Leslie Cisar, ND (00:00)
Welcome to the Healing Migraines Naturally Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Leslie Cisar, and I'm a licensed naturopathic doctor, former chronic migraine sufferer, and I've dedicated my life to helping other women with chronic migraines rediscover a migraine-free life. So yesterday I had a free consult call with a woman who's been listening to the podcast, and part way through she told me,
I have been contemplating going back on the Gaps diet just because I had such relief with it. So here's what happened. Last year, she went on the GAPS diet in May and she stayed on it until December. So about seven months. In those seven months, she had one migraine. One. Okay. Now she was a chronic migraine sufferer, more than 15 migraines a month. So this is
Spectacular reduction, right? Then Christmas came, and in her words, she got off of it because I wanted to eat the food, right? Who who can blame her? And then the migraines came back. She said that so far this year she's had 20. Now, this is still significantly lower than what she had been struggling with prior to going on the GAPS diet.
But you can see, right? Okay, now I'm getting more than two a month, and I don't like the way this is, I don't like the way this is trending, right? So her plan was to go back on gaps for three months and then slowly bring foods back in one at a time to figure out what was causing her migraines, right? So this is sort of like an elimination diet type approach. And so I told her.
I am really glad you reached out before you did that, because we're a month away from Thanksgiving, right? We're coming again into the holiday season. Now, why would I say that, right? Well, why would I say, well, don't go back on this diet that helped you so much? Because clearly, right, it you could say worked, right? Seven months, one migraine, you start introducing more variety of food, and then migraines start getting worse, right? So
It seems kind of logical. Well, go back and don't eat those foods that you've been eating for the past ten months. Go back to the very, very restricted diet that you were on before. So why would a doctor be glad that she didn't go back to something that worked? And I'm gonna tell you, but first there's something else she told me on that call.
and it's actually the most important part of what she told me on the call. So on the GAPS diet, it wasn't only her migraines that went away. Her reflux went away. She always had belching, and that got better. She used to get this weird kind of stomach ache, and that went away too. Her hot flashes went away, and her periods changed.
Before Gaps, her period was coming every three weeks and it lasted for three days. On Gaps, it went to every four weeks and she bled five to seven days. So a much more normalized period. In her words, she said it felt like my hormones were kind of getting back into place. So she mentioned all of those other things sort of in passing, right? Because to her it was almost like those were extras. She called me about her migraines.
The migraines are what's causing her the most suffering. And so that's what she's been paying attention to. But I said to her, those those two are connected. Your digestion cleared up and your head pain cleared up. Your hot flashes got better and your periods normalized. Those are all connected. It's not a coincidence that all of those things shifted while your head pain got better too.
And I asked her, has anyone put that together for you before? And she said no. She talked to her primary care doctor about her migraines. she got her refills. She talked to her gynecologist about her period. her gynecologist said take birth control, and she said I'd rather work on my diet than take a birth control pill. No one had connected her stomach, her period, and her head.
She thought she'd found a diet that had some nice side effects. What she'd actually found was proof. So let me ask you: Do you get heartburn? Belching? Bloating after you eat? Periods that you've just learned to put up with because that's how your periods have always been. And migraines? You've probably got a different doctor for each one, or maybe the tums in your purse.
three problems, three doctors, three different prescriptions. Has anyone ever told you that they might be the same problem? Because when one diet makes all of them better at the same time, that's not a coincidence. That's your body telling you something. And by the end of this episode, you're gonna know what. But first, you need to know what this woman
Actually ate because when you hear it, you're going to understand why she did come off of it at Christmas. So GAPS stands for gut and psychology syndrome. It comes from a physician named Dr. Natasha Campbell McBride, who published a book by that name in 2004. She built it on an older diet called the Specific Carbohydrate Diet.
The idea behind it is that if you heal your gut, you help the brain and the rest of your body. The gaps people say heal and seal the gut. And what they're talking about is when they say heal and seal the gut is what a lot of people call leaky gut. And certainly, you know, I couldn't agree more.
