Magnesium For Your Shit Stress

Many clients find me after reaching the end of their rope with meaningless diagnosis (ahem, IBS, ahem), medications, dietary changes, psychics, “healers”….you name it. It’s most rewarding for me to work with new clients who’ve just about exhausted all avenues because they ultimately come to the truth: everyone (especially thyself) is full of shit!

Digging through my blog, you will learn that constipation and gas literally stir up all sorts of shit in your body. Seemingly unrelated symptoms like back pain, belly fat, heartburn, acid reflux, migraines and even fatigue can all be attributed to system backup. One of the most underrated causes of bloating and constipation that is constantly dismissed by doctors and patients alike is stress. It is widely accepted that many degenerative diseases and gastrointestinal distress are caused by stress.

For the most part, life would be boring without its stresses. However, many of my clients (and I assume the general population here in the tri-state area) are burdened daily by the demands of their high-pressure jobs coupled by those of their families. I’ve lived the desk life, so I can empathize. But I was less of the driven type and more of the is-it-five-o-clock-yet? type and I’m not really into the having kids thing, so perhaps it suffices to say my empathy is limited. That said, I’m not disqualified from giving you the following advice based not only on patterns I’ve observed in my clients, but on hard scientific Doody Free Girl evidence.

Do not eat at your desk when you are stressed. If there was a belligerent drunk knocking down the front door of your apartment, your heart rate would rise, adrenaline and cortisol would course through your system and you would instinctively do whatever you could to protect you and your cat. You wouldn’t be able to (nor want to) do all of this while munching on Jackson’s Honest salt and vinegar potato chips. In fact, you would probably vomit. The same thing happens when you eat under pressure at your desk (minus the drunk boyfriend and the cat). Your body will reject the food from a nutrient perspective. Scientists have discovered that the fat tissue around your midsection is active and is actually a member of your endocrine system, holding on to fat as future energy stores. This happens even more so when you’re stressed because your body is less likely to respond to the hormone leptin, which signals when the body is full. Furthermore, your body is in no position to receive nutrients, resulting in knots, bloating and constipation.

So resist any temptation to eat at the desk because it is most likely unwarranted. You are stressed and looking for something to make your boss go away. You are not starving for anything other than magnesium. So reach for a Metagenics MetaRelax beverage instead of a piece of the third office birthday cake this week that tastes like shit anyway.  MetaRelax is a delicious citrus powder supplement sweetened with only stevia that contains 150mg of magnesium, B6, B12, folate and taurine. It is a vegan formula designed to cause the mysterious disappearance of stress, depression, anxiety, constipation and your annoying boss. Magnesium has been proven to aid in 600 enzymatic processes in the body, lower the risk of heart disease, increase calcium absorbency while preventing vascular calcification, lower depression and anxiety, and even move your bowels. I am so excited about this product because I have a hard time swallowing chalky magnesium pills and now I look forward to taking this critical mineral everyday. For those who do not have any issues swallowing pills, Metagenics makes an excellent supplement called Bone Builder, a ratio-balanced blend of magnesium and calcium.

 

magnesium for stress and anxiety relief

 

 

 

Happy MLK Day 2017!!!

Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day! Martin Luther King Jr. embodied the true spirit God intended here on Earth. A peaceful protester with a humble righteousness that is not only admirable, but penetrable even 50 years after his passing.

I’ve done a shit job of making and keeping a New Years Resolution this year, but every time I read this MLK quote, I instantly feel like an inferior human being and then resolve to make his words my daily resolution. For anyone who can relate, I’ll be open all day on Monday to purge you of your old ways.

God Bless!

A Tight Squeeze

Yesterday I was wearing these “cool” new yoga leggings, but had to take them off in the middle of the day to work pant-less because they were giving me gas. Not so fucking cool.

I felt the need to write this post because almost instantaneously, my gas went away. Comfort (and especially bowel health) should not be compromised to squeeze into the latest trend, especially when it comes to workout clothing. Clothing is meant to accommodate and cover your body, not squeeze you so tight you have zero room to even pass gas.

