The AIP diet is a way of eating designed to support those with autoimmune conditions. “AIP” stands for autoimmune protocol. This diet works to remove many irritating or inflaming foods and incorporate foods that are known to be healing or health-promoting. Specifically, the diet is helping you manage your autoimmune symptoms and improving your gut health.
The autoimmune protocol diet is like a more intense version of the paleo diet. The paleo diet eliminates some common allergenic or irritating foods. The AIP diet takes it up a notch. The AIP diet removes all of the foods that paleo removes but then also includes eggs, nightshades, nuts, seeds and coffee.
Foods that are encouraged to make it into an AIP diet are high-quality proteins, fruits, vegetables and healthy fats. Other health-promoting foods are encouraged as well, such as fermented foods, bone broth and organ meats.
As you can see, the foods included on a strict AIP diet are limited. But, for most people, the AIP diet can be followed in phases. Most experts agree that the diet doesn’t need to be followed strictly forever. (We recommend working with your personal healthcare professional to figure out exactly what you need.)
Our general recommendation is to stick to the strict AIP diet for 30-60 days. This gives your body time to cut out common inflammatory foods and hit the reset button on your health. After your desired amount of time, you can begin to add foods back into your diet - slowly and deliberately.
We call this the reintroduction phase. Let’s say after 60 days, you want to add eggs back into your diet. Try to eat some eggs on day one of your reintroduction phase. Wait two or three days before introducing another new food to see if your body has any reactions to the eggs.
If you notice a symptom (maybe you break out or have digestive issues), then you know that you still need to avoid eggs for the time being. You can then move on to the next food you’d like to reintroduce. If you eat this food, wait a few days, and notice no immune response, then it can be slowly included back into your diet.
It’s important to know that this diet is not meant to heal your autoimmune condition (but for some people they might see this happen), but it can drastically help you improve or manage autoimmune symptoms.
If you’re looking to stay AIP, these are the foods you should focus on eating.
It’s worth noting that egg whites and nightshades are some very common “healthy” foods that are excluded in AIP diets due to their unique ability to cause inflammation.
We’ll be working on sharing some of our favorite AIP meal plan recipe ideas coming soon.
Here are some of the most commonly asked questions we get about the AIP diet.
On our AIP meal plan, we offer the ability to have an AIP breakfast planned for you every day.
An AIP meal plan is a weekly plan for sticking to your AIP diet. Because AIP is more health focused - small variations of non-AIP compliant food can set you back days or even weeks.
Fortunately, we offer an AIP compliant meal planning tool here at Ultimate Meal Plans. You can try it risk-free for 14 days here.
You can see a full AIp diet food list here. The short version is that it is a stricter version of paleo with restrictions on nightshades, egg whites and other similar foods.
While many people do lose weight on an AIP diet - the diet is primarily focused on eliminating inflammation and pain. While sometimes - this allows people to lose weight easily - it’s not the primary goal.
The easiest way to start the AIP diet is to read a beginner’s guide like we have built here. Then, we recommend using an AIP meal planner like Ultimate Meal Plans to help plan your meals + recipes automatically for you.
While coffee can be anti-inflammatory, for many people coffee can cause inflammatory responses. For this reason - we recommend when starting out AIP - that you remove coffee completely from your diet. If you want to try adding it back in later - you can have a clearer idea on how it affects you.
People are always looking for more information on the AIP diet. Unfortunately, though, there are unhelpful and frankly unscientific resources out there, that's why we've come together to collect the best resources we can find. Read more below: