[00:00]
Migraines themselves are genetic. There's 1 to 128 genes, lucky, that give migraine.
[00:08]
And so people really can experience a migraine is an experience that involves a lot more
[00:13]
than head pain. It can involve nausea, vomiting, trembling sensation, half paralysis of the
[00:19]
body. It can involve heavy constipation. It can involve speech difficulties, cognitive
[00:27]
impairment, complete loss of eyesight. And it can take anywhere between three to four
[00:34]
hours to a couple of days. It can also start one day and never finish. And the thing is
[00:39]
the person looks perfectly healthy. It doesn't look disabled. However, the world around that
[00:45]
person is unfit to help them live a normal life.
[00:53]
Hey there, I'm Stephanie Shaw and this is Hello, Hot Flash, the podcast where midlife women can
[00:58]
learn from guest experts and authors who discuss menopause and all that comes with this new
[01:02]
chapter in our lives. Hello, Hot Flash, where we learn to control the change and not let the
[01:07]
change control us.
[01:16]
Have you ever looked in the mirror and thought, when did my body stop listening to me? The
[01:21]
weight won't move, the low energy, the belly fat that shows up out of nowhere, and everyone
[01:26]
just keeps saying, try harder. But here's the truth. It's not your fault. It's not my fault.
[01:30]
It's not our fault. Our bodies change in midlife and the programs built for those 20 year olds
[01:36]
were never going to work for us. That's why I want to introduce you to Reverse Health. It's an
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app created specifically for women over 40. Real women, real schedules, real hormones. You get
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is a game changer. If you're tired of feeling stuck, try Reverse Health and feel the difference from
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day one. Visit the link in the show notes to learn more about Reverse Health, because your midlife
[02:20]
body deserves a program designed for you. Again, the link is in the show notes.
[02:30]
Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Hello, Hot Flash, where we help you control the
[02:36]
midlife change. I'm excited today to talk to Diane Dukarm. Diane, thank you so much for being a guest
[02:43]
with us today. Thank you so much, Stephanie, for having me. Yes, Diane is the host of Migraine
[02:48]
Heroes podcast and the founder of Migraine Heroes app. She blends traditional Chinese medicine,
[02:55]
Western science, you know, I love the two, I love that combination, and technology to transform the
[03:01]
lives of those who suffer in silence. She's a Harvard Business School grad and neuroscience
[03:07]
enthusiast. Diane is on a mission to bring lasting relief to a million people navigating
[03:13]
migraines. Again, I'm really, really happy to have you here. I had migraines throughout my entire
[03:20]
perimenopausal experience, and I didn't understand that relationship between the two. So I know we're
[03:25]
going to talk about it. We'll get into some more details about perimenopausal, and I'm going to
[03:30]
get into some more details about perimenopause versus menopause migraines, but thank you and
[03:35]
welcome. Thank you so much. Yeah, I know part of this journey came about because of an experience
[03:41]
that your sister had with migraines. Talk to us a little bit about that. Yes, so my sister suffered
[03:48]
from migraines for a couple of years, and she had gone to doctors to do MRIs and CT scans, and
[03:55]
there was nothing, but she was in pain a lot. And at the time she shared it with me, it was a really
[04:01]
special time because I have a really large actually Christian family, and my uncle died from
[04:08]
my godfather from a brain tumor, and he had four children, and so it was quite traumatizing. And so
[04:14]
when she shared that news, it was in that context and super anxious that what she was was so much
[04:20]
more. And so I took that very seriously, and I said to her, look, I do think you have something.
[04:26]
I don't think it's that. I hope it's not, but I don't think so because he never complained
[04:31]
necessarily about that. Why don't we talk? I know someone who can help. And that someone had helped
[04:37]
me a couple of years prior was phenomenal, and she was helping people just by adding foods, and I
[04:43]
loved that about her. She was based in Asia, and she had the wisdom of generations after generations,
[04:49]
and together we solved this. And it took three months, and I thought it was normal, and there was
[04:54]
nothing special about what just happened until much later, until much later. My neighbor
[05:01]
and friends told me, oh, I have migraines. I've suffered from them for the last seven years. I said,
[05:06]
I'm so sorry. I had no idea. She said, I don't like to mention them. Otherwise, people come with
[05:11]
all sorts of solutions. But my father is telling me to medicate for a lifetime and have injections
[05:17]
in my brain. And I thought, whoa, that sounds, wow. I mean, really? I said to her, look, I know
[05:25]
someone maybe who can help me between her and I. Let me text you a couple of things in between work
[05:29]
and see if we can do something. And just give me six months, okay? Because it sounds very,
[05:35]
I have a lot of empathy for your pain, but injections for a lifetime sounds not very safe.
[05:43]
And so we helped her together, and it took four months. And I thought, huh, why did your father
[05:50]
tell you to do that? And she said to me the strangest thing. She said, my father is a
[05:55]
renowned neurologist. And I thought, oh, that doesn't make sense. Why would her father not tell
[06:01]
her what to do? And so I went online and I discovered this entire world of people suffering
[06:09]
for years, having their life completely taken away from them, having these debilitating migraines
[06:17]
that would steal days with their children, work, their relationship. They'd lose everything over
[06:25]
migraines. And they would discuss online with communities where they would feel a bit safer
[06:30]
than in the large world, still being targeted by all sorts of advertising. And I don't know,
[06:36]
I fell in compassionate love. I thought, wow, this is so unfair. This is just so unfair.
