All Things Hormones with Dr RitaMarie Loscalzo
On this episode, Dr. Ritamarie discussed the importance of the endocrine system, insulin resistance, and sensitivity in maintaining good health. She emphasized the need for a personalized approach to addressing these issues, using tools like glucometers and CGMs to gain real-time feedback on patients' health. She also explored the importance of a balanced diet, regular exercise, and stress management techniques in maintaining good health. Additionally, we discussed the benefits of fasting as a healthy practice, introducing a fasting regime developed based on Dr. Valter Longo's research, and highlighted the importance of breaking fasts with the right mindset.
To connect with Dr RitaMarie:
https://drritamarie.com/
https://www.facebook.com/DrRitamarieLoscalzo
https://www.instagram.com/drritamarie/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfPgfwBCmsOSg7YTe89BZIQ
https://www.linkedin.com/in/drritamarie/
Episode Transcript: (unedited)
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: Welcome back to the holistic health bytes. Podcast today, we're gonna talk a lot about the overall endocrine system or overall hormones, and how insulin resistance and insulin sensitivity. All play into that, and I am joined today by Dr. Rita. Marie. Thank you so much for joining.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: I'm so glad to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: Yeah, absolutely. This is gonna be a lot of fun. So you obviously do a lot of things. You've been in this field for a very long time, both teaching practitioners and working with clients, and just all the things. So can you just do a brief introduction and tell everybody about you.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Sure. I have been in practice for over 30 years. I think it's probably going on 32 33. Something like that. Got into the whole holistic space back, you know, in the 19 nineties, early 19 nineties, when there was no Internet. And there was, you know, lot of people didn't know about this. So and I did it because my own health challenges. And over the years I have developed strategies.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: And and one of my big passions is helping people reverse insulin resistance because well, first of all, know that they have insulin resistance, and I have a term I call pre insulin resistance for the people who don't know they have it. They're not medically diagnosable, but they're on that path, and we have a way for them to identify. So we help people to identify. If they're on that path.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: reverse it, and then, you know, move on to whatever whatever life has for them. Some people will we work with that way? And they're like everything secured. Okay? All of a sudden their hashimoto's goes away, and all of a sudden their auto immune gut condition goes away, and for others there's more work that needs to be done. So it's really I. It's really a customized approach
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: to health and nutrition. So I get into it because of my own health challenges. I found out I when doctors kept giving me medication after medication after medication, I started to do some research on my own, and figured out that I ate poorly. Thought poorly did a lot of things poorly. A lot of exposures cleaned up, my act, cleaned up, my diet, cleaned up, my mindset.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: did it cleanse, did a fast back in the day before it was considered normal to fast on a regular basis, and I've been fasting for 38 years. And I've done extended fast, short, fast, etc, etc, and I've been doing it and teaching about it ever since.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: Oh, I love it all the things! Yes, and I think just like you said it has to be customized. It has to work for you. It has to be based on your history where you are right now, where you wanna go all the things. And yeah, so I definitely wanna dive into some fasting information, because I think there's a lot of misconceptions around. How to fast, when to fast? When is it good? When is it bad? Who should do it, who shouldn't do it all the things. So I think that could be a great topic. And then, of course, just
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: you know all the things that led to all of our health issues. You know some of the mistakes we were making, whether we knew they weren't so good or
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: things we thought we were actually doing right, that actually, you are not serving us. So I think we have a ton to talk about. So can we just back up a little bit and just give like a foundation for like, what is the endocrine system? What are these hormones? What do we even mean when we're saying that.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Yeah, I think about the endocrine system as the master control system. So every tissue in your body, every hormone, every gland, every organ, whatever is controlled by hormones. Every single one like you can't think of any thyroid hormone controls. There's receptors for thyroid hormone on every cell in the body. There's the receptors for insulin on every cell in the body, right? And then there's others that might be a little bit more specialized. But they basically the endocrine system. The hormone system is a system where we have
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: room, we have released from one source a chemical, a chemical messenger that travels around and tells other tissues in the body, what to do, what to produce, how to produce other hormones. There's some like in the pituitary and hypothalamus that tell the other organs and or tell the other hormone glands.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: what hormones to produce or how to produce and when to produce. So it's basically everything's controlled by it. People think of sex when they think of hormones, or they think of thyroid. I mean, that's basically where it goes with people. But your heart is controlled by hormones. Your kidneys are controlled by hormones, your immune system, your brain.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Everything is controlled by hormones. So it's a master control system.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: Yeah. And insulin is one of those primary hormones that we really do need to pay attention to. And yet so much of us, so much, so many of us, so many in the population think that that really only relates to diabetes.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Yes.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: And I think we think of it as a medication, because we know of people who have to take insulin injections. But there's so much more to it, and it has so much more to do with a million things, not just diabetes, so can we dive in.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: And they don't, I mean oh, if we don't have enough, or we have too much insulin.