Below is the full transcript of Episode 87 of the Autoimmune Wellness Podcast. This transcript is provided for accessibility and reference.

Title: Celebrating NAIP Launch Week & Creating Through Chronic Illness with Alaina Moore of Tennis (Ep 087)

Mickey: Hi, everybody. This week, The New Autoimmune Protocol is out in the world, and reaching this milestone just feels so special. While I am no stranger to writing books, you guys know that this one was uniquely challenging in that I experienced some new health issues as I was deep in the creative process, which meant learning in real time how to keep showing up with a very different capacity and meeting these deadlines.

So this book really came together with real life, alongside my chronic illness, uncertainty, and with the kind of support that makes it possible to just keep going. Today’s episode is extra special because instead of me talking about the book or interviewing somebody else, I am going to be sitting in the guest seat with my college best friend, somebody who has known me since we met in music school, and who also deeply understands firsthand what it looks like to finish a creative project under the strain of chronic illness.

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Mickey: Welcome to the Autoimmune Wellness Podcast. I’m your host, Mickey Trescott, and this podcast is all about helping you take ownership of your health through the Autoimmune Protocol and beyond.

And just a quick reminder before we dive in, this podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. It’s not a substitute for medical advice, so always consult your healthcare provider before making any changes to your diet or treatment plan.

[00:01:31] Introducing Alaina Moore

Mickey: And now I get to introduce somebody who is incredibly special to me. Today’s guest and interviewer is one of my best friends from college, Alaina Moore. We met in music school long before either of us knew what our careers or our health journeys would actually look like.

Professionally, Alaina is one half of the popular indie band, Tennis, where she is the vocalist and songwriter. And if you guys are not familiar with their work, Tennis has built this totally devoted following for their distinctive, detailed sound that spans so many styles and their incredible live performances. Seriously, go check it out on YouTube. They are amazing.

Her work as a musician is rooted not just in that storytelling and creative process, but also in resilience. And what makes our conversation so meaningful is that Alaina understands firsthand what it means to continue creating while also managing chronic illness. Both of us have had to learn how to work with our bodies instead of against them, how to honor limitations while still pursuing this meaningful thing that we really want to do, and how to redefine what productivity and success actually look like.

And throughout the years, Alaina and I have turned to each other for support during some of these really difficult seasons of our careers. And so today, she’s turning the tables and interviewing me about the process of writing The New Autoimmune Protocol, what it really took behind the scenes, and what it means to create something meaningful while living with chronic illness.

So Alaina, welcome to the podcast, and actually technically, your podcast for today. Thank you so much for joining me on this special day.

Alaina Moore: Yay. Thank you for having me, and thanks for the introduction. I really appreciate it.

Mickey: Absolutely.

Alaina Moore: Well, you know I’m so proud of you. I have been for a really long time. Um, we both relate in the sense of self-publishing in a way. Like, so my husband and I are a band. We worked with labels, but after feeling really dissatisfied with those experiences, we started self-releasing. And around that same time you started self-publishing, and it was just really cool to relate on that level as being like control of your own work that is a creative labor of love, and then also being, like a business person.

Um, like just a weird confluence of things that most people don’t like business and creativity to go together, but sadly they often do. So that’s been really amazing to watch from the sidelines. And then now we’ve had our… As you pointed out, our relationship has had this really unique, like dovetailing where we’ve had these points of symmetry in all the years that we’ve known each other, starting off with bonding over being music majors and our love of music, and now somehow in publishing where we’re both writing books, I’m writing a book. And then the challenges of working with our own bodies.

[00:04:37] Inspiration From Artists Who Created With Chronic Illness

Alaina Moore: So in preparation for this, I was actually thinking a lot about, um, how many artists that I have loved who worked through chronic illnesses. A lot of people are going to know, like Frida Kahlo worked through a life of chronic pain. One of my favorite authors, Flannery O’Connor, actually had lupus her whole creative life.

Like, she had to work alongside of that. Recently I read a really beautiful memoir called The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, which is about this woman, Elizabeth Bailey, who was bedridden for, um, two years with an undiagnosable chronic illness on, like a cellular level. And was unable to do anything except for look at a snail that someone put in a terrarium on their bedside table, and she just observed a snail for two years while she was inert. And it was one of the most, like powerful things I’ve ever read.

But while I was working through my chronic illness, and you’ve been doing this for, you know, a very long time now, I took so much inspiration from the lives of other people who have done this, and I know we also have with each other. But I think it’s interesting how much of a… it feels very… isolating when you have a chronic illness, but it’s weird how actually how many people have had to work through this, and it gives you a really unique point of view. It shows you different things in the world, and I mean, if you let it, it can enrich your art and your work.

Um, and, uh, last before I finish my little speech here, I… while I was really sick and turning to you a lot, and we were in the middle of working on a record, I read the essay by Susan Sontag, “Illness as Metaphor,” not knowing what it would be about, but I thought, “Well, I’m certainly going to relate.” And the opening was so beautiful, I just wanted to share it with you:

“Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later, each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of the other place.”

I just thought that was really inspiring and a beautiful way of framing it, that this is something that touches all of us, and I know this is why your work has been so important. So yeah, I just wanted to have a conversation with you and dive into this.

[00:07:08] Mickey’s Creative Routine For Writing and Recipe Creation

Alaina Moore: My very first question for you is, I love to talk about, like, process. So what’s your routine as a, as a, not just a writer but also as someone who creates recipes? Tell me, like, what’s your routine, your creative process? Talk me through that.

