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.

Fear, Anxiety, and Thanklessness – A Sure-fire Prescription for a FAT Midsection

Most people consider me an expert in restoring and maintaining health using diet and lifestyle approaches. My “claims to fame” are my in-depth knowledge of nutrition and biochemistry, and my program effectiveness for restoring balance to achieve vibrant health and energy.

Countless people come to me for advice, wondering why they are still overweight and ill, in spite of eating a healthy diet.

How Stress May Supersize You

While I can usually find things to tweak in clients’ diets, and I can recommend herbs or natural nutrition supplements to restore balance, we’re fighting an uphill battle if we ignore the role of stress, negative emotions, and worry; your health, energy level, AND weight are all affected.

On a past radio show, Your Muscles May be Making You Fat, I explored in detail the mechanism by which stress and worry contribute to belly bulge, and I encourage you to listen for details.

In summary, fear, worry, stressful thoughts and situations, and negative emotions trigger the release of cortisol and adrenaline from your adrenal glands. This hormone release triggers a series of fight or flight mechanisms that cause your liver and muscles to release sugar into your blood. Normally, this release would ready you for your “chase” or “escape”.

But what also happens, and this is the troubling part when it happens frequently, is that your insulin is also triggered to rise, so the sugar in the blood can be absorbed by your cells and fuel them to flight or fight. Keep in mind, that extra sugar in your blood would normally get used. Unfortunately, when your stresses are mental, you can’t burn all the released sugar. Insulin, in following through with its job of maintaining healthy blood sugar levels, causes the sugar to be put back into storage… as white adipose tissues, whose main receptors are – you guessed it – right around your belly.

I discuss more details concerning insulin, its role, and insulin resistance in Video 1, of the 5-part Bye-Bye Belly Fat, Brain Fog, and Burnout video series.

When you get stressed over situations that are beyond your control – like fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, traffic, other people’s attitudes – you are creating the perfect environment not only for “turning your muscles into fat” but for injuring your insides and setting yourself up for diseases. The three most serious and very common sequelae [secondary conditions] to chronic stress are the BIG 3: Heart disease, Cancer and Diabetes.

If achieving a slim trim body and keeping yourself safe from “the Big 3″ aren’t enough motivation to get a handle on stress, there’s more.

A Change of Heart Can Mean a Change in Dress Size

Your thoughts and emotions impact others around you, both those in close proximity and those far away.

Let me explain.

Research at the Institute of HeartMath has confirmed that your thoughts and emotions affect your heart rate variability (HRV). When you’re calm, HRV, when graphed, looks like a nice even sine wave and when you’re frustrated or angry, worried or anxious, it’s erratic and spikey. Notice the difference in the graphs to the right.

The smooth wave pattern is associated with ideal blood pressure, clear thinking, proper metabolic function and overall well being. The other pattern hallmarks disease, dysfunction, resistant weight loss and a host of other serious metabolic disruptions.

This article on the HeartMath website gives all the details, and it also takes you step-by-step through a couple of their techniques for restoring balance:

http://www.alternativeworldwidehealth.com/files/Heartmath_Stress_chapter.pdf

According to HeartMath:

In my Mend Your Metabolism & Maximize Your Vitality webinar, I will take you step-by-step through one of the HeartMath processes for Transforming Stress so you can feel for yourself the effects of being in a state they refer to as “coherence”.

It’s an amazing feeling and you too can learn it. In my 30-day B4 Be Gone program, I guide my patients and students through daily practice of this technique, and send them daily reminders and a recording of me guiding them through the process.

Join us on the webinar to get yourself started.

Get Slim, Stress-free, and Save the World

So now for the really amazing, almost unbelievable finding.

YOU have more power than you think over the state of the world, the energy in the room, and the stressful feelings of others.

Hear me out on this one…

When two people with different HRV patterns come into each other’s energy fields, the HRV’s tend to synchronize, and the strongest field prevails. This has been measured by the institute of HeartMath researchers on medical equipment!

By practicing the HeartMath technique called Quick Coherence several times a day, with as little a time investment as 5 minutes a day, you’ll become proficient at changing your emotional state and the HRV’s of others with whom you come into contact.

