My name is V Capaldi, and I have a brand called PaleoBOSS Lady.
How that came about was, actually,
I wasn't trying to build a brand, it just seems that my message resonated with a lot of people.
In 1986, a long time ago, I got very sick.
We weren't sure what was going on with me,
but I lost feeling on the left side of my body.
I was having a lot of facial distortion.
Basically, my lip would just move, and my eyes would blink,
and my vision was a little off.
It seemed like it happened overnight. I went to bed one night and was fine,
and woke up the next day and just really wasn't.
That's really how it felt, this whole health episode, or scare, happened.
They originally said to me, "Well, you have an inoperable brain tumor
and we're not going to be able to do much, so just sort of hang on."
And I'm like, "Oh, OK, well, that's great. Thank you very much."
Luckily, I was encouraged by other people:
"Get other opinions. See other doctors. Don't believe what you hear from the first doctor."
I went around to a whole bunch of other doctors.
I was really grateful when I walked into this one doctor's office
because the first thing he said to me is, "You don't have a brain tumor."
Not even looking at tests or anything, just looking at me.
That was the first time anyone looked at me first and talked to me.
He was like, "I don't think you do."
This was before MRIs were an available mode of imaging.
He said, "There's this new technology, right outside of New York, actually,"
because, at the time, I lived in Philadelphia.
He said, "It's an MRI. I need you to go there.
I need you to have one of those because I think there's something going on,
but I don't think it's a brain tumor,
and the CAT scan really can't differentiate from what's a tumor
and what might be something else.
But, this MRI's going to cost over $10,000,
and insurance doesn't pay for it because it's kind of new."
I had to figure out a way to be able to pay for it,
and once I did, I went and had this MRI.
At the time, it was just so foreign.
It was in a trailer in the middle of a parking lot. It was really loud.
They didn't give you earplugs. It was a very scary thing,
but I just wanted to believe what this doctor told me,
and that I didn't have a brain tumor and I was going to be able to live a nice life.
After that, he said, "Well, I see stuff, and it's definitely not a brain tumor,
but I'm not sure what it is.
I would like to do a spinal tap because it may be multiple sclerosis."
As luck would have it, and it is luck,
I went from a death sentence to a life sentence, and was diagnosed with MS at the age of...
I got sick at 23. I was diagnosed at the age of 24.
At that time, there were no treatments, no cure.
We just knew that it was a progressive disease and that
the likelihood of my life being affected,
usually with mobility or vision,
was a probability, but it would be, we didn't know when, how, it would manifest.
The amazing thing is, at that time,
there [were] no treatments, no cure, and the only thing that the doctors offered me was Valium.
My mom was a prescription pill drug addict, so I chose not to take Valium.
I also started doing everything that Western medicine, traditional healthcare told me.
Disease-modifying drugs came out. I took disease-modifying drugs.
I was involved with the FDA with the pretesting of the disease-modifying drugs.
With MS, they were injectable, so I injected with disease-modifying drugs,
which caused a lot of problems.
Then I started taking drugs for all the problems that the disease modifiers...
Fast-forward, by the time I'm 37, I'm disabled,
I've lost bilateral use of my hands,
I'm having trouble swallowing, I'm living in pain, I have a rib girdle,
my out-of-pocket healthcare costs are over $30,000 a year.
Life is just not working out for me at all.
I was like the best patient.
I did everything that the doctors told me. If they said, "Do PT every day,"
and I went to physical therapy and the physical therapist said,
"This is what we need you to do, your home program," I did it,
exactly what they told me.
I got on the Board of the National MS Society,
so now I'm like, "OK, I'm with the people that are
looking to find a cure for this." I really just believed that,
I could beat this. And I wasn't. I wasn't.
In 2003, the doctor told me that I had moved on to the most debilitating form of multiple sclerosis, which is secondary progressive MS.
I was in Philadelphia at the time,
and I couldn't drive, and couldn't really do a lot.
I was married, and my husband drove me home.
Of course, we were very upset,
and he said, "I'm going to go to the movies."
He went to the movies, and he never returned.
So, now I am unable to care for myself, for the most part,
deserted by my partner, and my daughter is entering her senior year in high school,
and I knew that she was going to go away to college.
I'm scared to death because this is a progressive disease
that I'm just told has gone on to the most debilitating form, which,
for most people that have MS, that means that we lose our ability to move our body.
What kills most of us is that we choke. I was choking on thin air all the time.
I just always thought of Liz Lemon in "30 Rock" when she would always be like,
"I'm forever single, and I'm going to be eating a TV dinner and choke,
and no one's going to know. I'll be dead."
