Understanding Hormones, Stress & Detox: Natural Healing with Melissa Deally

Lexi Burt: 00:00:05

Alex, welcome to A Quest For Wholeness podcast. I'm your host. Lexi Burt, a fertility advisor and endometriosis advocate together, we're diving into the journey of understanding what it truly means to be a healthy, complete individual, biologically, psychologically, socially and spiritually. In solo episodes, I'll share my insights on fertility, holistic health and endometriosis, plus we'll have conversations with incredible guests, all exploring the same burning question, what does it mean to be a whole, healthy and satisfied person. I'm so grateful you're here today. I have Melissa dealey here with us. Melissa is an integrative mind body health practitioner, trainer of NLP, timeline therapy, hypnotherapy and magnified healing, dedicated to helping clients detox and heal their physical, mental, emotional and spiritual bodies with a fully virtual practice, she serves clients worldwide. Melissa is also the co founder of the amplify impact Academy, where she trains others in mind, body healing modalities to expand her impact. An international speaker and five time best selling author, Melissa hosts the award winning. Don't wait for your wake up call. Podcast ranked in the top 2% globally by listen notes and recognized with the 2024 women in podcasting award when not working with clients, Melissa's either outdoors with her daughters, skiing or hiking or dedicating her time to her non profit Girls Matter, which focuses on keeping girls in school in Uganda and Kenya, breaking the cycle of poverty, one girl, one family and one village at a time. I feel so honored to have Melissa on the podcast today because she's a client that I work with at amplify you, and I see the reaching impact that her podcast has. And I can't wait to talk with Melissa today about women's health and hormones. So what you're going to hear today is a bit of an overview on understanding hormones and their roles. What causes imbalances are PMS and menstrual symptoms normal and testing and knowing where you're out of balance, and then the solution, how to rebalance your hormones naturally. Melissa, welcome to the podcast, and thanks for being here.

Melissa Deally: 00:02:24

Well, thank you so much for having me. Lexi, this is such an important conversation, because our hormones and our menstrual cycles are obviously natural to every single female on the planet. And yes, girls learn about, you know, puberty in school, although often in a classroom full of boys where they're feeling embarrassed. So how much are they really taking in during that class? And where do we learn about menopause? We learn about it from our mother's experience, our friends experience, and then we think, Oh, well, that's their experience. So it's going to be mine, and it doesn't have to be that way, and I feel it's really important to get more information out to women so that they understand the symptoms are assigned for them to do something differently. The symptoms are a sign the hormones are out of balance, and we don't have to just tolerate them, as this is just part of being a woman, we can actually go, okay, my hormones are out of balance. Now, how do I rebalance them? So I'm excited for this conversation and to empower women in being able to choose to go through menopause gracefully, which is what I was able to do with the knowledge that I had. Oh,

Lexi Burt: 00:03:33

I'm so excited, because you're absolutely right. We I think a lot of young women, we learn about the reproductive organs and their functions, but we're not really taught about the hormones and the menstrual cycle. A lot of clients I've been working with, I'll ask them, tell me about your cycle, and they tell me about their bleeding pattern, which I think is really interesting. So if you want to kind of jump us off and give us some foundation of what are kind of the main hormones at play throughout the cycle.

Melissa Deally: 00:03:59

So the main two hormones that we really look at are progesterone and estrogen, and progesterone is needed in order to hold a pregnancy. And what's also at play with these two hormones is cortisol, and cortisol is our stress hormone. And unfortunately, in today's world, we are stressed out. And again, we look around and we see all our other friends stressed out, and we accept it as normal, and what we don't realize what it's doing downline to our health, and in particular, our own health, although it's negatively impacting the effectiveness of our immune system. It's shifting the balance in our gut, which I heard a quote yesterday that I thought was great. The gut is the queen of the body, and when the queen is unhappy, the whole kingdom falls down. Yeah. And so when our gut health isn't in tip top. Eight other downline negative health issues happen, and stress will cause that. What's happening with strats and our our estrogen and our progesterone is that it stops the production of progesterone because the body is so busy pumping out cortisol, because in that moment, our lizard brain doesn't know the difference between, are we really being chased by a lion, or is it just all this stress piling on top of us? It doesn't know the difference, and it thinks it needs to get us to safety. So it's pumping us with adrenaline so and cortisol, so that we can get to safety. And then what should happen is we get to safety, we get to breathe, we get to relax, and we get to calm down, and we get to drop back into our parasympathetic nervous system, except in today's world, that doesn't happen, because then the next stressor happens. You know, there's a call from school and you got to pick up your kid, or, you know, your boss calls and the presentation that was due tomorrow is now due today because he has something else on tomorrow, or you hit traffic and it's going to take you an hour longer to get where you need to go, whatever it is, we just keep having these stresses piled on top of ourselves. And the body can't do everything at once. It has finite resources, and so in order to produce all that cortisol and adrenaline, it has to stop doing other things. So it stops producing progesterone, and it's literally called the progesterone steel, and that starts to put our estrogen levels and our progesterone levels out of balance. And clinically, 99% of the women I see, their progesterone levels are too low. And that was my own experience years ago when I started getting migraines and I went to a naturopathic doctor and did some lab testing to figure out, Okay, what's going on with my hormones. And we discovered that. And once we knew that, then we knew how to respond to that and how to bring my my progesterone back into balance. However, until I knew that I was suffering with for me, it was migraines. In the next person, it's another symptom. And the reality is, is that PMS is a sign that your hormones are out of balance. And yet, as a society, we think it's normal, and girls are walking through the high school talking that I got PMS today, to the point where so often girls that don't have PMS, think there's something wrong with them for not having PMS. And the reality is those with PMS should be asking, Why am I encountering this? Am I getting enough sleep? Am I engaging in enough self care and looking after myself such that I can bring my hormones back into balance? The sooner we recognize it the easier it is to bring ourselves back into balance, and again with menopause. Now we hear women talking about, you know, night sweats and hot flashes, etc, right? Insomnia. And there's over 80 different symptoms that are accredited to menopause. It shows up in so many different ways for people when something is off, society's trained us to just ignore the symptom and push through. And I want to change that belief our symptoms are our body's way of talking to us and trying to let us know that something is out of balance.

Lexi Burt: 00:08:19

And I just want to go back to something you said there just about the brain literally favoring cortisol production over progesterone. And I think when we're thinking of, you know, our reproductive health and our our menstrual cycle, we're thinking about all the organs that exist in our lower pelvic region, and we forget that the brain is actually connected to and controlling them, and the brain is also responsible for the connection for all of the other things in our body. So when we're talking about women's health, it's not just the uterus, the ovary, the fallopian tubes. This is, this is our whole body, and it's that's out of whack, that is connected to something else that's out of whack?

Melissa Deally: 00:09:01

Yes, absolutely, because we are all interconnected. So we can't just look at one organ or one set of organs. We have to look at everything. So another reason that our hormones get out of balance is toxins. And there's many different types of toxic, types of toxins, and we do live in a toxic world today. So we've got environmental toxins, we've got heavy metals, we've got xenoestrogens, which are toxins that the body believes are estrogens. And so on top of the fact that our progesterone levels might be running low if we are in a stressed out state, we can be pushing our estrogen levels higher because of the xenoestrogens that are in the self care and products we use on our body, right? Our personal care products, as well as in plastics, etc, etc. And so these are all things to be really aware of. And I love to show people how to actually do a proper fun. Medicine detox. It's not about being stressed out and adding to your stresses. Oh, my goodness, there's all these toxins. How am I going to manage every single one? Honestly, we're beyond that. What it's about is accepting, okay, this is the reality of the world that I live in. What can I do about it? I can help my liver detox. Because when my liver gets overloaded and it can't detox, it's very smart, and it will move those toxins into our fat closets to keep them out of our bloodstream. Well, our fat closets are anywhere we have fat in our body. Our brain is largely made up of fat. Our breasts are largely made up of fat, as well as anywhere we're carrying excess that so that keeps the toxins out of our bloodstream. However, look at all the Alzheimer's and dementia that we have. Look at all the breast cancer that we have. Is there a correlation between the fact that we live in a toxic world and we're having these chronic illnesses? What if we could instead help our body get the toxins out with a proper detox. And I know that doesn't sound fun. However, once you learn how to do it, it's actually really quite simple to do. You feel better. Your aches and pains go away. You're sleeping better. You feel lighter in your body, and you know you're some you're doing something good and proactive for your health, and you just do it every quarter, once a quarter, do a detox, and it's a really easy detox, too, and that's what I do, so that I don't worry about all the toxins that are out there. I take action in a way that feels good for me, that I can take action and we need to support our liver, because it is getting overloaded,

Lexi Burt: 00:11:42

I feel like I'm a liver newbie. And like, honestly, I'm going through a bit of a liver cleanse right now with a friend of mine who's a doctor of traditional China Chinese medicine, and she has me reading liver rescue. And just as you said, the liver is such a smart organ, and we don't give it enough credit, I think because it's just silently chugging along as we, you know, hamper it with toxins every single day, whether we are conscious of it or not. So it does that role of protecting us from the the toxins that come into our body and and taking it out of the bloodstream. But I was just learning that one of its main roles is to house and store certain nutrients and vitamins so that when we need it, it can release it into the bloodstream, which I thought was very fascinating.

Melissa Deally: 00:12:31

So the liver is actually responsible for over 500 rolls slash chemical reactions within our body, and another one of them is detoxing excess estrogen. Now, again, I said before the the body has only so many resources, right? So if our trash can, if you liken it to an overflowing trash can in a park, right? Think of that as your liver and your kidneys. If they're overflowing, it can't do the job that it's supposed to do. So it's just working with the most critical toxins at that point, and it's not worrying about the excess estrogen, because it can't do it all. And so again, our hormones get further and further out of balance. And sometimes when women come to me and they have these symptoms of hormonal imbalance. All they needed was to do a good functional medicine three week detox. They didn't need to do anything more that mitigated all of their symptoms that are gone away. And I said, Great, that's all you need to do. Now, keep doing your detoxes in order to keep your symptoms under control. And let's talk about your stress, you know, let's look at some of the lifestyle factors that we can change so that we can be improving the situation for ourselves. And if the symptoms come back, well, then know when they come back, and right away, you know, huh, maybe it's time for me to do another detox.

Lexi Burt: 00:13:54

So we kind of talked about, you know, starting with recognizing that, like PMS, symptoms and pain aren't normal. So of course, kind of the first step in making any change is that awareness piece. So okay, we've learned that painful periods aren't normal, and I'm just going to say that one more time because I feel like I need to reiterate myself every time I say that painful periods are not normal. So if you're having PMS symptoms, menopause symptoms, it's a sign your body is telling you something. And then we can think about those things that are causing those imbalances, as you mentioned, the environmental factors, our self care products, okay? So we can understand that, but not get stuck there and not get too overwhelmed of the anxiety and oh my god, what am I gonna do? But then testing. So I'm wondering, in your professional opinion, Melissa, is it really important to do testing, even if you know something's wrong and you have all these symptoms already, I think a lot of people get really caught up in the like needing to know their hormone values, but if you're having sex. Symptoms, that's a sign right there.

Melissa Deally: 00:15:03

It is a sign right there. And the tricky thing with hormone symptoms is there's a lot of overlap. So if someone tells me their symptoms, that doesn't automatically go, okay, that means your progesterone levels are low, because it could mean their estrogen levels are low, and vice versa, which means I don't know what the next step is to take, because I don't know what the actual problem is, I would be guessing, and I might guess wrong. I have a 5050, chance of guessing right at that point, and I don't want to make someone's symptoms worse, so I offer a lot of functional medicine lab testing, you know, gut health testing and food sensitivity testing and inflammatory level testing and heavy metal testing and hormone testing. The hormone testing is the one where it is the most important that we run the test, because then we know exactly where your estrogen level is compared to your progesterone level. It shows us testosterone, which women have testosterone too, and if it's too high, we're going to have a certain set of symptoms. And if it's too low, that's also problematic. We're not able to build muscle. We're not able to keep our strength, which we need. It shows us our DHEA, which is a precursor to testosterone and estrogen, and it shows us our cortisol levels four times through the day and the daily total. And it's really important to see that, because when we see that cortisol pattern, it shows me how people are sleeping, and if their sleep cycle is messed up, which it is for many people, because of stress, and because we always have one more thing we need to get done today, and because maybe we're watching TV right up until the minute we go to sleep, and we've got all this blue light into our eyes, and then we lie down, and we expect to sleep on demand, and we lie awake and we wonder why, and what happens is when our cortisol levels are out of whack, as I explained, it's messing with our hormones, so I don't even necessarily start addressing the hormones first. Depending on what that lab shows me, it might be more important for me to be addressing our cortisol levels and our sleep pattern. And when we resolve that, then the body will resolve the hormones on its own, or depending how much out of balance they are, maybe they need, you know, three to six months of some natural supplements to support progesterone or to help the body detox excess estrogen, and then, with the lifestyle factor changes and improve sleep. Now the body can stay in balance, and the sooner we recognize the symptoms and take action, the easier it is to resolve. Well, I wonder, because a lot of women will go to their regular doctor or GP and get all these testing done and they're like, well, everything's normal, but I still feel crappy. So I'm wondering how you can maybe share with us how some of these functional medicine tests and values differ from what you might get from like our GP. So yes, so the functional medicine testing that I do is based on both a blood and a saliva test. So the saliva is testing the cortisol levels four times through the day, so we can get that pattern as well as our estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, DHEA levels. And then there's blood that comes in that same lab that will test the thyroid, because that's another downline marker of when our estrogen and progesterone are out of whack, or cortisol is out of whack, it starts to affect our thyroid. And that gives us all four thyroid markers, which are your free t3 free t4 your TSH and your TPO antibodies. If you go to your doctor, you're just getting your TSH. When we look at the free t3 and the free t4 we start to get early warning signs of maybe the TSH is going to go off, and we can again, support a thyroid naturally so that it doesn't have to go off. I see many times TSH is normal, and the doctor will tell someone it's normal. I can see, though, that the free t3 is low, which means pretty soon the brain is going to say we have to start producing more thyroid stimulating hormone, and it's going to ramp up. And then that T is TSH number is going to get higher, and then the doctor is going to say, Oh, you need to be on this thyroid medication. And the reason the free t3 is is low is, again, stress, because the free t4 isn't converting to free t3 because it's being blocked by the stress in the body. And that same lab gives us our insulin markers, both fasted and 90 day, as well as our vitamin D, which is essential in balancing our hormones. So we get a really good picture of everything in one lab, and then we know exactly how to proceed. If I don't have that lab, I'm. I would be guessing. I can have people come to me with their gut health symptoms, and I can say, You know what, if you don't want to run the lab, you've got the symptoms and finances are an issue, let's just go straight to the protocol. And I can make that call. The same with the anti inflammatory with food, they could do a food diary. Instead of running the lab for heavy metal detox. They could go straight to a detox like we live in a toxic world. Literally, everybody could do a heavy metal detox every year, and it would benefit their health. And they don't necessarily have to know what their numbers are with the hormones. It's really important to know the numbers. And this lab is really different to what you get at your doctor's office. They do First off, when you do the lab, you have to do it on specific days of your cycle, day 19 to 21 because we know exactly where your hormones should be on days 19 to 21 so based on knowing where they should be, we're getting a marker. As are they high or low to that, when you go to your doctor, they just send you for blood work. They have no idea what the beginning day of your cycle is. They don't even ask and then they tell you what your number is. Now your progesterone. If they take the blood test early in the cycle, when your progesterone is meant to be low, then they'll tell you it's low, maybe it isn't, or vice versa. Using the saliva test is great because it's showing us the usable hormone in the body. And so that's why I really like going with the functional medicine lab testing and getting all those layers of additional data and tying it back to the cortisol levels and sleep. Because, again, you go to the doctor and they tell you what your estrogen level is or your progesterone level is. They have no basis of a marker to compare that to for your unique body, and there's no tie in to stress and sleep,

Lexi Burt: 00:21:44

Which everyone is suffering with, like, no matter who you are, where you are. I mean, I try my very best to protect my sleep and have good sleep hygiene, but still, it's something I'm very conscious of and struggle with sometimes, which is it's so important for overall health, never mind just Hormonal Health. And before, I kind of shift, because I really want to get into some menopause talk, tell us a little bit about cortisol, because I feel like there's a lot of fear with cortisol right now where people being like, Oh, my cortisol is high, but we actually have this natural pattern of cortisol, which is meant to be high at some times and lower at others. So tell us a little bit more about that.

