Belly Fat Breakthrough: How Your Muscles May Be Adding to Your Midline

- by Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo

Have you noticed that excess belly fat appears to be almost epidemic these days, even amongst the very slender and the very young?

I’ m so tired of all the websites and programs that promise the answer to getting rid of those stubborn inches once and for all, while you still eat your favorite foods. They always flaunt someone with 6-pack abs to prove their point. The average person has tried at least 3 of these programs, only to find themselves back where they started, plus a few more inches in many cases, just a few months later.

Why are most waist-targeted diets simply a waste?

Most belly fat targeted programs fail to help you to change the habits that lead to your expanding waistline. Small and occasional “favorite food” indulgences could possibly be just fine and not sabotage your progress, but the truth is those foods are so addicting that small and occasional portions soon become small and regular portions, then larger portions regularly, and in many cases soon become all-out binges.

When the “favorite foods” include bread, chips, crackers and muffins, it becomes very challenging for most people to keep the portions small. These foods not only are deficient in nutrients, they generally also cause a spike in insulin, a hormone that’ s responsible for keeping your blood sugar at its optimal level. Too much insulin creates all sorts of problems, which we explain in detail in our Taming Your Midline Program.

If you want a smaller waistline you need a bigger understanding of insulin

In summary, when you eat high carbohydrate comfort foods regularly, your insulin levels become dangerously high and your cells become resistant to insulin. This means you can’t get enough sugar into your cells and you feel tired, unfocused, and hungry after meals.

To get control of your belly fat, you need to break the viscous cycle.

How your muscles may be adding to your midline

On top of the difficulty and stress people experience due to insulin resistance, worry and fear trigger increased cortisol, an adrenal hormone.

Here’s the kicker that keeps the belly fat from burning…

Cortisol mobilizes muscles to raise blood sugar quickly to prepare you to run or fight. When you’re sitting around worrying about something that may or may not occur, there is no way to burn all that extra blood sugar. So insulin comes to the rescue and stores it as fat.

And cortisol’s favorite place to store the fat is around your belly.

So how do you keep your thigh muscles from turning to belly fat?

One way is to stop worrying.  As a society, we do it all the time. Huge real estate in the local paper is devoted to gloom and doom predictions and stories of catastrophie. The goal is to induce fear. Fear sells.

Listen in on the conversations that surround you. You’ll repeatedly hear people say, “I’m so worried about… .”

When you worry over an event that has not happened and may not happen, the response in your body is identical to the reaction you’d have if the event was really happening. If the event does in fact transpire, you’ve paid twice! The wear and tear of worry on your body is huge, and constant worry over the years just may be a contributing factor to your expanding midline, especially if you’ve been exercising and eating well and don’t seem to be making progress.

One of the strategies presented in my free e-course and e-book, 7 Simple Strategies to Jumpstart Your Energy Practically Overnight, is to take a news fast. Try it for a week.

You just may find yourself being flatter around the middle, and as an extra bonus you’ ll be more focused and get a lot more done.

This is just one of the strategies I will be sharing in my hot new free video series called Belly Fat , Brain Fog and Burnout Breakthroughs.

Subscribe now to Jumpstart Your Energy and then watch your inbox later this week for the Belly Fat Breakthrough signup link!

Dr. Lindsey Berkson: Waltzing to Your Wildest Dreams

- a note from Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo

I am delighted to have as a guest blog contributor today, my dear friend, colleague and mentor, Dr. Lindsey Berkson.

For the last three decades, Dr. Lindsey Berkson’s focus has been as a nutritional consultant with a specialty in women and hormones. During this time, she’s run nutritional and hormone tests on thousands of women, worked with their doctors, and consulted with them about nutrition, food, and exercise choices.

I met Lindsey over a year ago at a continuing education class she taught on hormone balancing and we instantly became fast friends.  We partnered to bring the 5 week course, The Secret to Being Sexy at Any Age , Get Your Gut in Gear and have plans for more joint endeavors.  We both have a passion for helping people to overcome health challenges and recharge their energy tank so they can live their life with passion and purpose.

YOU CAN DO IT!!!

- by Dr. Lindsey Berkson

Who knows where life takes you if you face your edges and push them back with all your might?

Yikes!

