This is one of five Starting Paths for beginning the Ancestral Regeneration Protocol, offered for anyone whose current health or history means the standard Week One foods are not the best place to begin. Whichever path fits you, keep following the protocol week by week, or slower if that is what your body needs, for the morning routine, mindset work, detox, and lifestyle pieces. Skip any food you cannot yet tolerate, and bring it back in once you have seen some healing.
For the lows and the highs of this journey, it also helps to read Addiction and Compulsion: A Nervous System Perspective and Rhythm OverPerfectionism. They will help you meet setbacks with curiosity and calm, and celebrate your progress along the way.
If you are coming to ARP from another healing diet, like keto, carnivore, paleo, low-FODMAP, a specific carbohydrate diet, or any gut-healing protocol that took out starch and sugar, I want to start by saying well done.
You have already done so much of the hard work. You have learned to cook from scratch, to read your body, and to live without the foods that were feeding the problem. Nothing you did was wasted. Now you can continue to build on the foundation you have laid.
You may have found that you got better, but not all the way.
Maybe you plateaued, or you feel well only as long as you keep your food very narrow, or new sensitivities keep showing up.
Maybe your hair is thinning, your ferritin will not climb, your sleep has changed, or histamine and oxalate flares have started even though you are "doing everything right."
This is very common, and there is a reason for it.
Why Taking Out Starch and Sugar Is Only the First Half
Taking out starch and sugar starves the opportunists: Candida, Klebsiella, sugar-loving Streptococcus, and the rest of the crowd that thrives on a modern diet and not all pathogens can be starved out.
That is why these diets help so much at first.
But over time, and especially after eighteen months to two years, the same narrowing starves our birth microbes too.
Bifidobacterium, Faecalibacterium, Akkermansia, Roseburia, and the whole butyrate-making family feed mainly on small amounts of the right plant fibers and milk sugars.
When their food is gone, they slow down, then go dormant, and eventually some of them disappear.
These are the microbes that make our B vitamins, train our immune system, seal the gut lining, calm histamine, and help make our neurotransmitters.
So we end up with a gut that is quieter, but not truly seeded or fed.
ARP does three things most healing diets do not do, and it does them in a specific order.
- We rebuild the mucosa, the living lining the microbes need in order to live.
- We address the pathogens once that home is sturdy.
- We feed the birth microbes back to life with tiny, careful amounts of the foods they need.
The order is the medicine, and the patience is the work.
Where You Begin With Food
Because you are likely already eating without grains, sugar, and processed food, and you probably already tolerate meat stock, you can move on to the intense gut-healing phase of ARP (Week Nineteen) for your foods.
Stay in the week-to-week protocol from Week One for your learning, your routines, and your nervous system work.
Keep the foundations close:
- meat stock daily
- generous animal fats
- mineral salt
- mineral water
- electrolytes
If you have been eating very lean, add fat slowly, starting with a teaspoon in your soup and increasing by a teaspoon each week.
If you have been in ketosis, that is wonderful, and you can stay there; just know that some of the birth microbe foods in Phase Three may bump you out, and that is okay when it is done on purpose.
If You Have Known Histamine Issues: Three Weeks of Beef, Salt, and Water
If histamine is a known problem for you, with flushing, itching, hives, a racing heart, headaches, anxiety, or reactions to nearly everything, begin with a simple reset before anything else if you cannot tolerate the stock and ferments, that is OK!
For three weeks, eat only beef, salt, and water.
Choose fresh beef, cooked fresh each time, since leftovers and slow-cooked or aged meats build up histamine.
Salt generously with mineral salt, and drink good mineral water through the day.
You can begin with our Beginning ARP Meal Plan after lowering your histamines.
Along with the beef, add Lactobacillus plantarum 299v, starting with a speck or 1/4 capsule a day and building slowly as you tolerate it.
L. plantarum 299v is always the first strain we reach for when histamine is high, because it helps bring histamine back into balance and begins to settle the gut.
