Most people arrive at alpha-gal the same way. Something happened in the middle of the night, a few hours after dinner. It happened again a month later after a different dinner. Nothing connected the two meals in any way that made sense, and the first several people you told had an explanation that was not this.
Here is the short version of what is going on. Alpha-gal is a sugar. Its full name is galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose, which is why everyone shortens it. It is present in almost every mammal, and not in people, fish, or birds. Some people develop an allergy to it, usually after a tick bite, and from then on their immune system treats beef, pork, lamb, venison and everything made from those animals as a threat.
That last part is the piece that catches people out. It is not only steak. Gelatin is made from mammals. So is a lot of glycerin, and many things labelled natural flavors. Some medications carry it. Some capsules are made of it. This is the reason a person with alpha-gal reads labels in a way that looks obsessive to somebody who does not have it, and is simply arithmetic to somebody who does.
How many people have this
More than you would guess from how blank people look when you say the word. In 2023 the CDC published an estimate that as many as 450,000 people in the United States may have been affected, and that suspected cases had been climbing year over year. The same work found that a large share of clinicians had never heard of it, which is the other half of the experience: the condition is not rare, but the knowledge of it is unevenly spread.
The CDC keeps a plain-language page on alpha-gal syndrome at cdc.gov/alpha-gal. It is the best thing to hand somebody who wants a source that is not you.
Why nobody believed you at first
Food allergies are supposed to be fast. Peanut, shellfish, minutes. Alpha-gal is usually hours, which means the meal that caused it is long finished and often forgotten by the time anything happens. Somebody describing a reaction that started at two in the morning is not describing anything that looks like a food allergy to a person who has only seen the fast kind.
So the early months tend to involve being told it is stress, or reflux, or something viral. That is not a failure of yours and mostly is not a failure of theirs either. It is a pattern that does not look like the pattern.
What tends to get easier
Two things, in most people's telling. The first is that the reading gets faster. The first month in a supermarket takes an hour and feels like an exam. After a while you know your brands, you know the four or five words that matter, and it becomes a thing you do rather than a thing you brace for.
The second is that some people's sensitivity settles over time if they avoid further tick bites, and a proportion of people regain some tolerance. It is not universal, it is not a timeline anybody can promise you, and it is not something to test on your own. But it is a real thing that happens to real people, and it is worth knowing that this is not automatically a permanent sentence at the severity you have it today.
Whether any of that applies to you is a question for an allergist who knows your case, not for an app. Opie reads labels. It does not know your body.