#88 – Can hormone issues hinder weight loss, juicing vs smoothies, and what is food combining? With Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo!
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo is passionately committed to transforming exhausted high achievers all over the globe into high energy people who love their lives and live to their full potential. Now that’s a great mission statement! She founded the Institute of Nutritional Endocrinology because she is passionate about finding the root cause for illnesses, blending nature with modern scientific research, as a Doctor of Chiropractic and Certified Clinical Nutritionist. She’s trained and certified hundreds of practitioners and transformed countless lives through her coaching and online programs, and it’s such an honor to have her on the show! Enjoy!
Audio version: https://chantelray.podbean.com/e/wa88/
Video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cydJD41mXFs&feature=youtu.be
Her website: https://drritamarie.com/
Chantel: Hey guys, welcome to this week’s episode and we are so excited. We have Doctor Rita Marie and she has transformed thousands of people’s lives. She founded the Institute of Nutritional Endocrinology because she’s passionate about finding the root cause for illnesses. As she’s trained and certified hundreds of practitioners and transformed countless lives through her coaching and online programs, and it’s such a pleasure to have you. Welcome Doctor Rita Marie.
Dr. Rita Marie: Well thank you, I’m real excited to be here and I’m really excited about what you’re doing with your podcast, it’s awesome.
Chantel: Well thank you. And you’ve struggled with your own illnesses that has kind of lead you to this, so talk about that, just personally what’s going on with you.
Dr. Rita Marie: Well right now I’m feeling great. I love my life and I’m really healthy but it wasn’t always like that. Back in my 20s my health was falling apart and I didn’t even know why, I was just doing my life and it caught up with me and I was experiencing brain fog, you know that feeling of you don’t even know what’s going on. I was experiencing some more serious things like really severe headaches and sinus issues and the last straw was when I started to feel this doubling over pain in my stomach every time I ate.
Dr. Rita Marie: And I was going to doctors and specialists and I was given surgeries and I was given shots in my nose and cortisone and all kinds of antibiotics and ulcer medication and nobody could figure out what was wrong with me and I was 24, 25 years old. I finally, when they said, “Well you don’t have an ulcer, just keep taking the ulcer medication.” And I was like, “Huh? Could it be my diet?” And they were like, “Ah no, no, no, diet has nothing to do with it.” And I always take a challenge.
Dr. Rita Marie: My mom always called me the rebel girl so whenever someone said no it can’t be something I would say, “Sure it can.” And I’d try to prove them wrong. So I started my journey and I started looking in to diet, nutrition and fasting and cleansing and I got my health back. And it took a lot to do that, so I decided that it shouldn’t be that hard for others, and I went back to school, quit my lucrative job back then in the computer industry. Went back to school to be able to do what I do now, and I’ve never looked back.
Dr. Rita Marie: My health has never been better, it gets better and better as I age rather than worse and worse. You know I envision myself back in my 20s, what am I going to be like in my 50s? And ran my first marathon at 50 and did triathlons and I’m just full of energy and health and I love it.
Chantel: Wow. Well you talk a lot about hormone balance and hormone healing with the food that we eat. Are there groups of food that you think we eat way too much of and that we should be eliminating or restricting across the board or are you kind of the belief that it’s more of a case by case thing? What do you kind of tell your patients to start if they really want to start healing their body with food?
Dr. Rita Marie: Absolutely. So I think both, right? I think that there are absolutely foods that almost everybody needs to be avoiding. There are some foods that everybody needs to be avoiding, that we all eat too much of and then there’s the gray areas of those foods that… like some people just need more carbohydrates but in a complex way, you know, in whole foods. And other people crash and burn on any kind of carbohydrates, even if it’s just cooked carrots.
Dr. Rita Marie: So it’s really a matter of figuring out for each person. The things that we all need to avoid is… I don’t even think we should be discussing it in the category as food. It’s foods that are non-foods. The processed crap that comes out of factories that’s loaded with ingredients we can’t pronounce. Hydrogenated and oxidized oils, even oils in general, and I’m a big proponent of not oil because that’s not a whole food either. So whole foods, real whole foods that come from nature is where I try to push people towards.
Chantel: So expand on that just a little bit. Talk about the oils. Are you saying we just in general, Americans are just eating exorbitant amounts of oil?
Dr. Rita Marie: Way too much and we’re glorifying it. Right? We’re glorifying olive oil, just eat the olives. The olives still have all the protein and the fiber and all the other good things in them, I’m not like I’m a purist, that I never eat olive oil or flax soil or something sprinkled on my salad but I think that we’ve glorified it because we talk about carbs, right? Carbs have this, like right now in this society where everything’s intermittent fasting and Keto, it’s carbs, they’re like the enemy and they’re not but the carbs that most people eat are.