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Your health is is compromised, everyone's health is compromised. It's not just if you're diabetic, it's not just if you have diabetes in your family, and so many people are right on that precipice of having problems before they're even diagnosed, because we can go on for days about the the shortcomings of the traditional medical system or conventional medical system in measuring for insulin resistance.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: pre insulin, resistance, which is the stages that nobody's talking about, and that's what I help people to do.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: You got diabetes, you know how long that stuff's been out of balance. What? 2030, 40, 50 years even, and all the damaging things that happen when people are diabetic neuropathy, retinopathy, nephropathes heart problems, high blood pressure. All that stuff has been silently brewing for decades.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: but nobody intervenes until you're over the threshold into where lots of damage has been done in your body, and that's what people like. You and I are trying to stop.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: Pat.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: So let's define some of those conditions like up type 2 diabetes. I think most people are pretty familiar with, but we can start with that, and then kind of work back work backwards in the progression, to like the pre pre insulin, resistance.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: All that stuff exactly, and I have a really cool chart. People love it, you know. It shows diabetes over here, but the spectrum
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: of disorders that are leading up there. So we have diabetes full blown diabetes. Your blood sugar fasting is usually over 100 2,025 depending on who you talk to on 3 consecutive occasions, which, by the way, might be 6 months apart, because most people don't go to their doctors every other day. So I teach people how to measure their own glucose at home. So it's been that way.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: It's been going on for a long time.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: and it's really damaging insulin, resistance and metabolic syndrome. So let's define the difference between those insulin. Resistance is a state where the body's producing plenty of insulin too much insulin. And the cells basically hands over their ears. Say no more, no more, no more. We don't want to be damaged by all that insulin. And then what happens is, the sugar sits in the blood and builds up to dangerous levels
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: generally in medicine it's above 100. So if your blood sugar is a hundred fasting.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Then you're considered insulin. Resistant.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Metabolic syndrome is insulin resistance combined with lipid abnormalities, blood pressure, abnormalities, high cholesterol high ldls, low hdls, high triglycerides, and then usually people are bound to be in that situation and put on medications. And a lot of times we. They just ignore the insulin resistance part because they're not diabetic yet.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: They're just metabolic syndrome.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: And there's no medication to lower the insulin.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: I don't have a medication for that right? That's diet lifestyle factors that we can easily control. It's choices every day. People get to make choices all day long right? And if you make the right choices, you go down the path towards health
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: and happiness, and if you make the wrong choices. You're in the doctor's office every couple of weeks trying to get a new medication for whatever new ails you. So we have diabetes. Type 2. We have insulin resistance, coupled with either coupled with the fat abnormalities or metabolic syndrome. Oftentimes it's considered a later stage of insulin resistance, if
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: it's metabolic syndrome, but not always because sometimes those metabolic changes precede the actual blood glucose being high, and the high glucose and the high insulin actually contribute
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: to those metabolic changes. Right? So we need to step in a lot earlier. And you know, studies recently have shown that 93% of the population is metabolically unwell. 93% take that number in if you're sitting there going. Oh, I wonder if I am? Chances are pretty good. You are right. Chances are pretty good that what we're talking about affects you. And do you want to find out
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: after your diabetic? And maybe the eyes are starting to go? And you're you've gotten her up at these, or you want to find out decades before and prevent yourself ever from going there. That's the stand I take with it, cause it's too dangerous to go there. Once you've gone there, there's a lot of damage. We've had people who are not even diabetic yet.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Right? That's that's the key word. You go to the doctor and they go. Oh, you're not diabetic yet. I don't need to run your a one. C. No, I don't need to. Yeah. Yeah. Well, do you wanna wait for me to become.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: or do you wanna just find out earlier? So I can make changes and and avoid this. So that's where I come from, and why I'm so pat. You could tell passionate about this. But why I'm so passionate about it.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: What we do is we intervene early on so before the blood sugar goes above 100.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Everybody's like, you're fine. You go into the doctor's office. It's fasting blood sugars, 98. You're fine. No, you're not.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: No, you're not. It should be in the low eighties, right? There's some studies that show that for every time it goes above a little bit above and a little bit above and a little bit above 90,
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: there's an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, increased risk of heart attack, stroke. Those sorts of things. So is that where you want to be, or do you want to catch it earlier? But you can't go by just fasting glucose
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: right. So the people in that stage where their fasting glucose might be either perfectly normal or starting to inch up.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: and their post brandial glucose. The glucose that's after eating is going up. That's the stage I call pre insulin resistance. Right? You're still in danger, and it's it's a place that great. Let's catch it now before too much damage is done, because once you're diabetic, there's a lot of damage done, and it takes a little longer, although I've seen diabetics turn it around within couple of weeks right?
