5 Cutting Edge Strategies to Balance Your Blood Sugar So You Can Melt Your Midline, Sharpen Your Focus, and Recharge Your Energy!

Written by Sara



Do you find yourself wishing you could hit the snooze button instead of jumping out of bed feeling refreshed each morning?

Do you crave sugar, caffeine, or a NAP around 3 – 4 pm?

Have you been carrying around excess fat around your middle that won’t budge in spite of starving yourself and slaving away at the gym?

Whether you’re a busy professional or a professional mom, you need to stay focused and organized all day long and still have enough energy to say yes to enticing social events rather than falling into a heap because you can hardly keep your eyes open after working all day.

Watch this video to get the secret to more energy!

 Register here!

http://www.ByeByeB4.com

 

 




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Posted in Brain Fog, Chronic Fatigue, Cleansing Programs, Exhaustion, Fatigue Treatment, Hormone Imbalance, Immune System Support, Reduce Belly Fat



The Great Meal Timing Debate!

Written by Ritamarie Loscalzo



meal timing debateYour body is designed to be able to go long periods of time without external sources of food. Elaborate mechanisms are in place to keep your blood sugar steady, involving your brain, your hormones, your stomach and your liver.

If you find yourself cranky and irritable if you miss a meal and have been told to eat more frequent, smaller meals to avoid this, you may have been steered in the wrong direction.

Getting cranky and irritable between meals is a sign that something’s out of balance.

Simply eating more frequently takes care of the symptoms, but not the underlying imbalance.

You never retrain your body to do what it’s supposed to do when you simply avoid the behavior that highlights the imbalance.

Eating Frequent, Small Meals May be Damaging to Your Health

The idea that eating every couple of hours keeps your blood sugar levels steady without the dips (and severe hunger that accompanies those dips) has become popular. In theory, you’ll eat less if you never let yourself get hungry enough to overeat.

Recent hormone research tells us that this is actually the worst way to eat for blood sugar balance and weight loss and can actually be damaging to your health.

Join me and find out how eating small meals could actually be causing insulin resistance…and leading you to more belly fat.

Click here to listen in to the radio show recording.

The Myths That Keep You From Feeling Miraculous

Registration for my hot new very controversial teleseminar, and video series was unfortunately delayed due to technology gremlins, The videos have been recorded but woefully need to be re-edited so we’ve delayed the launch until February 9, 2012. This series will address the myths and surprising misconceptions around the metabolic and blood sugar issues that have people confused and chronically ill. Even if you participated in last year’s series, you’ll find something new!

I’ve been intently studying blood sugar imbalances and all the hormones and lifestyle factors involved in creating and preventing them so I can bring you the most cutting edge information.

Once the series begins on February 9, the first video will come to you immediately. Then every day or two, another video will be released until right before my myth-busting teleseminar.

http://www.ByeByeBloodSugarImbalance.com

Another Easy Instant Action Step To Bring You into Balance

How did you do with the action step I sent you last week?

Remember, the one from my “Timing is Everything” strategy?

It was about having your last meal no later than three hours before bedtime.

cinnamon - blood sugar balanceIf you found it hard, join the club. It’s difficult for everyone, yet yields phenomenal results when combined with the other strategies.

My new teleseminar and one of the videos will explain why this is so effective.

So this week, try another super effective step for balancing blood sugar. Sprinkle cinnamon liberally on your food. You heard me right. This common, every day spice is incredibly effective at restoring sensitivity of your cells to insulin, so you no longer have rapidly fluctuating blood sugars and the between meal irritability says bye-bye.

The registration page will be here:

http://www.ByeByeBloodSugarImbalance.com

The first 500 to register on February 9 can take advantage of another helpful resource.

The Recipes That Will Bring Your Inner Miracle Worker Back to Life

B4 Be Gone Recipe SamplerI’m going to make available a Bonus Recipe Sampler from my B4 Be Gone System for the first 500 people who register for the Bye-Bye B4 Video Series.

If you’re among the first to sign up for the free series on February 9th you can enjoy a taste of my delicious low-glycemic recipes designed to help heal your insulin receptors and restore your blood sugar balance.

You can ensure you receive your notice as soon as possible by registering for the early notification list here:

http://www.ByeByeBloodSugarImbalance.com

 

Have an awesome week.

