When we are feeling dirty, we take a shower. But what if the ones that need cleaning are on the inside of our bodies? Wouldn’t it be good if we could just take a shower and flush it all out? Well, we actually can through detoxing. In this episode, Karen Pulver and the Goddesses sit down with Holistic Health Coach & Guide Melissa Deally to discuss the significance of looking at our body as a whole and start changing our bad eating habits. Most food plans are often not sustainable, and we beat ourselves up over feeling like we got off the wagon with food. Melissa’s coaching, alongside a detox plan, is where you can get more empowered, leading you to more success and continued good habits. There are so many toxins that can get into our body which can cause the gut/brain connection to be foggy. Melissa will guide us through how to program our brains for success. So grab a really good smoothie and mindfully chew it (yes, chew, not gulp) as we sip and learn about health and wellness because we all deserve it!

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Watch the episode here

 

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Melissa Deally: Clean Out Your Garbage Can Gut For A Healthier Lifestyle

Welcome, everyone. We are glad and grateful that you’re here. I’ve gotten into some bad eating habits with COVID, especially being stuck inside, watching Netflix series over and over again, having that glass of wine or martini. Also, having that bag of popcorn that you take one handful and before you know it, it’s all gone. My husband and I love dark chocolate, which is a good snack, however, not when you eat an entire bag of dark chocolate chips, along with that martini. That’s yucky and bad. We’ve learned on Grateful Goddesses about bad energy being stuck in the different dense pockets of the different chakras. That can cause upset to our mind, body and spirit, so too what you fill your body with. Whatever you put in might feel good like eating those chocolates. Once it’s in your body, it can feel crappy.

I struggled over the past year from this bad eating. Of course, gaining weight is one side effect. Another side effect I had was I broke out quite a bit in the T-zone area, not just from wearing the mask but definitely from eating poorly. I had trouble staying asleep. I’d wake up quite frequently with stomach issues. I also felt extremely sluggish. I do love a good restorative nap. However, I felt like I had to nap. I couldn’t get through the day if I didn’t lie down. I do think that was because of the food I was eating. Our guest, Melissa Deally, knows a lot about what we put into our body, how we can clear the toxins, and how we can feel refreshed and energetic about all the things that we eat.

Melissa Deally is a Holistic Health Coach and Integrative Health Practitioner. Her company is called Your Guided Health Journey. She helps people deal with common challenges, such as getting to the root cause of your health issues, removing toxicities, and boosting deficiencies to help your body come back into balance so that it can heal itself, and give you newfound energy and a renewed joy of life. She uses functional medicine labs that get mailed to your home and help you see what is going on inside your body. She then provides a personal wellness protocol to guide your healing journey. Melissa specializes in gut health, women’s hormones and liver detoxes. She’s a speaker, connector, podcast host and guest, and outdoor enthusiast. Welcome, Melissa, to the show.

Thank you, Karen. I’m excited to be here.

Thank you for joining us. One of the things that Melissa offers in her coaching business is direct contact with her via text through Coach Connect. I’ve been doing the detox. I’m almost through with one of the detoxes that she recommends. One of the things I’ve been doing is texting you a lot. I said, “Melissa, I’m having a hard time with this moment. I wasn’t hungry. I was full. My husband and I were watching a show. He got out the popcorn and started eating it. I looked over and I’m like, ‘That looks good. I want to have a bite. I want to have a handful.’” I messaged you, “What do I do?” You got back to me right away and said, “Think about what is it that’s causing your brain to think this. You’re used to eating this way at night. Go for a walk or have a bath. What is it? Drink water.” I went and had water. I had a cup of tea, and I didn’t feel the need to have that anymore. I appreciate that. Tell me about your coaching business and how it is that it was okay with all those many texts that I sent you?

I’ve named my business very decisively. It’s called Your Guided Health Journey because when people are trying to regain their health, I’m looking at the whole body. I’m looking at nutrition, exercise, stress, sleep, mindset, belief and more. A big piece of that is nutrition. When we change the way people eat, it’s hard. People need more support. I want people to be successful in their healing journey. Offering this high level of support is what makes the difference. I’ve seen people get diagnoses or have lab tests run by doctors and naturopaths and get told, “Don’t eat this, and don’t eat that,” and then you’re left to your own devices. That’s when people end up looking for recipes online or going to Dr. Google, but then they’re not quite sure. There are other ingredients in it, “Can I have that? Can I not? Is this going to help me or not?” They don’t know.

The problem is when we start to change our habits, our brain starts talking to us because our brain is in charge of keeping us safe. It knows that what you’re doing now is safe because you’re here and you’re alive. It’s not sure where you’re going when you start to change habits, so it starts chirping at you to bring you back into that comfort zone with things like, “This is hard. These new recipes, you don’t know them in your head. They take longer. Maybe you shouldn’t do this. You don’t even know if you’re doing it right.”

Pre WW, the average person had fifteen lbs of sugar a year, and today, it is 125 lbs of sugar. Share on X

When it says that to you and you can’t get your questions answered, that’s when people fall down. When you can talk back to your brain and go, “I do know I’m doing it right because I asked the question, and I got my answer,” you’re in a much more empowered place to keep moving forward, knowing that you are supported. You are doing it right and you will get there. That’s why I love this app. I love offering this high level of support to people because it leads to success.

Especially in those moments of weakness where I wasn’t sure and I needed that support. Also, when I’ve been to restaurants and I’m looking at the menu and I text you like, “I don’t know, can I have this? What about this?” You get back pretty much within ten minutes. I love the support that you give. Thank you so much for that. I’d like to invite our Featured Goddesses on to join in this conversation, and especially talk about our eating habits and how it’s affecting us. I wonder, have any of you felt the same as me? Michelle, would you like to start?

I relate to what you said, Karen. I need a nap almost every day. I have to stop what I’m doing wherever I am and come home and take a nap. I know my eating is the same. It’s not been great. I’m usually a pretty healthy eater. Melissa, this is perfect for me. I’d love to talk about sugar too because that seems to destroy me.

Sugar is another very common problem because it’s in everything, unfortunately. The food industry is pretty smart. They know how addictive it is to humans. If they want to grow their bottom line and their profit, why not add some sugar and then some salt, in case you’re the salt person, into the food to get us addicted to it. We buy more and create more profit for them. In that process, sugar is also a poison. It’s toxic to the human body. The body needs some sugar. Our energy comes from glucose, etc., within the body, but the degree or the amount of processed sugar that we eat is toxic.