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Couple of weeks. So that's the stages. And I was starting to say earlier we had. We've had people come in and they have.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Their feet are tingly, and they're numb. And they're feeling this. And they they've read about it. And they go to the doctor and say is this related to diabetes? And they go. You don't have diabetes yet.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: and it turns out they did have
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: retinopathies.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: And this one person I'm thinking about had got those situations happening, and they went in. Got his A. One C. At a health fair, because the doctor wouldn't run it
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: this 10.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: It should be 5.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: Yep.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: So he was having huge spikes and then huge dips to balance it out, so that in the morning his what sugar was just 98
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: felt through the cracks. He's not alone. A lot of people are falling through the cracks.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: Insulin is actually the first one that gets dysregulated, and no one's even looking at that.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Nobody looks at that until you're even even type 2 diabetics. They don't run on regularly. They run it on type one, because they want to see the regulating their insulin intake.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Yeah, seriously.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: And I have a client right now who
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: was diagnosed as Type 2 by his medical team. He was on all the different drugs, including insulin, has tried all the things over the years.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: and they really never even looked at those values. And when I ran his labs he actually has low insulin.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: On, the.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: Like 2.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: So he's not a type 2 I've had that half time.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: I do?
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: I think he's a lot of. He's a little.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: Yeah.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Yeah. And then you run them. You run the antibodies to show where the and it's a different way to approach it, too, because you have to treat that as an auto. Immune condition, not just a blood, sugar, dysregulation, condition.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: But it's so important to know what's actually going on instead of just guessing. You have high blood sugar. You're type 2. No, there's a lot of things that could be going wrong here. We have to look at the full picture. We can't just hyper focus on one number.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Absolutely, absolutely. And then, even before that, you know, I see it as things that start to happen when you're a little kid. If you were the type of kid that would go out and play. But you had to come in every couple of hours and grab some food. You're always that's a sign that your insulin levels are too high and your blood sugar is probably going too low. That's what happens early on
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: people are told as adults. Hey? You have hypoglycemia. You're both.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: It's too low in reality. When we start testing either with a glucometer or a Cgm, we find that those periods where they feel like
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: there, glucose is actually high, because it's in the blood, not in the tissue.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Yeah.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: Yeah, or it was really, really high. And it's crashing.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: It's.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: Too high, still too high, but it's crashed from 200 to 120.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Then you.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: Big drop. Yeah. So they feel all the hypoglycemic symptoms, even though they're not actually hypo.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: That's a hyperinsonemia thing that nobody's really looking for. Yeah.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: There's so many things, and I think I'd love to dive in a little bit from what other things you've learned from glucometers and Cgms. I. These are my favorite tools ever because they give you real time feedback about what's going on in your body and your choices that you're making, and how those are actually serving you. So what are some of the things that either you've learned through using these tools, or you've seen your clients have learned when they see their data, and they can associate it directly to what they're doing.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Absolutely and seeing the data is critical. And I I started out when I started really teaching this in the in masses, I always taught it to my patients, one on one. It's about 1213 years ago, maybe and we started to do this
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: and get people to get a glucometer and measure their glucose and is hard. It's a hard sell, because they're measuring it a lot because you want to catch their peaks. You want to see how high it goes. So I had them testing before they ate, and then every 15 min, until it went back down to Baseline.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: And what we found was that those surprises? So so that was one of the big surprises. Somebody said to me, Oh, my God! I have one of those hypoglycemic spells, and I tested my blood glucose, and it was 200,
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: and all I ate was some raisins on the salad that I've been eating all along that didn't do anything to my blood sugar. And we're like, okay, they're very. Some people are very sensitive to sugars, not even
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: refine sugars, raisins, pineapple apples, grapes, pears, blueberries even, which are people whose blood sugar goes up too high after eating blueberries right? So they find out like, Oh, my God! I had no idea that that I've been eating that food my whole life. I had no idea it was causing the blood sugar spikes. We have people who find
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: oh, every time I talk to my you name it person on the phone.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: I my blood sugar goes up. The stress right? Cortisol raises blood glucose. We find people who can find their sweet spot of exercising.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: because they find out that certain times they go out. If they, if they do like a walk around the block. Their glucose is height, goes nice, and down, the body uses it, but if they go out and do really intense exercise.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: then sometimes the blood sugar goes way high. And that's because the body's releasing sores is not enough in the blood. So they find out so much, and it helps them to actually make the changes I would have told them to make, anyway. But it also helps me to see those fine tuning like, oh, you can eat pineapple, but you can't eat
