I wasn't actually counting calories, but since I was eating mostly soft pretzels, I was taking in a lot fewer calories than when I was gorging on chips and cookies.

There is autoimmune in my family history, mostly in the younger generation though. Or at least they've been diagnosed as autoimmune, whereas those issues were considered to be allergies in my generation. My parents' generation, it was kind of a mixed bag of diagnoses sometimes being called allergies - even though they didn't show any definite allergic reactions to the allergy testing, just very minor reactions despite each individual clearly having constant congestion or digestive issues. (The digestive issue diagnoses ranged from spastic colon to colitis to irritable bowel, when in reality it could have all been autoimmune based, or it could have simply been a matter of so much drainage from the constant head congestion that the digestive system couldn't take it)

(And we seem to have gotten waaaay off the topic of how Pioneer Woman lost weight)