You have to have good digestive function. When people say heal your gut, right? What they mean is, you know, I'm I'm having all these digestive symptoms, right? My stomach is upset. I have indigestion, heartburn, bloating, gas, what, you know, whatever it may be. And heal the gut means restore proper digestive function. When you're having those symptoms, your body is generating those symptoms because your digestive tract is not functioning.
Optimally, it's not functioning properly, and you want to get that digestion functioning properly. That's a cornerstone of what the body needs to get itself back into a state of health. That is, feel better and not generate symptoms. The question is, how are you going to go about doing that?
So let me talk a little bit about the digestive tract. Okay, so the digestive tract is lined with cells. They're called epithelial cells. Now you might have heard of epithelial cells because your skin is also made of epithelial cells.
So our skin, which is a barrier to the outside world, is made out of epithelial cells. And our digestive tract, which also has to form a barrier to the outside world, is lined with the same cells. Okay? But your skin is stacked up with layers, many cells thick, of epithelial cells.
the lining of your intestines is one single layer of epithelial cells. We think that when we're eating food, we're putting food in our body, right? I've
Put the food in my mouth and I've chewed it and I've swallowed it and now it's in my body. The food is not in our body. So our digestive tract, right, is a tube, and we are like a donut. So there is a hole running through us that we call our digestive tract, and we think is inside of our body. But we're putting food into this sort of donut hole, and we're keeping the food out.
Out of our body. We don't bring food into our bloodstream. We put the food in this donut hole, which is outside of our body, and then we squirt hydrochloric acid on it, and we've squirt enzymes on it, and we mash it up and so on, but we act on it outside of our body, break it down, and then what do we bring into our body? Is only the nutrients, right? We don't bring the food into our body. So
The same cells that provide that protective barrier, whether it's the skin or our intestines, it's the same type of cell. But, you know, when we think of our skin, we're very much aware, like this is a thick barrier to the outside world, keeping things from coming inside,
But we don't think about that with our digestive tract. So fascinating. It's the same type of cell that's performing that function, but it's only one cell thick in our digestive tract. Isn't that crazy? We've got
Layers and layers of epithelial cells that make up our skin and this thick barrier, but inside our digestive tract, it's one cell thick. And when those cells are healthy, they're pressed tight against each other.
And they only let through the nutrients. They don't let sort of partially digested food particles from coming through. When they're not healthy, there's gaps, little gaps open up between them. And things get through into our body, into our bloodstream that shouldn't get through. And this has been called leaky gut.
Okay, when this happens to you, they call it leaky gut. A food sensitivity test can determine if this phenomenon is occurring. And it as I've talked about on other podcasts, food sensitivity tests should be called leaky gut tests because they're not picking up anything in particular about the food. They're they're picking up the partially digested food molecules that are coming into your bloodstream and your immune system is reacting to.
so I did a whole episode on this. It's episode 12 is leaky gut causing my migraines. We'll link to that in the notes. So if this sounds like you, or you've done some food sensitivity testing, or you've wondered about leaky gut, go and listen to that one after you finish listening to this one. So I do agree with gaps on this part. The the gut matters, digestion matters.
where I part ways with gaps is what you have to do to get there. So let me walk you through what you actually eat on the gaps diet. So gaps starts with what's called the introduction diet. It comes in six stages, and you add foods back one stage at a time. So here's a day on stage one.
One. So breakfast, you're gonna have chicken soup. you're gonna have homemade stock made by boiling chicken. You can put some carrots and onions and cauliflower simmered in there until it's very soft, and then add in the cooked chopped chicken. For lunch, you could have butternut squash soup made with that stock. And for dinner, you could have beef soup.
In between you could have some ginger tea with a little honey and a spoonful of juice from sauerkraut or pickles. So that's the day. Soup, soup, soup. One of the Gaps cookbook authors says it can feel like dinner for breakfast. If you like I mean, if you like soup for dinner, right, that's what you'd be having for breakfast. And there are rules about how you
make the soup. Okay, so the vegetables are cooked until they're very soft with the stems and the peels removed. So if you were to have broccoli or cauliflower, no stalks, any sort of greens, you're not going to include any stems, everything is simmered in the stock, nothing raw, nothing fried. The meat is boiled as you move through the stages.
