Metabolic Health During Menopause and Beyond

Real quick, before we dive into this episode, I have a little sleep secret I want to tell you about. Look, sleep is crucial for your fitness, but it's crucial for just plain old everyday life and function. And I find I sleep great unless I have a migraine. And I've had more than my fair share since perimenopause all the way through postmenopause. My secret weapon was Blue Sky CBD sleep gels. Each gel contains 25mg of CBD and 25mg CBN for deep restorative sleep. Something about it helps to reduce inflammation, which I believe for me was key in helping me get to sleep. But the biggest thing is so many of the over-the-counter solutions, whether for sleep or migraines, can ruin gut health, and liver health. Neither one of those did I want to be problematic for me. So this option is recommended by healthcare providers worldwide and backed by thousands of happy customers, many of whom come from our Flipping 50 community. There is zero THC, so it's non-habit-forming. It's made by a trusted family-owned company that we all can feel good about. Third-party tested for purity and potency. And if you're interested, you too can try a sample for just $6. But even better, you can get 30% off forever with discount code FLIPPING50. That's FLIPPING50. Just go to flipping50.com/blueskycbd. We'll put that link in the show notes and you'll find it everywhere on Flipping 50 at My Favorites. What are you waiting for? Good night. Pop quiz. If I said define metabolic health, you say— okay, well, we're going to give you the answers to this quiz. But truly, one of the questions that I do think that we need to be able to answer is what is metabolic health? And I want you to stay tuned. So at the very beginning, you're going to hear this right away. We're not going to keep you in suspense, but the numbers, the percentage of us humans that have metabolic health are terrible. Let's be in the good percentage. My guest today is Dr. Rita Marie Loscalzo, the founder of the Institute of Nutritional and endocrinology. She's passionately committed to being a leader in transforming our current broken disease-focused system into a true healthcare system where every practitioner is skilled at finding the root cause of health challenges and using the wisdom of nature combined with modern science research to restore balance. Dr. Rita Marie, a licensed doctor of chiropractic with certifications in acupuncture, nutrition, herbal medicine, and HeartMath specializes in insulin, thyroid, adrenal, and digestive imbalances. She sounds like your new bestie, does she not? She's also a master at using palate-pleasing, whole, fresh food as medicine and is a best-selling author, speaker, and internationally recognized nutrition and functional health authority with over 30 years of clinical experience. Her podcast, Reinvent Healthcare, empowers health and wellness practitioners around the globe to be part of the movement to provide root cause care to people in need. Can't wait for you to listen to this show, and please stay till the very end because she's also sharing something for you if you're looking to improve your metabolic health. I'm Debra Atkinson. You're listening to Flipping 50. I started this podcast over a decade ago to answer questions about fitness in menopause and beyond before you knew to ask them. The goal: to help accelerate your results with science and the practical application of proven protocols while living your best life. There's no more powerful health influencer in the world than a midlife woman, and it's not just about you but the 3 generations that you influence. My unique 40-year career, including being a university senior lecturer in kinesiology, an industry subject matter expert, and an international speaker to founder of the first and the only exclusively made-for-menopause and beyond fitness membership in the world. Every week I interview experts behind the scenes and the science of optimal hormone-balancing fitness and longevity and share answers to our community's questions so you can have the vitality, and the energy that you want, need, and deserve. Dr. Rita Marie, thank you so much for being in the house.

Well, I'm happy to be in the house. It's exciting. It's always fun to be around you.

And this is such a great month. So actually, Nutrition Month, it's so appropriate that you're here. We didn't necessarily plan it that way, but this is so good. And we're going to review something that I would say my listener, every listener has heard this term And yet my belief is that if I turned around and said, define that for me, that maybe we wouldn't quite get it right. So we won't put anybody on the spot if you're listening right now, but there is a lot of buzz these days about metabolic health. So let's just define it.

