigger deal.

There is a whole section in one of the recipe books that

I love that's just with tofu.

There's a whole section that just deals with soy, how it's sourced, how

even soy sauces are made, why there's certain brands that sort of end up

being the top of the line for the world.

And then being told, "Oh, you can try tamari," when I learned that I couldn't.

I was having the same kind of reactivity to it, that you would expect as a

person who's reacting very strongly.

And it's-- so gastrointestinal, skin, having a little bit of

joint pain with it, just general feelings of malaise and unwellness.

So being able to get that back meant the world, and there are specific

recipes that I immediately tried once I realized I could have it again.

I didn't recognize, 'cause it'd been so long, how much that actually played

into some of the depression and the estrangement from my own culture.

Because as we sat around eating table style, and in Chinese restaurants,

you have a portion that's, you know, sitting in front of you and

everybody's turning the table to get to the foods that they want.

And I had to keep track of what was in which one, because we do family style.

We don't do individual plates.

And being able to have one more dish that I could eat and not have to

keep track of means so much to me.

And even if that's on, you know, on the table at home with extra guests, that

I could make something that everybody could have, not just me, and that

the modifications were so mild that they didn't notice the difference.

That means a lot 'cause there's that sense of belonging.

That was years of estrangement that a little bit of it got taken in

or, you know, removed from that.

So that's hard to put a quantifier on how valuable that

is, but that's just one dish.

Now we look at all the repertoire of things that I couldn't have for those

years and how that multiplied into situations where there wasn't anything

for me unless I brought it, but you can't bring that into restaurants.

So guess who sometimes didn't go?

That's, that's what happens, and that's what happens to many of us.

Being able then to recreate things at home and then invite people in

really made a big difference to me.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, and, and I think a lot of people don't estimate the labor is

involved in always having everyone over to your house where it's safe,

and preparing all of the food.

Going out to eat is just an experience in so many different ways, but one of

them is for those of us with chronic illness, you know, we're managing our

health, and then to have our whole family, who most of the time means well, and,

Mm-hmm.

know.

But it, that, that is really challenging, too.

Thank you for sharing that.

Talk to us a little bit about some of those other foods, like you've

mentioned, you learning to break bake with gluten-free sourdough and some

other ingredients that you tolerate.

Like we talked about soy, but is there anything else on the

list that has come back for you?

Yeah, the sourdough one I get the most questions about.

People ask like, "How on earth did you get that thing to take off?" And what

they're talking about is that sourdough, it usually likes a certain temperature.

I live in the Pacific Northwest.

Our kitchen rarely gets to, you know, an even-keeled 75 degrees, which would be

the minimum temperature that you want to have really for sourdough to take off.

And so first of all, I bought one of those little sourdough starter

homes that you stick your starter in because that just made it easier.

It's a lot easier to say, "I'm gonna stick that on 80 degrees," and that, that little

s- sourdough baby is gonna take off.

The other one is that I was working with brown rice.

You could use, sorghum.

You can use a variety of other flours.

But if you just went on the internet and used AI, it would

tell you to put rye in there.

And I'm just looking at it like, "Oh, nope, nope.

I'm, I'm solid gluten free.

I have celiac disease.

That is no longer celiac safe." And then on top of it, there was,

you know, some ideas that if you fermented it, then suddenly the gluten

in it isn't going to make you sick.

That's also not true.

So a three-day ferment does not remove all of the gluten in there.

The, the fermentation does not eat up the gluten.

It's still there.

You can still get sick from it.

And so getting a non-barley, wheat or rye sourdough starter going,

the, the first time I tried it, I killed it, meaning not a good thing.

I killed it for real.

Literally, it died.

It didn't work.

12 days later, it still looked awful, so I dumped it and started over again

and began experImeinting with, should I put a little bit of vinegar in this?

Should I try not feeding it more water, and on the second feeding,

just feed it brown rice and then stir it and then do this and do that?

And finally, at 80 degrees, it took off.

It got bubbly.

It did the whole thing.

I was filming it like, "Oh, my gosh, it's bubbly." I got, like, excited.

This is my sourdough baby.

Then I noticed that people were naming their sourdough starters.

So I named mine Doughfus.

Doofus, but Doughfus.

But other people just have brilliant names for their starters because you

gotta feed it all the time, except when you don't, which is you could put it at a

much colder level or in your refrigerator and let it go to sleep for a while and

then just wake it up when you're ready.

So what that did is it allowed me to make some of the bread items I wanted to make.

Now, I, I will be honest, I haven't tried to do some of the

Taiwanese baked bread items yet.

They're pretty fancy.

But I've just made, like, standard bread.