[06:42]
Yeah. Oh, those are both very, very powerful stories. I know several people who suffer from
[06:48]
migraines. One's a friend's daughter who's suffering from migraines. And when this came
[06:53]
up as an opportunity for me to sit down and talk with you, I thought about her and I thought,
[06:58]
this would be great to get some information to help folks. So thank you. Thank you for sharing.
[07:04]
So sometimes people will have a headache and they say they have a migraine, or they will have an
[07:10]
aura and they say they have a headache. How do you distinguish between if you have a headache,
[07:15]
if it's a migraine, if it's aura, or if it's something else?
[07:20]
It's a great question. Migraines themselves are genetic. There's 1 to 128 genes,
[07:25]
luckily, that give migraine. And so people really can experience a migraine is an experience that
[07:31]
involves a lot more than head pain. It can involve nausea, vomiting, trembling sensation,
[07:37]
half paralysis of the body. It can involve heavy constipation. It can involve
[07:44]
speech difficulties, cognitive impairment, complete loss of eyesight. And it can take anywhere
[07:51]
between three to four hours to a couple of days. It can also start one day and never finish.
[07:57]
And the thing is, the person looks perfectly healthy. It doesn't look disabled. However,
[08:03]
the world around that person is unfit to help them live a normal life. And so migraine is defined by
[08:11]
its debilitating nature. However, what I've noticed, because it's genetic, it's 5% of boys
[08:16]
and girls, the incidence is going to triple to quadruple for women at puberty. And that's the
[08:22]
stats. But then talking with experts that have a lot of data, it turns out that it doubles again
[08:29]
at perimenopause. Once you start to include dizziness, vertigo, Meniere's disease,
[08:36]
fogginess, when you start to include all of that low grade disabling brain sort of symptoms,
[08:45]
it's almost one in two women, sometimes even more depending on the stats you look at.
[08:50]
And so that becomes a really blurred line between what's a headache and what's a migraine.
[08:54]
And you can have people who live sort of a life of a couple of sporadic headaches in their lifetime.
[09:01]
And then at perimenopause, it massively hits them. And then they start to have that constant
[09:06]
dizziness, constant aura, and unable to work. And that completely redefines how they see themselves
[09:15]
and put them in a state of a lot of disarray. And it's just really, really sad. Yeah, really.
[09:21]
I didn't recognize that a migraine was genetic. So that was very, very interesting to me.
[09:30]
Can you talk a little bit more about that?
[09:32]
Yeah, so they tend to run in families. So they could observe if you take the Eastern
[09:37]
Medicine version, the Eastern Medicine could see because they were doctors from,
[09:41]
you know, father to son or father to daughter over time, they could see that they were running
[09:47]
in families. Not everyone would get them, but they would have a tendency to concentrate in families.
[09:52]
In the West, fast forward, we managed to really identify genes loci that are responsible
[09:58]
for migraine disease. Now both start to converge in one direction is that migraine itself is not
[10:06]
the fire. It's a fire alarm. And so the East, because it's been observing the phenomenon for
[10:14]
much longer, says there's no point in hammering the alarm box. If your house goes on fire,
[10:22]
don't go on the ladder to go and hammer the alarm box. No, no, no, no. Use your senses. Use your
[10:27]
smell. Use your eyes. Where is the fire coming from? Is it from the kitchen? Is it from the
[10:31]
curtains? Is it a candle? And go and distinguish that. Western medicine is encouraging people to
[10:40]
hammer the alarm box. However, when you look at some of the latest articles, for example,
[10:46]
from Dr. Elizabeth Loader from Harvard Medical School, she says, well, it seems that migraine
[10:51]
is more like a fire alarm. And if you think of it very logically, and what I really want
[10:57]
your listeners to take away is how logical their body is. How could a fifth of migraine
[11:03]
have a genetic predisposition? A fifth of women have a genetic predisposition for migraine.
[11:08]
How does that work? So a fifth of women are created cuckoo? No, that doesn't make sense.
[11:15]
Who would buy into that? But when you hear piecemeal information, once you start to put
[11:21]
it all together, like it's a genetic, it's one in five women during perimenopause, it's a lot
[11:25]
more significant, almost half, are we just created that way? For what purpose? Of course not. We're
[11:31]
taking care of our families, etc. So we have more senses, we have more intuition, we can predict the
[11:37]
weather when it's going to be bad, and we can see food is actually very poisonous. And we could see
[11:41]
we shouldn't intoxicate our bodies. And we can see that stress, relentless stress is not so useful.
[11:45]
So once you start to see it as a fire alarm to guide your family in decision making,
[11:50]
then you start to see that your brain is actually logic, even though with the cycles and the
[11:57]
premenstruation, you know, cyclicality of things, it can be incredibly hard to read. And so it's in
[12:03]
those moments that sometimes you lose faith in your own body, but you can have it. It sounds
[12:08]
like it's when you're comparing the Western and Eastern medicine, Eastern medicine is doing what
[12:13]
it always does and does so well, it gets to the root cause. Like you said, instead of like going
[12:18]
on top of the roof to find that alarm or where the fire is, that is it the candle? Is it the
[12:23]
curtain? Is it in the kitchen, you're going and pinpointing exactly where it's at, and then taking
[12:28]
care of that core problem that's going on. Absolutely. Because now let's imagine that
[12:33]
woman at the top of her ladder with her hammer. Yeah, she tries to learn, you know, it's not going
[12:38]
to work really well, the alarm is going to is going to ring again, but the smoke is going to be more
[12:43]
and the fire is going to spread. So over time, she's going to think, wow, and I have the sound
[12:48]
and I have now my house is on fire. Like what's happening to me? Why me? And those two things are
[12:53]
interconnected. And sometimes she's going to know, but she will be gaslit a lot by her doctors. Like
[12:59]
if she starts to make connections, also because she has a cycle and a cycle evolving, some of
[13:04]
her triggers will not always be there. So she might say, wine is a trigger. But then she's like,
[13:10]
well, the other day I had a glass of wine and it didn't trigger me. So is it or is it not?
