Endometriosis or PCOS? Getting the Right Diagnosis [Podcast]
Endometriosis and Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) share overlapping symptoms and are sometimes confused. In this podcast, endometriosis expert, Melissa Turner clears up the confusion and explains the symptoms of endometriosis, how to get a diagnosis, and possible paths to healing. Listen in as we also discuss:
- Three areas to focus on when treating endometriosis naturally
- Effectiveness of surgery
- Her REACH technique of managing endometriosis
- Nutrients you may be missing
All PCOS Diva podcasts are available on 
Full Transcript Follows
Bio: Melissa Turner is one of the most powerful voices for women with endometriosis, sharing a message of hope and possibility through her REACH Technique©. Through her international recognition and collaborations, she has transformed the lives of 1000’s of women around the world. Discover a deeper level of understanding about endometriosis and how to treat it naturally on her website www.endoempowered.com.
Full Transcript:
Amy: So, recently I had Dr. Lara Briden on the podcast. I think for your reference it’s podcast number 80, and we talked about how PCOS shouldn’t be painful. If you are having pelvic pain associated with PCOS, there’s probably something else going on. Dr. Briden mentioned endometriosis. So endometriosis and polycystic ovary syndrome, there’s some symptoms that can kind of overlap and there’s some confusion around the two. So, I wanted to sort of demystify that today. I think that this sort of confusion can often cause diagnosis delays and months if not years of unnecessary pain and suffering. It’s estimated that around 10% of women of child bearing age will suffer from endometriosis, and it’s kind of interesting that the common ratio of women with PCOS is also 10%.
So, let’s kind of uncover sort of the facts from the fiction about endometriosis today. In order to do that, I invited one of my favorite endometriosis experts, Melissa Turner. She is one of the most powerful voices for women with endometriosis, and we share a very similar message of hope with me in the PCOS community and Melissa in endometriosis community. She uses her REACH technique to help women and to kind of regain that sense of hope and possibility. Through her international recognition and collaboration, she has transformed the lives of thousands of women around the world to discover a deeper level of understanding and about endometriosis and how to treat it naturally. You can find her on endoempower.com.
So welcome, Melissa, to the PCOS Diva podcast.
So, why don’t you start by kind of describing some of the symptoms of endometriosis, and I’m sure some women are going to start listening and kind of checking off those symptoms like a checklist. Then we can kind of go into how do you get a diagnosis.
Melissa: Okay. So some of the most common symptoms are related to pain. So, any kind of pain in the abdominal area, and this can be pain on a daily basis, in some case. It could be pain before your period, during your period, after your period. Typically what you see with endometriosis however is that there is more of a deeper pain. It is often felt during sex. So particularly with any kind of deep penetrative type of sex a woman will often experience pain then. It can also be during if they’re just going to the toilet that can cause pain because there may be some tightness feeling in the abdominal area.
So, those are some of the most common symptoms, but not all women with endometriosis experience pain. So, this is where it can often be quite confusing. Now what I’ve noticed is that there are a lot of kind of what I call associated symptoms with endometriosis. Some of these are, you’ll probably pick them up with liver conditions or the liver sort of struggling. One of the common ones is estrogen dominance. So these are symptoms where essentially the body has too much estrogen and it doesn’t have the ability to flush it out effectively. There’s things like bloating. There’s having PMS type symptoms so being quite moody, maybe having outbreaks, having a shift in your digestive system just before your period or around that time. So some women experience more constipation. Some women experience more looser stools. A lot of the sort of associated symptoms like skin sensitivity, food sensitivity, having just a skin reactions like having breakouts a lot, particularly around the period times. Those kind of associated symptoms. I’ve also noticed thyroid conditions. Having like inflammatory responses in the body. So even something as simple as tight shoulders, particularly around the period time. Those are kind of associated symptoms.
Amy: So, I think that commonality between PCOS and endometriosis sort of lies in that estrogen dominance.
