640: Magdalena Wszelaki on Breast Issues, Hormones, and Finding Balance

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Katie: Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama Podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com and this episode is all about breast health, breast issues, hormones and finding balance. And I’m here with my friend Magdalena, who is the founder of Hormones Balance and of Wellena products, which are supplements made by women for women, and her online platform and products are dedicated to helping women balance hormones naturally. And I have known her for years. I’ve had her on before, and I will link to her first episode in the show notes as well.

But I always learn a lot from Magdalena, and this one is a topic I have not covered on the podcast until now, specifically focused on breast health. And she gives some very practical ways that we can support breast health and explains how our breast health is actually a window into other aspects of health as well, especially our hormones, and what certain issues can indicate how to keep a proactive pulse on breast health and hormone health in general, and so much more. We talk about everything from benign lumps and fibrocystic breasts to pain and swelling and more severe issues. She talks a lot about estrogen dominance, which was the topic of our first episode. She talks about oils and herbs that you can use in Lymphatic massage at home, and other ways to support the Lymphatic system to keep breasts healthy, and addressing the root cause of issues including estrogen dominance. We talk about diet and supplements that can be helpful, how hydration and lymphatic function come into play, and so much more. She shares some practical tips and her own experience, as well as her clinical experience in this really fact-packed episode. So, without any further wait, let’s join Magdalena. Magdalena, welcome. Thanks for being here.

Magdalena – Thank you. And this time around we’re doing video, so that’s a little bit new, but exciting.

Katie – It’s fun to get to see your face and we’re going to talk in depth about breast health and hormones today. But before we do, I have a fun fact about you. The first foreign language you spoke was Danish, and I just want to hear about this because that’s fascinating.

Magdalena – My father was a diplomat and his first assignment was Denmark. And we left there when I was five years old. And so I grew up there aged five to ten. The very first school I went to was actually a Russian school because we were part of a Communist block. So they forced us to go to a Russian school. But then when I found out that I wasn’t six years old, I was only five, they said, I have to go back home. And my mother didn’t want to have me at home. So they went to a Danish school, a public school, and it was kind of revolutionary because a lot of, you know, you were kind of supporting the Big Brother, which was Russian schools. And so my parents would consider kind of rebellious to do that. But, yeah, I was like the only kiddo coming from working like an intellectual family, because the rest of it were immigrants that Denmark was taking. It was very gracious to take a lot of immigrants from Afghanistan and India and from Turkey, and so it was a pretty rough start. But it was also like, we all learning the language and that was how I learned that as the first foreign language. In fact, when I get kind of tired or I guess if I’m a little bit tipsy, people ask me if I’m German or South African. So I think it’s the Danish influence.

Katie: That’s so funny and probably great for you life long, because I’ve heard if you learn another language before, I think like age eight or somewhere in there, it sort of pre primes your brain to be better at that kind of stuff your whole life.

Magdalena: You would know more about that than I do, right? With multilingual kids, right? Yeah.

Katie: Well, an area you are definitely also an expert in is all things related to women’s health and hormone health and breast health, which I’ve never talked about on this podcast and which is something that hasn’t been. I will admit super top of mind to me up until this point in my life. Just because I didn’t really think about it when I was younger. But I know it’s something to be aware of and I want to be proactive about as I get older. So to start off broad, I know there’s probably a lot of things that fit under the umbrella of breast issues, so maybe just kind of give us an overview of those and how common these things are.

Magdalena: Yeah, sure. So our breasts are, first of all, a huge indication of what is happening in our overall health in women, right. So whether it’s hormonal changes, like a lot of women, we start realizing that our breasts are potentially having a bit of a problem when it’s correlated with our periods, right? And so that’s like one type of hormonal changes or breast changes that happen because of hormonal changes. So we call it cyclical breast issues, right? And then you have the non cyclical, which means that there are some women who truly have health issues with their breast throughout their cycle or women who don’t have a cycle anymore could be going through a lot of breast changes as well.

So it’s super common and it’s common to a point where we almost dismiss it as saying it’s not a big deal, right? Meaning you go and see a doctor and you get an exam and it will say well, you’re just swelling. And even though your cup size goes from cup A to cup C in the course of four days and your swollen and it’s a lot of pain and you don’t want to be intimate and all that, they will say, well, that’s normal, right? Because everybody else is experiencing it.

What I’ve learned over the years is that as we have our cycles, there’s tremendous changes that happen, right. Our estrogen progesterone fluctuate, our FSH, LH, all of those hormones are fluctuating a lot. And so it’s not unusual for us to have a change in weight and mood and food cravings and even energetically how we show up, right. Whether we’re open to things or whether we want to kind of just hide in our cave and do our own things, which is normal. There’s a bit of a thin line between what’s normal and what’s not normal. Right. So the question is, can you feel any breast changes when with your cycle? Absolutely. Is it normal to go from cup A to cup C in the course of three or four days? And the answer is no. Is it normal that it’s so swollen that your breast is so swollen that you do not want to be sexual with someone? You can’t do sports, you’re going to put on a special bra.

This, even women who actually one of our formulators, which is kind of fun to work with her because we were experimenting with a lot of different oils and herbs with her. She could not put on a bra at all, even though she’s cup size C, she’s C cup because it’s just so painful and limiting for her. So is that normal? Absolutely not. And it can destroy the quality of life, but it’s also an indication there’s something bigger that’s going on. Right. And that’s really what we’re here to talk about. It’s like your breast is just yet another symptom or sign that there is a bigger thing at play. And I’ll just mention one more thing. Is that another thing that’s kind of normalized by our conventional allopathic doctors is when you find a lump on your breast, right. And so it’s like, yeah, whether it’s your choices to do a mammogram or you’re doing tomography, whether you’re doing a sonogram, and they go well, and there is a lump and it looks like it’s benign, and again, it’s dismissed as being it’s not a big deal.