Absolutely. You know, a couple of decades ago, and I've been working on this with people for over 33 years, and if I said metabolic health, they'd go, oh, I have a fast metabolism, or I have a slow metabolism. I gain weight easily. I don't. But metabolic health's way more than that. And it's made the news lately. I think the first study was that was published was 2018 that said that 88% of the population was metabolically unhealthy. And then in, I think it was 2021, it was redone and it's now 93% of the population is metabolically unhealthy. And there's some criteria that they base it on. And that criteria isn't even as stringent as I think it should be. So Probably about 2% of the population is metabolically healthy. So it would be nice to know what that is. Okay. So metabolic health is everything related to the taking of stuff from out there and turning it into energy in here. That's basically it, but there's a lot of processes involved in that. We start out and the criteria they did for metabolic health was mostly based on things related to insulin resistance and blood sugar balance. So we think about all the places that can get involved with how healthy is your metabolism. Well, if your digestion sucks, then nothing going from out there is gonna get digested properly and put into the bloodstream. If you have insulin resistance, meaning your cells are closed down, they've shut down their doors to insulin, which has to carry sugar in, then that sugar is not gonna get into the cells to even help you make energy. If your mitochondria are having a problem, then you're not even gonna be able to take, if the sugar gets in, you're not gonna be able to take it and convert it to ATP, which is the energy currency of the body, which we need for exercise, we know, right? We need for everything. But since your audience is very focused with you on a lot of the exercise pieces, if you're exhausted and you're trying to do a workout and Debra's out there going like this and you're going, "Oh, I can't do this," it could be any of those places. And then it's once that sugar, once it gets into the cells, right? The glucose and the oxygen turn into ATP in the mitochondria. We have to carry that oxygen around the tissues. So it has to do with iron metabolism and red blood cells and a whole lot more and bunch of nutrients. So everything that goes from there into making you full of energy, that's metabolic health. We think a lot about it and a lot of the buzz about it now is related to insulin resistance and ketones versus sugar burners and all this. But it's a lot more than that.

Wow. Okay, that is a lot. And my fear here is that a listener would be saying, oh, I thought it was so simple, and now it's like it could be any one of several things. How would I ever decide that? But I want to unpack something first with you. First of all, you've been doing this for 33 years. How did you come into this and doing this work specifically? Because I know not only are you here talking to our end user, what we talk at the consumer, so for me and for everybody listening, but you also trained practitioners. How did you get into this and working in metabolic health in the first place?

Well, because my health fell apart and I was in my 20s, and I was— I'm a classic person whose metabolic health falls apart, you know, drinking Kool-Aid, eating M&Ms, not eating much in the way of green leafy vegetables or any. I didn't even know—

knowing you now, I can't even believe that.

That was the first 25 years of my life. Yeah. And I feel lucky that my health fell apart then, that I didn't get cancer or something horrible, but my health just fell apart. I just wasn't feeling right. I didn't have, I didn't know I didn't have energy though. I never considered myself a non-energetic person, but I was on like 10 cups of black tea every day to get my energy. So I was energized on caffeine. So when I realized caffeine wasn't so good for me and I stopped it, then I realized, oh, I have no energy. And that's when I really had to work on a cellular level. Right, to get my energy back. So I had went through testing, and it was back in the day before the internet, like we're talking 30— it was 38 years ago when I first started having my health— for maybe 40 years ago when I started having my health issues. And so I was in my mid to late 20s, and you know, there wasn't an internet, there was no podcasts or blogs or YouTube, and none of that existed, right? We just talked to each other. We had telephones. We didn't have these, we didn't have these, we had those telephones, remember those, that attached to the wall by a wire. And then it had a cord that came out that attached to the phone by a wire. We had those to communicate. We had black and white TV, probably. I don't even think we had color TV. We didn't have VCRs. We couldn't record our TV shows if we wanted to watch TV. You know, it was the stone ages when I was not doing well. Right. And it was the early, early days of functional medicine. So testing was not predominant, but there were, I was able to find some folks that knew what they were doing. And then I found out about metabolic imbalances, fasting, blood sugar problems. I had a glucose tolerance test and they discovered that I was, you know, totally crazy, crazy imbalances in my insulin and glucose. And so, I made changes and I fasted long before it was popular. Only I kept my mouth shut about it because I thought people, when I did mention it, thought I was anorexic, right? So, I got accused of that. I got books shoved into my suitcase from well-meaning family members to have me read so I would be aware. But I fasted and fasting has so many health benefits that we now know about. And it's just a shame that more people don't do it, but more and more people are doing. I was teaching intermittent fasting back, I don't know, 14 years ago when I started doing my, what I now call the Sweet Spot Solution program, which helps people do a 30-day metabolic reset to get their metabolic health back on track.

Right.

And I've guided thousands of people through that with amazing results. So I fasted long before it was popular to fast. And I talked about metabolic health when people didn't understand what that meant. And I hardly ever talked about it. So I didn't even talk about insulin resistance, which now people have heard of insulin. Back then, they just look at me like, oh, my mother's diabetic. You should talk to her. Like, well, this doesn't— you're probably pre-diabetic or pre-insulin resistant, which is a term I coined because it's before the medical diagnosis of insulin resistance comes about because you have to have certain numbers on certain number of visits. So I used to just talk about, let's help you get rid of your belly fat, brain fog, and exhaustion. And they go, oh, I have that. Oh, my sister has that. My friend has that. And so then I had lots of people joining my program to try to get rid of their belly fat, brain fog, and burnout. Yeah, so generally speaking, it's really about when you ask where does it start, I would say you gotta start with keeping your blood sugar balanced. Yeah, it could be microbiome, and that's a huge piece of it, and that affects the blood sugar. But the thing you have the most control over Every time you pick up your fork, every time you either go for a run or pick up a weight or don't, every time you put your head down on the pillow, every choice you make affects your metabolic health in huge ways.

I've got a question for you. I mean, the staggering statistics you gave at the very beginning, in the opening, I'm still— I have chills, not in a good way, but we're not going the right direction. And there have never been more health coaches, more personal trainers, than in the world right now. Rita-Marie, so if I were to ask you, why isn't it getting better if we've got all this help out there? What's going wrong?

Misinformation. Too much information. And everybody thinks that they are the expert. And I did a podcast episode recently called Who's Right? And the answer is everybody's right and everybody's wrong. Gandhi once said every religion has a piece of the truth. And I believe we get caught up in food religions, in fitness religions and my way. There's training. Fit, don't lift weights, do lift weights, don't do cardio, do do cardio, don't waste your time on the machines at the cardio for 2 hours. What's the poor person supposed to do but, I'm just gonna go to bed. That's the only thing anybody agrees is good for me. There might be somebody who says that too much sleep is bad for you, but I don't know that. Well, how do we get in this mess that they're not being trained and everybody thinks they have the answer. And anybody that thinks they have the answer is somebody to run away from because there is no the answer. There are answers and then there's people, and then there's the people and we have to customize and fit it. You do exactly that. You work with women who are postmenopausal, premenopausal, right? Very different fitness needs than somebody who's 25 and training for a marathon, right? You get that. We have to adapt the fitness, we have to adapt the food, we have to adapt even the attitude things that the ways that people think to where the person is in their lifestyle, where they are in the world. Let me tell you, I'm not going out dressed in a tank top right now to go running because it's too chilly for me. But put me in an 85-degree climate and that's how I'm dressing. In climate right now, I'm gonna put on a sweatshirt. If I lived in Alaska, I wouldn't go out, period. I'd be doing the treadmill as much as I hated indoors.

In your parka.

Yeah, with my parka. Yes. Gloves. We have to adapt it to who the person is, what menstrual time they are, what their hormones are like, what are they doing? Are they training for a marathon or are they just trying to get fit? I had a patient years and years ago. She came to me and she said, "I really wanna do this triathlon. I've never done one before. I wanna train for it and I wanna do it in 2 months." And I took one look at her tests and I said, "Your adrenals are shot. This is not a good thing for you to be doing." But, "Oh no, no, no, no. Just tell me what I do. Tell me what to eat." And I'm like, "I would tell you not to do this. Put it out for 6 months and let's work on getting your stress levels down, your cortisol levels balanced. Let's get your hormones balanced." But we have to just look at people individually. And I think that's where a lot of health coaches are missing the boat. I think there are too many health coach trainings from people who, well-meaning but misguided, have just taken a course, gotten their own health back by applying certain principles and deciding that's the answer. And now they're going to teach that to everybody. Sorry, it doesn't work. And if you skip looking at metabolic health, If you skip looking at insulin and blood glucose and wearing a continuous glucose meter, you're missing the boat, I think, because that's a critical underpinning for almost every disease known to mankind.

And that was a great tip right there. So the glucose monitor, I love them. And let's go back and let's review. So you threw these out, but so everybody understands, what's the criteria to say you're metabolically well, you're not?

Okay, according to the study that said 93% of us are not, you have to have a waist-hip ratio that's 0.85 or less for women, 1 or less for men, right? So, it means you can't have a belly that's bigger than your hips. For women, you need to have that little, that hourglass curve a bit, more the better. You need to have a fasting blood glucose under 100. I think that's like, you're already in trouble. If your fasting blood glucose is 99, you're in big trouble, right? So that's why I said the criteria isn't big.

The bar is low.

The bar is very low. You have to have— they don't even test fasting insulin.

And is this—

go ahead.

Is this bar being low, is this kind of back to we're tucking norms now because they just bumped up the average?

They bumped it up, but they couldn't bump it up high enough because still 93% of us couldn't pass it. It's true.

Okay.

Yeah. Right. Hemoglobin A1c has to be 5.7 or less. 5.7, you're already running around with your average glucose like 118.

Not good.

We think, and anybody that, you know, kind of studies this thinks between 4.8 and 5 is actually ideal. Up to 5.2, you're starting to say, let's work on this. What's the other one? But it was waist-hip fasting glucose. They don't test fasting insulin. A1C, blood pressure, right? Okay. 120 over— it might be 130 over 80 or better.

Okay.

That's borderline hypertensive, but that's okay.

Yeah.

They should be looking at cholesterol, HDL ratio. There's a lot about triglyceride-HDL ratio. They're not looking at that and they should be looking at insulin because a whole lot of people, early insulin is the marker that shows up earliest to say you're on the way to diabetes, you're on the way to metabolic syndrome. It could be 3 decades before it shows up as a disease.

And we're talking diabetes, we're talking metabolic syndrome, and a lot of people are thinking, okay, well, that means if I'm overweight, but could this be an underweight individual as well?

Absolutely can be.

And it's not just fat. It's also, I mean, type 3 diabetes, Alzheimer's, correct?

Yep. Absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely.

So if you're walking around and you're 45 and you're going, where did I put my keys? What, what was your name again? There's something going on. Now, it could be just high levels of cortisol because that will turn that off. But over time, high levels of cortisol are going to lead you into this metabolic imbalance. And I have seen skinny people who weigh like 120 pounds come back with body composition where they're 35% fat. Can you imagine being 120 pounds and 35% fat. Yeah. You'd expect to see that in 165.

Skinny fat. Yeah.

Yeah. It's skinny fat. Exactly. And visceral fat, which you can't really see as much. It's not the fat that hangs over the belt. It's the fat that makes the belly protrude and it feels hard because it's fat around your organs. Most damaging stuff.

Yeah. Super scary. Okay. And you've hinted at these already, but let's review this too. The hormones that are involved because so pertains. So closely to the women who are here already kind of tuned into, okay, hormones are calling the shots here.

Yes.

And I need to get in control of that. So where is this haywire, and how is this related to, like, I just punched my ticket, I'm a woman in perimenopause or beyond? How is that impacting metabolic health? Hey, this Debra Atkinson, and there is one thing you can't do in the gym at your age, and that's get all the protein that you need. You've got to do that in the kitchen. To make it easy for myself, not only to get the protein but the fiber, the fruits and vegetables I want daily, I started drinking a smoothie a day 30 years ago. But when I realized all the junk the sugar and the extras that you don't want, that I don't want, hiding in most protein powders. That's when I finally caved in after years of saying I will never ever ever sell supplements. Stop skipping, skimping, and sabotaging yourself in the morning after workouts by always being prepared. Look, yep, I agree, real food first, but it's just not convenient to carry a turkey sandwich. Sometimes the protein— and don't forget the fiber— they kill cravings and they boost satiety. And you've got to make it easy to do the right thing. You can use code PODCAST for 10% off your first order at Flipping50.com today.

So the big hormone here is the one that gets the least attention is insulin. Although I will say it's getting more and more attention these days. If you do insulin search on YouTube, you're gonna find a lot of people talking about it. But insulin is, is huge. And insulin's a hormone. It's produced by your pancreas, controls your blood sugar levels. People, when they talk about hormones, they're talking what you're talking about with perimenopause and menopause, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, right? But the point is that once we hit menopause, which is why insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome gets worse and a lot of the belly fat gets worse, one of the reasons at menopause is that insulin requires estrogen to be absorbed, right? So, you know, if you can't, you can't get it into the cells because the estrogens are going, yeah, right. And it's, there's no steadiness. There's no steady state. That we can count on that it gets into the cells, which is why a lot of people experience that brain foggy stuff at menopause. Goes back to what you said earlier about type 3 diabetes, which is Alzheimer's, right? That we're not getting the sugar into the brain cells, into the hippocampus and the other memory centers. We're not able to take the short-term memories and stick them into long-term memory because we've got these interferences, right? The other hormone is cortisol. And we live in a stressful world. And years ago, when there really were tigers and lions running around chasing us, it was only for like little minuscule points of time. And the rest of the time we're like, okay, let's just handle things. But now it's like we have those tigers and lions chasing us 24/7. So don't listen to the news. Don't go on social media. Don't talk to your friends. Unless you live in an isolated world, you're gonna hear all the news. You're gonna get frustrated because you're a compassionate person and you don't like to see other people suffering and you're fearful for your own self and your own family. So we live in this perpetual state of cortisol imbalance and cortisol causes the release of stored sugar from the cells. So stored glycogen from the liver, which is our storage form, like we don't, 'cause we can't be necessarily eating all the time, right? So in the periods where we're not, the liver can release some of that and we can continue to survive. Um, it's stored in the muscles as well. And if there's not enough of that around, muscle gets broken down because the protein, the amino acids, can now be converted into sugar. Branched-chain amino acids, you've probably heard, a lot of people like to supplement with them. Gotta be careful supplementing with them too, because if you have plenty of protein and then you start supplementing with these branched-chain amino acids, It's excess amino acids that get converted to sugar, which is not what you want.

And I'm so glad you said that. And I do think that women know enough to be dangerous, you know, like we're hearing, you know, essential amino acids, branched-chain amino acids, and now I'm lifting weights. So do I need these? And I was like, let's talk about your diet first. Let's talk about getting them in real food first and not jumping ahead. So very important. Yeah, yeah.

Because that's the last thing I want to do is turn my thigh muscles into belly fat. And that's what I tell people you do when you get stressed out, when you're eating sugar and whatever else, you're turning your thigh muscles into belly fat. That's got to be the ultimate insult. You're working at the gym and now you're suddenly got a pooch.

Let me come back to this quote that you said. So insulin needs estrogen to be absorbed.

It's one of the components.

Okay. So what happens? So everybody's wondering, right? If they're post-menopause and say they're not doing HRT, what happens to a woman who's 70 and in order to make up for that?

Okay.

Okay. Don't have—

that's where the real problem lies. And we're going to go back to our friend cortisol. In at menopause, the ovaries stop making estrogen, but the adrenals continue to make estrogen, assuming You've not been stressing yourself out for your whole life and now your adrenals are shot. Okay, so if we're managing our stress, we're not overexercising, we're not underexercising, we're sleeping properly, we have some mindfulness moments, whether it's heart math or meditation or whatever is your flavor, then we keep those adrenals to the point where they can work. And a lot of people do not suffer from all the garbage that happens to most women. At menopause because they've supported themselves and they're still producing estrogen and progesterone in smaller amounts, not in enough to make you pregnant, but, or to allow you to get pregnant. But yeah, so that's what's supposed to happen.

Wonderful. Good. Okay. So let's say somebody neglected themselves, right? And they were, you know, under a great deal of stress and were coasting on sugar and/or caffeine in order to get by. And so they aren't in the greatest shape. Can they, in midlife or beyond, can they recover? Some of that?

It depends. It depends on how far along it's gotten. It depends on how dedicated they are. And they really do need to address things from a personalized standpoint. There's not like a magic adrenal restoration supplement, which we all wish there was. There's not a magic supplement for that. So we have to work at it. And there are foods that have phytoestrogen properties to them. We've all heard of them. Scare you away from some of them. Some people don't. Soy has gotten a bad rep. It does have a lot of phytoestrogens in it. It's like, well, has estrogen, therefore it can be carcinogenic. There's no scientific evidence of that, but each person has to be able to identify. And using a test that I use called the Dutch test, you can look at all the metabolites of your hormones. Metabolites being what happens to the hormone after it's processed by the body and the liver is trying to get rid of it. Some of those are carcinogenic, some of them are not. Right. So we can help that along. We can help it with bioidentical hormones. And they're not meant to be long-term though, in my opinion, in my experience, you put somebody on a bioidentical hormone to get them through the misery as you're working on the lifestyle. We can't just take a hormone or a peptide or a drug or whatever to get relief without working on the underlying causes because it's just going to keep getting worse.

Okay. So for everybody here, let's talk about how exercise fits in to becoming metabolically healthy, given we've also talked about— so it's not just, you know, checking a box, you know, for a quota. If this is uniquely individual and it's got to be customized, you know, talk about the gamut, because you've seen so many clients and you've worked with your practitioners who've worked with so many clients. So you've supervised a lot indirectly and directly. What have you seen work? Just give us a range. Because I think to everybody listening who might assume it's the more is better, it could be very different.

It's— yeah, and it's not necessarily more is better, and it's looking at where you're at. So when you think about exercise, first of all, healthy muscles, toned, fit muscles are more insulin sensitive than unfit muscles. Therefore, we're naturally going to keep the blood sugars in the right range. We're naturally going not produce too much insulin because we don't need to. You just eat something and the muscles go, "Hey, thank you very much. We're gonna use that for our next lift or our next walk," or whatever it is, walking the dog even. So, we need to find that balance of exercise. Everybody needs to be moving. For some people, it's a 15-20 minute walk a few times a week. Because if they overdo that, then they're gonna be throwing their adrenals into a tizzy because Exercise is a stressor. We know that. We know that marathon runners or people who are consistently pounding their bodies can get really burned out, right? So it's a matter of finding what works well for you and testing to see if things go okay, right? So I like to look at it as if you go out and exercise and you can't get up off the couch for 2 or 3 days after that and try it again. That's a problem.

I just know probably You know, for the people in the back, could you just say this again? Because I know you're here, and we've got women even within our membership who have often relayed this, but ladies, somewhere along the lines, you got the message that you're supposed to be good, you're supposed to be responsible, you're supposed to show up, you're supposed to do it no matter how you feel. And so you do and you're feeling worse because you exercise instead of better.

Okay, so we should feel better after exercise. Maybe shortly thereafter you're like, and but then by the time you have some water, you replenish your food, you should feel like, wow, that was so good. I want to go do it again.

Yeah.

The day after I did a marathon, I only did it once. I'm not, you know, I'm not into abusing my body to that extent over and over and over again. But I did it once and it was a couple of months before I turned 50. And I got the warnings, right? The next day you're gonna feel like you got run over by a truck, et cetera. But I didn't push myself beyond my limits at the marathon. I wasn't out to get a prize or get my age group or whatever. I wouldn't have come close 'cause the person in my age group was like way, way faster than me. But the point was the next day I felt fine. My legs hurt when I was going up and down the stairs. But other than that, I gave myself 2 days to not run or walk again, to just give my body a rest. But it didn't feel like I had to. All right. The reason was I trained well. I trained for 6 months, but I never pushed myself to the point of pain during my training. And maybe, you know, some of you hardcore athletes out there are going, wimp, wimp. I'm not a wimp, but I know my tolerance level and I knew that I could do, and I gradually got faster. I think maybe what saved me was during the race, my shoes— I had gotten new shoes, couldn't wear the new shoes because they gave me blisters. They came too close. I didn't break them in. So I went back to the old shoes, which had no cushioning at all. And so I was in pain the entire time. After about 6 miles, I was in so much pain I wanted to quit. It was a half marathon-marathon combo, so you got to a point where Marathoners went this way, and I'm like, I'm going that way. I'm just going to call my husband, tell him to meet me there. I'm like, nope, you're going to finish. But I went slowly. I didn't try to push and really cry. Every time I tried to push past him, I'm like, you can go a little faster. The guy in the wheelchair just passed you.

Come on.

And that's a little exaggeration, but I just basically, every time I tried it, I was like, oh, I can't do it. And then I slowed down and I did it. And at the end, My son was crazy. He's there waiting for me and watching me. He must have been, I don't know, he must have been 10 years old. And I go through and I go, okay, I can do it now, right? There's only another half mile to go. And I just pushed it and I pushed past the pain. And he was like, Mommy, Mommy, I was so proud of you. You ran past all those people. You were so fast at the end. Those are all the people that passed me along the way, right?

Our little secret.

Yeah. Listening to your body is so important. And if you are feeling under the weather, you have a cold and your body's saying, no, stay in. And it's not just your body saying, no, stay in and watch TV and eat bonbons. It's your body saying, no, no, no, you need rest. Listen to it. That's what's really important. And find the mode of exercise that works well for you.

Let me ask you this, because I think for a certain percentage, probably of our population, that has never really bonded with exercise. If they said listen to your body all the time, they might never get started. But what's your rule of thumb? I like to say, you know, 10-minute rule. And if at 10 minutes you still feel bad, okay, you're done.

Yeah, you're done.

But because sometimes you have to have enough going to let the neurotransmitters get released so you can have a little something.

And I'd say move your body in some way every single day. So if today it's just to walk down to the end of the block and back again, and the thing is, if you say, I'm just going to walk to the end of the block and back, if I feel good at the end of the block, I'll keep going, then that gets you past that inertia and it allows you to actually feel into it and go, you know what, I actually feel pretty good right now, right? And you do it. And I've done that plenty of times where I'll go, oh, I didn't get enough sleep last night, I'm just gonna skip. And I'm like, no, I'm just gonna lift a couple of light weights a couple of times, and then I do that and I go, this is like kids play. Throw them down and pick up the heavy stuff, and then I'm into doing my weightlifting. So play into how your body feels as a result, not how it feels before, but how it feels during and after as well.

Yeah, so true. I love to suggest, you know, if you feel like taking a nap afterward— I mean, no matter what, even if you feel that was a hard workout you shouldn't necessarily feel like taking a nap. You should still feel a little energized, like, oof, that was, you know. But 2 hours after, you should be fully recovered and be like, I'm so glad I did that. I feel so much better, more alert the rest of the day.

And I find it too. I'm feeling tired, like, like I'm hungry and I haven't exercised yet. I feel, well, I'll just go run because then I won't be hungry anymore because my body will release some stored sugars and it'll get— and I won't be hungry anymore. And that almost always works. If I feel frustrated and angry or something bad's happening, I go for a run. And then when I get back, I go, what was that I was upset about? So exercise is ultimate therapy, but you can overdo it. Like the girl who wanted to do the half marathon and she was in complete adrenal shutdown. You know, I had to advise her, no, you can't do this. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think that's such a great something to remember for those of you who really love exercise. And you are inclined to do more. I mean, I get you. I, you know, my story has been told too many times. But, you know, for those of us, you know, we have to hold ourselves back sometimes and remember it's, you know, we can go hard sometimes. We can't go hard all the time. And we've got to listen to what are the results, do some measuring, look at the numbers that Marie is giving you so that, you know, you know, not just scale-wise and what your clothes are saying, but also under the hood, you know those numbers before they are a runaway train.

Right, right. And that's what I would say. Your doctor's probably testing your fasting glucose every time you go in, but what he's not telling you— he or she's not telling you— is that that's the last marker to shift before you're in full-blown diabetes. So if they're not testing A1C, which more and more of them are doing these days, and giving you the example of the closer it is down to 5, the healthier you are. But if what they're probably not testing is insulin, it's $15 test. Worst case is you go to the lab yourself. There's plenty of walk-in labs. You get it tested. New York's one exception. Can't do it there. But so you have to beg and plead. But other than that, you get that tested. And if your insulin is above 5 fasting, which means there's no food in your system for 12 hours, you're getting into trouble and it's time to do something about it.

So good, Rita Marie. You're going to have some people come over there and follow you. I know you are. Where do they need to go to do this? And you mentioned something, and I know you are the, the queen of fasting, but doing it in a way that's tolerable. So tell us a little bit about that.

Yes, yes, yes. So my website, my main website is drritamarie.com. I created this. I started fasting 40 years ago before it was popular. And I did a 28-day water fast. I've done multiple 10 to 15-day water fasts. I've done dozens, maybe even hundreds of 5-day water fasts. And I do intermittent fasting, you know, time-restricted eating pretty much every, almost every day. Let me be 5, 6 days a week where I fast for like 16 hours. So I know fasting and I know the therapeutic effects and I've seen people literally reverse their diabetes inside of less than a week. And somebody full-blown diabetes who did a 28-day water fast and he went from being on insulin, metformin, and one other diabetic medication plus blood sugar, blood pressure medication to completely off and 60 pounds lighter in the side of that month or 50 pounds lighter inside of a month. It's miraculous. But a lot of people can't even make it to to 12 hours, let alone 24, 36, 48, or the therapeutic ranges.

It's so true.

So a few years back, I don't know, maybe 5 or 6 years ago by now, a researcher named Valter Longo, who studied the effects of fasting, said people can't do it. So he created, he did a whole bunch of research with lots of like thousands of people, something called the fasting mimicking diet. And it's a specific range of macro and micronutrients to get you into what your body thinks you're in a fasting mode. So your blood sugars go down, your insulin levels go down, your ketones go up. You go into a state called autophagy where your body gobbles up all the old junky cells. And so he created that and he wrote a book on it, but then he created a product that people could use, which is fine because it's convenient for people. But personally, it wasn't up to my standards of what I like to put in my body. And it doesn't taste all that great. So I decided to create my own fasting mimicking diet called Fasting While Feasting. And the reason it's called that is you get to eat 2 or 3 meals a day, whatever your choice is, every day from this set of recipes based on his guidelines. And they're delicious, they're filling, and you get the same effects as fasting. I mean, literally, I've taken hundreds of people through this by now and you get the same effects as fasting, but you still get to eat. And people say, do I really have to eat all those foods at that meal? Because that's a lot. And I'll go, well, you can't eat less than that, but you can eat that amount because we're trying to mimic the effect of fasting. And so I call it Fasting While Feasting and it's available anytime. You can go to the website fastingwhilefeasting.com and you'd sign up for it and you'll get, you know, all the videos and the recipe guide and everything you need to do Fasting While Feasting. And we even have a Facebook group that you can go and talk to other people who have done it or are doing it. You can find buddies in the Facebook group and do it together with people. And the original research recommended you do it once a month for 5 days. And you know, what you eat in between and do in between does make a difference.

But here's what I found. And this is, you know, I have also tried the fasting mimicking diet and didn't love it. Actually, my blood sugar spiked. We talked a little bit about that in the green room. But what I did notice is from doing it, then I was much more aware of the fact that when I was eating, but just out of habit as opposed to out of hunger, it just kind of tuned up my awareness of, yeah, I don't really need that. Similar to you saying, I'm going to go out for a run because maybe you didn't really need something and you were just you know, you needed the blood sugar stabilization, or the stress was kicking in. So many things that— is it really hunger, or just stress, or thirst, or fatigue, right?

Exactly. So it's a fun program, and I've led, you know, people through it live as a group where I watched them to see what they were getting. And literally, somebody on day 3, she got on and said, my fasting blood glucose was 65 this morning. So my first question was, are you on medication? Are you diabetic? And she said, yes, I'm on medication. I said, hang up right now and call your doctor because you've got to get that medication adjusted. I don't want you to go into, you know, too low hypoglycemia attack. And she goes, I already did. The doctor took me off metformin and halved my insulin.

Oh my gosh.

3 days of having been diabetic. How long have you been diabetic? 15 years.

Oh my gosh.

Nobody ever told her anything that I taught her.

Oh my gosh.

That's how it works.

So you heard it here, everybody, right? Time to be your own advocate.

Absolutely.

So we're going to put the link to that fastingwhilefeasting.com. That'll be in the show notes. And Rita Marie has a robust presence on social media, so I will lead— link to all of those in the show notes as well. Rita Marie, thank you so much for being here today.

Thank you for having me. I've enjoyed it very much.

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