Ep.55: Vibrant Living with Dr. Ritamarie

Robyn:                    Hey everyone, and welcome back to Your High Vibration Life. I’m your host, Robyn Openshaw, and I’m excited today to introduce you to a long time friend of mine. We call her Dr. Ritamarie. Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo is the founder of the Institute of Nutritional Endocrinology. We have been collaborating, talking, sending people to each other on the internet for literally ten years now, which is … What would you say, Ritamarie? Is that, ten years on the internet is like 80 dog years?

Rita:                          Yeah, I probably … It’s like a lifetime really, of the internet because we were both in the … When the internet was in the infancy stages for health programs, anyway.

Robyn:                    Yeah, everything has changed so much. She is a doctor of chiropractic, but she also has a lot of extra training. She has certification in acupuncture, she is a certified clinical nutritionist, she has a master’s degree in human nutrition and computer science, and she has like 500 hours in herbal medicine. I find Ritamarie to be not only one of the most sophisticated and educated natural practitioners out there, but she also totally walks the talk. We’re gonna be talking today about her nutritional approach, we’re gonna be talking about blood sugar, which is a big passion of hers. We originally connected over our love … Back in the day, there was a lot of excitement around discovering what eating mostly raw foods or all raw foods could do for you, so she’s a living foods chef. Sometimes we call the raw, plant based diet a living foods diet. She’s a chef, she’s an instructor, a coach. She’s certified hundreds of other professionals in teaching people to make whole fresh foods delicious. Not just healthy, but delicious.

I also really love about her … Because we talk on this podcast a lot about the Heart Math Institute, and she’ a certified Heart Math provider which has everything to do with living at high vibrations. She helps her clients and her followers understand the negative impact of stress on their health. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband and her two sons. This is a fun little fact here, I originally started sending people to drritamarie.com, and that’s D-R Ritamarie, so there’s two R’s in a row. I was sending people there because, back when greensmoothiegirl.com was brand new, we were a site for young moms trying to feed their children healthy. Lots of people ten years ago figuring out that the standard American diet wasn’t serving us, and I had lots of people saying, “What do you do?” They knew my story of how I weaned my first child onto formula, and then cow’s milk like all the other moms were doing, and I almost killed my son. I mean, he was really in and out of hospitals and emergency rooms.

So I found, and then sent countless people over the years to, drritamarie.com/shop/books, and she has a nut milk formula in there, a nut milk recipe book. I taught people to go check out her homemade, raw, super high nutrition formula for babies, because the infant formulas in the store are … They’re just terrible. They’re really … It’s just processed food, wouldn’t you say, Ritamarie?

Rita:                          Oh, it’s totally awful. I wouldn’t feed it to the neighborhood cat who was starving, probably. That’s how bad I think they are. They hurt more than they help.

Robyn:                    Yeah, and I made your formula on my path. I had my third child, couldn’t breastfeed. I got really, really underweight as a result of being really stressed, and this is how I found your work. She got extremely underweight and didn’t do well with any milk or formula. I finally used donor breast milk from a Denver milk bank.

Rita:                          That’s best.

Robyn:                    Yeah, but it was not cheap. You have to get a … I don’t even know if they still exist, but it really saved my daughter’s life. But your formula, it’s labor intensive, but it was really, really good stuff. I’ve sent lots of people there over the years because … Tell me if I got this right, because it’s been so long since I used to send people to you, you adopted both of your sons and didn’t you stimulate milk production and breastfeed them?

Rita:                          Yeah, I didn’t get very much milk but what I did was … Yes, I used a lactation device that’s made for women who are having difficulty nursing, and I strung it around my boobs and taped the little tubes and they fed that way. And they loved it, and we would put this homemade infant formula in there. I didn’t want to give them commercial formula, I wanted to give them the best they could, and I researched this like crazy. I’m a geek when it comes to that, and I printed out these formula … “What’s in breast milk? What are all the nutrients?” And I created this formula that would have that in there. It had to exceed, of course, breast milk because breast milk is more bio available.