 

I was reading something and back at pre-World War I in the UK, the average person was having 15 pounds of sugar a year. Now, it’s 125 pounds. That’s insane. The food industry makes it hard because they’ve got 50 different names for sugar. When you’re trying to be an educated consumer reading labels, how do you know what all these other things are? It’s hard. There are ways to lower our sugar intake. The detox is one of them. I also have a program, 28 Days to Kick the Sugar Habit. For somebody else that wants more support, we can do that over 90 days.

Sugar is causing crashes in energy because of what happens when we eat something that’s high in sugar. Think about how many people start their day with a cup of coffee because we’ve woken up a little bit tired and we need that kickstart to our brain. We might add a pastry with that from the local coffee shop. The body treats coffee quite similarly to sugar. You’ve given your body a double whammy of quick energy that we burned through fast. It creates an insulin spike. About an hour and a half later, we’re down here crashing. That’s when we reach for another cup of coffee or another pastry to get us through until lunchtime, and then at lunchtime, we get some real food. Hopefully, that gives us a bit of energy until mid-afternoon. We then might be deciding we need the daily nap or we reach for a chocolate bar or something else.

We have this ongoing roller coaster ride throughout our day, every day. By the time we try to go to sleep at night, it’s hard to get to sleep because of that coffee intake, which has an eight-hour half-life. If you had it at 8:00 AM, half of that is still in your body at 4:00 PM. Half of that is still in your body at midnight. That’s if you’ve only had one cup, and you’ve had all of this sugar still in your blood. Getting to sleep is hard. We then toss and turn all night. We wake up tired and we do it all again. When I work with people, I help them break the coffee habit. I help them break the sugar habit. They are amazed at how much new energy they have and how much better they feel as a result.

I’ve been on the detox. The first week I text you, I said, “I’m still tired. I’m still napping.” You said you were a little surprised. Maybe it was harder to detox and get it all out of me. I didn’t nap at all this past week. I didn’t feel the need. I went up to my room and be prepared to take that nap. I’m like, “I don’t need it.” It was strange. Tanys, would you like to add to that at all?

I like that Melissa is talking about the psychological effects of that as well because that’s definitely a big part. That’s something I’ve struggled with for sure. You eat for other reasons, not just because you’re hungry. That’s a good way to come at it with ongoing support. I was happy to hear that.

Michelle, were you going to comment some more?

That brings me to why detox is important and how it can help us with those cravings or things that aren’t good for us.

Detoxing is important because we live in a toxic world. It’s far more toxic than the human body has ever been designed to have to deal with. Since the beginning of time, the human body is slow to evolve. Since World War II, we’ve had almost 100,000 man-made chemicals introduced into our world that are getting inside our body through our food, through our airways, through our waterways, etc. Some of them are going in our mouth, and then the liver is charged with detoxing them. Many of them, we’re putting on our skin. It takes only 26 seconds to get into our bloodstream when we put it on our skin. There’s no chance for the liver to detox that.

Our body is getting bogged down with these toxins that it doesn’t know how to deal with. Our poor liver is charged with keeping our bodies pure and clean. It’s vital in over 500 chemical functions inside the body. It’s under a double whammy attack. We don’t give our liver enough respect, mostly because we haven’t been taught this. The liver is nutrient-depleted because our soils are nutrient-depleted. Since the advent of agricultural farming, we’ve been taking from the land, trying to produce more food to feed the planet and make a profit, not allowing the soil to settle and regenerate the nutrients. If those nutrients aren’t in the soil, they don’t get into our food.

When we apply lotion or product to our skin, it takes 26 seconds to get into our bloodstream. Share on X

The liver has two phases of detoxification, phase one and phase two. We’re getting the nutrients we need for phase one of detoxification to our food. We are not getting the nutrients we need for phase two of liver detoxification through our food. This phase is where the liver turns the toxins into a format that can exit the body. We need to be supporting the body more through good supplementation to help with phase two of liver detoxification. At the same time, we need to help the liver get these toxins out. The way we do that is we need to turn off digestion. The body needs to get into a state of autophagy or deep clean. In the first world where food is readily available, and especially during COVID when we’re all at home and a refrigerator is there, we’re grazing all day long.

Every time we put food in our mouth, it turns on digestion. Digestion uses 30% of our energy if it’s a healthy digestive system. We eat food for energy but we have to remember, we are using energy to break that food down in order to get the nutrients into our cells to give us energy. When we are digesting, other systems are being shut down. That would be our deep cleaning system, that system of helping move the toxins through and out of the body. With a functional medicine liver detox, we time our meals. We space them out through the day. We put an end to the grazing and we allow the body to get into a state of autophagy. When the body is in autophagy, it starts to clean up. It starts to move those toxins out but also gets rid of dead cells and damaged cells. When we’re in that stage for long enough, we start to have our human growth hormone get produced, which starts to regenerate new cells. Those new cells bring new energy.

That’s why we start to have more energy as we get our toxins out. We also start to sleep better because the body detoxifies overnight. If that process isn’t such a struggle on the body, we’re not getting woken up through the process. The body can do it more easily and we can start to sleep better through that process. The liver detox program I offer is based on science and programmed to work in alignment with the body, and get the body back to working the way that it should naturally. What I also find interesting is that if you look at Ayurvedic medicine, which goes back 6,000 years, traditional Chinese medicine, Latin American medicine, they all still detox to this day. It’s only in the Western world where we’ve decided that to be healthy and hygienic, we have to have a shower to wash our outer body, but we’ve completely forgotten about what’s going on inside our bodies.

It’s important to look after what’s going on inside our bodies because we now know that 90% to 95% of all diseases are triggered by the environment you create inside your body. It’s not genetics. Genetics plays a piece, but it’s also the environment we create that triggers the cells to turn on genes that we’re predisposed to. If we create a healthy and clean environment inside our body, those cells and genes don’t have to be turned off. It’s empowering because we have control and the choice to create a body that is inhospitable to disease. That’s what I like to teach people to do.

Alyssa, have you ever done a detox? What’s your relationship to food?