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: mango. You can eat this much pineapple, but not this much pineapple. Right. If you eat your tortillas, you have to have your tortilla with a big salad. Otherwise, you know, all kinds of great stuff. So health system, really fine, tune the diet and not have people have to go off of everything. I mean, I take people off of sugar, and everybody gets off sugar, agave maple syrup all that stuff cause. That's that's gonna
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: shoot it up regardless, and it's not good for you, anyway. But you know, if if somebody can get away with this much
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: you know, I don't know blueberries right. They can eat this much blueberries, but if they need a whole bowl of blueberries, their sugar goes up. Okay, you're gonna have to be fine with just eating a small amount. You don't have to give it up completely. So it teaches me how to help people to eat, right, to exercise right, to think right. Lack of sleep
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: right? All kinds of stuff. It teaches them about.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: You know, I think that's the beauty of being able to use these technologies that we have available to us today is we can really personalize it, I mean random things you would never think would spike. Some people like tomatoes are incredibly big spikers for some people or tomato sauces. I mean, it's just very.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Sauces for sure. Cook tomatoes for a lot of people right? Raw tomatoes. Maybe not. But yeah.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: The concentrated stuff. And so yeah, I think there, there's so many things that we can then personalize. And it's like, well, I don't wanna give up my blueberries? Alright? Well, let's see what we can combine them with.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Exactly.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: That maybe will blunt that response a little bit like some almond butter, or some, you know, some other protein.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Source, or something like.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: There's so many games.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: That's the best people to give the fat. But there's some indications that the fat with sugars is not so good. The greens, our greens are loaded with fiber, and all kinds of phytonutrients that help the insulin get into the cells with the sugars. So you know, I I really help them to do that exactly combined. But I really have found that the greens are the best
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: for young. Please.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: Yeah, I love that. So tell us a little bit about how insulin directly correlates to all the other hormones in the body. What? How does it play a role in whether it be sex hormones or thyroid? Or you know, whatever other, whatever other hormone
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: is in the body, how does insulin really have an impact in that.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: So to understand some of that. There's there's a lot of ways. But you have to understand the concept of insulin resistance. So insulin resistance is that
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: the insulin can't get into the cells. There's plenty of insulin
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: to deal with the blood sugar, but the cells have blunted the entry. Close the door to the entryway.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: What it turns out is that insulin also closes the door on cells to other hormones, and it can lead to thyroid receptor resistance progesterone resistance, estrogen resistance. So when you get those resistances going, you know, because people have symptoms of low levels of the hormone. But when you test their blood, the levels high, right? Like. So a diabetic who has insulin resistance versus a type one.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: They have symptoms of of high blood sugar
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: they have. Well, they have symptoms, actually a lot of them of low blood sugar, because it's all in the in the blood, and it's not getting in same thing with thyroid. Some people have symptoms of low thyroid, but you test them in their thyroid numbers. Look fine, but it's all in the blood, and not getting into the cells and into the nucleus of the cells where it needs to take action.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: So that's one way. It directly affects thyroid by affecting levels of TSH. By affecting the conversion from T. 4 to T. 3,
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: right? So all of these things make a difference in it, and and insulin can lead to inflammation and cytokine release affects the hormone receptor
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: function in just about every one of them. There's there's so many ways. I mean, it affects the gut
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: it affects. In fact, some of the medications these days now are
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: working on that effect in the Gut, like Glucagon, like Peptides, that get produced in the gut. So there's so many places, and if you don't get insulin balanced, it's really hard to get the rest of them balanced.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Yeah, ruthless.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: So is that your approach? Then if you find someone who is having these thyroid issues, but their thyroid levels look fine so clearly, it's a receptor issue, and things just aren't getting into the cell where they need to go. Is that your first place you start is trying to lower the insulin and kind of repairing the insulin resistant.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Is, I have a pyramid of of approach, so somebody comes in with symptoms.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: The typical medical approach is this is the symptom. Let's test to see. And let's give you something. A lot of folks who go into functional medicine will do the same thinking, said, Oh.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: this is what's the symptoms. Let's just say hot flashes. For example, you're having hot flashes and we're gonna testrogen progesterone all the balance. And if they're out of balance, we're gonna give you bio identical hormones, or we're gonna give you, you know, black cohash, or any of a number of herbs that might affect that.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: But you've got to ask the question, Why?
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Why?
