Patti Talks Too Much

Reversing Rheumatoid Arthritis Naturally: One Year Later

• Patti

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The journey to heal naturally from a chronic condition can be both challenging and profoundly rewarding. After being diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis last summer, I made the life-changing decision to follow a natural healing protocol based on Penny Kelly's work rather than turning to conventional medications. Now, approaching the one-year mark of this journey, I'm sharing the remarkable transformation I've experienced.

My healing path wasn't linear. Around December—six months into the process—I hit what I now recognize as a predictable healing crisis. My symptoms temporarily intensified despite my disciplined approach, leaving me discouraged. What I didn't realize then was that this difficult period represented my body actively detoxifying and rebuilding. Pushing through this challenging phase led to dramatic improvements in mobility, energy, and overall quality of life. Simple tasks that had become painful ordeals—opening car doors, climbing stairs, even cleaning my home—gradually became effortless again.

Perhaps the most eye-opening aspect of this journey has been realizing how we normalize declining health. When comprehensive blood work in March showed my inflammation markers still at 14 (normal range is 1-3) despite significant improvement, I was forced to confront just how severely inflamed my body must have been before. We adjust our definition of "normal" as our health deteriorates, only seeking help when symptoms become truly debilitating. This gradual normalization means many of us are accepting chronic inflammation and pain as inevitable aspects of aging when they're actually signs of imbalance that can be addressed.

The dietary changes required for healing—eliminating all grains, coffee, and inflammatory foods—highlighted how deeply unhealthy eating patterns are embedded in our culture. School vending machines generate $200,000 annually selling processed foods to students, while staff appreciation events center around pizza, donuts, and fast food. Swimming against this cultural current requires conviction and a willingness to be "the one who always says no to free food."

Today, I'm walking miles daily, regaining my social life, and experiencing a renewed zest for living that extends far beyond physical wellness. I view this healing journey as my investment in ensuring vibrant, independent golden years rather than a future dependent on medications and mobility aids. The returns on this investment—energy, joy, freedom from pain, and the ability to contribute meaningfully to my community—are immeasurable. If something in your body is trying to get your attention through discomfort or fatigue, consider it an invitation to investigate rather than normalize. Your future self will thank you for investing in your health today.

Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome. This is Patti, with Patti Talks Too Much and it's been a little while. I think the last time I did a podcast was December 1st, so it is now May 22nd, 26th, and it is the first official day of summer vacation for teachers. I am a teacher still teaching in a high school, and today is the first day, so we're all quite excited and relieved to be on summer vacation. So I have been doing podcasts just for if you're just tuning in for the first time, I've been doing podcasts to chronicle a lot of things, but mainly I have been endeavoring to reverse my rheumatoid arthritis naturally, without taking or using any medications at all, and so in June June will be the one year marker that I have been following this protocol to reverse my rheumatoid arthritis naturally, and I have to say that it has been quite a journey. So the last time that I spoke to you was December and I have to tell you I was having a hard time. I really was. I was still in a good deal of discomfort. My experience was that I had started when, just after I was diagnosed last summer diagnosed last summer I decided that I was going to reverse it naturally. I did some research I found a book and a naturopathic practitioner that I wanted to follow and then jumped into the protocol that was in her book and I may have mentioned it to you. This is the book by Penny Kelly and D Getting Well Naturally from the Soil to the Stomach, and in this book I discovered that she herself had been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and reversed her own rheumatoid arthritis naturally. So I decided to follow her protocol and began last June.

Speaker 1:

Now I just recently discovered that after you've been doing the protocol for a while, there are certain reactions that your body may have. The third or fourth month in that is, that can be alarming. There's a lot of the toxins have come out, the new cells have to be, you know, are growing, and there's all kinds of things happening in your body and for some reason, at about the third or fourth month in all, havoc breaks out. And that's what happened to me in December. So the last time I talked to you I was having a rough time and I was feeling a little discouraged because I had been at it. I thought I had been very disciplined and and I thought I was making a little progress, and then all of a sudden my body was, was hurting in my joints and I felt tired and so forth, and it really was that, that kind of hump that I had to get over during that month. And then, after that, things began to really shift for me. After the holidays things really began to shift for me and I started seeing marked improvement as the weeks and the months went on Definitely improvement in the inflammation, improvement in my mobility, improvement in my energy level and, you know, I was able to become active again.

