Episode Overview
Episode Topic
In this enlightening episode of Holistic Health Habits, host Surani Fernando dives deep into the world of nutritional endocrinology with Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo, a pioneering expert and founder of the Institute of Nutritional Endocrinology. The conversation centers on the critical role of hormones in maintaining overall health and how personalized nutrition and fasting can effectively balance the endocrine system. Dr. Loscalzo shares her personal journey from experiencing severe health issues in her 20s to becoming a leader in functional health and nutrition. This episode offers valuable insights into how you can optimize your health through targeted nutritional strategies, making it a must-listen for anyone interested in holistic health, nutrition, and hormonal balance.
Lessons You’ll Learn
Listeners will gain a comprehensive understanding of nutritional endocrinology and its significance in maintaining hormonal equilibrium. Dr. Loscalzo breaks down complex concepts, such as the relationship between insulin resistance and weight management, offering practical advice on how to use diet, fasting, and lifestyle changes to achieve optimal health. You’ll learn about the differences in how men and women should approach diet and exercise, particularly in relation to their hormonal cycles. The episode also delves into the science behind fasting, exploring its benefits and the importance of tailoring it to individual needs to prevent metabolic slowdown and maintain a healthy metabolism.
About Our Guest
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo is a renowned expert in functional health, nutrition, and nutritional endocrinology. She is the founder of the Institute of Nutritional Endocrinology, where she educates practitioners and individuals on how to balance hormones and optimize health through personalized nutrition. Dr. Loscalzo’s passion for health began with her own journey of overcoming significant health challenges in her 20s, which led her to pursue advanced degrees in chiropractic, nutrition, and acupuncture. Over the past 40 years, she has developed a unique approach that combines nutrition, lifestyle changes, and mindfulness to address the root causes of hormonal imbalances. Her work has transformed the lives of countless individuals and practitioners alike.
Topics Covered
This episode covers a wide range of topics related to nutritional endocrinology and holistic health. Dr. Loscalzo explains the concept of nutritional endocrinology, highlighting its focus on using nutrition to balance the endocrine system and hormones. The discussion includes practical tips on how to identify and address insulin resistance, the role of personalized nutrition in managing hormonal health, and the importance of sleep, stress management, and exercise in maintaining overall well-being. Additionally, Dr. Loscalzo shares insights into the benefits of fasting, the use of technology in monitoring health, and the importance of critical thinking and continuous education for healthcare practitioners. Whether you’re a seasoned health professional or someone new to holistic health, this episode offers valuable knowledge and actionable advice.
Our Guest: Ritamarie Loscalzo
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo is a pioneering expert in functional health and nutrition, with a focus on balancing hormones through personalized dietary and lifestyle interventions. As the founder of the Institute of Nutritional Endocrinology, Dr. Loscalzo has dedicated her career to educating both healthcare practitioners and individuals on the vital role of nutrition in maintaining endocrine health. Her approach is grounded in decades of experience and a deep understanding of the intricate connections between diet, hormones, and overall well-being. Dr. Loscalzo’s journey into this field began with her own health struggles in her 20s, which led her to question conventional medical treatments and explore alternative approaches. This personal experience fueled her passion for holistic health and shaped her innovative approach to healing.
Dr. Loscalzo holds advanced degrees in chiropractic, nutrition, and acupuncture, which provide her with a comprehensive understanding of the body’s complex systems. Over the past 40 years, she has built a reputation as a thought leader in the field, combining her expertise in nutritional endocrinology with a commitment to helping others achieve optimal health. Her work emphasizes the importance of treating each person as an individual, tailoring dietary and lifestyle recommendations to address specific hormonal imbalances. Through her institute, she has developed a robust curriculum that offers certifications and continuing education to practitioners worldwide, equipping them with the tools needed to deliver effective, personalized care.
In addition to her educational endeavors, Dr. Loscalzo continues to actively engage with clients through her online practice, where she applies her extensive knowledge to help individuals overcome chronic health issues and achieve lasting wellness. Her methods integrate group coaching, one-on-one consultations, and a variety of diagnostic tools, including advanced lab testing and genetic analysis.
TRANSCRIPT
Surani Fernando: Welcome to another episode of Holistic Health Habits, the podcast where we explore the latest trends, innovations and insights in holistic health with a focus on nutrition. I’m your host, Surani Fernando. Today, we’re delighted to welcome Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo, the founder of the Institute of Nutritional Endocrinology. She’s a leader in the field of functional health and nutrition, particularly in balancing hormones and optimizing health through nutrition. Ritamarie brings a wealth of knowledge with her to this episode, and I’m super excited to get into this discussion. Ritamarie is welcome to the show. It’s great to have you here.