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: And what I find is that 2 things at the base of the pyramid? I think of it as a pyramid.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: The base of the pyramid are good and and insulin.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: and everybody comes in, no matter what we check to see if insulin problems are an issue. In fact, in my big programs, no matter what they're coming in for. Everybody gets a Cgm
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: because we want to see what's going on for them.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: and they're always surprised
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: always surprise, especially if they have an autoimmune disease and thyroid, especially all of those things are related. So yeah, we always look at insulin. I don't. There's not a single person I would not look at it. You start with the basic blood test. Okay? You're fasting. Glucose was 87 great. Let's get it a one C, and let's get a fasting insulin. Oh, those look good, too. Alright! Let's just get you to test your post perennial. Right? Let's just get you to test if they don't want to do a
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Cgm. Let's, do, you know, tested it 45 min after a meal. Just let's see where it's going. It's going high. Then we go in further and deeper.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: So yeah, I start there with everybody. It's part of what I do as part of a thorough evaluation.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: It's so foundational and nothing else will work. If you don't get that stuff lined out first.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: It won't.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: Find the same exact thing. So what are some of the foods that you then have people lean into? If you figure out that they do have insulin resistance. They've got all of these underlying problems that we've been talking about. What are some of the things that you have them either remove or prioritize in their life.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Yeah. So it's both. I like to start with ads, because people tend to be. Although I've had recently couple of people who are more
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: prone to takeaways and having trouble with the ads. But usually people are okay. I want you to add green leafy vegetables. I want you to add these foods rich and omega 3 fats, I want you to add, you know, more fiber, rich phytochemical, rich foods to your diet, and then I have a a worksheet. It's like 6 page sheet that has just all these different foods that help restore insulin sensitivity
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: right? And it tells you why. And so I have them add, let's pick a couple of these a day and add these to your diet.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Right?
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: I will then say, Okay, let's take things away. And usually I'm doing some very specific testing to see where things are at. And I used to go in and have people do their ads and take aways. And then we start testing.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: And what I find found is that they're already getting such good results that they go. I don't have a problem with this, and then they go back and do the stuff that they were doing before. So now, I say, don't change anything, for in my group program don't change anything for the first 2 weeks. Get your meter and let's measure and see what you're doing. If you're typically having jelly beans for lunch, I want you to eat jelly beans for lunch, and they're like.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Okay, I want to see what your food is doing and they go. Oh, I had no idea. Oh, I just thought whole wheat bread was okay, I thought, or gluten free, you know, whatever quinoa bread was. Okay.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: except for the shooting your levels of sugar up. So we test that early on what do we take away? Well, we take away
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: the obvious, the refined sugar, but also all of the sugars that are taken away from their fiber constituents. So maple syrup, honey agave nectar, you name it anything that's a refined, refined sugar we take away. We take away flour, cause flour tends to move them up, and we have them test. So we have them take it out and then put it back in, you know. Do a 30 day reset to
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: help them to stay away from everything that raises it, and then see what they could add back in moderation, some things, but certain things are red. I say, don't ever add these back. It's just not a good thing to do for your overall health. Yeah. So we take away those things. We add in things like chia seeds and flax seeds and walnuts and good sources of Omega. 3 people eat animal products in fish, being careful where they get it from. We add those things in to give them.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: you know, a good balance, but we're taking away the salami and the baloney, and the process meets, and the mayonnaise, and all the hydrogenated heated oils. We're taking those things away, but I like to give them things, to replace it with.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: Yeah, yeah, I think there, there's definitely a balance between. We have to make sure we're getting all the essentials that we actually have to have to survive.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Right.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: But we do have to remove the offending foods. I mean, there are things that are directly causing these problems, and
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: no amount of supplements or amazing food is gonna overcome.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Gonna have a but.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: The things that are directly causing harm. So I, we definitely need both sides of that. So I think that's great. What about some things that are maybe not food related.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Just about to say that.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: Other lifestyle, things.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: I look at a 5 point thing. We have to have consistently good nutrition. We have to have consistent movement, whatever that is appropriate for you. Some people. It's running some people. It's walking, some people, it's, you know, doing sit ups or push up some people. It's just dancing in their living room, and whatever it might be, whatever your level of fitness, you have to be moving consistently every day, because that's gonna lower the response increase the sensitivity of those
