77 | Is Your Diet Keeping You Sick? The Truth About Food When Healing From Toxic Mold Illness

Aubree Felderhoff A doctor once told me to go gluten free and I literally laughed at her. I thought, what does food have to do with mold? Then I watched my antibodies drop from over a thousand to 36 in a few short months and I never questioned food again. Today we're talking about how diet can actually be one of your most powerful tools for your mold or chronic illness recovery. Let's dive in. Aubree Felderhoff Welcome to Mold Free Mom, where we cut the confusion and break down what it really takes to heal from mold illness. Whether you're dealing with unexplained symptoms and no real answers, or you know mold is your problem, you've done everything right, and yet you're still not better. This podcast is for you. I'm Aubrey, and I spent 12 years struggling with mold toxicity. before finally learning why nothing was working. Mold wasn't my only problem. Not knowing how to heal from it was. This is where guessing ends and real healing begins. Let's get started. Aubree Felderhoff Welcome back to Mold Free Mom. I am your host Aubrey Felderhoff. If you're new, welcome. I, along with my family, have gone through mold twice and after a 12 year battle, finally healed. And it is now my passion and my hope that this podcast will provide you with the education, the hope and the resources that you need if your family or you yourself are struggling with mold So today we are talking about something that I personally attribute to my ability to survive in such a toxic environment for so long, and that is diet. How we eat and how much that affects our body and our Now, as I said at the very beginning of this episode, I was once told that if I removed gluten from my diet, this was after I had been diagnosed with Hashimoto's hypothyroidism at the very beginning of my mold journey. If I removed just gluten from my diet, I could literally watch my antibodies for my thyroid slash in half or more. There was no way that I thought this was possible because I didn't think that I had an issue with gluten at the time. But of course I was desperate for healing because at the time I thought that Hashimoto's was the answer to why I was so sick. I had no idea. I had mold. And so I did what the doctor said kind of begrudgingly and wouldn't you know it made a tremendous difference. It was after that that I was hooked on the power and the healing effect of diet. And so I began going down the rabbit hole, as many of us do who are sick, and looking into everything I could possibly do to help myself with my chronic illness. And I eventually transitioned onto what was called an AIP diet. It's a form of a paleo diet called an autoimmune protocol diet. and it really removed all of the inflammatory or even possible inflammatory foods that I was eating. It was pretty hard for me to maintain, but I found such relief from that diet and it really helped me to survive for the next few years as I continued to unknowingly live in mold. So I wanna talk to you guys today about what that means for you as far as what are the diets that are best if you are living in a toxic environment or maybe you don't know that you're in a toxic environment, but maybe you're just chronically ill. What can we do? What can we do just at home with the power of food to help ourselves begin to heal? Well, the first thing that I would tell you to start to focus on is eating a lower inflammation diet. Now that all sounds fine and great, but when you get to the nitty gritty, I'm sure you're wondering, what does that even mean? There's so many things out there online and in books that tell you to eat this way and then the next person says to eat the opposite way and to cut this and to do this juice cleanse and it's so confusing, isn't it? I was even in the fitness profession for over 12 years and I found it to be confusing, all of the inundation of so many different opinions and studies and it was really hard to nail it down. But I think at the root of it all, don't we all know what we're supposed to be eating and what we're not? I know you've heard it. Don't eat stuff that goes in a box or a can. Eat the fresh stuff on the perimeters of the grocery store. So some of the top inflammatory foods that we put in our bodies are grains, specifically gluten, which is where I started on my food journey many years ago, but gluten and other grains. Whenever you're in a high inflammatory state, grains of any kind, corn, rice, gluten, those types of grains can cause a large amount of inflammation. Sugar. That's a pretty common and obvious one. Refined sugar is just not needed. There is no purpose for it in our diet. It tastes delicious. And does it make me happy when I have refined sugar once in a while? Yep. I think we're all on that boat. But we all know that if we cut sugar out completely from our diet forever, it would do no harm and it would only do good. Dairy is another one that is commonly Inflammation causing especially for people who are struggling with gut problems candida, SIBO Those types of things that are so common with mold and then alcohol alcohol is extremely inflammatory So these are some of the biggest drivers of inflammation that can make recovery or even just feeling better a little bit harder. If you're filling your body with inflammatory junk and toxins on top of possibly being exposed, you're not giving yourself a fighting chance to recover. So just something to think about. Now the next thing I would recommend is to, Slow your roll on the gut healing protocols. And let me tell you why. If you are actively in mold. And maybe you don't know. Maybe you don't know, maybe that's why you're listening to this podcast. But if you have a gut feeling, no pun intended guys, or you're dealing with mold illness, many, many times you will have gut issues because mold wreaks havoc on the gut. It causes all sorts of issues alongside colonization in the gut. So before we start working on healing the gut and doing what I did for years, I... chronically had gut infections and parasites and I kept going to doctor after doctor that would test my gut functional doctors integrative med doctors natural path I would go to these doctors and they would tell me that the reason that I was still sick is because my gut was messed up and it was the most frustrating experience because I ate so incredibly clean I did everything that all of the other doctors I told me to do all of the supplements and the bone broth and the collagen and the L-glutinin and all of the things that I was told to rebuild my gut alongside taking out all of the food that could cause inflammation. And yet nothing really changed in my gut. I continued to struggle with these gut issues and chronic infections and parasites, and I just could not seem to make progress. And what I figured out is obviously I wasn't going after the root cause which for me was mold I needed to get out of a moldy environment before I really had a chance at healing my gut and so I was pouring all of this money and effort into all of these protocols and Watching it literally waste away because the main source