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Thank you for having me. I’m excited to talk to your audience. Great.
Surani Fernando: And did I say your name right, or is it Loscalzo?
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Loscalzo. You said it perfectly. Okay.
Surani Fernando: Perfect. Yeah. Perfect. Yeah. , great. So, you know, we’ve got a lot to get into. Some go. We’re going to go a little bit deep into this episode. But first, can you just give us a bit of the lay of the land of your own background, education, experience and your journey as the founder of the Institute of Nutritional Endocrinology?
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Absolutely, absolutely. It all started with me and my health falling apart. I was the typical average American eating garbage food and not really taking care of myself. And my health fell apart very young. And I always say that I was very lucky that my health fell apart when I was in my 20s, because I had less time to do damage. And when it did, and I started to look into medical approaches to things that were going on with me, I wasn’t finding anything besides take this drug. Take this drug. No, we don’t know what’s wrong with you. Just keep taking these drugs. And so I branched out and asked if it could be my diet, branched out and started to research. And this was back before the internet. This was back in the 1980s when you had to go to libraries and bookstores and actually physically pick up pieces of paper that were bound together and read them. And I discovered that I had probably inadvertently, but I had been destroying my body with everything I was putting in my mouth and everything I was putting on my skin. And so I completely turned that around and was able to get my health back. And I said, this shouldn’t be this hard to do. I want to learn how to do this. So I went back to school and I got my doctorate in chiropractic and my master’s in nutrition and certified in acupuncture. And I started to just build up all these, these, , strategies that I could use with people. And I started practice and I started to work on this. And, you know, 40 years later, here I am.
Surani Fernando: Wow. Okay. So then so you’ve been practicing for 40 years, and then you founded. When did you, you know, start the institute.
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Let’s see. The officially the institute was started in 2013. Okay, so I had been working with clients, with patients in the office, had started to work online with people, and I had so much requests from practitioners of all kinds saying, I want to learn what you know. How do you know what you know? I decided to just start to create classes for practitioners. And it was so popular that people wanted more. And so I started the institute to, you know, house that and to create a plethora of educational pieces and certifications and things that practitioners of all kinds can learn, whether they’re just starting out in their nutritionists or coaches or whether they’re doctors that have been in practice for decades who are tired of the medical system, of not really looking at root causes, of really looking deep. And that’s when we started.
Surani Fernando: Okay. So is most of your time now spent like educating, or do you also have your own practice and your own clients?
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: I have a mixture of both. So I work online, but all exclusively online. I don’t have an office and I teach practitioners. I have training, but I also have coaching programs where I help individuals who want to get well. And I mostly do it through a combination of hybrid programs that combine group plus education plus one on one. And I’ve got a number of coaches and practitioners, doctors and nurses and, you know, coaches that have graduated my program and are certified in nutritional endocrinology. And they work on a on a team, and we work as a team to help people to really get to the root causes of their issues.
Surani Fernando: Okay, great. And so many of our listeners will be holistic health practitioners wanting to learn more, but some may be a little bit more fresh in the space. Can you just break it down? What exactly is nutritional endocrinology and then talk about your nutritional endocrinology endocrinology method?
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Yeah, absolutely. So nutritional endocrinology is it’s exactly what it sounds like. So it’s basically using nutrition to balance the endocrine system. The endocrine system is the hormone, the system of hormones. So many people don’t know how to say endocrinology because it’s a challenging word to get out, right. Understand it. But if you’ve been to, you know, anybody about your thyroid or your diabetes or other things that are hormonally related or hot flashes or whatever, oftentimes you’ll be talking to an endocrinologist. We’re not endocrinologists. We’re using the study of the hormones and how they work in the body with nutrition. And when I say nutrition, I don’t mean just the food that you put in your mouth or the vitamins and minerals. I think it’s when we nourish ourselves, anything that nourishes us. So it’s everything we put in and on our body, the thoughts we think, the stress we experience, the environment. So it’s everything that comes together to influence the hormones we look at. How can we help people to balance those hormones, get results, overcome a lot of their health challenges by using nutritional endocrinology?
Surani Fernando: Okay, and what about the differences in the approach that men need to take versus women? I feel like this is a conversation that we’re having more now, but still, you know, it’s a little bit blurry, like maybe 20 years ago was just the same recommendations for both men and women with diet and exercise and not really taking into account a women’s unique, you know, cycle, or even if they’re pre or post menopausal, how does your method take all of those moving parts into account?