My kids thrived. They’re now 23 and 19, and they’re strapping and beautiful kids, they were never sick, they were healthier than any of their friends, kids. And I didn’t control the breast … the pre-natal environment, so it wasn’t that I just took care of them while they were in the womb. They did not have a good environment in the womb, and we were able to overcome that by giving them good nourishment.

Robyn:                    Yeah, that’s really exciting. If I recall, again, being a long time, I remember there being fresh carrot juice and evening primrose oil in that formula. Did I make that up?

Rita:                          No, you didn’t make that up. There were essential fats, so we had flax oil and we had either GLA borage oil or primrose oil, and it was really designed to be balanced, the way it should be. Unlike conventional baby formula, which doesn’t have a lot of that stuff and it’s missing some of the things they really need. So, yeah, it had that in there. It had fresh juice, it was not just carrot, it had celery in it and it had some greens. It was all just put in there and blended with some almonds or other kind of nuts. I don’t remember exactly the ones I used at this point. I added some extra nutrients to it, like the flaxseed for the omegas and … What else did I add to it? A particular Thorne vitamin supplement that was … powdered vitamin supplement that had a wide range in good forms. And then zinc, and … Oh! Probiotics. It’s really fortified formula, absolutely.

Robyn:                    Yeah, it was amazing. It was just superfoods and incredible nutrition, and it’s just a great lesson in something that we’re gonna talk about today, that we don’t have to depend on Enfamil and Similac to feed our babies, just like we don’t have to depend on Frito-Lay and McDonald’s to feed us as we get older, right?

Rita:                          That’s right! Yeah, my kids never saw the inside of McDonald’s except when their friends would have birthday parties there, and they’d go in and jump on the stuff and they’d always say, “Mom, it really smells bad in here.”

Robyn:                    That’s so funny because I remember when my oldest son was 17, I heard him talking to his friends in the kitchen and I heard him say that, telling his friends that he had never been to McDonald’s. They were all like, “What are you talking about? Who hasn’t been to McDonald’s?” And my son’s like, “No, I literally have never been to McDonald’s.” And I walked in the kitchen and I said, “Yes you have. We stop at McDonald’s to use the bathrooms. Their bathrooms are the cleanest whenever we go on a trip.”

Rita:                          That’s what they’re good for, right?

Robyn:                    Yeah. Well, I love that we’re talking about blood sugar today, because I was just learning from our mutual friend Dr. Steven Masley, M.D., about his book coming out on the brain. He was talking about how cognitive decline is not only an epidemic right now, but it’s totally traceable to long-term blood sugar imbalances and how you have it for ten years before it’ll even show up in measurements. Talk to us a little bit about … Beyond diabetes, we all know that that is a risk of having out of control blood sugar, what’s the risk and what are the symptoms?

Rita:                          Here’s the deal. Brain is one of the big ones, and they’re now starting to … Even medical literature is, paper after paper, on the link between dementia, Alzheimer’s, and blood sugar imbalance. They’re even to the point where they’re starting to call Alzheimer’s type 3 diabetes. It affects the brain in that way, and it also affects the brain in more subtle ways that most people experience on a day-to-day basis before they see the light and start eating the way we recommend, is that the brain fog. You ever hear people say, “Oh, I got that brain fog. I can’t think, I can’t keep my brain straight.” That’s often related to blood sugar imbalance.

But more than that, it contributes to heart disease, high blood pressure, inflammation, cancer … All the big killer diseases can be traced down to blood sugar. I have a video I created last … I think it was last November or so, and it had to do with the hidden plague lurking in your bloodstream. It had to do with insulin resistance and blood sugar imbalance and the effects that insulin have on the blood vessel linings, on the blood pressure, on C-reactive protein which is an inflammatory marker that contributes not just to heart disease and strokes, but also to cancer. It’s the underlying thing in just about everything, and guess what? For those of you who just don’t really care about how it affects your health but you care about how it affects your looks, that layer of belly fat that just keeps creeping up even though the rest of you looks great? That has to do with your blood sugar imbalance as well.

Robyn:                    Okay, this is a great time to point out, and I hope I don’t embarrass you Ritamarie, that … You’ll have to, if you feel like it, tell us what age you are or what age range you are, because this woman has a rocking body. Like, flat belly. Flat belly. What’s up with that? What are you eating?

