I’m referring, of course, to the carnival/arcade game where robotic moles pop up from holes all over a game board, and you get points if you can hit the moles before they hide back in their holes again.

It’s kind of hard to hit them, and no matter what you do, more of them keep popping up again until your time is up.

Is there a way to win the Whack-A-Mole game so no more moles pop up?

Nope.

Sometimes, we treat our health and symptoms like the Whack-A-Mole game. Headache? BAM! Ibuprofen. Anxiety? BAM! Alcohol or benzodiazapines, like valium. Depression? BAM! Anti-depressants like SSRI’s. How about hormone problems? BAM! Birth control pills.

It’s reflexive and pervasive. Most of us have been raised to think this way. Symptoms happen, and we do what we can to make them go away right then. If “A”, then “B”.

But what if you want to figure out WHY the headaches, anxiety, depression, or hormone trouble? Wouldn’t it be better to remove the cause for the headaches, especially if they are common and frequent? The anxiety or other symptoms?

Hitting the symptoms with temporary fixes is a lot like the Whack-A-Mole game…you might knock that symptom back into its hole, but it’s just going to explode out of its hole again. A better fix might be to unplug the game. That way, no more moles are ever going to come out!

People can be impatient with what’s required to take this different approach to their health problems. It’s nowhere near as easy as popping a pill, and hoping that the problem won’t re-emerge. And for a while, this approach can seemingly succeed in keeping symptoms at bay.

However, eventually, if the original source of the problem is still there, you’re going to continue to need that pill to keep you on your feet, which can get expensive, both in money AND with side effects. (Have you ever read the side effect warnings on medication labels?)

Root Cause Resolution: Unplug the Whack-A-Mole Game

Resolving your symptoms at the source takes a bit more time, but with the proper guidance is totally possible. Let’s take the headaches as an example.

First things first: when are they happening? How often? When did they first start? What else was happening then? Did you change jobs? Move? Experience another stress? Begin eating a new food? Is it always before your period? A thorough health history and timeline can help illuminate the original cause of the headaches. These questions give us the initial clues to figure out where to try approaching the situation.

Let’s say that you’ve noticed that they always come around when you ovulate and right before your period. You also notice several other symptoms around that time that you also struggle with, such as irritable and dark moods, tender breasts, cramps, and diarrhea. You crave chocolate, but it makes your cramps worse.

Knowing all of these facts provides us with a lot of helpful clues. Now we begin the work of sifting through your day-to-day to identify which foods and behaviors may be contributing, and remove them.

I’m sure you can infer that we’re likely seeing a hormonal challenge with this hypothetical headache case, because the symptom shows up at certain parts of the monthly hormone cycle. And you might be tempted to say, “They have PMS.”

This may be true, but PMS is truly just a label, and doesn’t tell us anything about the specific players that make things better or worse, or how to approach. The first place I want to explore when hormones are at play is blood sugar handling.

What?

Yes. Hormone imbalances often begin with blood sugar handling. So more questions: are you eating protein with your breakfast? Are you eating throughout the day? What does your food intake look like? Are you getting protein, fat, and fiber in with each meal and snack? Does your diet include a lot of high carb foods? Junk foods? Caffeine? And so on…each of these can help me understand whether you may be experiencing blood sugar ups and downs that may be impacting your hormones.

How about dairy products? If they are regularly in the diet, their hormone content can impact hormones as well, especially if they aren’t organic. Are there other inflammatory foods in the diet, such as gluten or sugar? How about missing or deficient nutrients that might help the body function better, like magnesium or vitamin B6? Are there other signs of this deficiency?

Even before we get past “diet”, there are lots of possible supports for someone who presents with “hormonal headaches”.

There are many other pieces, such as exercise, stress, and sleep, which could be involved as well. Cleaning up all these areas often results in symptom resolution, for the headaches and other things that may be there as well. We could choose to take the Motrin and call it good, knowing that we’ll need to try to hit that mole when it shows up again next month…

Or, we could be proactive, and create a playing field where the moles just don’t pop up at all. We essentially REMOVE the moles from the game, so we don’t even need the Motrin, or antidepressants, and curiously, many of the other symptoms that plague us reduce in frequency or go away altogether.

This is functional nutrition, and how we work to remove the root causes, and how we avoid health Whack-A-Mole.

This approach is how we get power over our life back from our health complaints, by understanding how our actions and choices are impacting our symptoms, and making different choices.