Foods come back. So eggs, stews, like crock pot type stews, They have these recipes for a pancake type thing from nut butter and eggs and squash. You could do pot roast, eventually some cooked apple, and then again, finally a little bit of raw lettuce, peeled cucumber.
And then once you finish the introduction, you move on to what's called the full gaps diet. That one lasts a year and a half to two years. So the full gaps diet means no bread, no pasta, no rice, no oatmeal, so no grains, no sugar, no potatoes or other, you know, starchy vegetables, no pasteurized dairy.
Which in many parts of the country it's actually illegal to sell people unpasteurized dairy. So if you're in one of those areas, no dairy.
And then nothing processed. So nothing that was made in a factory for you, nothing that you're gonna open a box or a package and eat. So a day might be a vegetable omelette for breakfast, soup or some chicken with roasted cabbage for lunch, salmon and broccoli for dinner. So, you know, these are good foods. A lot of people like these foods.
But you're not eating some major staple foods like grains, you know, potatoes, starchier vegetables, right? And you only start adding foods back after you've had six months of normal digestion or digestion without symptoms. So so picture that soup three times a day to start.
Then a year and a half to two years of no bread, no pasta, no potatoes, no sugar, no processed foods. Very few people are going to do this. And now picture the holidays. It's Thanksgiving and you're at your sister's house, there's the turkey, the stuffing, the mashed potatoes, the dinner rolls, the pumpkin pie, and you're there with your container of soup. That's exactly where my caller was last Christmas. She wanted to eat the food.
So it's it's hard, it's restrictive, it's one of the most restrictive diets out there. And yet, for seven months, this woman did it and it helped her. So let's talk about why it helped. Because once you understand why it worked, you'll understand why she didn't need to do something this extreme. Okay.
So to understand what gaps did for her, I need to give you one picture first. It's how I think about everything, including migraines. Every cell in your body is working all day long. And every cell that's working is making waste material, byproducts. Okay. It's like you're in your kitchen, you're always generating trash when you're in the kitchen, right? You're cooking, you're eating, you're cleaning up, you're generating trash all the time.
That's not a problem. It's just what happens when you live in a house. Then on top of the waste your own cells make, there's everything that's coming in from the outside. So what you eat, what you drink, what you breathe, even if those things are organic, you know, pristine food, whenever you eat something like I've talked about on other episodes of the podcast, you're going to generate waste material.
And your liver actually has to detoxify the food that you eat. So then, you know, we're breathing things in from the air. These don't have to be man-made chemicals. You breathe in a whole bunch of pollen, you're breathing in toxin molecules that your body has to clear. And then certainly medications that you take have to be cleared from the body. All of this has to be dealt with. And your body does it in two steps.
First, it breaks the waste down and changes it into something that it can get rid of. That's called the process of detoxification. And your liver does most of that work. Think of it as bagging up the trash. Then it gets out of the body through your urine, your stool, your sweat, your breath. That's like taking that trash bag out to the curb. Now, picture a bucket with a drain at the bottom.
Everything that has to be dealt with goes into that bucket. I call that the toxin load. Your liver and your body's way of getting rid of the waste are the drain. As long as that drain keeps up with what's going in, you're you're you're good. That bucket isn't going to start to overflow. You're not going to have what are called toxicity symptoms. But you can't put in 10 pounds and have a three-pound drain.
Okay, that's just it's not gonna work. When more goes in than your body can clear, the bucket starts to fill up. And when it starts to get full enough, your body starts generating symptoms. I call these toxicity symptoms. There are specific symptoms that are correlated to that bucket filling up as that bucket gets fuller and fuller. some of them.
Are generated because your body is trying to defend itself, like a runny nose or vomiting. Your body's trying to flush these things out. But most of them are just sort of the damage from these toxin molecules. The waste and the toxins that aren't getting cleared are irritating and harming your body. And then you can you can feel that irritation and harm. So, in my view, a migraine is a toxicity symptom.