[13:14]
Usually I have them during menstruation or before menstruation, but the other day it was day four
[13:20]
of my cycle. So is it there or is it not there? And so she feels intuitively she has patterns,
[13:26]
but when she puts the data together and she goes to the doctor, it's not so clear on paper,
[13:32]
but it's somewhat clear in her mind. And so she starts to really doubt herself and starts to
[13:38]
isolate herself. And people try to give her advice that are not very useful. And so she
[13:44]
starts to close herself, which becomes really isolating, difficult. And she starts to be
[13:50]
sad and she starts to be anxious because it's so much pain. Sometimes it's comparable to labour
[13:56]
pain. It's so much pain that if you know every day the pain is going to hit at 8am when you wake up
[14:02]
or at 8pm when you go to bed or at 4am, usually it's going to you're going to wake up with pain.
[14:09]
You're really scared to go to bed now. Yeah, yeah, that's that's yeah, it's a it's hard.
[14:15]
It's hard to even think about that and what women go through. You we talked about or I mentioned
[14:20]
briefly that it's different in perimenopause than in menopause. Is that explain that to us?
[14:27]
Why the difference? And is there something different that we need to be doing during those
[14:31]
times? Yes, absolutely. So if you go back to Western science and Western science, we're really
[14:36]
good with data. And so we analyse and we're like, wow, it's 5% of boys and girls. Of course, it's
[14:41]
genetic. However, there's this weird thing happening at puberty. It's it triples to quadruples. Now
[14:47]
we're at 18% of women. So once you start to introduce the cycle, you change the migraine
[14:53]
patterns. Once that cycle starts to fade, you change them again. And once you're out of your cycle,
[15:01]
it changes again. And it really does make sense when you look at the macro data. It makes sense
[15:07]
when you live it through your body. It may feel like a storm. It may feel like a ghost,
[15:14]
you know, really on your shoulder that is just constantly or like a small, small little devil
[15:20]
on the back of your shoulder, like constantly sort of about to attack you. It's really, really
[15:24]
daunting because it sometimes really comes out of nowhere. And so it's harder to see
[15:30]
in details. And so in perimenopause, we have our beautiful life-creating force that starts to pass
[15:40]
it on to the next generation. And we let go of these beautiful abilities. And so when we do that,
[15:48]
we have two systems, according to the East, that starts to retire. We have the liver system and the
[15:54]
kidney system, and they both hand in hand go down. Now in my liver system, you can hear from
[16:00]
my mother tongue, my mother tongue is French, from my accent. But then I went on to learn seven
[16:05]
languages. And it's almost I speak two. I speak West and then I speak Mandarin. And in Mandarin,
[16:10]
when you see gan, which is liver, you don't mean the piece of flesh just below your rib cage.
[16:15]
It's not what it means. It means your liver and your gallbladder and all of your female hormones
[16:21]
and all of your mood hormones and a lot of your brain, your temple across your eyebrows, your eyes,
[16:27]
the top of your head. It means your eyes and vision. It means irrigation of your tendons,
[16:31]
your breasts, your uterus. And so the ability to produce these hormones. So when you go in
[16:37]
perimenopause, the system fundamentally changes. It changes because it's going to, well, it's
[16:43]
power to detox, it's power to produce female hormones and mood hormones is going to change.
[16:48]
And so therefore, it's going to alter also how the brain wires back to it. And so in that moment,
[16:55]
we're going to be a lot more vulnerable to these changes unless there's a lot of harmony inside of
[17:00]
the system. The kidney system is linked to the kidney, the bladder, the adrenals, ovulation,
[17:07]
hair, stress, resilience to stress, resilience to really large diseases, sense of hearing,
[17:12]
sense of smell. And so this kidney system is also going, as it stops ovulating,
[17:17]
is also starting to retire slowly. So the process is going to take quite a couple of years.
[17:22]
And so in those transitions, women will feel their hormones fluctuate more and their migraines
[17:28]
fluctuate more. Yeah. If you hammer the alarm box with medication, you do, you take a painkiller
[17:37]
that is going to intoxicate your liver. And the more you're going to intoxicate your liver,
[17:43]
which is proven in Western science, the more you're going to have migraines.
[17:48]
And so that becomes really difficult because the woman is going to have had in the past
[17:54]
some form of medications that used to work and they're no longer going to work. So she's going
[17:59]
to need to go higher in the dosage and tinker with medication. She might be put on all sorts
[18:05]
of different medications as a whole, almost like a hit and miss. And sometimes he's going to find
[18:10]
something that works for a couple of months or a couple of years, and then it stops working.
[18:15]
And so she's on a quest to intoxicate, I mean, to medicate her body. And at the same time,
[18:23]
she feels it's not right. She knows intuitively that there's got to be something else. There's
[18:28]
got to be an explanation for this. Why am I like this? Why me? Why, why, why every day?
[18:35]
And she started feeling more and more isolated from society. It's incredibly, incredibly difficult.
[18:42]
So it's like the liver takes on the medicine and then after a while, it just doesn't work anymore.
[18:50]
It gets used to it, basically. So you have to add more on and more.