Rita:                          I’m eating good stuff! I eat whole plant-based foods and low glycemic and nuts and seeds and a lot of really good stuff, and raw pizzas and lots of stir fries and things like that. I eat a lot of really good food, and I do it in a way that really pleases my palate, because that’s something that is important to me. It had been in the past. I would eat cardboard if I had to, to maintain my health, but I like having nice food. I even eat chocolate! But we do it in a way that doesn’t throw my blood sugars off. And yes, I’m in my sixties.

And I can continue … I had a … I’ll tell you this. I had a picture taken with my niece who had just gotten married. It was after the wedding and we were on a Caribbean island, and my husband took a picture of us. We were both wearing bikinis, and I was thinking, “Oh my God, I’m getting my picture taken in a bikini next to a 27 year old. Oh my God, I’m gonna look like … ” And when I looked at the picture I was like, “Holy cow! My body looks as good as hers does!” And that’s the comments that people said. And it’s not that it’s in my family history, we are all lean and mean. It’s not, it has to do with me taking control and really … For me the blood sugar is a huge piece of it, keeping my blood sugar nice and happy.

Robyn:                    And are you doing CrossFit or running ten miles a day?

Rita:                          No, no, no. I run. I run probably three miles, four or five times a week on a good week and maybe less. I weight lift once a week. I should do it more. When I do push-ups, when I get in the roll of it I can get up to 60 to 100 push-ups, but then I don’t do them for a long time and I don’t … I haven’t been doing push-ups lately, so I have no idea how many I can do right now. But no, I’m not in the gym. I do the 30 second burst training type of things, I run up and down my stairs, but I’m not … I don’t have to exercise, I don’t have to spend three hours in the gym every day to keep my body like this.

Robyn:                    So, a lot of people who were raw aren’t anymore. Are you still … What percentage raw are you? I’ve maintained 60 day percent raw for, oh … 23 years now. I don’t see myself ever going back, but a lot of the people who were raw are now eating some animal proteins. You eat plant-based, but everybody wants to know, you know you get asked this every day, right? Are you vegetarian or vegan? Tell us a little bit about your diet, and then I’ll stop obsessing about your diet and get into more stuff that applies to everybody. But I am really curious, because like I said it’s not normal to have a beautiful body like you in your sixties in America.

Rita:                          I have 100% plant.

Robyn:                    Okay.

Rita:                          100%. But I don’t do … You know the raw food dessert craze, and all that? I don’t do the dates and all the extra sugars and that from your various high glycemic fruits. I really do … I call it paleo-vegan. I know you laughed at me when I wrote that on a blog one or something, “Paleo-vegan? What the heck is that?” It’s basically the paleo kind of approach, where, you know … Eliminate sugars, dairy, pretty much grains. So I don’t eat grains, I don’t eat beans. I eat vegetables. I eat mainly vegetables with fat. Good fats, whole food fats. Not a lot of oils. Yeah, I have a little coconut oil here and there, but not a lot of oil. Just really whole food fats. We eat a lot of coconut, and avocado, and nuts, and seeds, hemp seeds. I make really nice dips and cheeses out of my nuts and seeds. I eat tons of vegetables. And green smoothies, Green Smoothie girl! I drink my green smoothies every day, at least a quart, sometimes two or three.

Robyn:                    Yeah, me too. Me too, because then it just makes it so easy and you don’t have to really think about it, you just get up in the morning and you make a whole blender full. I often drink that whole blender full by the end of the day. People say, “Does that taste good?” Who cares? I dunno. All the food I eat isn’t because it tastes good. In fact, let me ask you this, and then we’ll get back to blood sugar. Ritamarie and I actually met in person when she sponsored my lecture in Austin, so I did a lecture there and I really enjoyed getting to know her, and now we got to conferences together. Do you find, for yourself and for all the many people you’ve coached over decades now, that when they start eating higher vibration foods that they’re also then … When they’ve built their cells out of high vibration materials, do you find that they are more attracted to high vibration foods at that point? That they literally like them better?

