Today I welcome best-selling author, speaker, and internationally recognized authority in nutrition and women's health, Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo. Dr. Ritamarie brings her 25 years of experience to us to explain “pre insulin resistance” and her specific process for using glucose and ketone testing to detect it. She will also detail why she favors a whole foods, plant centered keto diet, intermittent fasting and fasting as strategies to reverse blood sugar imbalances at all stages.
More about Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo:
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo is passionately committed to transforming exhausted high achievers all over the globe into high energy people who love their lives and live to their full potential.
She founded the Institute of Nutritional Endocrinology so that she could be instrumental in transforming our current broken disease-management system into a true health care system where each and every practitioner is skilled at finding the root cause of health challenges.
Dr. Ritamarie specializes in using the wisdom of nature married with modern scientific research restore balance to hormones with a special emphasis on thyroid, adrenal, and insulin imbalances. Her practitioner training programs empower health and nutrition professionals, including health coaches, physicians, nutritionists, nurses and others to use functional assessments and natural therapeutics to unravel the mystery of their clients’ complex health challenges, so they become known as go-to practitioners for true healing and lasting results.
Dr. Ritamarie is a licensed Doctor of Chiropractic with Certification in Acupuncture and is a Diplomat of the American Clinical Nutrition Board. She is a Certified Clinical Nutritionist with a Master’s degree in Human Nutrition, and has completed a 500-hour Herbal Medicine Certification Program.
Dr. Ritamarie has trained certified hundreds of practitioners in the art of using palate-pleasing, whole fresh food as medicine. As a certified HeartMath ® provider, Dr. Ritamarie is passionate about using stress transformation techniques to guide clients to reduce the negative impact of stress on their health.
Show notes:
Fastonic Cellular Molecular Hydrogen – support all forms of fasting with molecular H2!
Dr. Pompa's Beyond Fasting book – now released!
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Transcript:
Dr. Pompa:
Do you have hormone resistance, insulin resistance? By the time you may take a test or your doctor gives you a test, you’ve probably been in that state for many, many years, and you’ve already caused damage to your brain, nerves, and your organs of your body. In this episode, you’re going to learn a very simple test you can do at home that will tell you if this is a problem. Here’s the best part: we actually give the solution. This is a massive problem, and yet, it’s going undiagnosed. This episode, get your notebook ready because there’s a lot of take-home that you need to do, and you need to spread the word on this. Watch this episode.
Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith, and today we welcome Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo, who is here to discuss pre-insulin resistance, and she’ll share her specific process for using glucose and ketone testing to detect it. She will also explain why she favors a whole-foods, plant-centered keto diet, intermittent fasting, and fasting as strategies to reverse blood sugar imbalances at all stages. This is going to be a really exciting episode, so let’s get started and welcome Dr. Ritamarie and, of course, Dr. Pompa. Welcome, both of you.
Dr. Ritamarie:
Hello. Hi. Thank you for having me here.
Dr. Pompa:
You’re a familiar face in our seminar, my seminar, that’s for sure. We welcome you finally on CellTV. You have a great message. Look, I don’t want this show just to be about diabetes because it goes into weight loss resistance, hormone dysregulation, and all of these things. However, there are so many people that wouldn’t necessarily be diagnosed with diabetes, but yet, they have insulin problems.
One of the things I want to tackle right up front is how do we test? You have some unique ways like I do to test for this problem. Do I have a hormone resistance, an insulin problem? Conventional testing, it’s not accurate. There’s so many myths around it and misnomers, so let’s start here. I mean, how do I know this is a problem? How do I know if I have this insulin resistance or hormone resistance problem?
Dr. Ritamarie:
That’s a great question. The problem is the conventional testing not only doesn’t catch it soon enough. It’s dangerous. People are running around with insulin problems for literally decades before it gets picked up by conventional testing which just says, if you’re fasting glucose goes above 120, 125, then you have diabetes. What about the decades that preceded that when the levels were up and down and the insulin levels were high and the sugar was high? Fasting glucose, as you know and teach, is the last thing to change, right? We’ve got to detect this much sooner.
I love to work with postprandial glucose testing, postprandial meaning after meals. Not just two hours after meals like a diabetic is told. Hey, check your sugar before you eat. As long as it’s not above 140 or 160 two hours later, you’re good. No, you’re not. No, you’re not. That’s absolutely wrong. When we can detect these imbalances long before diagnosis, then what happens is all those side effects, so to speak, of diabetes, peripheral neuropathies, retinopathies, nephropathies, damage to blood vessels. All of those have been happening for, literally, decades before the diagnosis. Then suddenly somebody has blindness that occurs, and they’ve got neuropathies. They have a heart attack, which is what happened to some family members of mine, and they didn’t get a second chance.
Dr. Pompa:
I mean, this problem is so widespread because it’s a cause of inflammation so meaning that chronic pain—people have all these issues that they never go, oh, it’s this insulin resistance problem, hormone resistance problem that I have that’s really driving the problem. Detecting it early is a really important factor. I teach testing your own glucose and ketones to determine your eating windows and intermittent fasting windows and doing that in the morning on an empty stomach. To your point, testing after meals is the way to see how am I responding to my food?
Dr. Ritamarie:
What foods should I not eat any, and what foods should I eat more of?
Dr. Pompa:
By the way, it’s one of the ways I test for coffee. Does your coffee work in your intermittent fasting window? What does your glucose do before and just 30 minutes after? If it’s spiking up, then that could break you out of your fast. Looking at glucose after meals, let’s talk about it. Let’s give them a strategy.
Let me back up one second before we give them these strategies. We’re also going to talk about strategies of how to utilize diet and fasting strategies, which is—I think we both would agree you can’t reverse these conditions and get your body to heal without understanding how they work these things in and around it. We’re going to get into that in a minute too. How did you get here? What’s your story?