[18:54]
Yes. And as you add more on, then your liver, who should be doing all of these beautiful things and
[19:01]
go in sort of peaceful retirement or, you know, change its function, go back to childhood in many
[19:07]
ways, is just suffocating, you know, on a really, really large load of work. So it was having a
[19:15]
difficulty to cope with the full workload. That's called in the East, it's called the liver cheese
[19:21]
stagnation when the liver receives a to-do list of 20 things to do every day. And these things,
[19:29]
these to-do lists are going to change. Some days, estrogen, some days, elage, some days,
[19:32]
progesterone. So they're going to change. And so if the liver doesn't have enough energy,
[19:36]
it's going to start to prioritize. And when it prioritizes, it's going to leave a few things
[19:43]
behind, usually a bit of toxins. But when we add medication to it, the toxin backlog starts to
[19:50]
increase and that starts to create a chronic level of inflammation between the liver and the brain
[19:55]
through the vagus nerve. And so that we realize really, really starts to create a lot of disruption
[20:02]
inside of the body because it can then lead to sort of chronic inflammation and chronic constipation,
[20:07]
for example, in the large intestine, because all of these systems are interconnected.
[20:13]
So the more I, first of all, I get so fascinated. I like geek out about this stuff. When,
[20:18]
when I interview people, I'm like, this is so fascinating. I wish I would have known earlier,
[20:23]
but what I've been, and I was telling you earlier that I've had like a lot of interviews
[20:27]
packed in together. I've keep hearing the liver, the liver, the liver, the liver. We're talking
[20:32]
about totally different things. Like all the interviews are totally different, but it keeps
[20:36]
coming back to the liver. And I didn't make that connection for with a migraine and the liver as
[20:43]
well. It's such an important organ. How should we be caring for it? I'm sorry, go ahead.
[20:50]
Yeah, absolutely. So a few interesting facts about the liver, the liver is the largest organ
[20:55]
of the body. And in perimenopause, according to the West, it can shrink and lose up to 44%
[21:02]
of its volume. So it almost shrinks by half in size. And so its functions decrease. Now, the
[21:11]
liver, I love the more Eastern way about the liver. The liver looks at, the East looks at the
[21:18]
liver a bit like a football team player. They're like, well, you can have the best football team
[21:22]
player. If you put him alone, he can't end score and defend and pass. It doesn't work. You need the
[21:27]
rest of the team to do the work. If you cut the liver out of the system, the liver doesn't do
[21:32]
anything. It's just a piece of flesh. But if you have the liver inside, inside its team, then it
[21:39]
can do its wonders. And so I find that in the West, we have this idea of detoxifying, always
[21:44]
detoxing, detoxing, detoxing the liver. The liver is a lot more than a toxin powerhouse.
[21:49]
And so while it can be useful, detoxing the liver also cools everything down. The liver operates at
[21:55]
40 degrees Celsius, so a couple of degrees more than the rest of the body. And so it needs that
[22:01]
warmth. And so if I detox it really harshly, I cool it down, but then I cool down my entire
[22:07]
rest of my digestive system. So I'm not fixing it in any shape or form. So I have to stimulate it
[22:14]
instead of harshly detoxing it. Yeah, does that make sense?
[22:18]
It makes perfect sense to me. And I'm like, oh, like all these things are popping in my
[22:23]
mind as you're talking. Talk to me about what that stimulates, because in all honesty,
[22:27]
I'm on a detox for my liver right now. Very good. Very good.
[22:32]
I am because I'm a lot more sensitive to foods that I'm not normally sensitive to.
[22:38]
I've had some tooth issues, some nail issues. And I'm like, as I'm looking and reading,
[22:43]
I'm like, oh, liver, liver, like everything is coming back like there's a block. But in my mind,
[22:48]
I need to detox. But you're saying I need to stimulate. So tell me what that is.
[22:54]
Very, very different. Yes. So stimulating versus detoxing. So in order to be stimulated,
[23:03]
the liver system has two functions. One is mechanical stimulation, and the other one is
[23:13]
a liquid stimulation. The mechanical stimulation comes from the diaphragm that massages the liver
[23:18]
when you breathe. So if you think you have a heartbeat, you also have a liver beat.
[23:26]
And that liver beat is your breathing. And that's why there's so much emphasis on breathing,
[23:30]
is also because it allows you to massage your liver system. The second mechanism to stimulate
[23:40]
it is the blood. So each time now I'm talking about your body, then I'll talk about what you
[23:44]
can do. OK, this is the body, how he does it. Yeah. So the blood is going to go inside of the
[23:51]
liver when it goes into detox mode or digestion mode and then come back out in the body. So when
[23:57]
I sleep, I go in deep sleep. My basal temperature decreases and my liver and my brain are detoxing
[24:03]
at the same time. If my liver has too much toxicity or it's overloaded, I'm going to have
[24:09]
a tendency to wake up between the hours of 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. Yeah. And so that's how I will typically
[24:15]
know. And and so that that blood goes in and out, in and out a bit like a sponge. So the liver is
[24:23]
stimulated like a sponge all the time and is in function a little bit like the heart.
