Below is the full transcript of Episode 94 of the Autoimmune Wellness Podcast. This transcript is provided for accessibility and reference.

Title: Food Nomad: Navigating the Emotional Journey of Autoimmune Disease with Imei Hsu (Ep 94)

Mickey: 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.

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Mickey: 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.

[00:02:34] Introducing Bernice Imei Hsu

Mickey: 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.

Imei Hsu: Thank you so much for having me.

[00:03:39] Introducing Imei’s Concept of Being A “Food Nomad”

Mickey: 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?

Imei Hsu: 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.

[00:06:17] Discussing Imei’s 2021 Article “Bringing Culture Back Into The Kitchen”

Mickey: 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.

Imei Hsu: 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.

Mickey: 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.

[00:13:21] The Long Game of Healing

Mickey: 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?

Imei Hsu: 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.

Mickey: 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,

Imei Hsu: Mm-hmm.

Mickey: know.

But it, that, that is really challenging, too. Thank you for sharing that.

[00:18:19] Gluten Free Sourdough Baking Experiments

Mickey: 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?

Imei Hsu: 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

Mickey: I want to know where this recipe’s gonna be published if you feel so generous, ’cause this sounds delightful!

Imei Hsu: 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.

Mickey: I love that. I’ve,

Imei Hsu: Yeah

Mickey: 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.

Imei Hsu: 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.

Mickey: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:25:58] Bringing Culture Back Into The Kitchen

Mickey: 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?

Imei Hsu: 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

Mickey: 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.

[00:31:48] Food Is Belonging And Navigating Relationships

Mickey: 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?

Imei Hsu: 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?

Mickey: 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.

Imei Hsu: 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.

Mickey: Yeah, and

Imei Hsu: Now-

Mickey: 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

Imei Hsu: We know

Mickey: 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.

Imei Hsu: You’re welcome. I personally did cartwheels around my house like, “No way!”

Mickey: 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.

[00:37:55] Giving Yourself Permission

Mickey: 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?

Imei Hsu: 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.

[00:42:09] What It Means To Keep The Food Flame

Mickey: 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.

Imei Hsu: 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.

Mickey: 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.

[00:46:12] Encouragement For Anyone Struggling To Keep Culture In Their Kitchen

Mickey: 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?

Imei Hsu: 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.

Mickey: 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.

[00:48:24] Wrap-Up and Closing

Mickey: 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?

Imei Hsu: 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.

Mickey: 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.