Crawl, Walk, Run, Fly!
Working Your Way Up
I liken Eric’s progression to what we as adults go through when we take on new lifestyle habits, begin a new business, or take up a new art form.
The crawling stage seems endless as we make small strides, slowly. The problem with adults and lifestyle habits is, too often, you’re not as relentless as Eric was. After a few falls, you are tempted to give up rather than continue on towards your goals.
The big difference between Eric and many people I counsel about health issues is most people don’t even have a clear goal like little Eric did. He was clear about his goal and he kept going until he reached it. If you don’t have a clear goal, it’s hard to be relentless in its pursuit.
It’s similar to my experience with the pottery class I began in January, attempting to “pick up where I left off” when I quit 7 years ago because I had a traveling husband, homeschooling kids, and a small health practice to run.
I am happy to be back, and find I’m back at the crawling stage because I didn’t keep up with the skill set.
If you’re just starting out with healthy eating habits, an exercise program, a meditation/stress management regime, or getting back into one of these after a hiatus, remember the stages. It’s impossible to run before you can walk!
Do You Have Someone Who Uplifts You?
The other thing that was reinforced with my pottery class was the fact that having a mentor is soooooo important.
Back in 2006, about a year and a half after I quit pottery classes because my husband started traveling again and I just couldn’t fit the classes into the schedule, my husband surprised me with a pottery wheel and kiln, a special gift for my 50th birthday.
I was all excited to get started.
By then, I’d forgotten some of the basic techniques, so I purchased a set of DVDs and sat down at the wheel to throw.
It was really hard and really frustrating, fumbling about with no one to turn to for guidance. I did it a couple of times, made a few awful pots, and never even fired them. The wheel and the kiln have been gathering dust since.
Once I started taking pottery classes in January, I realized how much I rely on asking for guidance, getting help with the same technique over and over, and being encouraged and supported.
It really is the same with health habits. SO many people I speak to have more than a few exercise videos still in the shrink wrap, or a food dehydrator they’ve used once, or all sorts of super foods still in their original bags, unopened because they are just not sure how to use them.
Whether You’re Struggling With Crawling or Flying, I Can Help!
Knowing that it’s human nature to need help with change, that’s exactly why I create my programs the way I do. While some people have the budget to get my assistance one on one when they’re ready to finally get their health in order, many don’t.
SO I’ve developed group coaching programs, my most popular being the Energy Recharge Green Cleanse and the B4 Be Gone System for balancing blood sugar and getting rid of belly fat, brain fog and burnout.
With the right support, the “shrink wrap” finally gets removed and people get into action. And I’m there to answer questions and provide encouragement and support.
It’s so rewarding when I hear how much these programs have changed lives. Many have: shed upwards of 60 pounds of unwanted fat, dropped 8 clothing sizes, let go of 9 inches round the waist, eliminated or reduced the need for medication, been freed of joint pain, finally got their brain back to focus, and so much more.
Because I have lost so many loved ones and watched them suffer, I have made it my mission to offer the education and support that people around the world need to avoid this fate.
The Moment That Inspired Me to Change and to Act
Last fall I was at a seminar and the host decided to raise money for a charity that supported children who’d lost a parent to cancer. I was deeply moved to action. My thought was how about instead we focus on educating people on how to avoid cancer in the first place?
Do you believe there are associations raising money for cancer by selling candy?
I am on a mission to raise consciousness and every person who goes though one of my programs can help me on that mission. By embracing a healthy diet and lifestyle and getting yourself strong and healthy, you too can spread the message of health and be an instrument of healing.
Are You Ready to Fly?
My group program, B4 Be Gone System, guides hundreds of people at a time to balancing blood sugar and getting rid of belly fat, brain fog and burnout. B4 Be Gone is so much more than a weight reduction program, although those that have extra weight gladly shed it.
It’s about making the changes on the inside that reduce the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.
It’s about seeing results on the outside that give you the confidence and mental clarity to be effective in your life’s chosen endeavor, be it Mom or CEO.
For details about B4 Be Gone, go to:
Insulin Resistance Solution
Practitioner Training
If you happen to be a nutrition or health coach, holistic practitioner or functional medicine doctor and you’d like to get the behind the scenes on how to run a successful program to reverse insulin resistance and balance blood sugar, one on one or in small groups, check out my new Insulin Resistance Solution Practitioner Training. It includes registration in B4 Be Gone and parallels it with “Rounds with Dr Ritamarie calls”, a community forum,worksheets and assessments and a grand finale powerful all day Saturday virtual retreat.