[24:30]
Now, if I want to stimulate it, I want to have it move. If I detox it, I change its chemical
[24:36]
composition. But that doesn't really, really help because most, let's face it, most of the women
[24:42]
with migraines, including you, you're healthy. It's not like you're running on an alcohol regime
[24:47]
with like so much recreational drugs, a ton of medication and, you know, fish and chips for
[24:54]
breakfast, lunch and dinner. Right. So how much is it intoxication versus how much is it that
[24:59]
the liver becomes what is called sluggish. And so to stimulate it, there's a number of foods
[25:04]
inside of the world that can give us that stimulation. For example, one I really like
[25:10]
is goji berries. Goji berries allow to stimulate and detox the liver. Same for chamomile. Now,
[25:15]
I love to combine both in particular. You said chamomile? Yes, exactly. Chamomile together with
[25:22]
goji berries. If you have those, I'd say a few caveats about those. Please not during your
[25:27]
menstruation. That would make you bleed more. If you stimulate the liver while you menstruate,
[25:32]
you menstruate more. We don't want to do that. So just like chamomile and goji berries infusion
[25:38]
can help to just stimulate it gently. The chamomile is quite cold in nature,
[25:43]
but the goji berry is neutral to warming. And so the beverage is going to be quite perfect. And so
[25:49]
this is something that people can have very safely. Do not do it when you have your menstruation,
[25:55]
when you're sick, when you have a cold, a flu, because when you take a potent food, when you're
[26:00]
sick, you empower the body. You also empower all of the viruses and bacteria in your body. So you
[26:06]
don't want to do that at that time. And if you have IBS, you will see that maybe this is a bit,
[26:14]
it makes you bloated. If it makes you bloated, don't have it. Basically always listen to your
[26:18]
body. It just means that the fructan that is inside of the chamomile and goji berries is just
[26:24]
not tolerated really well, not processed right now by your body. Let it go. Yeah. Yeah. Oh,
[26:30]
good stuff. Yeah. Really, really, really good. And even I was thinking about, I did breath work
[26:37]
for a while and stopped. But when you're thinking about like the diaphragm massage, that's all part
[26:44]
of breath work. Absolutely. I need to start that back again too. And why it's so important is
[26:51]
because there's interdependence between systems. And so at Migrant Heroes, like we put so much
[26:58]
emphasis on sort of who started the fight, who, who, who, who got naughty in the first place,
[27:03]
what happened and then started to have a ripple effect on the other system. And then that's how
[27:11]
sometimes from the liver system, you can go into other systems such as the kidney system or even
[27:15]
the stomach spleen, because if the liver has excess toxins, it's going to try to, to put in
[27:21]
a few places. It might try to put in the breast and you have sore breast, or it might try to put
[27:28]
it in the lymphatic system, doesn't love it, but you know, or on the ovaries or flush it through
[27:33]
the kidney system, in which case you're going to start to wake up at night and urinate. And so
[27:40]
your brain will pick up, your brain will pick up all of these nuances. And that's what's gonna,
[27:48]
that's, these are some of the root causes that can come, the fire that can come initially very
[27:53]
slowly, but then strong, more strong. And so if instead of taking care of your liver, you hammer
[27:59]
it with medication, so don't get me wrong, it's really important to go to your doctor and get a
[28:05]
confirmed diagnosis. It's important to do the MRI. It's important to do all of that homework.
[28:09]
However, if you've seen doctor for 10, 20, 30 years, and the only answer is try this other
[28:15]
medication, and that you feel, hey, this hasn't been really working for me, then you have to
[28:20]
pause and reflect. And it's really important to pause and reflect. Because by adding more toxicity
[28:26]
to the liver, we make that beautiful system a lot more complex and a lot more struggling,
[28:33]
you know, than it should be. Yeah.
[28:36]
So what, besides, let's talk about some migraine triggers and how to overcome those as well. So
[28:41]
we're doing what we need to do, we're, you know, getting our liver healthy, we're using the app,
[28:48]
all the good stuff. But sometimes there's still things that can trigger migraines.
[28:52]
What are some of those? And how can we avoid some of those triggers?
[28:55]
Yeah. So over our time at Migraine Heroes, we've discovered people have fast and slow triggers.
[29:02]
Fast triggers are things that you're going to have, and you instantly know it. It was that
[29:07]
glass of wine, that piece of cheese, that piece of chocolate. It was, you know, something that
[29:13]
you did and just instantly, bam, it just comes. And sometimes it can be screen time, sometimes
[29:17]
it can be stress, sometimes it can be weather change. But then there are these slow triggers
[29:24]
that are a lot more pernicious because they just make something weaker, but you don't get
[29:29]
a migraine in the moment. I'll give you an example because it's a food that is highly recommended,
[29:34]
both in perimenopause and for migraine, is for example, ginger. If you have a tendency to be
[29:40]
constipated, to have evening migraines, to have migraines after your menstruation, then ginger
[29:46]
is going to be really warm in nature and consume some of the elements that allow to hydrate your
[29:52]
bowel movement and your brain. And so over time, it's going to start to give you more and more
[29:58]
dizziness, vertigo, aura, and aggravates the migraine. It's not that it's going to be
[30:06]
sudden, and so therefore you might not correlate the ginger together with these symptoms,
[30:12]
but the ginger is a slow trigger, for example. So surprising because ginger is so good for you
[30:18]
so many other ways. Absolutely, absolutely. The thing is, a lot of the studies that are done on
[30:25]
men, they're done on people, you know, 30 to 50, etc. Ginger is really warming in nature. And
[30:32]
as we age, we start to deplete a reserve that is called the yin in the east. And the yin is the
[30:39]
moisture. Think of the liquids, the collagen, the liquids of the good parts of the brain,
[30:46]
the menstruation. And so as we age, we lose some of that. And that's the cooling agent that allows
[30:54]
for your body to stay at a certain temperature, that allows you not to have night sweats at night.