 

In talking to people, I probably had a typical journey with food. At the beginning of the pandemic, we were all nesting, cooking a lot, and baking a lot. In my house at least, I had gone from being an empty nester back to a full house when my kids were home. We were like, “Enough. We are gaining weight. We are eating too much sugar.” We felt like we could because we needed to treat ourselves because of everything else that’s going on around us, and outside wasn’t fun. We were going to feed our souls, and then we just decided enough was enough.

I stopped the baking. No more banana bread. I started cooking and eating healthier. I did some delivery meals in our own way. We do eat pretty healthy around here. I’m back to somewhat of an empty nest. That depends on the day. Summer’s here and the weather’s beautiful. We didn’t want to feel yucky like we had during the winter. We’re coming out of our hibernation and starting to eat healthier. It’s been a bit of a journey. I’m finally back to where I started from pre-pandemic. It took a while to get there.

I wanted to ask you, Melissa, about the connection between detoxing and people who suffer from a chronic illness or people like me who have a genetic predisposition to brain health issues. I wanted to get your take on how detoxing can help that. There are many different diseases out there. People suffer from many different diseases. If you are predisposed to something, how can detoxing maybe ward off diseases like that?

Detoxing is powerful in warding off those things. When we detox, we literally are clearing out our pathways through our whole digestive system. Our immune system, 70% of it is housed in the gut, which is all part of our digestive system. When we clean up and strengthen the health of our entire gut, we’re also strengthening the health of our immune system. That can then be helping to ward off chronic illness. You also mentioned brain issues or brain fog and all of that.

The gut-brain connection is powerful. I used to think that our brain was in charge. What I’ve learned is that for every message from our brain to our gut, there are nine messages from our gut to our brain. Now I think of it as the gut is my command center, and my brain is the operation center that makes it happen. There’s this strong connection through the vagus nerve between the gut and the brain. When the gut is not happy, the brain is not happy. When the brain is not happy, the gut is not happy.

Think about if you have a headache, you probably don’t feel like eating. If you have a stomach ache, maybe you have brain fog or you’re not processing things as well. We also know that 90% of serotonin, one of our feel-good hormones is made in the gut. Dopamine is also made in the gut. If our gut is out of balance, it’s not going to be producing those necessary neurotransmitters to the degree that it should, then it’s much harder for us to be feeling good and happy. That’s when we can end up going to a doctor. They might prescribe an anti-anxiety or an anti-depressant drug, or send you to a psychiatrist for an evaluation. What I invite people to do is let’s start by looking at the health of your gut because if we can rebalance your gut and get your gut naturally making neurotransmitters again, maybe you don’t need those drugs.

The detox is not a diet, but you can lose weight. Can you explain that?

That’s quite simple. Several things, first of all, toxins weigh something. When we get those toxins out, we naturally lose weight. The other thing is because we are setting the timing of eating. On the fasting days where you have the shake, the shake has all of the goodness in it that your body needs. It’s got all your vitamins and all your micro-minerals and minerals, etc. It’s not designed to go hungry. The reason we’re hungry is that we’re taking in a lower calorie load than what we’re used to. If we’ve been grazing all day long, then that caloric load is higher than it needs to be.

This is a reset for the entire body, including the amount that your body needs to eat to function at an optimal level. When we overeat, we put a lot of stress on our digestive system because it has to break all of this down. It uses 30% of our energy. If we’re constantly using that energy, we are going to feel like we have less energy for other things, less cognitive energy, and less energy to get in workouts. We lose weight and we gain energy, and it’s a win-win.

We want to get our bodies in a state of autophagy or deep clean to help the liver and stop digestion. Detoxing is the way to do this. Share on X

Who drinks coffee here? Michelle doesn’t. Tanys, what’s your coffee regime?

I’m bad in the mornings because I have a little bit of sugar in my coffee, but I only have 1 to 2 cups in the morning. I’m not one that drinks it all day or anything like that.

Do you put milk in it?

Yes.

Alyssa, you too?

One cup a day in the morning. I need it. It’s a habit. It’s hard to break and a little bit of almond milk.

I was surprised when I started this detox, Melissa. It was just two days and I was like, “I don’t feel the need for a coffee right now.” It was strange, but I’m sure for some people, it’s hard.

It is and for some people coming off coffee because it has become such a habit, it triggers withdrawal headaches, which shows how addictive it can be. We all have different tolerance levels to coffee, and even to sugar. Some people can eat sugar and not have that huge energy shift. Other people can’t and it is exactly the same with coffee. People who know they are sensitive to coffee are aware of it. I have never drunk coffee in my life, but I know I’m sensitive to caffeine. Not that I drink pop at all, but when I was younger, even in my teen years, I couldn’t have pop after 2:00 PM and go to sleep. I avoid caffeine because I know I’m sensitive to it.

 

People that are less sensitive to coffee can get into habits of drinking more and more of it. It has that eight-hour half-life, so it starts to negatively impact their sleep. When we do break that habit, and it can be hard because they will go through withdrawals, so I coach them through coming off it slowly. Reduce your intake over five days or even a week before starting the detox. That is why I do calls with people to set them up for success on the detox before they start, so they’re fully prepared. When we plan and we’re prepared to do something, we can be much more successful than if you decide, “I’m going to do this and I’m going to start tomorrow. I’m not prepared. Now, I’m dealing with painful headaches. I haven’t prepared my meals for the days that I get to start eating again. Now I’m preparing a meal while I’m still fasting.” That’s cruel to yourself and your body. Setting people up for success and planning ahead of time is what ultimately leads people to success through the program.

The meal prep was key. I’ve felt that. On the detox that Melissa suggests, you don’t fast. You have four shakes on days 1 and 2 with supplements. On day three, you have a shake in the morning, then you can eat lunch. That was the best meal ever. I was mindfully eating too, which I don’t normally do. I normally eat on the run. I sat and made this beautiful soup three days before. I took it out and I was eating it. It was so good and filled with many nutritional yummies in there. I’m getting back to coffee because even though it was easy, I still want it eventually. I still want to have my cocktails here and there. When I do finish, you said you’re going to talk with me about re-introducing food. Will I be able to reintroduce coffee?

