BIOptimizers - Awesome Health Podcast

If you're a woman or know a woman who has struggled with weight loss the answer may lie in your hormones. Karen Martel is here to talk about hormones and weight loss for women - weight loss resistance, plateaus, the dos and don'ts and common mistakes people make that actually set them up for failure. Today's show is extra important for anyone who has been struggling in this area. Join us as hormone and weight loss expert Karen Martel takes us on a deep dive into this topic on today's Awesome Health podcast. More Awesome Health With Karen Martel We start with Karen's story: today she's a bright, fit, happy mom with lots of energy and a great business. But it wasn't always that way for her. Since she was very young she struggled with her weight and with body image issues. She was severely bulimic in high school and recovered in her 20s, but continued to abuse her body in other ways until she eventually cleaned herself up entirely. She got to a healthy weight and felt good; then about a year after having her first child she started gaining weight. So she did what every other woman does - she did boot camps, she hired a personal trainer, tried different diets including raw, vegetarian, Atkins, juicing. This was all during a two-year period. Even though she got in the best shape of her life, she continued to gain weight. It was incredibly frustrating! And it took her back to her childhood and teen years of struggling with her weight. When she was 14 her mom put her on birth control and she gained 20 pounds in the next year. For the next two years she was very heavy, and suffered with depression because of the birth control. Her mom was a fitness guru who ran Nutri-System weight loss center. She told Karen to go to the gym with her and started eating less. No one thought it was the birth control pill, but when Karen stopped taking it the extra weight went away. But by that time the detriment was done. She was terrified of gaining weight and that was the impetus for her bulimic activity in high school. I asked Karen if she could talk more about the negative effects of birth control, and she described how difficult it was and why. Not many people know how awful the birth control pill is for you. Back when she took it the pill contained very high amounts of estrogen. If she didn't take the pill at the same time every day she would vomit because it would make her feel so sick. It wrecks the body's microbiome, and is something she would never put a teenage girl on. Some people can handle it better than others, but it still harms everyone no matter how your body responds to it. The entire experience set her up to have a bad relationship with her body until she figured it out after the birth of her daughter. She thought she was doing everything right at the time, but she couldn't lose weight. She began digging and researching to find out what was happening. On an intuitive level she knew something was wrong. One of the big pieces was she had to go back and heal her relationship with her body. She realized how unkind she had been to her body over the years, and she knew had to respect her body and love herself again. Having her daughter was the big push to do this because she knew her daughter would also disrespect her body and not love herself the same way Karen had. And that is something she emphasizes: sometimes we have to find leverage outside of ourselves, we have to find a reason that is bigger than us in order to reach our goals. The Link Between Hormones and Weight Loss for Women I was curious about how she made the shift and how she found out why she continued to gain weight, despite doing everything right. Karen paints us the full picture and describes the other symptoms she was experiencing at the time: even though she was sober and had stopped drinking when she was pregnant with her daughter, her health continued to get worse. She had terrible migraines, severe PMS, rashes on her body, and bloating. She talked to her naturopath and he suggested she try the ketogenic diet. This was 10 years ago when no one in Canada had heard of this diet! She went online and started researching, and started the Paleo diet A lot of her symptoms went away quickly, and she thought she had found the right diet for her. She felt better but she still couldn't lose weight. So she got her hormones checked, she couldn't imagine she had issues in that department because she was only 33. It turns out her cortisol levels were super high, her estrogen was also very high and her progesterone was also incredibly low. In short, she was stressing her body out and that was making it impossible for her to lose weight. It was a big wake up call because she was working out very hard, and it was the completely wrong thing for her! She quit working out and switched to yoga. She would never have thought she was stressed out, but seeing it on paper showed her the truth. In reality, she was just living the way everyone around her was living, without r

