Appreciation Overcomes Fatigue: Dr. Ritamarie’s Gratitude Journal Day 2

Appreciation gives you energy; therefore, it’s a great antidote for chronic fatigue and adrenal exhaustion.

Yesterday, I started an Appreciation Journal, and I plan to continue to  share my appreciations every day  for 30 days.  Who knows, maybe I’ll continue after that.

If you’re looking to experience more energy, health and joy, join me on this appreciation journey and watch magical things unfold.  Comment below with 3 things you appreciate today.

Dr. Ritamarie’s Appreciations for Today – Day 2

1. I appreciate the sunshine and warmth we had today – especially since it’s November!
2. I appreciate the energy my morning green drink gives me!
3. I appreciate my computer because it connects me people around the world!

As I move through my day I like to play the appreciation game.  Every time there’s a change of scenery, I need to find 3 new things to appreciate in the new location.

Try it.

You’ll find yourself walking around brimming with joy!

With Great Love and Appreciation,

Dr. Ritamarie

Go ahead, give yourself an energy boost.  Comment below about what you appreciate today.

The Power of Appreciation to Transform Your Health: Dr. Ritamarie’s Gratitude Journal Day 1

Consistently evoking positive emotion and carrying an attitude of gratitude is right up there with fresh whole food and exercise in importance when it comes to restoring your energy, focus, and fitness. Yet it’s often set aside as a “nice to do when I have time” activity.

According to researchers at the Institute of Heart Math, published in a paper called “The Appreciative Heart: The Psychophysiology of Positive Emotions and Optimal Functioning” by Rollin McCraty and Doc Childre, “Positive emotions have been demonstrated to improve health and increase longevity, increase cognitive flexibility and creativity, facilitate “broad-minded coping” and innovative problem solving, and promote helpfulness, generosity, and effective cooperation.”

Wow.

In recent years, their research has concentrated on studying the effects appreciation has on your heart rhythms and understanding how heart-brain interactions affect your body, mind, and emotions.

And the message is really clear. Positive emotions, especially appreciation, trigger health enhancing changes in your body involving your hormones, enzymes, digestion, detoxification pathways, immune system and cardiovascular system.

And the good news is that you can invest just a minute a day to your “appreciation practice” and still reap the rewards.

So every day for the next 30, I’ll be publicly posting my appreciations for the day.

Join Me for 30 Days of Gratitude!

Try it!

Simply go down below to the comments box and post your appreciations for the day.

You’ll be pleasantly surprised at the changes in your “energy, vim, and vigor.”

Evoke appreciation before each meal, and you’ll soon find your digestion is humming and your energy is rising.

Dr. Ritamarie’s Appreciations for Today – Day 1

1. My once rebellious teenage son, Eric, now 17, is a joy to be with and is studying for SAT’s and applying to college.
2. My husband, Scott, who cleans up the messy kitchen after my many food experiments and is following along with my B4 Be Gone Program and dropping some stubborn weight.
3. My new to teenager-hood son, Kevin, who hasn’t hit the rebellious “I don’t want to be around you anymore” state, still asks me to cuddle with him at night before he goes to sleep.

It feels really good to write these things rather than just think them.

I feel like my inner radiance has tripled by writing them rather than just thinking them. The emotional state these thought evoke are powerful and invigorating.

Go ahead, give it a try and discover the magic for yourself.  Write your appreciations below.

Healing Cancer: How Your Emotions are Essential to Recovery

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

39 Quick and Easy Ways to Reduce Your Risk of Getting Cancer

Cancer is often referred to as a modern day disease, as if it was barely recognized as a disease back at the turn of the 20^th century.

Yet I recently found a book called “Cancer…Its Causes, Symptoms and Treatment”, by Eli G. Jones, MD.  It was recommended by my herbal medicine mentor David Winston.  It sat on my shelf for almost 2 years and I just happened to come upon it during my recent reorganization frenzy.  What I read blew me away.

The cover looks modern enough, since it was reprinted in 2004, yet the inside has many tell-tale signs of age.  The book was written in 1921!  What shocked me were the cancer statistics presented in the very first chapter.  Before reading this, I had thought that cancer was practically unheard of in the early part of the 1900’s.

In the US in 1890, there were 18,536 deaths from cancer.  In 1900 there were 29,222 and in 1921 there were over 50,000. In 1921, it was estimated that one man in 32 and one woman in 11 die of cancer.

Cancer Statistics: Are We Really Making Progress?

Conventional medicine would like us to believe that great strides have been made in the eradication of cancer.  Yet the statistics say quite the opposite.  Today, in the US alone, there are over 562,000 deaths per year from cancer and it’s estimated that 1 in 2 or 1 in 3 people will get cancer.  And if do you get cancer, the odds are bleak if you rely on modern medicine to bail you out.