How cool is that?

And when you practice their more advanced technique, called Heart Lock-in, you actually practice deliberately projecting your energy out into the room. To master Heart Lock-in takes a bit more time, 15 minutes about 3-4 times a week!

When natural disasters like fire and flood strike, the natural tendency is to feel victimized. That puts you into the “triple P emotional state” that has been shown to be the most damaging of all… powerlessness, pessimism, and pervasive worry.

It’s times like these that we need to band together energetically and send positive thoughts, prayers, and uplifting energy to those whose lives are affected. Imagine the effect of thousands of people all over the world projecting their positive energy field! According to the above aforementioned article from the Institute of HeartMath (which I highly recommend you read in its entirety), “positive thinking” without accompanying positive feelings usually only provides temporary relief from emotional distress. Whereas the activation of positive emotions is more likely to transform the stress at its source.

According to Joe Vitale, author of The Attractor Factor, “there are over 25 scientific studies that prove when a group of people meditate together, they can change their surroundings — just by getting settled inside.”

Dr. Vitale lives not too far from where I live, just outside of Austin, and he sent out a plea for help with getting the fires under control through the power of positive emotion.

I’ve printed his entire letter on my blog, where Joe tells of his experience with this process when Hurricane Rita threatened Austin a few years back.

Whether you believe Dr. Vitale’s account of changing the course of natural events or not, there’s no disputing the positive effect of appreciation and love on your own chemistry and that of those around you. Lots of studies at www.heartmath.org support this.

So, what do you have to lose?

Even if you think it’s goofy, it can’t hurt and it will change your own emotions and your internal well-being.

So take a deep breath… find that place of peace inside yourself where you know all is well. Access that area of inner calm…and then just feel the fires going out; imagine the hurricanes heading out to sea; envision the earth’s core relaxing; and perceive that all the people affected are safe, sound, and protected.

Stop, breathe, focus, pray, or in some positive way send out an energy that will help dissolve the fear.
It’s your way of making a difference in the face of disaster, even if you can’t send lots of money or travel to the scene to help.

Check out the book Unconditional Bliss by Howard Cushnir. He says you can find happiness in the face of hardship.

And in the words of Joe Vitale, “… be happy, right now. Smile. Send that loving energy out, in the direction of Texas.

Intend for all to be well, for, in reality, all is well.”

Adrenal Fatigue: 3 Tips to Make Your Weekend Count

You’re not alone if you feel frazzled and exhausted by the end of the work week.  While our fast paced age of technology has done wonders for keeping us connected like never before, it comes with a price.

Used to be you only got your adrenals fired up when tigers and lions were chasing you.  As soon as the threat was handled, your adrenals would settle down and you’d return to a calmer and more steady pace.

When you’re at work, managing the tigers of deadlines, unhappy customers, unruly students and the abundance of stressors that frequent your day to day life, your nervous system operates from a state called sympathetic dominance. When you meditate, rest, do yoga and take time to “smell the roses”  you operate from parasympathetic dominance.

Who cares?

You need to if you desire to be focused instead of foggy, energetic instead of exhausted and  fit instead of fat.

You see, in sympathetic dominant mode, your digestion slows down, the valves between the various parts of your digestive tract tighten (leading to constipation and abdominal discomfort), and the high level thinking part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex, is inhibited, your hippocampus, gate keeper of your short term memory,  gets damaged and DHEA, sometimes called the anti-aging hormone, decreases.  The end result is you feel bloated, foggy headed and worn down.

In parasympethic dominant mode, the opposite happens.  Your digestion becomes more efficient,  your prefrontal cortex is enhanced, your hippocampus repairs and DHEA increases. As a result you feel calm, clear headed and focused and young.

By you may be wondering how to lengthen your stay in parasympathetic dominance.

Start by using my 3 tips to make your weekend count.  They will put you into parasympathetic dominance and enable you to rejuvenate before starting the hectic pace all over again on Monday.

Make the weekend count by using it to regroup and give yourself the gift of self care.