Rita:                          Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I love the whole concept, bringing up the vibration, because I know that’s something you’ve been researching a lot, and that’s what I feel like… Those kinds of foods have shifted me so much. And yeah, how much raw … Because you asked that before and I didn’t really answer it, I would say in the summertime close to 100. Some days I have stir fries or steamed vegetables, or … Today I went out to lunch to an Ethiopian restaurant with my son. I didn’t eat the breads, I just ate this big plate of vegetables. But they were cooked, there was a little bit of salad. So, I’m not a dogmatic raw foodie, but a lot of days I don’t eat any cooked. In the winter I eat a lot more, because I’ll make a big pot of steamed vegetables and eat it that way. But lightly steamed, and I’ll eat it with salads and raw.

So getting back to the vibration, it maintains the vibration of the food and when you’re resonating at this high vibration, you have more energy. You have plenty of energy to just do everything you wanna be doing. That’s what I love about that, and I feel like when people make that shift, a lot of them are like, “I’m going into a new career now! I’m gonna teach other people how to do this!” Or “I’m gonna finally do that whatever that I’ve been thinking about for years,” because they have … Their whole being is just at a different level and they start to think differently and act differently, and it’s just amazing to see.

Robyn:                    I’d love for you to talk about sugars in whole foods vs sugars in processed foods.

Rita:                          Absolutely. Yeah, those are great questions. Beyond that, also another couple of things are that getting exhausted at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, just, “Okay, gotta go to the snack machine, gotta get a cup of coffee,” being hungry even after eating a full meal but feeling like it’s not complete without some sugar and craving food late at night, those are all signs that the blood sugar’s off as well. So how do you find out? My favorite way to do it with people is to actually get them to invest $15 in a little blood sugar meter and test their own blood sugar, because here’s the deal. The doctor’s gonna test the fasting blood glucose, and they’re gonna tell you when it goes about 100 and say, “Hey, you’re pre diabetic,” and they’re gonna tell you when it goes above 120 and tell you that you’re diabetic, but you know what? That’s the last thing that changes.

So it’s subtle little changes, and quite frankly, I didn’t have belly fat, brain fog, or burnout, but I discovered about six years ago that I was in the state of pre insulin resistance, so decades before I would have developed pre diabetes, I was developing it. When I discovered that through the little meter and I shifted things … I was already feeling great, but the energy was even better after that. My belly even flatter after that. It was night and day, really, when I discovered that. And I didn’t have any of the external symptoms, actually.

Robyn:                    Okay, so I’m not having to take my own blood, I assume, and where do I get the $15 meter?

Rita:                          So you can get the $15 at Walgreens or CVS or whatever the local pharmacy chain is for you. You can get it on Amazon. It actually has a little poker that you poke a little drop of blood and it pops out of your finger, and you put it on a strip and you test your own blood. I teach people to look at what happens when they eat certain foods. If you were to test your blood and let’s just say it’s a nice, clean 80 before you take your meal. And you have a meal of Twinkies, which a lot of people do, right? Middle of the afternoon, they’re eating Twinkies or-

Robyn:                    Didn’t they go out of business? Didn’t Hostess go out of business? Didn’t we say bye-bye to Twinkies?

Rita:                          I think we might’ve. I’m just not up on that. Whatever the latest one is. So they have their little snack, and then you test your blood sugar. And somewhere between about 45 minutes … or half an hour to an hour, but around 45 minutes, you’re gonna see it go up to the highest it’s gonna go and then it’s gonna start coming down again, your sugar. And if it’s above 110, you’ve got a blood sugar issue.

Robyn:                    That’s very specific and really helpful. Okay, so we’re all gonna go out and get, on Amazon or at Walgreens, at a drugstore we’re gonna get a $15 blood sugar, and we’re gonna poke our finger before a meal, and 80 is a good number. Then 45 minutes after a meal we poke our finger again, and it should be below 110 is good. Is that right?