Dr. Ritamarie:
I got into the whole health field just through having problems of my own like you and many others of us, right? You’re just falling apart. No Western medicine approach does anything for it, and you start digging and exploring. I’ve always been a—having a scientific brain. I come from the computer field. I’ve always been a mathematician and computer scientist, and so I know how to solve problems. It’s like, okay, I need to learn the hardware and the software of this body, so then I can figure out why all this is going wrong. Long story short, went through a couple of years of trial and error back in the 80s, by the way, before the internet and before what we have now, right?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I was there too.
Dr. Ritamarie:
I figured it out. It shouldn’t have to be this hard for other people. I quit my job, which was in the computer field making good money. I said now I’m going back to school, and I went back to school and got my degrees in chiropractic and acupuncture, herbal medicine and nutrition. Then came out and started to do this. As far as the insulin resistance work, though, it happened over time. As I’m looking at people and going I think they—I don’t know why. Based on knowing the hardware and software, I think it’s something related to insulin.
I started testing people early on and started having them buy a glucose meter. I remember buying my first glucose meter. I don’t even remember when it was, but when I went back to it after a while, I’m like, oh, the strips aren’t even made for this thing anymore. I would get them to test, and then I thought about it. I thought about the physiology. I thought about the biochemistry of it, and I thought, well, we have them test. Then two hours later it should be back to baseline at two hours later if you’re good, if you’re really healthy.
What do we do instead? Studies show that the peak, the highest level that the glucose will get is usually going to happen somewhere between a half an hour and an hour, so we want to catch that peak. I started teaching people to take their glucose every 15 minutes until they started to see it go back down, right? That’s how I came up with the process of teaching people how to figure out what foods are actually good for you? Not what good foods the glycemic index or Dr. Pompa says or somebody else says. No, what foods work for you, and how do we eliminate those foods? Also, tie it in with stress and sleep and all the other, exercise. How do you keep your glucose in the exact right range for you?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s why the test for coffee is—does my coffee work in the fasting window? I said test your glucose before, 30 minutes after, and if on average it’s rising every time, you’re going to have to change something. Maybe it’s what you’re putting in coffee, right? If it’s fats, try black. If it’s black, try fats. It could be a food intolerance. It could be your body doesn’t like caffeine. It could be your body—whatever it is, the idea is change something. I love the idea of, well, what’s going on after my typical lunch, or dinner, or breakfast? Test and then you can have an idea of what foods to work with and, to your point, maybe have an early diagnosis. If it’s taking three hours for your blood sugar to come down, you have a problem.
What do we want to start with? Do you want to start with how to look at food problems, or do you want to start with how do we know if maybe I have an insulin problem or glucose problem?
Dr. Ritamarie:
Yeah, so I want to know. Do they have it? There are tests that people can do early on that are not done except if you’re already a diabetic when it’s too late, like hemoglobin A1c. There’s some issues with that. Sometimes in athletes and others, it’s not that accurate. There’s fructosamine and there’s insulin. Those are tests that you can have your doctor run if they’re willing to do it, or you can go to direct access lab and have it run as an early screen. Why not at 18, or 20, or whenever they’re going to first go in and get their full-blown lab testing? Let’s throw in insulin and hemoglobin A1c just to see if there’s some indications that there’s a problem.
I had this guy come in to see me. His fasting glucose had been in the 90s, which you and I know that’s not in the ideal range, but in terms of medicine, that’s considered ideal range. They never said anything, and he said, “I’m starting to get a numbness and tingling in my feet.” He goes, “Can that—I’ve heard about diabetic neuropathy. Can that be that?” He goes, “They said, no, get away. You don’t have—you’re not in that range,” so he just went on. Okay, so he heard about this test called hemoglobin A1c, and they were doing this little screening at work. He said, “Well, what the heck? I’m going to get this test done.” Guess what his hemoglobin A1c was when he got it first tested? This is a nondiabetic who’s told he’s fine, 11.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s a massive event. Just so people know, the—she’s talking about a HgbA1c. Some people just call it A1c. We’re looking at glucose levels on average over three months as a way to spot your glucose over three months, but you did say there’s some inaccuracies with it, which there is. Share a little bit about that. It’s an accurate test because we’re looking at three months, but there are also times where it’s not so accurate. Share that.
Dr. Ritamarie:
Yeah, so if somebody is super athletic, it turns out their red blood cells, which is—we’re measuring the amount of sugar that’s coating your red blood cells. Their red blood cells last longer. They’re healthier, so it’s really not a three month average. The number is out of whack. It may look like it’s higher than it really is, right?
Dr. Pompa:
What is the normal range that you like? My ranges are different than the lab ranges.
Dr. Ritamarie:
Your range is probably similar to mine. I like it between 4.8 and 5.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s what I like, yeah.
Dr. Ritamarie:
Yeah, and the lab range is they say if you go above 5.6 they consider you in the pre-diabetic stage, insulin resistant stage. If it’s in the 7s, 6.5 or something like that, or higher, you’re considered diabetic. To me, it’s like, as you’re creeping up—if you’re 5 and then you’re 5.2 and then you’re 5.3, 5.3 is still normal. Not normal anymore. You’re creeping up. Why don’t we catch it when your body starts to go out of balance and [00:11:35]?
Dr. Pompa:
Okay, so then let’s talk about now testing your own, and by the way, we’ll put the link of how you get a keto-glucose meter. We use Keto-Mojo. It does glucose and ketones, and you’re going to talk about both. Okay, so now, okay, you recommended testing every 15 minutes after 30 minutes, right?
Dr. Ritamarie:
I usually have them do it—at the beginning, I’ll just have them do it every 15. There are some people who have an early peak, so I just look at that. After you have established…
Dr. Pompa:
All right, so 15 minutes up to—go ahead.
Dr. Ritamarie:
After you established that their peak is at 35 minutes, 40 minutes, an hour, 45, whatever we’ve established, then I tell them stop pricking your finger so often. We have an idea.
Dr. Pompa:
What’s the normal peak, and what peak are we looking for? Then when should the glucose be back to normal?
