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Well, I’m really glad to be here. It’s almost six months since I was sitting where you’re all sitting. And it’s been a pretty amazing six months. When I was sitting where you’re sitting, I weighed 78 pounds.
My name’s Judy, and I mainly had Lyme disease, which was causing chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia. And I had had Lyme disease since the early nineties, so I’d had it for probably 16, 17 years, something like that. Well, the food sensitivity, this is the thing that I feel goes back toreally from when I was born because I had issues at that time, which I think might have been caused by my mother having a severe postpartum depression, and they couldn’t find any formula that I could tolerate. And then I had hepatitis when I was around five or six. And again, I had to go on a special fat free diet. And then in my thirties I got candida. I was diagnosed with candida and had to go on the candida diet.
So I’ve got this slew of things that have gotten my limbic system in this trauma loop. When I really started getting sick, and that’s when I got diagnosed with Lyme disease. And basically what was happening was, besides having chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia, at that point I was losing foods by the day. And so that was when I went and started having this battery of tests to try and find out. And sure enough, it was Lyme disease.
A couple of years before that was when I first started noticing the chemical sensitivities, and I noticed it with my daughter. She was a teenager and she used to like to go to the nail salon. And I suddenly found myself not able to go into the nail salon with her. I would have to wait outside in the car. So that was the first thing. Then in 2006 when I started losing all the foods, was when I started really getting sensitive to all the chemicals, perfumes, car exhaust, new car smell. We had wildfires in Colorado. The smoke from the fires was a major deal for me.
One of my low points, I guess it must have been around 2008, 2009, my food sensitivity symptoms. They create, they’re the same as my Lyme disease symptoms. So I mean, I can totally see this cross wiring is so clear to me. I mean, how could it be that I would eat a food and my hand would, you know, one of my Lyme disease symptoms is in my arm and my hand. And my hand for a while was like a claw, and would get painful and I couldn’t straighten my fingers up.
I was on so few foods, just basically fish and some dark green leafy vegetables.
Couldn’t eat any oils, no fats, no carbohydrates. So not even butternut squash because it’s got too much carbohydrate in it.
And I stopped being able to eat out. It got more and more difficult to travel because if you can’t just eat some food somewhere, you have to always take something with you. But I also had blood work all over the place with my endocrine system, low thyroid sky, high cortisol, sky high human growth hormone, low estrogen and progesterone. I mean, actually almost non-existent estrogen and progesterone. I mean. So my blood work was all over the place and the doctors thought I might have a, a tumor. And then of course my muscle wasting because of all the hormonal stuff and the endocrine stuff. I wasn’t just losing weight, I was losing muscle strength too.
So I couldn’t go upstairs. It was hard to walk the dog. It was hard to keep up with housework. It was hard, hard to do the dishes. I mean, I knew that it was, I knew that it was a concern, you know, to bury the rest of my family. Seeing me so sick like that, I mean, one time I know my husband and I were trying to figure out how much money we might have spent on, and we felt that it was probably in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. I remember being panicked. I mean, in December of 2011, I was panicked ’cause I could see the writing on the wall. It was like, I can’t keep going like this because I keep thinking that the answer is to cut out more foods and there’s gonna be none left. I mean, and that’s what, at that point, that’s what I was looking at was, there’s gonna be none left, so I was pretty desperate when I came to the program. I only weighed 78 pounds. I could span my upper arm with my finger and thumb. My arms were so skinny. I mean, when I looked in the mirror, I couldn’t relate to myself. When I looked at myself in the mirror, it was like I just couldn’t relate. I looked like pictures of somebody who had been in a concentration camp.
So, it was huge for me, being here. And you can see that I don’t look like that now. So something definitely happened.
When I realized what was happening. I had offered to Annie that I would take pictures of myself ’cause I knew how bad I looked. And so, I weighed myself. I realized that I was gonna be gaining weight pretty quickly. So I weighed myself right when I got home from the seminar. And that’s when I realized that I was 78. I thought I was still in the eighties ’cause I hadn’t weighed myself in a while.
Then I was gaining weight, by the like five pounds a week.
So, that was huge. And then of course, as soon as I started eating, it seemed like the other things just kind of fell away so that I, my muscle strength came back, my thyroid stabilized. another thing that I forgot to mention before is that I tried flying at the beginning of that year. I went to LA and when I got there, my ankles were like elephant legs ’cause my ankles had swelled so badly. And so when I just recently flew, I had no ankle swelling at all. Chemical sensitivities. I would say they’re 80% better at this point. So before my daughter had moved out of our house and gotten an apartment and we had furnished it for her, but I couldn’t go visit it because the furniture was new. And so I couldn’t go see her in her apartment.
Now I can go and visit because furniture’s not a problem. My chemical sensitivities kept me from going to the movies because I couldn’t, the popcorn smell would give me horrible migraines. Just two months after I did the program, I went to the movies and they had refurbished the movie theater, which was an absolute no-no for me to go, you know, in a refurbished movie theater. I was asymptomatic. And that was a really big milestone for me of just how the impact that the program was having in my life, that I was able to stay and enjoy that movie and be symptom free when I left. For me, the seminar was fantastic. I mean, I’ve just, no other words to say, you know, last night Barry and I were talking and he said, well, do you really think you wanna say fantastic? Because, you know, people might be experiencing all kinds of different things.
And I recognize that ’cause I know it’s individual for each one of us. I mean, each one of us has our own story that’s so different from anybody else’s. And yet, you know, I just went this is just my story. And for me it was fantastic because once I realized that I had these tools and that I could eat, I started eating . What the program has given me is insight into myself in ways that are new for me. I mean, I’m the kind of person that tends to self-reflect, so I sort of have a lot of knowledge of myself, and so this was really interesting ’cause it was, it was new and I could just see how that those traumas, those early traumas in my life had set me up to just leaning towards being a slightly anxious person, a slightly fearful person.
And that had really impacted my whole outlook on life. I mean, even though I’m an RN, we learned about the limbic system, but I never thought that it was my limbic system that was causing all of this problem. I’ve really been struck with the insight that I think Annie must have into the brain to have come up with this idea that it’s the limbic system. I would say that this is the answer really because I have a medical background and so I’m, you know, sort of aware of medical things and I mean, the whole thing of food sensitivities, it really made sense to me. It’s like you’ve got a hornet’s nest and you’re trying to swat the individual hornet as it comes out the nest instead of really just dealing with the nest.
And I feel like that’s what this does. This deals with the nest, you know, it goes to the, the root of the problem. So that’s a real leap to me where it seems like a real leap to recognize that it’s the limbic system. The interesting thing about the impact on my family is that there was so little actually that I knew about the impact until I had been to the program. And then after I came back from the program and I started eating and I was out of that danger zone, that’s when people started telling me how worried they had been about me. They didn’t say it before then, because I guess they were just trying to be encouraging. And that was pretty stunning to me. And very moving because I saw how much people care about me because everybody was just saying, I’m so glad to see you looking so much better. And the color of your skin is so much better. And my daughter said something, she said, yeah, I thought that your organs were gonna fail. I had no idea how worried she had been about me. So it’s huge. I mean, it’s brought a lot of joy back into our whole family really.