This is why a migraine feels so much like a hangover. A hangover is what happens when there's more of alcohol's byproducts in your body than you can clear fast enough. The pounding head, the nausea, can't stand the light. Does any of this sound familiar? And menstrual symptoms, the cramps, the heavy periods, the PMS, the cycles that are all over the place. Those are toxicity symptoms too.
Every month your liver has to clear your hormones on top of everything else that's in that bucket. If the bucket's already full, you're going to feel it. So, three ideas. Your body makes trash and takes in more from the outside. That's the load, and it all goes into the bucket. Your liver and the elimination process are the drain. And when the bucket gets too full,
You get toxicity symptoms, migraines, menstrual symptoms. Keep that bucket in your head because now I can tell you why gaps worked for her. I see three reasons. Reason number one: it was very easy to digest. So if you eat easier to digest foods, it's easier on your digestive track, okay? If you
Right? Your digestive tract has to work harder or less hard depending on the food that you eat. So if you're eating food that your digestive tract doesn't have to work so hard to digest and it doesn't struggle so much, then your digestive tract isn't going to generate so many symptoms. So let me show you what I mean. have you ever made like
Broccoli for dinner, and then you forgot to put it away, and you come down the next morning to the kitchen and you're like, oh shoot, I left the broccoli out. I didn't get it in the fridge, right? Well, you're not going to eat that broccoli. The broccoli has already started to rot. So the same thing happens inside of our digestive tract. If your stomach and your small intestine aren't breaking your food down all the way, the food sits in your digestive tract.
And it starts to rot. mean, it's very hot in there. It's like over 98 degrees inside of there, right? So you have to break your food down quickly, right? You can't just have it kind of sitting in there, you know, okay, well, I'm gonna wait for enough hydrochloric acid, I'm gonna wait for enough enzymes from the pancreas. You've got to get this food broken down quickly because it's really hot in there and it's going to start to rot. And the bacteria that love rotting food, they're not the beneficial bacteria.
Okay, so when food rots, those bacteria that are rotting the food make toxins, microbial toxins, and you absorb those toxins. That goes right into your own bucket. So if you're eating easier to digest food and you're actually breaking the food down, and it isn't rotting in your digestive tract.
you're not absorbing the toxins from that rotting food. And that lowers the load that's coming into your bucket.
Let's go through gaps during the introductory phase. Soup, soup, soup. Everything cooked, very soft, no skins on anything, no stems, like when you boil something, you're literally kind of pre-digesting the food. So which one do you think is gonna be easier for your stomach to break down?
So that's reason number one. She made it super easy for her digestive tract to work. she was sort of pre-digesting the food before she even ate it. And so she was breaking her food down better. And her reflux and her burping and her stomach aches got better because it was just easier. It was just easier for it to work. And if you don't have the food rotting in your digestive tract and these, you know, bad bugs go into town.
And generating a whole bunch of gas and toxins and everything else, that your your digestive tract is gonna feel a lot better too. But gaps didn't fix her digestion, it just gave her digestion less work. And that's not the same thing. So let's go to reason number two. Okay. reason number two is eating that way gave less for her liver to process in a second way as well.
Okay, so the more colorful, aromatic, flavorful, and spicy a plant food is, the more of what we call phytonutrients it has. Those are the compounds that give plants their color and their flavor. So these phytonutrients are also what are called phytotoxins. So I call this the plant.
Nutrient slash toxin paradox. So plants make these You could call them chemicals, you could call them plant nutrients, you could call them antioxidants. Plants make them to defend themselves, okay? Because plants they're stuck in the ground, they can't run away from a predator, so they make themselves poisonous so that if a predator eats them, they get sick and they stop eating them, right? So
Even most plants on the planet, we humans do not eat, right? There's a a relatively tiny percentage of plants that we actually eat because the plant toxins are so toxic that we can't tolerate them, right? But the plants that we do eat, we can take in those phytotoxins slash phytonutrients and detoxify them and use them. Okay, so every
One of those phytonutrients or plant nutrients that everybody talks about that are so beneficial for you, they have to be processed by your liver because they're also phytotoxins. So, like a chili pepper, okay, that's gonna put a lot of work on your liver. A piece of bread is not too colorful, okay? So that's not going to put a load on your liver.