You can. It’s up to you as to what degree you reintroduce it. Some people are like, “I don’t want to reintroduce it because I realized how it was bogging down my energy.” To some people, as Alyssa said, it’s a habit and they love it. I then ask, “Do you need the caffeine or can you do decaf?” Some people choose to reintroduce decaf. Other people reintroduce coffee but limit it to that one cup a day because they now know about that eight-hour half-life and how it’s affecting their sleep or was affecting their sleep. Now they’re sleeping better and they don’t want to go back to the way that it was before.

It’s the same with alcohol. Alcohol does have sugars in it and it can impact sleep and the liver. Everything becomes a choice because you have greater awareness around how to fill your body well and what you want to put in it at any given time. During COVID, maybe it was easy to sit down and have a glass of wine or two every single night. Coming off the detox, it might be, “I’m going to do that on Friday and Saturday nights.” I believe in the 80/20 rule. We’re all human. We’re not perfect and we can’t be perfect. I don’t want people getting stuck trying to be perfect. I never ask anyone to eat 100% of the time perfectly. I don’t want anybody else to.

The 80/20 rule is powerful. If you eat well in a way that serves your body 80% of the time, it’s able to cope with the 20% of the time where you choose to eat food that nutritionally may not be as good for you. There’s a celebration around it or whatever and you’re going to enjoy it mindfully. When we eat mindfully, then we know what we’re doing. We’re making a choice to do that. We don’t go away and beat ourselves up afterward for having done it, which puts stress on the body and causes the body to hold on to weight. When we do it mindfully and we enjoy it, we can walk away from that, feeling light and happy without stress.

First of all, I drink a cup of green tea every day. I’m curious to know if that’s the same as coffee.

The caffeine in green tea and the way the body absorbs it is different from the way the body absorbs caffeine in coffee. The caffeine in green tea, while we don’t do that during the detox, is a better option than coffee. Keep enjoying your green tea. I drink green tea every day as well.

Thank you. Going back to 80/20, do you recommend doing that in a certain way, not all day because it’s only 20%, but having one day where you break it or you can go through the week and play with that?

Do you mean drive-thru Shake Shack, then you go to Portillo’s to get the chocolate cake, and then you top it off with a martini? I’ve done that.

90-95%of diseases are triggered by what happens inside our body. Share on X

Yes, I do. Ideally, the way to do it is to have your two cheat meals a week so that way you can plan around social events if you know that you’re going out. That’s going to be a cheat meal because you’re less in control, especially if you’re eating at someone else’s house. You don’t want to have them two days in a row either. You need to space them out to give the body time to process and move all of that through before you hit it again.

Two cheat meals a week. If you’re eating nutritionally dense meals the rest of the time, your body will be thriving. Generally, that 80/20 rule is such a massive shift for people from where they’re at. For some people, they could be the other way around, and doing 20% of the time, they’re eating well and 80% of the time, they’re not eating in a way that serves their body. Every shift towards that 80% of nutritionally complete meals is the shift in the right direction.

I have a question. We know sugar is bad. Sugar equals poison. Are there any big myths in the food industry or from a diet that people out there were not aware of? Things like these are five foods you think are healthy, but they’re the worst things you can put in your body, or other myths that we’re being told or stuff we’re being fed by the food industry.

There are quite a few. One thing that I want to say before I start going into the myths is the fact that the weight-loss industry is feeding us a lot of myths and confusion. This is a billion-dollar industry with magazines at the checkout counter, “I lost 30 pounds in 30 days doing this and you can too. You must do keto. You must do paleo. You must do carnivore.” What I teach is each of us has to find the right way to eat for our unique body because our microbiome is unique. It’s as unique as our fingerprints, and it goes back four generations.

The way that our microbiome or our gut wants to be fed and that bacterial and microbial balance in our body is impacted by where we lived and where we came from four generations ago. Different ethnic foods might be healthy for one person, and then not for someone else. There are plenty of healthy foods that some people can’t eat. People have a food intolerance to apples, pears and nuts. They’re healthy, yet some people can’t do them. What’s healthy for one isn’t necessarily healthy for everyone.

That’s something that I do for people. I run food sensitivity lab tests so that people can discover what their body doesn’t like. We then remove it while we help their gut healed, and then we can reintroduce it. Maybe it’s once a week or once a month thing, depending on the degree of intolerance because we want to know this because every time we eat foods that our body doesn’t like, it creates inflammation in the body. When we get into that state of chronic inflammation, that’s when the body can start triggering genes to turn on disease.

Back to myths. There are some that probably most people know but not necessarily everyone. If you go back to the late ’80s, we were all told to eat no fat, low fat. That was based on pure logic, but our body isn’t that simple. The idea was if you don’t want to be fat, don’t eat fat. However, our body needs fat. Our brain is made up of fat and water. It needs good quality fat. When the food industry took the fat out of the food, it tasted like cardboard. Nobody wanted to buy it. What did they add? Sugar.

All of a sudden, we think we’re eating healthy because we’re choosing no fat, low fat as what we’ve been told, “If you don’t want to be fat, don’t eat it.” Now, we’re eating foods loaded with sugar that leaves us hungry two hours later, crashing for energy, so we eat more. We’re taking in way more calories in a day. They started that back then to try and curb the pace at which we were going with heart disease, obesity and Type 2 diabetes. It’s completely backfired because we are in a far worse position now. That’s one.

Another one, start your day with fruit juices. That’s a healthy way to start your day. That’s how I was raised. The reality is, when we take the juice out of the fruit, it’s simply fructose, the natural sugars in the fruit. We’re getting all of that in the juice but we’re not getting any of the fiber by eating the whole piece of fruit. When we have sugars with fiber, good quality fat, and good quality protein, it helps flatten that insulin spike. When we just have the fructose, back up we go. We’re literally drinking teaspoons of sugar.

Some of those juices have added sugar, which is completely unnecessary. Those little juice lunchboxes that we send our kids with to school because we think that’s a healthy drink for them to have in the middle of the day, some of them have nineteen grams of sugar. That’s about five teaspoons of sugar. There’s no way you would spoon-feed your child five teaspoons of sugar and yet they drink it down. That’s another one.

The dairy industry has us all convinced that cow’s milk is the best source of calcium. It’s great marketing. I grew up drinking cow’s milk because that’s what my mom was taught. That’s what she believed. There are many other better sources of calcium through our vegetables and other carbs than cow’s milk. We’re the only mammal on the planet that drinks another mammal’s milk. There are many people who have lactose intolerance. They generally know it. There are also people who have an intolerance to casein, which is the protein in cow’s milk. They don’t do well with dairy. Yet, they don’t know it. That causes all sorts of digestive issues down the road when they continue to drink it, thinking it’s healthy and that’s their best source of calcium.

Those are just three examples off the top of my head. There are quite a few other ones that we’ve been told and people believe because the media does such a good job of getting it out there. It’s marketing from the food industry. Another one is to start your day with healthy cereals on the shelves. Look at all of the boxes, “Fiber-added, vitamin D-added and iron-added,” but when you read the ingredients of what’s in those cereals, they’re loaded with sugar. They’re loaded with chemicals, and there isn’t much nutrition in them. There are many better ways to start our day and feed our kids before they go to school in the morning.

I have a question about keto and going into ketosis. Is that a dangerous thing for people to try? I know there are a lot of people on that keto train.

There are a lot of people on the keto train. There are a lot of people that don’t do it well. They take what they like about it and don’t necessarily do what they don’t like about it. It has its purpose in the short term. For somebody who is recovering from cancer, it can have huge benefits because the cancer cells in our body have fifteen times the sugar receptors of our healthy cells. Starving them of sugar, even sugar from carbs is very helpful. In the long term, it is not a good diet for somebody to be on.

 

That’s why many people will start off. They’ll do well. They’ll lose some weight and then they hit a wall. They stop losing weight and they don’t understand why. They think they have to do it more and longer. It’s because the body doesn’t want to be on this diet for the longer term. What it can do is put the body into a stressed state, which is where we hit a wall, and we start losing weight because, in this stressed state, the body is holding on to weight not losing weight.

I was talking with an individual who is on the keto diet and has been on it for two years. She’s on it because she has an increase of cysts in her ovaries. She’s been told to be on it for that reason. Is that what you’re referring to with cancer, where you have to be on these diets for a short time? She’s still planning on staying on it because it keeps her blood sugar level at a certain baseline and doesn’t spike. Do you still feel even for that, that it’s too long?

I don’t want to go against what some medical doctor might have told her and I don’t know her full medical history. There are other ways that we can be balancing our insulin levels that are not depriving us of entire food groups. Cysts in the ovaries are fairly common. I would want to look at other ways of addressing that besides using one diet.

I’m going to have her reach out to you for sure.

We’ve talked a lot about things that are unhealthy. Karen, you’ve been detoxing. I would love to know how it works and what a typical detox program looks like.

The program that I offer is a 21-day program that most people are needing to do. I have a detox quiz so people can discover their toxic load score. Based on that score, it indicates whether you should do a 7-day, a 14-day or a 21-day. Most people are 21 days because they haven’t detoxed before and because our world is highly toxic. We do it over three weeks in order to allow this program to work within your daily life.

If I tried to ask you to do six days of fasting in a row, you wouldn’t be able to continue going to work and living your life through the week. We spread it out over a three-week period. We start off with two days of fasting with shakes. You’re getting all the minerals and vitamins that you need. There’s protein and also a detox formula in the shake. Your body is getting what it truly needs. In a way, that digestion is quick so that it can get into deep cleaning mode or autophagy.

On days 1 and 2, you have four shakes, 3.5 to 4 hours apart, which gives your body almost 72 hours because you don’t have lunch and you don’t eat into the lunch on the third day of autophagy and deep cleaning mode. The longer we’re in that phase, the longer we get to that place where our human growth hormone is produced and starts regenerating new, young, vibrant cells. We then get to have lunch on day three. It’s the best meal you’ve ever had. I love how when we take away food for a little while, we truly appreciate it much more when we get to eat again. I love seeing those messages, “I can’t wait for lunch,” then a few hours later, “That was the best meal I’ve ever had.”

I do ask people to be mindful about eating that meal. From the recipes, I offer to choose a stew or lentil dish or a soup because it’s easier for the body to digest. We’ve given the digestive system a break for 2.5 days. We don’t want to shock it back into operation by chowing down our food on the run and choosing something that might be a little bit harder to digest. For the rest of the week, days 3 to 7, you start off your morning with a shake. You then have a vegan lunch. You have a shake in the afternoon again, and then you have dinner, which you can add animal protein if you eat animal protein. I provide all the recipes. There’s also a list of foods. If you’re handy in the kitchen, you can make whatever you want from the foods that you’re allowed to eat. It’s all whole plant-based delicious foods, a good mix of protein, good fats and carbohydrates to give you everything that you need nutritionally.

90% of serotonin is made in the gut, and so this is why the gut/brain connection is so powerful. Share on X

The recipes are nutrient-dense, so you tend not to go hungry between meals. Sometimes you are hungry, and then I’ll coach you through what to do about that, as I’ve done with Karen. It’s always to look at, “You’ve finished eating. Are you hungry twenty minutes later? Am I truly physically hungry or is there something else my body needs? Am I thirsty? Do I need a walk? Should I go have a bath? Is it my brain talking to me, but I’m not physically hungry?” This program works well because that first week, people are adjusting. The body is adjusting to the new calorie intake, starting to get those toxins out. People are noticing the body detoxes through the skin, through our urine, and through our bowels.

I had a bad rash on the second day. I was nervous. I texted and said, “What is this rash?” I took a picture on my stomach. I’m like, “Am I doing this wrong?” She said, “No, you’re doing it right.”

It’s called a Herxheimer reaction. It’s the way the body reacts when we start allowing those toxins to come out. We take week one, and then we repeat it again in week two. We repeat it again in week three. What I generally find is I get lots of questions in week one as people are trying to figure it all out. In week two, there are fewer questions because they know what they’re doing. By week three, there are even fewer questions, generally. I do love people asking questions because then they can get their answer, then I know that they’re that much further down the path to success.

When I finish, I told you I’m going out for my wedding anniversary that night. Is that going to be such a shock on my system if I decide to have that drink, have that peppermint ice cream? I’m thinking about it and the more I go through this, I’m like, “I don’t know if I want to do that to my body, but I also want to.”