And as we now know, breast lumps are even those benign ones are indication of estrogen dominance that’s going on in a woman’s body, which can then lead on to DNA damage that then can lead to breast cancer. Right. So a lot of times that lump at the time when it’s found it’s not a big deal, but if you continue having lumps for a very long time and as a clear indication of estrogen dominance, that can lead to more serious conditions like estrogenic cancer. So every reason to really start looking at your breast and understanding what your breasts are telling you when it starts happening, right from the beginning.

Katie: Yeah, I think that’s such an important point. If this is even if it’s considered benign by traditional medicine, it’s still a good clue of something that’s happening inside in the body, something our body is trying to tell us. And I also think, to your point, that distinction between common and normal is not made enough in traditional medicine. Just because something happens often does not mean that it’s, “normal”. And I’ve gotten that from doctors in the thyroid space before or when I had symptoms and I had just had a baby, I was told, like, oh, that’s normal because you’ve had a baby. And all those things.

I think I say this so often on here, but we are each our own primary health care provider at the end of the a day. Like, the responsibility lies with us. So anytime there’s something that can give us more information on what’s going on in our body that is awesome, even if it may be in the moment, doesn’t feel awesome or it’s not a comfortable symptom, it’s still awesome because we’re getting data about what’s going on in our body. And I know for me, the only time I’ve had drastic changes in my breasts was when I started breastfeeding, and they did go up multiple cup sizes in a day when my milk came in. But that’s about the extent of me having personal experience with any kind of rapid changes. And it makes me curious what causes these issues. I know I hear more and more from women who are experiencing things like fibrocystic breast or lumps or pain and swelling, like you mentioned. What’s causing that?

Magdalena: Yeah. So it’s multiple factors that play a big role here. I think the two main ones that we can name really, is inflammation and estrogen dominance. So let me talk about estrogen dominance first. Estrogen dominance is a condition where you either have too much estrogen as compared to progesterone or whatever estrogen that you have, the way you’re breaking down that estrogen into clean and dirty estrogens is unfavorable. Meaning you’re producing too many of those dirty estrogens. Or for those of you who are clinicians in here, it will be things like the antagonistic metabolites of estrogen, right?

And when that happens, estrogen in excess is basically very inflammatory. And so when a woman is estrogen dominant, a lot of times it’s not just breasts, but it’s also just overall ability of losing weight becomes a problem, especially around our hips and thighs. That’s where estrogen likes to deposit itself. And then there’s a whole host of other symptoms of estrogen dominance. And we did a podcast on that two or three years ago when my book came out. I remember you were really keen on wanting to talk about estrogen dominance and I thank you for that.

So estrogen is highly inflammatory, but the other thing that happens with the breast is that the highest number of receptors in the body for estrogen is an ovaries in the breast, right? So naturally, when you have too much of that estrogen and it goes into your breast when you have so many receptors and that estrogen is not a clean estrogen, it is a dirty kind of estrogen, or like I said, it’s not enough progesterone to offset it, it becomes highly inflammatory. And so what happens is in the breast, you have lobules, you have ducts, and those are like these canals. There’s a very rich lymphatic system in the breast which will come to it in just a second and that causes swelling. So basically all these passages swell up, right, with the presence of excess estrogen.

And that’s what kind of leads me to the second point, is that estrogen dominance causes the lymphatic system then to swell up in the breast as well. So think of the lymphatic system like a highway for us to get rid of like little trash cans, driving around trash trucks, driving around the body, evacuating rubbish or trash from our body, right? That’s what the lymphatic system overall is for. And in the breast, we have a lot of the lymphatic passages as well. So the swelling of that causes a lot of the water retention right, in the breast. So that’s when become really heavy, really swollen, really large.

So ultimately, those are the two main things. And the third one is just overall inflammation. For women who are inflamed because of it doesn’t have to be a hormones. That can be lifestyle choices such as addicted to caffeine, that are low on magnesium, for example, right? That also causes inflammatory responses generally in the body. And for some women, as you always say, everyone is a little different, right? And symptoms of inflammation can manifest. One person puts on weights and that a person gets horrible headaches and that person can’t sleep. For some women, especially, who are more susceptible to estrogen dominance as well, inflammation then manifests in the breast overall. So, yeah, those are the major three things. So inflammation, estrogen dominance, and stagnation of the lymphatic system.

Katie: And I know we’re going to get to go deep on the lymphatic aspect in a minute. And I will make sure to link to our first podcast episode in the show notes. So if you guys have not listened, highly recommend that episode as well. And I know we covered it in depth in that one, but can you just briefly touch on if someone knows they have estrogen dominance or now suspects that they do? What are some of the ways that we can help combat that? I know, like, for instance, from our past conversation, stress comes into play, magnesium comes into play. There’s a lot that comes into play, but would just be a quick overview of that.

Magdalena: Yeah. So let’s start off with symptoms. Anything from anyone who is struggling with terrible PMS, terrible periods, very heavy periods, scanty periods, absent periods, irregular periods. All of that can be due to estrogen dominance. Then you’re looking at things like reproductive organ health, right? So we talked about breast, but also fibroids, uterine polyps, the growth of those. Endometriosis, is largely fueled by the axis of estrogen and then how you look, right?

