This is a first-person testimonial (YouTube) by Ann describing her multi-year illness journey culminating in a 2020 clinical assessment of a tick-borne (Lyme) condition alongside MCAS symptoms. Ann recounts an earlier period (late teens) when an integrative/functional doctor improved her health via lifestyle and diet, then a relapse after moving to the country ~7–8 years earlier. She describes severe GI and anxiety-like symptoms, extreme dietary restrictions, and progressive incapacity to reintroduce foods. After joining the Gupta Program she reports major improvements: shorter symptom episodes (minutes to hours instead of days–weeks), less chaining of symptoms, and improved quality of life (condition no longer dominates daily conversation).
Questions this video answers
2020
40 minutes
About seven to eight years ago
Chapters
So my name is Anne. And before the condition, I had a fairly active lifestyle. Not in terms of going out running marathons, but I was working. Very, very social person. I have a husband and dogs. We would be out with them a lot, eating whatever I want, having cocktails and enjoying life. When I was in my late teens, I had a period of being very ill and we didn't know what was going on and went to what was then just called a crazy doctor, but now is called probably a functional medicine doctor, integrated doctor. And he helped me so much, completely changed my lifestyle and diet and got me living a lot cleaner. And I was able to do well for quite a number of years. And about, I would say, seven or eight years ago now, we moved to a new, new home. I moved out of a city into the country and became ill. At first I thought I was getting menopause symptoms. I was blaming it on a lot of other things. I was able to cope, I think a lot longer than most people because I already had a lot of the lifestyle things implemented from my illness about, oh, 25 years earlier. So we couldn't figure out what was going on. I ate all organic of vegan. We use no chemicals, we do everything so clean. And we couldn't figure out. And my integrative medical doctor could not figure out what was going on. I finally, in 2020, I believe it was 2020, went to a new doctor who right away said, it's tick borne. I was developing other symptoms. I was having what I thought at the time were panic attacks, a lot of GI symptoms, a lot of frequent bowel movement. I lost a lot of weight. We couldn't figure out what was making me sick. I thought, oh, it's this food, it's that food. I started going on every diet known to man. I was on low histamine, low fodmap. I did sulfite free. I'm already a vegan with sugar free, wheat free, corn free, soy free. I went through a year where I ate nothing but chickpeas, rice and kale and oatmeal. And we couldn't quite figure it out. I was getting very concerned about my limited eating and my inability to start introducing more foods. And that is how I found the Gupta program. My symptoms have improved greatly. They've changed. The biggest change for me the other night I said to my husband, am I really that much better? And he just laughed at me me, what the biggest change is, I am not a symptom, free healthy person yet. I will be one day. But the biggest change for me is before I would get symptom A and symptom A would then trigger symptom B. C, D, E and symptom A would almost vanish immediately. But I would be stuck with BCD and E for a few days, a few weeks, sometimes up to six weeks, and I would just be decimated. Now if I get symptom A sometimes that's it and it's gone in 10 minutes. Sometimes I might start to get symptom B. It'll last for a few hours at most, a little bit into the next day. And that to me has been the biggest change. And that is where I can step back and see the hypothesis and what really is happening. How my body, I'm in cell danger response, what we call the loop. I guess if I am starting to get a symptom and I get anxious, I will sit down and do a 40 minute soft numb flow. And how it works for me is initially, usually that symptom starts to get a little worse because I'm focusing. And then by the end, almost across the board, it is 50 to 100% better, tremendously better. So a big change, a big change with my relationship is our life is not spent literally 23 out of 24 hours of the day talking about my condition. It is taken it from being a center part of my life to just being a small part of what my life is right now.