[30:59]
If you start to have less yin, you dry, and your bowel movement and your brain starts to be a bit
[31:04]
more dry, you start to be more constipated, you start to have more wrinkles, etc. The warming
[31:10]
food, like spicy foods, for example, as well, will trigger migraines because they consume this yin in
[31:16]
order to be digested. So it's going to aggravate something that is a bit weak, and it's going to
[31:21]
give sort of a, yeah, a low grade, yeah, headache, dizziness, vertigo. And so it's quite, so the food
[31:30]
in the West, we look at the food, and we look at its nutrients, and we look at it in absolute terms.
[31:35]
We say like ginger is, and milk is, and, you know, goji is. However, there's nuances, like how it
[31:43]
interacts with its environment is very different. So a piece of ginger on a man who is in his 30s
[31:51]
is absolutely an anti-inflammatory, absolutely, of course. But on a woman who's in perimenopause,
[31:57]
it's going to need to be accompanied by other things to make it nice, yeah? Otherwise, it's too
[32:03]
warming. That's what I was going to ask. So you want more of a cooling food? Exactly, a cooling
[32:09]
agent with it. So there's this really classic ginger, lemon, honey, when people are sick. And so
[32:14]
that's going to play that beautiful role of anti-inflammatory while having the honey allowed
[32:20]
to moisten the bowel movement and allow for the viruses, et cetera, to come out. So that's a
[32:25]
beautiful mix. If you really want to have ginger, then have it, yeah, with chamomile, why not?
[32:31]
To cool down, to counterbalance the effect of the ginger. It's really, really important. Sometimes
[32:37]
people can have a habit of, you know, having, I don't know, a ginger, turmeric, lemon every single
[32:44]
day. And that's very, very warming, very warming. And so we have, for every door you push, you pull.
[32:53]
Forces are two ways. And so it's all about finding that balance.
[33:00]
So with the app, is that part of what it teaches women how to do? Like, you know, how to make sure
[33:07]
that they're eating more cooling versus warmer foods? How to make sure that their yin is proper
[33:13]
and that their lips nourish? Yes. So what we started with is by doing an assessment. We have
[33:20]
a migraine assessment on migraineheroes.com slash assessment. And then there, there's about 70
[33:26]
questions that we try to find what's the root cause. I mean, we don't try. We've done this
[33:30]
since 2019. We find what are the different root causes and the domino effects that happen inside
[33:36]
of the body. And that allows us to have a full picture on all of the things that have been
[33:41]
damaged and need improvement in fixing. And then inside the app, we just add foods. We don't remove
[33:48]
it. We just add, then we add to repair. Sometimes it can be delivered, but there's a myriad of
[33:57]
different things that can go slightly off inside the body. And once people do that and they,
[34:03]
and it works, they feel, wow, my body is so superior. It's just so magical. It's just so
[34:08]
special. Oh my God. And sometimes it's after a decade of migraine, sometimes 20, 30, 40, 50,
[34:14]
60 years of pain. And there's quite bittersweet moments. It's sweet because wow, I have my life
[34:21]
in front of me and a little bit bitter because why? And so in menopause, we've also welcomed
[34:27]
women who were saying, I have these liquids in my face or I have these liquids in my ears. And I do
[34:32]
all of these exams and doctors tell me there's nothing, but I know there's something. I'm sorry,
[34:36]
what do you mean by like liquids in the face or ear? Well, they will say, I feel I have things,
[34:41]
I have literally liquids in parts of my face where I feel I have liquids inside of my ear,
[34:48]
but I go to a lot of ENTs. I've done every single exam under the sun and I'm told there's nothing,
[34:53]
but I swear there is something. And these very beautiful machines that are very useful
[34:59]
to pinpoint other problems are not very good yet to see these types of very sort of
[35:07]
normal but misplaced liquids. And so by removing them, people feel, oh wow, I was right and this
[35:14]
is gone. And now I am feeling fine. They've externally not changed, but internally they're
[35:20]
completely different. Yeah, that's beautiful. That's beautiful to be able to change people's
[35:25]
lives because it can be debilitating. You can not be able to take care of your children or
[35:30]
your spouse or your family or go to work. Yeah. I mean, Stephanie, it's just wonderful. I cannot
[35:37]
express how much happiness this brings me and my team at Migraine. He was like, everyone's so happy.
[35:44]
We have this little chat called hashtag team victory. And it's each time it happens every day,
[35:49]
a couple of times a day, each time someone chats to us in the app, something positive that happened
[35:54]
to them that day. And we anonymize it. It's just among ourselves. It doesn't go anywhere. We could
[36:00]
put it on the website. We've never done that. But it's like all of these like waterfall of love and
[36:06]
kindness and happiness of families getting back together, people being promoted, people back at
[36:11]
work in their community, mums taking care of their children, children commenting on the energy of
[36:16]
their mums. I had this beautiful testimonial in the Migraine Heroes podcast of Wendy and Patrick
[36:22]
and how Patrick and Wendy said, we've prayed for so many years for you. And I said, I needed all
[36:28]
of these years to revive to you, too. It was a long journey for me as well. And yeah, it's just
[36:35]
incredibly just so much love, so much, you know, getting people back with nature, back in their
[36:40]
natural bodies. And and I always mind I'm like, oh, what are you going to do with all of your free
[36:45]
time? And how they have that moment to reassess over time, right? They're like, oh, wow, you know,
[36:52]
if I have so much more time, how do I want to spend it? And I want to be so mindful and deliberate
[36:58]
about how I spend it. Super special. Isn't that beautiful that you get to even ask that question?
[37:04]
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, you know, you know what, I think for me, what really matters
[37:13]
to your listeners is to really, really trust your body. Your body has nothing wrong. It's
[37:19]
been beautifully created. And it's not because people can't understand it, that it's defective
[37:25]
or that it's erratic. It's not. It has its own logic. It sometimes can be really hard to read.