And instead of eating some of the breads that are commercially made for

gluten-free that I could eat, the ones that I was making at home, a little

less expensive, a lot more dense, but they still had nice airy pockets in

it and no giant hole in the center.

For those who know, you know what I'm talking about.

No giant hole in the center, which is really nice.

It just made bread-making, everything from French-style

baguettes, everything a lot easier.

Then I started going into, well, if we can make bread, can't we make pizza?

So that's been one of the things, and I, I wrote about it a little

bit in that original article, that pizza was one of those things on the

pathway that would help me know if I was making advances, like I was

actually getting towards, towards a destination, but I'm on the path.

If the pizza tasted more and more and acted more and more like pizza,

then I was making some progress.

And so now I have pathways that go with just standard flour, and doing a three-day

ferment in the refrigerator versus the sourdough and doing it that way.

The only thing is both of these styles cannot go in a pizza oven.

So I had to learn from, Peter and his wife have a beautiful book on pizza making.

So it's all, celiac-safe versions of pizzas that you could make at home.

And in the very front of the book, there's a little blurb there that describes how

he got restaurant quality out of the bake.

And just for that section there, if you get a chance to read that, then you

realize how to get the crisp outside and that nice soft texture that you can fold.

So it's the foldability of the pizza.

Now, put that with sourdough, which that book does not emphasize, and

now make sourdough pizza crust

It's amazing

I want to know where this recipe's gonna be published if you feel so

generous, 'cause this sounds delightful!

I'm still playing around with it.

Right now there's a person who has her version out there.

It's Natasha's Home, and she has a sourdough recipe out there for

free that you could take a look at.

She also has stuff on subscription and books as well that, that focus

on… She's mostly focusing on baked things, and they're all celiac safe.

She has different options and substitutions, and good amount of them

are vegan for those who cannot do dairy.

I love that.

I've,

Yeah

admiration for people who really trial the bread side of things

for people with food sensitivities.

That is not my primary wheelhouse, but I have a lot of respect for

the time and energy and variations it takes to really get that right.

And I love hearing that you've hacked a really good gluten-free sourdough.

I know for a lot of people, I don't love bread, you guys probably

see that reflected in my recipes.

I'm not over here trying to recreate bread.

Although recently I've been playing around with a fermented buckwheat,

trying to get a modified AIP option that has, has been surprisingly good.

But yeah, props to you for really figuring out a gluten-free sourdough

that really works and is adaptable.

It was more out of necessity because I, I do so much

activity in my life that I needed something that was portable.

So I do like to run and hike and having something like a bread there with some

kind of lean protein and, fruits that I could carry with me that were light worked

a lot better than what other standard runners or hikers do with their eating

gels, which were really hard on my gut.

I found that bread, if I made it myself, was not hard on my gut.

So it was more a necessity and then I, I fell back in love with bread.

Otherwise, for a while, bread wasn't really on the table for a while.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, going back to your article, you write about grieving the temporary loss of

some of your food traditions and wondering if you'd ever make certain dishes again.

Today, what does that mean to bring culture back into your kitchen,

and how have those recipes evolved alongside your own healing?

So, you know, you, you look at in recipe books what the quote-unquote

"standards" are, and if you compare recipe to recipe for the same thing, there's,

you know, a set core of ingredients that just get repeated over and over again.

And some of those things were eliminated for me, not for the 30

days, not for three months, but years before they could come back in.

Fortunately for me, some of those weren't like the, the staples around it.

So for example, I just could not eat a lot of nightshades for years.

It just bugged me.

Tomatoes, until fairly recently, gave me a lot of gut distress.

Fortunately, in my culture, tomatoes aren't a central piece of most dishes,

so it-- that didn't affect me as much.

But other things could.

There are dishes with eggplant.

There are dishes with peppers in it.

Would be, if you're meat eating, the, the beef and the peppers with a nice

sauce in it is, is a very common staple of everyday eating, and that had to go.

It had to be replaced by other vegetables that I could eat, like your

bok choy or your, a cabbage instead.

Things that I could eat.

So there are modifications that I could do.

It was just harder finding them.

Again, when you go out with friends or you go out to eat, those were harder to make.

So for a while, I just stopped expecting that those restaurants could cater

to me, but that was five years ago.

Things have changed.

I think the pandemic changed a lot of how restaurants look at what

they do deliver because they're trying to get people to come back.

So when I went traveling, I was so surprised how, how

much easier it was this time.

So the recent trip that I took with my husband was to South Africa,

and I was surprised that even in remote areas, the restaurants

there were very, very well-informed about making these substitutions,

what they could and couldn't do.

So they instead of trying to cater to you and please you, but it wasn't

really true, they could just tell you.