I always thought, "Well, I'm going to be the new version of Liz Lemon.
I'm going to choke from MS and no one's gonna know."
One of the biggest debilitating things that MS delivers to me is,
I have no ability to regulate body temperature.
For a lot of us with MS, if we overheat or get too cold,
it literally incapacitates us. When I get really warm and hot,
I physically can't move my body.
When I get really cold, it hurts to move my body, in my joints.
I feel like the Tin Man and even oil isn't going to help.
After my husband walked out on me and my daughter…
she got accepted to a college in Boston and I knew she was going to leave to go to school,
I decided to take a bold move and move to California,
to Venice Beach, where the weather is between 55 and 75,
you don't need air conditioning,
to try and save myself because I was going nowhere good, and I was completely alone.
I packed up everything the day my daughter moved to Boston,
and I moved to California,
which seemed like a really smart thing
because I was on the beach every day.
It's a much slower life here than on the East Coast hustle and bustle.
You're motivated to exercise every day.
Back East, I would literally go to the mall in the morning in the winter,
just to be able to walk a little bit to get some exercise.
It's really hard to be motivated when it could be
100 degrees or -10 within 6 months of the year.
Because my body is affected by that,
it just made it really hard for me to maintain movement,
and movement not only kept my body in a good place, but my mentals, as well.
When I first moved out here, it was like, "Wow,
I'm so smart!" I thought I was genius.
I'm like, "Everybody should move to California that has MS.
It's the smartest thing you could do!"
But then, in typical MS fashion,
what looked like a good idea, all of a sudden, wasn't a good idea.
The level of disability that I came out here with just accelerated quickly.
I found myself now living out here 2.5 years,
and my healthcare costs were getting more.
MS delivered alopecia, so my hair started falling out in clumps.
I had a candida overgrowth that I couldn't control.
It was all over my whole body.
And the use of my hands, before, I could use them a little bit,
but now I was struggling to feed myself, dress myself,
and use the ladies' room, so now I required full-time help.
The choking was getting more and more,
so now I required that I had to have people living with me because the Liz Lemon reality was real.
I was having severe throat spasms.
You get Charley horses in your feet, and they get stuck.
That was happening in my throat.
Now they're putting me on high-level muscle relaxants.
With people with MS,
you can only take the MS-specific muscle relaxants to a certain milligram,
and then after that, they put a pump in you.
Everyone that I had seen with a pump in them,
it does the reverse, so your body's spasming so much that it becomes,
they call it, rigid, where it feels like you're metal,
like your arm is metal or your leg is metal, and you can't bend it or move it.
And then, they put these pumps in you where, basically, you become a vegetable.
You're going to be in bed for the rest of your life.
That's truly where I was.
As luck would have it, in that short time
that MS went into remission in my 20s and early 30s,
I built a lot of technology companies, so I was very successful.
At the time, when I started having full-time help,
I did have a lot of money, by American standards.
I had a couple million dollars in the bank.
I had no debt. I bought a house with cash,
and redid it so that as my disability kept affecting my mobility,
my house, I figured, "Well, I'll live in it until I die.
It's totally set up to help me."
In America, when you have a situation like this, it doesn't work that way.
It's going to bankrupt you
because you're going to take drugs that are going to give you more side effects.
Then you have to take more drugs.
The standard of care in America is, if you have MS,
you have to have an MRI every year with gadolinium injected in you,
which is a radioactive dye. And you have to have this test and that test,
all these tests, which, I did them every year,
Every test, they just didn't say anything. It didn't change anything.
They were like, "Oh, OK, we just looked at your brain again like we have for the last 30 years,
and injected you with radioactive dye, but we're not going to change anything.
We just wanted to see what your brain looked like."
I went along with everything,
and when it got to the point where I looked at my money and I looked at how my expenses were,
and I looked at how I kept becoming more and more disabled,
the only options that I saw before me were institutionalization.
I did a study and found out that the second largest population
that lives in institutions in America,
and youngest, are people with multiple sclerosis.
The first are people with mental issues, usually self-harming mental issues.
I just didn't want to live in an institution for the rest of my life.
I was in my 40s.
I could be homeless. When you live in Venice Beach, California,
that doesn't really seem like that bad of a life, I have to tell you.
I was like, "Well, OK, maybe I'll be homeless."
And, really, then, the other thought was to take my own life.
I decided, as any rational human being would do,
I decided I was going to go to Burning Man.
I don't know if you know what Burning Man is, but it's a festival in the desert.
