A True Story of Reversing Autoimmune Disease with Dr. Terry Wahls

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Welcome to the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show with celebrity nutrition expert, fitness hall of famer and four time New York Times best selling author, JJ Virgin. JJ is a warrior mom whose knowledge and expertise have helped change hundreds of thousands of lives. With over 3.5 million podcast downloads and appearances on Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, the Today Show, Rachael Ray, Larry King Live.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. This show is about you, not about me. I want to help you find practical, real world ways to dial in your health and mindset so you can finally lose that weight and feel strong and, and energized. Stop settling for less than your personal best. It's time to find out how to look and feel better than ever. And I'll be right here with you the whole way. I am bringing you an icon today. Oh my gosh. I am so excited to be sharing Dr. Terry Wahls with you today. If you have autoimmune disease, anyone in your life has autoimmune disease. You want to avoid getting autoimmune disease. You're worried about neurodegenerative disease disease. You want to be healthier. Listen up because I've got some great information for you. If you've not heard of Dr. Terry Wahls, her TED talk had over three has, has and counting, over 3 million views where she shows the wheelchair that she was in. It wasn't just a regular wheelchair either. It was this very specific wheelchair where she was like leaning back, this tilt, recline wheelchair. Um, and she goes through and shares how she goes from being in that wheelchair to being able to bike within a year by what she discovered and created, which has now become the Wahls Protocol and a book, Wahls Protocol How I Beat Progressive Ms. Using Paleo Principles and Functional Medicine. She also has a cookbook, the Wahls Protocol, Cooking for Life. And she has put together a great group of info for us, including that TED Talk, a one pager on the walls protocol, some of her research, and you'll hear too. We're gonna, we're gonna dig into that and some of the foods and some of the things that you can do. So I am so excited about this. I can't begin to tell you. I have been wanting to have Dr. Terry Walls on for a while. By the way, we are going to be doing a Facebook and Instagram live so you will want to are on my channels that you've liked them. So you know when things come up like this because I've been bringing on some amazing guests on there as well, which gives you a chance to in real time interact and ask questions. All right, now I want to also do a shout out to Jesse Nuri from Australia who says a longtime listener from Australia, five star review in Apple itunes. Coming from a Chinese background, I was in love with white rice and noodles, but I haven't had them in my pantry for four years now. I found out about JJ from Dave's bulletproof Radio years ago. I just did a blood test and My LDL is 0.37 now this is different in Australia, but she says woohoo. Thank you for all the work you put in. I've learned so much from you. I recommend you to everyone around me because I really believe diet can change people's lives. And I had to read this one today because when you listen to this interview today, it is the classic example of how diet can change, changed one person's life. And now she is doing it to save lives worldwide and to change the way we're practicing medicine. Honestly, wait till you hear Dr. Terry Walls. What a powerhouse. You're going to be able to get this cool stuff that she's put together for you too. @jjvirgin.com Dr. TerryWalls. You spell that D R T E R R Y W A h l s. Dr. Terry Walls. Alrighty. This is going to be one your favorite all time, all time, all time episodes. And before I dive into this interview, I want to share another favorite with you.

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Dr. Terry Wahls, welcome to the show. I am so excited to be talking to you.

Oh, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Well, you are doing life changing work and talk about like getting, you know, getting lemons and making lemonade. So I want to, I want to start with how this all came to be. Like how you went from, from being in a wheelchair to now, like biking, walking, but more importantly, showing so many people out there what is possible and how to turn around autoimmune disease. Let's start from the beginning. Yeah.

So it's really quite remarkable. I'm an academic internal medicine physician. I was very skeptical of special diets, complementary alternative medicine, and taught my physicians, residents to be skeptical. But then in 2000, I was diagnosed with relapsing, remitting Ms. And I sought out the best people, which was the Cleveland Clinic, saw them, took the newest drugs and went steadily downhill. Within two years, I was doing steadily worse. I was advised to start the paleo diet, which I did after being a vegetarian for 20 years.

And who advised you on that? Where'd that come from?

Actually, it was stunning. It was the Cleveland clinic physicians.

