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

How a Lack of Sufficient Sleep Makes You Fat

The subject is SLEEP:  how lack of sufficient sleep disrupts your hormones, your immune system, and your ability to think clearly. The average person in our modern world gets between 5 and 6 hours of sleep each night.  And that’s just not enough.

Ever wonder why you can’t diet or exercise your weight down to where you’d like it? Or, have you ever thought about why you have a spare tire around your midline, even though the scale says you’re not overweight?

Resistant weight loss and belly fat are intimately related to your hormones, and your hormone balance can be severely disrupted by chronic sleep disruption.

Did you know that your sleep habits are just as important as what you put on your fork when it comes to releasing weight? (especially the extra padding around your middle!) Research shows that shift workers are, on average, heavier than those who work day jobs! And it has to do with disruption to the hormone dance that happens while you sleep.

The hormones affected by sleep control your appetite, the growth of lean muscle and your fat, and carbohydrate metabolism.

How Insufficient Sleep Affects Your Weight:

1. Decreased serotonin and dopamine production, which leads to cravings for sugary foods to bring the levels back up.
2. Increased ghrelin (a hormone that makes you feel hungry even if your body has enough food) and decreased leptin (makes you feel full and satisfied after eating) – the result means sugar cravings and continued hunger even after you’ve eaten a full meal.
3. Decreased growth hormone, leading to decreased ability to burn fat and lay down lean muscle.
4. Increased cortisol, “the stress hormone” which triggers the breakdown of muscle stores, increased blood sugar, and increased insulin. This leads to the deposition of fat, mainly around your waist.

Module 3 of my new program, B4 Be Gone, is called The Hormone Dance. In it, I outline the exact steps to take to determine how much sleep you need and what to do to get your hormones in balance so you burn rather than store fat at night.

Sleep Your Way Slim

My video, The NOT-So-Sexy Hormone Imbalances That Keep You Flabby, Foggy and Fatigued goes into a lot more detail more about the hormone imbalances and offers you a couple of steps to take right away to turn your bed into a super charged fat burning monster. On that video, I bust the myth of eating small frequent meals, which plays havoc on your hormone balance.

It’s not just important for your appearance that you get a good night’s sleep. These same hormone imbalances can have long term, dangerous consequences on your heart, increase inflammation and pain put you at a higher risk for cancer.

The loss of my parents, then my sister, a couple of friends and cousins, and most recently my brother-in-law and father-in-law has made me fiercely determined to stop the madness. I know their deaths could have been prevented had they just known what to do and had a guide to take them through every step of the way.

Turning Loss into Life

I created the B4 Be Gone Program to offer just that step by step guidance that so many need. Within 30 days, most people have lost their cravings and reset much of the faulty metabolism by bringing into balance five key elements: diet, stress, exercise, sleep and TIMING.

All the sleep research has me really taking a look at my own choices. I push the envelope with sleep because I feel fine even when I don’t sleep. But that’s on the outside. I know enough to realize that what’s going on inside as a result of my lack of sleep could come back and bite me in the you-know-what. Indeed, I have noticed that I’ve been extra hungry during the day these past few sleep-deprived weeks.

I am looking forward to doing the 30-day metabolic reset with the group and committing to getting enough sleep.

It’s All About Balance.

Balance is the key. It’s not enough to just drink green smoothies or just exercise daily or just get lots of sleep. The balance among stress, sleep, exercise and diet are key.

And on top of that, Timing is EVERYTHING.

You can do all the right things, but if it’s out of sync with your bio-rhythms, your belly will stay flabby — no matter how many sit-ups you do or green drinks you drink.

If you’re feeling flabby and frustrated, my advice to you is to sleep on it and then join us in the next B4 Be Gone Journey.

Metabolism Boosting Blunder: Why Eating Smaller, Frequent Meals May Make You Fat!

- by Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo

I want to share one of my favorite tips for keeping the extra pounds from creeping in around your waistline, and it has to do with how far apart you space your meals.

One of my Bye-Bye Belly Fat, Brain Fog, and Burnout video subscribers wrote and asked me why I was advising only 3 meals a day spaced 5-6 hours apart when she had at least 5 books on her shelf written by respected health educators telling her to eat frequent, small meals.

All too often, “so called experts” tell you to eat many small meals throughout the day to keep your blood sugar steady. What they don’t tell you is that constant feeding means you have a steady stream of insulin in your bloodstream.

Whatever sugar insulin can’t manage to get inside your cells, it stores away as fat… around your belly!

So, while eating every couple of hours keeps your blood sugar from getting too low, it never allows for the rhythmic ebb and flow of insulin. It also causes your leptin and growth hormone levels to go down.