Melissa: Definitely. Yeah. The tricky part is that endometriosis is not just a hormone-based condition. This is where there’s a lot of information around estrogen dominance and the link between estrogen dominance and endometriosis. So, a lot of women go down the track of, “Okay. Well, I have estrogen dominance. Let me try and address that as a main focus.” So, this is where you get ideas around, “Ah, let’s go on the contraceptive pill,” like a progesterone only pill or, “Let’s take progesterone creams,” or even trying different hormone based treatments, all natural of course. But the focus is on hormone imbalance. Now, I don’t believe that endometriosis is solely a hormone imbalance base, but that is, to me, not the root cause of endometriosis. To me, that is a symptom. So though we address that, the deeper focus is on well, why is there a hormone imbalance to begin with? I believe it relates very closely to the liver and ultimately the liver’s inability to flush out those excess estrogens.
Amy: That makes a lot of sense.
Melissa: Yeah.
Amy: What about the role inflammation plays?
Melissa: Well, this is the thing, so the three areas that we focus on when we treat endometriosis naturally is hormone imbalance, obviously, is a factor. Then we look at inflammation as a factor and ultimately autoimmune. So, the autoimmune will obviously overlap with all of us. So inflammation in the body is going to cause estrogen to flare up as well. Obviously autoimmune is also going to reveal itself with an inflammatory response.
Now, there was a study done on Rhesus monkeys where they showed that monkeys given dioxin, which is a key ingredient in RoundUp, developed endometriosis. This study, to me, was really a huge eye opener and trigger point for saying, “Hang on a second, endometriosis is not just about hormones. There is a toxin contributor here and that toxin is ultimately thereby create that autoimmune response, which trickles down into inflammation and then hormone imbalance.”
Amy: Wow. That’s really fascinating. I mean, it kind of reminds me of the studies that have been done with women with PCOS where we had the elevated levels of BPA and PFOAs in our blood. It could be a contributor to the PCOS symptoms. So, there’s this environmental root cause as well.
Melissa: Oh, definitely. I have no doubt that a lot of the conditions that women experience these days is largely attributed to that.
Amy: Yeah. So, if you’re resonating with some of these symptoms, I know a lot of them sort of overlap PCOS, but if you’re having the pain, how do you get a diagnosis? I understand it’s pretty difficult to diagnosis endometriosis.
Melissa: It is very difficult to diagnosis and it’s a bit of a catch 22. I know that doc lab is looking at saliva test using biomarkers. I’m yet to look into the details of that fully to determine how effective that is. At this stage, the only 100% way of knowing is to have surgery. But to me that’s slightly contradictory because surgery brings with it inflammatory responses in the body. So, what you could inevitably be doing is actually triggering more of the endometriosis growth just by having the surgery without touching anything. There’s a lot of debate around surgery, type of surgery, done with endometriosis. It’s a lot of surgeons saying that excision surgery is the only form of surgery to have to have it removed believing that it is 100% effective. I have not seen that at all.
A woman comes to me, unfortunately, at the end of their journey, and I wish they would find me at the beginning of their journey, but they come to me at the end when they’ve exhausted all possibilities. They’ve had the excision surgery. They’ve had some of the most horrendous stories as I’m sure you’ve heard too. But if a woman comes to me and they say, “I’ve had excision surgery more than once,” I’m unfortunately going to be doubtful as to its effectiveness. I don’t know how these surgeons get these claims or where they get their data. Whether they follow up with patients afterwards or not, but my mind sight on that is not been that it is 100%.
I guess to me it’s also how you look at the body. To me just cutting things out isn’t resolving the reason why it developed in the first place. Yes, there’s a lot of discussion on, “Well, perhaps it’s a genetic component to it.” But that doesn’t explain why not every woman who has a sister or a mother, not all women have endometriosis. My sister doesn’t have it. I don’t know if you’ve looked at sort of work around genetics, but they can be activated or deactivated depending on how you treat your body. It’s about creating the right environment for that or against that. So, I believe if you’ve been exposed to toxins, you’ve perhaps not supported your body in the best way, then it creates an unpleasant environment and that’s where then that could be a trigger.