Mickey: Yeah. So thank you for that opening, and I really love that piece, and I love the dual citizenship ’cause sometimes that’s how it feels, right? Especially when you have some sort of a public face to whatever you’re doing, and the private part, you’re kind of like, “I’m a member of two clubs,” but you know, one of them, everybody’s making an assumption. So thank you so much for sharing that. I love that.

Alaina Moore: Of course. Yeah.

Mickey: So the question about process, so I have a couple different processes. So there’s writing, and that’s like the written word, the research, the interpretation of medical research, and then translating that into the protocol, and then writing about the protocol in a way that everybody can understand.

That is, uh, honestly was really easy for this book. I don’t remember doing it. It took about six weeks to write all of the protocol, and I think because I have been doing this for 15 years, I have been living it, teaching it, doing the medical research, collaborating, breaking all of that down, it just was like right at the surface. And honestly, the first book I ever wrote, “The Autoimmune Paleo Cookbook,” 15 years ago, it felt the same way. Like, I don’t remember doing it. I just said, “I’m doing this,” and all of a sudden, the writing part was done.

So for this book, very similar, six weeks. Woke up every day, you know, took care of, like, my morning feeding, a little mobility routine, got feeling really good and limber ’cause I think when my body is just a little bit, you know, open and not feeling stiff, I usually feel pretty stiff in the morning, then I will jump at the computer. I’ve got a few hours, and work on that, and I did that, like, every day for six weeks, and then that was done.

The recipe development is completely different. So, I have a little bit of hyperphantasia. I don’t know if you know what that is. Okay, so I’ve actually recently learned this because I have a brother-in-law who has aphantasia, and we’ve been kind of discussing it.

So he can’t picture anything in his mind. Hyperphantasia is the opposite, so everything is happening in my imagination, and it’s actually familial. It actually makes a lot of sense. Like, my mom has a photographic memory. We have a lot of artists in our family. But I have that with taste and with sound, and my senses get a little scrambled. Sometimes even, so with sound, I actually get visual memory. I have a perfect memory when it comes to hearing things, which is kind of why I wanted to study music and get into sound engineering and composing because I can imagine what I want to create.

Now, I’m really inhibited by my musical skill and actually, like, the technical skill needed, so I think that’s why I didn’t end up being a musician. But I think that’s why I loved studying composition in college because I could literally imagine what something would sound like. And as long as I could communicate that, whether writing that on a page or to somebody who was going to perform, ’cause it for sure was not going to be me, then I could make that happen.

With taste- I can conjure the taste of something that I haven’t had in months. Like, I remember tastes. I can taste test flavor combinations. So recipe development starts as a mental process for me, and because of what I do is try to help people find solutions to cooking foods that are very common, I actually just start with a list of, like, proteins.

So, you know, chicken, I want to hit all of the areas of foods that people have access to in the store. So it’s going to be chicken thighs. It’s going to be chicken breast. It’s going to be ground beef, ground pork. You know, just go down the list of kind of a percentage of what most people have access to.

And then in my mind, I’m thinking, “What flavor do I want to combine?” And I map out kind of the bones of a book that is completely theoretical and based on just covering all the bases both in flavor, in texture, in ingredients, combinations, and then techniques. And so once I have that, then I start going recipe by recipe and then imagining how all those flavors would taste together.

And then I go into the kitchen, and I test it to make sure that whatever I have written out in terms of process or my idea, then technically I use my cooking skill to figure out how to make it taste how I had imagined, and then that’s the recipe development part. And I mean, that takes a long time, just because you have to cook something over and over.

And then the last part is the photography. So there’s kinda three buckets for me. There’s writing, there’s recipe developing, and then there’s the photography, and the photography is the “artsiest” part, right? It’s like having a visual of, you know, having an accurate representation of whatever the, the meal is, you know.

Like, I’m not making something that you’re not going to be making at home in your kitchen. So I want to make it a true representation of what it is, but I want it to look really good. I want the pictures to be technically correct. I want the shadowing and everything just to look like that is a beautiful photo. That is something that I want to eat.

Alaina Moore: Yeah, you want it to be inspirational.

Mickey: And colorful and, and yeah, exactly. And, you know, when you have a book that has over 100 pictures in it, it’s kind of like, honestly, Alaina, when you’re writing an album and you’ve got X amount of songs, you know, you can’t have too many songs that sound similar even if they’re really, really good.

You kind of want to, like, have a range. So in terms of, like, flavors and textures and ingredients, I think of this spectrum of, like, all the areas that I want to hit in terms of a cookbook. And so that might be like, you know, 5% desserts. It might be 5%, like, drinks and smoothies. Those aren’t really exciting to people.

But, like, the 80% is going to be the stuff that everybody’s making every day, weeknight dinner, ingredients you can get at any store, you know. So hopefully I described it. It is kind of like on one end, it starts as like a math and like a thinking project, and then kinda comes through this filter and ends in like a very creative photography project at the end.

[00:13:31] Alaina’s Creative Process with Songwriting

Alaina Moore: That’s so interesting because it’s really similar to my process as far as these like different categories of what parts of your brain you’re enlisting to execute a task. But for me, it’s reversed. So for me, all the like really creative work very like artsy is upfront, and then the more like thinking, analysis side of my brain gets employed on the back end when it’s time to, like, challenge the ideas, edit the songs, mixing, mastering, whatever.

