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

The Power of Digestion: Chronic Fatigue Links to Your Stomach

Poor digestion is beyond bloating and gas.  Chronic fatigue, adrenal exhaustion, depression and challenges with focus, can all originate  from poor digestion.   According to Hippocrates, ‘the father of medicine’, “All disease begins in the gut.”

You may have been lead to believe that shopping the perimeter of the grocery store, eating whole foods, breathing deeply and moving is all it takes to have get up and go and maintain perfect health.

Yet more and more health practitioners are beginning to realize that even if you take the time to eat better and to shop, prepare and consume more consciously, you are not what you eat. While what you eat is vital to your overall health, it would be more accurate to say “You are what you digest and assimilate.”  You may be eating great yet your cells may be starving. How can that be?

According to the NIH, each year digestive problems account for  about 105 million doctor visits, more than 13 million hospitalizations and over 230,000 deaths in the U.S alone, and the cost of digestive disorders is staggering. These diseases cost the United States $100 billion annually in direct medical costs and $44 billion in indirect costs such as disability and mortality.

Digestive disorders are more than just a nuisance. They are downright dangerous. Chronic gut issues can contribute to cancer, heart disease, diabetes, suicide and a host of other serious conditions.

Most of us don’t think about our guts unless they hurt us. Yet your gut can be hurting you by letting you down on the
digestive job, even if you don’t have specific gut complaints. Maybe you experience fatigue, the inability to lose that last 5 pounds, or a brain that doesn’t seem to be the sharpest tack in the box anymore.

While you can’t build a healthy body without good food to nourish your cells and organs, even if your food is perfect, you can’t flourish unless your digestive tract is able to break the food down, absorb the nutrients and eliminate the waste.

So how do you know if you have digestive issues that need attention?  If you’re bloated, gassy or have gut pain, it’s obvious.  It’s the more subtle signs that are less frequently associated with gut problems.  For example, difficulty sleeping, referred to as circadian dysrhythmia, can start because your cells are not well fed and your organs, like your adrenal glands and brain, are not receiving what they need to keep you energized during the day and horizontal and refreshed during the night.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself to determine if your gut is contributing to disease.

• Do you have a chronic fatigue that doesn’t go away with any intervention you have tried?
• Do you carry an extra 5 to 50 pounds regardless of how you eat or how much you exercise?
• Do you have trouble concentrating, remembering things, or making decisions??
• Are you frequently cold for no reason?
• Are you frequently stressed out, worn out or depressed for no apparent reason?
• Do you have a chronically coated tongue?
• Does your pulse increase 20-25 beats within 15 minutes of eating?
• Do you feel worse after you eat?
• Do you usually have less two bowel movements daily? (Hippocrates told the Athenians that is was essential that they pass large bulky motions after every meal!)
• Do your stools regularly smell ‘bad’?
• Do you have chronic  heart burn, burping, bloating, gas and pain immediately or within hours of eating?
• Do you just not feel well no matter how vigilant you are with eating well, taking supplements, working out, trying to have a positive attitude?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you likely have a gut issue that needs to be addressed to protect your
health.  If you answered yes to 3 or more of these, it’s possible that your gut problem is already adversely affecting the rest of your body and you need to take action right away.

Getting nutrition from your mouth to deep down into your cells where it counts takes a lot of intestinal fortitude and multiple steps with many organs and nutrients working in harmony.  Many of our modern “advances” interfere with your gut’s ability to do its job – things like environmental chemicals, antibiotics, alcohol, some prescription and over the counter medications and chronic stress.  This can leave you with chronic fatigue and adrenal exhaustion.

In restoring optimal gut function, it’s important to evaluate and target all the working parts of your digestive tract.

If you have chronic problems or are experiencing the effects of gut imbalance in parts of your body outside your digestive tract, it’s important that you take time out to do a gut healing protocol as soon as possible and repeat the process a couple of times a year to maintain your gut health.