Obviously, these are all questionable things and I’ve heard so many different theories on endometriosis. There’s lots of factors that come into it. It’s not a single thing. It’s not yes, that’s definitely what causes it. There’s lots of layers to the condition, but I certainly believe there’s a huge link with liver health and endometriosis.
Amy: Yeah. I just think as your talking and I’m listening to you, there’s just so many parallels with PCOS and one thing that sort of popped in my mind in particular with these women that are having surgery, I think so many times as women we take what our doctor says like face value without doing our own investigation. We kind of hand over our power, and I know I did that early on in my journey. I was taking lots of different pharmaceutical drugs, including one of them was Actos, which now can cause bladder … It’s like black label for bladder cancer. I mean, I just took it because I just thought the doctor knows best. Sometimes I think that’s not always the case. I mean, it certainly can be, but I think when we hand over our power, we sort of become kind of a victim of the syndrome, the disease, whatever it may be. When we can kind of inform ourselves with podcasts and online information from sites like yours EndoEmpowered, then there’s so many things that we realize we can do that’s within our control. That’s what I’d like to talk about now. So, if somebody comes to you is really suffering with some of the symptoms that you mentioned, where do you start the healing process?
Melissa: Yeah, so the first thing I guess is looking at the mental side of it. There is so much shame around endometriosis. It’s a huge amount of shame. Women feeling dirty and they don’t want to talk about it. It’s amazing how many women I attract from the Indian community because I think they don’t talk about periods and they don’t talk about anything to do with your private parts. It’s just not something you talk about. So, one of the key things we offer is a support group where women can come in. They can share whatever they want. There’s no TMI. It’s a very supportive space. People don’t get shunned on if they ask a question about anything really. It’s a very welcome space. It’s taken a many years to get to that, to be honest. I mean, in the beginning we’d get all sorts of things that were not appropriate. You have to kind of check in on it and make sure it still falls in line with the whole idea behind EndoEmpowered.
So, what we aim to do is not to tell a woman what to do. I think that came out of my own sort of dislike of being told what to do. So even my program, it doesn’t tell women what to do. It’s here’s the information, here’s the research, here’s everything you need to know. Now you can go and decide if you agree with what I’ve shared with you, fabulous. Then I’m sure you’ll find it easy to implement, but if you don’t, it’s up to you whether you do it or not. So it’s quite a different approach to a lot of doctors and surgeons who almost have this kind of … We place this almost they must know everything. They’re the experts. I always say to women, “Well, you’re the expert of your own body. If something doesn’t feel right, whether it’s physically or whether it’s emotionally you just don’t feel right about having safer hysterectomies.” I get so many emails from women saying, “I’ve had enough. I don’t know what to do. I just want to have a hysterectomy.” A, it’s no guarantee because endometriosis spreads outside of the uterus. So having the uterus removed actually makes no sense. But secondly, it’s so drastic, and it’s such a huge part of being a woman.
Amy: Right.
Melissa: Yet, they feel so desperate. So, wanting to get rid of the pain, that they feel that there is their only option. I totally get that because I was there too in my 20s. I went to my surgeon and I said, “Just take it all out. I’ve had enough. I don’t want to deal with this anymore.” I felt so like I had no choice. I think that’s the key reason why I created EndoEmpowered is I want to show women that there is a choice. There is a way that you can look after your body that is in your control because I think for me, I felt so powerless all the time. I’d go to my doctor and I’d be like, “I’m in so much pain. What can you do?” He’d be like, “Well, there’s all these hormone treatments, but they have a bunch of side effects. So, it’s kind of a toss-up as to which side affects you want to deal with.” Or, “Oh, well. All I can give you is stronger pain killers.” I literally, I mean, I was like addicted to the things because sometimes I wasn’t even in pain. I would just take them to potentially prevent pain.