Did you know the average person passes a balloon’s worth of gas each day? (Thank you @IFuckingLoveScience). Now imagine if you were unable to pass any gas and how uncomfortable you would generally feel. Gas can make you feel like you’re having a heart attack, give you heartburn, give you back pain and it can make you burp like a trucker – there’s nothing wrong with burping to alleviate the gas pressure, but if you’re burping because you’re majorly backed up, then your fumes probably smell like shit.

You fart a balloon's worth of gas a day

I know a lot of women who are avid Spanx consumers. I find it hard to believe that wearing Spanx on the regular won’t fuck you up in the long run. Dr. Holly of CBS News declares that shapewear is the new girdle, causing all sorts of issues from rib compression to nerve compression, abdominal distention and even blood clotting.  I have always found regular tights to give me gas, so I wouldn’t even dream of spending all day in Spanx. Anything that will hold your stomach in all day, while keeping you from farting is bound to contribute to some major internal gas pressure that will ultimately result in bowel distention. But at least no one will notice because Spanx will be containing your bloated ass…right?!

Rather than continue this torture, I believe the best clothing are stylish, bloat-friendly clothing. I’ve created Pinterest boards for both men and women on what I consider timeless, bloat-friendly fashion. You can now let it all hang out without feeling like a total slob. I will also be creating a board for workout clothing because your midsection should feel sore from your workout, not from your workout clothes.

Just Add Vinegar.

Growing up, my mother cleaned the entire house every single weekend. I would wake up to the sound of the annoying vacuum cleaner and the pungent smell of vinegar, Clorox bleach and/or Windex. What I would give now to wake up to someone magically cleaning up after me on autopilot week in, week out! Instead, this would start my weekend in a sour mood because I couldn’t hear the TV or Rage Against the Machine (AKA the Good Mother) and the house ironically smelled like shit to me.

I’ve always thought that vinegar smelled like complete ass. I would experience overwhelming disgust when my mother would gleefully diffuse the house with vinegar through the coffee machine. It only took me 35 years to appreciate the cleaning power of this amazingly edible detergent. I just finished cleaning the entire Doody Free Girl studio with distilled white vinegar and am overcome with the same cleaning joy that plagues my mother each week, even though my skin smells like it’s been fermenting in pickle brine. None of that matters when my floors look brighter than ever! White distilled vinegar has  a PH of 2.4, allowing it to easily dissolve all of your nasties. Before using it to clean your entire life, make sure to research thoroughly the surface you plan to use it on because apparently, it is so strong it can actually dissolve granite surfaces. It also makes a great fabric softener (use just 1/4 cup), but I’ve also heard that this can dissolve the hoses and rubber seals of the machine, so please use some discretion.

Using white distilled vinegar is a superior alternative to all of the chemical-laden products on the market and even those marketed as “natural.” Nothing is more natural and non-toxic for your house and your innards than distilled white vinegar. The chemicals found in your average household cleaner can actually affect your endocrine system when inhaled and the amount of anti-bacterial properties can have a devastating antibiotic effect on your home’s probiotics. Just like our bodies, the less good bacteria -or probiotics- that reside in our home, the less immune we are to disease and “superbugs.” 

While I love distilled white vinegar for cleaning, for regular ingestion, I highly recommend using raw Apple Cider Vinegar. For those who’ve been following me for a while, you know how much I love ACV. Apple cider vinegar is the ultimate home remedy for just about anything, the most important being acid reflux and gas. Many times, acid reflux is actually a result of an underproduction (not overproduction as commonly assumed) of stomach acid that is pushed upward due to the gas in the intestinal tract. Drinking a teaspoon of raw ACV diluted in a cup of water at least fifteen minutes before a meal aids tremendously in digestion. It is also a great tonic to have first thing in the morning to round out your body’s overnight cleansing fast.

 

 

Happy Holidays!!!

Hanukkah and Christmas fall on the same day/week this year. I will be offering Confession and Mikveh to anyone interested. Book your colonic appointments today!

 

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Crap, I Forgot My Probiotics!!