Dr. Rita Marie: Because they’re white, they’re refined, they’re processed, they’re made into flours, they make the blood sugar rise really quickly and that does a number on hormones. So we say, okay, so whole grains are better than white grains, right? So the white flour stuff has been given that status of not good for decades. But we still look at oil, oil is the same as white flour. Oil is to fatty the same as white flour is to a whole grain. So it’s not something we should be an exorbitant amounts of. Its something that, I mean we do it for the delicacy of it, right?
Dr. Rita Marie: It just tastes good to have a little bit of olive oil sprinkled over your tomatoes and basil, but that whole, lets throw a couple of tablespoons of oil into our shakes for health. Let’s eat whole foods because they have all the others. Now, not to say that I don’t therapeutically use oils with people, I have somebody whose underweight and just can’t gain and just can’t eat very much because their digestive tract’s a mess. I’m going to be putting them on coconut oil or MCT oil or having them abundantly add that just so that they can maintain while we’re healing.
Chantel: Gotcha. Now, one more thing before we get started with the listener questions, I like to ask all my guests about what they eat on a typical day. So walk us through the day of the life of Doctor Rita Marie. What did you eat yesterday, and do you do any intermittent fasting or fasting yourself at all?
Dr. Rita Marie: Okay, so first of all there is no typical day for me because I’m on the run, or I’m traveling, or I’m here, I just eat differently but there are certain things that I do every day. So I’ll answer the second question first because that’s easier. Yes I do intermittent fasting. Fasting and fasting itself by five day fasts regularly, sometimes 10. I’ve even done as much as 28 days and that’s what gave me back my health back in the day, you know, 30 years ago.
Chantel: Did you do 28 days of-
Dr. Rita Marie: Consecutively and just water.
Chantel: Just water, that is amazing.
Dr. Rita Marie: It was an amazing healing event, and yeah I lost a lot of weight, I was 92 pounds when I’m finished. You can see I’m still not 92 pounds and it comes but when it came back I was building it back with good food, with whole food. You know I grew up in the Twinkie generation, the breakfast cereal, the M & M’s and Kool-Aid and all that kind of garbage and that just wasn’t serving my body and when I could clean it out and clean house and just start from fresh, that changed my life. But on a regular basis, at least four times a year I’ll do a five day fast. Sometimes I’ll extend it to seven or eight or 10.
Dr. Rita Marie: On a regular basis I generally, I always go minimum 14 hours between my last meal and my first. Oftentimes usually it’s more like 16 to 18, sometimes I do 24 hour fasts. When I first started teaching intermittent fasting back in, I don’t know, 2010 or something, what I was teaching was more the intermittent fasting of twice a week do a 24 hour fast. Have breakfast and skip til the next breakfast or have dinner, skip til the next dinner, whatever works best in your circadian rhythm. But now everybody’s talking about more this fixed feeding window. I always taught people 12 hours, you always should have 12 hours, so I don’t consider that intermittent fasting, I just consider that a normal eating pattern.
Dr. Rita Marie: But when you extend it to 16 there is a little bit more of a challenge for people who do that. Like you have to get used to that feeling of hunger and go, “Oh it’s just hunger, I’ll eat in a couple of hours.” And eating within a window, right, a window of six or eight hours is where I get my food. So I do intermittent fasting all the time. Very rarely do I eat before noon, usually it’s more like 2:00 before I have my first meal. I tend to be a late night person, which I shouldn’t be, it’s not good for me, but I tend to stay up late. So if I start eating say at 2:00 and I finish at 8:00 it works for me.
Chantel: Awesome. All right, lets jump right in.
Dr. Rita Marie: Oh food, I didn’t answer your food.
Chantel: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dr. Rita Marie: Yesterday, I’ll give you yesterday because that’s the most close on my mind. Yesterday at about, I think it might have been 1:30 or 2:00, I had a quart of green smoothie and in my green smoothie is a whole bunch of greens and turmeric and ginger and jalapeno and avocado. No fruit, just greens. I mean it’s just like this really hearty but lots of flavor, you know, lots of spices and things and it’s delicious. So I had that to start. Yesterday I actually had two of them in succession because I was very hungry still, so I had two of them.
Dr. Rita Marie: Often times I’ll have that and I’ll have say, a bowl of sauerkraut with chopped up avocado and hemp seeds on top of it or something along those lines. Or if I have time I’ll make a full on salad and eat it but oftentimes I’ve got a lot to do so I want foods that I can eat quickly and don’t have to do a lot of chewing and as you know eating a salad is a lot of chewing, it takes a long time. In addition to that yesterday, so I had the smoothie and along with it there’s this almond cream cheese that’s made by Kite Hill I think is the name of the company and it is jalapeno flavor.