Here’s a short list of actions you can take to get the process started:

1. Chew your food well.  The only part of your digestive tract that has teeth is your mouth.  Un-chewed food particles can’t be digested and can contribute to inefficient digestion.  You’d be surprised by how many digestive problems are solved by this simple step.
2. Start to eat gut healing foods on a daily basis.  Three that are easy to incorporate are:  chia seeds, which soothe the gut lining and contribute essential fats to calm the fire of inflammation, green drinks, which provide an abundance of healing chlorophyll and minerals, and turmeric, a potent anti-inflammatory and cancer protective herb.
3. Eat daily servings of probiotic containing foods like sauerkraut, homemade nut and seed yogurt and coconut kefir or take a high quality probiotic supplement to keep your gut critters in harmony.
4. Relax and breath before you start to eat.

Having the discipline to do a gut support protocol on your own can be challenging.  There are always excuses that prevent you from starting.  That’s why I teamed up with my good friend, colleague and mentor Dr. Lindsey Berkson,
author of “Healthy Digestion the Natural Way” to create a unique program called “Get Your Gut in Gear”.  This program is for you if:

• You’re fed up with chronic indigestion, gas and bloating and you’re ready for a flat and comfortable belly.
• You’re frustrated with not having the energy to fully engage in the activities you love.
• You’re concerned about the risks of an out of balance digestive tract.
• You’re tired of that extra 5 to 50 pounds you just can’t shed.
• You answered yes to 3 or more of the questions above and you’re not sure where to begin to restore your gut to health.
• You’ve tried various gut herbs and cleanses before and just can’t seem to complete them or get the promised results on your own.

Get Your Gut In Gear is lead by  two digestive health experts and includes membership in a supportive community to guide you to detox, rebuild and reboot your gut so you can sleep better, feel better, think better and shed those last frustrating pounds.
Just eating a colorful healthy diet may not be enough. Digesting it adequately is what counts.

As Hippocrates said, “All disease begins in the gut.” To take it a step further…

“Good health begins in the gut.”
“Great health begins in the gut.”
“All health begins in the gut.”

Love, Health and Joyful Digestion,

Dr. Ritamarie

www.GetYourGutInGear.com

7 Simple Strategies for Correcting Hormone Imbalance and Harmonizing Your Life

When you hear the term “hormone imbalance” do you right way think about PMS or menopause?  If you’re not suffering from hot flashes or cyclic irritability, you may be tempted to dismiss information about hormone imbalance as “not applicable to me”.

What you may not realize is that your hormones are involved with just about every aspect of your day to day life, including:

- Your metabolic rate, which means how quickly you burn fuel for energy.  Imbalances can lead to hard to shed extra pounds and low energy.

- Your response to stress.  Hormone imbalance affects your ability to respond to stress without burning yourself out or getting sick.

- How much sugar is in your blood and how much reaches your brain, controlling your mood and your ability to think clearly.  Imbalances can lead to diabetes, hypoglycemia and insulin resistance.

- Your mood and attitude, due to the intimate relationship between hormones and neurotransmitters.  Hormone imbalance can lead to depression, anxiety and irritability.

- The efficiency of your digestion.  Imbalance can lead to ulcers, irritable bowel and chronic infection.

- Your sex drive and ability to enjoy intimacy.

- The quality of your skin and hair.

- Your short term memory and ability to think clearly and quickly.

- The quality of your sleep.

The list goes on and on.  This is just a sampling of the widespread and diverse effects of your hormones.

How Hormone Imbalance Effects your Health

Hormones are like members of your family.  When they’re in sync, everyone is communicating well, resulting in happy and harmonious relationships.  When they are out of sync, you’re sunk.  Communication gets disrupted and dysfunction results.

There are over a dozen major players in your hormone family, and your health relies on proper communication and balance between them.

The sooner you get them working in harmony, the happier and healthier you’ll be.