So if you're eating fewer of these colorful, strong flavored foods, your liver doesn't have to do so much detoxification of them. So that's less going into the bucket. Remember, I've talked about this on other episodes. Every time we eat, we've got to actually detoxify the food.
So if you're eating less of those things, you're not putting so much through your liver. And the gaps intro diet is like mostly soup and then, you know, vegetables that are.
Cooked way down and they're peeled, right? So what's more colorful on a zucchini? The peel or the interior of the zucchini, right? So if you're gonna put zucchinis in your chicken soup on the gaps diet and you're peeling that green skin off of the zucchini, what's left? This beige inner part of the zucchini. So when you're peeling all of this produce to put in your gap soup, you're peeling off
The nutrient density from the from the plant, And when you're peeling off the nutrient density, you're lowering the toxin load on your liver.
I've talked about this phenomenon on a few other podcasts. So, if I have a client that is, daily head pain, daily migraines, right? They're in medication rebound. And so they're taking medication daily or almost every day, They're rotating through their Excedrin through their fioricet through their triptan through their nurtec right? In that case, for some of those clients, if it's appropriate.
I will have them eat for a short period of time less colorful food. Because if we do that, we're going to take that phytonutrient load slash phytotoxin load off the liver. Now, that might be two weeks, it might be a month, right? A short period of time with the end in sight We're not talking years and years of this.
But this is where, if you understand the components of food, if you understand how the digestive tract works, if you understand this process of detoxification, this is where you can craft a diet or a way of eating for someone that's going to be, you know, beneficial for them, take a load off, be easier for them to digest, right? If I have someone who, you know, every time they eat, they're having heartburn and gas and bloating, I mean, you know, indigestion, they're nauseous all the time.
Yeah, if we eat more cooked food, if we don't eat a whole big bowl of raw kale every afternoon for lunch, and we're eating more cooked food that's pre-digested, some broth-based soups, yes, this is going to be easier to digest, and it's gonna take the pressure off the digestive tract. So the gaps diet, I'm not saying you're a lunatic to eat this way.
The problem is the restrictiveness of it and the duration that people are on it. That's what I take issue with.
eating is one of the most foundational pleasures of life. And breaking bread with our kin is something that's very, very important for us humans. And so if you're on a restrictive diet, it's one thing to say, you know, for the next two weeks I've got to eat a little I gotta eat a little bit differently. It's another thing where, you know, for the next two years you can't go to
your sister's house or, your mother-in-law's house. you can't enjoy a holiday meal, you can't go out for your birthday, you can't eat in a restaurant, right? That's you know, if if that's what it takes, okay, great. If that's what it takes, that's what it takes. But if it doesn't take that, right, then why are we doing that?
So reason three, keeping your blood sugar steady. So even with the very restrictive soup version of the GAPS diet, I could see that if you did it properly, if you structured it properly, you could keep your blood sugar very steady.
And that matters because blood sugar spikes and drops are a physical stressor on the body. And most migraine sufferers are pretty sensitive to this type of physical stressor. So a great way to get a migraine for most migraine sufferers is to have a spike and drop in your blood sugar. So when your blood sugar drops, your body goes into fight or flight mode. It releases adrenaline and cortisol.
A lot of women are going to get a migraine after that adrenaline and cortisol surge. I've talked about this on other podcast episodes, but to have your blood sugar spike and drop, you're putting a lot of physical stress on your body. Just like if you go out in the sun or out in the heat, that's a physical stressor on your body. And if you don't have enough resiliency and vitality to weather that stress, well, you could get tipped into a migraine. And some people are more sensitive to
certain physical stressors than others, right? So some people are very sensitive to the physical stressor of the sun, or the physical stressor of a barometric pressure change, or the physical stressor of a blood sugar spike and drop, right? So there is a component where we do have our individual sensitivities to stressors, but if you're sensitive to that particular stressor, you have to have enough resiliency and vitality to weather that stressor. And if you have chronic migraines, I can tell you that your resiliency and vitality
It's a little low, right? And you're you're susceptible to these types of things we call triggers, right? In the migraine world. So, you know, this isn't just me saying this. in one of the biggest studies on migraine triggers, more than half of the patients named not eating as a trigger. Well, what happens if you don't eat a meal? If you miss a meal, your blood sugar is going to drop. But you can even eat in a way that
spikes and drops your blood sugar. So it's, missing a meal, sure, but most Americans are eating in a way that they're, you know, inadvertently or unknowingly spiking and dropping their blood sugar all day long. so on the gaps diet, you're not eating glucose dense foods. You're not eating sugar.
