Brian Austin Green opened up about his long path to recovery after facing major health issues — and his journey to find a diagnosis.
During the Monday, October 2, episode of Cheryl Burke‘s “Sex, Lies and Spray Tans” podcast, Green, 50, recalled meeting now-fiancée Sharna Burgess while they were both putting in the work to better themselves.
“She had been really working on herself hard. She’s been single for almost five years,” Green said about Burgess, 38, adding that he was single at the time and “aggressively in therapy” after his 2020 split from Megan Fox.
Green’s self-improvement mission took a serious turn when a health complication forced him to change his diet. “I’d spent four and a half years recovering from stroke-like symptoms without ever having had a stroke but I couldn’t speak,” he revealed. “I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t read. I couldn’t write.”
According to Green, doctors initially diagnosed him with vertigo and ulcerative colitis. He was bedridden for three months as a result, but it was still unclear what was causing the illnesses.
“Then these neurological things started happening after the vertigo, and that was — it was four and a half years of my life. I got to the point where I shuffled like I was a 90-year-old man,” he continued.
Green has since connected his health scare to a “dietary” issue, adding, “It was all undiagnosed by Western medicine, so I ended up having to finally find a doctor that is much more into kinesiology and Eastern medicine.”
The Special Forces contestant was later told by a new physician that he had “internal inflammation from gluten and dairy.” Green was surprised by the diagnosis, which came after nearly 200 blood tests and two MRIs.
“I had such brain fog that I reintroduced my best friend of, like, 25-plus years to my sister, who he had also known for 25-plus years,” he explained.
Like Green, Burgess has been candid about her ups and downs in recent months. The Dancing With the Stars pro confessed in September that she heavily smoked meth as a teenager.
“I was gifted this moment of clarity of I could change my life and I was meant for more. I hope that those moments happen for everybody,” she said of her decision to get sober on the September 26 episode of her “Old-ish” podcast with cohosts Green and Randy Spelling. “I was 17 years old, and this was at the end of probably being awake for three days. We were sitting out [in] the backyard of someone’s house, and a crack pipe was being passed around with meth in it, and we were all taking hits of it.”
She continued: “Here I was, 17 years old, high, awake for three days. Watching 20-somethings and maybe even young 30-somethings passing around this crack pipe just waiting to get a little bit more out of it. I had been smoking meth now for a little while, not every day, but just on and off because it was new.”
Burgess, who shares 15-month-old son Zane with Green, clarified the experience was “over 20 years” ago. “It wasn’t as, may I say, as dirty as it is now. It was a newer drug and a lot cleaner,” she noted. “So, it’s not like I had it, and I was hooked and I was on it every day. But it was definitely, at that time, a party drug and around all the time, and I was partying pretty much three to four days a week.”
Before the episode was released, Burgess spoke exclusively with Us Weekly about her decision to not hold back when it comes to discussing her past.
“We haven’t come up against anything that’s off the table,” she shared in September about her podcast venture with Green. “I think naturally there’s things that we won’t share when it comes to a certain subject. We are definitely keeping some things in our space, but we went into this knowing that we wanted to be vulnerable and transparent so we can give people that opportunity to see, ‘Oh wow, the things that I’m going through aren’t just me.'”
