Ep. 6: Your Body Can Heal Itself | Wine & Migraines?

Ep: 6 Your Body Can Heal Itself | Wine & Migraines?

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Maria Mayes: All right, so welcome back to another episode of Chakras and Chardonnay. I am really excited to introduce my guests today. So, Melissa Deley, we met at a, uh, an event for podcasters about a month or so ago. And she's actually had a similar story to mine. She was in the corporate world for 24 years, and then as the story goes, a big fish bought a little fish and she was let go with an hour to clear out her desk and no word of thanks.

So, Definitely a choice point there, and she chose, instead of being a victim to look at it as an opportunity to do something completely different for the second half of her career, and was really just in a space of being open to be guided to whatever was next for her. So she was guided into the health and wellness space, and she is now an integrative health practitioner, a master practitioner in N L P [00:01:00] timeline therapy, and a hypnotherapy teacher and trainer.

And she, uh, loves the work she does and is grateful for getting that kick in the rear eight years ago to step into her purpose work. So she spends a lot of time helping clients get out of fight or flight using meditation, breath work, hypnosis, and other techniques, and has, I love this piece about Melissa is that she walks the walk, she.

Does what she practices, what she preaches, uh, cultivating herself a very healthy self-care ritual and lifestyle so that she can then really show others that as well. So thank you so much for being here, Melissa. I'm so grateful to have you. Thank you for saying yes to, uh, sharing some of your wisdom with our listeners today.

Melissa Deally: It is absolutely my pleasure, Maria, thank you for helping me get this message out to the world. It's so important. It is so important. 

Maria Mayes: So let's just jump right in. What wellbeing tip would you like to serve up [00:02:00] to our listeners today? I. I would love every individual person to know just how empowered they are in their health.

Melissa Deally: Hmm. And that it's not about waiting to get sick and going to a doctor and expecting them to fix you. Which is what many of us have been taught. Just get sick, go to the doctor and they'll fix you. That's putting a lot of responsibility on another human being and it's also giving up all your power. Oh, yeah.

What I have learned in this journey is that our body is designed to self-heal and it talks to us all the time in symptoms, and those symptoms are asking us to do something differently, and when we slow down. And we pay attention, which I know is what your work is all about as well. Maria? Mm-hmm. We can start to understand what our body is asking us or even noticing those symptoms, and then choosing to [00:03:00] take action and we can be empowered in that process.

We just have to slow down and I want people to know that, that when we take proactive action in our health, We don't even have to wait to get sick to go to the doctor. We can just not get sick. And that's what I really love to share with my clients as well as the piece that chronic illness is not a life sentence, which many people are told that it is.

Here's the pill, take this for the rest of your life. Mm-hmm. We can discover the body's imbalances and toxicities, remove the toxicities, support those imbalances, bring the body back into balance, at which point, again, it will heal itself. So my wellbeing tip is for you to really understand that your body can heal itself when you create the environment for it to do so.

And it's not that hard to do [00:04:00] that. I do understand that you may not know how to do that today. I didn't know that eight years ago either. However, you can work with health coaches and practitioners that can guide you through that journey. Mm-hmm. And when you work with someone else, that's the most effective way because you're not guessing anymore.

You're trusting in the process of someone who knows how to do this, how to guide you. They're not doing the work for you, they're not fixing you, they're not healing you. Your body is healing itself under their guidance, and that allows you to relax into the process. And here's another tip. The body doesn't heal in a stressed out state.

Maria Mayes: Don't we know that? Oh my goodness. 

Melissa Deally: So we have to get you out of the stress state in order for your body to start healing. And the other thing that I love to share with people is that your mindset is absolutely critical in this work as well. If you believe you can heal, your body will [00:05:00] heal. If you believe you can't.

It won't. It's as simple as that. So what story are you telling yourself, or what story are you buying into? You can change that story, and all you have to do is find one person, one person that's healed from whatever you have that you're struggling with, and attach yourself to that person that hope, because if they can do it, you can do it too.

Don't worry about all the other thousands of others that you might have been told. Oh, they didn't heal, okay. Mm-hmm. They didn't take action in order to rebalance their body, to allow themselves to heal. 

Maria Mayes: Love it. Oh my God. There's so much amazing wisdom packed in there, Melissa. And it's so in alignment with, uh, the Ayurvedic lifestyle that I teach in mentorship on, on.