One area of health that isn't often talked about is optimal sexual health. Our guest expert today is changing that! Susan Bratton is here to divulge the secrets on the often-taboo subject of sex. Get ready for a fun, playful and informative talk; we cover the 16 different types of female orgasms and 14 types of male orgasms, why being more masculine or more feminine influences how we experience arousal. Susan shares on those subjects and much more on today's edition of the Awesome Health podcast. More Awesome Health With Susan Bratton Not wanting to waste a moment, we jump right into our first topic. I asked Susan to explain how we find our orgasmic pleasure and what are the differences for men and for women when it comes to sex? The first place to start is orgasmic potential. In a master class she offers she explains the 16 types of female orgasms and the 14 types of male orgasms. We talk about a few of them, starting with men: the way men think about orgasms is pleasure, arousal which climbs and climbs to a climax during which they ejaculate. After that, they are done. When they are young they can do this a few times because they have a quick refractory period. As they age, they have loss of firmness and loss of sensation because the nervous system is operating optimally. This happens for women, too. Women have exactly the same amount of genital tissue and structure - the difference is men's genitalia is external and women's is internal. She likes to say men are outies and women are innies! The interesting thing about male orgasm is that orgasm and ejaculation are two separate systems in the body. They are not the same even though they happen at the same time. One of the areas of exploration for men is male multiple orgasms. It used to be when you talked to a man about multiple orgasms he associated that with semen retention, which most men didn't want. In fact, studies have shown men have better prostate health when they ejaculate frequently. However, there are people who feel bad when they ejaculate and some who need frequent ejaculation to feel good. Most people are somewhere in the middle, 3-7x a week. And just as there are differing numbers of ejaculations per week among men, there are also different types of orgasms. A few of them are the ejaculation-climax orgasm. A second one is no ejaculation but a full body orgasm, the heart is connected to the genitals and the orgasm feels like a full explosion of love and orgasmic sensation. There's also a braingasm, which is similar except the orgasm is pulled inward and upward through the head. The great thing about all of these braingasms and heartgasms is they are a part of a man's optimal sexual health and they are a learned skill. The best way to do this is not by edging, which is what most guys want to do, but by riding the wave. Susan explains what each of these terms mean: edging is where you take yourself to the edge of the climax and you keep the stimulation level such that you prolong the climax and stretch it out like taffy. You stay in the orgasmic peak experience and make it last longer. That's a good practice, but it still results in ejaculation. Whereas riding the wave is a different type of stimulation. If you think about arousal on a scale of 1 to 10, you learn how to separate orgasm and ejaculation while learning how to manage your arousal. (This is a great practice if you feel you ejaculate too quickly. And if you want to prolong your ejaculation, you are not alone. Around 1 in 4 men report wanting to last longer). Riding the wave is how you set the groundwork for becoming a multi-orgasmic man. Starting with masturbation, you take yourself up to a level 5 and then pull back. Take yourself up to a 6 and pull back to a 5. Then up to a 7 and back to a 5, and up to an 8 and back to a 5, etc. You do this all the way up to a 10 where you can barely contain your desire to let go, but you do contain that desire because you can now down regulate your arousal. You can pull the arousal back down and into your body and spread it into your body so you feel the pleasure in your body. As you do the riding the wave technique it does a few things: it trains you to manage your arousal ladder. It also pulls the semen up and down in your prostate and allows the fluid that gathers at the bottom of the prostate gland to mix in with the new semen so that when you ejaculate you are moving the old and the new fluid out. This technique is very healthy for the prostate, it gives you stamina and it is one of the paths to multiple male orgasms. She goes on to explain the various spots and erogenous zones to explore for enhanced stimulation and pleasure in a man, before we talk about the female possibilities. The Masculine and The Feminine Experience of Sexual Arousal Susan says to fully explore a woman's optimal sexual health and sexual pleasure, it's important to talk about the masculine and the feminine. Whether we identify as male/female or we lean more towards the