While hormone imbalance can result in unpleasant conditions like depression, dry skin, low energy, irritability, insomnia and hot flashes, what’s more important is that hormone imbalances underlie much more serious illnesses, like osteoporosis, diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

So getting your hormones in balance is not just about improving the quality of your life; it’s about actually saving your life.

So how do you get your hormones in balance?  Do you need the latest designer drug or exotic supplements?  Expensive medical procedures?

Natural Methods for Hormone Imbalance

Fortunately, in most cases, balance can be restored through the application of diet and lifestyle actions combined with targeted and specific supplementation of  nutrients and possibly bioidentical hormones, if your body can no longer make them on its own.

There are foods to avoid, foods to include, environmental factors to clean up, stressors to manage, and simple things like the amount and type of movement you do, how much sun you get and the balance between activity and rest.

Here’s a list of seven simple strategies you can get started on right away to get you started on hormone balance.  This is a handful taken from the dozens included
in brand new “The Secrets of Being Sexy and Vibrant at ANY Age” course.

7 Natural Approaches for Hormone Imbalance

1-Consume at least 32 ounces of green drink daily, made from at least a pound of green leafy vegetables.  This may sound like a lot but the greens are so important and drinking them rather than just eating them helps increase the quality you consume.  You can make delicious green smoothies,  juices or soups.  Greens are filled with antioxidants, minerals and the B vitamin folate, which  is very important for hormone balance.  Be sure to include  sprouts and cruciferous vegetables as they’re especially potent hormone balancers.

2- Break a sweat every day, even if just for 30 second bursts.  Exercising to exhaustion for 30 seconds at a time, for a total of 4 to 8 minutes is an amazing way to increase testosterone levels, balance adrenal hormones  and  the hormone insulin, support your thyroid hormone production and overall strengthen your immune system.

3- Get outside for at least 20 minutes, preferably in the middle of the day, for fresh air and sunshine.  This supports your body in making Vitamin D and excreting the chemicals you breathe from indoor air.

4- Open your windows, even if just a crack, for at least 15 minutes every day.  This brings fresh air in to replace the buildup of hormone disrupting chemicals found in indoor air.

5- Dump the sugar for whole fresh fruits.  Sugar disrupts your B vitamins which are essential for hormone regulation.  It also affects the balance between estrogen receptors that are protective and those that promote growth.  When these receptors get out of balance, your risk
of hormonally induced cancer increases.

6- Drink pure water from glass containers, rather than plastic.  Hydration is vital to production and circulation of hormones and chemicals in the plastic have been shown to  be hormone disruptors.

7- Take time each day to appreciate your gifts and the people you love.  Appreciation has profound effects on your immune system, the level of stress hormones in your system and your ability to cleanse and detoxify the toxic exposures that disrupt hormone balance.

You’ll most likely notice changes right away when you master these 7 simple strategies.

If you’re already suffering from symptoms of hormone imbalance, like depression, fatigue, sugar cravings, excess weight around your middle, menstrual irregularities or pain, hot flashes or other menopausal symptoms, or if you or a family member have had breast cancer, or if you’d just like to circumvent these problems and be vibrantly healthy, strong and sexy your whole life through, it’s worth it for you to invest the time to learn all you can about keeping your hormones safe and balanced.

To bring you the whole scoop on hormone balance,  I’ve teamed up with world renown hormone expert Dr. Lindsey Berkson, author of “Hormone Deception”,  “Safe Hormones, Smart Women”, “Natural Answers to Women’s Health Questions”, “Healthy Digestion the Natural Way”, and at least 8 other books on natural health.  We put together a groundbreaking 5 week course that’s filled with information about hormones that even most doctors don’t know.

We’re thrilled to bring you cutting edge information that will enhance your life and may even save your life.  It saved Dr. Lindsey’s!  Read her story for details.