The Journal of Clinical Oncology in 2004 (16:549) published a study done by two Australian oncologists who looked at every randomized controlled clinical trial between 1990 and 2004.  On average, the 5 year survival rate for 22 types of cancer treated with chemotherapy and radiation was 2.1 percent.  Admittedly, the survival rates tend to be higher in the general population than in studies.  Michael Boyer, head of oncology at the Sydney Cancer Center estimated the 5 year survival rate to be closer to 5 or 6 %.   It should be noted that in drug trials, anything with less than 30% effectiveness is considered placebo.

The cancers with the best 5 year survival were:

• Hodgkin’s lymphoma – 40.3%
• Testicular cancer – 37.7%
• Cervical Cancer – 12%
• Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma 10.5%

What About Nutritional Cancer Interventions?

Are the statistics much better for non-conventional treatments?  Hard to say because we really don’t have good statistical analysis for non conventional treatment approaches.  And to further complicate things, most people who undergo alternative cancer protocols do so AFTER conventional treatment has failed.  At this point their bodies are so ravaged from the chemotherapy, radiation and surgery that it would take a miracle for them to recover.

Still, there are so many case reports of people who have been given up as dead who turned to nutrition and natural therapies and went on to live for decades.

The Hippocrates Institute in Florida was originally founded by Ann Wigmore who at the age of 56 was given 6 months to live.  She turned to the natural medicine wisdom of her grandmother, completely reversed her disease and went on to use her approach to do the same for thousands of others with cancer and other serious illness.

The Gerson Institute in San Diego California, uses a program of organic foods, juicing, coffee enemas, detoxification and natural supplements developed by Dr. Max Gerson in the 1920’s and has helped thousands of cancer patients recover their health.

The Oasis of Healing in Tempe, Arizona, is a comprehensive and integrative medical and healing facility that helps cancer patients and their families learn to re-establish health.  It’s run by Dr. Thomas Lodi, whose 3 pillared approach has restored health to thousands of people.  Dr. Lodi combines juicing, living foods and emotional healing with elements of modern medicine to guide the patients to stop making cancer, target and eliminate the cancer without harm to healthy cells and enhance the immune system.

There are many other healing centers that utilize natural methods, mainly diet and nutritional balance, movement and attitude in helping hundreds of thousands of cancer patients regain their health.  Others include Optimal Health Institute in Austin and San Diego, Creative Health Institute in Michigan, and an Oasis of Hope Hospital near Los Angeles, California.

Strengthening Cancer Defenses vs Killing Cancer Cells

The approach of natural cancer interventions is to increase the body’s ability to get rid of cancer cells or to cause the cancer cells to self-destruct.  Contrast that to chemo therapy which initiates machine gun fire on all cells, hoping the cancer cells die before the good ones.  Statistics tell us that’s not what usually happens.  Many cancer deaths are a result of the treatment, not the illness

According to Mike Anderson, author of “Healing Cancer from the Inside Out”, when caught during the initiation or promotion stage, a true anti-cancer diet has 100 percent chance of reversing the disease.  When it’s progressed beyond that, nutritional treatment extends patients lives form months to years, or at minimum, reduced pain and suffering.

Seems to me the best approach is to adopt a diet and lifestyle to PREVENT cancer long before it strikes.   Prevention programs target what you eat, how you think, the quality of your relationships, with others and yourself and a long list of lifestyle choices over which you have day to day choice.

There are many books and many natural cancer prevention and management programs.  The one thing that almost all have in common is that the diet is primarily or exclusively plant based, fresh, whole living foods.

Your body makes cancer cells every day.  Your body also has the ability to destroy the cancer cells before they multiply and create a problem.  Your daily choices determine how effectively your immune system checks the growth of cancer cells keeps you safe and healthy.  If you wait until cancer is detectable, you’ll have to work a whole lot harder to get rid of it that you would have to prevent it in the first place.

It’s your choice.  You can choose health or you can make choices that increase your risk of  cancer.  What will it be?