Since these hormones are involved in feeling satiated after meals and in fat burning, you’re shooting yourself in the foot when you eat every few hours.  The ideal meal spacing appears to be somewhere between 5 and 6 hours.

You might be thinking, “I can’t go 5 hours without eating.”

Of course you can’t NOW. You have faulty metabolic pathways that need to be repaired before you can space your meals optimally.

Eating every couple of hours may appear to “solve” your problem and keep your blood sugar even, but it’s really just masking the underlying issue. A balanced body can go 6 hours or longer without feeling faint or irritable.

My B4 Be Gone System gives you the steps to repair the underlying imbalances so you can keep your blood sugar nice and steady without the damaging effects of high insulin all day long.

And I show you exactly how to gradually increase the length of time between meals so your energy remains steady.  My system is designed to guide you to find the right timing for YOU and gradually optimize it as your cells repair. This can happen rather quickly.

One of my clients went from having to eat every hour to easily going 5 hours between meals…within less than two weeks! And she finally dropped 12 of the pounds she’d been struggling to let go for years.  In my B4 Be Gone Program, I show you exactly how to restore the sensitivity of your cells to insulin so you can space your meals, burn more fat, lay down more muscle, and keep your energy and focus nice and steady all day long.

You owe it to the world to get out from under the veil of an under-focused mind, low energy, and lack of confidence in your appearance.  It’s your time to shine.  Join us for the incredible B4 Be Gone Journey and unleash your greatness.

You really are unstoppable!

You’re going to step into your passion and potential as soon as you step out of the fog.

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.”

Belly Fat Breakthrough: How Your Muscles May Be Adding to Your Midline

- by Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo

Have you noticed that excess belly fat appears to be almost epidemic these days, even amongst the very slender and the very young?

I’ m so tired of all the websites and programs that promise the answer to getting rid of those stubborn inches once and for all, while you still eat your favorite foods. They always flaunt someone with 6-pack abs to prove their point. The average person has tried at least 3 of these programs, only to find themselves back where they started, plus a few more inches in many cases, just a few months later.

Why are most waist-targeted diets simply a waste?

Most belly fat targeted programs fail to help you to change the habits that lead to your expanding waistline. Small and occasional “favorite food” indulgences could possibly be just fine and not sabotage your progress, but the truth is those foods are so addicting that small and occasional portions soon become small and regular portions, then larger portions regularly, and in many cases soon become all-out binges.

When the “favorite foods” include bread, chips, crackers and muffins, it becomes very challenging for most people to keep the portions small. These foods not only are deficient in nutrients, they generally also cause a spike in insulin, a hormone that’ s responsible for keeping your blood sugar at its optimal level. Too much insulin creates all sorts of problems, which we explain in detail in our Taming Your Midline Program.

If you want a smaller waistline you need a bigger understanding of insulin

In summary, when you eat high carbohydrate comfort foods regularly, your insulin levels become dangerously high and your cells become resistant to insulin. This means you can’t get enough sugar into your cells and you feel tired, unfocused, and hungry after meals.

To get control of your belly fat, you need to break the viscous cycle.

How your muscles may be adding to your midline

On top of the difficulty and stress people experience due to insulin resistance, worry and fear trigger increased cortisol, an adrenal hormone.

Here’s the kicker that keeps the belly fat from burning…

Cortisol mobilizes muscles to raise blood sugar quickly to prepare you to run or fight. When you’re sitting around worrying about something that may or may not occur, there is no way to burn all that extra blood sugar. So insulin comes to the rescue and stores it as fat.

And cortisol’s favorite place to store the fat is around your belly.

So how do you keep your thigh muscles from turning to belly fat?

One way is to stop worrying.  As a society, we do it all the time. Huge real estate in the local paper is devoted to gloom and doom predictions and stories of catastrophie. The goal is to induce fear. Fear sells.

Listen in on the conversations that surround you. You’ll repeatedly hear people say, “I’m so worried about… .”

When you worry over an event that has not happened and may not happen, the response in your body is identical to the reaction you’d have if the event was really happening. If the event does in fact transpire, you’ve paid twice! The wear and tear of worry on your body is huge, and constant worry over the years just may be a contributing factor to your expanding midline, especially if you’ve been exercising and eating well and don’t seem to be making progress.

One of the strategies presented in my free e-course and e-book, 7 Simple Strategies to Jumpstart Your Energy Practically Overnight, is to take a news fast. Try it for a week.

You just may find yourself being flatter around the middle, and as an extra bonus you’ ll be more focused and get a lot more done.

This is just one of the strategies I will be sharing in my hot new free video series called Belly Fat , Brain Fog and Burnout Breakthroughs.

Subscribe now to Jumpstart Your Energy and then watch your inbox later this week for the Belly Fat Breakthrough signup link!