Khrystle Rea is an amazing woman who today leads a blissfully balanced life. But she has overcome more than her share of health struggles to get there. And now she's sharing what she learned with other women: as an empowerment coach and strategist she aids them in transforming their overworked lives into a blissful work-life balance by elevating their food, feelings, and fitness. On this episode of Awesome Health Podcast, we talk in greater detail about her experiences, why the best healers are often those who go through the worst crises and much more. Hear her insights and her passion about health, healing and the power of the mind and body on the 29th edition of Awesome Health Podcast. More Awesome Health With Khrystle Rea We begin with her back story: in college she experienced depression and severe anxiety including panic attacks, uncontrollable shaking, racing heart rate for no reason, etc. She also had difficulty eating and when she did it hurt her stomach. But her health issues went back even further. She also had abandonment issues from childhood and physical illnesses. She had a benign tumor on her breast at 15, she had strep throat 14 times between 2 and 4 years of age. To make matters worse, people told her she was a hypochondriac and she felt like she didn't fit in anywhere. It all came to a head in 2012 when she was a senior in college and had the worst anxiety experience; she had hit her rock bottom. Today she does what she does because reaching her rock bottom and the experiences she had along the way taught her so much, especially about food. She realized that was she ate could alter her mood and influence how she felt. Sometimes she would eat something and it would cause her heart to race for no apparent reason. She could eat something else and have stomach discomfort. It became apparent to her that she couldn't eat gluten and dairy. But doctors told her there was nothing wrong with her stomach after she had a scope, so she went back to those foods only to realize she was right: those foods were making her feel awful. It took so long for her to find answers and come to that conclusion, and she is a health coach now to help other people get answers faster than she did. She's here to help speed up people's journey to health: it doesn't have to take 10 years! Once you start feeling good it becomes addictive. Taking Responsibility For Your Own Life We have a raw and honest conversation about divorce and grief before talking about how she took responsibility for her life and her experiences trying to heal: how did she do it? Her mom knew she couldn't fully help Khrystle so Khrystle began therapy at the age of 8. And Khrystle feels she had a choice on whether or not to do her own healing work, and she chose to do it. She's also been extremely curious her entire life so she was open to exploring options and taking her own power. And from January 2018 she was seeing a few healing practitioners and felt she was healed. But she also knew she had tested positive for Mtfhr and found a functional medicine doctor who could help her. She knew exactly what she needed and wanted, and she found it. Because of all the healing work she had done she had a good idea of what worked for her body in terms of diet, exercise, lifestyle so she didn't need someone to tell her what to do in those areas. She needed someone who would work with her knowledge and help her fill in any blanks. And this doctor did just that: he filled in those blanks with supplementation. It helped her realize she could help her body in certain ways through foods and supplementations, and doing so would help her symptoms. Which was a very different experience then she had when she originally got into pole dancing competitions and weight lifting competitions. We talk about why she got interested in both arenas, plus why she became a health coach. One of our final topics is the most common issues she sees her clients dealing today. Khrystle says it is their thoughts and their beliefs about self-worth; people feel they don't deserve to feel good or feel loved. And a lot of her clients struggle with comparing themselves to others. She feels many people are listening to what is outside of them more than what is inside of them, and that is leading to issues. Many people believe their thoughts and our thoughts are not who we are, but people are allowing themselves to believe they are. We also talk about the influence of outside energies, how to stay centered and grounded so we know our feelings are own versus someone else's. You'll hear those powerful topics and more on today's Awesome Health podcast! Episode Resources Khrystle Rea's web site Khrystle Rea on Facebook A Blissfully Balanced Life podcast Khrystle Rea on Instagram Awesome Health course You Can Heal Yourself, by Louise Hay Awesome Health episode with Scott Abel Masszymes (shake10) bioptimizers.com/blissfullybalanced