Dr. Ritamarie:
Yeah, that’s a great question. I think it should be back to normal at around two hours. It might be slightly longer. It might be slightly shorter, but somewhere around that two hour range it should be back down to baseline within five points. What’s normal? What’s considered normal? In diabetics, they’re told, as long your 2-hour glucose is at 140 or below, you’re good. It never should go to 140. It never should go to 120. I believe it should be 110 or lower at that peak if you’re eating properly to keep your body in balance, and if you’re on a keto diet, it’s not going to go above 110 unless you’re already diabetic and you’re in the process of reversing it. Then it starts to come down, but it shouldn’t go above 110.
The studies I’ve looked at, when it goes above 120, even temporarily—say it’s only up there for 20 minutes. Everything above 120 starts to damage those peripheral nerves, starts to damage the retina. There’s some studies that show above 100 starts to damage the islet cells, which are the cells inside the pancreas that make insulin, so you’re damaging your body whenever you get those high spikes of blood glucose.
Dr. Pompa:
Explain to people why glucose is so damaging and insulin for the brain, right? Your brain needs glucose, but it also has to release the insulin to get the glucose in the cell. We know that there’s something called insulin-degrading enzyme whose job is to get rid of the insulin because it can cause problems. Explain why insulin can be damaging to the brain, why glucose can be damaging for people.
Dr. Ritamarie:
First of all, we just mentioned earlier that measure. Hemoglobin A1c is how sugar coated your red blood cells are. Think about if you ever made taffy when you were a kid. You heat up the sugar or the syrup, and it gets spiky when that—it’s just eek when it’s at the temperature, so you get these spiky—so imagine your red blood cells are covered with this sugar that gets spiky. What’s that going to do to the linings of your vessels? That’s not very good. The glucose, the high levels of glucose damage the nerves, the nerve endings going—especially the small nerves going into your feet, in your retinas, in your kidneys. It damages the cells and the nephrons, nephropathy. We don’t want the high levels of glucose to be anywhere because it has the potential to damage cells in the body.
The other thing with insulin—oh, I’ve got a laundry list of all kinds of things at high levels of insulin. I’m sure you’ve taught people this many, many a time. It affects other hormones. It affects sex hormone-binding globulin. Makes that go up. Makes your effective utilizable testosterone and estrogen go down. It’s bound onto this thing. It affects TSH. It causes TSH to go up.
It affects receptors. Not just insulin receptors and creating insulin resistance, but all the hormones can have a resistance. Usually, you develop a resistance to a hormone when the level of that hormone is too high. Insulin affects thyroid receptors. Insulin affects progesterone receptors. Insulin affects all the other hormones, the receptors for the hormones. Now, you’ve got all these hormones floating around in your system, and the doctor thinks you’re fine. They do a blood test, and you’re hormone levels are fine, and meanwhile, they can’t get—you can’t get the hormones into your cells.
It causes the excretion of magnesium, excess magnesium excretion through the kidney. Magnesium is critical for getting the glucose across the cell walls with the insulin. It causes increased retention of sodium, which could raise your blood pressure. It causes damage to the lining of your blood vessels. It causes them to get stiff. You know that your blood vessels need to be fluid. You’re going to go run. You got a flood of blood coming through. They have to be elastic. They get stiffened, which causes high blood pressure, which can cause damage, stroke, heart attack. There’s so many more, but those are just a few things that are caused by high levels of insulin.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I always say, if you want to age faster than anyone, just keep spiking your glucose and insulin levels, right? I mean, look, periodically, the body deals with it. When this is starting to go on day in, day out, you’re aging prematurely, just to wrap everything you said up in a nutshell, driving inflammation of the cell, affecting your hormones, affecting the way your brain works or your nerves. Every aspect of all the pain syndromes and all the syndromes everyone has and are chasing it with medications and even supplements when the problem is you’re running too high glucose and insulin for too long, too much. We’ll talk about some other solutions in a minute, but let’s not leave on the table of how to use post-glucose as looking at food intolerances or food that you may not be agreeing with. Talk about that a little bit.
Dr. Ritamarie:
Yeah, so foods that are high glycemic, flour, sugar, some of the whole grains even, those can cause the glucose to go up. However, if you eat a food that is causing your body to have an alarm state like, oh, this food causes inflammation, that inflammation is going to cause the glucose to go up. It causes cortisol to be produced. It causes the [00:17:50] of stored sugar, right?
Dr. Pompa:
Glucose follows cortisol.
Dr. Ritamarie:
You can actually get an idea. People will say, wow, I just ate this meal, and I had broccoli. Everything else seemed to be what I normally would eat, but it went up. I’m like, well, broccoli’s not a common thing to be allergic too, but maybe you are or whatever it might be that they had that wasn’t really a high glycemic food but caused their sugar to go up. It’s a stress on the body.
Dr. Pompa:
Maybe don’t panic if you see this high level. It could be a food intolerance of some sort. I’m going to be honest with you. I don’t run food intolerance testing anymore just because—I’m a scientist in my heart, meaning let’s run it three days later. I go wait a minute. We just got different results, a month later really different results, and then people stop eating these foods. They become intolerant to the new ones they’re eating. I don’t even bother with it. I think this is a better way. At least we can—it’s cheap. We can immediately see what we’re actually reacting to.
Dr. Ritamarie:
Right, it’s like the pulse test. Dr. Coca wrote a book ages ago about the pulse test. That the pulse will go up as a stress response to eating a food that you’re intolerant to, but your blood sugar can too. There’s no absolute. It’s not going to be like, well, my blood sugar doesn’t go up. I must be tolerant to it. It might not be. You have to take a lot of other things into account. It’s a stressful situation on the body when you eat a food that causes an inflammatory response of the immune system.
Dr. Pompa:
All right, so let’s talk about something you and I love and agree on is this fasting for this solution. Why does fasting work? I guess maybe we should be a little bit—what type of fasting am I talking about? I’m a believer in longer fasts and shorter fast, daily fasts. All of which are great solutions but talk about that.
Dr. Ritamarie:
There’s all kinds of fasting, right? There’s even fasting with food. I just ran a challenge for people on Facebook.