Oh, that's awesome.

Which is actually very good. And so I read through the papers and decided it made scientific sense. And so after a lot of prayer and meditation, I went back to eating meat. But I continued to go downhill. And the next year I needed the tilt recline wheelchair. My disease had converted from relapsing remitting Ms. So now I was in the progressive phase of the illness. No spontaneous recoveries would be anticipated. I took mitozantrone. I continued to go downhill. I then took Tysabri, this very potent biologic drug. I continued to go downhill. Then I was switched to cellcept and Continued to go steadily downhill. It was clear to me that I was going to likely become bedridden by my illness, quite possibly demented by my illness. I also have trigeminal neuralgia, which is intense electrical jolts of pain that was getting more and more difficult to control. So I thought it likely I would suffer from uncontrolled refractory electrical pain.

Now, you sound so technical at this point, but let's go back to where you were then in your mindset. You must have been like, what was going through your mind?

Well, you know, I was having to continually reimagine my life because I had once been an athlete, but I was getting more and more disabled. I had very young kids, ages 5 and 8 when I was diagnosed. So I'm getting more and more disabled, But I'm thinking, how am I going to teach my kids how to be resilient when life is difficult? And so I could either give up or I could just go to work every day and talk about that. Life's not fair, but you got to do the best you can anyway. My kids get chores and more chores and more chores is I could do less and less and less. And so that helped me a lot. It was immensely helpful to have my kids and young kids who were dependent upon me and that I thought, okay, I could still teach resilience. I had thought I was going to teach them resilience by being an athlete and doing this wilderness travel, But I taught them resilience by they were going to have chores and life's not fair, but we all do the best we can anyway. And then, you know, as things were getting worse and worse and worse, I decided to go back to reading the basic science, because I had originally started reading the science a lot when I was first diagnosed. But it was so discouraging because once I converted to progressive ms, you know, and I saw that Ms. Is a progressive disease, Even relapsing remitting progresses over time. And half of people will become disabled within 10 years. One half will be unable to work due to severe fatigue, disability. And so my family had convinced me to stop reading the literature because it was just so upsetting. But once I was in the wheelchair, it's like, well, I know how bad this is going to be. It's pretty terrible. And if I want to do everything that I can, I need to read the literature again. So I went back to studying the basic science and would decide that mitochondria were key and would work on creating a supplement cocktail to support my mitochondria And I did figure out that my supplement cocktail did help my fatigue somewhat, and it slowed the speed of my decline. Although I was certainly not recovering. My paleo diet certainly did not recover me, but I stayed with it because at least I was doing something. That patient empowerment. At least I was doing something. And then the summer of 07, I discovered the Institute for Functional Medicine. I took their course on neuroprotection, which was tricky because I was beginning to have brain fog then. So it was. It was a slog to get through that and had a longer list of supplements, and I added those. But then I get this really big aha moment at the fall of 07 when I said, you know, I should redesign my paleo diet based on what I was learning in functional medicine and based on what I had put together with my own supplement cocktail. So I worked on my supplement cocktail, but what I did now was I redesigned my eating plan. Still a paleo plan, but in a very structured way, focusing more on what were the nutrients I needed to get in the food. And that's how I created what I now call the Wahl's protocol, this very structured way of eating, some targeted supplements. I went back to daily meditation and, of course, my very intensive physical therapy program that I'd been doing all along. And what is breathtaking, jj, is how quickly things changed once I had this new structure in place.

And did it take all of that together? Because you just named mindfulness exercise, a diet that was supplying key nutrients and not having specific ones, like taking things out and putting specific things in. And then supplements. Those four, like I would say, was it the combo? Was there one thing that really made the shift? What was it?

You know, I think it was everything. You know, I remember I was so devastated, I could no longer sit up. I had a zero gravity chair where I'm reclined with my knees higher than my nose. It's a struggle to walk 10ft. I'm having brain fog. I'm having refractory horrific pain. I've already added the supplements. I retarget my diet, and within a month's time, I can tell my energy's improving, my mental clarity is improving. In three months, I'm able to begin walking with a cane. In six months, I'm walking without a cane. In nine months, I do a bike ride around the block. You know, I'm crying, my wife's crying, my kids are crying. Because it had been easily six years since I'd been on my bike. And then at 12 months, I'm able to do a 18.5 mile bike ride with my family.