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: yeah cells. So if you have a muscle cell that's untrained versus trained.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: the trained muscle cell is gonna be much more insulin sensitive. So we make sure they're getting the movement. We make sure that their stress is addressed cause cortisol raises blood sugar. So we do some things, whether it's tapping or heart math or Yoga meditation, whatever their favorite, whatever the practitioners favorite thing to do and to teach
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: you teach because they have to get that level of stress down. I love that people are doing all the wearables right. And now the or ring even tells you your stress level. So you can look and go. Okay, let me get let me meditate. Let me get it down, cause they know that if that's going up they're gonna see a shift. And people who are doing both like an or ring and a Cgm. They see the correlations as well. So that's important. The one that people don't like so much is sleep.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: cause everybody's like, well, just gonna stab and get a lot of done. And it's like the badge of courage and the badge of honor, and I was like that. That was my biggest problem.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Now I'm in bed by 9, 30, 10 o'clock every night. That's it. Sorry it's past my bedtime. I gotta go, as it's so important because you're healthy. You don't have any signs of insulin resistance, pre insulin resistance, anything. But you have one night a bad sleep like baby that kept you awake. You're gonna be insulin resistant the next day. So a tip, I tell people you had a bad night asleep, and you do normally. Don't.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Don't eat high glycemic foods. The next day give your body a break.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: Which is extra hard to do when you're sleep deprived, you're gonna have way, more cravings and way less inhibitions and.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Growling leptin growing goes up. Leptin goes down. You're like, just give me food. And of course you're not craving broccoli, you know.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: You also don't have the energy to like, make a whole meal and all the things. So yeah, you have all these factors that are working against you when you're sleep deprived. And yeah, it's just the worst possible scenario to be in.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Absolutely, and the last thing we I teach them is the timing, because people have been taught over the years, especially people are trying to lose weight.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Eat every 2 h to keep your blood sugar steady. It's the worst thing you can do. 4 to 6 minimally right now. Can't necessarily, if you have to eat every 2 h because of how your body feels, you have to slowly increase that we've had people who tried going from that to 6 h. And they're like having heart palpitations. And they're getting sweaty because their bodies going into stress response. So just everything we do, we just ease our bodies into it, and when we can make those changes.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: life goes on. We have people reverse their insulin resistance. In no time. We've had people reverse insulin resistance, Hashimoto's hypertension, and who knows what else was going on with them in like 3, 4 months? Yeah. Completely gone at age 65,
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: like somebody who's 22, and you go? Oh, they're more resilient. No.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: right? So it happens when you take charge and you make changes, and you make choices
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: that affect your body
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: in a positive way. It it a lot of times. It happens really fast.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: So that reminded me we were gonna talk a little bit about fasting. So I do wanna circle back to that because I think it's such a big, important topic that people are either scared of it or obsessed with it. And there's a happy way in the middle where it's a healthy thing. It's not an obsessed thing. So how do you approach the topic of fasting with your clients?
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: There's lots of different kinds of fasting, right? There's inter what people are calling intermittent fasting, which is really time restricted eating. You're eating within a certain window and fasting within a window. We have to realize that healing happens in the fasted state nourishment and build up happens in the fed state, and we need a balance between them. Unfortunately, people are eating right up until bedtime. They're eating first thing in the morning. Some of them are getting up in the middle of the night and go into the kitchen and getting a snap.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: and we need to give the body a break. We need it, I think at least 12 h break at night. I don't even consider that fasting. I just think of that as good sleep. Hygiene, good overall.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Have your last meal at 8. Have your first meal at 8. That's 12 h. That shouldn't be a big deal. We wanna leave the 3 h from the time you have your last food till the time you go to bed to give yourself the best night sleep possible that make sure your growth hormone gets released. Make sure that your liver and your gallbladder, and they do all their detox stuff overnight that you're growing, and leptin stay balanced. I call it the hormones that the hormones that dance in your sleep.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: There's all this whole symphony of hormones that are acting, and if you throw it off by
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: eating the last meal right before you go to bed, having that bowl of ice cream or the chips on the couch and the glass of wine. You're you're thrown off your sleep, and that's gonna throw off your mental stability. The next day your insulin sensitivities, your cortisol levels everything, all your hormones. So that's an important piece so fasting. I think if you want to start to extend that window beyond 12 h, that's when we get into what we call
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: what is currently called Intermittent Fasting. I've been teaching people in my Sweet Spot program how to do that for