[37:30]
But if you remember anything from this conversation, is my migraines are not irrational.
[37:35]
They're just telling me a signal. And yes, that language or that signal might be hard to interpret
[37:40]
because the brain is hyper connected to a lot of part of my body. However, it is logical. And I can,
[37:46]
I can actually trust it. Yeah, that's, that's great. That's amazing. Diane, if you could go
[37:53]
back to your 25 year old self, what one piece of advice would you give yourself?
[37:58]
I would, I would tell myself to just trust the process. When I was 25, I had had a skiing
[38:06]
accident. I had lost half of my blood. I had shrunk a kidney and I had broken my femur.
[38:11]
And I was struggling with my own health until I discovered that Eastern doctor I talked about.
[38:18]
And she changed my life, but it took until I was 29. So for sort of 12 years, my body was,
[38:24]
you know, functioning, but off. And, and I didn't know why. And I didn't know where I'd find
[38:32]
solutions. I'm like, why am I going through this? And then, and then once you can give that back
[38:37]
tenfold to others, it just makes, it's so worth it. So yes. So trust the process. Yeah. I love
[38:44]
that. That's beautiful. That's beautiful. Tell people how they can find out more about the app
[38:49]
and more about you and your services that you guys offer. Yes. So go on the, the migraine heroes for
[38:55]
us having free resources is incredibly important because migraines can put a big financial toll on
[39:01]
people. And so the migraine heroes podcast is there with a lot of advice. So every week, twice
[39:08]
a week, we have advice, like concrete things you can do in your home that day. And, and so it's
[39:14]
wonderful. The second thing that we do is that we do that assessment to really help you understand.
[39:22]
And I think understanding is such a huge, important of remission, important part of remission,
[39:27]
like from the moment you understand, you're like, Oh, wow, this is feasible. Now I understand what
[39:32]
happened from my first onset all the way to today. You take that migraine assessment, you get
[39:36]
instantly, um, four pages results, and then we can speak online for $30 for 19 minutes. We're trying
[39:43]
to keep it really, really democratic. And, um, and then, uh, and then if you're interested, then we
[39:50]
start to work together. You can also download the app free of charge. You can start to track
[39:54]
and it's beautiful. And when you do that, please think of, um, all of these, uh, women that came
[40:01]
before you and men and children, um, because they all made that app more beautiful. Um, we do not
[40:08]
have investors, we're completely bootstrapped. And so it means that we can just have one sole goal
[40:14]
is to help you. There's no other hidden goal. We're not even, you know, trying to make money
[40:20]
or something. And we're just trying to repair lives. Um, and that's just super, super, super
[40:25]
special. Yeah. Diane, I, I, I feel that you're super special. Yeah. Oh, thank you so much.
[40:33]
Yeah. It means a ton. Yeah. You're good people.
[40:39]
It's spread that around lightly either. No, I, I mean, look, I feel, um, I mean, happiness is
[40:46]
such a beautiful equation and I feel, uh, deeply grounded, deeply where I'm supposed to be. And, um,
[40:55]
and sometimes I meet people and I'm like, I was supposed to meet you. You know, I was supposed to
[40:59]
at some point transform your life at some point and look the second half, the second part.
[41:04]
And sometimes, you know, there's just, there's always a hundred percent of your life ahead.
[41:09]
And, and, uh, and so I need you to achieve the small and the large things that you want to
[41:14]
achieve in your life that you want to need to achieve in your life. And they're to enable you
[41:19]
to do that today. And it's just, it's really, really, really special. Yeah. So trust your body,
[41:24]
trust your instincts. Don't let people tell you it's illogical. It's erratic that you should just
[41:30]
mute it. Don't let people tell you to give up. Don't give up. Don't give up. Don't give up on
[41:35]
yourself. Don't don't why, you know, uh, um, sometimes I would come home in menopause and
[41:42]
sometimes they are so fast, so fast in six weeks, eight weeks they're on their feet.
[41:47]
Um, and so don't give up trusting yourself and, um, and power through, um, and listen, listen,
[41:54]
listen to your inner voice, inner, inner, yeah. Sensations. How was your sister? Oh, great. Yeah.
[42:02]
Great. Great. Now three kids and you know, the meat's driving and, uh, yeah, yeah. She's busy.
[42:07]
So she's happy to hear and same for my friend. Um, and so, yeah, so it's been an enormous journey.
[42:15]
Um, yeah, absolutely. So my grades are genetic, so it means it can come back sometimes, you know,
[42:20]
if you have a really long COVID or something, but then the message means something else. It's like,
[42:24]
Hey, can you address this? And once you've understood that you actually address it much
[42:27]
faster and, um, and you're back on your feet. Um, it's that beautiful communication between
[42:34]
the gut and the brain, between the brain and the rest of the body.
[42:36]
Yeah. Um, yeah. I love that you've, oh, and I said that at the top of the show,
[42:40]
that you merged Western and Eastern medicine because Western just wasn't doing it for me. I
[42:45]
just, I just could not move forward and I refuse to take any medicine. So I'm sure I slowed up the,
[42:50]
the process. It really wouldn't have been still because I would have been medic. But I, when I
[42:56]
found Eastern medicine and I started talking to people who had studied Eastern medicine,
[43:01]
it completely changed everything for me. So the idea around you, um, being educated in both is
[43:09]
super powerful. Yeah. Yes, absolutely. And I find that I like, wow, their medicine is just,
[43:16]
it's just a lot older. It hasn't changed. Also, if you think of it, our medicine changes all the
[43:21]
time. The thing that we used to see are no longer true. Um, we keep on changing our minds all the
[43:26]
time. Um, yes, because we make discoveries. I think in the West we have a bit too much arrogance.