That’s when, like, all of the like, engineering brain or editor’s brain is employed, which would be more analogous to, like, your science writing in the beginning stages. So it’s just reversed for me.

But I think that’s something a lot of people don’t understand about a creative process, is that it actually takes both sides. This, like, editor analysis kind of brain, that’s very just, like, task-oriented, and then the other side that is, like, your artsy, like, exploratory, like, I’m following my inspiration, I’m expressing myself.

It’s hard to make yourself do both. And people tend to, like, feel more comfortable in one camp or the other, but it seems like you have, like, this very healthy way of, like, breaking it down and, and just, like, executing the tasks, which is really amazing.

Mickey: Yeah, and, and I will say, the writing part, I need complete control over my environment. I need foam earplugs, noise-canceling headphones. I need to have eaten exactly the right thing, done my mobility work, have it be the exact time of day, and I get in front of my computer for, like, research and writing, and I am like a sports car.

I’m like this finely tuned machine. I can write, like, X amount of words in X amount of time, and I have a schedule of the day that my manuscript needs to be done by my own, you know, design,

Alaina Moore: timeline,

Mickey: am done on that day. Because I just have done the math on, like, how many words I need to write. I’m literally a machine.

I get to photography, and I am waking up, sleeping in. I’m like, “What, what am I doing with my life?” Like, for some reason, the chaos, I would be really curious to know how you deal with this, Alaina, but, like, I feel like the visual part is so creative that I need it to be wild and

Alaina Moore: Mm-hmm

Mickey: have some sort of like, “Uh-oh, is this going to work?”

That’s when it’s the best, you know, which I don’t feel like that with writing. With writing, I feel like I can just sit down and do it.

The photography, and I’ve really struggled with that with this book, because of my health, I just, you know, there was a lot of chaos. I think it produced really a good product but yeah, I’d be curious to hear how you deal with that.

Alaina Moore: You’re totally right. I think you need to go into that kind of thing with, like, something, like, you need a plan.

But, you’re right, it needs to be chaotic because you need to be kind of responding to what’s happening, because you won’t really know what’s working until you see it, and you kind of need to like, follow the trail of what’s actually working in real time. You might have had this, like, grand plan, and then once you’re doing it you’re like, “Hmm, it’s not really feeling that good. But, oh, that crumb fell over there and it’s in this golden halo of light. Actually, “get that.” You know, it’s like, “Who saw that coming?”

Mickey: Oh my gosh. I actually was just going to ask, have you ever been so invested in something that you’re just forcing, and forcing, and forcing, and, like, so much time goes into it, and then you do, like, literally throw this over here and, like, take a picture, and it’s, like, the best picture in the book? I had that, and then I’m sad about all the time I spent doing the thing that was bad that I just kept trying to make it happen, but it’s wild how that’s how it works sometimes.

Alaina Moore: We have that all the time, not usually so much with photography as we do with songwriting, where we will, like… It feels like very Sisyphussian, of we’re boulder up a mountain situation. After, like, a month of wasted effort, we, like, give up and get distracted and do something stupid, and we’re like, “Whoa, that, that’s a whole song, and that’s actually 10 times better than the other song we were, like, agonizing over.” That usually happens once per album, and it’s very frustrating. But I also think it’s not really wasted effort. I actually think that that is your weird process to get to that one amazing, moment that was like honestly just a moment of chance that you were noticing. But I feel like sometimes I think it’s just, like, you know, billiard balls bouncing around, and you just had to kind of launch it into motion chaotically. And, like, as long as you get there, you get there. It’s fine that you had all these, like, aimless paths.

Mickey: I love that. Yeah.

[00:18:11] Developing Range in Music and Recipes

Alaina Moore: Um, I actually had another question for you

Mickey: Mm-hmm.

Alaina Moore: thats related to the music and taste

Mickey: Mm-hmm.

Alaina Moore: sides of your brain. Patrick and I are not great cooks, but we love food and we do love to cook. We often think about music in terms of taste when we’re writing, like, in terms of, like, the properties of taste vice versa, food in terms of music. Like, salt is high end bass is, is umami. Do you ever think like that?

Mickey: Oh my gosh. Okay. So, uh, yeah, I have– So my end of the spectrum of like sound and taste and imagery is a little hyperactive. So like there’s a lot happening in my brain, that’s why I have to shut the world out when I write because that’s the hardest. Words, listening to words, like editing words, coming up with words, it’s the hardest thing because I think there’s no visual.

Alaina Moore: Mm.

Mickey: Um, there’s nothing to… I don’t know. There’s like nothing fun about it. So when I hear music, I actually have a visual representation in my mind. It’s like waves and colors, and it’s kind of like an aura, and it happens most when I hear something that is like I don’t want to say beautiful sounds weird, but like something that is thoughtfully and surprisingly curated, it gives me like a visual sensation, and it’s like harmonious and pleasing in not just I’m listening to something good.

I also get that with food because you’re right, food has a very similar quality to music in that there is a range. There is like the element of surprise where you think you’re going to eat something and you have had all this experience with food in the past and you think, “I’ve made this thing. I know what it’s going to taste like.”

And then there’s something about it that’s like surprises you, right?

Alaina Moore: Mm-hmm. Um,

Mickey: there is very grounding flavors. There’s very, like not in my style of cooking, but like there’s a complex interplay between like different types of heat and flavor that, definitely come in. So yeah, I love that you guys do that.