Rita:                          Absolutely. Absolutely. And if it’s not, then I have people just start testing all their different meals, all the different foods, and figure out what raises it above and what keeps it below. Then once they’ve got some tracking on that, then we do a 30 day metabolic reset, where for 30 days you’re only eating the foods that keep it low. Now, you might say that, “Oh yeah, the sugar from whole foods versus processed foods. Obviously the sugar in whole foods is much better, because it’s loaded with the vitamins and the fiber and the antioxidants and all the great things that we need.” But if someone has developed a blood sugar imbalance as a result of years of drinking too much wine, eating too many M&M’s, eating too much bread and other kinds of processed foods, then for awhile even fruits are gonna do it.

For me, the first sign I had was I was gonna make a video to teach the people in my program about how to take your own blood. I took my blood sugar and before my meal it was 68, which is actually quite good, if you look at … It’s actually a very good number. 68. So I ate a pineapple, just put a bowl of pineapple and I ate it. Within about 15, 20 minutes it was up to 130, and I went like, “Whoa.” And within about 45 minutes, it was up to 167. It had gone up 100 points. 167 is considered by all measures to be in the diabetic range. So I ate pineapple, and I had very dangerously high blood sugar. It’s a good food! I’m not saying it’s a bad food, but for me at that particular point in time, the way I ate it was not.

So I looked at it, I put myself on my own program. It’s not just about the food. It’s about stress, it’s about fitness, it’s about sleep, and for me I discovered it was really the lack of sleep. I had so much energy I wasn’t going to bed. I wasn’t getting the kind of rest I needed, and that creates insulin resistance in susceptible people, even in healthy people. I have genes that predispose me to type 2 diabetes. So for me, I needed to be a little bit more careful than that. Now I can eat pineapple, but I have to eat my pineapple with my green smoothie. No in my green smoothie, because I want to taste my pineapple when I eat it, thank you very much. If I blend it I do tend to have higher levels of sugar, but if I chew it and I have one bite of pineapple and a sip of green smoothie, and another bite of pineapple and a sip of green smoothie, I’m happy and I get to eat my pineapple and I get to keep my blood sugar nice and normal.

Robyn:                    So, what is it about greens … And while we’re at it, what is it about greens that helps control your blood sugar while you’re eating fruit as well? And also, what else is in your green smoothie?

Rita:                          Okay, cool. So what is it is, it’s the fiber, the cellulose, that slows everything down. It’s the minerals, because greens are just so loaded with minerals, and those help the body to transport the glucose which requires insulin to get into the cells. So those minerals like magnesium and chromium and zinc and all that are actually assisting the body in clearing the sugar out of the blood and getting it into the cells, so you can make energy. Those are the things in there, the fibers and the minerals.

What’s in my green smoothie is a ton of greens, including a bunch of sprouts, and cucumbers maybe, and celery. Or not, but lots of greens. Kale, arugula, spinach, whatever I have on hand. An avocado usually. Sometimes I’ll put coconut instead, sometimes maybe a handful of, I don’t know, hemp seeds or macadamia nuts or something, or a combination. So some sort of fat, whole food fat, and lots and lots of greens and lots of lemon. I love lemon. And then some spices usually. Maybe there’s some cayenne in there. Oh, always ginger, a big hunk of ginger and tumeric, because those are great antioxidants and detox …

Robyn:                    Yep, that sounds like almost exactly my green smoothie. Sometimes I’ll put aloe. Yeah, aloe is probably the one thing that-

Rita:                          Aloe, yeah. That’s great.

Robyn:                    So talk a little bit about insulin resistance, because I think people struggle with this concept and you have this insulin resistance problem well before you ever get diagnosed with diabetes.

Rita:                          Yeah, absolutely. It’s been going on for decades before that. And we can detect it real early on. Insulin is the hormone that gets secreted by the pancreas, that’s job is to escort glucose into the cells so your cells can make energy and you can feel great. The way you’re supposed to feel after a meal, not tired and sluggish, but you’re supposed to feel good and energized because your body now has fuel. Well, insulin requires certain nutrients to escort the sugar into the cells, and there’s receptors on the cells.