 

I look forward to connecting on the teleseminar.




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Posted in Hormone Imbalance, Reduce Belly Fat, Vibrant Health



Digestion and Diabetes: The Relationship That May be Damaging Your Inner Miracle Worker

Written by Ritamarie Loscalzo



Your inner miracle workerHave you ever wondered what really happens inside your body after you eat?

It’s a complicated process that involves muscles, organs, hormones, enzymes, acids and a variety of vitamins, minerals and antioxidants.

I am really glad that my conscious mind doesn’t need to get involved to make it happen… it just happens.

Imagine if half way through digesting my food I got distracted by a phone call? The food would likely just sit there until my next meal as I’d be apt to forget I was digesting and move on to other more exciting tasks.

There’s an Inner Miracle Worker Inside You

Your body is a miracle, and it handles all those things behind the scenes so you don’t have to be involved on a conscious level. It’s like having the world’s best personal assistant doing everything you need before you even know you need it.

It all runs smoothly and like clockwork… if you take care of yourself.

When you feed yourself the right fuel, move, sail through the day with joy and ease, and sleep well at night your “personal assistant” inside keeps things running well, so you feel energetic, clear, focused and full of life.

Ideas pop up and you’re able to run with them and create the life of your dreams. You look great. Your tummy is flat, your muscles are toned and strong, and YOU are unstoppable. You are unlimited.

But What If Your Inner Miracle Worker is Run-Down and Ragged?

If what I just described is not your life, then listen up.

It’s not your fault.
It’s not that you’re lazy or unmotivated.

It’s because you learned habits early on that caused you to make choices that basically poison your “feel good” mechanisms.

You were fed processed foods from early in childhood, even just out of the womb in some cases. The processed foods cannot come close to providing the nutrition offered by their fresh counterparts. “Made by nature” is always better than “made by machine”.

The processed foods early on interfered with your body’s ability to choose the foods that nourish your cells rather than excite your taste buds and drain your energy.

diabetes, children, and processed foodBy the time you were six, chances are good that you had been on multiple courses of antibiotics and maybe had even begun to put on some excess weight. Like me, you were most likely addicted to foods like M&Ms, Cheetos, cookies, and soft drinks.

If so, you no longer were accessing the inner wisdom that guides you to eat, drink, and move in ways that bring balance.

Fast forward to today.

Perhaps the extra weight is your biggest concern. Maybe it’s your fear of life altering illnesses like heart disease, cancer, or diabetes. Or it might be your lack of energy and your inability to really enjoy things the way you used to.

Whatever it is you are striving for in your life, without your health the path will be obscure.

Are You Eating Yourself Sick?

So getting back to digestion…

When you’re out of balance, missing key nutrients, have eaten foods or engaged in activities that disrupt normal intestinal and hormone function, it’s as if you’re in charge and get distracted by a phone call.

Digestive enzymes become deficient or ineffective, your gut lining gets damaged and can no longer absorb all the nutrients in your food. Worse, it also allows foreign proteins to penetrate the disrupted intestinal membrane.

diabetes chart: type 1 and type 2 diabetesAnd you start to feel unwell.
Your energy drops.
Your mind gets foggy.

All the sugar and processed starch causes a spike in insulin. Over time, your cells become resistant to the insulin, and almost all the food you eat gets stored as fat.

The high sugar levels make your blood cells more sticky. The high insulin levels thicken the walls of your blood vessel and make them stiffer.

You are now a prime candidate for a heart attack or stroke.

You are on your way towards diabetes.

You May Not Know If You Have Diabetes Until There’s Damage

Diabetes is on the rise and prediabetes is almost an epidemic. Normal blood sugar balance is one of the prime casualties of an out of balance lifestyle.

The sad part is, you won’t be warned by your medical doctor until much of the damage has been done.

The reason?

The methods used to assess blood sugar imbalances, prediabetes (often called “insulin resistance“), and diabetes are based on standards that are too lenient.

There’s an ideal range for you blood sugar and the conventional standards give too much leeway.

