Treating MS Naturally: Diane Capaldi’s Amazing Success with the Wahls Protocol

Diane “V” Capaldi goes by the moniker PaleoBOSS Lady because she IS a boss. After being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) at 24, her health declined rapidly for 23 more years, with her symptoms becoming more and more debilitating — and the MS treatment options growing more and more expensive. Then, a life-changing trip inspired her to pursue treating MS naturally. She took things into her own hands, making various lifestyle changes, discovering the best diet for MS (spoiler alert, it’s something called the Wahls protocol), and ultimately healing herself to the point where she needed no drugs and no doctors, and became the most healed MS patient on record.

*This is a short clip from Capaldi’s full interview— click here to watch the whole thing.*

You can also listen to an audio version of our interview with Diane Capaldi on The WellBe Podcast. 

Getting an MS Diagnosis Out of Nowhere

Capaldi’s problems started seemingly overnight. At age 24, out of nowhere, she lost feeling on the left side of her body. She lost control of her lips and eyes, and her vision was off. “I went to bed one night and was fine,” she says. “And woke up the next day and just really wasn’t.

All of the things happening to her body were multiple sclerosis symptoms, but she had no reason to know that at the time. Turns out, her doctors didn’t realize it either: They told her she had an inoperable brain tumor, and that there was nothing they could do. She would just have to “hang on.” 

Luckily, Capaldi was encouraged by others to get more opinions, and so she went to a number of different doctors until one, without even administering tests, looked at her and knew she didn’t have a brain tumor. “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,’” she says. “That was the first time anyone looked at me first and talked to me.”

MRIs weren’t in common use at the time (it was the 1980s), but her doctor recommended she get one. She travelled from Philadelphia to New York to get the test done, and sure enough, no brain tumor. To figure out what was going on, the doctor then ordered a spinal tap, which revealed that Capaldi had multiple sclerosis, a disease of the nervous system that affects the flow of information in the brain and between the brain and the body. “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 24.”

If you want help navigating integrative ways to deal with an MS diagnosis, schedule a 1:1 call with Adrienne to learn about her holistic patient advocacy services. 

Trying Traditional MS Treatment Options with No Success

At the time of Capaldi’s diagnosis, very little was known about the disease and the MS treatment options were extremely limited. “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,” she says. 

Capaldi decided to forgo the Valium that doctors offered her (the only MS treatment option available at the time), as  her mom had been addicted to prescription drugs. Instead, she focused on doing everything her doctors and physical therapists told her. She was part of an early test group for injectable disease-modifying drugs, which caused her problems that required more medication to treat. 

By the time she was 37, Capaldi was legally disabled. She’d lost bilateral use of her hands, had trouble swallowing, and was living in pain. None of the MS treatment options she’d tried were working for her, and yet her healthcare costs were over $30,000 a year.

In 2003, she learned that her multiple sclerosis had transitioned into secondary progressive MS, the most debilitating form of the disease. Her husband drove her home from the doctor’s office — she was unable to drive at that point — dropped her off, and told her he was going to go to the movies. He never returned, and Capaldi was left completely alone, as her daughter was heading off to her first year of college.

With nothing left keeping her in Philadelphia, she decided to make a cross-country move in the hopes that it would help her symptoms: because MS left her unable to regulate her body temperature, she decided to move to Venice Beach, California, where the weather is always between 55 degrees and 75 degrees. 

The lifestyle change worked for a while, but then Capaldi’s  symptoms came back with a vengeance. “When I first moved out here, it was like, ‘Wow, I’m so smart!’I thought I was a genius,” she says. “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.”

She developed alopecia and an uncontrollable Candida overgrowth, and lost control of her hands. She also started having severe muscle spasms in her throat, so doctors put her on strong muscle relaxants.

She had so little control over her body, she was choking on air. “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,’” Capaldi told WellBe. “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.’”

Capaldi had had career success during the years when her MS was in remission, so she was able to afford full-time help and remodeled a home to suit her needs. But as she watched herself get worse and worse, she feared she would end up institutionalized. The only MS treatment options presented to her were more muscle relaxants and, eventually, a pump to stop her body’s spasms — which would also leave her immobilized and bed-ridden. Something had to change. 

Discovering the Best Diet for MS: The Wahls Protocol 

Left with dismal MS treatment options, increasing disability, and the prospect of bankruptcy from her medical bills, Capaldi made a bold move. “I decided, as any rational human being would do, to go to Burning Man,” she says, referring to the annual festival in the Nevada desert. 