Dr. Rita Marie: So I had maybe a third of the container of that with some celery and I just ate that and that was my lunch. My dinner was a huge salad and the huge salad had all kinds of greens and arugula and things like that. A little bit of tomato, radishes et cetera and some steamed veggies. My husband steamed up some broccoli and cabbage and cauliflower so steamed cruciferous vegetables on top with sprinkled with hemp seeds, a little bit of flax oil, so there I did the oil thing, because I don’t like flax seeds but I wanted some of that. So I sprinkled a little of that on there and I had some sauerkraut with that. I always do probiotics with my meals and that was my meals, two meals.
Chantel: That is fantastic, I love that. It sounds like a great one. Now, as far as grains go, do you eat any grains? Do you really just try to focus on fruits and vegetables?
Dr. Rita Marie: Yeah I don’t personally eat grains but it’s not that I don’t recommend people do. Some people do really well with quinoa and millet, I always say non-gluten grains and always not flour, just the whole grain. But I just don’t. I tend to have a hereditary blood sugar… A tendency to blood sugar imbalance, so for me a bowl of pineapple will shoot my blood sugar through the roof and drop my ketones down. So I’m constantly measuring. Not constantly but I regularly measure my ketones and my glucose and have a range that I want to keep myself in.
Chantel: So how much fruit would you say you have in a day?
Dr. Rita Marie: In a typical day none. In a typical week maybe, you know, like last weekend I bought a package of blueberries to eat with my coconut yogurt and it took me four days to get three quarters of the way through the little half pint of blueberries. So I eat very little. I had a couple of orange slices, I was traveling. So I eat very little fruit on a regular basis, if you don’t count avocado and tomato and cucumber which are botanically fruits, I eat a lot of those. Yeah.
Chantel: Gotcha. And then, so what about, do you eat meats or do you not eat meats at all?
Dr. Rita Marie: I don’t eat meats at all. So my diet consists of lots and lots of non-starchy vegetables, raw carrots work really well for me, so those are a bit starchy but if I cook them it raises my blood sugar. So I’m always battling with these genetics towards diabetes and heart disease and I’m really strict about not doing it. If I’m out, I think I had some strawberries over the weekend, I was at a wedding and they had these big, beautiful strawberries. I have no problem, I love fruit, I love fruit but I just am careful with it and when I do eat fruit I eat it with greens, I don’t just eat it by itself because when I find that when I eat it with greens it doesn’t raise my blood sugar and it just gives all those nice minerals to help absorb it. Yeah, so grains are-
Chantel: What about nuts? What about nuts?
Dr. Rita Marie: I actually eat a fair amount of nuts. I try not to eat nuts. I use them more like, I make yogurts with them, I make sauces with them, I make dips with them. Because they tend to be an addictive food for me. How easy is it to just sit there and eat 1,000 calories worth of nuts right? It’s just so easy to do, and I don’t do that.
Chantel: Gotcha. So do you share some of your amazing recipes that you do?
Dr. Rita Marie: Oh my God I have probably published almost 1,000 pages of recipes. Yes I do share my recipes.
Chantel: Wow.
Dr. Rita Marie: Yeah.
Chantel: And is that on your website?
Dr. Rita Marie: Well there’s books that you can purchase on my website and there’s programs that I’ve created. So hormone balancing programs and my blood sugar balancing program, we have a 250 page recipe guide. In my gut repair program we have 180 page recipe guide. So each of those, hormone repair is adrenal repair, thyroid repair, we have a specific recipe guide that is geared towards that. So the people in the programs get access to those and then on my website I have a breakfast menu one and I have a lunch and I have other recipes like that, and then I have a lot of them that are freebies, that you know, just give me your name and email address and I’ll send you a copy of it and I’ve got a hormone elixirs recipe guide, I’ve got a really cool breakfast guide that’s more Keto friendly, intermittent fasting friendly breakfast guide that’s really good.
Chantel: And have you personally had any thyroid issues at all in your previous?
Dr. Rita Marie: Back in my 20s I believe I did but knowing what I know now, I have a feeling I might have had some auto immune thyroid issues back then. But nobody was testing for it. As you know, with thyroid, nobody tests for it, right? I don’t right now, my numbers are all looking good, but I think I did back then. I just have a feeling looking back, knowing what I know now, I wish I would have tested so I would have known.
Chantel: Awesome. Okay lets jump right in to the listener questions. This is from Angie in Maryland. I’ve been doing intermittent fasting consistently for about a year. I stick to a six hour window during the week and eight hours during the weekend. I eat a low carb diet in my window and hardly splurge. Several times a month I will do a 24 to 48 hour fast and work out five days a week.