It's on the menus.

It's stated as such.

When we went on safari, which is a whole different thing, we had all of my

intolerances listed and what foods that I absolutely could not have, and they

made me a menu that looked very much like the menu everybody else got, but

mine was made separately from theirs.

Very brilliant, very thoughtful and mindful.

This is where the "Food Nomad" concept comes at and bringing that

culture back into the kitchen, is adopting some of those practices

that I saw out there to my own home.

And that could start with the spice, the spices first, the things that

sort of made something feel more unique or could start with the base.

So it is taking that culture, bringing it back home, then looking at what is

the repertoire of the things I like to eat on a normal basis and seeing

how some of those could be folded in or incorporated at a smaller level.

So again, I think what's gonna happen is sort of this, the diaspora effect that

we will have as a community bringing some of that forward because everyone

who comes in contact with us then gets to try some of this and go, "Ooh, that's

really interesting," or, "That's really different," and they make a note of it.

I think that's where I'm mostly at, and then also ticking away at

those big, the big-ticket items.

Being able to have as low emulsifier amount as possible of, say, the jiaozi,

which is the the fluffy dough on the outside with a meat and vegetable on

the inside, or if you don't eat meat, to have a substitute on the inside.

That's, that's a big item to be able to make because the dough

has to act a certain way, and then it has to stand up to steaming.

But to me, it wasn't just the food.

It's that you never made these things by yourself.

You would have five or six relatives with you folding these all day and getting

them ready, for the steamer and then eating them, not all at once, but as

the food gets pulled out of the kitchen.

So there are waves of food coming.

Orchestration's gonna be a while coming.

It's a lot of labor.

It's also getting people involved to understand that process.

So I've had to wait for my community to grow a little bit more, who

understand this and have the patience and tolerance to, to be part of that

Yeah.

Food is belonging, right?

It really is how families celebrate.

It's how we connect with each other.

A lot of times it's how we express love.

And you touched on this a little bit, but do you have any other specific

points about what you've learned about navigating relationships when your

food choices no longer fit neatly into that family tradition box?

I always want to say that it depends from situation to situation.

I mean, I do know some people that because they are in an intergenerational

home, their oldest generation that knows things as they were, tends

to be very protective of that.

So if you enter into their home, they want you to eat their foods as it is, and to,

to not do that often brings some offense.

And the younger generation that understands will go, you know,

"Don't, don't take it personally.

That's just my mom," or, "That's just my dad." And I don't, I don't take it

personally, 'cause I do understand where that's coming from, but then it doesn't

allow me to have that many choices.

So navigating that is really sometimes before the visit.

Is it okay to come to the table and not to eat?

If, if that's what it takes, or to have some dishes that have nothing

of the things that I can't have and, and be able to pick from those.

Or is there some room or latitude or understanding that, that I could eat

beforehand or eat some of my own things?

So I had this little hashtag on some of my posts on social media that

just says, "I am my own food truck."

A reminder that, that I just have to bring my own food.

You know, and I take a container out of my purse and just sort of discreetly

lay it out on a plate and eat that.

Is that going to be okay?

And really clearing it with the host.

Because I do understand that there's this protectiveness around those things,

that what they mean by providing it is love and belonging, and overtly

it, it may appear to some is that you're rejecting their hospitality

when it's not about that, right?

Yeah, I completely agree with how you have approached this in your own life.

And personally, something that I add on in the pre-managing the expectations,

that's always best not to just show up and expect it to happen, but to

have the conversation beforehand.

But something that I will say is, I know that this gathering is because of

X, Y, or Z, and for me, the meaningful thing is to be here with you celebrating

the graduation, the birthday, whatever we're doing together, just company.

That's what I want to focus on.

And usually when I say that, something clicks, even if it's

a very resistant family member.

They're like, "Oh, you are coming.

You want to spend time with me.

You want to have meaningful connection.

The food doesn't work for you right now.

Got it." You know?

But when you don't say all those things and you just show up and

you're like, "I'm not eating," that sets the stage for somebody to be

offended, in my experience as well, so.

What was so exciting about all of the time around, like,

beginning with asking all the AIP coaches, for example, when did they

introduce some of the foods in?

Did they do it exactly like the classic AIP and the re introduction

recommendations, or did they introduce some things earlier?

And that's how the, the science and, and the studies got to gather

around that, that legumes and rice could be introduced earlier.

It was out of absolute desperation, I was one of those people.

Rice is a staple in my diet, and I introduced it.

I knew going into this that I wasn't reactive for rice, but I did 30 days,

and I was so thin and so hungry that I said, "If I can get in coffee and

rice, I'm gonna be okay." And then that led me into people's homes

because at least I could have rice.