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: 2,01114 year, 13 years. Right? So we've been talking about this for a long time, but nobody was talking about it then. Right? So I just. It was a private thing between me and my members. But now everybody's talking about intermittent fasting. So a lot of people are on like 16. 8, okay, 16 h of fasting, 8 h of eating that may not be possible for some people. You may not be able to go that length.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: especially people who have high metabolic rates, and they're really skinny, and they need more calories.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: It's really hard to get it all in an 8 h window without stuffing yourself. Right? So you have to figure out is fasting good for you. And what's your ideal fasting window? So I always tell people, just get to the 1212. Just get there, cause that's that's what everybody should be doing there. There's rare situations where that's not gonna work. And then from there, if you feel like you wanna extend your window a little bit, your fasting window a little bit longer. The advantages we get into something called autophagy.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: When we've been in the fasted state for some people say 15 h, some people say 18 h. There's caught, nobody knows for sure, somewhere in that range. But we get into this state where the body starts like eating away damaged tissue autophagy is a great state to be in.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: So we can do that on a daily basis. We can do that 3 days a week. Women need to be careful about where they are on their menstrual cycle, because it can throw off their litanizing hormone, and it can affect their periods, and it affect their fertility. So we don't mess with that too much. But
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: few days a week of doing this can be super helpful for folks right and there's authors out there that talk about it very specifically at specific times of the month.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: I mean, you can do all that.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: I work a lot with post metapal women. So don't matter. We're we're all safe, always the same.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: But that's important. There's other kinds of fasting, though there's extended fasting. People think extended long fast 3 days. Well, that's not exactly a long fast, but 3 to 5 days is more of an extended fast that a lot of people can safely do at home, but I usually recommend that they work with a practitioner who's gonna help them to monitor their blood sugar, manage, monitor their electrolytes and be cognizant. But I've had people do 3 to 5 day fast, you know, in my groups, and
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: with miraculous results. Amazing results. Right? So you can do that. But for everybody. It takes fortitude to get through the first day, because there's a lot of psychological driving like I'm just gonna finish that, whatever it is in the refrigerator, and then I'll start tomorrow, and there's always a reason to do that.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: But then they gets into a physical state once you get into that second and third day. Physiologically, you're going into detox modes for most people. So it gets uncomfortable once you get to day 4 and 5. For most people it's like, Oh.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: this is really cool. I really feel good, but most people don't have the fortitude to make it that far right, and you don't have to, but having, I think, some sort of fasting regime.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: That you do on a regular basis, whether it means one day a week you do a 16 8.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: That's fine.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: But one of the things that I developed based on the work of Dr. Walter Longo, who's a longevity researcher. And he came up with this concept of fasting, mimicking diets.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: And you can actually eat in such a way that it mimics the effects of fasting. Is it 100%? No, but it mimics. So I took his research, and I looked at what his macronutrient ratios were. And I created a 5 day plan a 5 day program
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: where you eat. Every day you start out with like 1,100 calories, maybe 40% of what you normally would eat, or 50% of what you normally eat. And then it goes down from there. And it's whole foods. It's all plant based. Because that's what the research showed. And people are feeling full.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: They even say to me. I can't eat all the food on the menu plan. It's too much for me. Do I have to? I'm like, no, you can eat less. You just can't eat more right because they're feeling so full and satiated. And then we have people by day. 5 who's fasting in glucos are perfect, and if they test insulin, then the fasting insulins are good, and then their ketones are in a really great place, and they're like mental clarity. They're losing weight.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: That's something you can actually do once a month.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: And that's what his research showed. And maybe you just do that for the first 3 or 4 months, and then you spread it out and just do it a few times a year to get the benefits of fasting without actually fasting, and your insulin levels normalize your blood sugar levels. Normalized blood pressure normalizes. It's a phenomenal process. I've taken hundreds of people through with amazing success.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: Yeah, I I'm a big fan of fasting as well, and I know it. It like you. It doesn't work for everyone. There's no perfect regimen. There's no perfect schedule. I think the thing that we really have to be mindful of is how we break the fast.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Oh, yeah.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: What you do at the end of the fast, when you start eating again makes all the difference. That's actually more important than how long you fasted for.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Cracked so.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: Definitely don't fast so that you can binge.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: Don't fast as a punishment because of something you already ate like. We'd really have to approach it with the right mindset, with the right healing attitude, with the right intentions, and then come out of it the right way too, or you not only undo all the benefits you just got.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: So. But yeah.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: Actually set yourself back even farther, and it can actually be really dangerous if you come out of it the wrong way. So I don't know if you have any thoughts on like, what do you recommend for people even after just like 16 8, but especially after a longer fast.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Yeah. 16 8. It's not as critical, but I think that the first meal I like to have the first meal be
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: nutrient, dense, nutrient, dense, and easy to digest, especially 16 8. Not so much. But that mean that's how I eat, anyway, is a salad. Vegetables? You know, if you're doing it 16, 8 every day. Then you just have to get into what's a good meal for me to maintain my weight, or, you know, continue my health goals.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: but for a longer fast, you know, if you haven't put food into your body for 3 to 5 days, and you sit down and eat pizza.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Your body's gonna revolt. It's gonna revolve. So my typical, if I do, I 1 one year I do