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Wow, that’s a great question. And the way that we do that is we treat each person as an individual, right. I believe there’s no one size fits all for, you know, here’s a protocol for endometriosis. Here’s a protocol for diabetes. No, it really is. There’s some general guidelines, but there’s a customization that needs to happen. So the way that we approach that is we do thorough histories with people and get all the information about their background, their family, their genetics. We study genetics. We look at labs and then we help people to customize their diet, nutrition plan, their lifestyle plan according to where their imbalances lie and where their potential imbalances lie based on family history and genetics. So it’s a combination approach. And sure, that just takes into account, you know, men need different types of exercise than women. Women need different exercise during different parts of their cycle. It’s just talking to somebody today about that. During this part of my cycle, I really can lift heavy and I can build muscle during this part of my cycle. I have to take it easy. I just can’t do that right? Yeah, it’s really taking it in. But the thing I want to just really emphasize is when people hear hormones, their first thought goes to estrogen, testosterone and progesterone. Right. Right. The sex hormones. That’s just like a little blip in the tapestry of the hormones in the body. And hormones actually control every function in the body. And so when we look at nutritional endocrinology is helping people to balance the hormones that affect every function in their body and identify where the imbalances lie.
Surani Fernando: Okay. Are you able to, you know, put that into context a little bit with maybe a certain case study that you had where, you know, there was the patient or even the practitioner looking at a patient was trying everything, and, you know, nothing was working. And, and where it really required a shift in, you know, the hormonal equilibrium. Do you have like and what were the steps to get there.
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Yeah. So what I see a lot is women and men too. But mostly we hear it from women who just can’t seem to shed the weight. They’re trying this diet and that diet. They’re starving themselves and they’re exercising like crazy and the weight just won’t come off. When we look at those people oftentimes, and I’ve had many people say I can’t, it’s hard to get it down to just one. But I had many people who, when we look at them and we look at lab testing in a way that’s different than what conventional medicine looks at by conventional medicine. The only test they do related to blood sugar metabolic health, for example, is fasting glucose. And that’s like a little blip in the picture. Right. And so we look at for people like this who the struggle is, they can’t seem to lose weight no matter what they try. It’s often that they have too much insulin in their body. Now I get type one diabetic who has too little, but too much and too much leads to insulin resistance. And but before it becomes type two diabetes, before it’s medically Diagnosable. There are warning signs for decades, so we’ll find that that person may have an elevated insulin level. And the insulin is what’s called a fat storage hormone.
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: It causes the body to store fat on the body. So if the insulin is elevated, no matter what they’re trying to do, the body’s fighting against them because their hormones are out of balance. So when we balance those hormones, and the cool part about it is when you balance insulin, you also can balance the thyroid, the adrenals, the sex hormones. They’re all kind of all intimately tied together. And then suddenly they get results. I can give you one case. We had one person who had come in and she did. She did a group program with us, and she had been she was 65 years old. She had been diagnosed with panhypopituitarism, meaning her pituitary was low functioning, which affects everything in the body. She had gone to the doctor and heard her fasting glucose was creeping up. It wasn’t in the diabetic range yet. It was close to that. And so the doctor just said, well, lose weight, blah, blah, blah, you know, come back in six months and if you’re in the diabetic range, I’ll give you medication. That was unacceptable. Right. That’s not the answer I want to hear. What do I do now to prevent myself? My mom had it. My uncle had it. I saw the misery of it.
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: They didn’t have anything for her. So she came and worked with us. And she got the testing done. She got a glucose meter. That’s something unique that we started doing, I don’t know, 12, 13 years ago, even before that. But in a group setting, we had people get glucose meters and monitor. Now everybody and their brother is talking about glucose meters. At the time, people were saying, how do you get non-diabetics to test their glucose? And why do you do that? Because it gives you the picture of what’s going on, how the glucose levels are affected by food, By stress, by lack of sleep, by the amount of exercise, by lifestyle. And then they give people the power to make changes based on that. And voila! This woman went on to lose 110 pounds, reversed her Hashimoto’s that she’d been diagnosed with for 50 years, got off all her other medication because she took care of that hormone imbalance that had been missed all these years. She was just put on thyroid medication. She was just put on blood pressure medication. She was just put on medication to help her pituitary know she needed to get to the root cause. And then she was medication free.
Surani Fernando: So just knowing, knowing her those imbalances and then tackling it with nutrition, like tackling it with, you know, what would you say? I mean, obviously you don’t have to go to her, you know, whole diet. But what would be some key changes that, you know, she was a daily habit, a daily, you know, intake that she had to change.