Now, in the Chinese way of thinking, a meal is not complete without rice.

There, there's actually a saying that way.

The way you call your family to dinner is to basically say, "The rice

is ready." It's like, "Good rice.

Come and eat." So it has the word fan, which is rice.

So I knew then at least I could sit at a table and pick at a bowl

of rice, and I'm gonna be okay.

Yeah, and

Now-

Imei, honestly, the Modified protocol is what it is today because of

coaches like yourself who gave us the feedback about certain foods that are

just so important culturally, and then also stood up on the research side,

not immunologically being an issue.

Of course, the one person who is sensitive to rice, I know you're

going to comment somewhere.

Yeah, I know you're out there.

I have worked

We know

with clients, we know.

But the vast majority, rice and legumes are usually fine.

Part of the reason why Modified is the way it is, is because of of

people like yourself, so thank you.

You're welcome.

I personally did cartwheels around my house like, "No way!"

Yeah.

And really, this is gathering of information that we have all

done as a community is to make it easier for the next person.

I think of my own experience through AIP 15 years ago without any guidance

or structure and where we are today.

Is it perfect?

No.

But we do know so much more than we did back then, and hopefully that

can help each individual person that encounters this have an easier

time navigating all of these areas.

So, I love that.

Another idea that you have already talked about in this discussion, but

I'd like for you to expand it a little bit more, is just to give yourself

permission to expand on tradition instead of trying to perfectly recreate it.

So you've talked about letting your senses guide you instead of trying to

make everything just like you remember.

It feels like such a powerful metaphor beyond food, so can you talk to

us a little bit more about that?

Yes.

So I have memories of being in my parents' kitchen.

My, both my father and my mother actually cooked really decent Chinese

food, and they say that my father taught my mother, like, 'cause he

knew what he liked, and so she learned how to make things that he enjoyed.

It was so much so that, the food and the dishes got to be a certain

way that my mother had a hard time letting us kids actually in there

preparing with her, 'cause she wanted them done just a certain way.

If you grow up in that kind of climate there, then cooking for yourself on

your own when you launch, starting your own household, family, cooking

for others can feel that extra layer of pressure to do it just right, just so.

The problem is my mom never worked with measures.

So the two cookbooks that I remember she had, one was like a Betty Crocker sort of

type of cookbook, and the other one was the Better Homes and Gardens to learn how

to cook like everybody else made things.

That's the only time I ever saw her measure anything.

Everything else, she would just, like, take the oil and just eyeball

it, or she'd take the salt and pour a little in her hand and throw it in.

So when I tried to learn those recipes, as a young person, I was a little lost.

I couldn't figure and remember, and so I started trying to write stuff down as

guesstimates 'cause she says, "I'm just guessing, too." I'm like, "Huh." So there

was no quality control in that sense.

I had to give myself permission that there's just… 'cause it's being

handed down, and I never got to see my grandmother cook those same recipes.

So I have no idea what was in them.

Is to give myself permission to remember what I can and then flex.

And then with autoimmune disease, I had to flex again, is to let go of those

hard, like, it has to be these things.

That core ingredient list might have to shape a little bit differently.

And again, referring back to our earlier conversation, who gets to

say that that's right or wrong?

Who gets to say that that's not good because it's not authentic?

Because that dialogue has been going on for a long time about who gets

to produce what and for what reason.

For the moment, if it's my gut, it's my reason.

If it's for a community of people who also have restrictions and

things, then it's our reason to adopt these to the way that we work.

For my friend Estella, who has a bakery that is top nine

allergen-free, it's their reason.

They adopted all of their recipes, many of hers coming from the Philippines, to

top nine allergen-free versions of just about anything you can think of, and

she didn't ask for anybody's permission.

She's catering to that community.

So can we evolve our own foods?

Do we have the right to?

Yes.

Do we have purpose and meaning in that?

Yes.

Would we like them to have a look, a mouthfeel, and a

remembrance of its original form?

Yeah, that would be nice.

We don't always get what we want.

Beautifully said.

Yeah.

love this, and I love that at the end of your original article, you

describe becoming the keeper of the food flame, basically preserving

traditions while adapting them to meet your own health needs.

you've continued healing, talk to us about what that means to you today.

The keeper of the food flame is again memory.

I have a memory of my parents in the kitchen.

I have a memory of my mom preparing cabbages and a Japanese radish

called daikon, chopped up and being made in different levels of heat

for, you know, their spiciness.

So one for the kids is less spicy, one for the adults who don't like

super hot food, and one for my father, who just needed it as hot

as, you know, anything off the chart.