Dr. Pompa:
Partial fasting.
Dr. Ritamarie:
Fasting mimicking. During the fasting state, we have the glucose naturally drops. Now, in some people, the glucose will go up first because it triggers a response. They’re dumping glycogen stores and all that. It’s a temporary thing. Usually, especially after time, if they’re doing intermittent fasting, which would be say it’s 14 hours, 16 hours, 18 hours a day without eating and then a short window, I like to call that time restricted eating rather than intermittent fasting. Then there’s every other day fasting where you go—you eat dinner tonight, and you don’t eat dinner again until the next day. It’s a 24-hour fast, and there’s a little bit longer fast, 36-hour fast or a 5-day fast. I love five-day fasts.
You were in a group where you do five-day fasting every few months. I try to do a five-day fast every month, six weeks or so just because it’s just a nice reset. I have a lot of genetics that predispose me to insulin resistance and diabetes. I figured it’s a good way for me to just always reset, and ever since I started doing that regularly, my fasting glucose is lower. My response, my postprandial glucose is lower, my ketones. I’m perpetually in a state of mild ketosis, even if I’m not trying. As I go out and eat a banana, that’s going to change it, but most of the time, my ketones are elevated.
When you fast, you get a decrease in insulin. You get an increase in growth hormone, which helps you to burn fat [00:21:29], right? Your ketones naturally start to go up. You reach that state of autophagy, and I love the ratio. I first heard that from you, and then Keto-Mojo now has a calculator on their site, which is really cool. Now, when I do my fasts, within—sometimes by the end of the first day but definitely by the end of the second day I’m in [00:21:51] autophagy. It’s so good. It’s so healing.
My first introduction to fasting was through one of those allergy relief books where five days off of food, and then you test your foods. I botched that really badly when I added the foods back because I had no idea what I was doing back in the day. My next introduction to fasting was doing the long fast, a 28-day fast. I did a 28-day water fast, and it completely cured everything. Everything that was wrong with me, the candida overgrowths, stomach problems, the sinus problems, the headaches, the brain fog, all went away after doing that 28-day water fast. It’s a phenomenal healing tool that makes metabolic shifts in the body. That helps your body to detox, to cleanse better, and to keep everything nice and steady in terms of your glucose and your ketones.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I mean, I always say, look, I mean, fasting’s a stress on the body like exercise, and if you adapt, you get stronger. When you fast, you put a stress particularly on the mitochondria and the cell where you make energy. Bad cells don’t adapt. Good cells get stronger, simple as that. Through autophagy, the body gets rid of these cells that are causing all this bad stuff that we’re talking about, all the mischief, the damaged cells, the ones that aren’t using glucose and insulin right. It’s that stinking smart. It goes after those cells, so after enough fasting, you just get rid of more and more bad cells. You create better and better ones. It’s that simple.
Dr. Ritamarie:
It’s very simple. Even with the fasting with food, I first heard about it from Dr. Longo, as you know, and I looked at it. Most of my people like real food. They weren’t crazy about doing the kit, so I created a meal plan that followed the macros and the calories and all that. I was like I don’t know if this is going to work real well. Let’s see. We had a couple of people who were diabetic who dropped their fasting glucose by 200 points. A couple of others had dropped them by 100 points. People got into ketones of 4.5 to 5.5 by the fifth day, and they were eating. They were enjoying it. They were eating meals and posting the pictures of their meals and loving it.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, I find that even diabetics who have just—or people who have trouble not eating, and it’s a great place to start. I call it partial fasting. I think I learned it, oh gosh, probably ten years ago. It was from a Frenchman, Albert Mosseri. He used partial fasting on the backside of water fast, and then he started using it on the front side for really challenged, sick people that just couldn’t handle too much autophagy. Partial fast was a better way to start for them, just reducing calories depending on body size. He always lined it up on body weight. That’s where I got that is from him. The bigger people can get away with a little higher calories. Smaller people less. Then cutting the protein, again, based on your body weight.
I discuss that in my book as well. You’re right; it’s a great alternative for people that, hey, I could start there. Let me just start with reducing what I’m taking in my body for five days. It’s famine, right? It works. You still get autophagy.
Dr. Ritamarie:
Yeah, it’s great, and the other thing about it is that even just starting with an intermittent fasting or a time restricted eating. Most people, even just going to 12 hours between meals, you just think, oh, that’s normal, right? It should be normal, but it’s not for the average American who has their last dish of ice cream and their cookies right before they go to bed. Then first get up, they’re eating their toast and then drinking their coffee. There’s an 8-hour window for some people and just extending that to 12 hours, which shouldn’t be hard, and then once you do, it’s so much easier for people than I was expecting it to be. It’s easy for me because I’m fasting adapted, and I’ve been doing it for a long time. I can make friends with hunger. It’s okay. No big deal. For a lot of people—so many people have come and said, oh, my God, I went 16 hours between meals, and I’m fine. I’m going to go 24 hours.
One of my clients just wrote me a note, and she says I’m on day three of my five-day fast. I’m like, wow! She’d never gone more than 24 before. I thought it was really fascinating.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, I mean, it’s the key to living longer. When we look at studies of just eating less, how many people watching and listening to this have tried to push food away? Eat half your meal. Push it away. Eventually, you fail. You either give in to it, or your body thinks it’s starving eventually. Then it just starts holding on to everything, even if you’re eating 800 calories, a salad. Short-term famines work. Five days of eating less and then not does work. Our bodies are genetically set up for that, but long-term caloric restriction doesn’t. Intermittent fasting, which eating less often, is really a strategy to eat less, and therefore, live longer healthy.
Dr. Ritamarie:
Absolutely, I like what you talk about with the flexibility of feast two days, fast two days. We keep our bodies guessing. We don’t go into that metabolic slowdown, yeah, over the long haul. I had somebody who had been 600 calories a day, and she was not losing any weight. She had a lot of weight to lose. I said, “Okay, I want you to add 300 calories worth of coconut to you diet, coconut oil, whatever it is.” She started losing weight. She’s like, “No, I can’t. I can’t.” Within three days, she started losing weight again.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, of course, the body went, oh, okay, I’m not starving. I’ll start burning fat.