Chantel: This has worked out really well for me to get my ideal weight and maintain it. I’m really upset because in February I didn’t change anything about my diet or habits and gained 12 pounds. Something has to be wrong. Do you have any idea what’s happening? I scheduled a doctor’s appointment and I want to make sure that I’m asking the right questions and have the right things tested. Could this be hormone related? Angie in Maryland.
Dr. Rita Marie: Does she say how old she is?
Chantel: No.
Dr. Rita Marie: Yeah, so given that if she’s right around the perimenopausal age some things do shift. I would say first of all, the first thing I think about is stress. Did something stressful happen? Did some family member die? Did you get divorced? You know things like that, that create stress that increase cortisol and cortisol increases insulin because it increases blood sugar and then we go into fat storage mode. I would say sleep wise, how’s the sleep? Are you sleeping enough, because again, if I’m not sleeping enough I will have lots of cravings for food.
Dr. Rita Marie: I also gain weight without even eating any more. The other thing is, sometimes we reach a plateau and the body gets to the point where it down regulates the metabolism. It goes, “Okay you’re not going to feed me more, I’m just going to slow down a little bit.” So that kind of thing can happen, especially if you’re on it sounds like more of a Keto type diet with intermittent fasting, that sometimes happens. The other thing, it depends on how you’re doing this. You don’t say how much fruits and vegetables your eating. You say low carb so probably not a lot of fruit, a lot of people the mistake they make when they’re doing a low carb diet is they’re eating low carb but they’re not eating a lot of veggies, they’re mostly eating mostly meat and lots of fats and lots of oils.
Dr. Rita Marie: And you know, after a while the liver can get toxic and sluggish from that, so if you’re going to the doctor here’s the things that I would recommend that you make sure that they test for you. One is a full liver panel. All your liver enzymes to see how your liver’s doing. The other one is full thyroid testing because sometimes with a ketogenic diet that’s high in animal fat, that’s low in fiber will down regulate the thyroid. So would do a full thyroid panel including total T-4, well TSH they always do but total T-4, free T-4, free T-3 and thyroid antibodies TPO and antithyroid globulin. And get that full panel because there might be some effect that’s not on your… possibly even reverse T-3.
Chantel: Yeah. I think that’s exactly how I would answer that for me as well. I would say a lot of times, the one thing that she said in there was that without changing my diet and I’ve seen a lot of people who get on to these high fat, Keto diets and number one, I’ve seen a lot of people get non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and people think if you have fatty liver disease that you have drank too much alcohol or stuff like that and so one of the things that I would suggest too is really writing down what you’re eating because she says “I didn’t really change anything about my diet or habits.” And like you said, a lot of times, like with nuts, you could eat 1,000 calories of nuts and not really over eat. You know what I’m saying?
Dr. Rita Marie: You don’t feel full and bloated from it yeah, exactly.
Chantel: No you don’t feel full and bloated and it’s like yeah but you might be just eating an exorbitant amounts of calories and not even realizing it. So I would really want to see it written down, what is she actually eating because 12 pounds is a big deal and that means to me that she’s probably eating some really high caloric, even avocados, which I’m obsessed with avocados but I can get a little out of control with avocados because I love them so much.
Dr. Rita Marie: Yeah, that’s great advice because a lot of times we lose track of it and the thing is when we start a Keto type plan, people find they can eat as much as they want [inaudible 00:19:46] and they just drop the weight because they’re just shifting in to fat burning but there reaches this plateau where you can’t do that anymore and I agree with you, though right it all down. But also look at those other factors in terms of stress and sleep, yeah.
Chantel: Absolutely and the biggest thing, like you said, I would look at that reverse T-3 because a lot of times when they do your thyroid panel, they do a very limited one and they don’t do an extended one.
Dr. Rita Marie: Exactly.
Chantel: Okay, Jackie in Oklahoma. My husband had been complaining more than usual that I leave clumps of hair in the shower and I’ve realized that he is right. I’m not sure what’s going on but I’m shedding like a dog. Could this be hormone related and should I be worried? When do I know it’s time to go to the doctor?
Dr. Rita Marie: All right, so, first of all again when you don’t say your age I don’t have… like when I know an age then I can more accurately assess what might be going on. Hair loss is a common thing. It could be a biotin deficiency. You’re not just suddenly going to develop a biotin deficiency. More likely it’s a hormone related thing. It could be thyroid related, it could be adrenal related and it could be a menopausal type thing. So depending on what your age is, if your 35, it’s obviously not going to be going in to menopause unless you’ve got some weird genetics.
Dr. Rita Marie: So those kinds of things. So I would say when to go to the doctor, most doctors, if they’re conventional western medicine trained they’ll laugh at you and say, “All right, no big deal just change your shampoo.” Right? They don’t really look at that and they don’t really dig for it. So I would look at what kind of stress have you been under. Stress catches up to you and then all of a sudden things happen, right? So what kind of stress have you been under over the last few years.