I knew I was going to forget my probiotics the second I started packing. I’m going on a cruise today for my cousin’s wedding and I just hope the boat does not come down with a case of dysentery.Taking probiotics while traveling is critical in combatting all of the new bugs you’ll encounter, so wish me luck!

Please note that I will be away through Monday, December 12th, so I won’t have access to the Interwebs. If you need to schedule an appointment, please make book online and I will answer any questions when I return! And don’t forget your probiotics when you travel. Purchase Metagenics probiotics here.

iPoo on Calling Exboyfriends

I apologize for any texts/calls I may have missed over the weekend. It is very unlike me to not respond within a few hours of receiving a message without good reason. I got my phone back this weekend, but not without a two hour visit to Verizon Wireless and two hours of quality phone time with Apple. At least they give you a choice of music while you hold for a minimum of ten minutes at a time. Their customer service was great… the wait not so much.

The bottom line is I think the new IOS has a serious flaw that resulted in me getting locked out of my phone. I turned my phone off on Friday because it was running slower than usual (I had an iPhone 5c that was slow as shit and I know my Bitmoji app didn’t help matters). When I turned it back on, I was welcomed with an activation screen asking me to enter my exboyfriend’s apple ID and password. This made me completely livid because he has never had anything to do with my cell phone and isn’t exactly the hacker-type, not to mention we don’t even speak! Over three years ago, he borrowed an iPad my brother had gifted me that was never even linked to my account. I only recently activated that iPad and linked it to my account, which required entering my exboyfriend’s Apple ID password in order to unlock it. This required calling my ex, having him create a new Apple ID password since he forgot it (he only recently got an iPhone), engage him in small talk while we wait for him to graciously receive the password recovery email and then shoot myself in the face for forcing the both of us to endure said awkward exchange.

So imagine my delight on Friday when I turned my cell phone on only to encounter that familiar activation screen asking for my exboyfriend’s apple ID password! Apparently, I am destined to be forever haunted by the Macintosh of exboyfriends past. I definitely did NOT want to ask my ex for any more favors (my ego can only take so much bruising!). In a state of panic, I rushed to Verizon as soon as I could after my clients on Saturday. I ended up spending a few hours there, half of which were spent on the phone with Apple. The good news is I can get access to my phone with proof of purchase, but this could take up to a week after submitting the receipt. Until I resolve this issue with Apple, I won’t have access to old photos and text messages. So I got a new phone (the iPhone 7 camera is the shit!) and created a new cloud to ensure this never happen again. I never really use the cloud because frankly, I don’t get the point and I don’t want my 1,768 photos on every single one of my devices since I probably don’t even want about 1,700 of them! But apparently, I used the cloud sparingly enough that my contacts were shared on my iPad, so I was able to sync my contacts from my iPad using the Verizon Content Transfer app. Thank God!

On Sunday, I proved my IOS hypothesis to be correct when I upgraded the IOS system on an old iPad (not the one my ex borrowed) and I received the same fucking activation screen asking for his password. Just like my phone, he never had anything to do with this iPad. So I had to get on the phone with Apple once again and submit proof of purchase. Now we wait…

I forgot to mention that throughout this entire debacle, I’ve sent my exboyfriend a Facebook friend request, a five page message on both Facebook messenger and text message, and left him a long-winded voicemail explaining this entire situation.

He has not responded. iLose.

 

baby on phone
www.niceshirtbaby.com

 

Come Celebrate Brown Friday!

This Friday is the Second Annual Brown Friday Celebration. In honor of my clients, I suppress the urge to indulge in retail therapy in order to offer a post-Thanksgiving cathartic experience to all. I’m not promoting binging and purging, but Thanksgiving is filled with lots of love and in many families, love is also known as force-feeding. So there’s no need to blame your family for feeling like shit the next day, just get it out with a good ‘ol anal cleansing. Book your colonic appointment, yo!

 

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Dry Brush The Bloat Away!