Dr. Ritamarie:
It’s starving. I’ll increase. She had more energy.
Dr. Pompa:
Exactly, that’s awesome. No, it works. Unstoppable Health, what’s your book about?
Dr. Ritamarie:
My book is actually a novel. It’s a novel about—it’s set as my—a composite of some of my clients and patients I’ve worked with over the years, and it’s set so that people actually read it. You know how you pick up a book and you go this is a great book, and after chapter one, it goes on the shelf with all the other great books. I wanted to keep people going from chapter to chapter. I follow her journey of shifting her diet, shifting her mindset, and going through this process, and most people say that it’s the first health book they read cover to cover. It was pretty basic. It’s not elaborate. We’re not going into fasting theories and autophagy and all that, but it’s a really great book for people.
Dr. Pompa:
Where can the get the book?
Dr. Ritamarie:
Amazon, amazon.com, yeah, as an eBook on Kindle or as a hard cover book.
Dr. Pompa:
Remember the days where we used to actually go to Borders and actually physically pick up a book?
Dr. Ritamarie:
Oh, remember when we used to do that, and you just sit there and just read?
Dr. Pompa:
Half the time I wouldn’t even buy them. They encouraged hanging out, but I would just quickly brief books and get the general idea and move on. Oh, gosh, these days…
Dr. Ritamarie:
I know. I think the sales are probably better for people now that they have to actually buy it and have [00:28:47].
Dr. Pompa:
That’s what I mean, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it’s funny. What’s a day of Dr. Ritamarie look like? What time is your first meal? What do you do? Do you drink coffee, tea? Do you not? I mean, give us your day.
Dr. Ritamarie:
Yeah, so my typical day is I get up in the morning, and I exercise and meditate, and then I start working. I usually eat somewhere—my first meal is usually between noon and 2, sometimes not until 4. Usually my first meal is coconut yogurt and a green smoothie. Sometimes I’ll have a chia porridge with that. I’ll take the coconut yogurt and put it over chia seed and add a few nuts and seeds. Sometimes I have a quick meal of a jar of sauerkraut with an avocado on top of it, so I try to get a probiotic in there.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s basically what I had today. I had an avocado. It’s called double cream cottage cheese, and it’s all grass fed but, anyway, had that with this fresh pressed olive oil and then with the good, fermented vegetables on top.
Dr. Ritamarie:
Fermented vegetables, to me, the ferments are just so much what—future microbiome makes a health body and all, so that’s what I typically do for my first meal. I drink water up until then. Occasionally, I’ll have some herbal tea, but generally, I just do water until my first meal. I don’t drink coffee. I never have liked coffee, always thought it was the most foul-tasting stuff on the planet, so I never developed a taste for it. If I drink a tea on the colder days, which aren’t that many because I live in Austin, but I’ll be having a mug of herbal tea, chamomile tea, tulsi tea, something like that to get me through. Usually, I don’t put anything in it, so I don’t have to worry about it breaking my fast. Then dinner is usually some sort of big salad with nuts and seeds, and I make these amazing dressings that I put on. Maybe a stir fry in the winter. In the summer, I don’t even want to cook food. I like simple approach.
Yeah, over the weekend, I taught a couple of classes, so now I have all these dehydrated pizza crusts that I made that were made out of nuts and seeds and vegetables and had a pizza last night so made a cashew-based cheese for the top of it, put some tomatoes and some pesto. Voila! I had a pizza. Occasionally, I do that kind of stuff too. I do have a sweet tooth. If I’m going to do a dessert, I’ll take some raw cacao and almond butter or coconut butter, and I’ll mix that together. Maybe a little bit of MCT oil and some chocolate stevia. Voila! It’s a little pudding so quick and easy stuff like that.
Dr. Pompa:
Man, see, that’s creativity there. I wish I had so much creativity. I’m such a simple eater half the time just because I’m always moving.
Dr. Ritamarie:
Yeah, that’s usually me.
Dr. Pompa:
Meat and vegetables, grass fed only. For dinner, like you, in the afternoon, it’s something super quick like at the time of the day.
Dr. Ritamarie:
Super quick and easy.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and some days I eat one meal. Some days, I eat a lot more. It’s feast-famine for me.
Dr. Ritamarie:
Yeah, some days I eat one meal. It starts at 2, and it ends at 6.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, yeah, actually, that’s a very European way of eating and a very tribal way of eating so just one big social meal. Believe me; I do that plenty of days too. It’s like I feel like—oh, yeah, well, I start eating at 4, and I just eat from 4 to 7. Then I’m done. I start my eating, so it’s like I think I’m eating two meals sometimes. It’s like, no, I just ate.
Also, people have to understand this is—we’re talking about eating two meals, one meal. People go, well, I only eat that, but they’re putting things in their mouth constantly. They just don’t realize it because they didn’t sit down and actually eat, or it’s the kombucha. It’s this. It’s that. I mean, those little things still will spike your glucose and insulin.
Dr. Ritamarie:
They will. The thing about that, the grazing concept that was popular for a while and more and more people are getting wise that that’s not right— I mean, just if you think about the biochemistry in insulin. Insulin’s a fat storage hormone, and if you’re eating every couple of hours, the insulin is constantly elevated. Do you want to be in fat storage mode most of the day? No. You separate, and depending on how many meals you’re going to eat—if you’re going to eat three, make them four to six hours apart. If you’re going to eat two, make them four to six hours a part. If you have two in that four to six hours apart, you’ve shrunk your eating window, so you have more of a fasting window. Then fasting is where all healing happens. Fasting-fed, fed is where building happens, and fasting is where…
Dr. Pompa:
We need both.
Dr. Ritamarie:
Yeah, we need both, right.