Amy: Yep.
Melissa: I got immune to them almost. They just didn’t have the same effect anymore because I was taking so many of them. I think that’s the thing with EndoEmpowered is that it’s about, “Okay. Well, have I considered cutting out gluten? Let me see if there’s any benefit to this, and see if it makes a difference.” So, that’s a simple example, but it’s like that is within your control. You can decide, “Okay. I’m going to not have bread for a month or cut out the pasta and all these things that I currently eat for a month and see if it makes a difference. At the end of that month, if I still feel pain and all those things, then okay, maybe it isn’t gluten.” But the opportunity is within our power to do so. It’s taking back that power and saying, “Well, I have full control of what I put in my mouth, and I can see how that reacts in my body. That is totally within our own power. That to me is super empowering. You’re not reliant on somebody else. You can decide what you can do for yourself.
Amy: Yeah. That’s my philosophy as well. I know I had a client that called PCOS this just one big science experiment. It does take a lot of experimenting with diet and lifestyle and supplements and even mindset. How do you view yourself and the syndrome? So, there’s so many things that can really move the needle, I think. So I’m just curious, if you don’t mind me asking, did you wind up getting the hysterectomy?
Melissa: No. No.
Amy: Okay.
Melissa: Well, he talked me out of it actually. He tried to talk me down because a lot of the doctors still believed that if you get pregnant than this is going to solve the problem. But I was in my 20s. I had no concept of getting pregnant at that stage. I was single and traveling the world. It wasn’t even an idea. So, he believed that if a woman got pregnant, it would fix everything. But, obviously, that is also not true. So, that’s another myth around endometriosis.
No, I carried on. I had seven surgeries in the end. By the seventh surgery, I just woke up afterwards and just went, “No more.”
Amy: Yeah.
Melissa: “My body can’t do anymore of this. I’ve had enough. I’m physically exhausted. Emotionally exhausted. I can’t keep treating my body this way.” Decided I had to do something different. It took very, very long time to actually implement everything, and that’s why I say to women, “It’s a journey. It’s not something that’s going to fix in a month. You’ve got to consider that your body’s been going through this for a number of years and you can’t expect it to turn over in a few months.” So yeah, but it took me seven years to finally get to a place where I don’t experience pain or symptoms of any sort with having endometriosis. I’ve had without physically having a surgery to validate that, I’ve had a number of experts validate that I don’t have endometriosis. It’d be silly for me to have a surgery to prove that. So, yeah.
Amy: So, I think same with PCOS that it’s … I call it sort of this healing continuum. There’s no kind of point in the future where I think you can really truly say “I’ve been healed” if you go revert back to your old lifestyle.
Melissa: Exactly.
Amy: You have to kind of continue this journey throughout your life. I’m thinking that it’s probably similar with endometriosis too.
Melissa: Oh, for sure. That’s why it’s called managing endometriosis. But the amount of women who have followed my technique, the REACH technique, which I’ll tap into shortly, they follow it, they implement it, and they don’t have pain anymore. I mean, it’s amazing to see the transformations of some of these women. I had one woman, she was a singer, and she had such severe pain. It was daily pain that would really inhibited what she could do with her life. She could do a few hours and then she would just be like, “Oh, no. I’m in too much pain. I can’t even focus. I can’t even sit on a plane. I have to go and lie down.” She followed my advice and now she’s done amazing things. She’s touring. She’s doing these huge performances.