Our skin is full of shit and I encourage you to dry brush everyday because it takes less than five minutes to make your skin feel so fresh and so clean, you may not even need to shower! Showers are boring anyway. Dry brushing improves not just the quality of your skin (even known to reduce cellulite!), but the quality of your body’s drainage.

Ever since reading The Raw Food Detox Diet by Natalia Rose, my original inspiration for everything detox, I have dry brushed everyday before getting in the shower (I do shower sometimes, but prefer the shower bidet). Dry brushing stimulates the lymphatic system, which is responsible for removing cellular waste and debris from body tissues. Lymph nodes are spread throughout the body with heavy concentration around the neck, armpits and groin area and serve as sites for immunity cells, which assist our immune system in filtering out cancer cells and foreign substances. The lymphatic system needs a lot of encouragement to assist in these processes because it does not have its own heartbeat pumping these fluids out. Dry brushing is the easiest activity to incorporate into your daily life to help drain your lymph. Dry brushing has even been associated with alleviating bloat because it encourages the lymphatic system to drain excess water and toxins, improving digestion.

Lymphatic drainage is so powerful that it is employed at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. One of my favorite clients owns a popular massage spot, Knead, in Downtown Jersey City. Her knowledge of the body is impressive and she was trained/certified at Memorial Sloan Kettering in lymphatic drainage massage. I believe she is the only one with such credentials in the entire state of NJ! I always assumed that every kind of massage assists in lymph drainage, but I stand corrected. Deep tissue massage actually has the opposite effect on lymph. While it helps break up crystallized lactic acid in the muscles and soften scar tissue, it cuts off lymph drainage. Lymph drainage massage is more like gentle tickling. Sign me up!

So while it may seem like dry brushing ain’t doing shit, trust that it is actually assisting one of your immune system’s most important functions. Brush your entire body, with special concentration around your pits, neck, stomach and groin area. Make sure to brush in the direction of your heart, which is best for circulation. You can find my favorite Yerba Prima Tampico dry brush at any health food store.

I Don’t Have Time For Weak Ass Shit!

Last week I felt like utter shit. My sinuses were congested in an allergy-kind-of-way and I was chronically tired. It was no mystery to me. I know I’ve been eating a whole bunch of crap (lots of soy, wheat, fried foods and too much wine). You see… if you eat like shit, you feel like shit. And if you don’t take big shits, you feel even shittier (Damn, I just realized I’m a sage).

One of my New Years Resolutions was to stop eating meat and that just segued into eventually becoming vegan again with the exception of some honey and wearing my old leather. In a past life, I was a raw vegan for about two years, which propelled me into the alternative health world and then into insanity. After becoming completely orthorexic (unhealthily obsessed with clean eating), I finally admitted I had a problem and needed to chill the fuck out. So I transitioned back to eating cooked vegan foods, then pescatarianism, then vegetarianism, then straight up carnivorism and finally constipationism. So I threw this journey in reverse and have arrived back at veganism (not raw veganism) because videos like this really strike a chord with me and keep me from being a “weak ass motherfucker”:

 

 

But eating too many nasty tofucken-like dishes has been slowing me down and proving to be just as constipating as its meat counterparts. Plus who knows what’s in that shit?

For those following, you know I wanted to do another one of Andreas Moritz’s Liver & Gallbladder Cleanse early November. I started my Liver Cleanse on Monday and just completed it today. For the first time, I released no stones in the toilet unlike past cleanses. I guess this disproves the theory that the stones released on the seventh day are, in fact, gallstones and not coagulated olive oil. I’m feeling like a better version of myself, thanks be to God.

So my takeaway from both my alternative health journey that started about ten years ago and my entire liver cleansing journey that started just two years ago as my New Years Resolution in 2015 is that no diet will make anyone perfect. Finding a lifestyle that incorporates a mostly plant-based diet that is kind to your liver will benefit you, your digestive tract, your karma and the environment. And having this knowledge is empowering for those times you just feel like fucking shit.

You can find instructions for the Liver Cleanse here and follow my journey under the Liver and Gallbladder Cleanse category on the left side of the screen. And you can book your Liver Cleanse here.