You're not eating, white flour. You're not eating processed foods. You're not eating grains. You're having protein and fat at every meal. So if you're lowering your intake of very glucose-dense foods and you're also having protein and fat, that's a way of eating that's going to keep your blood sugar pretty steady. So
Again, if you were to structure the gaps recommendations correctly, you could take away one of the big physical stressors that migraine sufferers are sensitive to. Right? So let's put this all together. So what did my caller do? She made it super easy for her digestive tract to function. So she was breaking her food down better. She lowered the toxin load, the
phytonutrient slash phytotoxin load coming in from the food itself and she kept her blood sugar steady. So remember what I said about migraines and menstrual symptoms. They're both toxicity symptoms. So she had two major toxicity symptom profiles going on in her body. She did not understand that they were connected
And she massively lowered the load. So both of those got better, and her digestion improved to boot. So, I told her on the call, you took a bit of a load off, and your body responded. That's why everything got better at once. Her head, her stomach, and her period weren't three different problems. They were one body with a bucket that was too full. So
Now we come back to what she wants to do. Go back on gaps. Okay, she's half right. The diet did work. It lowered the load. Just not enough for her to feel better after she reintroduced some very reasonable food. Like she told me, I eat very healthy, And most migraine sufferers,
Let's get real here, right? You get a migraine and your coworker or your brother says, What did you eat? What what did you eat? Did you eat a bag of Doritos, right? Did you go out and did you have, Taco Bell, right? What did you do? And here's the thing, Most migraine sufferers are already eating pretty well.
They're already paranoid about food because food triggers is a major concern for migraine sufferers. So my caller was definitely in that frame of mind, right? I'm already putting a lot of effort into my eating habits. I'm already eating good food, So here's the thing, She did this very restrictive diet, and yes, it lowered the load on her body, and then those symptoms responded. But as soon as she started
Adding back in variety of very reasonable food, right? She didn't tell me, well, I stopped doing the gaps diet. And then I started eating, a big, super 32 ounce bag of Doritos for lunch every day. And what do you know? I'm not feeling well. That's not what she's doing, right? She's adding in, oats. She's adding in, you know.
zucchini that hasn't been peeled, right? that's what people are adding in, and then they're starting to feel worse again.
Right, she added back in potatoes, some sourdough bread, some rice, some yogurt, a little bit of dark chocolate. heaven forbid you have chocolate again in your life, I said to her, you're eating sweet potatoes. That's good food.
So she's not as restrictive as she was at the beginning, but she's still pretty restrictive, and her migraines are getting worse anyway, and her periods are becoming irregular again.
So the minute she let a little bit more food back in, her migraines came back, and so did her period problems. If she goes back on gaps, the same thing happens again. She'll feel better and then the day she comes off it, the migraines will be waiting for her. There's another problem. Gaps doesn't work the same for everybody. I have a client who
Who did eat the Gaps diet as recommended for two years. And the fact that she was able to keep that going for two years is a testimony to how desperate she was to feel better. But unfortunately, despite that tremendous sacrifice of willpower and white knuckling, which pretty much totally destroyed her enjoyment in eating, she was still in a chronic migraine state. Daily head pain with migraines flaring on top of that more than 15 times a month.
One of the first things I did was to have her reintroduce food. Now, if you haven't eaten a wide variety of food in two years, you've got to do this carefully. You've got to have a plan and you've got to go slowly. And that's exactly what I provided for her, because if she just suddenly started reintroducing a whole bunch of food that she hadn't eaten for two years, she was probably going to get really sick, both from a digestive standpoint and from a migraine standpoint.