And begin your nervous system work on day one, which is described below.
A histamine bucket overflows most often in a nervous system stuck in fight or flight, so the calming work matters as much as the beef.
Keep lovingly in mind that histamines heal.
They are simply trying very hard to heal what is going on inside the body, so approach them with neutrality, if not love.
After three weeks, move into Phase One below, bringing in meat stock, cooked 1.5 hours with salt only, cooled right away in an ice bath, and frozen in small portions, and adding new foods one at a time as described in Reversing Food Intolerances.
Phase One: Rebuild the Mucosa
Before we ask anything to leave, we make the home sturdy.
The mucosa is the living lining of the gut, throat, sinuses, and lungs, the surface where microbes either find a safe home or do not.
A healing diet can calm the gut, but it does not always rebuild this layer, and without it, the birth microbes have nowhere to live.
For two weeks to a month, and continuing through everything that follows, we rebuild it with a few gentle daily companions.
Begin low and slow, with just a speck if you are sensitive, building over weeks as your body welcomes them.
Lactobacillus fermentum CECT5716: 1/4 capsule daily. A keystone mucosa rebuilder that continues through the whole protocol and beyond.
HMOs (human milk oligosaccharides): a pinch daily, as the food for the fermentum.
Bacillus subtilis HU58: 1/4 capsule daily. A soil-based organism that holds the terrain steady; please do not run out of it.
Lactobacillus plantarum 299v: 1/4 capsule daily, which you may already be taking.
Underneath these, keep your foundations in place:
- enough zinc,
- daily electrolytes (potassium and magnesium), and
- generous mineral salt so your body has the sodium and minerals it needs
If your body has been reacting to everything, even tiny doses of supplements, this may be a sign of mucosal collapse, and the order matters even more: begin with the fermentum and HMOs alone, then add plantarum 299v, and then HU58.
Please read Week 59 for more on mucosal failure, and Week 81 for the birth microbes.
Phase Two: The Pathogen Protocol
Once the home is sturdy, after at least a month and when your body has settled, we layer the pathogen work on top, keeping every mucosa companion going the whole time.
If you can, a GI-MAP stool test is a wonderful guide here, because it shows which pathogens and overgrowths are present and which birth microbes are low.
The protocol is three simple steps, taken one hour apart, with water only for the first two steps and nothing else to eat or drink until the third.
Hour 0 — the biofilm buster
NAC together with proteolytic enzymes (or the enzyme matched to your organism), with water only, at least an hour away from food. This gently opens the protective slime pathogens hide in.
Hour 1 — the quorum sensing disruptor
the one matched to your organism, such as ajoene from aged garlic for broad action, berberine for Gram-negative bacteria, or quercetin for histamine-stirred bodies, with water only. This quiets the chemical signals pathogens use to coordinate and defend themselves.
Hour 2 — the antagonist and toxin neutralizer
the beneficial organism matched to your pathogen (for example, HU58 when strep is in the bowel, L. salivarius UCC118 for the mouth and throat, or S. boulardii for fungal overgrowth), together with lactoferrin. This one can be taken with food.
You can take 1 capsule of each non-microbe supplement, 1 slice of crushed garlic clove left out for at least 10 minutes and up to 5 or so hours and 1/4 capsule of microbes or make a yoghurt of them, having a spoonful for a dose.
Run this part of the protocol for at least a year if retesting is not in your budget, or retest with a GI-MAP around thirty-two weeks to see how far your terrain has come.
Week 86 walks through this in detail with strep and its common companions, and the same rhythm works for nearly every organism.
When the time is right, often six months to a year in, Week 88 covers going back for parasites, metals, and oxalates.
Phase Three: Feeding the Birth Microbes
Once healing is well underway and your body begins to ask for them, we gently bring back the foods that feed your birth microbes.
Bring them in tiny, carefully controlled amounts, one at a time, and keep the portions very small until either the two year mark or more than three months of steady remission.