What are the doctors who are around you at the time saying to all of this? Because, like, you were the first person I ever heard who did this.

Correct. So no one had had such a dramatic reversal of progressive Ms. And if you do a case report search, I'm the first one and the only one that has that kind of case report in there. I have a case series now where I've reported this in our clinical trials, where we reported it also. My physicians were, of course, thrilled at this stunning recovery. But then I changed my clinical practice, and I'm talking less and less about drugs and more and more about food and. And some vitamins and exercise, and people are complaining. So my chief of staff calls me in to say, terry, what's going on? People are upset.

Well, are the doctors complaining or the patients? Who's complaining?

Oh, it's the doctors, the patients.

So they thought prior to this, all this, that maybe you were having some kind of miraculous spontaneous recovery. Like, didn't anyone want to know what the heck you were doing? Well, you know, that's what's crazy to me.

What is encouraging, though, is the chief of medicine at the time, he's a rheumatologist. He saw my decline, my recovery. He said, terry, this is so stunning. He gave me the job of writing up a case report, and then when that was done, he called me back and he said, now I want to do a safety and feasibility study. So. So the chair of medicine saw this was really remarkable, and he was very, very supportive and ultimately my chief of staff, who I had to explain what I was doing and why people were complaining. He too, became very supportive. But it is interesting that my partners got very uncomfortable at first, that my focus switches away from drugs onto diet.

And lifestyle, and that you have to look at a feasibility and safety study when one of them, you have these drugs that have crazy side effects and are super expensive versus diet, exercise, mindfulness, and supplements.

Is that interesting?

We've got it the wrong way. I mean, clearly, it's like, what?

Fortunately, my chief of staff gave me the time. Chair of medicine had since got promoted to the dean of the medical school. So he was very instrumental in making sure that I stayed with the plan to get the safety and feasibility study going unimproved. And then every year with the research week, I'm presenting our research and our progress. At first, people are amazed. I can get people to adapt this very rigorous protocol, and then they're impressed with the remarkable Changes that we're reporting in these amazing videos of the gait improvements that we're able to achieve, not in everyone, but the fact that we could get half of our people to have clinically meaningful improvements in gaits in, that is walking ability in others with progressive multiple sclerosis.

Well, and what you just explained before is that even though you had. You called one progressive and one was more like stable. What was the name?

So when I was first diagnosed, it was relapsing, remitting. That's where you have spontaneous, getting worse, getting better spontaneously. And then it converted to secondary progressive, where you expect to have a 10 to 20% worsening every year, and you don't anticipate any spontaneous improvements. So when I did my safety study, jj, we chose just primary and secondary progressive Ms. So if anybody improved, we would know it's from my intervention as opposed to a spontaneous improvement.

And these were people that really were only using medication to manage the slow decline, Right?

Well, you know, some were using meds, but at that point there really aren't. There's not a lot approved for either primary or secondary progressive Ms. And that was back in 2010, 2011, 2012, when we were doing that study. So it's quite remarkable. We had remarkable improvement in energy.

It's a little more than quite remarkable. It's way past that. I mean, again, I just got to recognize you for. Look at what has happened because of what happened to you and because you just kept digging and digging and digging, not giving up hope, doing this, seeing the slightest bit of like, huh? And just keep going. And now look at like, how many people have you impacted so far? You probably have no idea. I know. What's in the seven figures?

Well, we know 3 million people have seen the TED talk. My first book has been over 200, the Walls Protocol. There's been over 200,000 copies of that has been sold. And then the fact that my success caused the Ms. Society to fund dietary intervention studies and make that a research priority. So there are a lot. Several more pilot studies underway. And now because of that funding, priority shift from the Ms. Society. Now, if you go to ClinicalTrials.gov there are 13, 15 different dietary intervention studies underway for multiple sclerosis.