So this is not something where you say, well, let me go to town here. Your digestive tract is not expecting you to eat a potato. It's not going to be prepared for that. You don't want to catch your digestive tract off guard, especially when you have daily head pain and 15 migraine days a month. So we carefully reintroduced food. Now she no longer has daily head pain.
She's still getting migraines, but she can go 10 to 14 days between flares now, and she's on a good path to continue to improve. And she's starting to get that spark back. She's starting to enjoy what she's eating. She's having fun in the kitchen again. And her husband is certainly happier with the food that she's making. can you imagine? That's the other problem with these diets. You're eating soup three times a day. What's your husband going to eat? What are your kids going to eat?
Now you've got to make separate meals for everybody. You're like a short-order cook making custom meals for every member in your family. And it's it's no way to live. I had another client who was on the GAPS diet for two years as well. For her, it took her from near daily head pain to about half of that. Which, it sounds good. But 15 head pain days a month is still brutal. But she was afraid to come off the gaps diet.
She was trapped by the Gaps diet. She'd gone from basically daily head pain to only half the time, but she hadn't been able to eat in a restaurant or anyone's house for two years. She was totally stuck.
We also started introducing foods and working on her digestion right away. And now she's down to about one to two headaches. Not migraines, but headaches a month now. Eating more, eating more variety, putting the variety back in her life. And again, I'm confident that she's going to continue to improve from there. So think about these three women. My caller went on gaps and got noticeable improvement.
Until she came off of it. One client got about half better and was trapped by it for two years. Another client white knuckled it for two years and got no improvement. Same diet, three different results. How do you know which one you're going to be? Do you want to give it a try for two years and find out? And think about what that two years means here.
Remember that single layer of cells lining your gut? Those cells, they don't live very long. They're continuously dying and being replaced, just like your skin is continuously renewing itself. But your gut lining does it much faster. It replaces itself every two to five days. That's a tremendous turnover. So for those cells to come back healthy every few days, they need three things.
They need the nutrients that those cells need to reproduce themselves and function properly. They cannot have waste material building up inside of the cell. And they need the cell's own energy to function, to do the work that they're supposed to do. Just changing your diet for two years. Okay, that could be one way of doing it.
But do you want to spend two years getting cells that replace themselves every few days working properly? There's one more cost, and my caller said it herself. Well, it does give you food fear. It does. And food paranoia is already a problem for migraine sufferers. was it the tomatoes? Was it the chocolate? Was it my caffeine? What did I do?
the last time I felt okay, now I ate it again, I don't feel good, is it a problem, right? You just rack your brain thinking about food triggers. That's what her plan would have done. Go back on gaps, then bring foods back in one at a time, waiting to see which one gives her a migraine. Every bite is a test. So if you've been through this, if you found a diet that worked and you couldn't keep it up, you didn't fail the diet.
The diet was never going to do what you needed. You don't have to go on a restrictive diet like Gaps to feel better. And why do something that's so restrictive that you can't eat in a restaurant or you can't eat a holiday meal at somebody's house when it's not necessary? Maybe you want to go to somebody's house for Thanksgiving and have a piece of pumpkin pie.
Maybe you want to go to a restaurant and order off the menu without causing a big scene and making it a five minute special order while everyone else at the table sits there. That's not too much to ask.
To me, I want to have as normal a life as possible while maintaining my health. And that's what I want for you. Look at what my caller's body did. It responded. We just need to get it dialed in. And gaps isn't the only way to get these three things. There are much easier ways. The Mediterranean diet is probably the most researched diet there is.
US News has ranked it the best diet overall eight years in a row. It's a way of eating with a lot of variety. Basically, you're eating real food that's health-supporting. I teach a modified version of it, my own modified version of it. I'm a little less strict because I don't think you have to follow the Mediterranean diet to a T to support your health.
So I teach my clients how to eat in a health-supporting way. That means adequate protein, adequate fat, and adequate plant foods. Plant foods are where most of our carbohydrates or glucose comes from, and your body needs glucose.