of the problem problem, which was the mycotoxins that had completely flooded my system they were still there and even as my gut maybe was healing with some of these protocols it was immediately being broken back down and so if you are possibly in the same position and you're having the same type of lack of progress like I had slow your roll and focus on getting the bad stuff out first it may be mold And then once all of the bad stuff is eliminated, then we can really focus back in on nourishing with the good stuff. but don't just jump into the fun stuff of let's heal the gut before we get rid of the toxins and all of the bad stuff. And then the next thing I wanna tell you is some people need to go on a lower histamine diet. Some people don't do well with some of the traditionally what's been taught to us traditionally healthy foods because we're already dealing with mold toxicity. We already have histamine response. Maybe we're dealing food sensitivities I know my family went through the brain growth it and histamine can build up in foods pretty quickly. And so if you're filling your body up, with some of these foods that we have been taught by many well-meaning professionals are good for your gut, you might actually be filling it with things that for you in particular are doing more harm than good, especially at this time. Now some examples of foods or drinks with higher histamine are things that are aged. So think of aged things that are fermented. So I know for years my family was huge in kombucha. I don't know if y'all have tried kombucha. We love kombucha at our house. And because I am a family of five, And I have three growing boys and everybody was drinking kombucha constantly. I ended up brewing my own kombucha to keep up with the financial demands of the kombucha. And so we really drank the kombucha then, but that's fermented. And at the time I had no idea that I was flooding our guts with a higher histamine drink that was supposed to be helping us. And in the long run, it would have helped us had we not been in mold. But at the time, at the time when we were in the house and dealing with so much sickness that was not helpful even though it was what I was told to do by a lot of well-meaning but not knowing doctors. So, fermented, aged, Things that sit in your refrigerator for a while. I hate to say it because i'm the queen of it but leftovers Leftovers the longer they sit the longer things sit the more histamine grows on them nuts is another one which With my family that was pretty hard. we relied on nuts heavily when we removed grains because we used almond flour for all of our baking needs and that was a bit tricky. And of course alcohol. I feel like alcohol is probably gonna be on all of these lists. But alcohol is another one that it sits and it ferments and it's super high in histamines and can cause a histamine response in you. Now the last thing that I want you guys to consider here, if you're listening to this and you're like, my gosh Aubrey, you just took all the fun that was remaining in my life and you removed it. Okay. I am surviving because I have your fun square of cheesecake every night or I love a good hamburger or a pizza on Friday. And I don't know what I'm going to do if I remove everything you just said. That... stinks and I get that. I want to tell you right now that it's not always an a black or white all or nothing type statement. Everybody is different. Our bodies are different from day to day. And as we heal, things will change. So don't be surprised if one day you might be okay with certain grains and the next day they cause you issues. Especially as you're healing and your body and your gut are beginning to rebalance, you may have times when things that previously were fine and not causing you to react are all of a sudden causing you to react. And that is okay. It does not mean anything is permanent. It's just our body healing. And so we want to embrace that. We want to remember that this is not permanent. Very little of this will be permanent, but this is a great, great step towards your healing. So look at it as an investment in your healing that you can do right now without a doctor, without anybody else. You can make that decision and begin to really give your body the tools that it needs to start working on healing So if everything I just told you is overwhelming. and you don't know where to start. I would encourage you to start with the two biggest inflammatory foods and just play with removing them from your diet, gluten and dairy. And if that is overwhelming, start with one or start with sugar. Just pick something to really start focusing on. I would not recommend unless you wanna go all in, but I would not recommend going after everything at once. That can feel so restricting and so difficult. and cause a lot of stress, honestly. That's the approach I took and it was really hard. And if even removing one or two things from your diet overall feels confusing or you're dreading it or you just think, I don't know how to do this, my brain fog is so bad, I'm so exhausted, I don't know how I can make this happen and go on living my life, Aubree Felderhoff | Mold Fr... I want to remind you that you don't have to do this alone. mold can be such a isolating experience. You can feel alone. You can feel laughed at. You can feel as if it isn't real, as if you're in denial. You can feel angry and frustrated. I've really... felt all the emotions on this journey of mold. And if you're feeling this way and you don't know where to start, how to do this, you know you might need to change your diet. You want to change your diet, but you're exhausted, you're depleted, you're hurting, you maybe have been sick for years and you have no idea how to take on such a big life change, I wanna invite you to get on my website and book a free discovery call and we can look at how to get you on a path where you have guidance, where you have the next step and only the next step laid out for you and you no longer have to walk this path alone. So if you haven't yet taken advantage of my free discovery call, I will leave a link at the bottom of the show notes and you can hop on and book a time. and I look forward to helping you navigate this complex area and get your life back. Aubree Felderhoff All right, friends, I hope that this episode has empowered you to take your health into your own hands. There are things you can do right now in this very instant to begin that healing journey. as always, if you have questions or need help, please reach out. and I'll see you next time on Mold Free Mom. Aubree Felderhoff Thanks for listening to Mold Free Mom. If this episode has helped you make sense of some of your symptoms, diagnoses, or why nothing has worked in the past, please make sure to follow the show and leave a quick review so others who are struggling can find it quicker. If this episode brought someone struggling with unexplained sickness or mold to mind, please share it so they don't have to waste years of their life chasing the wrong answers like I did. Remember, you're not broken. You can get your life back. You just need to be shown how.