So, for example, I mentioned when you have too much fat stored in the thighs, in the hips and the butt. And women who just can’t lose that weight no matter how much they exercise, right? That’s highly estrogenic. So compare that to women who have a lot of fat around their store, a lot of fat around their abdomen. That tends to be a metabolic disorder, right? So, like, typically high blood sugar levels, high testosterone levels. Women with estrogen tend to be your proverbial pear shape who really struggle with their weight. And with that also come a lot of, like, mood swings, especially if you have mood swings and migraines, it’s correlated with your period. It could be highly, very much due to estrogen dominance infertility, miscarriages, super, super common. And then you’re talking about things like varicose veins. Like if you have a lot of varicose veins around on your face, on your legs, right, a little tiny cherry moles and that you might find around the body that can be also due to estrogen dominance.

So hair loss is another interesting one. Hair loss, most of the time, if it’s a hormonally driven, that thyroid is the first thing to inspect. But if your thyroid is perfectly fine and then using, you know, Dr. Izabella Wentz’s set of labs, not what your doctor told you, then you will see that it could be also due to estrogen dominance. So if the estrogen dominance is caused by low progesterone, then other symptoms will be things like insomnia, having a lot of anxiety, having memory lapses, a very common one.

So as you can see, there’s almost like, when I go down the list, a lot of times in a group of women, everybody starts going like, oh yeah, that’s me. There’s almost no women that we know of who wouldn’t experience that to some degree. Right. And I was just mentioning about because you asked, how do you know? So going by symptoms can be extremely telling. For some women, it’s like the proof is in the pudding. I need to see some labs in order to believe that that is the problem. The one type of lab you don’t want to go with is blood work, which a doctor might have ordered.

And Katie, when I was in private practice, I cannot tell you how many women will walk in and say, my hormones are perfectly fine. Right. Then they show me the blood work. And it was never accounted for, like, where were you in your cycle when you did it and such. And so the most reliable form of really understanding your hormones is going to be doing DUTCH tests, which is a urine test. Saliva is probably a pretty far second best, but that’s going to show you a lot more accurate numbers of where you are with your estrogen progesterone and how you’re breaking down estrogen.

Katie: That makes sense. But it does sound like for women, where the cost would be a reason they couldn’t do a lot of lab testing, the symptoms can be a really good insight. And I know that many of the things you recommended in that episode are also just generally supportive of good health, so they would be safe to try even if a person wasn’t going to go get full lab testing. Like, all of your advice in there was so solid that I feel like if you even suspect you have these problems, maybe start there with the foundational things before you start spending a lot of money on testing and get those foundational things in place. And then if you need to, then find a practitioner, do testing and work with them. But it seems like there is a lot that’s within our control if we start paying attention to our own bodies.

Magdalena: Exactly. And most people, most people, you know, I would say, like, don’t ignore your symptoms because a lot of times you’d be like, my mom had always lumpy breasts and have problems with her gall bladder. I forgot about gallbladder is another one. When you have chronic problems with your gall bladder, it could be also because of estrogen dominance. Thyroid nodules is another one. Right. And then the biggest one that I forgot to mention is estrogenic cancer. So breast cancer, ovarian cancer, uterine cancer, lung cancer in non-smokers. And most of them are estrogenic cancers. So most women who are like, who have issues with estrogen dominance is typically not one symptom. It typically is a host of symptoms anyway for every good reason just not to ignore it. For sure.

Katie: That makes sense. And it lines up with I had Dr. Thomas Seyfried on the podcast talking about the cancer, the metabolic disease link and how there’s like, a metabolic component there in a lot of cancers, which makes sense with these as well, that estrogen could come into play in a metabolic way because we know from that first episode how much it impacts so many systems within the body.

And you also mentioned the lymphatic side. And I feel like this side is not talked about hardly at all. And I’m excited to learn from you on this. The extent of my knowledge and anecdotal experience here is reading that, for instance, like, really tight restrictive clothing isn’t ideal long term. And so I sort of switched away from that and into non-restrictive, non-underwire. And I noticed I actually saw changes in my breast. They were perkier without the support. But that’s about the extent of my personal experience. So maybe explain to us from the lymphatic side what’s happening and how to optimize there.

Magdalena: Yeah. So as we know, the lymphatic system is all about getting the trash out of the body, right? And look, even just by you sitting on a chair right now doing this, this is already moving your lymphatic system. Let me just get up and show you something else. We are standing in the line for shopping and stuff and you’re like, standing and waiting. Instead of just going from one leg to another, all you have to do is just stand up on your tiptoes and just do this and just drop. Right? It’s a great way of just activating the lymphatic system. And you don’t have to have a rebounder. I mean, if you have a rebounder, gosh, that’s amazing. That’s already another step in that direction.

Now, for some women, just doing an overall lymphatic drainage like that or going and getting, for example, a lymphatic drainage massage can be a wonderful way of opening everything up. And like, after surgeries, like when you have a lot of swelling in different parts of the body, I mean, this really gets everything going. But for some women, that’s just not enough. And so there’s a method that I have learned from a doctor in Maryland, Dr. Rind, who invented this method and shows how massaging your breast through a thermogram. He will do that before and after in a thermogram, right? It will show a lot of redness and a lot of oranges, orange rate, which is like highly inflamed breast, as long as it’s not cancer or it’s not something serious. But if it’s just purely inflammation just by massaging your breast, how much of that relief happens? And doing the scan one more time after, and it checks everything returns to being green, which is the healthy color of a tissue we should have in the breast, right? So sometimes for some women, paying a little bit of attention to massaging your breast can be really helpful. And I’ll show you the method and then let’s talk also about what kind of oils and herbs you can do too, you can infuse it yourself. You can get it from online, you can get it from us, whatever is your choice just to even amplify the massage effect even further. Do you want me to start with the massage?