I never thought being well into menopause I would be flying high on some gorgeous man’s shoulders and doing back flips 6 feet off the ground, but here I am. Ritamarie and I were supposed to have a meeting yesterday and I told her, “I just had this two and a half-hour dance rehearsal, and I could barely put the key in my front door and turn it to let myself in.”

I told her why.

Several weeks ago when I was moving back into my home and going through boxes that had been moved and stored and moved and stored, I found an old tape cassette of a song for which I had written the words and music, had professionally produced, and then eventually forgot about.  Once I found this tape I ran to see if, with all the years in storage, it even still worked.

And it did!!!

Though my professional work as a hormone specialist now occupies my time, I am also a dancer.  A social dancer.  Though I haven’t been dancing very much the last 4 years with everything going on in my life: dealing with my mother’s dementia, taking care of her, living with her in the lock down dementia unit (which prompted writing the book My Mother Who Worse Her Purse as a Shoe), getting engaged (and unengaged), handling a year of the 3 M’s – mold, men and moving, and publishing 7 books (one – Safe Hormones, Smart Women, which bumped me fairly solidly off the dance floor).

Wow I thought. A real dream, before I die some day, would be to dance and perform to my own song. Wouldn’t that be a ‘died and gone to heaven’ kind of deal?

So I had the song (called Walking Through Rooms and professionally sung by Ellis Hall) transposed to a CD 2 two weeks ago and contacted one of my favorite dance champions, Mike Topel, from right here in Austin, and played it for him. He said, “Let me choreograph this; I think we can come up with a lovely performance.”

The song is a waltz.  Writing a waltz was easier for me, and it was one of my earlier songs. But I am not really a waltzer.  Considering that I am a medium to advanced social dancer, I just blazingly thought, I can do this… Why not? (Little did I know….)

I called up Sherry Reynolds, a dance champion who is part owner of Uptown Dance Studio in Austin, and it turns out she is hosting the Lone Star Dance Invitational Saturday, August 13^th, which gave me around 10 days to put something together and perform it at the dinner show.

“I had no idea,” I told Ritamarie, begging off our business meeting as I could hardly walk or move after my third rehearsal, “that performance dancing was such a totally different animal than social dancing.”  I had no idea that I signed up for:

• being dragged (not the correct dance term I am sure) on the floor, him grabbing my arms and me rolling across the hard wood dance floor, lying down, while he walks through my legs
• holding his waist while my legs whip around at chest height
• grueling ballet pliés and seemingly endless lunges
• kicking legs up in the air (and if they are not straight and high enough one looks like an idiot)
• being up in the air balancing only on my abdomen with head high, then back flipping out and snaking across his abdomen and down through his legs back onto the floor.

Now I work out daily, but all this “waltzing” requires incredible core strength.  Lots of it. Thank god I down chia seeds and green drinks!

The whole time Mike is giving me directions I have two loud dialogues in my head:

1. What the F… am I doing? Am I nuts? I can’t do this! I am scared to death! What if I fall? My old bones–yikes–I am out of my mind!
2.  I can do this! I can do anything! Why not? Sure, cool.

Soooo much distraction; I’m sure Mike was wondering why I kept asking him, “What did you say again?”

Two concurrent dialogues — faith versus fear.

But that has pretty much been my entire life: pushing the edges of fear and having faith that it will work out. Who would have thought that even though I am older, this theme has not seemed to have slowed down? Yikes.

Have I mentioned yet that this physical and mental marathon all has to be done in a long, floor length skirt, which I have NEVER worn let alone danced in. We had an argument as I insisted I just simply could NOT do this in a long skirt; he replied that with dance regulations I simply could not NOT do it in a floor length dance skirt. So that was that.

Will I get to do this next Saturday at the cabaret dinner dance in front of the hundreds of dancers and judges? I am not positive. If we decide we need some more weeks we may dance it somewhere else, or feel it is finished enough to perform next week. We are working our b…. off to try to pull next week off.

But I do know that age is just a number. Stretching oneself physically and emotionally is part of the de-acceleration process of anti-aging and staying younger no matter the numbers that keep (thankfully) ticking away. You truly are just as old as you fight back the demons of fear and go for things you never dreamed of even in your 20′s–if your adrenals, blood sugar, lifestyle, and food choices are watching your back.