Dr. Rita Marie: Those life habits, those life events like divorce and death and changing jobs and relocating and having babies. All of these things play in. You don’t say whether you have babies. If your six months post child birth it’s going to mean a different hormonal imbalance than it would be if not. So I would say before you go running to your HMO, PPO type doctor, think about getting full lab panels from somebody who knows what they’re doing in terms of functional medicine. So a functional medicine assessment is what I would say is a good thing right now.
Chantel: Awesome. The next one is from Cheryl in Sarasota. It says I’ve been struggling with heart burn and some digestion, I.e. poop issues and a friend of mine mentioned that I should look into food combining. She swears it’s really helping her with her weight loss but I’m a little skeptical and wonder if that’s a bunch of hype. I figure all food goes to the same place when I eat it anyway, can you explain how it works and if it’s really worth it?
Dr. Rita Marie: Yeah so, food combining works in a lot of folks because it simplifies what we’re putting in. I mean think of your typical meal and how many different types of foods might be in that meal and different digestive needs. So high fat needs a different set of digestive environments than carb and when you combine them together you tend to get the body a little bit mixed up so it’s not efficient at all of them.
Dr. Rita Marie: So for some people that’s really important, for some people not. People who already have a compromised digestive tract, it could be helpful and it could be something to look at. When I think heartburn though, if I think heartburn I think reflux, or it’s in the stomach or it’s coming up the esophagus, one or the other and she doesn’t specify, but that says to me that either you have acid in the wrong place, which is when it comes up in the esophagus, the esophagus doesn’t have this nice plump juicy lining that allows it to get acidic and protect the underlying tissue like the stomach does.
Dr. Rita Marie: So usually that heartburn is that acidic contents of the stomach are flowing up. There’s a lot of things that can cause that. Low stomach acid, not high stomach acid again, age dependent. If you’re a teenager, it could be high stomach acid. If your past your 30s it’s most likely not because it declines with age. So it’s looking at that sort of thing. For symptomatic relief I would be looking at demulcents.
Dr. Rita Marie: It’s a term of for a specific set of herbs in foods that have a lot of mucilage in them that help to repair. One of my favorites is slippery elm, there’s also marshmallow and DGL licorice. And I say DGL licorice versus just straight licorice because licorice has a tendency to raise people’s blood pressure in certain individuals but if I don’t know, if I don’t know enough about your history I always go there because that has that piece that glycyrrhizic acid which raises blood pressure taken out. Look at some of that, I would also look at what your eating.
Dr. Rita Marie: I have a whole chart of foods that hurt the digestive lining and foods that help. Alcohol can thin it, caffeine can thin it, if you’re a smoker, if you eat fast, that can cause a lot of problems there too. If you’re not chewing your food enough. If you’re eating under stress, this is huge and these are the simple, I call it eating hygiene that most people over look.
Dr. Rita Marie: If you’re eating when you’re sitting at your desk scarfing down this food, not chewing well, but you’re under stress trying to get a project done and a deadline met, you have cortisol levels elevated in your system and cortisols job is to get you tiger safe, right? You’re ready to run away from the tiger so it shuts down the digestive tract because that’s not important in that particular realm. So those are some of the things I would look at for her.
Chantel: Yeah and I will tell you for me personally, food combining is a really great thing. The idea behind food combining is that different foods digest at different rates in the body and they required different digestive environments. So for me, the basic principles if you haven’t heard about it before is to always eat fruit before a meal and by itself and that you should avoid combining starches and protein in the same meal.
Chantel: So that’s kind of the basics of it if you haven’t heard about it, but for me, it makes a big, big difference with digestion and especially if you are used to eating larger portions. If your portion sizes are really, really small I don’t think food combining is quite as big of a deal but unfortunately the average size of what portions are around here are so much bigger than they actually need to be.
Chantel: So when you’re eating large volumes of food, food combining is actually really, really important. Especially a to of people who are eating, like they do the one meal a day or stuff like that and they’re eating huge portions they have to be extra, extra careful with food combining.
Dr. Rita Marie: Yep, I agree with that.
Chantel: Okay, Katie in Virginia Beach. You talked a bit about celery juice in your last episode and all the excitement around that and I wanted to see what your opinion is on juicing versus smoothies since I know you love both. What are the benefits of one or the other and are there certain fruits and veggies that are better to juice versus blend in a smoothie? Or is it an all a matter of preference? Katie in Virginia Beach.