Speaker 1:

There's one of the things that happened as my rheumatoid arthritis progressed, I became more fatigued and it was difficult for me to, say, get to the gym, which you know I had done pretty regularly, but it was. It was painful to go to the gym and, to be honest with you, I was just, for a period of time, I was just getting myself through the day. I mean, teaching high school does zap and a lot of time. I was just getting myself through the day. I mean, teaching high school does zap and a lot of energy. I was just getting myself through the day and the thought of going and working out after work was very, very difficult for me.

Speaker 1:

So that shifted as I moved into January, february and I have to tell you that I overdid it. I went out and I decided I was just. You know, I was an idiot. I went out and I was so anxious to start exercising again because the lack of exercise caused me to gain weight and that was very, very distressing for me. So I went out there and I got these weights and I put them around my ankles and I was like I'm feeling better, I'm going to get on the track and walk with these ankle weights, and what happened was I hurt myself and that put me out of commission for about a month and a half. I couldn't walk or anything, because I had overdone it. I hurt my knee and I needed to rest it. But that was just me and my anxiousness to get back into some kind of groove again. And it was quite a lesson in patience and listening to my body and respecting my body and respecting the healing process and being being patient with with the process.

Speaker 1:

So some of the things that I learned along the way were some of the ways that I learned along the way were some of the ways that I was still rationalizing eating, some of the things that were going to be inflammatory. So, for instance, I'm Italian, I love bread, I love pasta, and there was this period where I said, all right, so I'm not going to have any regular bread at all. What I'm going to do is I'm going to get a mill and I'm going to mill my own grains and they're all organic. So if it's all organic and freshly milled and I do sourdough bread, I'm good. And you know, the thing is that might be true at some point down the road that I'll be able to kind of enjoy that sort of thing right now, but in the process of healing, what I realized was that I needed to eliminate all grains, all grains, and and that was a little tough for me. So there was a period of time when I was doing a little rationalizing and saying, well, if I do this and if I do that, then those grains will be okay, and at this point in the process they're not.

Speaker 1:

So some of the things that, if you are endeavoring to heal yourself, naturally there are going to be things that you're going to have to eliminate. You know, like coffee, for instance, was another one. It's like, you know, I really, you know, coffee is not quite my friend and I really need to stop rationalizing the fact that I drink only organic and I drink only I drink it black. Oh well then that should be fine and honestly it wasn't. So I needed to let go of coffee at least for now, and then I can return to it and I'll drink my organic black coffee at some point and every once in a great while I'll have a cup. The problem is is that I love it so much that you know how it goes. You know you have one and you want to start having it every day, so something I have to be careful about.

Speaker 1:

But for me, coffee, coffee had to go, all grains had to go, anything inflammatory, and that really makes socializing and participating in group activities quite difficult, and one of the things that was such an eye opener for me and I did know that. You know we, you know we don't eat healthy in our country. I didn't know that, but it was amazing to see the extent to which that is true. So I work in a high school and one of the things that's been absolutely appalling to me is that on every single floor I work on the third floor, and this is true for the different buildings. It's a pretty big high school, so there are different buildings, and in my building and in the other buildings, on every single floor there is a vending machine, and those vending machines will have Coke and I guess they think that it's healthy if you also let's offer Coke Zero because that's healthier and Takis and Doritos and all of all of these things and that are just so toxic and they're available on every floor and the kids are always going to the vending machines and eating this really, really unhealthy stuff. So that's one. You know. That's one thing, because you know our young people are not healthy at all and this junk that we, you know, kind of offer up to them on every floor of a high school is just ridiculous. And and and unfortunately these vending machines are moneymakers for the schools. So you know they're about my particular school they make about $200,000 a year just on the vending machines. So that's an awful lot of money. So it's a hard argument to say, hey, you know, we probably shouldn't have so many vending machines when it turns out to be profitable. Unfortunately, we are profiting from poisoning our kids.