So what happens when you eat the standard American diet like I did, lots of processed grains and lots of sugar, you’re constantly producing a lot of insulin to try to help get all that sugar into the cells. Insulin itself is actually damaging to the cells in excess amounts. So after a while those cells get depleted, they get damaged, they get inflamed, and they can no longer escort the insulin. Plus we deplete all those great minerals that we need to escort it. The food is depleted in those minerals, so we’re not replacing them but we’re using whatever we have to try to get the insulin into the cells with the glucose. And we become what’s called insulin resistant. Most people will be diagnosed with insulin resistance when you go to the doctor and they measure your fasting glucose and it’s above 100 three times in a row. They’ll say, “Huh, you have insulin resistance. It’s pre diabetes.”

My take is, why don’t we let people know not when they have inulin resistance, which that point there’s dangerously high amounts of insulin in the system. Why don’t we let them know 20 years, 10 years before that, that they’re heading in that direction? So there’s ways to do that with that little blood sugar meter, and also with another test called hemoglobin A1c, that doctors usually only order when somebody’s already diabetic. And by then it’s too late, by then it’s way up high, and they think it’s good if it’s above seven. It really should be around five. That gives us an idea of the average blood glucose over time and what that’s measuring is actually how … What percentage of your red blood cells are coated with sugar? Glycosylated hemoglobin. What percentage of your red blood cells are coated with sugar, and guess what? Have you ever made molasses when you were a kid? Made hard candy, and you take the molasses and you heat it but then when it hardens, it has these stiff brittle points to it? That happens inside your blood.

So your red blood cells are getting coated with sugar, and they’re kind of stiff, and they can poke holes in the blood vessel lining. Those holes will need to be repaired and cholesterol is a good repairer, and then the cholesterol goes and deposits there, and guess what? We start to line our blood vessels with these cholesterol and calcium-containing plaques. So it’s a real risk factor, and it’s happening blindly. It’s happening before you even know it’s happening because you’re not getting the tests that the doctor’s taking … They’re not the appropriate tests, is what I’m trying to say. They’re not gonna catch it early on. We want to catch it early on. So that’s where we are.

Robyn:                    Interesting. I did not know that an early predictor is this blood sugar meter, and the nice thing is it’s super cheap. I’m all over that, and I’ll report back later about what I learned and that will be a good … So you’re not just driving blind when it comes to food, and you can see how you personally are reacting. That’s really great.

Rita:                          Exactly. People say to me, “Oh, well are sweet potatoes allowed on this diet?” Depends. How do sweet potatoes react in your body, right? “Are dates okay?” Well, depends. How does your body react to dates?

Robyn:                    Yeah. So what things can we do? What are the dietary things, what are the lifestyle things that we can do that are gonna make the biggest difference in controlling our blood sugar?

Rita:                          Great question. I look at five lifestyle areas that I think are most key. One is, you gotta start with the stress. That’s where I start, because stress … Like you talked about Heart Math. I teach Heart Math. When the person is under stress, the level of cortisol goes up in the body, and what that is intended for is to flood your body with sugar so that it can get your extremities ready to run and jump and punch and get away from tigers. Right? That’s what cortisol is all about. What the problem is most people are getting stressed out about is stuff they’re sitting at their desk for. So the cortisol is still released, the blood sugar goes up, and guess what? Cortisol goes for protein, so it goes to the muscles, breaks down the muscles in a process called gluconeogenesis, creates sugar from the protein, from the branched amino acids, and then the blood sugar goes up.

But guess what? There’s no tiger running around my office chasing me. It’s just the tiger in my brain, so I don’t have to use all that energy. So my blood sugar goes high, my insulin goes high, and it’s contributing over and over again to insulin resistance. What I teach people to do is how to manage the stress, and we use Heart Math, mini meditations, tapping, whatever really works for someone, but you do it throughout the day. The other thing I teach them is, if you get into a real stressful situation, do some exercise to kill that sugar that your body just created. Run up and down the stairs, do squats at your desk. If you work in an office and can’t do that, go to the bathroom and do squats in the stall. Go for a walk, but burn up the sugar. That’s one thing. So stress is huge.

Sleep is another one, and that was my downfall. I wasn’t sleeping. I was sleeping three, four hours a night. I was all excited because I had all this energy and I could do all this work, but in reality it wasn’t giving my body a chance to regenerate every night and get the levels of insulin down, get the levels of growth hormone … Which is an antagonist to inulin, it helps us to repair and burn fat. I wasn’t giving myself enough hours of sleep to have that be optimized. So sleep is super important. I’m gonna throw in one more and then we’ll talk about food.

