Dr. Terry Wahls - Minding Your Mitochondria

Minding Your Mitochondria

Dr. Terry Wahls, the doctor who biked her way out of a wheelchair — and what her story can teach the rest of us

There was a season when I knew the symptoms in my own body — the kind of bone-deep fatigue and neurological strangeness that makes you wonder what is happening to you. I was on a 4-month waiting list to see the "MS Expert". After 4 months of radically changing my diet, the symptoms went away and I cancelled my appointment. So when I first heard the story of Dr. Terry Wahls, it hit home powerfully.  I had done a similar thing to be well. I want to tell it to you, carefully, because it is one of the most hopeful stories I know about the power of real food.

Who is Dr. Terry Wahls?

Dr. Wahls isn’t a fringe figure — she is a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine, an academic internal-medicine physician, and an active clinical researcher. She was once a competitive martial artist. And in the year 2000, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

By 2003 her MS had progressed to secondary progressive MS — the more severe form that responds poorly to treatment. Despite care at one of the best MS centers in the country, the latest drugs, and even chemotherapy, she kept declining: from a cane, to a scooter, to a tilt-recline wheelchair she depended on for nearly four years. She was a doctor, doing everything medicine told her to do, and she was quietly terrified she would end up bedridden.

The turning point

So she did something remarkable: she stopped waiting. She began combing through the medical research on PubMed herself — not just for MS, but for other brain diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, where the brain also shrinks. One word kept surfacing again and again: mitochondria, the tiny power plants inside every one of our cells that make the energy our bodies and brains run on.

She came to a conviction that changed everything: that her cells were starving for the building blocks they needed, and that the best way to feed them wasn’t a cabinet full of supplement pills — it was food. Whole, nutrient-dense, real food.

What she actually did

Using a hunter-gatherer, modified-paleo approach as her model, she built a plan around getting an astonishing density of nutrients from her plate every single day:

The heart of the Wahls plate

• 3 cups of leafy greens (kale, chard, spinach) — for B vitamins and minerals
• 3 cups of sulfur-rich vegetables (cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, onions, garlic, mushrooms) — to support the body’s own detoxification
• 3 cups of deeply colorful vegetables and fruits — for antioxidants
• Grass-fed meat, organ meats, wild-caught fish, and seaweed — for protein, minerals, and omega-3 fats
• And out with refined sugar, refined grains, gluten, and processed, packaged foods
• And here is a piece that often gets left out of the retelling, so I want to be honest about it: it wasn’t food alone. Dr. Wahls combined her nutrition with neuromuscular electrical stimulation (e-stim) of her muscles and a steady program of movement and physical therapy, all while remaining under medical care. It was an intensive, whole-person protocol — and food was its powerful foundation.

What happened

The change was dramatic. Within a few months of beginning, she could walk through the hospital without a cane. A little while after that — to her own astonishment and everyone else’s — she got back on her bicycle. In under a year she went from a tilt-recline wheelchair to biking, and not long after, she was biking eighteen miles in a single day and riding to work. A woman who had been facing a bedridden future was pedaling down the road.

Medicine had focused on managing her decline. Food, movement, and stimulation helped her body begin to rebuild. That is a different kind of hope entirely.

Let me be honest with you, because honesty is part of hope

I love this story with my whole heart, and precisely because I love it, I won’t overstate it. A few honest truths belong right here:

MS is a serious, lifelong disease, and there is no guaranteed cure. Dr. Wahls’s own recovery is remarkable — but it is her story, and not everyone who follows her protocol will see the same results.

Her research is genuinely promising but still emerging. Her clinical trials have shown real improvements in things like fatigue and quality of life for people with MS — encouraging, but not the same as a proven cure.

She did not throw out conventional medicine to do this. She worked as a physician, under care, layering nutrition and lifestyle alongside the medical world. If you or someone you love has MS or another autoimmune condition, please don’t stop any treatment — partner with your neurologist and bring this in as support, not a substitute.

None of that dims the wonder. It just keeps it true — and a true hope is the only kind worth building your life on.

Why I say “amen”

Here is the deep idea underneath it all, and it’s the part I can shout amen to: our food is not just calories. It is information and raw material for every cell we have. When we give our bodies an abundance of real, God-made food — greens and colors and clean proteins and good fats — we hand our cells the very building blocks they’ve been missing. That isn’t magic. It’s the way we were designed.

This is exactly why I am so grateful for Real Foods Market in Orem, Utah (now Redmond Heritage Farm) for faithfully stocking some of the very best food on the planet. Having a place to find truly clean, nourishing food is a gift, and I will be forever thankful for it.

Where to learn more

If your heart is stirred, Dr. Wahls has told her story in her own words. Her first, self-published book is Minding My Mitochondria, and her fuller, updated, more comprehensive book is The Wahls Protocol (there’s a companion cookbook too). Her TEDx talk, Minding Your Mitochondria, has been watched millions of times and is a beautiful place to start.

“And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed…to you it shall be for meat.”

— Genesis 1:29

Whatever you’re walking through, take heart. The body God gave you is astonishingly willing to heal when we give it what it truly needs. Feed it well. Keep hoping. And never, ever give up.

With much love,

Steffanie

A caring note: I’m a wellness educator sharing an inspiring story and my own love of real food — not a doctor, and nothing here is medical advice. Multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune diseases are serious and complex, and no diet is a guaranteed cure. Dr. Wahls’s recovery is remarkable but individual, and the research on her protocol is still developing. Please don’t start, stop, or change any treatment based on a blog post — work with your own qualified physician, and keep your medical team in the loop about any dietary or lifestyle changes.