Melissa Deally: 00:22:25

Yes, so cortisol, we want it to be high in the morning when we wake up, it's what helps us wake up and have energy as we start our day, and then as we go through the day, it lowers. And we want it to be the lowest at bedtime, ideally between 10 and 11pm at night. As humans, we are all part of nature, and we need to follow the rhythms of the sun, right? Ideally, we're waking up at dawn and we're going to sleep in the dark sometime after dusk, and around 10 to 11pm is when our melatonin levels are at their highest, because cortisol and melatonin are inverse hormones. So we want cortisol cortisol low at night time so that our melatonin can be high, so that we can get into a nice, deep, restorative sleep, and then overnight, cortisol starts to rise again until it's highest in the morning, between six and 8am which is when we ideally want to be waking, and our melatonin is at its lowest. And we have so many factors in our lives today that are negatively impacting our melatonin levels. And so our melatonin isn't rising at night and cortisol isn't coming down. So when cortisol is high, it's very hard to fall asleep, for starters. And what happens? I hear a lot of people say, Oh, I'm a night owl, like, I like to go to bed at 2am and I'm like, so do you get a second wind after like, 10 to 11pm and they're like, Yeah. And I'm like, Yeah, that's your cortisol already going up. And you're not supposed to wait for your second wind and do more work and then go to sleep later. You need to slowly start to shift your sleep patterns and aim for being asleep between that 10 and 11pm and obviously the night owl isn't going to just suddenly go, Okay, I'm going to go to bed at 10pm now forever more, and just make that shift. We need to do it gradually, and I recommend 15 minutes a week. So if you're a 2am sleeper, then next week, or starting today, make that 1:45am and then the week after 130 and then 115 and when we do it gradually, like that, we can adjust, and you'll adjust your morning routine, you'll notice that you can start to get up a little bit earlier, and you shift everything, perhaps because you're getting up earlier whatever you were doing in the evening, you can move to be doing in the morning and shift things around in your day. Now what's negatively impacting our melatonin levels, big time is blue light. So. So blue light from our screens and all of our devices, television included, is the same light we get into our eyes at high noon. So that does not tell the brain it's time to start getting ready for bed. Before the advent of electricity, the brain got signals of time to get ready for bed simply by the change in the color of the light in the sky as we went through dust, we don't get that signal anymore, because we've got all these lights on, and that blue light is the worst, because that's telling the brain It's high noon, and it actually blocks the production of melatonin, because we don't need it at high noon. So for every hour you were on a device in the evening, it will block melatonin production for 30 minutes once you get off, unless you have screens and blue light blocking glasses to block it. So when I watch television at night, which I watch, you know, maybe once a week I get around to doing that, I wear my blue light blocking glasses. On my laptop, I have a blue light walking software that's free is literally called just get flux, F, l, u, x.com, you download it, it has GPS within it so it knows where you are in the world, and it will adjust at dusk and turn a yellow light on your computer so that you're not getting The blue light in your eyes. Now, one word of caution, it changes the color on your computer. So if you are, you know, shopping online for clothes, don't do it in the evening, because I thought I was buying a beautiful salmon colored top, and when it arrived, it wasn't actually that color at all, and I realized it's because of the skewed colors, because of the yellow light that we're not used to looking at on your phone. You have night shift on an iPhone, on Android, they have something similar iPads night shift, and you can set that so that every day, it turns on at, say, 5pm and turns off at 7am and I don't even know if there's blue light blocking on televisions. We don't have a new version, maybe on new versions, it comes with it. I just wear blue light blocking glasses when I watch television. And every once in a while, I still forget. And I'm always surprised at the fact that on the night I forget, I can't fall asleep. And then I think we're yet I do fall asleep.

Lexi Burt: 00:27:21

I think we're all dying to know what color was the shirt.

Melissa Deally: 00:27:25

What color did it come in? As it was just a really pale pink, and I have bright colors, and I wasn't gonna wear a really pale pink, and the yellow had made it look more salmony.

Lexi Burt: 00:27:42

My partner was sharing with me this little cartoon, and it was a bunch of people lined up to go to the doctors. They all had sleep issues, and the doctor said, well, like, why don't you try just not going on your phone? And everyone was freaking out. No, I will do anything else to get some sleep. I am going crazy. Well, you could just not go on your phone before you go to bed, I will take any pill. I will do anything else to get some sleep. I'm going crazy, Doc, you said, I don't know what to tell you, and this is just the thing, right? I think we're so quick to find the external thing that can soothe our internal experience. But what you were just saying with the sleep like this is purely a behavioral thing that is actually having a consequence on our physiology and our health.