Dr. Rita Marie: All right, that’s a great question. So personally, I think fruits should never be juiced unless you’ve got someone who absolutely is emaciated, is cachectic, and just needs the extra calories. What happens with it, and that’s probably not a good idea with them either because they’re probably that way because of cancer and juice feeds cancer, whether it’s fresh squeezed orange juice, fresh squeezed organic apple juice, regardless, you’ve taken out all the fiber and that sugar goes right into your system just as if you ate a candy bar.
Dr. Rita Marie: So I avoid juicing any kind of fruits. I love both, so for me personally, I have very sensitive blood sugar. If I drink a quart of green juice, even if there’s no fruit in it and i just do my typical, just drink it down, gulp it down in 15 minutes it will raise my blood sugar a little bit more than I like. Not terribly high like if I drank fruit juice, but it raises it a little bit higher. So what I find is when I’m traveling I do more juices because it’s easier to go to the store and buy a nice green juice.
Dr. Rita Marie: I usually throw some chia seeds in it, and the chia seeds will soak up some of that, and it slows down the absorption so that I have all that fiber that slows down, and I don’t get the sugar rush. But I do drink a lot of juice, I also drink a lot of smoothies. My favorite is the smoothies because I can pack so many things in it and I can make it taste phenomenal. I don’t put fruits in there. I used to. I used to put fruits in there. I always though follow the rule of at least 60% leafy greens and celery and other things like that in there so that you don’t, again, get the blood sugar rush with those.
Chantel: Yeah. And I love that you said that about the fruit juice because… So I have this great juicer, like a citrus juicer at the house, it’s automatic and you just cut the fruit in half and then you just stick it on and just, you know it’s one of those Breville ones and you just push it down and I love it for lemons and limes but my husband loves this mixed drink that we have here in at a place called Watermans, its like all the rage.
Chantel: Its called an orange crush and they do fresh squeezed oranges and a medium sized orange is about 10 grams of sugar and I made just a cup about this size, I had poured, you know, juiced the oranges. It took six oranges to fill up a cup this size. And I was thinking “Oh my gosh.” So if someone literally drank eight ounces of this, that would have been 60 grams of sugar that’s just a lot. And obviously it just depends on the orange and all of that but it could be anywhere from 40 to 60 grams of sugar depending on that orange and that’s just like you said, just too much without having any fiber at all.
Dr. Rita Marie: Yep. So here’s the only exception I make to doing juicing. If you have a recipe for a salad dressing that’s grapefruit juice or orange juice blended with avocado or something like that or blended with… I usually blend it with veggies. I love to make salad dressings where I throw something in the blender, I blend up some veggies and then add some fat and some tartness and that kind of thing where you had a little bit of orange juice thrown in and then you have it with fat and with the fiber, then that’s going to slow that down and it won’t give you that sugar rush into your system.
Chantel: This next one is from anonymous. She says, it’s a girl or guy, I don’t know. This is my craziest time of the year as I’m an accountant and my stress eating is out of control. I don’t have time to go home, grocery shop and cook so I’m binging on fast food. During the day I constantly snack at my desk because I feel like the only I have to look forward to each day is the food and what I’m going to eat next. I’m sure a big part of the problem is my mind and mental state. What can I do to get this stress under control?
Dr. Rita Marie: Wow. Yeah so emotional eating is a very common problem. More so in women than men, although I know some men who have that issue. They don’t talk about it as much as women do. It’s very common and we learned that as kids, you know, momma soothed us when we got a cut knee and get us a lollipop and we learn to associate food with soothing and when you’re under stress like this and your constantly working, it’s common to have that.
Dr. Rita Marie: So I think getting some help with that, and there are some wonderful programs that can help guide you through it from people who have already been there and have very specific activities, that’s not my area of expertise, but I always guide people in that direction. But I would say, incorporating something like HeartMath and go to HeartMath.org, it’s a very quick technique and I do this throughout the day because I’d be like, “I don’t have time to meditate.” But you need to meditate. I don’t have time to meditate.
Dr. Rita Marie: So I would do things like, I learned about this at HeartMath and it’s a technique which involves breathing and appreciation and you can just literally do it in 30 seconds to a minute. It may take a little longer to learn it, maybe it takes two minutes or three minutes but you can literally shift your state and shift yourself down and get those cortisol levels down. You’ve got a double whammy when you’re sitting at your desk eating all day and you’re under stress because cortisol itself will go and break down muscle and turn it into sugar so you can get away from the tiger.
Dr. Rita Marie: No tigers there, so it gets stored back as belly fat and that in addition, what happens is when you’re eating all day you’ve got a steady drip of insulin in your system and insulin is a hormone that stores fat, can’t burn fat, it actually turns off the breakdown of fat when insulin levels reach a certain level which is just slightly above base line. So you can’t burn fat.