Katie: Yeah, let’s start there.

Magdalena: Okay. So I’m going to explain it like as if some of you are watching us online. Some of them you can see the video, others, you’re just listening to it. So I’ll do it in a way that everybody will benefit from that. So the idea is that you can massage your breast. You can do that first thing in the morning. You can do it while you’re taking a shower. It doesn’t really matter. The idea is that you put your so I’m lifting up my left hand. I’m putting it behind my head. If you have a problem with your shoulder and you can’t raise it, just raise your hand as far up as you can, right? And if you do that, think of your clavicle area. This is going to be your exit site. This is where we’re going to be massaging the breast so that we want all the gunk to be going out that way. All right?

Where we’re going to start is from the nipple. I’m pointing at 12:00 and I’m using my right hand and I’m using the three fingers from my pointing finger to my ring finger. And then 12:00 from the nipple. And gently you want to massage your breast up towards the clavicle, right? And then we’re going to move on to 11:00. We do exactly the same thing. Now in terms of pressure, imagine like if under your skin you just had a whole bunch of honey and you want to move that honey up, right? So it’s not too hard, but it’s not too soft either. So just imagine it is the honey.

And then we’re going to, you know and then I’m moving over to 09:00, right? And so on and so forth. When you come down to the bottom of your of your nipple, you want to go down the breast and then bring it up over to the other side. So I’m like closer to your armpit and then again towards the clavicle, right? And then you continue doing that. It literally should take you about two minutes to finish massaging your breast. You do exactly the same thing with your right hand up, using your left palm to massage your breast. You can do that if you suddenly develop pain and you want to do it quickly. You can do it over the clothes, just the way I did it.

Some women love to do it in the shower, so I personally don’t. But you can perfectly well do it in shower because you are nice and slippery. Everything is moving. Make sure you’re using some nice clean soap, like castile soap, and nothing synthetic, right? This is like one area you definitely want to be putting all these horrible chemicals on. But my favorite is to really use specific oils to really not just massage the breast, but also give the breast like some extra nutrition and movement.

So a couple of options here is, let me start off with the first oil, and that is oil that’s infused with poke root. Poke root has been used in herbal medicine for generations. And a lot of wise women and midwives will use it for mastalgia, for mastitis, right? So inflammation or infection on the breast. It’s a wonderful herb. It’s one of those herbs that if you go to PubMed, there is no much research on it at all, right? But at the same time, we also didn’t have much research about meditation or yoga 20 years ago. And now everybody is like, just because we can put somebody into an MRI and show what’s happening now it’s a legit intervention, right, or support for health. So don’t dismiss poke root. It’s been used for generations and women had incredible results with poke root.

For those of you who are in the south, you might know poke salad, right? And so it’s actually kind of toxic unless you wash it many times. But this is the root of the plant that gets excavated in fall and that’s when it’s at its prime and it’s got a lot of nutrients in it. And then we infuse it into an oil. So if you just go on online, there’s videos that show you how to do that. You can also use dried poke root so you can get it from like Mountain Rose and then infuse it yourself in an oil for like 24 hours at a low temperature, right? That’s already a really great gain that way. If you are lucky enough to have fresh root in this fall, then go in to get out and just do it yourself. It feels like very special when you do that.

So poke root has got incredible anti-inflammatory activities. And poke somehow, herbs have this intelligence of really having incredible affinity towards a lot of times towards specific organs. When it comes to poke root, it’s specifically a reproductive organs that poke really works hard on. And so you can even use the same oil. If you’re having terrible PMS, you could go have fibroids. In fact, I’m working on a fibroid formula now, and we’re going to be using poke as well for reducing fibroids. And so if you’re having very heavy bleeding, right, it’s a wonderful herb just to apply on your abdomen. You can infuse it into any kind of oil. But there’s sunflower oil, olive oil, doesn’t really matter as long as it’s not, a nice organic oil, right? And you massage it exactly the way I described. And if you have no time, no big deal whatsoever, just grab a little bit, a tablespoon or so on each breast, put it on. The only thing with oil that takes time to absorb, right. So you might need to let it sit there for a few minutes before you wipe it off and you put on your clothes on and start the day.

Another oil that is amazing and many of you might have it actually in your kitchen, and you can start it tomorrow, is if you have evening primrose oil that’s got gamolenic acid in it, right. It comes in a capsule. It’s always obviously oil based, right? And so all you have to do is just poke the capsule with a knife, open it up. You might need a capsule on each side. And that’s another one. The gamolenic acid works wonders on the prostaglandins that are inflammatory prostaglandins. So it calms down the pain by working on the inflammatory prostaglandins. And then it upregulates the protective pain killing prostaglandins. That’s pretty amazing oil as well.

One more thing I want to mention is, speaking of external application, is using St. John’s Wort. So let’s not freak out. St. John’s Wort taken internally can interfere with a lot of medications. That’s true. And the kind of is also goes to say, like how powerful herbal medicine can be, right, that it can interfere with your SSRIs and a whole host of different, so I’m not talking here about internal application. We’re talking about external application, which will not interfere with any drugs you’re taking. And so infusing St. John’s Wort, which is a total weed, you have passed by it many times, probably on many of your walks and hikes. You can again, same thing. You can buy it from an herbal store and infuse it yourself.