Well, and it also just gives it. You know, I think that your impact goes even bigger than that because it also just makes us look at the overall impact of diet on autoimmune disease. Yes, on diet, on all disease. Like, you know, it always kind of struck me as bizarre that diet was considered alternative. I'M like, what? You know, I mean, wouldn't we put this first and then build on that? And I think what you've done is created that shift, which is so incredible. So it's way bigger than, you know, than where you started.

Absolutely. We now appreciate, because of the advances in the microbiome research, that the microbiome has a huge impact on immune cell activity for all autoimmune diseases and a lot of neurological diseases as well. And so now my basic science colleagues and my clinical colleagues now begin to agree that yes, diet quality has a huge impact. And so it's, you know, here at the university, I've gone from being sort of this eccentric oddity to this brilliant visionary.

Yeah, that's, isn't it funny? I think don't most, most brilliant visionaries start out as eccentric oddities?

Yes, absolutely, yes.

And so you, you talked a little bit about this, but let's go a little deeper into, you know, you started out with your own situation, then applied it to other people with Ms. What else can the Wahls protocol, who else can it help?

Well, certainly we see that it helps a wide variety of autoimmune diseases. So I've seen it in our lifestyle clinic to be very helpful for lupus, for rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, other neuro inflammatory conditions, myasthenia gravis, inflammatory bowel disease, and then in terms of neurodegenerative things where you have shrinking brains, early cognitive decline, even early Alzheimer's patients have done very well with it, Parkinson's has done well. And then we have so many folks with chronic pain, fibromyalgia, neuropathic pains. Those people have been greatly helped. People who've had old war injuries in amputations found this to be helpful at reducing pain and then mental health issues. Anxiety, depression, ptsd, traumatic brain injury. You know, in the va we had so many people with traumatic brain injury that were able to turn things around.

And what are the basics? So we have the mindfulness. You talked about going back into meditation, you talked about specific exercise. Tell us a little bit more about the diet piece of it. And I know that for everybody listening, by the way, you are going to get a summary of the diet, you're going to get access to some of Dr. Wall's research linked to some of the videos. So you're going to get a lot of information. I'm going to put all of that@jjvirgin.com Dr. Terry and that's D R T E R R Y Walls W a h l s so Dr. Terry Wahls. T E R R Y W A H L S But let's get just a little bit of a overview of what the diet looks like.

So there are a couple things that we're going to have you remove. Gluten, dairy, and eggs. These are the three most common foods that have unrecognized food sensitivities that.

Amen.

That drive up your inflammation. So you got to get rid of the harmful foods.

Can I tell you something very funny, Terry, that I never like when I wrote the Virgin diet, all I saw was I was going to the doctor's office teaching them how to use a food sensitivity test with their patients. And people would walk in complaining about fatigue and joint pain and headaches and all this stuff. And we do the test and the food showed up over and over again. It was always dairy and eggs. And then gluten was a different type of test. Yeah. And I just started to see when we pulled them out, they lost weight really easily and effortlessly and it stayed off. But then I had people come to me and they were like, my psoriatic arthritis. I like, it's not a problem. And I was like, oh, you know, so I loved hearing that because that's. I didn't plan to find that out, but that's what I found out.

Absolutely. Very common. So there's a food you remove. But. And remember, for me, I'd already taken that stuff out. It wasn't enough to recover me. I had to ramp up the nourishing foods. And so those nourishing foods, lots and lots of vegetables, in particular, green leafy vegetables because of the vitamin K, the carotenoids and antioxidants in those greens, the deeply colored. So beets, carrots, berries, peppers, things that are colored all the way through. We have many, many studies showing lower risk of cancers, heart attacks, obesity, mental health problems. When you have more color then lots of sulfur in the cabbage family, onion family, mushroom family, those foods ramp up the enzymes involved in processing, eliminating toxins. They also ramp up some very important enzymes in making neurotransmitters. So they're very, very important if you have a neuroinflammatory disorders such as ms, very important for autoimmunity in general to improve your detox pathways.