The Myths That Keep You From Feeling Miraculous

On January 31st, 2012, I’ll be opening up registration for an all new and very controversial webinar that will address the myths and surprising misconceptions around the metabolic and blood sugar issues that have people confused and chronically ill. The webinar will be part of my updated free video series called Bye-Bye Belly Fat, Brain Fog and Burnout!

We’ll be sharing fresh, newly recorded videos, so even if you participated in last year’s series, you’ll find something new!

Bye-Bye Belly Fat Brain Fog and Burnout free video seriesI am soooo excited about this.

The truth is so many of my family members have suffered and even died because they were not given the information I am about to share with you. It’s not that I didn’t offer. It’s just that they were afraid to go against the status quo.

I know you’re really open to the latest and greatest health information or you wouldn’t be reading my newsletter.

Registration opens on January 31st at around noon, pacific time. I will send you an e-mail message when registration opens, but if you’d like to get your notice and access a little early, be sure to register for early notification:

http://www.ByeByeBloodSugarImbalance.com

Once the series begins on January 31st, the first video will come to you immediately. Then every day or two, another video will be released until right before my myth-busting teleseminar on Feb 9th, 2012.

I’ve been intently studying blood sugar imbalances and all the hormones and lifestyle factors involved in creating and preventing them so I can bring you the most cutting edge information.

In the videos and on the teleseminar, I’ll share 5 simple strategies you can start to incorporate right away.

An Easy Step To Help Heal Your Inner Miracle Worker

For now, I would like to close with a small piece of one of the strategies you can get started on right away.

It’s from my “Timing is Everything” strategy.

It’s going to sound really simple, and I know you’ve heard it before.

During the Bye-Bye B4 Video Series, I will share the details about how and why this strategy works. Its effectiveness has to do with hormone balance and your body’s detoxification mechanisms.

Stop eating at least 3 hours before you go to bed.

There should be 12 hours between dinner/supper and breakfast.

Go ahead and try it.

Once we open up registration, we’ll have a blog area where you can post your experiences. Start slowly if this is hard. Increase the time between dinner and bed time by 15 minutes each day until you’ve reached your goal.

Then when you come to the training call and watch the videos, you’ll learn how this affects your hormones, blood sugar, brain chemistry and detoxification. You’ll understand how proper meal timing protects you from life threatening diseases like diabetes, heart attack and stroke.

The registration page will be here:

http://www.ByeByeBloodSugarImbalance.com

The Recipes That Will Bring Your Inner Miracle Worker Back to Life

B4 Be Gone Recipe Sampler If you act quickly, you can take advantage of another helpful resource.

I’m going to make available a Bonus Recipe Sampler from my B4 Be Gone System for the first 500 people who register for the Bye-Bye B4 Video Series. If you’re among the first to sign up on January 31st for the free series, you can enjoy a taste of my delicious low-glycemic recipes designed to help heal your insulin receptors and restore your blood sugar balance.

You can ensure you receive your notice as soon as possible by registering for the early notification list here:

http://www.ByeByeBloodSugarImbalance.com




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Posted in Brain Fog, Chronic Fatigue, Fatigue Treatment, Reduce Belly Fat



Why Eating Frequent, Small Meals May be Damaging to Your Health

Written by Stacey



By Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo

the dangers of frequent, small mealsA common recommendation for people suffering with blood sugar imbalances and attempting to reduce weight is to eat frequent, small meals throughout the day.

The idea is that eating every couple of hours keeps your blood sugar levels steady without the dips (and severe hunger that accompanies those dips). In theory, you’ll eat less if you never let yourself get hungry enough to overeat.

Recent hormone research tells us that this is actually the worst way to eat for blood sugar balance and weight loss and can actually be damaging to your health.

Understanding Why Frequent Eating is Faulty Advice

Hunger, satiation, and blood sugar balance are all under hormonal control. And we’re not talking about reproductive hormones like estrogen and progesterone. We’re talking about what I refer to as “the survival hormones.”

insulin levels and fat burning relationshipEating between means alters powerful hormonal signals, interferes with the mechanism that burns fat as fuel, clogs liver metabolism, and sends calories right to fat stores.

Insulin is a hormone secreted by your pancreas in response to eating. It doesn’t much matter what you eat; insulin will be secreted. The composition of your meal determines just how much insulin is secreted. The more carbohydrates in the meal, the more insulin that’s required to keep your blood sugar regulated.