You just take a deep breath, pull those shoulders back, and say, “Hell yeah, I can do this!”

My website is in a new construction phase, and Ritamarie felt I needed to say all this, even here in her blog, to get this out to all your sisters and brothers as a message of hope from a crone-ish cougar doc, so I am writing this to share with you. I want to remind you, “We can all do it. Whatever you have held as a dream in the corner of your consciousness, no matter how wild and hanging out there by a dental floss string it may seem to make you feel, now is the time. Go for it. You can do it!”

LindseyBerkson.com

Reduce Belly Fat by Reversing Insulin Resistance

Insulin is a hormone that’s produced by your pancreas in response to a rise in the  sugar levels in your blood. After you eat a meal, there’s some increase in blood sugar.  Some foods produce a rapid rise, others a slower rise.   Insulin triggers your cell membranes  to open up and let the sugar in, where it gets converted into energy.

Unfortunately, for a large and growing population, that’s not what happens!  You see, frequent consumption of large quantities of sugar and processed carbohydrates leads to a condition called insulin resistance.  It’s as if your cell membranes get tired of insulin shouting at them all the time and they close their ears.  Your cells become resistant to insulin and your blood sugar rises to an unsafe level.   If this continues unchecked, it could lead to diabetes.

When the sugar  in your blood can’t get it into your cells it’s converted to a kind of fat called white fat, which is primarily stored around your waist.  Thus insulin resistance leads to excess belly fat!  Instead of having energy after a meal, like you should, instead  you feel tired and you put on weight.

There are ways to determine if your belly fat is associated with insulin resistance.  We have a detailed online assessment with score card in our webinar course called  “Tame Your Midline”

A few of the hallmark signs are excess belly fat, craving for sweets after a full meal and an afternoon dip in energy, usually accompanied by a craving for sweets.

You can also purchase a glucose meter and perform what’s known as a glucose tolerance test at home.  The usual purpose of the glucose tolerance test is to see how your body responds to a glycemic load.  These are usually done in a doctor’s office and can cost hundreds of dollars to do.  After taking a fasting glucose reading, you would be asked to drink a sugar syrup concoction and your blood sugars are tested for several hours afterwards.  It’s a great way to assess how your body handles a huge sugar load, but not how you handle your typical daily diet.

You can perform a glucose tolerance test of sorts at home when you purchase an inexpensive home monitoring unit, available at most local pharmacies and pharmacy chains.

Instead of glucose syrup, you’ll test with a real meal…representative of the worst meal you’d typically eat in a week.

We go over the details in our online class “Tame Your Midline”

Start with the worst meal you typically eat, including the maximum quantity of carbohydrate rich foods you’re likely to eat at any given  meal.  Be honest with yourself.  If you have not yet given up eating sugar, test a sugar rich meal s you know exactly how you react to it.  It’s ideal to repeat with several representative test meals to see how your body handles different types of foods.  This will help you design the diet that’s just right for you.

In addition to measuring blood sugar at designated intervals, monitor how you feel.    Record any symptoms, such as light headedness, headache, dizziness, hunger, cravings, nausea, etc.  Be sure to record the time the symptoms occurred.

It’s helpful to know how your body responds to certain foods that you regularly eat or would like to eat.  You can do a mini test on each food .  Simply measure your blood sugar before and after eating the food.  It should stay at  or below 120 and return to the pre meal level by two hours.

Daily pre and post meal glucose monitoring for a week is also a way to determine the foods that create glucose spikes.   Once you know how your body responds to certain foods, you can make informed choices about what to eat, rather than relying on hearsay or guess work.

Insulin resistance can lead to diabetes, a serious and life threatening disease.  Even if it doesn’t , insulin resistance can be life threatening in that it can lead to high blood pressure, heart attacks and stroke unless you take the steps to reverse it and control your blood sugar levels.

Do you suspect you are at risk for  insulin  resistance?  In the Taming Your Midline webinar package, there’s an online assessment that provides a scorecard of your risk.  Then there’s a 30 day program  for restoring insulin sensitivity.  It works.  Most of my clients get dramatic results within two weeks.

Start by measuring your waist/hip ratio.  If you’re a male and your waist is equal to or bigger than your waist, you most likely have developed insulin resistance.  If you’re female, your waist measurement should be less than 80% of your hip measurement.

