Ryan did not arrive here with a plan. He arrived here having tried most things, lost faith in a few of them, and eventually decided that if he was going to get better, he was going to have to understand why he was ill in the first place.
That process took years. A diagnosis of Ankylosing Spondylitis in 2021 gave him something to work with, but by then he had already been through clinical depression, severe anxiety, ADHD, a medicine cabinet that would make a pharmacist wince, a difficult relationship with alcohol, and a withdrawal from psychiatric medication that he describes as one of the hardest things he has ever done. The AS was almost the last straw. Almost.
What followed was not a clean recovery story. It was a lot of research, a lot of trial and error, some decisions his doctors would probably raise an eyebrow at, and a few that turned out to be genuinely transformative. He refused biologics for a year while he tried a carnivore diet. His inflammation markers improved. His mental health shifted in ways he had not expected. He eventually started the biologics anyway, and he is not embarrassed about that either.
The honest version is that none of it has been linear. Diet helps enormously, until he falls off it, which happens. The biologics help, though starting them meant confronting fears he had spent a year avoiding. Progress is real but it is not permanent, and managing a chronic condition long term turns out to be less about finding the answer and more about staying curious enough to keep looking.
Empowered Function exists because that curiosity needed somewhere to go. Everything here comes from lived experience and his own reading. None of it is medical advice. But if you are navigating something similar and feel like you are doing it alone, you are not.