Speaker 1:

Another thing I noticed is that every year there's teacher appreciation and it goes on for about a week and they do these special things and everything. And one of the things I noticed was that I was able to participate in almost nothing they were offering, because one day was pizza day, another day was donut day, another day was burgers and hot dogs day and those are just not they're. They're not foods that that I eat anymore. So I got quite a reputation on the campus for being, you know, the one who always says no to free food. They just don't understand why would you, why would you bring your lunch when the school is offering you a free lunch today? And it got a little monotonous telling people I just don't, I just don't eat that. So that's, that has been quite an eye opener. And if you endeavor to, you know, go on this kind of path where you are reduced, where you are reversing a chronic condition, you know, and you want to address it through nutrition and supplements and detoxes and everything you really do see, it just takes you to a whole other level of observing how unhealthy we eat on a regular and it is just completely normalized how unhealthy Americans eat. So that was a real eye opener.

Speaker 1:

Another thing that I did along the way this spring, in March, because I was feeling better, I decided that I was going to do my own blood screening. I highly recommend this because you go to the, the doctors, and it's very minimal the kind of screening you get and you know, I know you have to go in your pocket to to pay for these, but you can get a really good, thorough blood screening. Blood screening it actually, you know some of those results will be screaming at you, I guarantee it. But a blood screening, blood screening it actually, you know some of those results will be screaming at you, I guarantee it. But a blood screening for you know, probably between the three and $500. It depends my my. I went through ways to well and they offered a health practitioner to sit down and go over my blood work with me. So I paid a little extra for that because I didn't know what I was looking at. So I wanted those kinds of explanations.

Speaker 1:

My blood work was very sobering. It was a very sobering experience for me because by march I was feeling really good. The inflammation had been reduced, um, I was starting to feel a little more active, uh, and, you know, hopeful for the future. Honestly, my mood was changing because, you know, I had more energy, I had more. You know, I had more zest for life. Things seem to be looking up and my body was feeling better, and so I decided to do this better.

Speaker 1:

And so I decided to do this, this blood panel, thinking my numbers are going to be awesome, and the fact of the matter is is that they weren't. They were. I'm sure they were better than they would have been if I had done that panel six or eight months earlier. If I had done that panel six or eight months earlier, I'm absolutely sure, because I was feeling better, so clearly my blood work was better. However, it was still concerning. So and the. You know, and I won't go into all of the details but one of the things that was concerning to me was the was the indicator for inflammation. Now, you're supposed to have like between one and three or something on this, on this indicator in your blood work, and my inflammation was at 14, 14. And so I was. I was shocked by that because I thought I'm better. Why is it still so high?

Speaker 1:

And I realized that six months, eight months before, it had to be so much higher than that, because my body was beginning to shut down, like I mean my joints, you know, difficulty going up and down stairs and all of the things that had become difficult for me, like you know, even cleaning my house, like there was a period of three or four months that I paid someone to come and clean my little apartment because there were things that were difficult for me to do, like I had difficulty cleaning my tub, I had difficulty washing the windows, so there were all of these little everyday things that were difficult for me because my hands were in such pain. You know, even opening the car door, shifting the car into the gear, you know so many tiny little things throughout the day that were really uncomfortable. The day that were really uncomfortable so that's what I mean by my body was really it was shutting down, like my joints and so forth. The inflammation was getting to the point where it was really debilitating and that can be really frightening. So, at any rate, it was still sobering to get my blood work and see that my inflammation was still really high.

Speaker 1:

And I think that what just normalize it? I realized that so much of my the aches and pain, you know, until it got to a point where it was really interfering with everyday life, all the kind of the gradual inflammation buildup, I think I was rationalizing oh okay, it's just the normal aches and pains of getting older. Oh, I guess this is just something that I have to adjust to and I do think that most of us to adjust to and I do think that most of us normalize the aches and the pains and the kinds of things that are going on in our body that aren't normal, but we normalize them because they're not at this critical point that is completely interfering with our everyday lives. It really has to get to that point where you know where we feel like disabled and in order for us to say, well, wait a minute, what's going on in my body? So that was a wake up call for me and I honestly I think that most of us do that we rationalize, we normalize a lot of the discomfort in our bodies. That really is not normal at all.