And so a couple things that came up to me, for me, as you were. Discussing that is, is, you know, the way I look at it too, through Ayurvedic lens is [00:06:00] all of these cells in our bodies, they all have this supreme intelligence and they have the capacity to heal. We each have our own unique capacity. But as you said, sometimes we need a guide.

And so we see it as kind of a forgetting, if you will. Mm-hmm. Based on all the conditioning of the world, right? Mm-hmm. And then just starting to come back to a remembering of that wisdom that exists within each of us. And so I love, I love that. And you know, you starting out saying, you know, the power that we have, Is so in alignment.

Um, so I know why we are having this conversation today for sure, because it's, you know, something, one of my teachers, Dr. Suhas shared in one of, um, the training sessions he led, is he asked this question, are you outsourcing your health? And I've stolen that from him, and I use it a lot of times with my clients because the thing is, we really are, you know, and, and this isn't to discount.

Our medical system or our doctors, or any of the practitioners or healers out there. [00:07:00] But our most powerful tool for healing, I believe as well, is our own selves. It's the, the wisdom within. Yes. But we just need them help to tap into that. So I love that. Exactly. I love, um, I love the the mindset piece too.

So, um, how, what do you recommend, let's say if someone is in the space of where you were eight years ago and where I was about a decade ago too, just. In that space of, I don't even know where to start. I'm just, you know, I'm not feeling well. I know I'm not as vibrant as I'd like to be. Maybe they have an actual physical manifestation of disease at this point.

What, where should they start? What's, what's a, like, how do we open the door a little bit? 

Melissa Deally: So I would open the door by deciding that you want to get to the root cause of what's going on. That's the first thing that we need to understand is choosing that path rather than the path of masking symptoms. [00:08:00] And when you choose the path of.

Wanting to get to the root cause. Then you're just going to start to look at, okay, who is it that I can work with, right? Who can help me get to that root cause? Is it my local naturopath? Is it perhaps an energy healer that you know, is it going to your local chiropractor? Is it working with someone like me, an integrative health practitioner, where I offer at-home lab testing the labs, get mailed to your home so that we can run those labs and see.

What is going on inside your gut, which of course is the epicenter of your health. Mm-hmm. Do you have bacterial overgrowth, candida overgrowth, mold, fungus? What are your inflammation levels? What are your mineral levels? What are your metal toxicity levels? What are your food sensitivities and what are your hormones doing?

Right? It depends what you have. Going on for you as to whether we need to run the full gamut of labs to get to the bottom of it or your, your symptoms very clearly indicate there's one aspect that's really outta balance that we need to start with. Right. Okay. Because we are the whole being, and I know that [00:09:00] you look at this in ayurvedic medicine as well, we don't just look at one part of us.

Sure. Right. And the body doesn't heal just one part at a time either. Right. But sometimes one system might be really off, and that's really obvious. And so that's where we start. And then we continue from there because remember, your health is a journey throughout your entire life. So when you get started, you, it's a beautiful thing.

You're looking for the root cause. You're understanding that you're, again, the root cause always comes down to your level of toxicities. Mm-hmm. Your level of deficiencies. And then how that's being impacted by stress. And we all have stress in our lives. It's a matter of how much stress do we have in our lives, and how toxic are we?

How deficient are we? And can our body cope with the stress that we're under? Right? So these are the three key factors that, you know, I'm always looking at. Okay? And we bring the body back into balance. You regain your health and then what? Right? Well, you wanna stay on top of it. You don't wanna [00:10:00] get back to where you were, right?

Mm-hmm. And. When we have symptoms showing up in our physical body, They've already moved through the spiritual, the mental, and the emotional bodies. Mm-hmm. So we start healing in the physical body, but then we might be looking at, okay, maybe we need to release the toxins in the mental body, in the emotional body.

In the spiritual body for that lasting healing to truly optimize your health. In your health span. And then some people wanna take it even further and they wanna get into biohacking and then like really reversing their mm-hmm. You know, biological aging versus their chronological aging, which is really fun too.

And I'm actually in a course right now learning more about that and we're looking to be making a hundred, the new 75. Right. For those people who really care about their health and look after their health, that they're going to easily get to a hundred. With the biohacking that we are now, like five to 10 years away from having become the norm, it's all in the labs now.