It’s just like unveiling somebody’s abilities and unveiling the potential. It’s so beyond just, “Oh, I don’t want to have pain anymore.” Or, “I really want to get pregnant.” It’s so much more beyond that because it’s suddenly you don’t have this restriction in your life anymore. That’s the thing that I think women underestimate. You could just take some pain killers and yes, in some cases, doesn’t even work, like with me. But it’s not about that. It’s about this thing that sits in you that is this thing that’s always there that reminds you that I can’t do certain things. That to me was what I hated so much because I’m very much about freedom and being able to do anything. So, silly things like I couldn’t bounce. I couldn’t bounce a trampoline. It was such a simple thing that I couldn’t do it because the bouncing action tugs on adhesions with endometriosis. Adhesions stick to organs so you can imagine it’s like having something sticky between organs. Instead of them gliding over each other, they pull on each other. So when you’re bouncing, I mean, there’s kind of an extreme action of that. So, I’d be in pain for days afterwards because of that.
Now I’m like awesome. I just want to bounce for the sake of it because I can, not because I particularly … It’s kind of fun. But it’s more than I can. Things like running I couldn’t do. It’s the ability to do anything that you want and that to me is really the bigger picture of it.
Amy: Yeah. I mean, I completely agree with you. I think with the work that you do and the work that I do, I think it’s our calling and our purpose, right? I see it as then you’re helping women move beyond the pain and struggle of the PCOS, the endometriosis so they can go on and live their soul’s calling. It’s really …
So, let’s talk about your REACH technique. I’m dying to know how you were able to manage your endometriosis.
Melissa: Yes. So REACH is an acronym and it stands for replenish, which is about sort of what you eat, your diet, that sort of side. E is exercise. A is affirm, which is essentially affirming a belief in yourself. It’s the mind, body connection. C is cleanse. So getting rid of parasites, bacteria, toxins, all of that. Then H is help and support. So the way I started was really just on diet and my focus was completely on what they call the endo diet. I cut out so many foods to the point where I almost had nothing left to eat. That’s why I don’t like the word diet, and I don’t sort of greatly advocate the endo diet because to me it’s more about replenishing, and that why we call it replenish because it’s how do you replenish want’s missing in your body. With endometriosis, as I’m sure with PCOS, you notice certain nutrients of things that are deficient. Zinc would be common. Magnesium would be common. Selenium. These are some of the common ones with endometriosis probably is an overlap there.
So, the way you eat and I don’t like the word diet but essentially the diet that you have is focused on really replenishing your body with everything that it needs. So when you make food choices, it’s not just about avoiding things. There are certain foods that we avoid mainly because they inhibit the absorption of those good foods that you want. So things like gluten, things like dairy, they can have an inflammatory response for women. That response is going to be thereby affect your gut and your guy health, and thereby effect the ability to absorb the nutrients that you want from your food.
So, for myself, from the beginning, I had just focused on diet. That’s all I did. I had the most beautiful diet and there was nothing. I wouldn’t eat out. I didn’t go out to restaurants. I didn’t want to have anything that potentially would not fit into my diet. I think for me it was a little bit of a control thing. I’m a bit of a control freak. Almost to the point where it was like if I eat well, then I know my endo’s under control. That’s part of the mindset I had.
So initially I launched a program called Eat Endo Happy. I launched it to a small group of women, and I had some women run through it. What I noticed as these women were going through it, some of them obviously had some benefits, but a lot of them still had some other things going on. They weren’t exercising. They had a hugely stressful environments they were dealing with, and they were perhaps in toxic environments or they were bacterial or parasitical things inside the body that weren’t being addressed with that. So that’s where I had to almost go, “Okay. What I’m sharing isn’t helping these women. I need to reevaluate.” So, I actually took the program down and spent another six months looking into everything and researching things further and working with those women and working at what was going on. So that’s where the REACH technique was born because it was, “Okay. What we’re actually doing is creating the perfect environment for healing.”
The body isn’t … It’s not like you take a pill and that fixes the body. It’s actually more like you provide the perfect environment, so you give your body the best food, the best supplements, the best environment in terms of movements. So you’re moving your body. You’re getting blood flow. You’re getting oxygen. You’re thinking positively. You’re shifting the stress, altering the way you view stress, altering the triggers of stress. You’re getting rid of things that maybe inhibiting your health like there’s an overgrowth of some sort, there’s toxins in the body. So you’re creating this beautiful environment. Then your body goes, “Oh. This is so much easier. I can do my job easier. I’ve got all the tools I need as in the nutrients that I need. I’m not bombarded with all these toxins. I can now function better.” That’s when the body steps in and does the healing. So, it’s quite a different mindset shift, and I think a lot of my women who are in my program, they go, “Oh, I never thought of it like that.” Because oftentimes we go and we go, “I’m going to eat this food because I want this result,” but it’s not really like that. It’s not that sort of simple equation.
Amy: Well, it’s also sort of like a different way of looking at health. Cutting out the endometriosis, that’s not true healing. The reduction of pain and the symptoms are a result of your body coming back into balance.
Melissa: Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. That’s quite a mindset shift for a lot of women. Like myself, I mean, I was always under the belief of I have this problem. I’m going to take this pill and that’s going to solve my problem because that’s how we’re trained. You go to a doctor, you got a problem, they give you a pill, and then the problem goes away. I did this with women for a long time I focused solely on hormone imbalance because my belief was, “Well, my gyno said that hormone imbalance is a trigger for endometriosis. So he put me on the pill. I don’t want to be on the pill. So I’m going to find a natural alternative.” So, I went out and I researched a bunch of natural hormone treatments, and I went, “Okay. I’m just going to replace that.” I’m going to go, “Okay. I have a hormone imbalance. I’m going to take this hormone pill and then that should solve my endometriosis.” I did that for a long time.
My focus was so much on just diet and supplements in the beginning, and yes, I mean, I bet all women who manage to get things under control, they manage to support themselves through that, but I like to look deeper. That’s why I think you and I are so in sync because it’s like what’s going on with the digestive system? What’s going on with the liver? Why is your liver not able to flush out these hormones? We shouldn’t be relying on these things. Yes, they can help you through, and yes, they can help regulate your hormones. But the question still has to be there, why is that hormone imbalance there to begin with. That’s the questions I finally got to, to be honest, sort of three or four years into my journey. So, it does take time. So, yeah.
Amy: I’m just curious, is there a connection between fatty liver and endometriosis?
Melissa: I think there is. I know there’s definitely a liver connection, and I know that when we start looking at the liver and healing the liver and also emotionally. It’s interesting when you look at Chinese sort of approaches to medicine and the connections there with anger and liver and resentment and liver, it’s all related. That’s why the affirm part of the REACH technique needed to be in there because I underestimate how much emphasis the body … Like for me, my journey only the pain only really shifted. I mean, yes, I managed to get it down to sort of three out of 10, but I still had it. It was only when I started doing the emotional healing stuff. Getting rid of the beliefs that I had around myself and my abilities because those are stress triggers.
Like I’ll give you an example, I always had this belief that I need to work harder than everyone else. I need to do more than everyone else. I need to constantly people please. I didn’t see this in an obvious sense, but I had a job in advertising. There was a lot of young women in this company. I always felt the need to work later than everybody else. Looking back, I didn’t understand why that was. It was only once I uncovered some of the stuff that I realized it was because I didn’t believe I was enough just as I was. I needed to prove myself by working harder. This caused the stress because it was like you’ll never satisfy that if you have a belief that you’re not enough no matter what you do. You will never feel that what you done was enough. So that causes a tough stress in the body. So when you get rid of that belief that I’m not enough, well, suddenly that stress is no longer there. So this is why there’s a lot of stuff in the program on how to uncover that, but in a gentle way, not in a confrontational way because that doesn’t help. Makes you feel worse about yourself when you’re just harping on about all your stuff from your childhood and all of that.
So yeah, there is a huge emotional component. I mean, the amount of women who’ve had history of sexual abuse and sort of related to that in some way with endometriosis is quite high as well. Not to say all women have had that history, but I just noticed there was a lot of connection there with women not embracing womanly parts and all womanly nature or they creativity, being stumped by that or wanting to be more like man.
Amy: Oh, gosh. It sounds so similar to PCOS. I think it’s kind of that rejection of the feminine in a way.
Melissa: Definitely.
Amy: We need to do another podcast where we talk about that. I do think that there’s such a huge connection when you can start kind of healing, I call it embracing your Diva. There’s so much healing that can happen. I also just wanted to comment about what you said about Chinese medicine and the liver. I do think that in the western world we just don’t really make that connection or if you go to like your primary care, conventional practitioner and say, “I’m thinking about doing a liver detox,” they’ll sort of look at you like your crazy. I know mine has.
Melissa: Yeah.
Amy: We’re recording this where … I know you’re down under, but my half of the world, I see little shoots coming up out of the ground and it’s spring time. That’s sort of the time of the liver and to support your liver. I think that for women with PCOS too it’s so critical to love your livers up. We just don’t talk about that. So I’m glad you’re talking about that, Melissa.
Melissa: Yeah. To me it was a huge light bulb moment when I found Dr. Kabo. She’s an Australian GP, and she’s written a number of books. When I read her kind of symptoms around poor liver health and then I found all this information around family connection with they call them miasms in Indian Ayurvedic medicine.
Amy: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Melissa: Just realizing the whole family history, all the health issues in my family were all related to the liver. Sort of tracing all of those back. To me it was this huge kind of wow. I’ve found sort of everything in one go. Then working on the liver and supporting the liver and just noticing the huge shifts that it had for my health. That’s I think why … Yeah, I always like to dig deeper. It’s fascinating to discover how the body works and having gone back to study now as well where you study the liver, you study how it detoxifies and how everything works and how all these nutrients are components within that. If you are deficient in things like B12 and how that affects the ability for the liver to detoxify, you go, “Oh, hang on a second. I see why this one is important.”
Amy: Right. Right.
Well, we could go and talk. I feel like you’re just a kindred spirit, Melissa. But we’re running out of time. So I would love for you to just talk a little bit more about how women can work with you and how they can find you, where they can find you on social media, etc.
Melissa: Yeah. So, a woman can find me at endoempowered.com. We have a REACH Kickstarter program there where women who are wanting to implement the different components of the REACH technique can start using it. It’s a completely free program, and gives them some awesome recipes and things like that to get started. Then there is an option to join my program. So I’m in the process now of breaking the program up into modules. So, based on where you’re at in your journey, you can join the program in different parts. So, there is going to be a quiz where women can determine how strong their diet is because unfortunately some women come to me and they say, “Oh, I have the perfect diet,” and then once we uncover it, there’s some components that still need to be added in.
But essentially my program takes women through the REACH technique over a 12-month period. I’ve done that for a reason. It is not a quick six-week program where you just download a whole lot of information and get overwhelmed and potentially never implement everything. What we wanted to create was a way you could transform your life gradually, and a year from now, you no longer experience pain or symptoms with endometriosis. I’m sure that a lot of the overlap with PCOS would be the same. I’m sure that we share some of the approaches. But it guides you through everything step by step. There’s downloads. There’s videos. Every single week. There’s research to back everything and there’s a community and a space where you can share your journey.
We guarantee results. So, if there is shift in your pain or your symptoms with endometriosis, you get a complete refund because I believe in it so strongly, and I’ve seen the results. So, yeah.
Amy: That’s wonderful. What a great resource for women who are struggling with the pain of endometriosis. I’m just so grateful that you came on and shared your work with us.
Melissa: Yeah. I’m so grateful to share and that we also connected. It’s always wonderful when you find a kindred spirit who’s on the same mission as you and wanting to just change the lives of women out there.
Amy: Well, again, thank you for joining me, Melissa. Thank you everyone for listening. I look forward to being with you again soon.
Melissa: Thank you.