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Yeah. So there’s a lot of things. But with each person you’re looking at, which are the foods that cause these spikes. Yeah. The spikes in glucose usually correspond to spikes in insulin. So people are having these ups and downs and they just can’t seem to shed weight and their hormones are out of balance. So basically it’s identifying the foods that raise the sugar, getting off of all the ultra processed foods, the processed foods, the refined carbohydrates, flour, sugar. Big ones. Right. Getting on a diet that consisted of a lot of non non-sweet, you know, non starchy vegetables. So like high water content, vegetables lots of greens and doing daily meditation and daily exercise and getting the right amount of sleep. Those are the kinds of things that make dramatic effects on the hormone balance and get people amazing results.
Surani Fernando: Okay, so pretty, you know, straightforward. I mean, it’s often straightforward, but it’s so hard to do in, in practice. Right, right, right. But, . Yeah. What you’re saying is, you know, just, , the sort of things that a lot of people do say, , you know, with a healthy, balanced diet, you know, you know, I don’t.
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Believe in a healthy, balanced diet. Yeah. I don’t think there is a healthy, balanced diet, because what’s healthy for you is a balanced diet may not be for me. So for some of the people that have these imbalances, they have to go off of all fruit even for a while to get going. Yeah. To reset. Other people can handle it. And because we’re doing that testing, we’re looking to see what is it for you that you need to let go of so you can say to somebody, eat a healthy, balanced diet. But if you look at what a dietitian means by a healthy, balanced diet is totally not, in my opinion, a healthy diet. Right. There’s starch, there’s too much sugar. There’s too much crackers and cookies and all that kind of stuff, and artificial sweeteners and all that. That’s not really a healthy, balanced diet. So I think that saying that to somebody just go on a healthy, balanced diet is frustrating.
Surani Fernando: It’s a bit yeah, it’s a bit arbitrary. Yeah for sure. So yeah. So basically in like the, the, the key part is the testing. Like what foods are triggering that. Because for some people a food won’t trigger those insulin levels like another person. And then reduce that or eat something else to reduce that sugar spike. Absolutely.
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: And there’s some basic guidelines, right. Everybody needs to have enough water intake. Everybody needs to get enough sleep. But what you may need for sleep is maybe different from what I need for sleep. So it’s monitoring that. But from the food perspective, everybody should be off the processed foods. So everybody should be off the garbage that is in the supermarkets that’s labeled food that really isn’t food. Everybody gets off of that. But some people need to get off of some of the healthier foods, at least temporarily, while they’re rebalancing their body. Okay. And that makes a huge difference.
Surani Fernando: Okay. And you mentioned that, you know, some people have warning signs of elevated insulin. What are the warning signs?
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Yeah, there’s quite a number of them. So you eat a meal, you have a big full meal and you still want more. You’re still like craving something sweet at the end of that meal. Or you eat a big meal and then two hours later, you’re starving for more because your body is not getting all those nutrients into the cells because of the insulin resistance that’s going on. You may have a really good night’s sleep and still wake up tired, or you may have the ups and downs, like people who have to be chained to the refrigerator all day long because if they don’t eat every two hours, they crash. That’s all warning signs. And then getting some extra weight around the middle, not necessarily the whole body, But just like that abdominal, that muffin top is as it’s called, right? That’s a warning sign as well. Okay.
Surani Fernando: Okay. Very interesting. And what about things like fasting, you know, program fasting to balance hormones. Where do you stand on that?
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: I think that it works phenomenally for many people and not necessarily for everybody. So you have to really take it as a grain. You know, take it as an individual. Works beautifully for me. I really I regained my health by doing an extended fast and getting off all the things that were bothering me, and then gradually moving things back in and figuring out what worked for me. I’ve. I like the concept of intermittent fasting, may call it. I’ve been teaching that to people for a long, long, long time before it became popular that, you know, you just at least have a 12 hour gap between dinner and bedtime. But, you know, extending that to 14 or 16 hours can be beneficial for a lot of people, not necessarily for everybody. So you just feel it out and see what that ideal window might be. An extended fasting, I would say, under the care of a, you know, somebody who knows what they’re doing can be super helpful. I had one guy came to me who had diabetes, was on multiple medications, high blood pressure, was overweight, and he was just on all these medications. And he had heard me speak. He I was his wife was a friend of mine and said, I want to do a fast like you did. So we guided him through a fast and extended fast, got his doctor on board, taught him how to lower his medications because it was going to be needed. And by the end of that fast, he was off all his medications and lost 50 pounds. Wow. And felt great. Right? And the doctor was like, oh my God, I’ve never heard of anything like that before. Yeah.