I don’t think to have a creative profession you need to necessarily have these skills, but I think being able to tune into the qualities of your senses in a way that allow you to, imagine them or to, to just have like a meaningful moment.

One question that I actually have for you is can you imagine creating that, like with your music or your food? Do you have to do it and hear it and experience it or, or can you do it in your mind?

Alaina Moore: It’s always in my mind first.

Mickey: Okay. Yeah. You and I share that.

Alaina Moore: yeah. I have like a race to get it out before I lose it.

Mickey: Okay.

Alaina Moore: And it’s the translation from what is in here. Like when I hear… I’ll usually hear a song in my head. It’s every… It’s got the bass parts. It’s orchestral. There’s, I hear the drums. I hear the everything. The only thing I usually don’t have are words, but I hear vocal sound, the timbre, the melody, all of it is all there.

And then I’m like, “Ah, I have to get it out.” But I can’t even play half the instruments in my head. I can really only play like piano and then like barely guitar. And I can’t play all of them all at once, and as I try to like- I don’t feel like this is the right word, but like transliterated or

Mickey: Yeah.

Alaina Moore: to there. I start losing pieces of details and like the more I hear things outside, the less vivid in here

Mickey: Yeah. Yep. Yep.

Alaina Moore: And so it’s just a race against time.

Mickey: Oh my gosh. Okay, so I have the same thing, and that’s actually why I don’t like writing music is because it’s so frustrating to be able to hear something in my head that I can’t execute. You are actually, like, a incredible musician, so you can actually sing or play piano.

You know what I mean? Like, you can get it out, I think, in a way that obviously… Like, you’ve written all these incredible albums, so there’s, like, evidence of that. I hear something, and I’m always, like, going to Noah. Like, “I hear this, but I can’t show anyone.” Because if I could just plug something into my brain, that would be so easy, but it doesn’t work that way.

So, um…

Alaina Moore: my… Patrick, to everyone who doesn’t know who my Patrick is, my husband and band mate, he can usually execute what he hears on to the guitar ’cause he’s a very good guitar player, but he will hear vocal melodies and he can’t get them out. He can’t sing. And as soon as he starts to like make sound from his mouth, he’s killing his own idea ’cause it’s not sounding like what he hears.

So he tries to like mime, like sort of like atonally sing it to me, hum it to me, and have… I have to like crack the code. I feel like I have a Rosetta Stone of Pat’s brain, where I’m trying to have like an association of basically like the intervals of the notes and be like, “Okay, I think he means this.” And then based on the key of what he was playing in, I have to try and figure out where that would’ve been placed. But it would be so hard to do.

But it is the hardest thing to do, I think, with music than anything. Like language is more tactile. Food is more limited. Like there’s only so many ways to make the food taste a way.

But one thing that I think is really interesting, is just learning how to notice, and this is obviously something you and I’ve been practicing, but the more you notice something… like I never had this with food. I would just eat something and think it tasted good. But later as I ate with more discernment and I began to write music with more discernment, that’s when I was making these associations of like, oh, like if a song sounds too like saccharine, it’s missing like acid. Like when you would need like vinegar splash in your salad dressing ’cause it’s too sweet or something.

Mickey: Yeah. 100%.

Alaina Moore: just about… It helps you like unlock, ’cause sometimes like your solution is abstract, so being able to pull in like different mediums helps solve the problem.

Mickey: Yeah. Yeah, and I mean, the technical skill, like what you’re describing about, like, translating the music creation process, the technical skill that it takes to do that is wild. With food, it’s not that hard, right? Like, cooking, there’s a lot of different techniques that you can use to arrive to the same product, which is actually what the recipe development process is.

I’ve decided already kind of the notes that I want to hit in terms of flavor and, like, what I want to do, but then it’s translating how do I teach everybody how to recreate that in their own kitchens using the technical skill which, you know, for the people that follow me, like it’s gotta be pretty easy.

People have chronic illness, like they don’t have a lot of fancy cooking tools, so how do you create something that is like really surprisingly flavorful and exciting but also like not super hard to do? So that’s kind of where the, the work part of being in the kitchen and doing the development is.

[00:25:07] How Mickey Perfects Her Recipes

Alaina Moore: Yeah. So, one other thing that I was interested in talking about, ’cause you had kind of touched on this once when we were hanging out, about how you perfect a recipe, which is really similar to like when we’re writing a song, we do like multiple iterations of it, testing it out different ways, seeing what is the ideal form of the song even once we kind of know what it is. Can you walk me through that process for a recipe of like getting to the final form of that?

Mickey: Yeah, so actually when I’m done writing the recipe, it’s usually handwritten, and then I will write that in text, and there’s an art and a system to that where everyone who writes recipes, some fancy cookbooks, they assume a lot of cooking techniques. So they might say, you know, “Brown the meat,”

and a experienced cook knows what that means. My style is to name every part of the process, even for people who are even beginners, I’m going to name every single thing so that it’s really, really clear.

So I will write that. Then I will make the recipe from my written instructions, and that’s usually where I catch mistakes. And then the last phase of the process, I will give that written recipe to somebody else and have them make it, and then I will ideally be available to actually taste what they made so that I can tell that that is written and they are… Like if a different person, if you could produce what I imagined, that’s my goal.