A lot of people might think it's a freaky festival.
I went to Burning Man for a few reasons,
because I wanted to see if I had the guts to take my own life.
About the fourth day in the temple,
it was like a brick hit my forehead,
and I was like, "Maybe my life is the problem..."
Because, when you have a lot of money, like I did at that time,
it's hard to know if people are with you because they're with you,
or they're with you because
"whenever we go out to dinner, you always pay the bill,"
or because I was sick and I traveled a lot, I would always pay for a friend to come to help me.
It's hard to decide why people are in your life.
I had some questions because, as I was getting sicker,
I noticed that, less and less, those people weren't around as much.
As my needs were greater, they were more scarce.
That really stood out to me.
I came back from Burning Man,
and I locked myself in the house for a year.
After about 2 months, I was actually very sick at this point,
I was in bed, and I'd been in bed for 3 days.
I couldn't use my hands, so I used the computer with my voice.
I remember, I was in bed, and I was yelling at the computer,
"Food! Medicine! MS! Lifestyle!
Doctors! Help me!" And then, all of a sudden,
a TED Talk came up the day it hit.
It was Dr. Terry Wahls. It was called "Minding Your Mitochondria."
Here's this woman, standing,
showing a picture of her in a tilt-reclining wheelchair, saying,
"I have multiple sclerosis,
and I was in a tilt-reclining wheelchair..."
I remember listening to it and thinking,
"I just dreamed this. This is not real. I'm definitely...
Oh, my goodness, this woman is walking,
and she's saying that she did this with food!"
I watched it once, I watched it a second time.
By the second time, I'm now in bed bawling my eyes out.
I couldn't even breathe. I was like, "I'm going to do exactly what she says."
January 1, 2012, I started following the Wahls Protocol,
which is a modified form of paleo.
Paleo, for people that don't know, is lean proteins,
organic vegetables, and fruits. We don't eat grains.
We don't eat gluten. We don't eat refined sugar.
We don't eat legumes.
We try and eat organic, and grass-fed, and wild-caught as much as possible,
if you can.
If you can't, that's still fine. You'd still be considered eating paleo.
By the following October,
I started going off the medications, one by one, because as my symptoms healed,
I didn't want to take the drugs anymore because, of course, I didn't need them.
By July 4, 2013, I moved independently for the first time in my life.
I was able to use my hands. My swallowing issues went away.
The left side of my body, which had been dead since the age of 23—
I couldn't feel it, you could stick a pin in it, you could punch me
and I would never even know it —woke up.
It still doesn't feel the same as the right side, but it's awake.
You punch me now, I'll punch you back.
I started managing every symptom that I had from multiple sclerosis.
But in that year that I locked myself in the house, I became really lonely.
I was telling everyone, my daughter
and the few people that I did keep in contact with, like my PT
and my acupuncturist at the time, and they were watching all this.
I kept telling them, "It's food. Food is so important."
I was already moving my body,
I already learned how to love myself, so that when I plugged in food, it was like, "Wow!
Wow, this is amazing, what is happening."
When I told people food was helping me, it wasn't received very well. It was almost like,
me saying that I was using food and healing myself, they heard it as,
"You're still eating a standard American diet and you're not smart,"
which is kind of a weird translation as to what I was telling them.
People weren't really embracing it.
Most of the time, they were asking me to just stop talking about it.
My PT at the time was like, "You should just call yourself PaleoBOSS Lady
and have a social media page. Talk to people that want to hear about it."
So I did.
And very quickly learned that there's a lot of people that wanted to hear about it.
My need for companionship and friendship,
because I was lonely after I decided to lock myself in the house for a year,
turned into a very fast-growing page on Facebook,
which has now grown to be a brand.
As of today, I'm the most healed person in the world
who has secondary progressive MS using diet and lifestyle alone.
I take no drugs and I see no doctors, and I have no out-of-pocket healthcare costs at all,
other than insurance premiums.
I completely take care of myself.
I don't see a PT. I don't spend money on a yoga class.
I don't spend money on anything.
By 2016,
as any rational human being would do,
I decided that I would sell all of my possessions,
throw them in a Fiat,
and went on Facebook and said, "Does anybody want me, for free,
to come to them, and live with them, and show them what I do?"
I'm now 2 years traveling all over America,
living with strangers for free,
opening what I call my bag of tricks, and showing them how I move my body,
how I feed my body, how I meditate, everything that I do,
hoping to inspire their journey, not to tell them how to do it,
just leading by example, and helping them to build community.