The science is there and it'll be out [00:11:00] soon. So it's exciting times. We just have to know at the outset that our health is our responsibility, and I think that's the biggest mind shift. 

Maria Mayes: Ah, taking ownership. 

Melissa Deally: Yeah, that I want people to hear and recognize cuz so often we just ignore it until we don't have it.

Maria Mayes: Yeah. I love how you said earlier, how, you know, what you question, what story have you bought into? Yes. And that there, because all the conditioning and the expectations and just the society, right. Our culture, um, certainly tells us we need to outsource our health to. Um, oftentimes a pill, right? How, um, I wanna dive in a little deeper cuz I'm really intrigued on the lab work, uh, piece of it that you do with your clients.

And so a detox, a daily detox is definitely part of my, um mm-hmm. Daily ritual. In fact, it's something that I work with clients on as well. And just with having a conversation this morning about, um, with actually a friend of mine who had recently started to do a [00:12:00] daily ritual of, of detoxing, and she found that it's.

Made her more mindful about mm-hmm. Um, what she's gonna then put in her body because yes, she's like, why am I doing all this work and then I'm gonna go junk it up again? And I'm like, yes, that's it. So, so tell us a little bit more about what you look for as someone's coming in and those initial, um, lab tests that you run for your clients.

Kind of like the baseline that you start with. And then, as you know, obviously you specialize based on what you find out, but I would love for you to explore a little bit more on that for the listeners. 

Melissa Deally: Sure. Well, first of all, I'm just gonna take it one step even before we get to the lab testing, which is detoxing because we do live in a toxic world.

You know, 144,000 manmade chemicals since World War ii, and they are getting into our body, through our airways, our waterways, our food. We're putting them on our skin and through the personal care products. We use, and again, we're not taught or told that any of these products are toxic. And very often they're tested one product at a time and saying it's generally regarded as [00:13:00] safe.

But when you are using, the average woman is putting over 200 toxins on her skin just from her personal care products. Wow. But those 200 are never tested together. And then, On a daily base usage to see if it's really safe and it's not. Just look at the chronic illness we have. Look at all the cancers we have now, but we didn't have a hundred years ago.

There's a reason we have all of this illness and it's coming from that toxic load. So for somebody to work with me, it is an investment in your health. Now it's a worthwhile investment because you get health span out of it, and the average North American is spending 10 years in a nursing home at the end of their life, and that's at a cost.

Right now of $108,000 a year, and by 2030, which isn't that far away, it's expected to be $141,000 a year, and that doesn't even include your medical costs. That is just room and board to be cared for for those last 10 years where you don't even have quality of life. 

Maria Mayes: Yeah. Being cared for is not quality of life, right?

Melissa Deally: Yeah. That is a huge cost. So invest now [00:14:00] and you're really, you're saving and you're getting your health span. So if you're going to invest, I want you to get the results. I want those results to happen quickly for you, and I want them to be noticeable. So the way we do that is we first get the toxins out of your body, cuz that's like sludge inside your body.

I liken it to an overflowing trash can, right? Yeah. If you put a healthy apple on the top of the overflowing trash can. It doesn't go down inside the trash can, it just plops on the ground next to it. Mm-hmm. Along with all the other trash that's plopped on the ground next to it. And that's what happens if we start putting healing protocols into your body right away.

So first we have to pick up that trash can and dump it out. So we do a detox program and it is based on. ayurvedic medicine as well. It's a functional medicine, ayurvedic medicine combination detox that's been North Americanized, because most North Americans aren't going to go to India and check themselves into an ayurvedic clinic and drink disgusting tonics, right?

So we've made it work for the North American market. Okay. And we start there and in just three weeks people start to notice improvement in how they're feeling. Their mental [00:15:00] clarity improves, their sleep improves, their aches and pains go away because their inflammation's gone down. They're feeling better, more energy, et cetera, et cetera.

And hey, there's some weight loss, cuz those toxins weigh something too. Sure. And you're starting to eat a healthier diet, so you're feeling better. Right. Then we run the lab test. Because that is reset for the body. Just getting your liver functioning properly again can start to reset your hormones, right?