And then if you count the photography as a part of it, then that’s the final one where it’s kind of a final test. Actually, Noah’s my prep cook for photography days, so he makes it. And sometimes there’s adjustments for the photo because the food is going to be sitting there or whatever, so sometimes we mess with the recipe just for the photo, which is why I don’t combine those final two because that making it to taste it, somebody else making it for me to taste it is very important to like saying that it’s done.

But then the making it for the photo can sometimes, you know, be a little wiggle room. Honestly, it might be like the difference in like recording a song for an album and then how you’d arrange it to do it live. It’s just, you know, somebody’s experiencing the same thing in a different way, and so you make a couple little adjustments ’cause it’s like going to pop in the photo a little different if you do something to it, so.

Alaina Moore: So. This conversation weirdly made me hungry, and I had a Ricola, so now I’m eating it. It’s like, “Mm, food.” I remember you saying that you would test out recipes on the fire department.

Mickey: Yeah. Well, yeah.

Alaina Moore: Yeah.

Mickey: Um, so my husband is a firefighter and, you know, four hungry people sometimes, like he’s worked in assignments where there’s seven to eight people in one station. They have to cook every day.

So it’s a really nice thing because when I’m recipe testing, I have to test the volume, which most of my recipes serve six to eight, because I want everybody to have leftovers so that they’re not just constantly cooking.

Alaina Moore: Mm.

Mickey: But if I need to do that every day, you know, I’m one person. If he’s on shift, I’m alone, and I’m cooking maybe two or three meals a day for the book. I am limited by how much food I can consume. So a lot of it goes in the freezer, but a lot of the time I will either drop off the leftovers for them to eat, or I will go to the fire station and have them try to recreate it, like be a part of that testing process, or I’ll just make it in their kitchen, which is also illuminating for certain processes.

Because one of my goals in recipe development is not to make it so that people need a very specific level of tool. Like if you just have like sharp knives, a cutting board, a soup pot, and roasting dishes, like you can make all of my recipes. But sometimes when you go into someone else’s kitchen and their oven is like a little different temperature and their burners take a little different…

You, you see like, oh, that, you know, sauteing onions takes seven minutes instead of five or whatever, and then I can adjust the recipe based on that. And then I get, you know, four people to eight people all telling me like if it’s good or not, and these are people that eat everything generally. So that’s really helpful.

Alaina Moore: I don’t know if I told you, but the first recipe I ever cooked was one of yours. I had never cooked.

Mickey: Which one?

Alaina Moore: It was your stir-fry recipe in the Autoimmune Paleo Cookbook.

Mickey: Oh my gosh. Awesome. That’s awesome. The beef, the beef and broccoli?

Alaina Moore: Um, no, the chicken one. Okay.

Mickey: Okay, cool. I didn’t know that.

Alaina Moore: Yeah, I had never cooked, and I mean, I was one of the people who just thought like I ate for pleasure or to stop being hungry.

Mickey: Yeah.

Alaina Moore: I didn’t eat to nourish my body. That wasn’t something I ever thought of, and then when I got sick for the first time, I turned to you.

Mickey: Aw. Aw. I love that. Well, happy, happy to help. Hopefully it wasn’t too hard to follow. Back 15 years ago, I didn’t know what I know now, so…

Alaina Moore: No, no. And also you’re the person who taught me about coconut aminos, which is now my favorite

Mickey: Yeah.

Alaina Moore: I actually couldn’t do without it.

Mickey: I, I love that.

[00:30:17] Mickey’s Inspiration to Share Recipes

Alaina Moore: I wanted to talk about, what you feel… you went through this period of chronic illness, and you had to basically solve your own problems. And now I feel like you’ve taken this amazing initiative to share everything that you’ve learned with the world.

It’s almost like this, it feels like an ethical decision almost, like you had to do it. And I’m one of so many people who’s benefited from this. And I was just wondering if you could speak to that at all. Like, what prompted you to do this? What made you want to, like, synthesize everything you have done for you and share it with other people?

Mickey: That’s a great question, and I really think back to myself when I was 26 and diagnosed, and just kind of feeling, like, alone, and researching and not finding anything. And feeling like if I figure something out, I’m going to create something for the next person that needs this. And whether that’s, you know– At first I thought it was just recipes, and I thought it was finding a different way of cooking because my body just needed something different.

But then it expanded into now the research is really important to me because that is actually going to filter down into doctor’s offices, which, like, I mean, I, 26 year old me who got diagnosed, I couldn’t even imagine. Even though I was asking my doctors, “Does nutrition or the way that I eat have anything to do with it?”

Of course, with celiac disease, they were like, “Just go gluten-free, you’re going to be fine.” But every other interaction I had was very dismissive and said that it didn’t have anything to do with anything. Now, imagining, like, even in 15 years, I couldn’t have had the imagination to see that actual medical researchers would be interested in it, would want to study it, and then that research now has translated into, like, the other day I heard about someone who went to an endocrinologist, which is a specialist that specializes in thyroid disorders,

Alaina Moore: Mm-hmm.

Mickey: And they were told about the autoimmune protocol because of the medical studies that I was a part of facilitating. You know what I mean? And so that, to come full circle, like, that could have been me, and that could have changed my life so much more quickly and easily. So yeah, that’s, that’s what motivates it, you know?

Specifically and easily. So yeah, that’s, that’s what motivates it, you know?