I'm 2 years in, and now I actually have a van
that is going to be converted into a green and recycled home so that
the barrier to entry for anyone to have me come and help them is much less
because they don't have to give me a place to stay.
I've dedicated my life to be of service.
You would think that most of the people that invite me have MS,
but that's not true at all.
In America, 1 in 5 are disabled.
The fastest-growing sector in disability is autoimmune.
It affects, mostly, 75% women.
I'm invited by people, you know, 1 in 5 disabilities…
There's lots of reasons why people are disabled,
mental, physical illness.
There's a whole category of people that
do have things wrong with them, and they haven't felt well,
but they can't figure out what it is.
They don't have a diagnosis, but they're just trying to get healthy.
My work goes across all... you just have to be breathing,
and if you invite me, I'll come to you.
I'm grateful that, since I started this journey 2 years ago,
I'm now a TEDx speaker.
I have won 5 different awards.
I've been recognized as one of the top 50 people changing healthcare in America.
My blog has won an award. My tour has won an award.
I've been a rising star in the blogger world.
I'm nominated for 3 other awards already this year
and we're only in January. My tour has a waiting list, which is sad, but not.
I'm grateful that I can tour and help people,
but I have over 200 people waiting to see me,
so I'm just sad that there are that many people out there that need help.
I really believe, and this may sound very strange, but
I really believe that I am on this Earth for this purpose.
There's a reason why I've been able to heal, even greater than Dr. Terry Wahls,
because Dr. Terry Wahls doesn't take disease-modifying drugs,
but she still does require some medication.
I don't take any medication.
I don't ever have to see a doctor or get an MRI.
As a matter of fact, if something did happen to me, I don't even have a doctor,
which, to a lot of people would be really scary.
MS still lives inside me and it still will rear its ugly head,
but I have this big bag of tricks filled with tools,
that I just go in my bag of tricks, pull out what I need and apply it, and MS runs scared.
Most people that have a debilitating disease,
we sit in fear of what it's going to take from us. I did that for 25 years.
MS is no match for me right now.
From what time I go to bed, to the clothes that I wear, to what I wash my clothes in,
to the hours in a day that I eat, because now I only eat 8 hours a day.
I intermittent fast. I go, every quarter, for 72 hours without eating.
I follow my circadian rhythm when I sleep.
I never worry about money. I only wear recycled clothes.
I eliminate every toxin that I can control in my life,
from friends to substances in my house.
I actually was just learning, I only buy recycled clothes anyway,
but about just, even, I always bought cotton, thinking,
"Oh, cotton's the best thing I could put against my skin,"
but, there's pesticides on cotton, and they're putting that in clothes,
so I'm still even wearing cotton pesticide clothes!
Just learning as much as I can to be able to
treat my body with gratitude for all it affords me,
and how it lets me move my body freely.
The more that I do all that stuff,
the more my body continues to defy the odds and heal.
I would recommend for anyone that has anything going on,
whether it's MS, or autoimmune, or even anxiety, depression, cancer, whatever it is,
the first thing I would do is have a real conversation with myself
about the way I live my life— how do I look at myself?
I think that self-love and realizing that your body is your temple is really the first step.
Otherwise, if you start moving your body and feeding your body healthy foods
because you have an issue, a disease, or a sickness,
you almost feel like you have to do it, and you might feel deprived.
And then success is harder.
Whereas, if you can come at it through a loving lens...
for me, when I look at my plate of vegetables every day
that I'm going to eat, where before, I'd look at it like, "Ugh! I want a pizza,"
now I look at it, and like, "Body, I moved freely all day,
and now I have a big present for you."
It's just a whole different lens and it's not like,
"Oh, I have to eat my vegetables." It's like, "Yes!"
My body functions great every day, and now it's watering the plant.
"Now, I'm going to give you some water and some fertilizer
so that, tomorrow, we get to do it all over again."
I look in the mirror and I'm like, "Yeah. You're so deserving of all this."
For 40-something years, I looked in the mirror and I was like,
"Ah, you have a pimple. Oh, your hair's a weird color.
Oh, you have cellulite." You know?
I think just making sure that your narrative regarding your relationship with your person
being spot-on is going to be the first step. Then you'll define food.
You'll figure out what's going to work.
I'm a Wahls Warrior, I follow the Wahls Protocol and paleo,
but for some people it might be vegan,
or vegetarian, or they might do better with an autoimmune protocol.
Everyone has to biohack. That's a big keyword, which is
trying things and seeing how it fits with your body.
I would recommend experimenting and trying things,
but do it from a loving, a self-loving lens,
because that's where the magic happens.
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