There, she realized that her financial success made it hard to tell which people in her life were actually her friends — and her “friends” weren’t stepping up as she got sicker. Maybe changing her life fundamentally would be the key to treating MS naturally. 

When she got back from the festival, she decided to lock herself in her home for a year. About two months later, still very sick and confined to her bed, she used voice recognition software to yell at her computer, “Food! Medicine! MS! Lifestyle! Doctors! Help me!” This impulsive outburst led her to find the best diet for MS, the Wahls Protocol.

The results from her search delivered Dr. Terry Wahls’s Tedx Talk, “Minding Your Mitochondria.” Wahls has secondary progressive MS and went from being stuck in a tilt-recline wheelchair to completing an 18-mile bicycle tour by using functional medicine and diet changes, a program known as the Wahls Protocol. .

“I remember listening to it and thinking, ‘I just dreamed this. This is not real — Oh, my goodness, this woman is walking,and she’s saying that she did this with food!’” Capaldi recalls. “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.’”

On January 1, 2012, Capaldi started following the Wahls Protocol, which is widely considered to be the best diet for MS. It is a modified form of the paleo diet that focuses on lean proteins, organic vegetables, and fruits, and skips grains, gluten, refined sugar, and legumes. The Wahls Protocol also involves eating organic produce, grass-fed meat, and wild-caught seafood as much as possible. 

By October, she started going off her medications one by one as her multiple sclerosis symptoms healed. By July 2013, she moved independently for the first time. The left side of her body, which had been unresponsive since she was 23, woke up. She had succeeded in doing the impossible: treating MS naturally. 

Reflecting back on the year she healed herself, Capaldi recalls knowing that it was all about food, and that only finding the best diet for MS would help. “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?’” she says.

Sharing Her Story of Treating MS Naturally 

Today, Capaldi doesn’t take any drugs or see any doctors, and she has no out-of-pocket healthcare costs. As she began to tell others how she healed with food, Capaldi was met with some resistance (people interpreted her success story as judgment of their own diet). But, at the encouragement of her physical therapist, she started a Facebook page that grew into the PaleoBOSS Lady brand and changed the course of her life.

Very quickly, she learned that a lot of people wanted to hear her story of treating MS naturally, and that she desperately needed the connection this allowed her, especially after her year of isolation. In fact, she derived so much joy from sharing her story that she reached out to her followers and asked if anyone wanted her to come live with them and show them the diet and lifestyle changes that helped her heal. As it turns out, many people did want her to do that, and she spent years afterward on the road, traveling America to spread the word about treating MS naturally.

 “I open my bag of tricks and show them how I move my body, how I feed my body, how I meditate, everything that I do, hoping to inspire their journey,” she says. “I’ve dedicated my life to being of service.” She explains that she doesn’t just work with MS patients, but people with disabilities of all kinds. She tells WellBe that 1 in 4 Americans are disabled, and that the fastest-growing disabled population are autoimmune patients, and 80% of autoimmune sufferers are women  — and she wants to help all of them: “You just have to be breathing, and if you invite me, I’ll come to you.”

Besides the Wahls Protocol, Capaldi shares her other strategies for treating MS naturally: getting eight hours of sleep a night, intermittent fasting, and reducing toxins in her life, whether that means specific products, substances, or people. 

One big takeaway she’s learned in her journeys (health and cross-country) is that the first step to healing is recognizing that your body is your temple and being grateful for all the work it does for you — then rewarding it with nourishing food, gentle movement, and love. While she knows not everyone will have a journey like hers, Capaldi truly believes that love and appreciation of your body is the first step toward health. “I would recommend experimenting and trying things, but do it from a self-loving lens, because that’s where the magic happens,” she says.

Watch our full interview with Capaldi to hear the entirety of her amazing story, or listen to it on The WellBe Podcast:

The recovery story above is anecdotal and specific to this particular individual. Please note that this is not medical advice, and that not all treatments and approaches mentioned will work for everyone.

Diane “V” Capaldi, also known as Paleo Boss Lady, is a small business and brand building consultant. 

Citations:

1. Koch M, Kingwell E, Rieckmann P, et alThe natural history of secondary progressive multiple sclerosisJournal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry 2010;81:1039-1043.
2. Wahls, Terry L et al. “Review of Two Popular Eating Plans within the Multiple Sclerosis Community: Low Saturated Fat and Modified Paleolithic.” Nutrients vol. 11,2 352. 7 Feb. 2019. 
3. Angum, Fariha et al. “The Prevalence of Autoimmune Disorders in Women: A Narrative Review.” Cureus vol. 12,5 e8094. 13 May. 2020.