It’s such a joy to have steady energy and mood, strength and stamina and the clarity of mind that balanced hormones brings.  We experience this daily and we teach our patients to do the same.   We’d like you to have the same experience.  For the first time ever, we have packaged this material in a way that we can share it with you in a convenient  and cost effective manner.

If you’re ready to take charge of your own hormones and create balance and vibrant health, we invite you to check out the course we’ve put together.

Love, Health and Joy,

Dr. Ritamarie

 http://www.drritamarie.com/go/vibranthormones

Hormone Imbalance Video and Self Assessment

Hormone imbalance is one of the most common causes of feeling “less than good”.

Proper functioning of your hormones depends on the delicate orchestration of a number of key lifestyle factors.  When your hormones are in balance, you feel great—energetic, clear headed, strong and joyful.  But, when your hormones  get out of balance, the opposite is true,  You just don’t feel quite right.

You may be suffering from adrenal fatigue, thyroid imbalance, autoimmune disease, digestive problems and a host of other symptoms.  Plus you’re at higher risk for hormone related cancers — breast, prostate, ovarian and uterine.

Use the assessment below to determine how well balanced YOUR hormones are:

Mark each one you experience.

1.    Fatigue/lack of energy?
2.    Distractibility or lack of focus?
3.    Memory loss?
4.    Anger or irritability?
5.    Anxiety?
6.    Depression?
7.    Mood swings?
8.    Headaches?
9.    Muscle Aches?
10.    Joint pain?
11.    PMS?
12.    Painful periods?
13.    Breast tenderness or swelling?
14.    Accumulation of weight around your midline?
15.    Weight loss resistance?
16.    Acne or oily skin?
17.    Dry or thinning hair?
18.    Dry or itchy skin?
19.    Increased facial hair?
20.    Urinary incontinence?
21.    Decrease in sex drive?
22.    Vaginal dryness, itching or pain?
23.    Painful intercourse?
24.    Difficult achieving orgasm?
25.    Hot flashes/or night sweats?
26.    Insomnia or night time awakenings?
27.    Osteopenia or osteoporosis?
28.    Elevated cholesterol?
29.    Constipation?
30.    Bloating, gas or indigestion?

Score one point for each positive answer.  Score an additional point for each symptom that’s moderate to severe in intensity or you experience it frequently.

**If your score is 20 or higher, you most likely have a hormone imbalance that needs to be addressed ASAP.

**If you scored between 10 and 20, you are likely suffering from a hormone imbalance that’s interfering with your
quality of life.

**If you scored between 5 and 10, your hormone imbalance is mild and should be addressed to prevent it from getting worse.

**If you scored less than 5, congratulations.  Your hormones are mostly in balance and you are in a good position to  take measures to protect and nourish your hormones to prevent future imbalances.

There’s a series of 5 videos we recorded to show you how to get your hormones in balance.  The videos are free at http://www.vibranthormones.com

I teamed up with internationally acclaimed hormone expert Dr. Lindsey Berkson, author of  “Safe Hormones, Smart Women”, “Hormone Deception”,”Natural Answers to Women’s Health Questions”, “Healthy Digestion the Natural Way” and 8 other books to create these videos that share the best kept secrets about nourishing and protecting your hormones.

This Natural Hormone Balance Video Series covers the following topics and more:

• How your hormones are like email messages – and the factors that affect their delivery
• Why testosterone is important for keeping women’s hormones safe
• Important vitamins  that balance your mood, energy and libido
• The intimate connection between food and hormones, and why living and raw foods can help keep your hormones balanced
• How sleep protects you from cancer
• Why synthetic vitamins may be hurting you

In the very very first video, we share why testosterone is so  important for women as well as men and how it keeps a certain body part safe.

http://www.vibranthormones.com

This information is not to be missed if you’d like to be healthy, happy, sexy and vibrant at any age!

Love, Health and Joy to you

Dr. Ritamarie

http://www.vibranthormones.com