And there’s something so magical about St. John’s Wort, especially in combination with poke root. It just almost feels like your whole breast just go, thank goodness, and then everything just calms down. St. John’s Wort is also the sunshine herb, right? It grows in very sunny, bright areas, and so it kind of creates the sense of lightness and relief of the breast. I can’t tell you, Katie, how spectacular it is, especially when you apply it. We were working on the cream formula. We were doing one cream at a time or one oil at a time, one herb at a time, just to see it’s efficacy, right? It is just so wonderful just to see how effective it can be. So the cream thing, it gives you like a quick relief, right? And you can do this on a daily basis and let the pain subside. You might realize that after one month of doing that, when you open up your lymphatic system, you have these herbs that are really working on the inflammation in the breast. You might find actually a lot of relief and you don’t need to use the cream anymore.

The thing that we have found is that if you don’t address the root cause of the problem, it will come back. So two months later, three months later, your breast might be like, the lump might come back. One really clever thing to do is to focus on really cleaning up your diet. So going in an anti-inflammatory diet, getting rid of the gluten, dairy, reducing sugar, caffeine, there are studies even showing how caffeine contributes towards fibrocystic breast. You mentioned magnesium. Upping your magnesium to a point that you have loose bowel and then back off because that’s, you know, somebody who has got sufficient magnesium levels might only need to take maybe 200 – 300 milligrams of magnesium. Somebody who’s really deficient might need to take as much as 1400 before she gets a bowel movement, right, or lose stool because you’re so depleted.

So your breasts love magnesium. Magnesium is going to help your liver tremendously in breaking out estrogen. So that’s going to be tremendous help. But also, let’s not forget the three supplements that I love in our practice that you can introduce to really help your body break estrogens in a positive way is using DIM, using sulforaphane, right, and using calcium D-glucarate. In fact, let me share with you, like, a super quick story because a lot of people know about DIM. DIM has been like, given the name of the being the estrogen buster, right?

So everybody’s like, oh, I’m going to take DIM when I’ve got breast problems, right? And doctors who don’t really understand the full story behind how estrogens get broken down will put patients on DIM. And then a lot of times women feel a benefit, like for the first two, three weeks, maybe a month. And then after that, they kind of start getting negative results and they feel like the breasts are getting worse, the period is getting worse, the moods are really compromised.

And so the reason when it happens is because estrogen gets metabolized in three phases. The first two are in the liver. The third one is basically pooping it out. So your digestion has to be fairly well working, right? So you’re getting rid of things. But let’s start off with the liver. So you have phase one liver detoxification. Phase two liver detoxification. DIM upregulates the first one. So by taking DIM, you just open up the flood gates and then you’re just passing on this flood over to phase two. But if phase two is not supported properly with the proper binders, right, and nutrients, that’s when a lot of the symptoms start coming up, when women start feeling terrible. So in order to support phase two, you could look at additional things like sulforaphane, which helps with the sulfation pathway, and calcium D-glucarate, which is very underestimated, but end is very powerful.

I’m going to give you a super quick story. I have a girlfriend who is an herbalist here in Colorado. She’s also a huge sportsman. She’s a skier and a climber. And so out of like two weeks out of a month, her breasts would be so engorged. She will go from cup A to cup D, literally. It would be so engorged. There’s just no way of doing any sports. Doesn’t want to be intimate. Horrible mood. Right? And because she also has a couple of autoimmune diseases, so she’s got her diet dialed in. You know, she’s doing AIP. She’s, like, religiously avoiding gluten and dairy and all that stuff, right? Way beyond that as well. And she’s gone to so many different doctors trying to figure out what’s causing that enlargement of her breast, and she could not find answers. And it was literally we went on a hike, and I was just, like, very casually going like, what about calcium D-glucarate? And she’s like, calcium what? And it’s not the one for the bones, because a lot of people think it’s for the bones. It’s not. It’s the glucuronic acid that it just happens to be attached to the calcium molecule. And she’s like, no, I’ve never heard of them. She’s been on NAC and rose vascular and sulfuricane. Like, tons of magnesium can do nothing, right? Won’t move the needle.

And I still have that text message from her. She would text me, like, two weeks later when it happened again, and she’s like, Dude, four days, and, like, my breasts are back to normal. And it was just that one compound. It was just that one detoxification pathway for her, the glucuronidation pathway in the liver. They just needed some support, needed that binder, right? And that’s also the pathway where estrogen also gets metabolized, gets broken up, right? And so it was just one supplement that literally changed her life. So it’s so fascinating, right? Like, we all have a little bit different. So what I’m trying to say is, supporting your body and breaking down estrogen is going to give you the long term effect and probably is going to get rid of a lot of other symptoms you’re struggling with that we talked about earlier that are estrogen dominant.

Katie: Yeah, I’ve experimented with calcium D-glucarate a little bit. I didn’t have anything acute. I was just curious to try it for it. But I know people also use it for mold detoxification, and it seems to really help that pathway for a lot of reasons. So that’s a great anecdotal story. And maybe someone who’s having a similar experience, that’s something they can try, that might have a really big benefit.