Dr. Pompa:
We need both. I mean, even when I say, hey, fast for five days, pick another five days sometime and feast, literally. I mean, do high protein, or do healthy carbs. I mean, do something to stimulate the other pathway. Both are healing: anabolic, catabolic. You need both.
Dr. Ritamarie:
Yeah, absolutely, I just did that while I was in Hawaii. I couldn’t resist. They had all these—they were making creams and cheeses out of cultured macadamia nuts. I mean, is that tropical or decadent? I was eating my celery sticks with tropical decadents on top of it. Yeah, I did that for more than five days.
Dr. Pompa:
Gosh, yeah, see, that’s easy to do. I love it because I don’t get bored. If I was just doing keto day in, day out, it’s like I get bored with it myself. People have to understand. Don’t beat yourself up. Change it up for a period of time. Keep it healthy, but change it up. It helps the mental status too.
Dr. Ritamarie:
It helps it a lot. My attitude about making these pizzas and puddings and things like that out of—it’s still keto food. I’m having a pizza crust. It’s still a keto pizza crust because it’s made with vegetables and some nuts and seeds. It’s still keto pizza crust. You’re eating this food and going, huh? That’s why people, when they did my challenge, they were like I’m eating all this feast food, and I’m losing weight and balancing my body. I think it’s important to keep it interesting. If you’re just fine with opening the fridge and eating, that’s fine. They don’t like that after a while. They’re just reaching for the peanut butter and jelly.
Dr. Pompa:
Bringing all this information we just talked about into a modern day, very common problem is, look, I’m doing maybe what—even what we said, or I’m doing this diet or that diet. My weight loss just stopped. It’s plateaued. Talk to us why. There’s a few reasons why weight loss would plateau, and then let’s talk about what we can do about it.
Dr. Ritamarie:
Yeah, so one reason is sustained low-calorie eating for a long period of time. Your metabolism goes down. You have to vary that, right? You have to just do that for a while and then go up. That’s why the intermittent fasting works so well. It’s because you’re having this amazing window where your body’s burning fat. Even if you’re eating the same—the number of calories, the maintenance number of calories, you’re still going to get into that mode where your body’s doing housekeeping, so I think that the sustained low-calorie eating is one of the causes.
Hormonal imbalance is another. If you really are having too much insulin secretion or insulin resistance—although, if you’re doing long-term keto type of approach, you generally—you reverse the insulin resistance relatively quickly within a month or two. Other hormones can be out of balance. Your thyroid can get out of balance. Your thyroid can downregulate. Yeah, there’s a lot of things. Microbiome imbalance is another [00:36:42].
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely. One of the things I’ll add to it too in this conversation even as a causative factor of some of the things you said is toxins just in general.
Dr. Ritamarie:
Oh, yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
Toxins go in, and they come into those membranes of the cells. They just drive inflammation, block the hormone receptors, create insulin resistance. I remember, gosh, years ago. It was a study that I used to show. I haven’t shown it in a while, but 35% of insulin resistance was caused by the toxicity. Then I read another study. It was like how much of it’s autoimmune. It was almost 50%. I’m like, okay, well, if you add this to this, you’re at 85% of toxin induced insulin resistance or hormone resistance. One of the reasons I’ve seen too is, people, they’re losing fat cells. Then what’s stored in the fat cells?
Dr. Ritamarie:
The toxins, right.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, so now you start pushing toxins out. Of course, it creates insulin resistance, and it shuts down weight loss. It affects the thyroid, shuts down weight loss. That’s another big causative [00:37:51].
Dr. Ritamarie:
When you’re releasing the toxins from the cells, now you have it in circulation. Oh, I got to store this back. You release it, and then it gets stored back. You release it, and it’s stored back. You hit this plateau. I had somebody who was real—would get to lose the weight for a while. Then after four or five days, she started to have really bad neurologic symptoms from releasing, and her weight loss would plateau. We had to play around with that in other ways.
Dr. Pompa:
You know this about my book is we had the fasting trio created, which is CytoDetox, which is—it’s a binder that works in and around your cells. BIND, that just stays in the gut and pulls that toxic complex out so you don’t auto-intoxicate, and then there was another one. It’s called Fastonic. It’s molecular hydrogen. People get this rise up of hydroxy free radicals. Those three together we learned—so when people fasted, they would release toxins and feel like garbage, and everything would be bad. We learned by just throwing these into the system to control that toxin release they’d be able to fast with greater success. Anyway, it might be a help to someone listening.
Dr. Ritamarie:
Absolutely, yeah, absolutely, awesome.
Dr. Pompa:
This is a question for you. If you had one tool in your shed that you would say, okay, this is it; you can’t use anything else in your clinic, what would it be? You’re only allowed to use one. I know it’s not the perfect world.
Dr. Ritamarie:
Only one, you mean in terms of…
Dr. Pompa:
What would you do to help someone? Everyone that walks in your door, you can only use one thing. What would it be? I’m asking the question. I’m thinking to myself I don’t know. I can’t wait to hear what you say.
Dr. Ritamarie:
If I had to answer that—there’s so many things and everybody’s unique and everybody’s different, but the thing that I see best is fasting, fasting in a plant-based keto diet.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I think fasting would be mine. People would think, wow, not cellular detox. Here’s the problem. I mean, cellular detox, it’s store products, purchasing products. Maybe some people can’t afford it. It still requires a lot of—fasting is the oldest therapy known to man, right? You’re relying only on the innate intelligence, right? You could do it on a deserted island. You can do it with no money, so I would agree with that.
What do you think of the number one cause, okay, one thing—again, we know there’s many but one thing that’s causing most of the disease today. What do you think that thing is in today’s day?
Dr. Ritamarie:
Sympathetic overload.
Dr. Pompa:
What was it?
Dr. Ritamarie:
Sympathetic overload. People are in stress mode. They go into this sympathetic nervous system. That kills everything. You could be eating a phenomenal diet, and you can be exercising. If you’re in this stress, stress, stress mode and the sympathetic nervous system’s in control and you don’t let the parasympathetic get control, the vagus nerve and all those things that heal, you can’t heal. I’ve seen it.