Speaker 1:

So as I moved through the months into spring, it was clear that my body, I was feeling better than I had in years I'm not talking about just a year ago like I'm feeling better than I felt a year ago. I was feeling better than I had in years. So that was quite a wake-up call for me because I realized how long you know. It's something that I had to ask myself, and I may never know, but how long had I just been normalizing some of the things that were going on in my body? But because I could still get up and go to work every day, right, and kind of do fairly normal things, then you know, that was just the way it is now, because I'm this year's old, that year's old or whatever. But I think that that's a mistake.

Speaker 1:

So, unfortunately, sometimes it takes going through this whole process where you're really cleaning out your body and detoxing and you get to a level of health and you realize, oh my God, I haven't been at this level of health in a really long time. What's been going on? So a lot of the conditions, particularly chronic illnesses, I think, really creep up. They have this creep that is going on in our bodies and all the while we're just kind of adjusting our sense of normalcy as it's going on until it reaches a debilitating point. So that's kind of a heads up for people, something that I learned that I think is really important for people to pay closer attention to what's going on in our bodies and try to address it sooner than the critical point, before it gets to a real critical point.

Speaker 1:

So where am I at this point? Well, I am active. I don't have to pay someone to clean my house anymore. I don't have the aches and pains that I had before I'm able to be active again. I've decided that walking is the exercise that I would like to do every day. So I'm walking a couple miles a day now and that feels really good. I am slowly losing the weight that I gained when I was more sedentary and, because you know I mean this, I understand I have to be patient with this too, but that is also moving in the right direction. I feel much, much younger and more more full of life and more wanting to be social.

Speaker 1:

I think that there was a period of time where it's just like, oh, I just need to stay to myself and get get this under control before I can, you know, go out and really enjoy myself again. So I'm, I'm at that place to where, you know, I'm feeling more comfortable being around people again and enjoying myself. It had been, you know, it had been a while, so, but that's, that's okay. One of the things that I learned was that, you know, sometimes we do have to go through those periods when we are cocooned and we are healing was. You know, I did a lot more reading, I got into audible. I, you know, did a lot of things that kind of nourished me intellectually and emotionally and spiritually. So, because I think healing is body, mind, spirit, so you have to be kind of nourishing and healing all of those areas along the way. That is the update.

Speaker 1:

I'm coming up on the one year anniversary of my healing journey and this has been very exciting because I do feel like I have a new lease on life. This, as I've shared with people, this is my investment. My investment in the next 20 or 30 years of my life is to reverse this condition and to get myself as healthy as possible so that I could have the kind of quality of life I want as I age, as I move into my golden years. Our golden years do not have to be spent bent over canes and walkers, with oxygen tanks and taking multiple medications. We can live very healthy, full lives all the way to our last breath, and that is my intention. That is what I would like to do, so that I can continue to contribute to my community and the world and to be there for the people that I care about to the very fullest that I can be there for the people that I care about, to the very fullest that I can be. So I want to be fully present until my last breath in this lifetime. That is my goal.

Speaker 1:

So this is an investment, and some people might think, well, you know, that's an awful lot, or boy, it costs a lot to take all those supplements or to do that thing. I don't know if I have that discipline or people will spend their money and their time and their energy on the things that are most valuable to them. So if you look at the things that you're willing to spend your money on and your time and your energy, that points to the things that are most valuable to you, that are most valuable to you, and I decided that what was most valuable to me was reclaiming my health, and so that's what I've invested in and I think it's been a worthwhile investment. I highly recommend it and I think that the returns on this kind of investment are limitless. So it's not about you know the returns on an investment that you've made. You know by putting money in the bank or you know investing in Wall Street and you see those concrete numbers, the kind of investment that you make when you invest in your health and your well-being is something that goes beyond, maybe, the numbers on your blood work. There are so many returns that you would say are the intangibles right? Intangibles right that have very much to do with all of the things that make your life full and rich and worth living.

Speaker 1:

So I'm so glad that you decided to join me today. I will be doing more of these. I encourage you to look into doing cleanses, look into doing detoxes, look into adjusting your food, your nutrition, and you don't have to make these grand, sweeping changes. They can be little changes over a period of time that make a huge difference. So I'll be talking more about you know the specifics, cleanses and the kinds of nutritional adjustments and supplements, and you know all of that sort of thing. If you have any requests about what you'd like me to address, I'm happy to Just let me know in the comments, and I look forward to our next chat. Have a wonderful day. Outro Music.