Melissa Deally: 00:28:27

Yes, and people aren't aware of it, right? Because, again, when are we ever taught to sleep? You know, I have a course six steps to better sleep, and I go through all of this because we aren't taught to sleep. We aren't taught how to optimize our sleep. We aren't taught the fact that we all need a bedtime routine. It's not just for kids. And when I learned that, I mean, I was in the corporate world before, so I had a bedtime routine for my kids, and then, you know, kind of once they were around age 10, it was like, Okay, you guys are good. You can do it on your own now, except they didn't continue the routine. They just did their own thing. And most adults that aren't aware of the need for this do not have a bedtime routine. However, if we have a bedtime routine, that's how we signal the brain to start producing melatonin, because it's not getting the signal from dusk, like I said earlier, it needs to know. So if, for 30 days, you do four to six things in the same order every night, whether that be wash the dishes, walk the dog, take a shower, you know, do some stretching, read your book and then turn out the light. Do it in the same order every night, everybody's like, Oh, washing dishes, okay, I'm gonna start producing melatonin.

Lexi Burt: 00:29:48

And I think it's just the thing of creating safety, like you were saying about kids, like they need to know what's coming. They need structure, to know that they're safe and they know what's happening. And I think we forget that we're you. Know, still have little babies inside of us, and we still need the same things too. So especially as women, to have healthy cycles, we need to have some structure in our brain and body to know what's going to be coming next.

Melissa Deally: 00:30:12

Absolutely, absolutely, and that's how we let our brain know.

Lexi Burt: 00:30:15

And I wonder, Melissa, I really want to transition into menopause, because to be completely honest with you, I know very few things about menopause. I know it from one woman specifically in my life who's shared some things, but as a young woman who has suffered with endometriosis for so long, there's actually great fear for me attached to menopause because it's this other significant change. And I think similarly to what you're saying about young women feeling abnormal that they don't have PMS symptoms, it's kind of this societal belief maybe that menopause means you're going to be feeling crazy, you're going to have hot flashes, all of these, these stereotypical things that we associate it with. So I wonder if you could go back and tell your young self three things about menopause. What would it be?

Melissa Deally: 00:31:09

Symptoms are supposed to be listened to. Symptoms are a sign there's an imbalance. And when we act on that right away and we start to look for the answers to that we can resolve that. And quite honestly, going through menopause, we can expect imbalance, because our estrogen levels and our progesterone levels do start to drop. That's part of the process. So it's completely normal to have imbalance. We don't have to suffer with symptoms, and so that would be the second thing is it isn't normal, or we don't have to accept it as normal to suffer with symptoms, and for women to know that, because right now, as we said at the very beginning of this podcast, we learn about menopause from our mothers, our sisters, our friends, and if enough of them tell you, you're going to have hot flashes, you're going to have night sweats, you're going to be an insomniac, you're going to have vaginal dryness, and you hear all these horrible things, no wonder. It starts to instill fear. Well, a and then what does fear do? Instill stress? So let's not go there, and let's recognize this. This is yet another miraculous and beautiful transition of the female human body. And when we recognize the symptoms and we know that we can do something about it, we don't have to be afraid of it, we can be like, Oh, hot flash, huh? Maybe I'm just starting to go into menopause, and probably the fact, by the time you get there, you've probably not had regular cycles for a while, so you already have a clue, right? And so then at that point, it's like, maybe now would be a good time to do some testing, see where I'm at, and then see how I need to support my body through this. And that's literally what I did, because I was fortunate, and I had this knowledge before I went through menopause, and so pre menopause, in my normal cycle, and because I'd suffered those migraines, and I'd gone to a naturopath, and I'd learned about this functional medicine testing for my hormones, you know, my medical doctor just wanted to give me more drugs for the migraines, and I just kept saying, No, I want to know why they're worse. Why are they worse? And that's when I discovered my progesterone level was so low. So she gave me a tincture called Vitex. It's absolutely disgusting, and I had to have a teaspoon of that every day for the first two weeks of my cycle to boost my progesterone. It worked. It was awful, and it worked. So the migraines went away. I did it for two months. Migraines gone. About seven years later, started getting migraines again. So I went back to her and I went, can I have some more of that horrible stuff? And trust me, if I didn't think I need it, I wouldn't have asked for it. It was vile, and she was let's do some testing. I said, No, not this time. Just give me the stuff, and if it doesn't work, we'll do testing. It worked, beautiful. And then years after that, I got migraines again, and they were different. So again, see how I'm listening to my body, and I'm not. I'm paying attention. So then I went back to the nation path, and when we got migraines again, and they're different. So let's test, sure enough. Now, my progesterone was low, my estrogen was low, and my testosterone were low, and she's like, Whoa, how are you still standing? And it's kind of funny that she said that, because again, I see this in so many menopausal women. So yes, I had more of that disgusting tincture to boost my progesterone. Now I needed to support my estrogen and my testosterone as well. And again, look at lifestyle factors and what was going on in my life at that time, etc, to support stress levels. And so did that, and I literally through menopause for probably a two year period. I just tested my hormones every six months to make sure. Everything was moving in the right direction, and then after that, I didn't need to do that anymore. And so I do feel very fortunate that I was able to move through with such ease and grace. And why was I able to do that? Because I had the knowledge, I had the education, and literally, knowledge is power, and that's why I'm so grateful to you for having me on the show to get this message out so that more women can have the education and instead of living in the program of this is what happens during menopause and suffering through because that's just what they think they have to do and recognize instead, huh? These symptoms are happening. Where are my hormones at, and what can I do about it?

