I was reading a FB post this morning about a woman who adopted the Wahls Protocol to overcome her multiple sclerosis. She was driven daily with a hard-core regimen to overcome the effects of that disease. She didn’t like it, but she did it anyway. A year or so later she could walk and started rethinking the intense strain of the daily regimen she was on – was it worth it to continue?
For those who might not know The Wahls Protocol, it is a book written by Dr. Terri Wahls. She is a physician. She came down with a very progressive case of multiple sclerosis late in life. No matter what her doctors did, her disease got worse. Eventually she ended up in a wheel chair. She researched autoimmune diseases and wrote a book, The Wahls Protocol.
She followed her protocol. After a month, she was out of her wheel chair that had claimed her life for the previous four years and was able to walk using a walker. A couple of months after that she could walk using a cane. By the end of a year she was riding a bicycle eighteen miles. Her protocol is rather simple. It involves diet, exercise, stress reduction and toxin removal.
My wife had breast cancer a couple or so years back. I could address every side effect of her chemotherapy except for fatigue. She would take one or two two-hour naps a day. Nothing I could find would crack the fatigue problem. I read The Wahls Protocol around the end of her chemotherapy and before she started radiation therapy. We decided that she would start it on the first day of radiation therapy. Her radiologist told her that her fatigue would most likely get worse.
Forty-eight hours into the dietary portion only of the Wahls Protocol, my wife’s fatigue disappeared. She has not had a nap since. Seven days later she was volunteering her time again at our church. The last day of her radiation therapy was the day before Thanksgiving. We left that day at noon and drove from Houston, TX to Jacksonville, FL to pick up the remaining items I had in storage from my parent’s estate. I rented a U-Haul and drove it with her following behind me in our car by herself. She drove 500 miles for two days by herself without a problem.
We must keep in mind that sometimes we are not working on strictly a goal – overcoming multiple sclerosis, for example. But, we are working on remaining on a discipline. Disciplines are never ending. They must be. Yes, the pain associated with a discipline might be onerous, however, the option of returning to a former status quo is not acceptable, especially with a debilitating disease. We forget this often when we embark on a temporary deviation from our norm, such as a diet. It should be a lifestyle change, not just a momentary change in direction.