Surani Fernando: That’s amazing. I mean, for me personally, I’ve found, you know, the benefits of fasting. I don’t know if you’re familiar with, , a woman called Doctor Mindy Peltz, but she came across she she just came across my YouTube feed just randomly. And then I started listening to her. And then I was like, this woman is saying so much that, like, I need to hear, especially about, like the hormones and the cycle and when to fast, when not to fast, what to eat at certain times. And, you know, I, I started to adopt some things that were very simple and sustainable for me. , obviously life gets in the way. So, you know, sometimes you every day is not, not, you know, the best day, but what one of the things was, you know, building myself up to a long, fast, a 36 hour fast at the beginning of my cycle. , just as like a detox measure. And it’s amazing how much, you know, it’s like I have. I’m reborn after that. Like, it’s like this detox. You know, obviously there’s one point where you have to push through, but once you push through, you just feel like you get a second life. And then the next morning you’re refreshed and you can break your fast and have so much energy. So that’s been great just in terms of energy levels. And then like, you know, I would say smaller like varying the fasts, not doing any big ones throughout the month and then not fasting at the end of my cycle like the week before. But eating really, you know, good carbohydrates and nourishing the body with what progesterone needs. And it’s been amazing. Like it’s been a year and the pain that I have during my period, if I do it right, if I do those two things correctly, I have no pain. That’s good. And just no clotting. I mean, this might be too much information, but, you know, just it’s just. Yeah. And it’s just.
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Phenomenal. It’s remarkable the power of fasting. And yeah, when we think about it, it makes sense. We live in a world where food is available 24 over seven. You get hungry the night. Most people you know, unless they live in the middle of nowhere, can just, you know, either get from their refrigerator or go down to 7-Eleven and grab food, and people are eating constantly, and the body’s not designed to do that. The body’s designed for periods of eating, periods of fasting. Healing happens during fasting. Healing doesn’t happen during. During, right? It happens during fasting. So we eat, we nourish, we get good food in there, and then we take a break and we allow the body to process. We allow the digestive system to rest. We allow the hormones to go back into balance. Then we eat again right and find the right windows for you is perfect. And she has great information about working with women’s cycles.
Surani Fernando: Yeah, definitely. And I feel like why, you know, like I’m 39 years old now and I’m just like, I’ve had my period for 29 years, and I took me this long to figure this out. And I could have been, you know, saving myself from a lot of drama each month. Like, it’s just like, so that’s been like a godsend. , but something that, you know, when I talk about my experience with people, they sort of, you know, I wouldn’t just say to my friend, you know, who just knows nothing about this area, like, oh, you should do a 36 hour fast. Like, you know, you have to educate yourself. You have to understand how your body works and prepare yourself for that. But I do get some looks, you know, just like you don’t eat for a whole day, but, like, that’s crazy. And but that’s so weird and you’re a freak and all this stuff. But, , what would you say to to the people who are, like, really questioning it because it’s so far from what they know? Like, is it? I mean, sometimes I bring up the Nobel Prize from 2016, you know, this, like, you know, it is proper science. And there are studies of studies around this. There’s tons.
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Of science. Yeah, there’s tons of science behind it. So that’s how I talk to people. There’s this in the literature. It’s in the medical literature. It’s also in religious literature, a lot of prophets and saints and all that did long fasts as a spiritual quest, but there’s been a lot of study on it and they look at the biochemistry of it. Like I said, not everybody should fast. You know, you’re not going to tell somebody who’s type one diabetic to just fast for five days. And it just doesn’t work that way. So I look at it as an educational process. Oh, so, you know, what do you think is so weird about it? And how does it feel to be eating all the time? Is that working for you? Are you willing to try something slightly different? There’s science back it. Here’s something to read so I generally will send them. I have a like a PDF docent on my website that’s available. I can give you a link and you can share it with your audience.
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: But it’s the many faces of fasting I think. And it just goes into all the different ways and very scientific. Has lots of references in it about how fasting can help the body. Right? Yeah, I don’t I don’t recommend long fasts without supervision. And when I say long fasts, I mean anything more than three days. Five days you might be able to do I because that’s easy for me now that I have been doing it. But I’m talking like a ten day, a 12 day, a 28 day. I once did a 28 day water fast. Wow. I’ve done multiple ten and 12 day fasts. I’ve done countless five day fasts, like, you know, dozens, maybe even hundreds of those throughout the years. Yeah. And it’s just you just. It feels great. You know, there is not that struggle during the first few, but even after the first few, you’re like, I know it’s on the other end, so I’m going to keep going. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you just feel like, oh, I’m reborn. Like you said, I feel like I’m reborn.
Surani Fernando: Right. Yeah. Now, the 36 hour one is is getting quite easy for me to do, but I can I can definitely see that as a woman. If I tried to do that in the last week, I would, I would struggle. Not good. Because I always want to eat. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s just so powerful to understand what your hormones are doing and then how you can navigate eating and not eating and things like that. Right.
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: And varying it to right. It’s like you don’t want to be doing the same fast every single day. You want to vary. And yeah, you know, have a feast day once a week, once every two weeks, right? Where you are not binging on Oreos. I’m not talking about that, but I’m saying having a little bit more on the carbohydrate type foods, more of the what Mindy calls the nature’s carbs, you know. Yeah, nature’s Cokes and fruit and things like that, according to you. And I really think it’s important to keep track and have a meter or a continuous glucose meter. When I first started wearing continuous glucose meter, I don’t know when they first came out to the public more 5 or 6 years ago. Seven years ago, I don’t even remember, but people would look at me like, I didn’t know you were a diabetic. Like, I’m not a diabetic. I’m trying to prevent myself become I have family members who are I’ve got to keep myself on track, and it helps me to stay connected with what I should and shouldn’t eat. Right. And now people are all over. What? What kind of brand of do you use? Right. Everybody knows what a CGM is. When I first started talking about them, nobody even knew what they were. Yeah, yeah.
Surani Fernando: I mean, I have a glucose monitor, but the the, , not not one that I touch. I just do the prick. Especially when I fast just to make sure everything is okay and I’m not dipping too low.
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Yeah. Yeah. It’s important. A lot of people don’t want to do that. So when the CGM came out, they’re like, give me the CGM. I don’t want to break anything. Which is fine. Like the process we originally taught was to try to mimic what you’d get from a CGM. So I had people test every 15 minutes after they ate to see what happened. How high did it go? And you know, how how low did it go? You don’t have to do that with a CGM. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s really fun.
Surani Fernando: And actually, I also follow this one guy on Instagram. You might, might, may have seen him because he has a lot of followers now, but he just all of his posts are just like, let’s see what this food does to my blood glucose. Yes. And it just goes and it’s like, it’s so addictive to just keep watching it. It’s such a simple feed. It’s like very systematic, but you know, it obviously works. And and obviously yeah, he’s very clear about, , this is for me, this is not good for me. And it’s exactly what you say. Like, you’ve got to understand what foods are not working for you with the insulin spikes. Yeah. You mentioned the tech of the glucose monitor. You know, we are in a tech revolution. Are there any other tech tools that you use yourself or in your practice, and that you recommend to listeners to understand more about what’s going on inside our bodies?
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Yeah. Great question, great question. I really like my aura ring. Everyone has that. That’s the nber one thing that I first got that no one got them. And they were like, what’s that ring? Yeah. Because what it does for me, how accurate the the data is, I have no idea. But I know that it gives me information and it keeps me on track with sleep. That used to be my biggest hangup is going to bed. I don’t need sleep. I eat well, I exercise, why do I need sleep? And then now when I watch that and I watch, , my nbers like I had this period recently that I had to stay up late because I was preparing for an event and I didn’t get done. So I was staying up late, which was past midnight in the olden days. Early was 2:00, you know, so it was still relatively. But I watched my what they call your readiness score and your resilience score, and I watched them go down. I, you know, got through that. I started sleeping again. And I’m watching them steadily. And it’s such a good feeling to know, oh, I have more resilience. Oh my body is really it’s adapting and it likes this. And then my blood sugar is going to be good after you don’t after I sleep well because if you don’t have a good night’s sleep, your blood sugar is going to be icky all over the map.
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: So that’s one I love. Another one is a muse headband. And for years, decades. Even I’d known that meditation is a good thing. Mindfulness practices. But I’m such a, you know, active, go, go, go person that it was hard for me to slow down. So I found this at a, at a, I don’t know, workshop like seven years ago, I don’t know how long ago. And I was like, oh, that’s kind of cool. And you put it on and you just wear it while you’re meditating and it measures your brain waves and it gives you biofeedback. It tells you, are you in calm mode? Are you in active mode? If you’re an active mode, the wind starts blowing and the waves start crashing in. When you’re in calm mode, the birds sing so you get feedback and you go, oops, there I go again, calm. So I started doing that and I have been meditating every day for the last. I think it’s six years or seven years. Like I have a streak going like that. I won’t break. So again, I won’t change anything. I won’t not meditate because I don’t want to break my streak. So it’s a really fun gadget to help you to stay on track if you need it, you know? Okay.
Surani Fernando: Super interesting. , any any others that you watch?
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Like, sometimes I, I don’t always wear it because I don’t like wearing a watch, but when I’m exercising, I can check. I can check my blood pressure. I can check my heart rate, I can check, you know how long I’m out there, how many miles I’m covering, how many steps I’m doing. So I’ve done that. There’s nothing that.
Surani Fernando: Might be able to give us some clues into our hormone imbalances or anything like that.
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Coming soon. Okay. I think what I hear from the manufacturers of the CMEs is that there will be more things that you can monitor that way. Okay. Ketones to start, which is a good thing to do, especially if you are fasting. But I mean, there there are some that can measure some other parameters. I you know, I non-techy things like dipsticks right with you stick it in your urine and you can see your what’s your pH And how’s your nitric oxide? Those are little saliva sticks. So there’s a nber of things that I teach people to use to track. Because when you measure things and monitor it, you tend to change. You tend to do the right thing because you don’t want to get a bad mark or a bad score.
Surani Fernando: Exactly. Yeah, totally relate to that.
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Yeah, yeah. So those are the ones that I basically use at this point. Okay, great. , I just.
Surani Fernando: Wanted to go back to that, the fasting conversation a little bit in terms of the nutrition part, like can you decipher, you know, the difference, the important difference between fasting and starvation? Because I think that this is something that I have seen with some people who think that they’re fasting, but they’re really just starving themselves and going into massive calorie deficits every day and are wondering why their metabolism slows down. And then they’re putting they just put the weight back on like, you know, right, right.
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Because their body is going. You just starved me. Where’s food? Let me have it. Let me hoard it. In the meantime, while you’re going through that phase, you’re dropping your metabolism, metabolic rate. So fasting will drop the metabolic rate after it’s usually after 2 or 3 days, you’ll start to see a drop. So if you’re just interspersing a 36 hour fast to your 48 hour fast, there are 24 hour fast there. It’s generally not as long as you keep active, and as long as in the periods when you’re eating, you’re actually eating nourishing foods and plenty of it. You’re not starving yourself. You’re not going into calorie deficit right during your eating periods that you’re eating lots of high density, high nutrient density, getting plenty of protein. So starving is just if you’re anorexic, a lot of people, you know, they confuse you. You don’t want to ask somebody who has a history of anorexia or bulimia to fast. It can trigger all the emotional things that are going to get them into starvation mode. Anorexic starve themselves. Their heart doesn’t get the nutrition it needs. Their muscles don’t. You can see them wasting away. I fast quite frequently. I don’t look like I’m wasting away. I have musculature, I have tone, I am not wasting away of good nutrition. Right? But starving is very different. It’s just. It’s just being afraid of food. , not eating because you want to just lose weight. I fast and I teach people to fast to keep their metabolism healthy, to keep their hormones balanced, not to get them out of balance and over fasting can throw your hormones off. And again, looking at the way Doctor Mindy talks about it with the cycles, right. If you eat out of sync with your cycles, or you fast out of sync with your cycles, you’re going to throw those hormones off and you’re disrupting your hormone My balance. Okay.
Surani Fernando: And, you know, we did talk a little bit about sleep, but what are the other behaviors that are just as important in the nutrition conversation, sleep, exercise, even work and socialization? You know, where do all of those things become super crucial when it comes to the overall hormonal equilibrium? And how do they also rank against the diet, like the actual physical food?
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: That’s a good question, and it depends on the person. But yeah, if you’re not sleeping, you cannot heal. You cannot like regenerate all the waste products and all the toxins that get produced during your day. You don’t get to regenerate that if you’re living in any city in the US, right? Unless you’re living on the top of a mountain, you’re exposed to toxins overnight. Your body gets the ability when it sleeps to cleanse and detoxify. If you’ve exercised. We want growth hormone surges during sleep because growth hormone helps us to store lean and burn the fat. And if we’re not sleeping, we’re not getting that. So sleep is critical, right? Sleep is is top thing. You can be eating beautifully, but if you’re not sleeping, your body is destroying itself. So that’s critical. Mindfulness , stress is one of the leading killer situations in this country. In this world, basically. Cortisol is a hormone that gets produced when we’re under stress. Cortisol. Cortisol messes with your blood sugar. Cortisol messes with the thyroid. Cortisol messes with digestion. Cortisol messes with estrogen and progesterone. So we want to keep cortisol balanced. There’s this thing called the cortisol steal phenomenon. When we’re under a lot of stress, all of the hormones in the steroid hormone pathways which would be cortisol, aldosterone, which controls fluid balance and kidney function, , estrogen, progesterone, pregnenolone and all the sex hormones, they all come through a similar pathway. If you’re under a ton of stress and your body needs to run away from tigers, it prioritizes the stress over reproduction.
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: So what happens is that cortisol steals away all of the other precursors, and we don’t make enough estrogen, progesterone and testosterone. We’re seeing just an enormous surge in infertility and in even men in their 30s with low sex drive. We kind of expect that happens later on, although it doesn’t have to. But when a 35 year old man says he has no sex drive, it’s the stress, right? So stress is critical for hormone balance getting that under control. So even short mindfulness breaks throughout the day. If you don’t want to meditate for 15 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever. Every day you take these breathing breaks throughout the day. There’s a system I love to teach people called Heartmath, which uses breath and appreciation throughout the day to balance out and get you into the parasympathetic nervous system versus the sympathetic fight. Flight critical was a critical thing, so I would say sleep and stress are the most important things and then exercise is important. But some people over exercise, believe it or not right. So it’s yeah I’ve experienced that balance you experience. Yeah. Then you’re drained and you just can’t move because you did too much for your body’s capacity at the time. So movement is critical for keeping the insulin levels balanced because those muscles that are well trained, they pick up the insulin better. So you don’t have the surges in blood sugar all. Yeah.
Surani Fernando: Yeah. I think with the exercise part, what I’ve realized from from my body, especially as I get older, you know, I do feel in the moment really good doing those like really intense high intensity classes where you’re like, you know, bettering your body around like it’s it’s fun to do it in the moment. But then afterwards, I do notice that my body is, is just like irritated, irritated like it’s or it’s inflamed or there’s something wrong. , whereas then I feel like when I stop doing it, then I sort of deflate, I almost, I almost don’t even look, I’m even though I’m building muscle, I won’t look muscly. It will look the other way. So, , so yeah, understanding what works for your body. And I was stressing my body and at the end of it, like I was, my body was in complete stress when I, when I if I do too much, even though it feels good in the moment, my heart rate is racing. I have quite a low resting heart rate with like what? What you would say is healthy, but it can spike up if I if I just do you know those kinds of. Right.
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: So it’s finding that balance, finding that sweet spot of where you get the best results. You don’t want to give it up. But you know, sometimes those high intensity classes might be too much. And just having some weights and you start to gradually increase your weights, increase your weights rather than incorporating it with aerobic kind of activity. And eventually, you know, if you build up and you get the good nutrition and the right nutrients, the right amount of protein and omega threes and vitamins and minerals, then you might be building, but it might be also when you’re in a state where chasing after little kids, stressful job, you know, whatever the stressors are in your life, if those are are under play, then you can’t exercise quite as much. Right? Yeah. You don’t want to be training for a marathon and trying to get pregnant at the same time, right? No, it doesn’t work that way.
Surani Fernando: No, no, no. Yeah. Way to put it. And just to finish off, you know, we talked a lot about practical tips for, for the listeners just everyday people. But for, for since you’re from the Institute for Health Care Practitioners that want to sort of step it up and fine tune their practice, their holistic health practice with some of, you know, embracing some more of these sort of endocrinology principles. What would you say are the main challenges that you see when people come to you for their courses? You know, where they’re struggling with their practice and what, what are the best tips that you can give them?
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo: Absolutely. You got to stay on top of it. You got to stay on top of the latest and the greatest. You have to really understand what’s going on in here. There are a lot of courses out there for health practitioners that just teach a superficial level, like, here’s a protocol for hot flashes, here’s a protocol for this. And if that’s all you know, and somebody comes in, they didn’t read the textbook. They generally don’t know what they’re supposed to present like. And there’s some unusual presentations. You have to be able to understand what’s going on. So keeping yourself educated. We offer lots continuing education all the time. We offer a health care practitioner three day event once a year. I’m constantly doing webinars and, you know, Facebook and YouTube videos, educate and really understand what’s going on because it’s critical thinking is very important. You have to be able to think through what this person is presenting with how this body is supposed to work, where it’s going wrong. Are there tests I need to run? What are some of the nutrients that are out of balance with and really putting it all together? So it takes critical thinking and staying on top of the latest information. Okay. We have lots of that at our institute.
Surani Fernando: Yeah. Great. Well thank you so much, Ritamarie for joining the podcast. It’s been great having you on this. The discussion has been super insightful. I’ll definitely check out some of your materials as well on your website. And for those who want to learn more about Anne-marie’s Institute of Nutritional Endocrinology, be sure to visit their website, which is I I n e method.com ww ww.com. Yeah. Don’t forget to subscribe to Holistic Health Habits for more episodes featuring experts in the field. Until next time, I’m Surani Fernando. Take care and stay healthy.