Alaina Moore: Wow. Well, I know that I’m grateful, and I know so many other people are grateful. Every time I have a friend who has even, like, a hint of sickness, I just buy them your book. I’m like, “Whether or not this is what you have, I’m sure this will help you.”

Mickey: Oh my gosh, you’re so sweet.

[00:32:56] Standout Moments from The New Autoimmune Protocol

Alaina Moore: Usually, on every album we write, there’s like, know, we are so proud of the whole thing, but there’s usually one song where you’re like, “I can’t believe I wrote that.” It’s so, like, it feels like out beyond you, like outside of your own abilities.

I’m just like, “Where’d that come from?” Do you feel that way about any moment in this book? Maybe it was even some research you did, or it was a recipe you wrote or something, or a photograph.

Mickey: You know, actually the photos are the things that I’m the most creatively proud of. Like, I can’t believe that I photographed this book, and what I had to do, like what I had to get through. So we haven’t really talked about the uveitis, but I had this autoimmune flare in my eye. I kinda was blind for a week in one of my eyes.

It was awful. It, and it was right when I was like at the peak of trying to put it all together visually, and I had this moment where I was like, “I don’t think I can do it.” And of course, I took a break. I got my eye taken care of. I kinda regrouped. But what came after that was like I just saw… Like in, mentally I spent so much time thinking about what I wanted to achieve, and I talked myself up like, “I can do it. I’ve got this.” You know? And, and I executed it, and so honestly it’s just the photography as a whole.

Alaina Moore: Mm-hmm,

Mickey: And when I look at it now, some of those pictures I was still recovering, so part of my eye issue, so I had uveitis, which is inflammation of the iris. It’s related to an autoimmune disease that I now have been diagnosed with, psoriatic arthritis.

At the time I didn’t know that that’s what it was. And so I had a flare in one of my eyes. I had to have my eye dilated, and then also I had to use a steroid drop every hour. So, and both of those things, so I had vision loss as a symptom of the inflammation, but then also, those things change your eye and your ability to see, so I was just blurry, sensitive to light. My pupil was super blown out constantly.

And I spent a lot of time with my eyes closed, and actually you sent me a list of albums to listen to, ’cause I could listen to music. So I listened to some incredible music- And what I did was imagine what I needed to complete. I had a list of recipes that I had to photograph, and I just got really clear on what I wanted the end of the visual, like putting it together.

I’m sure you’ve had this experience with an album where you’ve got like 80% done. You know kind of like the structure of what’s happening, but then that last bit I always feel is the hardest because you’re like weaving through the, the, the connective tissue, like the, the part that it’s all just going to connect it and make it seem like a full thought.

That’s exactly where I got that flare with my eye. But I had to really not be able to work for a few weeks, but I could work in here, in my mind. And when I actually physically could see again and work again, it like flowed in a way that I couldn’t have imagined, and, and I think because I spent all that time like just really thinking about the visual.

So that’s the thing that I’m like, “I can’t believe I did that.” And I would definitely have loved to not go through that uveitis flare. Like that was awful, but I think it made that finish of the book just like so much more special and important to me just because I was able to overcome that and, and get through it. And I have never photographed any of my books.

So for anybody listening, you know, they’re like, “Oh, you have three books. They’re really beautiful.” I’ve always hired and worked with people who are professionals. I’m not a professional photographer. So the technical side, all of that is, was very new for me,

Alaina Moore: Hmm.

Mickey: but I really wanted to do it.

Alaina Moore: Well, I’m so proud of you, and I knew how hard that period was for you, and I related… This is another example of our like twin resonances, because around that same time we were working on our album and I was diagnosed with dysphonia, which is something I am still dealing… I still have now a laryngeal muscular dysphonia, which made it extremely difficult to sing. Constant hoarseness. My voice would kind of just like collapse out from under me. So I would have to sing the album in like little tiny pieces and take all of these breaks, let the inflammation calm down, sing again. And at the same time I got this diagnosis, we had already booked the biggest tour ever.

It was already like locked on the books coming up, and I’m like, “Great. Well, it’s, it’s all happening, so we gotta do it, and now I have dysphonia.” And I remember you being like, “I’m to the visual arrangement of my book and I’m blind.”

Mickey: We laughed. We, we laughed for a lot just about, like, what are the odds it’s just, it’s crazy that it’s, like, the thing you need to finish it’s like my vision and your voice are, like, specifically the thing affected.

Alaina Moore: I know. It felt like a cruel test from the universe, but I think it just speaks to both of our commitment to what we’re doing, and that we believe in it. And then also having chronic illness, that you’re like just bargaining. You’re like, “Well, of course I’m going to be sick, but if only it wasn’t my eye.” Like, you know,

Mickey: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Alaina Moore: “Blight something else.” ha.

Mickey: Well, and I have to say, I’m really proud of us. Like, we’re fierce, you know what I mean? Like, you guys, the concert that Alaina’s talking about, I went to LA and watched her perform at a sold-out Greek theater, and she nailed it. Like, it was so good. I don’t think I’ve ever heard you sing that beautifully.

[00:39:02] Alaina’s Experience with Dysphonia and Reconstructing Her Voice

Mickey: She had to, like, reconstruct her voice with physical therapy just to be able to sing for that tour. So actually, can you talk a little bit about that?

Alaina Moore: Mm-hmm. Um,

Mickey: Cause I think that would be really interesting to hear how you overcame that.