Do you believe in the mind-brain connection? Research is showing us this is true, and one of the experts in the field is here to explain more, Dr. Caroline Leaf. Dr. Leaf is a communication pathologist and cognitive neuroscientist with a Masters and PhD in Communication Pathology and a BSc Logopaedics, specializing in cognitive and metacognitive neuropsychology. Dr. Leaf is also the bestselling author of Switch on Your Brain, Think, Learn, Succeed, Think and Eat Yourself Smart, and many more. All of that means she has studied the mind and the mind-brain connection, and researched the science of thoughts. She's been in this field for 25 years and today she travels the globe teaching and helping people understand how to control their thoughts, tapping into humans' innate resilience, and giving a new narrative to mental illness and mental health. More Awesome Health With Dr. Caroline Leaf Clearly there are many subjects we can talk about, the first one is what she thinks are the biggest issues we are dealing with today. Is it Alzheimer's, dementia and society's cognitive health? Dr. Leaf says it's not so much the labels of dementia and mental health, but mind management. About 60 years ago there was a complete shift in how we perceived humans. A person's story was considered important when dealing with whatever they were facing. Then things shifted and the focus became the person's symptoms (and not their stories) and their diagnoses based on the symptoms they were showing. So the physical aspect became dominant and the hunt began to find the genetic cause or neurological correlates of mental illness. Everything then shifted and centered on symptoms, diagnoses and medication to treat the diagnoses. Therapy became adjunct or even outright ignored, and medications are dominant. Dr. Leaf explains the particular class of drugs she is talking about are neurotropics and they act as analgesics (they numb the brain). They were discovered in the '50s by accident, and began being used when it was found they calmed people who were acting "crazy". That gave birth to the movement to medicate mental illness. By the mid 80s Prozac was released, and the push for medicating mental illness hasn't stopped. It's a problem because we are no longer in communities, forming meaningful relationships, being allowed to feel sad or anxious or depressed, and the self-help industry telling us we need to be happy all the time. (And if you aren't happy and the things self-help teaches you don't work then you are the problem). There's been an increase in suicides, mass shootings and other terrible things in countries that have adopted this philosophy. We Can Change Our Genes and Our Brains But since the early 2000s we now understand the brain can change and our genes can change. It means we are not hard-wired robots. It means we aren't born with a bad genetic hand or a bad brain, we can change our genes and our brain. We've also come to know our minds and our brains (and the rest of our physical body) are separate: our mind works through our brains and our bodies, and our minds are how we respond to life. Our brains and our bodies will be affected by whatever signal we put it into it because our brains and our bodies and our genes are responders, our mind is the generator. In that sense, if we are experiencing trauma or abuse or are engaged in a toxic habit that we haven't controlled and we aren't dealing with "our stuff" because society has us numbing our feelings with medications, then we can cause brain damage. Our brains are actually built to process, not to be numbed. The numbing of our brains keeps us stuck and injures our brains. Dr. Leaf shared so many profound insights, and I asked her to tell us more about the separation between our brains and our minds. How has she come to that conclusion based on her background and her studies and all the work she is doing? It's an ancient concept actually. If you look at the history of medicine and the philosophies of medicine and science, and you track back a few thousand years this concept wasn't even questioned. It was understood: the brain and the mind are separate from each other. Even though they are separate from each other they are interlinked and you cannot have one without the other. There's scientific evidence to back this: a significant amount of research, including research from Nobel Prize winners, shows as we think there is a physical response inside the brain. The philosophy we discussed earlier and the one that dominates now believes that everything is based in biology: your brain fires and produces your mind as an artifact; you have no free will and are a pre-programmed robot. But that goes counter to our natural instinct, we automatically know about our uniqueness and our ability to choose. The focus on the physical that began some 60 years ago has taken away the emphasis on that ability to choose, on the story each of us has to tell and on us as individuals. Her research has b

More Awesome Health With Dr. Caroline Leaf Clearly there are many subjects we can talk about, the first one is what she thinks are the biggest issues we are dealing with today. Is it Alzheimer's, dementia and society's cognitive health? Dr. Leaf says it's not so much the labels of dementia and mental health,… The post 030: The Mind-Brain Connection with Dr. Caroline Leaf appeared first on BiOptimizers.

