HGTV’s Lyndsay Lamb Reveals ‘Crazy’ Health Challenges: ‘Been Super Quiet About It’

Weeks before the season 5 premiere of HGTV‘s hit show “Unsellable Houses,” co-star Lyndsay Lamb has opened up for the first time about disorders that have plagued her for decades, regularly sidelining her plans and requiring multiple surgeries.

On August 20, 2024, Lamb and Leslie Davis, her twin sister and series co-star, discussed her health journey in-depth on their “Twin Win Unfiltered” podcast, prompted by many questions from fans about her noticeable weight loss this year.

“I’ve always been quiet about it,” Lamb said, explaining that only a handful of people have known about the challenges she’s faced since childhood. “I’ve always had, like, just health issues and just always struggled with them.”

Cross-talking over each other, Davis and Lamb revealed that reason for Lamb’s ongoing challenges — and years of attempts to fix what was wrong — have been “connective tissue” and “undefined autoimmune-type” disorders.

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Leslie Davis Says Sister Lyndsay Lamb Has Been Quiet ‘to a Fault’ About Her Illnesses

As Lamb reflected on decades of ups and downs in her health journey, she said on the podcast, “It’s crazy … but my health has actually led to some pretty major surgeries.”

Davis jumped in, recalling ways her sister’s health challenges have sidelined her, including a family trip to Hawaii years ago when she spent nine of their 10 days in the hospital.

“Because the altitude of the plane, you know, twisted up your intestines and organs,” Davis recalled. “Because one of the things that’s really interesting about your specific, you know, illness with the connective tissue is you’re very elastic so, like, all your organs and stuff, they shift.”

To avoid the same kind of health crisis on other flights, Davis said, “Now when we fly, you don’t eat for like, 24 hours.”

Lamb has chosen not to talk openly about what she’s gone through, including taking 12 to 15 prescription meds a day, until now.

“It’s wild, and the thing is, I’ve always been super quiet about it,” she said, adding, “I’ve never wanted it to be, like, who I am. Do you know what I mean? Because that’s, like, just not what I want to be known for.”

“Now I feel like (it’s been) almost to a fault,” Davis said, “because it’s like, you would push through things when it wasn’t in your best interest, when it was making it more detrimental for you, because you didn’t want to miss out.”

Lamb’s health issues date back to when the twins were children, they said, adding that Lamb has always been the “weaker” twin, saying that she received less of their mom’s nutrients in the womb. According to researchers at the University of California-San Francisco, unequal placenta sharing (UPS) in twin pregnancies can result in “less blood flow and nutrition to one fetus, with more to the other.”

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Lyndsay Lamb Has Been Back on ‘Normal Foods’ for a Year After ‘Extreme Elimination Diet’

Lamb shared on the podcast that for the first time, she has hope that she’s found ways to manage her issues without so many medications and surgeries, which has come after much trial and error.

“I tried so many things like, you know, doctors would tell me, ‘Swim, do yoga, do this, do that.’ And I just kept adding, adding, adding, adding.”

Her weight would often fluctuate, she said, because they’d also advise her to alter her diet including going gluten free, dairy free and more — but she said that while she may have lost weight, it never eliminated the pain and challenges of her conditions.

Eventually, Lamb said, she found an integrative medicine doctor which, according to the Cleveland Clinic, typically “uses a combination of therapies and lifestyle changes to treat and heal the whole person,” focusing on a “complete mind, body and soul” approach to wellness. The regimen began with slowly weaning Lamb off of many of the medications she’d been on for years.

“Because I was on so many medications, we had to start with a full detox,” she said. “And obviously she didn’t like pull me off all these medications in one day. That would never have worked, yeah, but we had to slowly detox my system from some very hard and aggressive medications. And so there was so many phases to it.”

They then did a complete overhaul on her gut health, she said, eliminating and reintroducing foods as if she were a baby — starting with soft foods, then working in solids. After what she called “an extreme elimination diet,” Lamb said she’s been “back on normal foods” for a year but no longer eats meat, has very little dairy, and limits her sugar and caffeine intake.

Lamb has begun to notice some significant improvements, including with her frequent headaches, and an ability to maintain a healthy weight.

“I giggle at the comments online about me taking Ozempic,” she laughed, adding that another huge benefit of her new regimen is that she’s finally been able to sleep, an issue she did reveal on their podcast in May. 

“I had diagnosed insomnia, which is actually incredibly rare to have diagnosed insomnia,” she reiterated on the latest podcast. “Most people say they have insomnia because they don’t sleep, but you very rarely find somebody who’s actually been diagnosed with it through a sleep clinic, who genuinely just cannot sleep. I couldn’t sleep with any sleep aids, anything. So now I sleep.”

In September 2023, she told TV Insider that she was trying to set boundaries in order to get the rest she needed.

“We’re just always reminding each other what the priorities are,” she said of her and Davis. “I have set a lot of boundaries as far as not working at all on Sundays, trying to keep that boundary as much as I can. I also need an obnoxious amount of sleep. So I typically have my phone turned off by 8:30 every day.”

On the podcast, Davis expressed how much she admires the changes her sister has gone through, and relief that she’s starting to feel better, adding, “You used to try to describe it to me like it hurt inside your body.”

Lamb said she decided to finally open about her health journey because she’s finally found ways to feel better and wants to inspire others to do the same.

“Hopefully this brings somebody a piece of hope, and they go and, you know, research on their own behalf,” she said. “You have to advocate for yourself. You have to absolutely have to.”

The fifth season of “Unsellable Houses” is set to premiere on September 4 on HGTV.

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