Today’s Mold Talks guest is Melissa Deally, registered Health Coach and Integrative Health Practitioner. She has personally experienced indoor mold exposure in her life while working in a hotel, which helped open her eyes to the health effects of this fungus. This experience was one of many that motivated her towards a life helping those suffering from illnesses caused by environmental factors, like mold exposure, find relief from the toxic load in their bodies.
By listening to her client’s experiences and symptoms, she creates a unique plan to unearth the root cause of their issues and forms a carefully crafted treatment protocol based on the results. In restoring the internal balance of the body, she aids in allowing it to rest, recuperate, and heal itself.
Our discussion today touches on how Melissa helps heal her clients through her functional medicine protocols and the experiences she’s had helping those suffering from mold exposure. She explains why it’s critical to listen to the body, suggestions on how to find relief from symptoms, and the importance of decreasing stress so the body can begin to heal itself. While the journey to wellness may be long, she wants everyone to know that it absolutely is possible.
Today’s Talk:
Melissa is someone who strives to know the “why” about things. Why were her hormones causing migraines? Why did working at her job all of a sudden cause painful symptoms? Why did going to the doctor just result in a higher dose of medication?
Luckily, her curiosity led her towards both escaping from mold exposure that was causing her to feel unwell and into the role of Integrative Health Practitioner and Registered Health Coach.
“Modern life has us too far out of balance (poor nutrition, sleep, too much going on in our lives) and it forces our body out of balance and it can’t keep up. I help figure out where those imbalances are and guide the body back into balance. It will heal itself, which is the beautiful thing about the human body.”
Her personal experience with mold exposure occurred when she was a young adult working at a hotel. As the building went through a large-scale renovation, she began experiencing severe migraines, which normally only popped up due to hormonal imbalances. When one of the workers came into her office exclaiming about the mold they found, she knew she had to leave that job and the exposure that came along with it.
Melissa said she feels incredibly lucky to have intuitively known something was wrong so she didn’t have to suffer for an extended period of time like many other individuals. Otherwise, she would have gone from doctor to doctor, like most people who are suffering have, and only been given prescriptions. No one, she believed, would have attempted to find the root cause of her problems: mold.
That experience coupled with various others throughout her life led her down the path of functional medicine. By running functional medicine labs, she’s able to assess what’s going on in the body, where it’s out of balance, and what that individual needs to get their body back on track. Oftentimes, that involves finding the root cause of what’s increasing the toxic load inside their bodies so that they can mitigate this exposure while simultaneously healing allowing themselves to heal.
“Getting to the root cause in both our health as well as our environment is the critical piece to helping people heal from any exposure.”
The most important part of healing, she said, is first just listening to our bodies. More often than not, western medicine doctors will only prescribe medication or say nothing is wrong with someone who is exhibiting symptoms that don’t quite add up to illnesses that doctor is familiar with. That situation can be incredibly discouraging to those suffering. But, Melissa encourages anyone feeling ill to pay attention to the way their bodies are talking to them and to believe it when it's desperately trying to tell them that something is wrong.
“Listen when your body whispers so it doesn’t have to yell at you.”
Symptoms are how it communicates. As she said, the body is an amazing healing machine, so if someone is feeling weak or experiencing frequent pain, obviously something is wrong that’s causing it. That includes individuals who are suffering from mold exposure.
Melissa has personally helped numerous individuals detox their bodies from mold exposure. She uses a proven 21-day functional medicine liver detox followed by her mold protocol to get rid of the rest of the toxins. One of the keys to her success stems from allowing her clients to release their stress during this process. By guiding them in their healing journey, they can turn away from Dr. Google and the stress mindset they’re in, and instead, allow their bodies to heal.
“Being guided just allows that to be relieved and it’s not on your shoulders anymore. You just follow the program. The body does not heal in a stress state. We’ve got to get you out of that stress state for the body to heal.”
From there, the only obstacle they'll face is overcoming their brain as they work to change habits in their life. Melissa said it’s sometimes difficult to convince our brains to move away from the norm we’re used to because they know it's their job to keep us safe. Sometimes, that can get in the way of our healing.
“Our brain is charged with keeping us safe and it knows it can keep you safe because you’re here and you’re alive. The moment you start doing something different it goes, ‘What are you doing and where are you going with this? I don’t know if I can keep you safe over there so I’m going to send you little messages to bring you back over here into your comfort zone where I know I can keep you safe because you’re alive.’”
By connecting with her clients through an app, she’s able to answer questions and help talk their brains through this process of change so they can successfully heal their bodies.
The most important thing to remember while feeling unwell, Melissa said, is that healing can be done. It will take time, require a multitude of steps, and be a bit complicated, but it can happen and that’s what matters.
“You might have been told that you’ll have to suffer from this for the rest of your life, and that is so not true. I want to give you hope and inspire you to keep going on your journey because you can resolve this health issue.”
The first step starts with listening to your body and finding someone who will help.