Alaina Moore: Yeah. Thank you. So I had been struggling for years, and it was getting worse and worse. I feel like I had a similar situation with you where I, I saw like 1,000 doctors, and it was just like nothing.

They’re like, “Allergies. Do a netti pot. I don’t know.” Like, no answers. And then finally it took me like escalating it to an insane point of desperation where I remember like crying to an ENT being like, “No, something is not right. You can’t give me antibiotics again. I promise something is wrong.” And then I finally got referred to Cedars-Sinai, saw a laryngologist.

I don’t even know how to say it. And she looked for one second into my, with like a little scope that went in here, and like peeked down at my vocal cords, and she had me make one single pitch. And she was like, “Oh, dysphonia.” And I was like, “What?” and it had been like five years to finally get some information, and by then I had been singing with like, a very weakened voice.

So I had solidified horrible habits around it, the same way you can imagine when you get an injury and then it just starts cascading because you’re babying that injury. So yeah, I had to do physical therapy, and that was the only solution. And the hardest part was actually that I think it would’ve gone faster if I had just gone mute until I could sing or speak correctly. I thought about, when you’re relearning how to walk, not like I want to compare myself to that, but you actually can’t walk until you can walk. But I could talk and sing, it just was wrong. So every time I did, it was reinforcing my bad habits. It was honestly just, the most difficult thing I’ve ever gone through mentally, and I had to go through hours a day of physical therapy, breaking down the simplest process from, like, breathing and exhaling over my larynx.

Like, had all these weird exercises of, like, blowing bubbles with a straw into, like, two inches of water and, like, sustaining a note. Until, like, one day something just flipped inside and I understood what I was doing wrong, ’cause I had to learn how to feel the difference between my larynx and my vocal cords, and they’re, like, right up against each other. And your larynx is a muscle, so it feels so much easier to control that than to, like, passively let air flow over your vocal cords. So it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, and there were a lot of moments where I was like, “I’m not going to be able to do the tour. I’m not going to be able to do the album.”

I just committed to the process. This is kind of a funny analogous thing, but at the same time, my husband is a skater, and he was trying to teach me how to skate just for… I don’t know why. I was like, “I’m going to learn how to skate.” And he starts trying to teach me how to do a shove it, which is where you, like, kick the board out from under your feet, it rotates 180, and then you land on it. And the whole principle of it, I was like, “Wait, so I kick it away, I jump off, and I just come back down and hope it’s there?” And he was like, “That’s it.” And I was like, “That’s crazy.” It took, like, a month of me trying before I had the courage to kick it away, jump up and come down, and then I landed on it, and I was like, “Oh my God.”

That was exactly what it was like to relearn how to sing. I had to, like… It was like some impossible thing that I couldn’t make my body do, but then one day I, like, jumped off of the ledge and I did it. It was such a bizarre experience. But now I have a lot of respect for physical therapy, ’cause I feel like it’s almost more mental than in your body. It’s like retraining yourself how to do something you’ve done many times before.

Mickey: Yeah, I mean, you’ve been doing it every day for 40 years. And also, like, who is learning how to do skateboard tricks at our age? I’m just, I’m just like, you’re just like, uh, le- putting it out there. I’m like that’s amazing.

Alaina Moore: Well I finally stopped because I had a few falls and I was like, “40 is too old to start falling,” I realized. I was like, “Okay, I have to…” ‘Cause, Patrick finally explained to me, he’s like, “Oh, half of skateboarding is falling.” And I was like, “All right. Well, I’ve peaked then. We’re done.”

Mickey: Oh my gosh.

Alaina Moore: But I felt really cool for like one year, and then I retired.

Mickey: Well, thank you for describing all of that ’cause I think it’s really easy to see the product. You know, I see the art. I was there at The Greek. I heard you sing your heart out, and it was just so amazing and beautiful. But you know, a lot of people don’t know what an artist might have to go through.

I think like you described at the beginning, so many incredible artists suffer through pain and different chronic issues to produce their art. And it’s probably a part of why it is the way it is, you know?

[00:44:11] Illness as Metaphor and Accepting Being Chronically Ill

Alaina Moore: I agree, I agree. You know, something that I really loved about Susan Sontag’s essay on illness as metaphor she talks a lot about how we use metaphors to talk and think about illness because we want to create distance from it because we are afraid of it and we’re even afraid of people who are ill. Cause A it could be contagious even when its not you feel like it is.

I hate to say it but its true that often people see it as a moral failing. Like what’s wrong with you, like what are you doing wrong with your life or maybe even your mental state, thats making you suceptible to this and its really difficult to not feel like you are living with like implicit judgement or shame. It’s just a really difficult thing that’s very humbling, and I’m… You’re the, actually the person who first told me, “Alaina, you have a chronic illness ,” and I, like, cried and cried ’cause it’s like, “Oh, I’m just, like, a little sick constantly.”

And you were like, “No, no, we should just acknowledge it.” And when you said it, I felt, like, a huge burden lifting. It was, like, such a relief almost to even just accept what was happening, it made it easier to even confront it and live alongside of it. And now I understand that with chronic illness, it’s actually just something you learn to live with the way that I, I have, like, very severe anxiety.

And I used to think about trying to cure it, but now I know you don’t cure it. You live with it. Like, you make it, make it your friend. Like, I put a cute hat on it, and I just lock arms with it, and I’m like, “Come on, bud. We’re going to do life together, and you’re going to make me a little less crazy.” I’m just going to, you know, mitigate this a little, reframe it a little.