I teach my clients how to combine those in a way that keeps their blood sugar steady. And I always encourage my clients to eat food that they enjoy eating. I don't like Brussels sprouts, okay? So I don't buy Brussels sprouts and I don't make Brussels sprouts. My daughter hardly knows what a Brussels sprout tastes like because I don't like them, so I don't make them for us. But there are plenty of other plant foods out there. So if you don't like something, that's fine. Now that doesn't mean that we just, quote unquote eat whatever we want.
Right? If you're eating a 32-ounce bag of Doritos every day for lunch, that's not going to be health supporting, and I think people know that. We have to eat in a way that gives us enough variety and enough nutrients. And a lot of the foods that you have to cut on a diet like GAPS have real health benefits. Coffee has health benefits. Dark chocolate has health benefits. I drink coffee every day. I had a cup of coffee right before I got on the phone with her.
And you can have all of that while keeping your blood sugar steady if you put it together correctly. You can eat at somebody's home. You can eat in a restaurant. It's it's very easy, it's very flexible, and it's high variety.
And while you're eating that way, we can work on why she needed the GAPS diet in the first place. So we give her body what it needs,
We open that drain up. So instead of a three-pound drain, we bring it up to a 10-pound drain. And then we can drain the bucket. So the bucket doesn't get so full. And then her body gets stronger and the colorful food stays on the plate instead of coming off of it. When we give your body what it needs.
Things start to heal. And digestion heals quickly. Digestion usually heals very quickly. Because those cells turn over so fast every two to five days, you're getting new digestive tract cells. It's in fact, it's usually the first organ system that starts to improve. When I'm working with a client who has digestive symptoms and migraines, I actually expect her digestion to get better.
Before her migraines do. Same three things gaps did for her. Food her digestion can handle, less in the bucket, steady blood sugar, no soup for breakfast, unless you unless you want to eat soup. Your tummy can feel good, your head can feel good, and you can eat in a restaurant. It's totally doable. So you might have heard Jean's story. It's episode 148. If you haven't, go back and listen to her story.
Jean had migraines since she was a teenager. When she came to me, she was averaging twenty-three head pain days a month. Her lunch hour at work was lying in the driver's seat of her car with a 30-minute alarm set, just trying to get a little bit of rest at lunch before she'd have to drag herself back into work. And she'd been doing what so many of you do. In her words, I've been
I had been white knuckling it, the foods that I eat, the daily habits I have. I was constantly questioning myself. She'd try to figure it out on her own. I would start with food, but I just didn't know what was causing the head pain. And Jean had stomach problems too, for years. And like the woman on my call, that wasn't what she came to me for. She came for her head. And this is what she said after four months. Stomach issues are something that I've
Been dealing with for many years, and you helped me through that too. It also helped my stomach. And my energy is so much better than it has been in a long time. And my stomach has gotten so much better. Her head and her stomach got better together. Same as the woman on my call, because it's the same body. The difference.
Jean didn't live on soup to get there. She's eating real food, and she went from 23 head pain days a month to one. So back to my call yesterday. She hasn't decided yet if she wants to work with me, she wants to think about it, and that's okay. I don't know if she'll go back on the GAPS diet, but I hope she heard what I told her. You don't have to go on a restrictive diet to feel better, and I hope you heard it too. If a diet has helped you,
That's good news. It means your body can get better. Your stomach, your periods, your migraines, they can all get better. And when they get better together, that tells you that they were all connected. You don't have to live on that diet. You need a body that can handle a normal health supporting diet, one that can get you to the holiday table and let you eat what's on it, pumpkin pie and all.
If you're living with chronic migraines and you're ready to understand what's actually driving them and what you can do about it, I would love to talk. I offer a free 30-minute consultation call. The link is in the description. We'll talk about your migraines and any other health conditions that you have or health concerns that you have, and we'll put together a game plan to get you feeling better. It's going to be the best 30 minutes you've spent on your health in a long time.
So thanks so much for being here today and I'll talk to you soon.