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: 2,019 I did. Every 6 weeks. I did a 5 day fast, and I wanted it. I kept wanting it. And then, towards the end of Mike I spread it out a little more, and then by the next year it's like.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: no, my body doesn't want to do it quite so often right. But it was for whatever reason my body needed it wanted it then, but I always broke it
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: with something easy. Now, personally, I digest that's really well, so I would have a half an avocado blended in the blender with a cucumber, and I would look forward to it because it was so yummy and delicious, right? But something like that maybe it is just a juice. Maybe it's a very a light smoothie, not like with 5 pounds of kale and broccoli in it, because it's gonna be hard on your system, not too much fiber, and you take you break it that way. I don't recommend breaking it with
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: animal products, because those are harder to digest, and a lot of people put it out there that they do. So maybe it works for some people doesn't work for me, doesn't work for other people I've worked with, but easy to digest foods that are nutrient, dense.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: probiotic, rich foods. That's another thing I often break it with is coconut yogurt right? Something like that with I don't usually break it with fruit, because I don't, wanna you know, jump my blood blood sugar up too much, but veggies.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: low glycemic veggies really, you know, potent, but easy to digest ones, not like a big plate of bro, you know. Raw broccoli. No, even cook broccoli could be problematic. So it's very easy to digest, depending on where you're at, you know. Maybe a blended soup
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: is good, especially if it's the winter right and you get colder when you're fasting, and to steam up a bunch of veggies, put them in the blender with the the water, the broth, and blend that up and season it. That's a great way to break it fast, you know, and you take it to your capacity cause the tendency is to like I'm gonna eat ton.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: My trick is I? If I'm doing an extended fast, I fast until my dinner meal, whether it's 4, 5, 6 o'clock. I break it with that one meal with the idea that I'm just going to do one meal, because if I start early, then it triggers like, Oh, I'm hungry again. Oh, I'm hungry again. I haven't eaten in 5 days. I'm gonna eat more, and then you go. Oh, no! Why did I do that? So that's my approach.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: Yeah, I think I I've found much of the exact same that definitely go slow, definitely pick easy to digest options, at least for the very first food you put in your mouth.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Oh, yeah.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: A broth, a soup, a light smoothie, a yogurt. Those kinds of things, I think, are a great way. Avocado is a great.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Simple.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: Whole way, and maybe maybe, like an hour later, you're a little bit hungry again, and you can have more of a regular meal. Still don't go for the pizza. Still, don't go for the junk foods.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: but you can maybe have a more full meal with more of the animal proteins or things that are a little bit harder to digest, because you've kind of primed this system already. You just don't want to start with something really heavy or hard to digest. I think that easier way back in after an extended fast is much more advised, for sure.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Yeah, for sure, for sure.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: Thank you so much for sharing all of this amazing information. We could probably talk all day, because I know you have even more amazing information for everyone. I know you also have your own podcast but I just want to give you the opportunity to share where people can learn more about you and all of the amazing things you're doing.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Yeah, absolutely. So my podcast is reinventing healthcare. It's geared towards
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: health practitioners and geeky. You know, people who wanna information for their own health, who aren't afraid of the science cause we get scientific in there. Reinvent healthcarecom. But it's on.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: you know, itunes and spotify, and all those places. I have a blog and every week we put up a new recipe. We've been very consistent for the last 3 years of putting up a new recipe every week, and their recipes coming from my books, from my programs and stuff like that. And we usually put up an article as well.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: And then so that's@drreadamery.com slash, blog. So if you just go to Doctor readhammer.com, you can click on blog.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: and I'm on Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, lots of Youtube videos out there. Probably you know few 100 Youtube videos out there. Where else? Yeah. And I have a couple of freebies that I can offer you guys, if you're interested in going deeper with some of the
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: stuff we talked about, and I'll give you give you the link that you can put with this. But the
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: hormone hacking. Break your fast menus right? And that's whether you're going 16, 8, whether you're going 1212, whether you've done a 5 day fast. It's a great way to start to prime your system for good hormonal balance. And then I have a really nice kind of infographic type handout of foods that improve insulin sensitivity. So both of those are there.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: Love it. Yeah, we will absolutely link all the all of that information up in the show notes. So people can just click really easily and get to all of your things. So thank you so much for all of the amazing insights that you shared today from insulin resistance and hormone health in general and fasting and lifestyle, and just so many amazing topics that we've covered today. So thank you.
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Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Thank you.
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Andrea Nicholson, MS, BCHN®️: To everyone out there. We'll catch you again on future episodes.
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