Now we're already up against 20 and I wanna go into gut microbiome and research and all this. So I am going to, while we're here, get a commitment that you'll come back, I'll come back pretty please. And for everybody listening, I want to also I'll put in my links for my social sites and for Dr. Terry. So you definitely want to be hooked up with Dr. Terry Walls and all of her latest research. But I'm going to also bring her on to a live and answer your questions too, because this is such key information and I know that you didn't just stop doing the research. You continue on and on and on. So I want to get the latest and greatest. So I want to remind Everybody, go to jjvirgin.com forward/doctorterrywalls and again, that's spelled T E R R Y W A H L S. And you will be getting a bunch of information there that will help. And also a link to the book. Do we have a link to your, your talk too, where you do the TED Talk where you show your wheelchair?

Well, we'll get that to you.

That, that like crazy stunning. Everybody needs to listen to that. So we'll have all of that information. And Dr. Terry Wahls, you are amazing. The impact you've made is stunning. And I know that you are just getting started. So thank you so much for everything you do.

Thank you.

This is the time where I answer a listener's question and you know, I get on my Facebook and Instagram lives, which I would love to hang out with you there. So again, JJ Virgin on Instagram, JJ Virgin official on Facebook and talk about how in the virgin diet, we really look at which foods work for you and which foods don't. The first thing that I do, and you heard me talk about this with Dr. Terry Walls today, was I in looking at food and food sensitivity testing and food intolerance testing for gluten and genetic testing, I discovered that gluten, dairy and eggs were the most common ones. And then the second tier were corn, peanuts and soy. And then of course, sugar creates a lot of the food intolerance issues. And so what I get asked all the time is, jj, I hear you say about pulling these foods out, but I just can't make that commitment. And here's what I would say. I don't want you to make the commitment forever. I want you to make the commitment for three weeks. And first off, could we agree that we can do anything for three weeks? I mean, really, we can do anything for three weeks. Secondly, in the virgin diet, I give you a lot of simple swaps that you can put in place. So if you've been putting cream in your coffee, you use coconut cream. If you've been having eggs for breakfast, you have A smoothie. If you're having a whole wheat pasta, you switch over to say, I mean, oh my gosh, there's so many great examples of pasta. Now, I love all the zoodles and noodles and butternut noodles and all that, but we give you a lot of simple swaps. And in fact, we'll put the resources in for the seven day challenge where you can get all of this stuff for free. But the bot bottom line is I want you to make a commitment for three weeks. And you heard Dr. Terry Walls talk about it too. Pull these things out for three weeks. Within one week, you're going to be blown away at how different you feel. And within three weeks, you'll have really given your body a chance to cleanse and reset. And that's when you pull all this stuff out. And then when you do it, you go back and you see how you feel. I have never had someone put gluten back in their diet and go, I feel awesome when I eat that. Never. It's never, ever happened. It. What happens is they go, you feel achy when I do that. I feel tired when I do that. I have brain fog when I do that. So the best indicator and the best proof is when you're able to connect the dots between what you're eating and how you feel. It's like so powerful because then you sit there and go, do I really want to feel that way? No, you don't. All right, hope that served. I love getting the questions. I love hanging out with you guys on the lives. And also, you can always leave a question here when you do a podcast review. Yes, that was a big hint. Leave a podcast review. And by the way, leave whatever review I've had people get on the reviews and say, you know, she rattles her papers too much or she was, she was cutting vegetables. I still love that one. I'm like, I'm sitting in a podcast studio. I definitely wasn't cutting vegetables. I will say that I can rattle papers here and there and I am sitting here looking at my ice cream tea. So, you know, I do drink that, but I'm really trying not to make as many voice any mouth noises and things that people talk about, but these mics are powerful. Oh my gosh. Anyway, doing the best I can and. But I'd love to know what you'd love more of. So leave a review, let us know. And while you're there, be sure to subscribe and share this info with people you love and care about. Okey dokey. See you next week.

Bye.

That's all for this episode of the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show, which marks another step towards a healthier body and mind. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to the show and we'll talk to you next week.

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