It’s a celebration. You said there are multiple servings. When you have multiple servings, it’s usually a small amount of each and there’s time in between. You don’t have to eat every single serving. You can have tastes of each one. With that time in between, you’re also giving your body time to digest. What we don’t want to do is what we tend to do with Thanksgiving, for instance, where it’s all on a table and it’s good, and we eat it all. We then go to the couch, we’re like, “I need to unbutton my jeans and unzip my jeans. I’m in pain. I have no energy.” That’s because we’ve bogged our digestive system down to the point where it’s using way more than 30% of your energy in order to process all of this food that you’ve shoved down. That’s why you don’t have any energy for anything else because it’s all gone to digestion.

When you enjoy the meal mindfully and slowly and have time for digestion to happen in between, it’s not going to be the shock to your body that Thanksgiving dinner can be. You may choose not to eat at all. You might want to taste a little bit of everything. It all becomes a choice. You have so much more awareness around your body, what your body likes, how your body wants to eat, that you will be able to make the right choices for you on the day. If you enjoy it on the day and the next day, and you’re not feeling that great? That’s okay too. You enjoyed it on the day. You had fun. You’re not going to do that again for at least a year or maybe 30 years. Don’t beat yourself up.

I have a question for you, Melissa. I am a 50-plus-year-old woman and I’ve gone through menopause. Would you recommend different things for people who have gone through menopause? Are there certain foods that you would say to definitely avoid? What are your thoughts?

Hormones for women are such a complicated issue. There are many factors that are causing hormonal imbalance. This can start as young as 35, as we start to go into menopause, and then post-menopause. There’s also our toxic load. There are many toxins out there called xenoestrogens that mimic our estrogen in the body. They’re coming into the body and the body thinks it’s estrogen. That can put us into a state of estrogen dominance which means we have too much estrogen relative to progesterone. It will put us into chronic stress because, in chronic stress, the body is producing more cortisol in order to allow us to fight or flight or freeze. At that moment, it shuts down digestion because it needs to get the energy from somewhere.

We don’t need to use energy and digestion when we’re trying to get to safety, and it shuts down procreation. It doesn’t need to produce progesterone. It produces more cortisol instead. We get into this state of estrogen dominance. That can then impact our thyroid and cause low thyroid that is a known cause of breast cancer that can increase weight gain. There are many symptoms that come with that, but some people are the other way around. They have low estrogen and perhaps higher progesterone. It’s rarer but it can happen. I run labs for people to see where they’re at because it’s hard to determine by symptoms where somebody’s hormones are at.

 

When we know that, we will use food as well as natural supplements to help bring someone’s hormones back into balance. They don’t have to suffer through symptoms that they may be struggling with like PMS or pain throughout their cycle. Knowing where your hormones are can help you decide what foods you should be eating or shouldn’t be eating. For instance, flax seeds are high in estrogen. Soy is high in estrogen. There are also foods that are higher in progesterone. Understanding where you’re at helps me guide people as to what foods are healthy in relation to hormones. To randomly say that isn’t going to help people if they don’t know where they’re at. Does that make sense?

It makes a lot of sense. Even if you don’t know where you’re at and you haven’t done the test, are there foods that you would avoid? You mentioned soy, flaxseed, and other everyday foods. I don’t eat meat and I don’t eat a ton of soy or tofu because I’m aware that’s not good. What do you do if you don’t eat meat or chicken? Does that come into play at all?

Animal proteins don’t come into play there. All of the foods are labeled healthy foods. They’re whole plant-based foods. There’s not any of them that I would tell people to stop eating unless I knew where their hormones were and I was trying to correct that.

Got it. Thank you. That clears up a lot.

You’re welcome. To add to that too, when our body is highly toxic and our liver is bogged down, we can trigger issues with hormone imbalances because the liver is also charged with getting rid of excess estrogen in the body. Our own body can make excess estrogen. If the liver isn’t functioning well, it can’t do that well. We then get a buildup of estrogen, which we don’t want.

Melissa, a logistics question which is, if somebody doesn’t live near you and you’re working with someone with these functional tests and lab tests that you talked about, how does that work?

My business is 100% virtual. The labs get mailed to your home. You do them in your home. You mail them back to the lab. I get the results. All my sessions are done on Zoom. It’s super COVID-friendly. I like people to be able to do the labs in their homes because that’s their place of comfort. Doing the labs in the home without the stress factor of going to a clinic is going to be giving you truer results of where you’re at. They’re easy to do. There’s a hair clipping one that will test for your minerals and metal toxicity levels.

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There’s a urine sample that tests your gut health and your neurotransmitter function, your vitamin levels, your mitochondrial energy function, and your detox pathway function. The others are all blood tests. That’s the food sensitivity test. There’s a test for testing inflammation levels in the body. The last one is your hormones, which is a saliva test to test your sex hormones and cortisol levels. We test those four times throughout the day because that tells me what’s happening with your cortisol and how that’s impacting your sleep. A blood portion to that gives me all four thyroid markers, your vitamin D levels, and your insulin levels both fasted in 90 days. It’s a great lab to see where people are at and how stress is impacting their bodies.

Is it the same group of tests that you do both at the beginning and the end of the detox period?

The detox is independent. People can choose to do the detox because they’re not feeling great. They want to clean up their diet and get some toxins out to feel better. If people are wanting to work with me one-to-one and do labs, then I always have them start with the detox. They do the labs first though. I send those off because it takes about four weeks for me to get results. Two weeks later, we start the detox. Two weeks after that, I’m reviewing their labs with them to see where they’re at, what their healing protocols are going to be. It gives them time to order those protocols while they finished the last week of the detox.

They then move straight into that healing protocol from the detox with no chance to retox in between. When we do it that way, their pathways are open and clear. Any healing protocol going in can get to the cells that need it. The results are much faster than if we’re putting a healing protocol on top of a toxic load. I liken it to putting trash on top of the garbage can at the park and you drop it on the top of that overflowing garbage bin and where does it go? Plop on the ground outside. That healing protocol isn’t necessarily getting to the cells to the same degree when we’re toxic when we start putting it in.

Tanys, what was your question?

I have a client that has had protein in her urine. Is there something that is creating that in terms of nutrition? Would that be something that’s more complex that you’d want to find more information on?