Magdalena: Another thing about calcium D-glucarate, I’m glad you kind of reminds me also, do take it away from your medication. So, like, if you take any thyroid meds, any kind of SSRIs, whatever meds, because if you had a situation where we first introduced it to our community, people started taking it, and you’re like, my antidepressants are no longer working. You’re like, oh, yeah, 4 hours away. And that is really powerful.

And also for people who have gone through I actually you know how I found out about calcium D-glucarate? It was from our colleagues who are ER docs and so emergency room physicians, because when people get that kind of treatment, they are just bombarded with all these, whether it’s antibiotics and anesthesia. I mean, there are just so much of drugs being pumped into the body for a person to survive. But afterwards they actually use, functional docs, use calcium D-glucarate to detoxify people after being going through surgeries. So that’s another really cool application. But always remember, four hours away from your meds.

Katie: Good to know. Important caveat. And just to recap, it sounds like for people who have a rebounder, which is like a mini trampoline or a trampoline, that’s a great just movement to work into our day. I would guess. This is also why another check in the box for why walking is great, because you’re getting that same sort of movement and we’re just not walking very much in today’s world, unfortunately. Same thing with vibration plates. Anything that’s causing that lymphatic movement, which doesn’t have to be running, it doesn’t have to be high intensity exercise, it seems like those gentle movements are actually better.

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And I love the lymphatic aspect as well because I feel like this has become so trendy for people doing lymphatic massage on their face and how drastically their face looks differently when they start really incorporating that. So it makes sense that it would be useful here as well. I just feel like nobody’s talking about this other than you. So I love that we got to have that conversation. And it seems like also a very low risk, potentially high reward thing that women can just add to their routine that could have some really profound beneficial effects.

And I love also that you brought up the herbs that can be used because I see people talking about like, rosemary oil and head lymphatic massage and hair growth. And I love any time we can use these herbs that seems like our ancestors have known for such a long time. It’s funny when they go TikTok trendy, but it’s like our grandparents and great grandparents have known this forever. And I love that we’re finally getting back to some of this wisdom.

Magdalena: Yeah, totally.

Katie: Also, it’s like a little bit of a deviation, but I’m guessing we’re going to get questions about it because you mentioned the terms both mammograms and thermography. And I would love for you to just share your opinion on those. And if either of those is valuable in certain ways for keeping an eye on problems like this, or if women who just want to have a baseline of breast health to make sure things are good, what is a good way to go about that testing?

Magdalena: Yeah, that’s such an important question, right? I’m a big fan of first of all, let me just say this because these wars between no mammogram, no thermogram, here’s an interesting thing. There are apples and oranges. It’s not interchangeable. They have a completely different purpose. Right? So if you’re proactive about your breast health because by the way, your thermogram you can do it all the way from your chin down to your abdomen. And it’s not just the breast, so any inflammation is going to get picked up, including thyroid issues, including anything in your abdomen. So thermography out of thermography from a perspective of prevention, right? Because it will show you changes in the color way before it becomes a problem and where a mammogram is going to show you when the problem is already there, right? So a very different application. It’s not one or the other. To me, a mammogram, it’s like doing a mammogram. It’s like, well, you already have a problem. What have you done about it to prevent it in the first place, right?

And that’s where thermography comes in. If I had a high-suspect lump on my breast, right? And given the history of my family, which is I have a lot of estrogenic cancers and death in my family on both sides, right? So I’m very primed on being in trouble. So I have to watch these things. If I had a lump that wasn’t going away and was showing certain symptoms that this is something isn’t right, I will definitely go and get a mammogram done. But all this time till now, I’ve been doing thermography and here’s the thing, I just want to also a couple of things people need to know about thermography. And I apologize if you already covered that on your podcast, but not all thermography is the same. So if you go into a place that does Botox and enhancements and this and that is more of a beauty center. And also, by the way, you can get a thermography done, most likely, it’s not going to be a very credible place. So you’re going to pick a thermography place where I cannot remember the resolution right now, but if folks go on my website, hormonesbalance.com, there is a thermography. There’s a whole interview I did with a doctor who’s a thermography DO osteopath. The resolution is that you can call ahead of time and ask them what is the kind of resolution they are using.

One dead giveaway is that you want to have color, but you also want to have black and white contrast. And that’s something that cheap places that are not serious about it, use inferior quality cameras would not give you the black and white. The black and white, by the way, Katie, is fascinating because when I worked with Dr. Rind to just to get a really better understanding of thermography, he was showing me pictures of somebody who had coffee. He called it the coffee test. Had a cup of coffee and then had a tomogram done, thermography done in black and white. And she looked like a panther. She looked like a tiger, rather like patches everywhere, right? And that’s one of the signs that you actually estrogen dominant. And then he waited for a couple of hours, he shot that again, and the body was now clear. So it’s really fascinating how caffeine as an example can be a big contributing factor. So quality resolution matters. Who is the practitioner, who is doing an interpretation is really important. The person is really knowledgeable. So you really are getting a solid reading and then you know you can really trust it. I think that part of the reason why there’s criticism of thermography of missing things and being sort of a pseudoscience and stuff is because it is done by, like I said, like Botox centers and they just don’t have the right technology for it and the right people to interpret the results.

Katie: Very important to know. And I’m curious, you mentioned some of the herbs in combination with the lymphatic drainage and calcium d-gluconate as a supplement. Are there any other good general dietary or supplement principles that women can know that are either just generally protective or acutely helpful if they’re having an issue?

Magdalena: Yeah, definitely. One of the big things is your hydration, right? It’s a huge thing that your lymphatic system needs that because it’s like literally like your Venice of your body. There is a couple of herbs also. One is clovers, sorry, cleavers is one of them. Really wonderful one. They don’t taste horrible at all. In summer you learn how to get them. You can also buy dried cleavers and then do a tea that’s your typical lymphatic tea. One of the women in our community had a double mastectomy preventatively and she had so much swelling around her breast she started drinking cleaver tea and a lot of the lymphatic drainage started happening right after that.

What we’re using in my practice and in our supplements that specifically for breast health and lymphatic is red root, which is a slight it works in the liver, but it also is a very gentle lymphatic mover. So red root is another you can also look at into getting a tincture if that is an issue and it’s also not, forget that especially like if you have a lot of problems, let’s say after surgery or women who just have a lot of issues with their breasts and things still aren’t moving. Doing castor oil packs on your breast are just a wonderful way of moving the lymphatic system there as well. So yeah, so just so you know, just simple solutions. Water, address your estrogen dominance, red roots, cleavers and castor oil packs.

Katie: Yeah. And I’ll make sure we link to your website because I know you have many more resources along those lines as well. But I feel like these are all just really helpful tools for women to know. And I also always encourage women to go back to the foundational basics too. And I know we’ve talked about these, at least in person, if not on the record before, but the free things that are foundational habits. I’m so glad you mentioned hydration. I’ve actually had multiple podcasts in the last two weeks where they talked about the importance of hydration from an electrical standpoint of the body and how the body is electric and without hydration and electrolytes, it doesn’t function properly and on the cellular level and detoxification and lymphatic and sleep and how intricately all those things are connected.

And so I always encourage people always start off with the foundational. Get morning sunlight for the sake of your hormones and your sleep cycle, get enough water and electrolytes in your diet, try to optimize your sleep and then anything else you do in addition, it’s going to be so much more effective because you’re supporting those natural things in the body. I also know we could have led with this, but I know you also have a personal story with breast issues, and I would love if you would talk a little of your personal experience and also tell everybody about Happy Sisters and what that is.

Magdalena: Yeah, let me put it this way. We always remember, I think a lot of women remember finding their own breast lump, right. Just the way we remember, like, when 9/11 happened, you know exactly where you were, right? When Princess Diana, if you follow the whole royal thing, when she died, when you heard about it, most people remember exactly the time and place and what it felt like, right, and I feel like for women, it’s the same thing. It’s like when you find your breast lump for the first time, it’s terrifying, right, because then it’s like the whole you go on the whole spin of, is it cancer? How do I get it diagnosed? And then you get the whole diagnostic decisions you need to make. If you call the hospital and your regular doc, they’ll make you sound like, if you don’t get a mammogram tomorrow, you’re going to die in a couple of weeks, right, and the pressure is on.

And then for some women, like, for me, too, there was like a big thing of guilt, of like, oh, is it all the all the smoking that I did and all the whatever stupid things that I was doing when I was younger and shame and was like, what’s wrong with me? And I’m taking care of myself, and here I am. So it’s a hugely emotional affair for a woman to find something on her breast, right? And we have thought to one of the things that I think is such a disconnect is like, the only time we learn how to touch our breast is to look for trouble, right? It’s like to look for that lump if I have one. But we’ve never done anything to kind of, like, do something because you go for a massage to feel good, right. You don’t go for a massage because you already have a problem for most of us. So why not just learn how to massage your breasts as a kind of source of pleasure, but also as a source of prevention and love that you’re giving the one organ that is just so important for us as women. So for me, there’s always been a huge it’s a very fear-based, it was, I should say, a fear based conversation around lumpy breasts, finding a lump on the breast or anything, estrogenic, you know, because both my aunts on both sides of my family have passed away from my aunt just passed away six months ago from uterine cancer. On my mother’s side, it was all about breast cancers, right?

And so it turns out when I have my DNA genetic testing done, they’re like, oh, yeah, you are really bad estrogen metabolizer. And that kind of explains if I was to go to Italy or Spain or Portugal and spend, like, a couple of weeks to three weeks, I’m not going to lie. I’m just going to be like, okay, I’m going to have more wine. I’m going to have some really great coffee, and there’s tiramisu here and there. And suddenly things start coming into my life that I typically don’t do. I end up with the worst period, right? And then I end up with lumpy breasts and lumps on my breast, right? For me, it’s always been a very fear-based topic until I started doing a lot of things around it. And now I have this thing where it’s like, okay, I’ve covered a lot of my bases. Maybe not everything, but a lot of my bases, and I’m doing what I can to minimize the risk. And so now it’s more coming from a place of empowerment and confidence rather than be if I find something, something suddenly hurts.

I haven’t found a lump, actually, in years, but I had a shooting pain here the other day, and I was just like, there’s a moment of fear, right, and paralysis, but then I just do what I need to do. Things like apply magnesium, apply the oils that we have, apply Happy Sisters, the cream that we formulated. And it’s just like everything just comes down in the back to. So I think it’s just really moving from a place of fear to moving to a place of empowerment. It’s like, instead of fearing, I feel like fear can be really great, and anger can be a really good energy to push us forward, to take certain actions and steps, right? As long as we don’t stay in a place of anger and fear for a long time. For me, that was the reason why we formulated Happy Sisters. So I can take it, and a lot of other women can take it. So you don’t hear yourself say, oh, yeah, my mom died of breast cancer. My sister has lost her uterus. Right. My aunt doesn’t have a gall bladder, and they’re also estrogenic, and it runs in the family. It doesn’t run in the family. You’re just predisposed to it, right? But there’s so many things you can do with the lifestyle changes and then adding a couple of things on top of that is prevention. And you’re going to be in a really good place, including just feeling really good about yourself and your choices.