1- Set aside 30 minutes for you! Go ahead and look at your calendar and schedule it in.  And KEEP the appointment with yourself.  Do something you love to do.  Take a bath, lay in the sun, read a book…just do something that’s strictly for you.  You’ll feel rejuvenated as a result.

2- Take time several times a day to express appreciation to someone, to yourself or to the universe for the blessings in your life.  Studies have shown that 30 seconds of appreciation is the most effective means of restoring balance to your system.  The Institute of Heartmath has performed dozens of studies on the benefits of appreciation.

3- Take some extra time to sweat. Yes, sweat.  When researchers analyzed the sweat of participants after exercise,  they found it loaded with toxins.  Exerting to the point of a good sweat has many benefits with regards to cardiovascular health, hormone balance and detoxification.  And surprisingly they found that the sweat after running for 30 minutes was more full of toxins than the sweat produced in a sauna. If you use your weekend to sweat away toxins, you’ll feel more focused and peaceful when you start the week again.

If you find yourself thinking, “I already know that”  in response to the simplicity of these tips, ask yourself this:  “Am I taking action?”

Many of the people I work with in group programs and individually are looking for the more glamorous solutions to their health challenges and fail to handle the underlying sympathetic dominance.

Sympathetic dominance is a real problem. No matter what herbs, supplements and foods you eat to support your tired adrenals, if you just keep forcing them to work hard, you won’t be able to restore them.  And burned out adrenals can lead to thyroid issues, hormone imbalances, insulin resistance –which contributes to excess belly fat— and chronic fatigue.

I urge you to slow down and use the weekend to restore balance.  Once you get that piece wired, we can talk about how to increase your parasympathetic dominance during the week.

To find out the impact of sympathetic dominance on your health, you can answer a set of questions, check physical signs, look at a few markers in routine blood work and even order specialized hormone tests.

In my new course, Assess Your Own Body Chemistry I teach how to evaluate for signs of nutritional deficiency and hormonal imbalance.

Love, Health and Gratitude,

Dr. Ritamarie

Emotional Stress and Your Health

I’m sharing this announcement with you because the Heart Math techniques have transformed my life.  I’ve been using them for the past 5 years or so myself, and I’ve taught them to hundreds of patients and clients.  I became a certified Heart Math Coach about 5 years ago.  I have a product called Transforming Stress which guides you step by step through a couple of the techniques I find most helpful.  It has changed my life for the better.  If you can fit this teleseminar into your schedule, I highly recommend it.  I’ve already put it on my calendar.

A special HeartMath MicroTraining in May to benefit the nation’s service men and women will feature HeartMath medical director and author, Dr. Bruce Wilson, a prominent Wisconsin cardiologist. Dr. Wilson’s presentation is especially timely. Emotional Stress and Your Health, a one-hour Teleseminar presented by Wilson and psychologist Dr. Deborah Rozman, takes on added importance in light of a recent Gallup Poll. Representing 95% of the world’s population from 140 countries, the poll shows that positive emotions were a reliable predictor of better health and negative emotions were a reliable predictor of worse health, even when basic needs of food, shelter and safety were met.

Dr. Wilson, author of The HeartMath Approach to Managing Hypertension, has lectured about and taught HeartMath’s emotion refocusing and self-management tools for over a decade in hospitals, companies, school systems and with his own patients. He will share his story of why he got involved with HeartMath and address the beneficial effects that HeartMath methods and emotional management tools have on people with chronic diseases. Dr. Rozman, author of HeartMath’s Transforming Series books, will discuss practical ways you can reduce stress, anxiety, anger and other negative emotions in these difficult times.

Among those most in need of HeartMath’s scientifically developed tools and technology are returning combat troops and the nation’s veterans, and the Institute of HeartMath is offering this MicroTraining in their behalf.

HeartMath already has assisted a great number of military personnel and hopes to expand access to its tools to thousands more, especially those coping with the personal impact of war. All donations from those attending this May 30 Teleseminar will go directly toward the Military Appreciation Service Fund. (So we ask that if you find value in this event, please consider a contribution of $10, $25 or $35 to this fund.)