So we do the lab testing right after the detox so that we know where you're at now. Okay? And then it takes about four weeks for me to get the results. And what I'm looking for in that lab testing is one of them is your food sensitivities. We test for 190 different foods cuz food sensitivity is not anaphylactic.

Anaphylactic, you know what you ate and you know what triggered it. 99% of the time with food sensitivity, that's when your immune system responds to the food and creates inflammation in your body cuz it's not loving it, but you don't really notice anything right away. It takes 24 to 72 hours for you to notice any kind of symptom.

Which [00:16:00] could be brain fog, it could be a little bit of a rash or eczema, it could be a headache. You know, there's so many different ways that it shows up. And so you don't necessarily connect it back to the food that you ate three day, three days ago, and you don't even remember what you ate three days ago, right?

So it's very hard for you to figure out your food sensitivities. However, your body knows what it's sensitive to, and every time you eat it, it creates inflammation. We don't want to be in a place of chronic inflammation, right? Mm-hmm. So running a, a lab for 190 different foods just boom tells you, and then you know which foods to eat less often.

We remove them for a certain amount of time while we heal the gut, and then it becomes a choice. Now, you know, as you reintroduce it, how that food makes you feel. If it gives you brain fog, well you're not going to eat it two days before you have a really big presentation, but you might eat it Friday night cuz you don't care on the weekend if you have a bit of brain fog.

Right? So then you have the choice, and that's what this is all about, is so empowerment, giving you the choice and yes, the empowerment in your health. [00:17:00] So that's one lab. Another lab shows me what's going on inside your gut. Now we know your gut is the epicenter of all your health. Hippocrates said this over 2000 years ago, that all disease starts in the gut, and the opposite to that is all health starts in the gut.

If your gut is healthy, your immune system is stronger because 70% of your immune system is housed in your gut. And what we're looking for in that lab is bacterial overgrowth, candida overgrowth, mold, fungus, very, very common. And again, Symptoms that are harder to diagnose. Mm. And so you are feeling off, you're going to the doctor, they're running their typical lab work and they're going, there's nothing wrong with you, it's all in your head.

I just had a client experience this. Mm. And after our first session, she said to me, Thank you for listening. You're the first person that's listened to me. She had been going to doctors for two years to find out what was wrong with her. She has three young boys. She had no energy to keep up with them. Oh, wow.

We ran her lab, we did the detox. She started feeling better. We ran that lab. [00:18:00] That lab showed lots of candid overgrowth, lots of bacterial overgrowth and mold, and the doctors hadn't found any of it. So when she got that result, instead of being upset, she's like, oh my God, I'm not crazy. I said no.

Maria Mayes: How validating and empowering is that And, and I exactly.

You know, as someone who's had a chronic health condition myself and having a re diagnosis after 40 years of a prior diagnosis, I completely understand that that piece of when you, when you get a shift, right, and it's just, it, it opens up this whole new world. So what a beautiful thing. You're able to do with your client.

That's amazing. So can can I ask you, um, something came up as you were talking about, and the, it's, everything is so resonant, right? Just crossover left and right because in are Ayurveda course it's not, you are what you eat, but it's, you are what you digest and 

Melissa Deally: Exactly. I like to say you are what you absorb, which is exactly the same thing.

Yes. Yes. 

Maria Mayes: And that sludge we would refer to as ama is a Sanskrit term that would, [00:19:00] uh, translate there. But in the. In doing the, the baseline right. Blood work after. Mm-hmm. Uh, after the, the detox and then doing the food sensitivities and then as they incorporate 'em back in. I'm just curious, do you ever find that when you've gone through the process a little further down the line and they've reset their gut microbiome, Are they able to then introduce some of those foods that maybe they were more Absolutely.

Before? Okay. 

Melissa Deally: Absolutely. Because as your inflammation goes up and your toxic load goes up mm-hmm. Your body becomes more sensitive to foods and it will then you will then have more food sensitivities. Mm-hmm. Right? So as you clean up your gut, as you bring your inflammation levels down, your body can tolerate more.

Those sensitivities just become yet another symptom of your body going, please stop doing what you're doing and do something different. I'm maxed out my trash can is full. Right? And when we empty it, [00:20:00] then yes, in not all foods, but many foods can then, um, be eaten and tolerated easily. And then what happens is, First of all, detoxing to me like you, it's a lifestyle.

