Adrenal Fatigue: 3 Tips to Make Your Weekend Count

Written by Ritamarie Loscalzo

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Adrenal fatigue is estimated to affect 80% of women at some point in their lives.  That’s 4 out of 5 women who’ll experience exhaustion of a key gland pair – the adrenals.

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

Tags: Adrenal Fatigue, appreciation, chronic fatigue, detox, detoxification, digestion, digestive tract, Dr. Ritamarie, DrRitamarie, health challenges, heart math, HeartMath, hormonal imbalance, nutrition, self care, supplements, thyroid, tired
Posted in Adrenal Fatigue, Chronic Fatigue, Chronic Stress, Detox Program, Exhaustion, Fatigue Treatment

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7 Simple Strategies for Correcting Hormone Imbalance and Harmonizing Your Life

Written by Ritamarie Loscalzo

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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

Tags: bioidentical hormone replacement, dr lindsey berkson, Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo, hormonal imbalance, Hormone Imbalance, menopause, PMS
Posted in Green Smoothies, Hormone Imbalance, Vibrant Health

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Fatigue and Burnout: Strategies for Adrenal Exhaustion and Just Plain Tiredness

Written by Ritamarie Loscalzo

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Are you suffering from adrenal burnout and fatigue? Low thyroid function? Chronic fatigue or Fibromyalgia?

Do you have as much energy as you’d like to have?

What would you do if you had more energy? Think about what it would be like  to pop out of bed in the morning, bright, cheery and ready for the day.

As you go through your day, you feel energized by your food, your conversations, your work and your activities. When asked by a friend or family member to participate in a fun evening activity , you always say yes,
without fear of losing steam at the end of the day, and being too tired to to do much more than flop on the couch.

You participate in activities you love, eat healthy meals, exercise and are fully present for your relationships. You never hear yourself utter the words, “I’m too tired.”  Instead you say, “I feel so energized.”

Sound like a romantic fiction novel? This life is possible for you.

Fatigue, exhaustion, tiredness, weariness, low energy…whatever you choose to call it, it’s a real problem and it happens to real people like you. There are many causes. Some are obvious, others not so obvious. When I asked  at one of my workshops for a show of hands of people who felt that were fatigued, or had low energy, all but 1 or 2 people raised their hands.

Then I proceeded to give one of my favorite definitions of fatigue. The definition goes something like this:

The decreased capacity or complete inability of an organism, an organ, or a part to function normally because of excessive stimulation or prolonged exertion.

I talked about how you may feel like you have plenty of energy (caffeine and other stimulants can give you that illusion), yes parts of you are operating sub par. Maybe your neurotransmitters are sluggish and you have difficulties with focus, or your digestion and you’re constipated, or your hormones, and you have menstrual irregularities.

It takes all of your parts working in harmony to achieve vibrant energy.

At the end of the presentation, one of the women who’d not considered herself fatigued, thanked me and said that she didn’t associate the sluggishness in her digestive tract with fatigue. She just figured it was “normal” for her. My talk inspired her to look at ways she could energize her digestion and thus improve her overall experience of vibrant health and high energy.

There are many causes of fatigue. Here are five:

1. Underfed and toxic mitochondria
2. Hormone imbalances – especially thyroid, adrenal, insulin and leptin
3. Digestive Inefficiencies
4. Autoimmune Processes
5. Serious diseases, like cancer, heart disease and diabetes

I’ll be exploring the topic of fatigue and its underlying causes and strategies for identifying and removing them on my Creating a Vibrant Life Blog Talk Radio Show on Wednesday, March 24 at 12:30 PM central time.

We’ll demystify adrenal fatigue, and distinguish it from thyroid fatigue. We’ll share strategies, stories and inspiration, to help move you from exhausted to energized.

Submit your questions for me pertaining to fatigue and regaining energy in the comment box below so we can address your concerns on the show.

The shows are all recorded and you can access the recording and download to iTunes by going back to the show link afterward. There are archives of past shows there as well.

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

And watch for my article called Running on Empty in the spring edition of Purely Delicious Magazine, due out in April.

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

I look forward to connecting with you soon.

Love, Health and Joy to You,

Dr. Ritamarie

P.S.  Comment below:  What are you committing to for your health?  Today is day 22 of the 30 Day Sleep and Fun Challenge.  I am happy to report that I have gotten more than 6 hours of sleep for 3 days straight.  Over the weekend, I actually managed to get 9 hours!  And my exercise is consistent again – almost everyday!

How about you?  Commit below and make it happen.

Tags: Adrenal Fatigue, BlogTalkRadio, Cancer, chronic fatigue, Cleansing Programs, energy, Exhaustion, fatigue, fatigue symptoms, fibromyalgia, hormonal imbalance, Hormone Imbalance, sleep, thyroid fatigue
Posted in Adrenal Fatigue, Holistic Nutrition, Vibrant Health

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