Fitness. Doesn’t mean you have to go to the gym and work out for three, four hours at a time. Burst training has been found to be the most effective for controlling blood sugar. 30 seconds at a time, maybe four to eight times a day. Contiguous … It could be 30 second and then you jog the rest of the time and then you do 30 seconds of sprint and then jog for a while. Or you could just, 30 seconds a few times a day. I keep a little excisor right by my desk, a little stair climber. I just get off and bounce up and down on it for 30 seconds. I keep a medicine ball nearby, and I run up and down the stairs a couple times a day. I stand up at my desk most of the time, and I have a little bouncy pad so I bounce up and down on it. Keep moving. It doesn’t have to be three hours at the gym.

And then the last one is the food. Again, the food … What foods you’re gonna eat are gonna depend on how you respond to the blood sugar meter. If people don’t wanna test their blood I give them a sheet that says, “Okay, for 30 days we’re gonna do a metabolic reset and you’re just gonna eat from these foods.” They’re all high plant powered, you can do it as a complete vegetarian, vegan, raw foodist if you want. You can do it with a little bit of organic pastured meat in there. We’re taking out the allergens, we’re taking out … The processed foods absolutely have to go. I have a yes/no/maybe column. Absolutely yes, most people can eat these without their blood sugar going up, like lettuce and kale and broccoli and things like that.

The no is the sugars and the processed foods and the crackers and all that, and then the in between is the stuff that some people can eat, some people can’t. That’s where all of our fruits lie, that’s where some grains might lie, non gluten grains like quinoa and millet. That’s where maybe sweet potatoes are. But if a person does those and their sugar goes up, they can’t do those. Then we do 30 days of metabolic reset, and the results are phenomenal.

Robyn:                    30 days of metabolic reset. I know you have a really great recipe guide that you’re going to give our followers here, and we’re setting it up at greensmoothiegirl.com/sweetspot, because Ritamarie has a program called The Sweet Spot Solution, so greensmoothiegirl.com/sweetspot. You can get Ritamarie’s recipe guide. Tell us a little bit about how this recipe guide works and how it’s gonna help them with belly fat. Tell us a little more.

Rita:                          Yep. Absolutely. We call it … I think we call it our Bye-Bye Belly Fat, Brain Fog, and Burnout Recipe Sampler. It’s basically a sampling of … In our Sweet Spot solution program, we have a 250 page recipe guide. So we took a sampling from the different chapters in there, so we have salads and dressings and smoothies and juices. We also have desserts and we have some dehydrated items, and we have a lot of … Really wide variety of stuff. So we took a sampling of that and we put it together in a 20 page booklet that we’re giving away for free.

Robyn:                    Cool, I love it. Well, I’m very excited about it, and I’ve really enjoyed learning from you. I’ve been furiously writing notes. I’m sure that our audience will too. This’ll be one of those that they listen to a second time. Thank you so much for being with us. Anything that you want to say that you didn’t cover, Ritamarie?

Rita:                          No, just … The only thing is, is that live your life every day with gratitude, and that comes with the stress and I teach that in the stress component. If you can wake up every morning and find things to appreciate, and you can just catch yourself when you’re flying off the handle and just come back to gratitude, that can make all the difference in the world for your blood sugars. Just eat real food!

Robyn:                    Perfect way to encapsulate the most important things we can do. I’ve had a recent question was, “What’s the number one thing you would do to prevent cancer?” And I said, “I can’t pick one, I’m gonna pick two.” One is eat more plants in their natural state, and the other one is learn how to metabolize those negative emotions and get into those high vibrations of joy and peace and love. You can choose them. You can choose into gratitude. You can literally spend 30 seconds feeling gratitude. You’re a wonderful example to me. You’re in the next phase of life that I’m looking at, Ritamarie, and I need inspiration. I need to have someone who’s in the next decade of life showing me how it’s done. Thanks so much for leading the way.

Rita:        Thank you so much for having me.