So I do the 21 day detox, and then I recommend clients do a seven day detox every quarter. Okay. As their metabolic, um, flexibility increases, they can do a one, uh, once a week fast, and they're getting the detox formula in and fasting, which allows the body to get into deep cleaning state and. The product that we use has a mild detox formula in it that they can drink every day as well.

Right? So that's kind of the degrees of detoxing that we do and. The purpose of that is that the toxins are always coming in, so we wanna always get them back out. And the whole program creates so much more awareness for people in understanding these foods, what their body can handle and not handle. And then over time, if after detoxing, they can handle these foods again, and then later on, three months down the road, they're like, I can't really handle this food anymore.[00:21:00] 

Guess what? That's a clue. Your trash can's filling up, you need to empty again. It's time, right? So then it, they start to have this awareness like, oh, if I'm not e, if I'm eating this and I'm getting that symptom, it means it's time to detox. 

Maria Mayes: I love that. It's a sign with your trash can. It's filling up.

That's such an easy way to look at it. Like just acknowledging, okay. My body's telling me my trash can's full, it's time to empty it for detox. Yes. I think it's such a beautiful thing to look at this through the lens of, it's not if we would live in a world that wasn't as it is today with all the toxins and the pollutants, et cetera, right, and, and just the noise, right?

Mm-hmm. The vibration of the noise. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Um, then we probably wouldn't have to worry about a routine detox, but the reality is, We do. So yes. If we wanna achieve that vibrancy of health, having that as, uh, a lifestyle in a, in a way with a, a professional like you that can guide us through process, [00:22:00] that is awesome.

So I really appreciate you sharing that, and I totally agree with you. I wish it wasn't this way, but it is. And so we have to recognize that it is. 

Melissa Deally: There's a lot of toxins out there. You gotta first recognize we have a problem. Right? Exactly. And, and we're not gonna fix that problem overnight. We can each individually make our own choices in our own home and buy different cleaning products and buy different personal care products and all of those things to lower the amount of toxins that we're getting in.

Mm-hmm. It doesn't stop the toxins in the air, in our water getting in, you know, the aluminum and all the other toxins that are in our tap water, just walking down the street and getting exhaust fumes from cars on you. There's. So much that we can't control. So we control what we control and then what we can't control.

We're like, okay, it's there. I'm not gonna stress about it. I'm just going to choose to detox on a regular basis to help my body get it out, because our liver is trying to do the best job that it can do, but it just needs that little bit of extra help. You know, the flip side is we have. Nutrient depleted soil systems.

[00:23:00] So the liver isn't actually getting the nutrients that it needs in order to properly be able to turn the toxins into being water soluble to get them out of our body. Right? So these are nutrients that people take during the detox so that it helps the liver and the kidneys do what they need to do.

Maria Mayes: Beautiful and so's the process. So beautiful. So I have another question that just came up, a curiosity, and it's a personal one, so, um, My husband likes to tease me saying that it's because I'm too clean. I'm sensitive to some of these things because I'm too clean, because I take such good care of my health and I am very clean with what I put in and on my body and do regular detox.

So have you ever, I, is there some truth to that, that once you've, once you've gotten into the state of, of really. Trying to achieve more purity and vibrancy right within health. And then when you do try to go back to maybe old, [00:24:00] and I'm an 80/20 girl, so nothing is off limits. Um, but sometimes when I dive into that 20%, something that I used to really enjoy, it just takes me down like a freight train.

So is there some, does he have some wisdom there that I should be acknowledging? 

Melissa Deally: I would say no, I'm an 80/20 girl too. Okay. I don't, I don't think you can ever be too clean, but I do teach 80/20 cuz we're all humans. We're not perfect and we need to have, give ourselves some grace and enjoy whatever we want whenever we want.

Okay. What I would say is you just have so much more awareness than you had before and you know what it feels like to feel good. You didn't used to know what it felt like to feel good, so you would eat that stuff and it would make you feel crappy, but you already felt crappy. So that was no difference.

So you didn't notice it. I love that. And that's where most people are at, unfortunately. Wow. Okay. Great, great. Um, great feedback. You get to choose to feel good. Yes, yes. 

Maria Mayes: So great feedback and I'll be sure to tell him he was wrong. And I've got, I've got, uh, someone [00:25:00] else to vouch for me that, that's a lot more about it than me.