For details go to http://www.drritamarie.com/programs/irspt/
Love, Health and Joy,
Dr. Ritamarie
Tags: Adrenal Fatigue, adrenalin, austin raw food, Austin raw food potluck, B4 Be Gone, B4 Be Gone program, B4 Be Gone System, belly fat, blood sugar, blood sugar friendly, blood sugar imbalance, brain fog, Brain Fog and Burnout, burnout, Bye-Bye Belly Fat, cortisol, Diabetes, diabetes raw food recipes, digestion, Dr. Ritamarie, Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo, eating before bed, eating frequent meals, eating small meals, fatigue, gluten free, Gluten Free Diet, growth hormone, insulin, insulin resistance, Insulin Resistance Solution Practitioner Training, leptin, low sugar raw food recipes, low-glycemic raw food recipes, meal timing, natural health, natural health radio show, nutrition coaching, pre-diabetes, prediabetes, raw comfort food, raw food online videos, raw food potluck, raw food radio show, raw food recipe sampler, raw food recipe videos, Raw Food University, reproductive hormones, ritamarie loscalzo, survival hormones, thyroid
Posted in Appreciation for Health, Health Coach
5 Cutting Edge Strategies to Balance Your Blood Sugar So You Can Melt Your Midline, Sharpen Your Focus, and Recharge Your Energy!
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!
Tags: 5 Cutting Edge Strategies, B4 Be Gone, B4 Be Gone System, Balance Your Blood Sugar, belly fat, blood sugar, blood sugar friendly, blood sugar imbalance, brain fog, Brain Fog and Burnout, burnout, Bye Bye Video Series, Bye-Bye B4, Bye-Bye Belly Fat, Bye-Bye Belly Fat Brain Fog and Burnout, Diabetes, diabetes raw food recipes, Dr. Ritamarie, Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo, energy recharge, fatigue, insulin, insulin resistance, lose weight, low sugar raw food recipes, low-glycemic raw food recipes, meal timing, Melt Your Midline, mental clarity, prediabetes, raw food recipe sampler, Recharge Your Energy, ritamarie loscalzo, Sharpen Your Focus, weight loss
Posted in Brain Fog, Chronic Fatigue, Cleansing Programs, Exhaustion, Fatigue Treatment, Hormone Imbalance, Immune System Support, Reduce Belly Fat
The Great Meal Timing Debate!
Your 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.
If 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
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 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.
Tags: B4 Be Gone, B4 Be Gone System, belly fat, blood sugar, blood sugar friendly, blood sugar imbalance, brain fog, Brain Fog and Burnout, burnout, Bye-Bye Belly Fat, Diabetes, diabetes raw food recipes, Dr. Ritamarie, Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo, eating frequent meals, eating small meals, fatigue, insulin, insulin resistance, low sugar raw food recipes, low-glycemic raw food recipes, meal timing, prediabetes, raw food radio show, raw food recipe sampler, ritamarie loscalzo
Posted in Hormone Imbalance, Reduce Belly Fat, Vibrant Health
Digestion and Diabetes: The Relationship That May be Damaging Your Inner Miracle Worker
Have 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.
By 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.
And 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!
I 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
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
Tags: belly fat, blood sugar, brain fog, burnout, Diabetes, digestion, Dr. Ritamarie, Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo, fatigue, insulin, insulin resistance, low-glycemic raw food recipes, prediabetes, raw food recipe sampler, reduce belly fat, weightloss
Posted in Brain Fog, Chronic Fatigue, Fatigue Treatment, Reduce Belly Fat
Why Eating Frequent, Small Meals May be Damaging to Your Health
By Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo
A 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.”
Eating 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.
- You eat, insulin levels rise, and glucose is moved into your cells to be burned for energy.
- 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.
- Glucose levels return to normal, insulin decreases, and leptin triggers fat burning.
If 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.
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:
- 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.
- When there is insulin resistance in your liver, your liver turns calories into fat at an increased rate, leading to excess weight.
The 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.
- 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.
- 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.
It 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.
Tags: appetite, belly fat, blood sugar, fat burning, glucose, hormones, hunger, insulin, insulin resistance, leptin, meal spacing, metabolism
Posted in Holistic Nutrition, Hormone Imbalance, Reduce Belly Fat
