Ryan Sutter's mysterious health condition, one that left him "paralyzed" with fatigue, has been solved: he has Lyme disease, and it likely has to do with his job as a firefighter.
On May 25, Trista Sutter's husband revealed the news on her podcast, "Better Etc."
"It seems to be that what happened is that my immune system was weakened through exposures to toxins and especially to mold," he said. "There are other people in the fire academy that probably had the same exposures who aren't dealing with these exposures because their genetics are stronger, they're able to get rid of the toxins easier."
Ryan and Trista, who married after meeting on the first season of "The Bachelorette," first spoke publicly about his challenging health condition late last year. Ryan said he was suffering from a "battery of symptoms," but didn't know why. They did know at the the time that it wasn't cancer.
Via further testing, it was eventually determined that Ryan was positive for both COVID-19 and Epstein-Barr virus.
"On top of being exposed to mold, I was also dealing with these long days, with exhaustion, dehydration; all these other things that weaken your immune system," the Colorado firefighter said. "So my immune system was weakened, making it difficult to fight off infections, or what it seems like, allowing prior infections that my immune system had been able to sort of suppress and keep down, to resurface."
To help fight Lyme, Ryan is changing his diet.
"What I'm doing is avoiding, as best I can, gluten, dairy and refined sugars," he said. "I've added a ton more fruits and vegetables to my diet, things that are easily digestible … I've gone on specific diets and things to try to alleviate a lot of those things so my internal organs can function more efficiently and begin to fight back some of these viruses and bacteria that they were able to hold back prior to going through this last year."
Now that they have answers, Trista is relieved.
"It's been hard," the reality TV star said. "It's a really difficult thing to see the person you love most in the world struggling. And he's a big, strong guy, and oof — to see him get emotional and feel hopeless, in that all I could really do is advocate for him, so that's what I did."