So. Beautiful. Beautiful. Well, I, let's just circle back. I just wanna kind of circle back to that one main theme and if you just kind of wanna restate that about the empowerment that is available to our listeners. And then I have a question about another topic for you. 

Melissa Deally: Yes, so I love to teach empowerment health, and the easiest way to teach it is through epigenetics, which is a relatively new science and study.

And what that shows us is that our health outcomes are dictated by only five to 10% of our genes. The other 90 to 95% of our health outcomes comes from the choices we make and the lifestyle we live, which includes what we put into our body, what gets into our body, out of our control, how much sleep we get, how much stress we're under.

And that all triggers inflammation in the body, right? [00:26:00] And if we're in a chronic state of inflammation, that chronic inflammation will then trigger. The switch for the diseases we're predisposed to, to turn on. However, if we don't live in chronic inflammation and we just have healthy levels of inflammation in our body because we are paying attention to what we're putting in, we're detoxing when we can.

We're living the 80/20 rule. Mm-hmm. Those switches never get turned on, and it's really as simple as that. So, The belief that my mother had breast cancer, my grandmother had breast cancer. I'm gonna get breast cancer is bogus. It's absolutely bogus. What you want to do is, my mother had breast cancer, so what can I do to ensure I don't?

And those are the choices you get to make because you don't have to get breast cancer. However, if you believe you will, and you have that running around in the back of your head all day long, in your unconscious mind, guess what [00:27:00] happens? You're asking for it, you actually create it. But instead, when you make different choices and you choose to go down a different path, and you have that mindset that never has to happen and that those switches never get turned on.

Maria Mayes: Hmm. I I just wanna pause there for a second and just let's let that sink in for the listeners. I mean, I felt that viscerally through my body and it reminded me a lot of, one of my teachers, uh, Deepak Chopra, um, Sharing some of the same information. And the way he talked about it was, it's a light switch.

I have the ability to turn on the lights, to turn on the genes that bring health, right? That help me cultivate health or turn off the lights, cultivate, and you know, help facilitate those genes that create disease. So there's so much in our control, and I remember when I. First was doing some coursework and heard that, you know, for me that was so empowering [00:28:00] because my father had Parkinson's early onset, and, and I watched him through that and cared for him through that, um, debilitating, um, disease.

My father-in-law had Parkinson's. And so knowing for my children's sake that this is on both sides, right? But then, and, and what the world will tell you is then well, Good luck, right? You're a goner girl. You're those kids got. Then when I find out 95% of it, 90 to 95% of it is in my control. I can cultivate a lifestyle to where even those 5% of those genes that are fully penetrant, those mutations, right?

That's a big percentage in my favor. So we have, that's huge. So much power. So I'm so grateful, Melissa, that you shared that and brought up that piece because. I know, I'm still feeling just tingly about it because we're a data world, right? Mm-hmm. And so to hear those numbers and to think about, whoa, I [00:29:00] have much more power than I think that's part of my mission here and your mission here, and I'm so grateful that you were, you were able to share that with us today, just so thankful.

So to the listeners, just really take those words that Melissa had to share. Um, and I do wanna ask her for a few more words. We're gonna pivot the conversation a little bit into wine. Now, since this is in chakras and chardonnay, we like to look at, uh, do you enjoy wine? Do you not drink wine? Tell me a little bit about you and wine.

Melissa Deally: So, I used to drink wine in my, uh, early twenties. I would, you know, buy that cheap wine in a bag and drink it and. That started causing me migraines and I would have just a little bit and get a migraine. And so that wasn't very much fun cuz it would ruin my whole evening. Right? Yeah. So then I switched to red wine and um, and I was able to, to drink red wine.

And in fact my husband and I used to enjoy making red wine. We had the, you know, you brew. [00:30:00] Place here where I live and okay, so we would go down and we would choose the grapes and we would set it all up and go down every so often and flush everything through and do what we had to do. And then we'd ball it all up and I'd have great fun making really fun labels for our 30 bottles of wine that we'd bring home and.

After a few more years of that, I again started getting migraines to the point where like, I literally couldn't have two sips and I would just feel that migraine start, right? Mm-hmm. And anybody who's a migraine sufferer knows that as soon as you feel it start, you need to knock it or you're down. You need to catch it in the bud.