Dr. Rita Marie: So you’re eating all day, even if you’re just eating celery and avocado all day, you’re still going to gain weight because you’re putting yourself into fat storage mode with the insulin. So I think getting the stress under control, check out something like HeartMath because it’s not something where you have to sit and meditate in position for a half an hour, hour at a time, which you don’t have but you do have 30 seconds.
Dr. Rita Marie: The other thing I would say is when you’re in the mode is do some exercise because exercise will bring down your sugar and something you can do right standing at your desk is just do a few squats, right? Do some arm lifts. I keep a medicine ball really close by and I can just pick it up and do a few things with it. I have a stair stepper by my desk, so depending on whether you work at home or you work in an office, how much you can have there but just little things like that, that you can do and I call it deskercise you know.
Dr. Rita Marie: You exercise at your desk and try to dissipate some of that stress and if you know how it feels if you’re stressed out, if I go out for a run and I’m stressed out I come back and go, I wonder what I was stressed about. You know, it goes away because you’ve got this movement and you’ve got this great set of hormones and oxygen gets to all of your tissues. Because one of the things we don’t do when we’re stressed is we don’t breath. We don’t get full air in, so just take a couple of breathing moments throughout the day.
Chantel: Okay. Adrienne in Greensboro. I’ve been fasting and eating about 90% clean for the past four months and I’ve consistently lost one to two pounds per week at a minimum, sometimes more. For the past two weeks I haven’t seen the scale drop an ounce. I’m still about 30 pounds overweight, so I shouldn’t be slowing down just yet. Do you have any advice on how I could break this stall? Are there foods I should completely eliminate? Adrienne in Greensboro.
Dr. Rita Marie: Okay, so I’m going to be speaking in a vacuum because I don’t know what foods she’s currently eating and the 90% always gets to me because whatever that 10% is can make a huge difference. And whenever we start a program there’s this rapid weight loss but then we plateau and there could be some food sensitivities. I would certainly look at if you’re eating gluten or dairy or sugar in any way, shape or form to get rid of them completely.
Dr. Rita Marie: To pay attention to how you’re feeling when you eat. Do you feel like your heart starts to race after certain foods? Do you feel a little bit tired or a little bit jumpy after certain foods? So identify food intolerances is key but what is that other 10%? I’d also look at spacing of meals. If you’re eating meals closer together than four to six hours, again you’re going in to that insulin levels. The insulin levels are in your system and a lot of times we start a program, and are really strict at the beginning and your spacing out your meals and then they’re like, a snack here, slips in and a little snack there slips in.
Dr. Rita Marie: So I would look at that 10% where you’re not clean and I would go 100% clean and do that for a period of three months and see if that can jump start it back down. And of course you gotta look at exercise. Sleep is huge. You’re going to gain weight if you’re not sleeping enough and people don’t associate it with that or you’re not going to lose weight because of the way the hormones shift during the night and leptin levels and insulin and growth hormone. If you’re not sleeping, that’s going to make a huge difference as well, and again the stress piece.
Chantel: Great. Last question, Devin in New York. In addition to fasting, I follow a low carb diet and my friend gave me a hack that magnesium helps her go to the bathroom. When I started taking it I noticed that my random muscle cramping really improved. I decided to do some Googling and found that literally almost symptom of a magnesium deficiency applied to me. Besides taking the supplements how can I be sure that I’m getting enough magnesium in my diet? And are there specific supplements you recommend? Devin in New York.
Dr. Rita Marie: Great question. So the foods that are high in magnesium tend to be the green leafy vegetables in a lot of the veggies. So a lot of folks are just not having their huge plates of veggies. And juicing and smoothies help you get a lot of that. But all that said, our food supply is really going down in terms of magnesium. So it often is important to add a magnesium supplement. I tend to like liquids, I was looking to see if I have one on my desk, but I don’t. I tend to like liquid mineral supplements better than pills because they get absorbed really quickly in ionized minerals.
Dr. Rita Marie: There’s several companies that make them. I think Sun Warrior just came out with one and there’s a company called Ohigh and there’s another company called Good State, and there’s a bunch of companies that make them in that liquid form. It doesn’t taste real good, but you just put a few dropper fulls in a little bit of water and scarf it down, and it’s not big deal. For the laxative effect, a powdered magnesium citrate tends to work the best. That’s the Calm, which is the supplement that’s sold but be careful because some of them may add other ingredients to them to make them taste good, but a magnesium citrate is the one that’s going to help you to flush and move your bowels better.
Chantel: Awesome. Well your website has a ton of resources besides your online courses, you have a ton of recipes and a link to all your books there. Tell everyone the best place to find you and follow you.
Dr. Rita Marie: Yeah so if you go to DrRitaMarie.com I would highly recommend you opt in to get my hormone elixirs, it’s like me standing there holding my elixir book. People love it, especially a lot of the questions that came up do have to do with the hormones and there’s some really great recipes in there and going back to the person with the hair loss, the experience I had with this book with the elixirs is someone started making an elixir every day.