39 Quick and Easy Ways to Reduce Your Risk of Getting Cancer

1. Eat plenty of sulforaphane.  Say what?  Sounds like the name of a chemotherapy drug.  It, in fact, is a compound found in the cruciferous family of vegetables.  These are broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, kale and all their relatives.  Sulphorophane blocks cancer cells.  Broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower also contain a compound called indole-3-carbinol that can combat breast cancer by converting a cancer-promoting estrogen into a more protective variety. If that’s not enough to have you packing in the crucifers, they also contain lutein and zeaxanthin, antioxidants that help decrease prostate and other cancers.
2. Try a daily dose of ellagic acid.  It’s found in about 46 different foods. The highest concentrations are in berries, particularly raspberries, and pomegranates, grapes and walnuts. Ellagic acid stops cancer cells from mitosis, the process they use to replicate themselves, prevents destruction of the p53 tumor suppressor gene, and causes cancer cells to commit suicide.
3. Eat an alkalizing diet. Your blood maintains its pH slightly alkaline at 7.35.  Life presents acid residue at every turn – when you exercise, get stressed, and in the foods and chemicals you take into your body. Foods that create an alkaline residue help balance life’s acids.  Cancer thrives in an acid environment.  Additional information on acid/alkaline balance is found at http://drritamarie.com/Articles.htm
4. Exercise daily and vigorously.  Cancer cells thrive in an environment deprived of oxygen.
5. Take a break from the news.  Studies show that the biochemical changes that occur when you’re stressed worried or feeling powerless affect tumor growth and spread by effecting DNA repair and the regulation of cell growth.
6. Give your body an oil change.  Heated oils oxidize, causing cancer-producing free radicals to form.  Switch them out for raw omega 3 fats like flax seeds, chia seeds and hemp seeds.  Minimize the use of oils.  Instead choose whole food fats.
7. Tame your sweet tooth.  Cancer cells thrive on sugar.  It’s best to eliminate all forms of refined sugar, and if you already have cancer, its best to eliminate all sweet foods, including fruit, with the exception perhaps of those fruits mentioned below,  used therapeutically for their cancer fighting properties.
8. Avoid animal foods.  Study after study has reported on the cancer protective effects of a diet free of meat and dairy products.  One of the most renowned is the “China Study”, conducted by T. Colin Campbell, and published in a book with the same name.  Animal foods are devoid of fiber and travel slowly through your digestive track, producing toxic metabolic wastes en route.   One mechanism proposed for the increased cancer rates in meat eaters is that the digestion of meat requires large quantities of the pancreatic enzymes trypsin and chymotrypsin, which leaves less of these enzymes available to dissolve the protein coat on cancer cells.
9. Get plenty of sunshine.  Vitamin D is made in your skin from exposure to sunlight. Maintaining appropriate blood levels of vitamin D has been shown to protect against many forms of cancer.  If you can’t be out in the sun, take a vitamin D supplement and test your vitamin D blood levels regularly.
10. Eat organic foods as much as possible.   Pesticides affect your immune system and detoxification systems and put you at higher risk of cancer.
11. Use “Green” cleaning products.  Products using natural substance reduce the toxic load.  Many of the chemicals used in commercial cleaning products are carcinogenic.
12. Keep cholesterol levels in a safe range.  Excess cholesterol can trigger cancer proliferative estrogens.
13. Keep your colon clean.  You need to be having at least 2 good sized bowel movements each day to keep the waste flowing out.  Sluggish bowels predispose you to toxic recirculation and increased risk of cancer.
14. Breathe deeply and fully to increase oxygenation of your tissues and minimize cancer risk.  Cancer can’t thrive in well oxygenated environment.
15. Avoid refined foods.  These are devoid of cancer protective phytochemicals and nutrients and usually contain preservatives and chemicals that can increase your risk of cancer
16. Chew your food thoroughly.  When you eat under stress and on the run, your digestion becomes inefficient.  Toxic residues accumulate from unchewed and undigested food, leaving you more prone to immune stress and cancer formation.
17. Avoid food allergens. Anything you are allergic to creates an immune system response, which distracts your system from the more important work of cancer surveillance and destruction.
18. Drink plenty of pure water. Insufficient hydration decreases your kidney’s ability to excrete water soluble toxins.  Recirculation of these poisons increases your cancer risk.  Rule of thumb is ½ your body weight in fluid ounces each day.
19. Eat lots of green leafy vegetables every day.  They are loaded with cancer protective phytochemicals,  minerals and nutrients that protect from cancer and disrupt the functioning of cancer cells.
20. Load up on Vitamin C.  It’s a powerful anti-cancer nutrient that’s frequently given in IV form to treat cancer.  Foods like fresh greens, bell peppers, berries, citrus, and sweet potatoes are rich sources.  Supplementary vitamin C can be taken in the form of buffered ascorbic acid or whole food concentrates, like camu camu, amla, goji, acerola cherry and pomegranate powder.