Dr. Pompa:
Wow! What are some of the other things that drive this sympathetic state, meaning we all—sympathetic is like flight or fight, save your life. Parasympathetic is your daily maintenance. What are some of the things locking us into that save your life?
Dr. Ritamarie:
Look around. Look at the news. The news is playing on getting people up in arms against something, and people tend to have stressful jobs. They’re trying to make ends meet, right? Their kids are doing whatever they’re doing, and there are certain people who are wired—just naturally, when you look at genetics, I’m actually wired for sympathetic dominance, and I’ve had to really work at using strategies and techniques like HeartMath and meditation to get myself down. There are certain genetic patterns where you’re going to be more likely to be what I call hypervigilant, right? You’re just like everything causes—you’re a perfectionist. You got to be perfect, and you get upset about everything, the worry or stuff in the world. I mean, a lot of it is driven by—well, there’s the stress of the electromagnetics. There’s just stress of the toxins in the environment, so all of those things are driving the sympathetic…
Dr. Pompa:
The body doesn’t know the difference, physical, chemical, emotional. It puts you in that same adaptive stress that you’re talking about, right? What are some of your favorite solutions to that? If someone’s going, okay, well, that’s me, what are your favorite solutions?
Dr. Ritamarie:
I really love a process from the Institute of HeartMath, and it’s a process of combining breath with appreciation. You have to stop yourself but before you start to apply it when you’re in a stressful situation. I just have people just stop 30 seconds to 2 minutes multiple times throughout the day. Before each meal is perfect. In order to digest your food, you have to be in parasympathetic. You cannot digest food when you’re in sympathetic, which is the fight-flight thing. How many people are sitting at their desk scarfing down food while they’re watching the news, or stewing at their boss, or trying to get a report done? Your body is not going to recognize that food.
Dr. Pompa:
I am guilty of that.
Dr. Ritamarie:
You are? I am to an extent.
Dr. Pompa:
I am. I’m such a goer. I’m not a stressed out person. I’m not but I’m that. That puts me in sympathetic. I’m just drive, drive, drive, and it’s just simply not good. I mean, sitting down with your family, sitting down and discussing and being grateful, if I just did that, man, I—darn it. I’m writing it down right now as one of my goals. I mean, I just have to be better there. You just struck…
Dr. Ritamarie:
Yeah, I agree with you that that’s something that’s the hardest thing to do, but I’ve seen it where people just do that for—I said all I want you to do is take some deep breaths. Chew your food thoroughly. Stop in between bites, and just reflect on how appreciative you are to have this food. It makes all the difference in the world.
Dr. Pompa:
You mentioned breathing. I think people watching this—I’ve heard it, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s so in vogue right now, breathing, breathing, meditating, breathing, breathing. You know what? The person, I’m speaking for the person watching. I don’t do it with any lasting time, meaning I do it for three days, and I stop. I do it for three days. I don’t notice anything. I stop.
I mean, how have you put that, honestly, into your life? I’m speaking for the person who goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. I know. I just really haven’t put in my life.
Dr. Ritamarie:
With the HeartMath, I studied it. I learned it. I saw the changes in people, and I was still guilty of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I’ve just started to—actually, really, when my son who is now 21 but was 4, he was a tough kid. He was a challenging, challenge everything kid, and so I learned this process. I’m like I should be doing my breathing now, and I just want to strangle him. I got to the point where I go, okay, I’m going to try this.
I remember one day this made such a difference in my life. He was having a tantrum. What? I wanted him to clean his room, or bring something down, or come to dinner. I’m like, okay, I’m going to go in there, and he’s going to throw stuff at me. This is going to be a challenge. I went in there. Before I went in there, I took some breaths. I went into appreciation.
I said this is a kid who’s not going to get walked over in life. He’s going to grow up to be a fine adult who is strong and powerful, and I just thought about all the things I appreciated about him. I opened the door, and I said, “Can you please come downstairs and pick up all the Legos that are on the floor in the living room? Then we’re going to have dinner.” He looked at me. He could feel that presence, and he said, “Okay, Mom.” I was shocked. I was shocked.
Just having an experience like that made me—it wasn’t like I had it down right away. The thing about doing this HeartMath appreciation thing, it’s not like sitting and meditating for a half an hour twice a day. You can do it in a matter of seconds. Every time stressful comes at me…
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, take us through the process.
Dr. Ritamarie:
I basically will focus—first I like to focus on my heart. That’s the place where—it’s part of the parasympathetic too. Focus on my heart. I’ll take a few long, slow deep breaths. My shoulders drop, and that’s the normal part. Then I think about some place, some person, some situation where I felt joyful that I can appreciate right now, so for me, I go to the beach. Okay, I’m on the beach in Maui, hearing the sound of the waves. I’m seeing the waves on the shore. I’m smelling the sea air. I’m getting into the water, and I so appreciate that I’ve had that experience.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s awesome.
Dr. Ritamarie:
It doesn’t take much, and you can feel the shift in your body.
Dr. Pompa:
I think the helpful hint there that I just took away from that was you can do this at any time. You can do it before a meal. You can do it before you have to confront your child or anyone, your husband, wife, whatever it is, a situation, a meeting, after a stressful moment. You can just do it anytime. I think that you hit it. Maybe you knew you hit it right away, but you hit it. Again, people are so busy, da, da, da, and they think they have to put this structured time of meditation into their day and breathing. It happens for a period. Then it doesn’t because life takes over. If this becomes a habit to do in the moments, I think it’s doable for people.
Dr. Ritamarie:
It is. The more you practice it at those times—you just say I’m just going to do this before I get out of bed. I’m going to think about all the things I appreciate. You’re going to attract more things to appreciate that day. You’re going to notice more things, same thing right before sleep. It helps to get you to sleep better but then before each meal, and you just get into this habit.