I probably will want to find out more information on that. My first reaction would be that her body isn’t breaking down the nutrients to the degree that it should and that happens in an unhappy gut. We then can end up in a situation of malabsorption and the micro-minerals, nutrients, vitamins and proteins are not being broken down and getting into the bloodstream. Instead, the body is passing things straight out. That could be a reason for it but there could be other reasons for it as well. I would want to look deeper into that.

Nutrition is one piece of that and then she should be following up with other people.

I want to look at her gut health and see what is going on inside that gut that is triggering that to happen.

How often do you suggest that individuals do the 21, 14, 7-day detox, or whatever is required that they feel? How often should I be doing the 21, for example, once a year or twice a year? What do you suggest?

Our toxins are always coming in and we need to always be getting them out because we can’t avoid them. We can lower our toxic load. I do encourage people to be looking at replacing their personal care products with non-toxic products. Replacing their cleaners in their house for non-toxic products and lowering that load, but we’re never going to avoid them forever. We’re all together. We start with the 21-day detox and then I recommend quarterly seven-day detox on an ongoing basis. If you keep doing that on an ongoing basis, those toxins that are coming in, you’re getting them out. When you get to the seven-day detox, Karen, you’ll be like, “This is easy.”

I know Karen very well. When I got on to Zoom and looked at her, I forgot that she was doing the detox. I said, “You’re glowing. You look amazing.” She’s like, “You’ve got to tell Melissa. I’m doing the detox. It was awesome.”

My son is in town and he even said, “Mom, you’re glowing.” I’m like, “What?” My son even said that.

I said that after I saw you the last time. When we get those toxins out, it allows our skin to heal. It shows on the outside what we’re doing on the inside.

As much as I want to have the celebration dinner, I’m not going to go as crazy as I normally would. I like the idea of having one martini but then I’ll have a little taste of things. I don’t have to eat an entire bowl of peppermint ice cream.

Somebody said this to me once and I thought it was brilliant. You take no more than three bites of something sweet and loaded with sugar and not going to serve your body that well. Enjoy three bites of it, but don’t make those bites big that you’re shoving them into your mouth and you pretty much eat the whole thing in three bites. Eat those three bites as if you’re eating them on television and the whole world is watching you.

 

One last question from me. What would be a healthy average breakfast, lunch and dinner? I know that’s a lot to ask. Are you guys thinking that too? What are some suggestions for that?

I love to recommend people start their day with a smoothie. There are several reasons for that. First of all, you can pack so much goodness into a smoothie because the blender is doing all the work. It’s easy on your digestive system. It doesn’t have to use 30% of your energy. That allows you to start your day with extra energy for cognitive function if you’re trying to get work done or physical energy to get through a workout. You’re not draining your energy right off the bat trying to digest a big, heavy breakfast. Seven to nine cups of fruit and veg in a day is what our body needs to be truly healthy and thrive.

We want to eat the rainbow. As many colors as you can get into those 7 to 9 cups and when you break it down, it’s probably 2 to 3 cups of fruit and then the rest would be veggies. In that smoothie, you can put in many different things. Get a portion of the fruit, colored veggies, and all that nutrient density into your breakfast to start your day. In lunch, you’re going to be adding in lots of veggies. It could be a salad and then you’re going to add some protein. You want to have half a cup to a cup of protein at each meal. In your smoothie, you’re adding a protein powder, a good quality one. You can be adding hemp seeds for your protein into your shake.

Lunch, a bunch of greens, and some protein on top, or maybe it’s a soup that’s full of veggies. I love lentil dishes. Lentils are such a great protein. You can add in lots of veggies with that. It’s easy for the body to digest because they’re cooked down to being almost like mashed potatoes. At dinner, make sure you’re finishing off whatever you haven’t had. Those 7 to 9 cups, you’re going to have at dinner, so probably half your plate is veggies. Another half cup to a cup of protein, depending on your body’s size, your energy output, how much protein you need, and then some good quality fats at each meal. It could be olive oil drizzled over the veggies. It could be half an avocado. It could be some coconut oil in your shake in the morning. That’s how I like to eat.

No snacks?

We’re doing 3.5 to 4 hours apart, so you probably need an afternoon snack in there somewhere between lunch and dinner. That could be veggies or some fruit in there. I love to make pumpkin coconut muffins. That’s usually my afternoon snack. I make them with monk fruit extract rather than processed sugar. It’s 300 times sweeter than sugar, so you don’t need much, but it also doesn’t trigger an insulin spike. It’s a good sugar alternative. It’s packed full of coconut and pumpkin, which is super healthy. Sometimes I’ll throw in a bit of banana.

Sugar is a common problem because it's in everything that we eat, unfortunately. Share on X

Nuts are a great snack for people that can eat nuts. It has a lot of good benefits. I’m not talking peanuts. I’m talking walnuts, almonds, pecans and seeds in there. I do all my baking and I know a lot of you are talking about baking through COVID. Baking at home, you can make some excellent healthy snacks versus store-bought where you’re going to have more processed sugar and more chemicals to add to the shelf life. That’s how I like to eat in my day.

You missed one thing that you taught me, which has been a game-changer for me, hot water with lemon in the morning.

That helps turn on digestion. Having that before a meal helps signal the brain that food is coming. It turns on digestion, turns on our salivary enzymes. All of the enzymes throughout our body are hydrochloric acid in our stomach. When we put the food in, it’s ready to break it down. Many people do struggle with low stomach acid because of high stress. Remember what I said about high stress, the body shuts down digestion because when we’re trying to flee and get to safety, we’re not caring about digestion.

Many people are living in a state of chronic stress, so digestion is turned off when we put food in. That means the body has a hard time breaking down the food and that can be resulting in constipation, diarrhea or people having potentially protein in their urine. It’s not getting into the body and it’s going right through the body and coming out the other side. Using lemon water to help turn on digestion ahead of eating is powerful as well.

Melissa, would you suggest doing the lemon water before the morning shake or after?

I do it before my lunch because I have the shake in the morning and that’s already blended. It’s easier for the body to digest already. I do it before lunch. Sometimes, depending on what I’m having for dinner, I might do it before dinner. Starting your day with it, if that’s the only time that you can do it based on your busy lifestyle, then having it before your shake and getting it in because it also helps balance blood sugar. There are many benefits to it. Before a meal rather than after a meal.