After that, let your appetite and tolerance guide any increases.
- Green plantain: 1/4 of a chip or a small cooked slice (never cooked in seed oils).
- Raw milk: one teaspoon, for its lactose.
- HMOs: a small pinch.
- Colostrum: a pinch to half a teaspoon.
- Chitin: a small amount of chitosan, or finely ground shrimp or crawfish shells.
- Larch arabinogalactans, or birch bark tea.
- Hibiscus tea daily where tolerated.
- Acacia fiber or PHGG: a small daily pinch.
- If chicory tea is not already part of your routine, a pinch of inulin or Jerusalem artichoke.
- Garlic, carrots, and onions feed the birth microbes too, and they are probably already on your plate.
If you have been carnivore or zero-carb for more than two years, some strains may need to be brought back as live organisms, not just fed.
Raw fermented foods, time with your hands in the soil, time with animals, and targeted microbes all help replant what has gone quiet.
If any of these foods brings back symptoms, step back to the last food you tolerated well, wait a week, and try again with an even smaller amount.
Nervous System Work
None of the food, microbes, or protocols will hold if the nervous system stays on high alert.
A body stuck in fight or flight cannot rebuild its mucosa, cannot calm histamine, and cannot welcome its microbes home.
So many people coming from other healing diets have become very good at controlling their food, and the fear of eating the wrong thing can itself keep the body in threat mode.
This work is how we teach the body, over and over, that it is safe.
Begin it right away, on day one, whether you start with the beef reset or go straight into Phase One.
The Body Scan
The body scan is the backbone of our nervous system work.
Lie flat on the floor or the ground, with no pillow, your arms slightly out from your body and your palms turned up.
Close your eyes and move your awareness slowly from the soles of your feet to the crown of your head, noticing each part of your body without trying to change it.
Do your morning body scan for twenty minutes if you are working, or a full hour if you are home.
Take two 5-minute body scans through the day, especially whenever you notice yourself hurrying or bracing.
Let your bedtime body scan carry you into sleep, flat on your back in a pitch-black room.
You can use a guided body scan recording, or begin the practice with your own voice and images.
EFT Tapping
EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) tapping combines gentle tapping on points of the face and body with words that name what you are feeling and offer your body safety.
It calms the stress response and helps the body let go of fear, including fear around food and symptoms.
Do EFT tapping for 20 minutes a day.
The Tapping Solution on YouTube is an excellent resource to get started.
Limbic Retraining
Your limbic system is the part of your brain that decides what is safe and what is a threat.
After years of illness and careful eating, it can learn to treat ordinary foods, smells, and sensations as danger, and it keeps sounding the alarm long after the real threat is gone.
Limbic retraining gently teaches it something new through repetition, redirecting fearful thought patterns, visualization, gratitude, and safe, gentle exposure.
Every day, listen to and speak along with our Daily Affirmations YouTube playlist.
Say the words aloud, sing along when you can, and let them become the new automatic thoughts your brain reaches for.
When a fearful thought comes, like This food is going to hurt me, notice it without judgment, stop, and gently replace it with a truth: My body is learning that it is safe. I am healing.
Pair the affirmations with a hand on your heart and a slow breath out.
Your brain responds to repetition, intention, and safety, and you get to choose what fills those.
Keep the Rest of the Foundations
Get morning sunlight in your bare eyes, and sun on your skin through the day.
Ground with your bare feet on the earth.
Keep your wake time, meal times, and bedtime the same every day.
Take your detox baths, move gently, laugh daily, and find your community.
Practice gratitude for the beautiful days and for the difficult ones.
A Word to Close
You have already proven that you can change how you live for the sake of your health.
Now we are going to use that same strength a little differently, not by narrowing further, but by rebuilding, restoring, and welcoming life back in.
Go slowly, one step, one food, and one breath at a time.
The body knows how to heal when it is given what it needs and feels safe enough to receive it.
I am so proud of you and love you all!