The most basic concept that you need to understand is that whenever insulin levels rise, fat burning stops.


The Hormone Relationship Between Insulin and Fat Burning


In order to understand why an increase in insulin levels affects your fat burning ability, let’s start by understanding what should happen with hormones in a perfectly balanced body.

  1. You eat, insulin levels rise, and glucose is moved into your cells to be burned for energy.
  2. Insulin triggers leptin levels to rise (leptin is the hormone your fat cells secrete after a meal) which signals the brain to turn off your appetite and tells your pancreas to stop making insulin.

  3. Glucose levels return to normal, insulin decreases, and leptin triggers fat burning.
  4. hormones and timingIf your blood sugar begins to drop too much, glucagon is secreted to mobilize stored calories and all is well, until your next meal.

Typically, insulin levels peak at around 30 minutes after you eat and return to normal at about 3 hours. Then leptin gets to go to work and triggers fat burning.

In the ideal situation, insulin sends 60% of the fuel in a meal to the liver for “quick access” storage as glycogen and triggers the uptake of the remaining 40% of the glucose and amino acids into muscle cells and cells of your vital organs, which use the glucose for fuel and the amino acids for growth and repair.

However, if you’re eating every 2 – 3 hours, as some experts advise, your insulin levels never go back to normal and you never go into fat burning mode.

Understanding the Process of Becoming Insulin Resistant

When you eat frequent, small meals throughout the day, insulin levels stay elevated all day, triggering fat storage and leading to insulin resistance. What this means is that your cells no longer hear the cry of insulin to allow fuel in for energy. As result, more fat storage occurs and you feel tired all the time.

If everything is functioning properly, then after a meal there is no need to eat again for 5 or 6 hours.

The hormone glucagon is in charge of keeping your blood sugar steady between meals. Glucagon signals the liver to turn the stored glycogen back into glucose as your sugar levels begin to drop between meals. It also triggers a process called “gluconeogenesis” which triggers the creation of glucose from stored protein and fat.

In a healthy person, insulin and glucagon are good siblings and take turns.

There’s enough carbohydrates stored in the liver in the form of glycogen to last 24 hours, unless you are engaging in extreme exercise like marathons or triathlons, so when things are functioning well, there are no blood sugar dips between meals.

I'm hungry!Snacking between meals causes insulin to rise again, even before it’s returned to normal, suppresses glucagon, and raises leptin levels unnaturally, leading to a condition called leptin resistance wherein the brain and pancreas no longer hear the signal from leptin to turn off appetite and reduce insulin secretion.

Constantly elevated levels of insulin, either from snacking between meals, deliberately planning meals close together, or eating foods high in sugar and simple carbohydrates, causes hyperinsulinemia, a condition of too much insulin in your blood. This condition leads to insulin resistance as the cells can no longer take in so much sugar and “close their ears” to the insulin signal.

Insulin resistance leads to weight gain, especially around the middle, stiffening of your arteries, elevated blood pressure, systemic inflammation, and eventually to cardiovascular disease like heart attack and stroke.

The Dangers of Insulin Resistance

Once you understand how the hormones are supposed to work together, you can understand why eating frequent small meals is not just a bad idea for weight loss, it’s outright dangerous.

In addition, eating too frequently can cause your liver to get congested. Remember, ideally, the liver takes 60% of the fuel from each meal and stores it as readily available fuel. When the liver becomes insulin resistant, those calories eaten head directly for fat storage as your liver can no longer accept them without the aid of insulin. Further, eating too often clogs your liver’s fuel storage system, resulting in fatigue and impaired detoxification mechanisms.

Eating too often also triggers your liver to produce excess VLDL, the most dangerous form of cholesterol. As a result, snacking between meals causes cholesterol to rise even more than eating cholesterol rich foods.