Katie: Yeah. And I think that advice ripples out into every aspect of health and toward our mindset, really, in that, like you said, those can be great motivators. But also if we can then move beyond that and come from a place of self love and respect for our bodies and love for our bodies, we see this even with women in the diet culture. Like if we can break that that deprivation or that fear mindset when it comes to any aspect of our bodies, whether it’s what we eat or how we’re taking care of them and moving to that place of love, it’s just going to be a much more powerful response in our body as well. And it’s coming from a healthier place. But also, those can be a good motivator, and they aren’t bad in and of themselves. It’s just like you said, not getting stuck there either.

Magdalena: Yeah. Just moving on to it. And for me, moving forward with this was formulating, like you mentioned, Happy Sisters. That is basically a kit that contains a supplement. And it’s got the cream. So let me just talk about the cream. One of the cool things about the cream is that it took us the longest time to formulate it. And you know, Katie, because you formulate your own products, this can be a two year process sometimes it’s got this nice pinkish color hue to it.

And the cool thing about it is that one of my biggest briefs for the formulator is to have all this, like, we have castor oil in here and all the herbs that I talked about, we have GLA for gamalinic acid. We don’t use India primrose oil, but we use another one from borracho seed, which is even better for GLA. And St. John’s Wort, and Nigella sativa, which is black cumin oil in here. Right. So just some really wonderful and it smells divine. And one of the risk was that it has to absorb within less than five minutes. So the whole purpose was that you put it on and if you want to go to sleep, you’re not going to be like having oil all over or if you were off to start your day, you can put on the bra. In fact, when I’m touching this now, it’s almost gone. And then you could put on your bra and then start the day really quickly.

And the supplement, when the supplement was formulated, therefore, it contains all DIM, sulforaphane, calcium D-glucarate, has got tons of magnesium. It’s got red root to move your lymphatic system. It’s got andrographis here as well. We have found that andrographis actually helps you to break estrogens as well. It’s got red clover, which is women’s tonic. It also helps with estrogen. So quick relief from a cream. And for the supplement is just, like, more of address the root cause of the issue so that it helps your body metabolize estrogen better. And it does come with, like, a little spendy. So it’s like a little tent. You can put this together, put it on the bathroom, on the stands so you can learn how to massage your breast. You do this three or four times and you can throw this away, right, or gift it to someone. Yeah. And then it comes with this cool booklet so that tells you what every herb is and why we used it. I just want to show you one graphic because I think it’s kind of, my team came up with this idea. It’s got all sorts of different boobs, and it says here, we’ve made Happy Sisters for all sorts of sisters.

Katie: I love that. And I’ll make sure those are linked in the show notes as well. For all of you guys listening on the go, everything along with the notes I’ve been taking are at wellnessmama.fm. You can find it there if you are walking, exercising, or driving while you’re listening. And a couple of last questions I’d love to ask at the end of interviews. The first being if there is a book or number of books that have profoundly impacted your life, and if so, what they are and why.

Magdalena: Yeah, gosh, I should have prepared better for this. I forgot to prepare for this one, to be perfectly honest with you. I think there was one that it was actually, strangely enough,
it’s a business book that I read in my early 20s, but somehow had an impact on me till today. And it’s called, “What They Don’t Teach You at a Harvard Business School”. And one of the things that it was written by a guy who basically created the whole sports marketing thing. But the point of it was that I think one of the things that resonated with me and stayed with me forever is what he said, that luck doesn’t happen. And I feel like with health, it’s like most of us, unless you have, like, super strong genes and stuff and nothing will touch you, the whole point was that luck doesn’t happen. You create luck for yourself.

And the reason why he said that is because it’s like you listening to this podcast, right, or following Katie’s work or going to some kind of a women’s gathering, like you’re exposing yourself to more information and opportunities to really help yourself. And this really applies to anything in life, right? Because you go out there and you network with people and you are friendly towards people and you’re helping other people and you’re kind, right? And then suddenly people come to you and they imagine, like, you lose your job and suddenly all these opportunities show up. Right. And it doesn’t come from anywhere. It just comes from the fact that we really create these opportunities for ourselves and we end up saying it was just luck. The truth is that we actually set it all up. So that was always something that stayed with me.

Katie: I love that. And along that line of thinking, is any parting advice for the listeners today that could be related to everything we’ve talked about or just entirely unrelated life advice?

Magdalena: Yeah. So I would say your breast that’s speaking, if your breasts are in pain, they’re swollen, you’ve got a history of lumps. Listen to that. It’s like your breast is saying to you, I need your help. We need your help, your sisters need your help, and do something about it. And the chances are not only your breasts are going to feel better, but a lot of other things in your life that’s going to start feeling so much better.

Katie: Awesome. Well, Magdalena, thank you so much for your time today. I know I learned a lot. I’m excited to keep trying your products and to implement some of these things that we talked about today. And I’m guessing lots of women listening are taking notes and also going to do the same. So thank you so much for being here.

Magdalena: I thank you so much for just creating so much awareness about this issue that is not that is so common, but it’s not normal.

Katie: Yes, to loop right back to the beginning. Common but not normal. And thank you for working to change it. And thanks, as always, to all of you for listening and sharing your most valuable resources, your time, your energy and your attention with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did and I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of The Wellness Mama Podcast.
If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.