Recently while spending time with Dr Terry Wahls I asked her to talk to us about how she works with her patients. Dr. Terry Wahls is a Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of Iowa. She has a truly remarkable healing story. She was diagnosed with progressive multiple sclerosis, became profoundly disabled with worsening symptoms over the course of seven years, spending four years in a reclined wheelchair. She was so weak she couldn’t even sit up. She was beginning to have brain fog, and suffered profound pain due to trigeminal neuralgia. But she was able to turn all of that around using a therapeutic diet and lifestyle that she designed specifically for her brain. She is such an amazing example of how food really is medicine and that’s why we pay so much attention to it and clinic and also why we’ve developed the ‘3 Steps to Your Personalised Power Foods’ course. Why? Because we know the healing benefits of diet and how you need to be eating right for your unique body!
Dr Terry is now able to bike to work. She can bike 20 miles. She writes books. She’s currently writing research grants to get more funding to prove, with evidence, the impact of diet on health. And the key message she wants us to know is that if she can come back from such profound disabilities, such profound pain, from such profound physical limitations to a full and vibrant life, there’s every reason to think that you too could recover your energy, your joy, your mental clarity, your mood, your strength, your stamina. You can reclaim your life again so that you can live the life that you love and want to live! We can use diet for longevity and preventive medicine not as reactive medicine. With every bite we take, we are making a choice with our health.
So diet and lifestyle are the root of why we become unwell and are the root of how we can once again flourish. So if you’re having difficulty with pain, with fatigue, problems with your mood, declining stamina, look to your diet and lifestyle. The biggest thing Dr Terry likes to teach her patients and what you will see in all her protocols is she wants you to eat all the colours of the rainbow in your veggie intake. But also to increase your vegetable intake. Most of us aren’t eating nearly enough vegetables. For anyone doing the ketogenic diet (and Dr Terry likes the ketogenic diet) take up the challenge of how you can make it more plant-based. How can you get in more vegetables? You can do this on any budget, Dr Terry works with many patients that are on food stamps. So we can all do this!
The challenge today is to increase the number of vegetables you are eating and also the range of vegetables.