21. Eat laetrile containing foods, like apricot and peach kernels,  buckwheat, berry seeds,  grape seeds,  chick peas, lentils, lima beans, mung sprouts, cashews, alfalfa brown rice,  millet, bitter almond and  macadamia nuts.  Laetrile has very powerful anti-cancer properties.  It works by killing cancer cells and building the immune system to fend off future outbreaks.  For the treatment of cancer, many experts recommend a daily dose of 24 – 40 apricot, spread throughout the day.
22. Eat carrots, which contain thousands, of phytonutrients, many of which have already been identified for their cancer-fighting abilities.
23. Eat flax seeds, which contain antioxidant lignans that block or suppress cancerous growth.
24. Season with Garlic.  Its immune-enhancing allium compounds .increase the activity of immune cells that fight cancer, help block carcinogens from entering cells, and indirectly help break down and slow tumor development. Diallyl sulfide, a compound found in the oil of garlic, has been shown to deactivate carcinogens in the liver.
25. Enjoy Citrus fruits. Grapefruit and oranges contain monoterpenes, which appear by clear carcinogens from the body.  Tangerine peels contain cancer destroying Salvestrol 40, a type of phytoalexin produced to repel insects or fungi. Oranges and lemons contain Iimonene which stimulates cancer-killing immune cells
26. Eat red grapes, especially concord grapes with the seeds.  They contain cancer protective compounds such as ellagic acid, catechin, quercetin, oligomeric proanthocyanidins (OPC), resveratrol, pterostilbene, selenium, lycopene, lutein, laetrile, beta-carotene, caffeic acid and/or ferulic acid and gallic acid!  There are several books written about a cancer treatment called the grape cure, during which a water fast is followed by a diet of blended grapes.  The idea is that the cancer cells love the grapes because of their high sugar content and while eating the sugar, they are poisoned by the chemo therapy that grapes naturally contain.
27. Make friends with mushrooms. There are a number of them that have been shown to have cancer protective effective and immune building effects, including shiitake, maitake, and reishi.   The mushrooms contain lentinan, beta glucan and  lectin –powerful substances  that help build immunity.
28. Eat 2 Brazil nits every day.  They provide cancer protective selenium, an essential mineral.  Other nuts contain the antioxidants quercetin and campferol that may suppress the growth of cancers.
29. Season your food with cancer protective herbs and spices.  Turmeric is extremely powerful as an antioxidant and anti-cancer agent. It inhibits production of cyclo-oxygenase 2 (COX-2), which reduces inflammation and cancer cell growth, especially bowel and colon cancer. Rosemary contains carnosol, which inhibits breast and skin tumors in animals. Rosemary may help increase the activity of detoxification enzymes.
30. Indulge in asparagus when in season.  It contains cancer reducing saponins.  Blend 1 or 2 stalks into a green soup or salad dressing.
31. Add beets to your salads.  They contain anti-cancer proanthocyanidins (OPC’s).
32. Get tropical. Enjoy raw pineapple and papaya.  In addition to lots of vitamin C, they contain the enzymes bromelain, papain and pexoxidase that have been shown to have anti-cancer properties.
33. Eat from the sea. In addition to being an excellent source of minerals that support your immune system, sea vegetables contain substances which bind to heavy metals and toxins and eliminate them from your body.  Powdered sea vegetables like kelp and dulse can be added to salads, soups and smoothies.
34. Switch from coffee to green tea. Green tea contains polyphenols , one in particular called particularly epigallocatechin gallate, or EGCG , that inhibit an enzyme required for cancer cell growth and  kills cancer cells without harming healthy cells.
35. Eat tomatoes.  They contain lycopene, an antioxidant that attacks cancer promoting free radicals.  Blend them into a sauce with rosemary, basil, thyme and oregano for extra immune support.
36. Prioritize fresh foods. Adopt a diet that contains 75% or more fresh raw foods, including lots of sprouts and greens.
37. Drink a green smoothie every day to provide lots of fresh raw cancer fighting plants.
38. Learn to love your lawn.  There is a cancer protecting effect of several of the cereal grasses.  There have been several prominent rat studies which showed a definite reduction in cell mutation in rats fed wheat grass juice along with a highly carcinogenic substance called benzopyrene compared to when they were fed the benzopyrene alone.  Barley grass extract was demonstrated to inhibit growth of human prostate, breast and melanoma cancer cells in a study done at George Washington University Medical Centre.  While wheat grass juice may not be the tastiest juice you can drink, it sure does appear to be one of the most health promoting ones.
39. Practice the Art of Appreciation.   There is no better way of getting your stress hormones settled down and your immune system fired up than taking time to deeply appreciate your blessings.  Do it daily, morning and evening.  Find 3 things to appreciate and experience how good it feels.

So there you have it.  Creating cancer protective habits is not difficult.  There are lots to choose from.  While you don’t need to master all 39 tips all at once, the more you do, the better your odds of protecting yourself from clenches of cancer.

To hear more, visit www.drritamarie.com/cancertalk.

Love, Health and Joy ..and lots of Fun!

Dr. Ritamarie