A Chain of Collapse

This whole process, a guaranteed “chain that makes you gain,” becomes a vicious, vitality-sabotaging cycle:

  1. When your liver gets clogged and develops insulin resistance, it’s hard to go 5-6 hours between meals or to sleep through the night because your liver can no longer produce a steady stream of glucose – it needs to comes from outside.
  2. When there is insulin resistance in your liver, your liver turns calories into fat at an increased rate, leading to excess weight.
  3. theThe constant high levels of insulin due to eating too frequently result in excess leptin and eventually leptin resistance, which further confuses your liver and turns down the production of glucagon, the hormone that keeps your blood sugar steady between meals by stimulating the release of stored fuel.
  4. To make matters even worse, the lining of your blood vessels and your nerve cells do not become insulin resistant and are subject to the stiffening effect of excess blood sugar and insulin.
  5. The net result is stiffening of your arteries and hardening of your nerves, leading to cardiovascular disease and mental decline.


Breaking the “Gain Chain”: Solutions to Restore Your Hormones

So, now that you understand the dangers of eating frequent, small meals and how they affect your hormone balance, what’s the solution?

Timing your meals to optimize hormones is key.

It’s important to remember that fat burning is impossible when insulin levels are elevated. It takes about 3 hours after a meal for insulin levels to return to baseline, even if you just eat a small snack.
Until then, fat burning is impossible.

If you have weight to drop, are fatigued, concerned about family history of heart disease, cancer or diabetes, make use of that critical fat burning time.

At 3 hours after a meal, do some exercise, drink some water with lemon juice and do whatever it takes to hold off the next meal for as long as you comfortably can.

healthy timing means healthy hormonesIt may only be 3 hours and 15 minutes to start, then 3 hours and 30 minutes, and then eventually, in 15 – 30 minute increments, you’ll be able to gradually move your meal spacing to at least 5 – 6 hours.

As you stretch the time between meals and change the foods you eat to foods that require less insulin, you’ll see the pounds melt away, your energy rise and your mental clarity improve. And maybe, even more importantly, you’ll protect yourself from the top 3 killer diseases in our modern world.

To find out more, register now for the free teleseminar recording, Dr. Ritamarie’s “Hush Hush” List of Hormones and Strategies for Busting Your Holiday Bulge.




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Posted in Holistic Nutrition, Hormone Imbalance, Reduce Belly Fat



Leptin and Ghrelin: Two Powerful Hormones to Heat Up Your Holiday Fat Burning Furnace

Written by Ritamarie Loscalzo



By Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo


Say no to Santa pants!Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes when you get hungry?

What gives the signal that you’re full?

Have you ever eaten beyond full and felt uncomfortable?

With Thanksgiving coming up in just a couple of weeks followed by the winter holidays – Christmas, Hanukkah and New Year’s – holidays focused around food, you may have thoughts of getting out your “eatin’ pants” to avoid the painful dig and pinch of a waistline that often becomes too tight this time of year.

You’ll need those pants, unless you learn to make friends with leptin and ghrelin and the powerful effects you can have on fat burning when you understand how to make them work for you.


The Fat Burning Benefits of Ghrelin

Neither ghrelin nor leptin has a gland the way that estrogen, thyroid, cortisol, and insulin do. Ghrelin is secreted by your stomach and leptin by your fat cells.

Your stomach secretes ghrelin when it’s empty, signaling the hypothalamus to turn on your appetite. As a society, we’ve come to fear hunger and avoid it like the plague. As soon as we feel hungry, we look for ways to satisfy our desire for food.

hunger and hormones: leptin and ghrelinBut what if you could make friends with hunger and actually learn to enjoy the feeling?

There are benefits to prolonging eating and staying hungry for a while. You see, ghrelin is a potent stimulator of growth hormone, and growth hormone has profound effect on fat burning and building lean muscle. It is often considered an anti-aging hormone.

So the next time you get hungry, remember that the longer you hold out (within reason) the more you rev up your fat-burning furnace.

The Appetite Attacking Benefits of Leptin

Did you know it is now believed that eating many small meals actually contributes to increased fat rather than decreased?

By delaying eating and spacing your meals 5 – 6 hours apart, you profoundly affect leptin levels. Leptin is the hormone your fat cells secrete after a meal to tell your hypothalamus to turn off your appetite.

Leptin levels are optimized when you space your meals 5 – 6 hours apart, avoid snacking, stop eating within 3 hours of bedtime, avoid high carb breakfasts and instead include protein at breakfast, and avoid overeating.