I like it in the morning because it’s the habit of a warm drink. I’ll have that and then a caffeine-free tea and then the shake.

We are dehydrated when we wake up. Start our day with some warm water because the body absorbs warm water better than cold water and getting hydrated after those 7 to 9 hours of sleep and no hydration. The body needs to get hydrated at that time.

Melissa, if people would like to reach out to you for coaching, how can they do that?

My website is simply YourGuidedHealthJourney.com. They can go to my website and in the top corner, it says, “Contact.” They can reach out. There are a couple of questions to fill out as to what’s going on for them. That’s the best way to reach me. I also have my podcast, which is Don’t Wait For Your Wake Up Call!. People can check that out if they want to get to know more about me and my work. They can also email me, [email protected].

Thank you so much for joining us. We’ve learned so much. This has been fantastic. Your Coach Connect sent me a message saying, “What’s for lunch? Send me a photo.” I’m going to go figure out what my lunch is, probably a good big salad with some important colors in there. All the rainbow colors for my lunch. Thank you so much again. We appreciate you joining us. You’re going to help a lot of people. Thank you.

Thank you so much for having me. I enjoyed talking with all of you. Thanks for your time.

—

Welcome to Favorite Things with our guest, Melissa Deally. She is here joining us talking about nutrition, holistic health care for your body, and keeping your gut clean. We’re going to talk about our favorite things. I brought along my new favorite. It’s a store near my house called Aura. I made my own candle. It’s been burning and smelling beautiful this whole episode. I want to read underneath what’s in it, “Olive blossom, honeydew, verbena and vanilla.” I went to this new store and there are over 100 different scents that you can choose from, different essential oils. You add them to the base of the candle. You get to pick your vessel. This is my Goddess candle. It smells good. My husband made one that was more of a manly scent. He put in it Dad’s Den and Fresh Clean Shave. You walk in and it smells like a men’s bathroom as far as I am concerned. He enjoys it. Alyssa, what did you bring for your favorite things?

I brought two things that I’ve been using together. It’s summer. I don’t tan even if I wanted to. I don’t go in the sun anymore because it’s not good for me. I have been using this tinted moisturizer that I like and it’s Laura Mercier, but it’s got sunscreen in it. You know how a lot of times these tinted moisturizers you put on, you feel like you’ve done nothing, but you don’t want to wear some thick or heavy makeup. Tinted moisturizer for me is the most I’ll put on my skin in the summer when it’s hot. I found this product at Bluemercury, one of my favorite stores also in our neighborhood, Karen. It’s called a Brightening Serum. The company is By Terry. A couple of pumps of this into this and you get this glow and you have people say, “You look tan.” I’m not tan at all. I never tan but it’s the thing that’s helping me faking a summer glow.

You do have a glow. Now you have to do the inside glow.

I don’t have that glow from the detox yet. I will.

We can glow both together. Tanys, what did you bring?

This is one of my Amethyst crystals. Amethyst is a great overall healer. It’s also calming and relaxing. That helps your digestion. The more you work with crystals and stuff, the more you’re raising your vibration, so you’re also helping to get that glow.

It’s funny because I put this crystal at the base of my spine. I do that for some of the episodes. I don’t know what it is, but somehow it grounds me. I’ll put it right back. You know what it’s called, I bet.

Aragonite.

Thank you for sharing. Tanys has a beautiful collection of gems. I love to see all of them. Melissa, you’re wearing a stone as well. Before we get to you, we’re going to Michelle. What’s your favorite thing, Michelle?

I’m rethinking it a little bit but it’s RXBARS. I have at least half for breakfast every day. The ingredients are three egg whites, five pecans, four cashews, two dates, and, “No BS,” it says. That’s it. I love them. It gives me that nice chew. I like the way I start my day with that and my cup of green tea.

Melissa, is that a good choice?

I use RXBARS when I go backcountry camping because of the choices out there. It’s a great choice for getting some energy. I love that it tells you exactly what’s in it and that no BS.

Melisa, what did you bring?

It ties in beautifully. I brought something big compared to all of you. I brought my backcountry camping backpack because it’s backcountry camping season. My daughter and I went out for our first hike and camp of this season. It’s something that we’ve started doing together since COVID. When we couldn’t go anywhere else, we started exploring our backyard and hiking up to beautiful lakes, camping and taking everything with us, and being prepared. It’s a wonderful way to leave behind the world, leave behind screens, leave behind stress. Nature is rejuvenating. Get out there and enjoy it.

Try to break the coffee and sugar habit and be amazed at how much new energy you have and how much better you feel as a result. Share on X

Thank you for sharing that. I love the quote behind you, “Health isn’t everything but without it, everything else is nothing.” That is such a beautiful way to go about our day in our life. Thank you so much for sharing your favorite things, everybody. I love to tie it all together. We’re going to light a candle by holding the Amethyst. We’re going to put on our sunscreen and our tinted moisturizer. We’re going to have our little bar and then we’re going to go camping. Don’t you love how that all goes together?

You could even do that while you’re camping.

Thank you again, Melissa, for joining us. We’ve learned so much.

Thank you. It’s my pleasure to be here.

Important Links:

• Your Guided Health Journey
• Don’t Wait For Your Wake Up Call – Podcast of Melissa Deally
• [email protected].
• Aura
• Laura Mercier
• Bluemercury
• By Terry
• RXBARS

About Melissa Deally

Tired of trying to figure out what is going on with your health and not getting answers?

Do you keep getting told nothing is wrong with you or that they don’t know what is wrong with you?

Tired of the only option being offered is a drug that you have to take for the rest of your life?

Well that was me….my migraines had become so frequent, and all my doctor offered was more drugs. I wanted to know WHY my migraines were suddenly more frequent. When I turned to holistic health, I was able to do a lab test that showed my hormones out of balance. When I fixed that, my migraines went away.

When my 6-year-old daughter got tummy aches every day, I was told “all little girls get tummy aches, she’ll grow out of it” except there was no answer as to how long that would take. Again, I turned to functional medicine labs, and learned she was intolerant to gluten and dairy, so we removed those and voila! The tummy aches were gone!

My experiences taught me that there are often answers that traditional medicine doesn’t provide. There are other solutions, and now, as an integrative health practitioner, I can help many people who are struggling and looking for another way.

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