We start by talking about a burnout experience I had a few years ago, and how I recovered. In essence, we're talking about managing your nervous system. Doing so is one of the most important things you can do for your overall health and well-being. There are phases of this experience which Matt details on this show. The first is fight, flight or freeze. The next is impaired decision-making ability and the final phase is mental and physical burn out. Matt shares his experience with burn out and then goes on to explain his current strategy for avoiding a nervous system meltdown. To understand his strategy it's important to first understand some basics about the nervous system. Your nervous system is divided into two parts: the sympathetic (this is where the fight, flight or freeze system comes from) and the parasympathetic (this is where all the healing happens within your body). Going more in-depth, in most instances exercise puts your body into fight or flight mode. This includes things like lifting and running. The exercises that are healing for your body are tai chi and yoga, they activate your parasympathetic nervous system. When you're breathing deep and slowly that activates your parasympathetic nervous system, when your breathing is more rapid your sympathetic nervous system is engaged and you go into fight, flight or freeze mode. Personally, I've been doing breath work for 20 years including meditation. Breathing can change your brain state, belly breathing is a necessary part of this. By allowing your belly to come out with your breath your lungs will open up so you can get fuller and deeper breaths. I start every day by doing a few quick exhales and then long and slow inhales. I do the 10-10-10-10 process which is 10 seconds in, 10 seconds hold and 10 seconds exhale and then 10 seconds with no breath. This is also called box breathing and you can start with just a few seconds (like 4 or 5) and work your way up to 10. Healing The Body to Avoid Burn Out Next, we talk about brain waves and neural feedback. Neural feedback is brain measuring feedback system that feedbacks to you what is happening. It's like a GPS system that trains your brain to hit different states. These different states fall in one of 5 categories, three of which are healing and two of which are fight/flight/freeze. The healing states are alpha which is when you are relaxed but alert, then there is theta which is even slower and deeper than alpha. And the last of these three is delta - that is the state we are in when we are sleeping. On the fight, flight or freeze side, the two states are beta and gamma. Beta is when you are engaged and focused and thinking. Anxiety looks like too high levels of beta. Gamma is a very high spiritual state, it is very powerful and intense but there is a cost to it. We also discuss dopamine levels and blue light from social media and technology, before we move into how to know we are overstimulated and heading towards burn out. One of the big X factors in avoiding burn out is resilience, there is a physical component to this. Matt has worked to increase his through neural feedback and also cleaning out his limbic system. (The limbic system is one component of our nervous systems, it is responsible for our emotions). He has cleaned out his limbic system by facing and healing old emotional wounds. Take for example the person who was bitten by a dog and doesn't like them, even though it's been 40 years since they were bitten. They haven't healed that experience and their limbic system will respond to dogs as if they were about to relive that old experience of being bitten. One way to work on these old emotional wounds and put your nervous system in a more relaxed state is through EFT (the Emotional Freedom Technique), it is also known as tapping. EFT immediately starts to shift your nervous system into parasympathetic. When you tap the specific points in EFT your nervous system shifts over into a parasympathetic state. You can also do neural feedback, meditation and practicing gratitude. Pay attention to how often you laugh - if you are laughing you are probably in parasympathetic mode. Another piece of avoiding burn out is macro and micro recovery. In general, the harder you want to drive the harder you need to focus on recovery. If you want to drive your body like a race car then you need a really good pit crew and really high-quality components to put your car back together, or you will crash and burn! There are some supplements you can take to help with this. For the fight, flight or freeze, things like coffee, THC, caffeine, etc would fall under this category. But you can stack parasympathetic supplements with sympathetic supplements to counterbalance their effect. Matt talks about which he likes best and why, plus which essential oil has been shown to increase alpha brain waves. You'll also hear how we both healed ourselves with magnesium and why floating was part of that! It's all here on episode