Go ahead and do this simple waist/hip measurement and comment below.  Are you at risk for insulin resistance?

Day 14 of the 30 Day Fun and Sleep Challenge: Exercise, Vitamin D and Antidotes for Chronic Fatigue

What do chronic fatigue, belly fat, depression and hormone imbalance have in common?

Exercise, sleep, fresh air, sunshine (vitamin D) and fresh foods.  A deficiency of any or all of these can create imbalances in hormones and  blood sugar irregularities that lead to persistent belly fat, fatigue and depression.  So what do these have to do with the 30 day fun and sleep challenges?  Plenty!  Most people I talk with feel fatigued much of the time and would like more energy.

Lack of sleep is only part of the equation, but it can make you fat.  Researchers have found that lack of sleep can cause decreased leptin levels.  Leptin is a hormone that regulates your appetite. As a result of not getting enough sleep, you’ll find yourself more hungry and you’ll find it challenging to control the amount you eat.  This leads to blood sugar imbalances, insulin resistance and increased belly fat.  Insulin resistance results in fatigue after eating, rather than  increased energy, which means you’re less likely to exercise.  It’s quite the vicious circle.

While I have not been as good as I had planned at writing these blog posts daily, I am pleased to admit that the reason why I haven’t had the time to write the blog posts daily is that I have been fulfilling my commitment to get to bed as close to midnight as possible.  Thus, I am sleeping more.  As a result of sleeping more, I’ve also been exercising more.  A double win!  There have only been a couple of later than midnight bedtimes, and that was because I chose to sit in the sauna before bed.

If my lack of posting has in any way effected your commitment to the 30 Day Fun and Sleep Challenge, my apologies.  I am committed to resuming writing daily, and have it scheduled in my calendar.

Our weather in Austin has finally become warm and sunny!  I’m very happy about that.  The mornings have still been cool…40′s, but the afternoons are in the 70′s and 80′s.  So I have been out for a run in the sun most days this week.  It feels great.

I am usually very consistent with exercise…as consistent as I am with food.  When the weather got so cold and cloudy for so long, I got out of the habit of running first thing in the morning, and some days, time and obligations got away from me and I found my exercise dwindling.

In addition to getting your daily dose of vitamin D on sunny days, exercising in the fresh air offers so many benefits. Exercise is super important for hormone balance, weight management, increasing your energy and overcoming fatigue.  It’s also good for your heart, your mood and your immune system.  Fresh air and exercise are a dynamic duo, so get outside and move as much as you can.

My blog post back in the fall about exercise and burst training is a good one to review for some tips.

My report card for the last few days:

1- getting to sleep at or around midnight:  Excellent

2- exercise:  excellent

3- writing my blog posts:  fair

4- Having fun – good.  I’ve spent a lot of time with family and have had some friend fun too.

My commitments for Monday:

1- bed by midnight.

2- finish writing a few projects that are close to completion

3- fun time with kids, who are off school for spring break

4- running in the sun

Commitment for at least one day this week:  Get to bed by 10 PM and see if it is really as good as it’s cracked up to be!

What about you?  What are you committed to?

Post below in the comments section.

This week we’re having a contest.  I’m offering a prize to whoever posts the most this week…genuine commitments and report cards.  I’ll post the prize on Tuesday.

Wishing you lots of Love, Health and Joy (and sleep, too)

Dr. Ritamarie

Creative Approaches to Fitting Exercise into your Program: Great for Overcoming Chronic Fatigue and Adrenal Exhaustion

Believe it or not, exercise is actually a good antidote for chronic fatigue and adrenal exhaustion. Exercise creates energy. Most people who don’t exercise use lack of energy as an excuse (the other big excuse is lack of time). As long as you don’t overdo it, exercising when you feel tired can actually give you an energy boost. Try it sometime.

I recorded a video on creative ways to get exercise and how to fuel yourself and “get enough protein” to build muscle.

Another way to fit exercise into your busy schedule is to learn about something called burst training.

I’ve recently discovered it and love the concept, although I have yet to have direct experience with it for long enough to rate its effectiveness.

How do you plan to make exercise a part of your life? Please comment below.

Love, Health and Joy,

Dr. Ritamarie

www.FreshnFunLiving.com