[43:32]
We need a bit more, uh, humidity, what we know, what we don't know, acknowledge what we don't know.
[43:37]
Um, and, uh, and with that humility will come a lot more learning. And I think we have beautiful
[43:42]
years ahead of us, but, um, Eastern medicine is still the same way. I read really old books that
[43:48]
have been written a really long time ago. They're still, they're still timeless. Um, and, um, and
[43:54]
they still work, they still function perfectly. So yeah, respect your body, honor it. Um, listen
[44:00]
to it. Yes, I am completely with you. For me, it transformed me. I had been limping for 12 years
[44:06]
and in three weeks I was on my feet and there was, I was like, what? And then I went, and then the
[44:11]
worst is I went back to work. I was working with a lot of men and they said, oh, Diana is placebo.
[44:16]
And I thought, whoa, whoa, whoa. And to myself, uh, my cycles were like 56 days and then 43 days
[44:22]
and then 61, uh, they're now clockwise. I can't just decide that in my brain it is not placebo.
[44:30]
Um, and, um, but I thought, whoa, interesting that they see that way. Um, just a lot of work
[44:38]
to undo that, um, the thinking process. Yeah. I've heard, I've heard a lot of that or them not
[44:43]
writing down like certain herbs or something that I'm taking. I'm like, they, you know,
[44:48]
they can counteract. You still need to know that. Oh, that stuff doesn't work. I'm like,
[44:52]
oh my goodness. It does. If you would just listen to me, like you can see the trend.
[44:58]
My doctors could see, cause I went to.
[45:00]
different doctors and most of them multiple times. I'm like, you can see how
[45:04]
much I've changed, how I come in differently, my energy, my skin, my hair,
[45:09]
all of that changed, but I didn't take any of your drugs, so you should be
[45:15]
writing something down. Just as you said before, you need to go to your doctor, you
[45:22]
need to have the MRI, you need to have the CAT scan, you need to do what you
[45:26]
need to do in order to rule things out. Exactly, exactly. But on top of
[45:32]
that, there's some really good solutions. I always say
[45:36]
that my grandmother used to tell me all this stuff and you know I was young
[45:41]
and foolish and I was like, I'm not doing that on my baby, I'm going to go take
[45:45]
them to the doctor. And I'm like, man, why didn't I write all that stuff down? Because
[45:49]
the stuff that I do remember, I've used and it works. So yeah, absolutely,
[45:55]
absolutely. I mean, yes, that would have been such a shortcut to,
[45:59]
you know, when I was 25. It would have been nice to
[46:04]
discover all of that earlier, for sure, for sure. Yeah, so much beautiful wisdom.
[46:08]
I'm very grateful for it. Also, I have to say, we welcome doctors, we
[46:14]
welcome nurses, we welcome nutritionists, we even welcome practitioners, because
[46:19]
margarine can be so complex and we, every single day, take care of so many that
[46:24]
we've seen about everything. And sometimes, when you have just a sample of
[46:29]
one, you're, let's say, very good with respiratory problems or even, you know,
[46:35]
menopause, perimenopause problems and etc. But we do margarine every
[46:39]
single day and sometimes it can be that one little thing in the way. So for
[46:43]
example, if there's impurities inside the uterus, like cysts, clots, etc., they can
[46:47]
alone themselves drive migraines in menstruation. And that's something really
[46:51]
that most practitioners are not trained in. Why would they? And so,
[46:58]
because we do that every single day, we have that ability to, with a lot of
[47:03]
precision, find out very fast what's in there and then know what to do. Yeah, I'm
[47:09]
so excited. Like, when we get, since we get off this interview, I'm like texting my
[47:13]
friend. I'm like, you kind of have to go to this website and do this. And I'll probably
[47:16]
let her sneak and listen to the episode early. Maybe I will. We'll see. It's very good. Yeah, this has been so
[47:24]
powerful. I never understood the connection between the migraine and the
[47:30]
liver and now you're saying cysts. And there's so many inner workings that can
[47:36]
trigger the migraine when we all think that maybe it's inflammation or, you know,
[47:41]
one or two things. But there's, just like with everything, it's the root
[47:45]
cause. It's the entire body that's reacting to something that it doesn't
[47:49]
like. And this is how it's showing you. Yeah, exactly. Absolutely. Thank you so
[47:55]
much for being a guest today. I truly appreciate our time together. Thank you for having me.
[48:00]
Yes. Everyone, thank you guys for joining us here on Hello Hot Flash, where we help
[48:04]
you control the midlife change. We'll put information in the show notes so that
[48:08]
you can get in contact with Diane. And if you have any questions, by all means, let
[48:12]
us know. Everyone, here's to your health.
[48:21]
If you're a Christian woman navigating menopause, Christian Women and Menopause
[48:25]
is the podcast for you. With only 21 episodes, this limited series dives deep
[48:31]
into how the Bible can help with menopause symptoms like stress, anxiety, and
[48:36]
confidence. Don't miss out. Listen to Christian Women and Menopause on Apple
[48:40]
Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
[48:50]
The information shared in this episode is for educational purposes only and is not
[48:54]
intended as medical advice. Always consult with your health care provider before
[48:58]
starting any new supplement, including adaptogens, especially if you have
[49:02]
underlying health conditions or take medications. The views expressed by our
[49:07]
guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Hello Hot