“Whoa!” You might be thinking, “That sounds hard AND it flies in the face of what I’ve been taught. I thought it wasn’t a goodidea to let myself get too hungry because that’s a sure-fire trigger for overeating.”

Yes, indeed. Getting too hungry can cause you to eat everything in sight. That’s why I recommend a gradual approach, so you can retrain your conscious brain as well as your hormones.

meal timingEating small meals may keep you from getting hungry and overeating at your next meal, but generally the results for weight loss are short lived. When you eat all day, you keep your insulin and leptin levels elevated all day. Insulin puts you into fat storing mode, which is the exact opposite of what you want.

Elevated leptin does indeed turn off your appetite, which is a good thing, but chronically elevated leptin results in leptin resistance, wherein your hypothalamus doesn’t hear the cry of leptin any more and it shifts your metabolism into starvation mode. You’re constantlyhungry and your metabolism is so low that every morsel you eat gets protectively stored away around your waist like an energy insurance policy.

In my B4 Be Gone program, I share my Snack Attack Strategy for dealing with the desire for food that creeps up on you in between meals as you move towards spacing your meals.

Part of the trick is to eat enough at each meal to hold you for 5 hours. Many of my B4 Be Gone members are finding that they can’t even finish the meals I’ve laid out for them because they get too full, so they’re not hungry again for many hours.

When retraining yourself, it’s important to start with choosing snacks that are nutrient dense and calorie and carbohydrate sparse to prevent insulin spikes.

Things like green smoothies and juices, vegetable sticks with delicious omega-3 fat-rich dips, steamed or raw vegetables, and chia seed drinks or porridges are the most helpful here.

Ghrelin and Leptin Optimization Strategy for the Holidays

To keep the extra weight from creeping in this holiday season, follow these guidelines:

  1. Start your day with a low to moderate carbohydrate meal that includes ample protein. You can include choices that will stabilize your glucose, insulin, and leptin levels and keep you satisfied for hours if you include more:
    • green smoothies made with low-glycemic fruits like berries and green apples
    • green juices
    • shakes made with powdered greens and veggie protein powder for when you’re in a hurry
    • chia-rich meals like shakes or porridge
  2. Do a 30-second burst of high intensity exercise every couple of hours to increase fat burning.
  3. Be prepared. Make a variety of delicious vegetable dishes and dips to satisfy the nibbles when everyone else is eating the low-nutrient, high-calorie hors d’oeuvres and hoarding away the extra pounds. If you’re looking for ideas, click here.
  4. Healthy Holiday Traditions RecipesLearn delicious alternatives for traditional dishes. There are all sorts of great book resources for Thanksgiving and winter holiday ideas. You can also find videos and recipe guides.
  5. Satisfy your sweet tooth healthfully. While sweet desserts, even the healthy, gluten-free raw kind are not the best for daily consumption when you have a few extra pounds, they are welcome and delicious alternatives to traditional apple pie, pumpkin pie, cookies and truffles. All you need are some mouth-watering recipes and some guidance on how to recreate some sweet treats.
  6. Pace yourself. Eat slowly, give thanks for every bite and truly enjoy. Then stop when you get the signal you’ve had enough.
  7. Wait to be really hungry before you eat your next meal. Remember, ghrelin, the appetite stimulating hormone, is your friend. You burn more fat when you’re hungry than when you’re full. Spacing your meals allows for the normal ebb and flow of leptin so you can retrain your brain to turn off your appetite when you’ve had enough.


Above all, learn to eat with an attitude of gratitude, fully conscious of the effects the food has in your body. You are what you eat, digest, and absorb. Keep that in mind as you eat.

Do I want this to become a part of my cell structure? What you put in and on your body becomes your body, so choose wisely.




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Posted in Healthy Holiday, Holistic Nutrition, Hormone Imbalance, Natural Hormone Support, Reduce Belly Fat, Sleep for Vibrant Health




Medical and Site Disclaimer: The information on this website is not intended to replace a one-on-one relationship with a qualified health care professinoal and is not intended as medical advice. It is intended as a sharing of knowledge and information from the research and experience of Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo, DrRitamarie.com LLC. We encourage you to make your own health care decisions based upon your research and in partnership with a qualified health care professional. All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
Comments are owned by DrRitamarie.com. © 2012 Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo