One to Remember

November 11th, 2011 Volume 1, Issue 17

Today’s a special day…11/11/11.

Each year on 11/11 we honor the soldiers who have both risked and lost their lives defending our freedom. We pay particular attention to the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month as it signaled an end to the first world war.

With it’s unique date, I’m not sure exactly what today means, but it must mean something very special. It’s the only time in your life that all the numbers in all the date fields are the same. Last year we had 10/10/10 but somehow that’s not quite as intriguing as 111111.

So while the tradition of today is to remember an ending, perhaps today we all need to do something for the first time in celebration of the day of ones.


A Celebration of Beginnings

Maybe this can be the first day of your new exercise program or healthy diet. Perhaps it’s the first day of your commitment to be fully present and there for your significant relationships, or your first kiss.

Think of all the babies born today. They will carry 11/11/11 throughout their lives.

As for me, I think I’ll make it the first day of my commitment to getting a good night’s sleep on a regular basis.

Last week I started a gratitude journal because I feel strongly about the importance of an attitude of gratitude.

I decided to make November Thanksgiving month instead of just having one Thanksgiving Day. It’s amazing how powerful it is to publicly declare your appreciations every day. Perhaps that’s why today, being a day of remembrance, has such impact when we publicly join together to express our gratitude to our soldiers and veterans.

The gratitude connection has allowed me to still be joyful at the end of a week that included a rib injury that hurts when I breathe deeply (getting better), a 4 hour outage on my web server and having to pull an all-nighter to get it working again, an IRS audit, and an almost all-nighter searching for missing receipts and documentation.

It’s interesting. Those are big stresses; yet, as I wrote and tried to recall them, I found it hard to focus on the negative when there are so many more positive things happening around me.

That’s the power of expressing daily gratitude. It’s energizing, improves your digestion, normalizes blood pressure, improves insulin control of blood sugar, calms your adrenals, and even has the ability to decrease pain and inflammation.

Share Your Appreciation

Go ahead and give it a try.

Post your appreciations on the blog. Share your thoughts and any positive benefits you notice from putting them out into the world.

And along the same lines, be sure to check out the recording of this week’s blog talk radio show. I interviewed my dear friend and colleague, D.r Linda Berry and she shared a couple of practices she uses to transform stress. Dr. Linda has had so many stresses in her life, including physical traumas, becoming paralyzed in the height of her dance career 30 years ago, and struggling to get back on her feet in spite of being told she’d never walk again.

She shared a couple of her special techniques that have helped her cope with physical and emotional pain and come out a stronger person for it.

Find Your Way Back to Good Health: click HERE.

Enjoy 11/11/11

It’s the only day in your lifetime that all the numerals in the date will be the same.

Love, health, joy and much appreciation,

By Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo

Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes when you get hungry?

What gives the signal that you’re full?

Have you ever eaten beyond full and felt uncomfortable?

With Thanksgiving coming up in just a couple of weeks followed by the winter holidays – Christmas, Hanukkah and New Year’s – holidays focused around food, you may have thoughts of getting out your “eatin’ pants” to avoid the painful dig and pinch of a waistline that often becomes too tight this time of year.

You’ll need those pants, unless you learn to make friends with leptin and ghrelin and the powerful effects you can have on fat burning when you understand how to make them work for you.


The Fat Burning Benefits of Ghrelin

Neither ghrelin nor leptin has a gland the way that estrogen, thyroid, cortisol, and insulin do. Ghrelin is secreted by your stomach and leptin by your fat cells.

Your stomach secretes ghrelin when it’s empty, signaling the hypothalamus to turn on your appetite. As a society, we’ve come to fear hunger and avoid it like the plague. As soon as we feel hungry, we look for ways to satisfy our desire for food.

But what if you could make friends with hunger and actually learn to enjoy the feeling?

There are benefits to prolonging eating and staying hungry for a while. You see, ghrelin is a potent stimulator of growth hormone, and growth hormone has profound effect on fat burning and building lean muscle. It is often considered an anti-aging hormone.

So the next time you get hungry, remember that the longer you hold out (within reason) the more you rev up your fat-burning furnace.

The Appetite Attacking Benefits of Leptin

Did you know it is now believed that eating many small meals actually contributes to increased fat rather than decreased?

By delaying eating and spacing your meals 5 – 6 hours apart, you profoundly affect leptin levels. Leptin is the hormone your fat cells secrete after a meal to tell your hypothalamus to turn off your appetite.

Leptin levels are optimized when you space your meals 5 – 6 hours apart, avoid snacking, stop eating within 3 hours of bedtime, avoid high carb breakfasts and instead include protein at breakfast, and avoid overeating.

“Whoa!” You might be thinking, “That sounds hard AND it flies in the face of what I’ve been taught. I thought it wasn’t a good idea to let myself get too hungry because that’s a sure-fire trigger for overeating.”

Yes, indeed. Getting too hungry can cause you to eat everything in sight. That’s why I recommend a gradual approach, so you can retrain your conscious brain as well as your hormones.

Eating small meals may keep you from getting hungry and overeating at your next meal, but generally the results for weight loss are short lived. When you eat all day, you keep your insulin and leptin levels elevated all day. Insulin puts you into fat storing mode, which is the exact opposite of what you want.

Elevated leptin does indeed turn off your appetite, which is a good thing, but chronically elevated leptin results in leptin resistance, wherein your hypothalamus doesn’t hear the cry of leptin any more and it shifts your metabolism into starvation mode. You’re constantly hungry and your metabolism is so low that every morsel you eat gets protectively stored away around your waist like an energy insurance policy.

In my B4 Be Gone program, I share my Snack Attack Strategy for dealing with the desire for food that creeps up on you in between meals as you move towards spacing your meals.

Part of the trick is to eat enough at each meal to hold you for 5 hours. Many of my B4 Be Gone members are finding that they can’t even finish the meals I’ve laid out for them because they get too full, so they’re not hungry again for many hours.

When retraining yourself, it’s important to start with choosing snacks that are nutrient dense and calorie and carbohydrate sparse to prevent insulin spikes.

Things like green smoothies and juices, vegetable sticks with delicious omega-3 fat-rich dips, steamed or raw vegetables, and chia seed drinks or porridges are the most helpful here.

Ghrelin and Leptin Optimization Strategy for the Holidays

To keep the extra weight from creeping in this holiday season, follow these guidelines:

1. Start your day with a low to moderate carbohydrate meal that includes ample protein. You can include choices that will stabilize your glucose, insulin, and leptin levels and keep you satisfied for hours if you include more:
   
   • green smoothies made with low-glycemic fruits like berries and green apples
   • green juices
   • shakes made with powdered greens and veggie protein powder for when you’re in a hurry
   • chia-rich meals like shakes or porridge

   
   

2. Do a 30-second burst of high intensity exercise every couple of hours to increase fat burning.
   
   
3. Be prepared. Make a variety of delicious vegetable dishes and dips to satisfy the nibbles when everyone else is eating the low-nutrient, high-calorie hors d’oeuvres and hoarding away the extra pounds. If you’re looking for ideas, click here.
   
   
4. Learn delicious alternatives for traditional dishes. There are all sorts of great book resources for Thanksgiving and winter holiday ideas. You can also find videos and recipe guides.
   
   
5. Satisfy your sweet tooth healthfully. While sweet desserts, even the healthy, gluten-free raw kind are not the best for daily consumption when you have a few extra pounds, they are welcome and delicious alternatives to traditional apple pie, pumpkin pie, cookies and truffles. All you need are some mouth-watering recipes and some guidance on how to recreate some sweet treats.
   
   
6. Pace yourself. Eat slowly, give thanks for every bite and truly enjoy. Then stop when you get the signal you’ve had enough.
   
   
7. Wait to be really hungry before you eat your next meal. Remember, ghrelin, the appetite stimulating hormone, is your friend. You burn more fat when you’re hungry than when you’re full. Spacing your meals allows for the normal ebb and flow of leptin so you can retrain your brain to turn off your appetite when you’ve had enough.

Above all, learn to eat with an attitude of gratitude, fully conscious of the effects the food has in your body. You are what you eat, digest, and absorb. Keep that in mind as you eat.

Do I want this to become a part of my cell structure? What you put in and on your body becomes your body, so choose wisely.

Once a month, you can join us LIVE in Austin, Texas for a local raw food potluck where you can:

• Meet like-minded people and make new friends.
• Learn new and exciting recipes.
• Gather valuable health and nutrition information.
• Feel supported on your health quest.

Click HERE to learn more about the event and find out all the details on what to bring and what to expect.

You can attend our Raw Food University Classes live and in person and get to sample the delicious raw food recipes or learn to make these dishes from the comfort of your own home.

Either way, you get a recipe guide e-book and fully indexed online video class you can watch over and over.

• December 10th, 2011 – Party and Potluck Nibbles that Nourish

Check back here soon for more details to be announced!

Presented by Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo, Karen Osborne, and Pamela Weems

Whether you’re entertaining for the holidays or looking for that perfect dish to take to a party or potluck, you’ll find a recipe in this class that will raise eyebrows and delight taste buds!

Not only will these dishes meet all your expectations when it comes to elegance and taste, they also come with a fat-pant-busting guarantee that you won’t pack on the extra holiday pounds when you stick to these dairy-free, sugar-free, and gluten-free whole food options.

Register for this class and learn how to make nourishing and nutritious holiday dishes that will make your next party platter a hit including:

• healthy hor d’oeuvres
• fresh finger foods
• appetite-friendly appetizers
• to-die-for desserts that boost longevity

Remember, all recipes are made with 100% gluten free, dairy free whole fresh foods – no sugar, no processed oils, no grains, and no cooking!

You never have to worry about missing a class! All of our delicious, health-boosting Raw Food University classes are recorded. You can access videos and recipes in PDF format for any of our past classes including:

• Holiday Feasts
• Sweets for the Holidays
• Eating for Hormone Balance
• One Dish Meals

You’ll find a complete list of past classes available HERE.

Dr. Ritamarie’s Vibrant Health Solutions Radio Show: combining experience, education, and practical advice to make healthful eating fun again! Click here to learn more.

Future Show Schedule:

• Thursday, November 17th – Feast Your Way to Health
• Thursday, November 24th – (No show due to American Thanksgiving)
  

You’ll find a wealth of free natural health resources when you visit our radio shows archive!  Look for the most recent shows in the sidebar of the Vibrant Health Solutions Radio Show homepage.

Here are the latest shows we’ve added:

Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo, MS, DC, CCN, DACBN, has been an integrative health care practitioner for over two decades, empowering her patients and students to overcome health challenges and lead a joyful and healthy life.

By Ritamarie Loscalzo

This gourmet Savory Stuffing will be as beautiful to behold for your eyes as it will be to taste with your taste buds.

It’s just one of the delicious recipes you’ll find in my Thanksgiving Feast recipe collection. In addition to my stuffing, my collection has all the ideas you need to create a healthy alternative Thanksgiving dinner with recipes like:

• Apricot Pecan Yams
• Herbed Mashed “Potatoes” with Mushroom Gravy
• Spicy Cranberry Relish
  
• Pumpkin Pie
• and many more!

Savory Stuffing

Ingredients:

• 4 cups nuts and seeds, soaked and drained (suggestion: 1 cup almonds, 1 cup walnuts, 1/2 cup pumpkin seeds, 1/2 cup sunflower seeds, 1 cup hazelnuts)
• 1/2 – 1 cup yellow onions
• 6 stalks celery
• 4 carrots
• 6 scallions
• 2 cups mushrooms
• 2 apples
• 1 cup pecans, preferably soaked, rinsed and dehydrated
• 1 cup parsley
• 1/2 lemon, juice of
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon poultry seasoning, or 1/2 tablespoon each of rosemary, thyme, sage, and marjoram
• additional seasonings to taste: fresh or dried herbs: rosemary, thyme, sage, marjoram (start with 1 teaspoon dried or 1 – 2 tablespoons fresh and adjust to preference)
• black pepper to taste (optional)
• fresh pressed garlic, 1 – 2 cloves or to taste (optional)

Directions:

1. Place soaked nuts and seeds in food processor with apples, onions, carrots, and mushrooms and process with “S” blade until finely chopped and somewhat sticky. It should resemble traditional bread stuffing after the bread has been moistened.
2. Remove from processor and set aside in a large bowl.
3. Pulse chop parsley, celery, and scallions in food processor with “S” blade until finely minced. Add to nut vegetable mixture.
4. Pulse chop pecans in food processor to about 1/8th-inch pieces.
5. Add pecans, herbs, salt and lemon juice to bowl.
6. Mix well with wooden spoon or your hands. The mixture should hold together.
7. Add seasonings to taste: rosemary, thyme, sage, parsley, salt, pepper, and garlic.
8. Arrange on a serving platter and serve as is, or put in dehydrator overnight to warm through and create a crusty exterior with a moist interior. You’ll need to remove some of the dehydrator trays to fit the platter of stuffing.
9. If you prefer a crispier stuffing, dehydrate the stuffing as a 1-inch thick patty and crumble in a bowl before serving.

Personal Note: The seasonings in this recipe are adaptable to your particular tastes and traditions. You may use the basic recipe for texture and adjust the seasonings and flavorings according to your favorite family recipe.

Do you have a great raw food recipe you’d like to share? Submit your recipe at: https://drritamarie.com/wp-clone/newslettercontributions/

“Would you like to learn more simple strategies to achieving vibrant energy, a strong lean body and an extraordinary life? Check out my web site, www.DrRitamarie.com, for free articles, free resources and to sign up for my free report 7 Simple Steps to Energizing Your Life… in as little as 30 Days.

Internationally recognized speaker, author and mentor, Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo is the “Woman’s Fatigue Expert and Vibrant Health Mentor.”