Then when those stressful situations come at you—like I’m on a webinar, and I’ve got all this technology. There’s 1500 people waiting, and all of a sudden, the technology fails. Instead of going into, oh, my God, what am I going to do, which is going to turn off my prefrontal cortex where I could actually think and solve the problem, put me into my lizard brain and I’m useless, I just take some breaths . Okay, how can I solve this problem? I go into it. People always comment how do you stay so calm? How do you stay so calm? It’s not my nature to be calm. It is practice, and it is rehearsal.
It started out I couldn’t meditate. I tried. I took every class going, and I tried. I could not sit still long enough. I could not sit still long enough. This I can do in a matter of a few breaths, and I can feel the shift in my body. Now I do meditate because I got this really cool device called the Muse, and it’s a game for me now. I’m at 894 days straight of meditation, and I don’t want to break that.
Dr. Pompa:
Where do you get it? What is it?
Dr. Ritamarie:
You can get it on Amazon. You can get it on Muse. Just do a Google search, M-U-S-E. You wear it. It measures your brainwaves, and it reads into a little app. Yeah, it’s a little bit of Bluetooth, but it’s not much. You’re only wearing it for ten minutes or whatever number of minutes you do. It gives you this feedback, and it’s a biofeedback. It’s giving you this nice, little waves or the right [00:49:22], whatever you do, and then when you start to go wander off and start to solve your problems of the world and go off thinking, it goes SHH, SHH, SHH. You go, oh, yeah. Then when you’re calm, it goes—the birds go tweet-tweet, tweet-tweet, tweet-tweet.
Dr. Pompa:
I like that. I like that.
Dr. Ritamarie:
You get feedback, and it’s helped me. It’s a game. You know the competitive me.
Dr. Pompa:
If my wife were doing it, all you’d hear is tweeting, tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet. What do you have, a bird game over there? For fun, I’m going to make her do it. Okay, this is the last question. I mean, from pain to purpose is I think all of our story, but looking back at your life—I mean, I can look at my life and say wow. If it wasn’t for that tragedy or what we would look at in the moment as this horrific thing, I wouldn’t be me. I wouldn’t be able to serve the way I serve, do what I do. What was your big one in your life that you would say, man, if it wasn’t for that horrible thing that I thought was horrible at the time, I wouldn’t be you?
Dr. Ritamarie:
Can I give two?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you can do two.
Dr. Ritamarie:
The first one was losing my health in my 20s. As valedictorian and always super smart to be sitting across from you and being able to just—I couldn’t even focus on your words. The brain fog was so bad and then all the physical symptoms. That was what got me out of my career in computers and into the career in health. Then, about a month before my—two months before my graduation, my mother died suddenly of a heart attack, 56 years old. She died suddenly of a heart attack. I just went into the why? Why? Why? Why? Why?
That’s what got me really looking. How do I motivate and inspire people? How do I use this to really drive me to do what I need to do? Two years later, the same thing happened to my dad, and then about ten years later, one of my sisters got lymphoma and died within three months. At that point, it was like this has got to stop. They didn’t get the right care. They didn’t get the right testing. My sister was just given radiation and chemo and left to die, and nobody talked to them about their health habits. Nobody talked to them about their food. Nobody talked to them.
I did, but I’m just family member. They weren’t listening to me. Those are the things. Death of close family members was what really drove me to do why I’m so passionate right now.
Dr. Pompa:
It played a role in my life as well. I always wonder why. Gosh, what drives me to find out how to age slow and slow—I just don’t want to suffer like my parents did. I watched the golden years of their life be crushed by disease. My dad, when I was always trying to motivate him to make changes, his theory was, well, you’re going to die of something anyway, so I might as well enjoy myself, right? I’ll be honest with you. That was his whole mantra, right?
Dr. Ritamarie:
My mother said the same thing.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, right, but his mantra changed the last ten years of his life to—and this is his words. Son of a bitch, if I’d of known I was going to live so damn long, I’d of taken better care of myself. I swear, that’s…
Dr. Ritamarie:
I’m going to listen to you, son.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s a true story, right? He regretted it, right? It’s like he just thought he was just going to die. He just thought it was like I’m going to enjoy myself and die. He didn’t anticipate living so long unhealthy miserable, and he watched my mother too. He had to change my mother’s diapers, for goodness sakes.
Dr. Ritamarie:
Oh, that’s so sad.
Dr. Pompa:
That motivates me.
Dr. Ritamarie:
It motivates.
Dr. Pompa:
I’m not choosing that. I’m not. That’s why I just dig and dig and dig. My goal is to do the exact opposite. I’m going to be in my 90s, maybe over 100, doing everything with my grandkids and loving it and doing what I do. That’s it.
Dr. Ritamarie:
Exactly, that’s a great motivating force, right? Unfortunately, for both my parents, they did have the—dead suddenly. They just died. They didn’t have any warning.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s a motivating factor too, right? I mean, it’s like who wants that on a scale…
Dr. Ritamarie:
Who wants that, right? I don’t want to leave my kids, right? I was 56. My son was going off to college. I would’ve not been able to be there for him.
Dr. Pompa:
My dad thought he was going to live to 90 and just that that would happen. It didn’t happen. Who wants that?
Dr. Ritamarie:
No, we don’t want either one of those, either one. I just want to live a long and healthy life and inspire and help people until 200, and then maybe drop off then.
Dr. Pompa:
Ritamarie, thank you for coming on CellTV. Unstoppable Health sounds like an amazing book. It really does. You live an amazing life, so you’re in fact unstoppable. Thanks for all your tips. This is great. People need to do this testing. We need to know. If we can see that there’s a problem, then we can make a change.
Dr. Ritamarie:
Yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Pompa:
We even gave you some of those, so thanks for being on.
Dr. Ritamarie:
Thank you for having me. Thank you for all the amazing work that you’re doing in the world.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, appreciate it.
Ashley:
That’s it for this week. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode, which was brought to you by Fastonic Molecular Hydrogen. Please check it out at getfastonic.com. We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10 a.m. Eastern. We truly appreciate your support. You can always find us at cellularhealing.tv, and please remember to spread the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, or sharing the show with anyone who may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening.