Dr. Rita Marie: She loved them, they tasted good.She also got off gluten and she was really focusing on her omega threes. Within a month, she sent me a before and after picture. Her hair was so different within a month, so when she said that, a lot of other people, she said it on one of our coaching calls and a lot of other people said, “Oh I’m going to try that.” And I consistently started to hear stories that after a month of being on these elixirs the hair started coming back. I would highly recommend you do it that way and just explore around.
Dr. Rita Marie: I also have some gifts that we will have the links there for you that I would love to offer you. One is called the hormone hacking break your fast recipe menu guide. And I call it break your fast versus breakfast because people associate breakfast with that sit down first thing in the morning and eat breakfast and within intermittent fasting a lot of people aren’t even eating until noon or 2:00 in the afternoon but it’s still important that the meal that you use to break your fast, break your overnight fast or even breaking a longer fast has some balance to it. So I give you the five key components, essential components of a break your fast meal and then I give, I think there’s actually 19 recipes in that book, it’s really a nice little book.
Dr. Rita Marie: So I’d love to offer that and then the other thing, because we’re talking fasting a lot and ketosis and ketogenic, low carb diets, the myth is that you have to be eating 80% fat and very few grams of carb and the truth is, if people do that, then the only green vegetables they’re eating if they have to stay under 50 grams of carbs are like lettuce.
Dr. Rita Marie: They’re not really even able to get it, because the fiber carbs are different than sugar carbs and I’ve discovered that you can eat a lot of vegetables, a lot of vegetables with the fat and you don’t have to be meticulous about measuring it. Find what works for you. So I have a little booklet called ketones to the rescue for brain health and it talks about the difference between burning ketones and burning fat and it has some really fun recipes in there.
Chantel: Awesome and if you go under your link under books, there’s one book that I like, it says Desert, Making It Rich Without Oil. I need to get that one. That one looks really, really good with no gluten, no dairy, no refined sugar, no soy, just really good raw, whole food kind of treat.
Dr. Rita Marie: Yep.
Chantel: Now how often will you say that you will eat one of these? Would you say I eat something every day or a couple times a week?
Dr. Rita Marie: Oh a recipe?
Chantel: From one of your sweets.
Dr. Rita Marie: That book uses fruits as sweeteners so dates or raisins. I don’t actually eat from that book anymore. I’ve substituted and in my other programs I’ve taken recipes from there and substituted. So here’s a real good hack. If you have a recipe that calls for dates, say as a sweetener or calls for honey or agave or maple syrup as a sweetener, what I do is I soak some chia seeds to get the goopy, you know the syrupy kind of thickness to it and then I add a low glycemic sweetener like Luo Han or Stevia.
Dr. Rita Marie: Some people can tolerate erythritol, one of the sugar alcohols and sweeten it that way and just do that to taste and then add that to the recipe, and it works beautifully. So that’s what I’ve done with most of those recipes in there, and I have a book, I have my own Unstoppable Health Book which I’ve written and there’s a resource page on my site, and I think it’s on, oh buy the book for 99, 2.99 or whatever on Amazon and there’s a link, I don’t remember it but in there, there’s a really nice… it’s like a two page thing on how do you substitute sugars. Like you have a recipe that has sugar in it, how do you substitute it for the low glycemic version.
Chantel: Awesome. Well your website is amazing. I didn’t see that book, The Unstoppable Health on your website.
Dr. Rita Marie: Really? Go to Amazon, we should put a link there. My site has been like my forgotten child. So [inaudible 00:43:48].
Chantel: Yeah so you can find that one, the Unstoppable Health on Amazon then?
Dr. Rita Marie: It’s on Amazon right. You can go on and get the hard cover or just the kindle or both. The other thing that I will say is I don’t know if it’s on the website yet, I’m going to make sure it gets there, is we just did a healthy keto challenge called the Healthy Keto challenge because it was talking about how you measure, get into ketosis, incorporate intermittent fasting but also incorporate lots of veggies, and it’s a five day challenge. Amazing, we had such amazing results, and it’s available if you go to HealthyKetoChallenge.com you can get all the recordings, and the recipe guides and all that kind of stuff, and it’s only like $27. So yeah.
Chantel: Awesome. Well Doctor Rita Marie it has been a pleasure having you and we’re just so grateful that you came on the show. And if you have a question that you want answered go to questions@chantelrayway.com. We’ll see you next time. Bye-bye.
***As always, this podcast is not designed to diagnose, treat, prevent or cure any condition and is for information purposes only. Please consult with your healthcare professional before making any changes to your current lifestyle.***