Maria Mayes: Yes. Yeah. You gotta catch that early. 

Melissa Deally: And so I actually just stopped drinking wine because it wasn't. Enjoyable for me. I'd just rather not drink anything and go out and have a good time with my friends or whatever than end up with a migraine and having to leave and go home early. Wow. And so I haven't actually ever drunk wine again.

And it's probably been, well my oldest daughter's 25, so at least 25 years, closer to [00:31:00] 30 years at this point. Um, I have had some people tell me, you know, why don't you try the low sulfite wine, et cetera, and. My attitude to that is, is just I don't care enough. Yeah. To decide to try it, and I don't miss it.

I've never missed it, and I don't wanna risk another migraine, so I just don't drink wine anymore. It's choice. 

Maria Mayes: Yeah. No, I think it's beautiful that you shared that because there are a lot of people who their body reacts to either the histamines in the wine or the sulfites, depending on what study you wanna look at on that.

But it. The key piece here is that the wisdom that your body was sharing with you, Hey, this just doesn't feel right to me. And so I love that you honored that and listened to that and are sharing that with, uh, With the audience today too. So, cuz nothing's worth a migraine in my mind personally either. So, um, wow.

Melissa Deally: Any migraine sufferer would agree so. [00:32:00] Right. And, and I have since learned through all of the work that I've done on my health, even when I was in the corporate world, cuz I really did struggle with migraines then too. And I, it was, came down to my hormones as well. Right. So I really resolved them by rebalancing my hormones, interestingly, doing the same hormone test then with my naturopath that I offer people now.

Oh wow. Full circle. Exactly, and so that's been really cool to understand. The root cause of my migraines was really my hormones, but I had other little root causes, like when I get dehydrated or the wine were other triggers, right? And so I would just make sure I didn't get dehydrated and I would avoid the wine.

So those were easy solutions, whereas the hormones, I had to dig a bit deeper and do some lab testing to figure that out. I had no idea, obviously, that my hormones were all outta balance. Sure. Um, but yeah, any migraine sufferer would know that they will do anything to not get those migraines. And for me, that's a lifetime, you know, a lifestyle, drinking wine.

Yeah, exactly. But I, you know, [00:33:00] listen to your podcast several times and love what you share about wine. I literally have no knowledge. Like, I don't know any, I mean, I know there's red and white. And I know there's rose and da, da da da. Mm-hmm. But like, I just enjoy learning from you because now I find that interesting to learn.

Mm-hmm. But it's not something that, you know, I would ever dive into myself. So yeah. It's great to continue you. Yeah. 

Maria Mayes: Well thank you. And I, I really appreciate you sharing that with our listeners too, cuz I think it's really important that, as you know, uh, I make a choice to now mindfully consume wine and it's much, much less wine than I used to consume.

And there's weeks and sometimes even months where I don't consume any wine. And so, Really, again, coming back to that whole theme of this episode, which is all about empowerment. Such an empowering choice that you took for your health to step away from something that was triggering migraines. I mean, that's a huge nut, um, that we're offering the audience too.

So thank you so much, Melissa. I'd love for you to share how everybody can get ahold of you. I will have all your contact information in the show [00:34:00] notes, but please, I think there's gonna be a lot of folks listening that are thinking, Hmm, how can I work with her? 

Melissa Deally: Well, thank you so much. The easiest way to get hold of me is literally going to my website, your guided health journey.com.

And there is a contact button and a book button at on the top right. And you're welcome to book in for a, um, half an hour complimentary consult with me. If you are struggling with health issues and you think that I might be somebody that can help you get to the root cause of them and guide you on your healing journey, you can just go ahead and book in.

Or if you just wanna have a chat first or a conversation by email, you can. Can just use the contact button and uh, we can communicate that way. So completely up to you. I am on LinkedIn as Melissa Deley. I'm on Facebook as Melissa Deley. I'm on YouTube as Guided Health Journey, and I'm on Instagram as Guided Health Journey.

Maria Mayes: Beautiful. Thank you so much, Melissa. Thank you to our listeners and, um, just really grateful to have shared this time with you. Thanks again. 

Melissa Deally: Thanks for having me, [00:35:00] Maria. Mm-hmm.