But, like, trying to banish it isn’t the way. It’s about, yeah, like part- like partnering, having solutions, accepting it for what it is, and then, like, learning how to make sense of what that will mean for your life.

Mickey: Yeah. I’m, I’m rethinking, I’m like thinking back to when I said that to you, and I can’t remember, but I’m really, really happy that you were receiving that and like, and as a good thing because it does become one of those things that when you’re, experience chronic illness and you kind of see it in your close community, of course, we’re not like going around people on the street like diagnosing them.

Our culture wants us to maintain this facade of perfection, and if there is anything, any imperfection, we’re taught to neutralize it, hide it, don’t talk about it, especially women. So yeah. I mean, we gotta take care of each other, and we gotta support each other through the subtle stuff, and we gotta talk about it out loud.

Like, I mean, even just being able to talk about it right now, it feels really good to me because both of us have very public-facing careers. And especially, like from my side, feeling like talking about even in the last year, the uveitis, the new diagnosis, you know, there’s a lot of fear there of like people thinking like, “Well, maybe it doesn’t work,” or, “Maybe she’s not healthy,” or, “Maybe behind the scenes she wasn’t doing all the things that she talks about, and maybe she’s not a reliable person of health advice.”

You know, because there is so much, especially online, that is maybe not true and accurate to the experience of like managing illness, all we see are the overcoming. I overcame this, and it’s gone, like you said, managing the anxiety. I love that because there, you know, you’ll find a billion stories of people saying, “Well, it’s gone now because I did X, Y, or Z.”

And I think the people who really are talking about managing, that’s… I use that word over and over because it’s just like, it’s a part of you. And sometimes it flares up, and sometimes it seems like this tiny, tiny potential part of you. But we usually exist in this space that is not here nor there. And I really value having experience with this because, like you said at the beginning, you know, the dual passport, everybody’s going to have that side. Everybody’s going to experience chronic illness at some point. They are going to become a part of this community. And so if we just recognize it as a part of the human experience, and normal, and talk about it, and support each other, and see it, and not be scared of it, then I think we can all, navigate it in a much healthier and supportive way, you know?

Alaina Moore: Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. That’s really powerful, and I just really appreciate that that’s something that you gave to me, and I know you do this for a lot of other people.

Mickey: Thanks friend.

Alaina Moore: Mm-hmm. Yeah, you like solve problems and I distract people from them.

Mickey: Both are important though. You know what I mean? Like, both are important because, like, when you are trying to get through something, like literally the eye thing that I have, music was what got me through that week. I needed something creatively stimulating to set the mood for all the imagining, ’cause that’s all I could do.

And you sent me a list of, like, 10 albums that was just so… Like, I just remember that experience with such vivid richness of, like, it was actually fun. It was beautiful. Even though it was painful, and it was scary. I interviewed KJ Ramsey, who is a therapist, her memoir came out last week. And, she talks so much about finding the joy in those very real and, like crappy circumstances that those of us that experience chronic illness. And I really think back, and I can see that joy that I felt in just being able to experience.

This is an interesting problem. I can’t use a screen. I can’t use my phone. I can’t write. I can hardly open my eyes. But you know what I can do, is I can listen, and I can think.

Alaina Moore: Mm-hmm.

Mickey: That was my project for those few weeks of healing, so.

Alaina Moore: That’s so amazing. I actually have more music for you to listen to.

Mickey: Yay

Alaina Moore: Yeah, Patrick made a playlist, like a DJ set from our vinyl record collection of like different songs from each record, and he recorded it all from vinyl to digital and mastered it, and he did all the like, little faded connections. but I’ll send you the link.

Mickey: Awesome. Is it something that we could share?

Alaina Moore: Yeah, absolutely. Anyone can listen. Available on our website. It’s called tennis-music.com, is our website, and there you’ll see a little link to the playlist and you have to put it in your cart, but it’s just a free download.

It’ll just email you the download, and it’s lossless and it’s really beautiful. It’s like straight from vinyl, so it really sounds like you’re listening to the records.

Mickey: Amazing. I will definitely link that in the show notes so you guys can just click and go there. That’s awesome.

[00:51:14] Wrap-Up and Closing

Mickey: Alaina, thank you so much for being here and for holding this conversation with so much care. It means the world to me to share this moment with somebody who not only has known me for so long, but who truly understands what it means to keep creating through all of these complexities. I’m just so, so grateful for you.

If you’d like to keep up with Alaina and her work, you can find her through her band, Tennis. I highly recommend giving their music a listen. That playlist that we’re going to link is a great option. You can also find them on all the streaming platforms, through their website and social. I’ll make sure everything’s linked in the show notes.

And to everybody who’s listened to this episode, thank you truly. This has been such a special week, seeing the book baby, The New Autoimmune Protocol, out in the world. Knowing that so many of you have your copies in hand right now is something that I don’t take lightly. The book was created for all of you guys, for your healing, for your understanding, for your journey, and I am just so honored that it is now a resource that you can actually hold in your hand and use in your life.

So if you received your copy this week, I hope that you are taking your time with it, highlighting, bookmarking, and just making it your own. If you share anything about the book on social media, make sure to tag me @mickeytrescott. Use the hashtag #thenewAIP so that I can see and share your posts. And thank you so much for being here and for supporting the work, and thank you for being a part of this community.

I’ll see you next time.