And she would just show me how much she was putting of the different things in

there, and then she would take chopsticks and stir it around every so often, and

I would just think how inefficient.

And then when it was my turn to keep the flame of having these fermented foods

around, I put them in the same bottles using the same method of boiling the

bottles, making certain they're clean, getting the lids ready, testing them,

and then putting the daikon in, and then I went, "You know, it's not very good

to use chopsticks to try to marinate by stirring. Why not just seal it all up

and roll the bottles on the counter?"

Just roll them twice a day.

I'm the keeper of that food flame, and I don't use chopsticks anymore.

But I get my fermented food the way that I like it in the memory of something

that I know even the ancestors that I had never met and only heard of probably

did the same thing in different ceramic containers, maybe not glass, and they

were using whatever they had, maybe even their own hands, putting their hands in

there and stirring as we do with kimchi.

Maybe that's like one symbolic way of looking at it, is that if we don't keep

them up, they die out with our generation as the next gen-generation moves on.

So I'm watching my sister's children who are starting to have children now and them

becoming the keepers of the flame, what kinds of things they have brought on with

them and how much they ask us, you know, " How do you make such and such thing?"

We don't really know, and there's recipes out there, but, like,

how did Nai Nai, which would be grandmother, how did Nai Nai make this?

And we could give them sort of generalized ways of doing that.

Also, as, you know, some of the adult children from my sister's

family, her kids, ask for different recipes, and I could say, "Is there

anybody in your household that has some type of restriction?"

It's like, "Oh, I know about how to substitute that. Here, try this in this

amount. Let me know how that goes." Their feedback back, if that worked, ends

up becoming a part of the collective.

I love that.

Chronic illness is not something that a very small minority of

people are going to experience, especially as it intersects with food.

So I love that you have described so beautifully how you keep those traditions

alive while also there for the people in your life who might just start to

be curious about like, "Maybe I need this too," and sharing that and letting

that grow as a part of your traditions.

It's really beautiful.

So as a wrap-up, for somebody who's listening who's still in the elimination

phase, we're going to think back to the very beginning, the way back.

They might be grieving foods, traditions, or experiences that

they've had to put on hold.

What do you want them to know about what's possible over time?

In that present moment while they're still in the elimination

phase, and maybe it seems like those reintroductions that they would

love to have back seem far off.

For the present moment, I want to take a moment to say it is normative to grieve.

It is normative to feel pretty down about the effect of not having those

foods, feeling a little bit estranged, having to go through a lot of labor

and time and energy to eat the way that you do in the hopes that you will

feel better, that you will be able to reintroduce these foods, that you'll

have a solid understanding that maybe there's some things that can never be

reintroduced again, but a lot of them can.

And what I want them to know is to see that future self being able to enjoy

those foods, being able to travel again with more ease, as I've discovered,

knowing that that is possible for you, that this is a passage that you're

going through, again, just part of the journey, but it's not the entire journey.

Perfect advice.

Thank you for it, and thank you for being here.

Imei I think this is such an important reminder that the goal

isn't simply to get more food back on our plates as quickly as possible.

It's to build a way of living with autoimmune disease that leaves room

for the things that make life so meaningful, our families, our culture,

being able to experience travel, connection, and of course, joy.

And I especially love the idea of being a "Food Nomad", and that our

relationship with food doesn't have to return to exactly what it was before

in order to feel rich and connected.

It can absolutely evolve with us.

So before we go, where can listeners find you if they'd like to learn more

about your work or connect with you?

The easiest way would be on Instagram.

So I have my handle there, Everyday with Imei, and Imei is spelled

I-M-E-I, so Everyday with Imei.

And you can either DM me there or follow along.

I don't just talk about food.

I talk about movement.

I talk about de-stressing.

I talk about things that have to do with the counseling and coaching world as well,

and then you'll get to meet my cat, Mina, who's a big part of my life right now.

She's an American Bobtail.

So if you like all kinds of stuff like that, you'll get a

little smathering of everything.

But definitely my heart is still around what AIP can do for those who

are pre-autoimmune and autoimmune diseased and trying to find a way to

manage their symptoms and feel better.

Thank you so much for joining me, Imei.

It's been really special to revisit your article five years later and hear

about where this pathway has taken you.

For everybody listening, I will link the original article in the show

notes so you can go back and read it, as well as Imei's Instagram account.

For anybody who is somewhere earlier in the process, I hope that

today's episode gives you a little perspective on that long game.

Your relationship with food, your traditions, your life can

continue to expand and change as you learn what works for you.

Thank you so much for listening to the Autoimmune Wellness Podcast, and

I'll see you in the next episode.