Lexi Burt: 00:35:44

Yeah, you know, likewise, I feel like I feel fortunate to be growing up and be a young person in this time where there is more holistic education on the female body and information and education resources like you that I get to connect with because that won't be my experience when I get to that beautiful transition time. That's really what it is like, is this, this transition? So I want to view it that way. But if a woman's listening who is maybe experiencing menopause symptoms, or know she's approaching that and she unfortunately has lived in this time of not listening to her body or or that that connection and that intuition being dampened, what would you tell her?

Melissa Deally: 00:36:27

I would tell her a you have awareness now, and so now you get to make a choice. You can choose to work with someone like me find a naturopathic doctor that can run lab tests for you in order to then guide you on which way you need to go, in terms of supporting which hormones need support or not. And that's what it comes down to, is some people choose not to you know that that's their programming, and it's literally up to each individual, and when the pain gets bad enough, that's usually what move people into making a choice to move forward. And I invite people to let them know you don't have to wait until the pain gets bad enough, and I don't want you to wait until the pain gets bad enough. However, some people will, and some people, after listening to this will be like, Huh? I didn't know that. So when I have the symptoms, I'm going to remember that's my cue to start looking into where my hormones are at well,

Lexi Burt: 00:37:28

and just like the title of your podcast, don't wait for your wake up call. You don't have to wait till it gets so bad. However, as you said, I really appreciate that. Is like you have the choice, you can do this, you can explore this or not, and that's okay, if that's not for you right now, or maybe it's down the line when you feel more ready to make that decision. Because I think having the choice, it's a lot of responsibility.

Melissa Deally: 00:37:58

It is, it is. And if we can come to a place where we all are grateful for the fact that we have a choice and that whatever we choose in that moment is going to be right for us, and just because you make a choice today doesn't mean you can't change and make a different choice a week from now.

Lexi Burt: 00:38:21

Love that well said. Well, Melissa, as we wrap up, if people want to learn more about working with you or connect with you, what's the best way they can do that?

Melissa Deally: 00:38:29

The best way is just to go to my website, your guided health journey.com. And you can there's a contact form you can fill out let me know a little bit about what's going on with you. And there's also a book, a discovery call, and people can just book straight into my calendar, and we can have a chat and see if my way of working with people aligns with what you're looking for, and if I'm the right person for you,

Lexi Burt: 00:38:54

I am so grateful to have your voice on the podcast and get to share this with people who need it. So thank you so much

Melissa Deally: 00:39:02

My pleasure, and thank you for having me and helping get this message out.

Lexi Burt: 00:39:10

Thank you so much for tuning in to today's episode. I hope you feel inspired and empowered to embrace your whole self in mind, body and spirit, if you're ready to take the next step in understanding your fertility or women's health needs, I would love to support you. Book a free consult with me, and Together, we'll explore how we can work towards your healthiest, most vibrant self until next time, take care you.