Getting your Hormones and Life Back with Dr. Anna Cabeca

Getting your Hormones and Life Back

Getting your Hormones and Life Back with Dr. Anna Cabeca

Dr. Trevor Cates: Welcome to The Spa Dr. Podcast. I am Dr. Trevor Cates. On today’s podcast we are covering how to help balance your hormones naturally so you can overcome symptoms and get your life back. My guest is Dr. Anna Cabeca. She is a triple board certified physician and hormone expert who was diagnosed with early menopause at age 38. Devastated by this she set out on a personal wellness journey to reverse her menopause symptoms which resulted in getting her health back and delivering a healthy baby girl at the age of 41. After experiencing her own health successes, Dr. Cabeca began counseling others and ultimately changing the lives of thousands of women around the world. She is author of the Hormone Fix and Keto Green 16. These books, along with her other empowering transformation programs have helped women of all ages become themselves again. Her work has been featured in major media including NBC, CBS, ABC, people.com and NPR. Dr. Cabeca is back on The Spa Dr. Podcast to share with us how hormones impact our memory, mood, sleep, and much more and she explains ways we can use diet, including intermittent fasting and ketosis. To help balance hormones and optimize health and vitality. So please enjoy this interview.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Anna, it is so great to have you back on The Spa Dr. Podcast. Welcome.

Dr. Anna Cabeca: It is always a pleasure to be here with you, Trevor. Thanks for having me back.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Yes, of course. So we are talking about a hot topic, which is hormones, always a popular topic with The Spa Dr. Community. We always want to know what we can do to balance our hormones, optimize our hormones. And I think that sometimes people think, okay, we are just going to do bioidentical hormones or hormone replacement therapy, to fix hormones, especially as they decline with age. There is so much more we can do to support the body and balancing hormones. So that is why I wanted to have you back on to talk about this.

Dr. Anna Cabeca: It is such an important topic, like how do some people sail through and others have longer and more difficulty during this transition time and are actually in the post-menopause and how it takes more than hormones to fix our hormones. That is so true. If that was not the case, everyone on thyroid meds would be thin. But we know that’s not the case. So we really have to look at what are the therapeutic ways that we can improve our transition through menopause and certainly maintain the highest quality of life, the best immune system. The strength and resilience that we need at every age, especially as we get older so that we can live that quality of life that we have worked so hard for.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Absolutely. And misbelief that we have to suffer and struggle as we age and we have to feel tired or be overweight, or just struggle with all these things. It is just not true. There is so much we can do to optimize our health so that we can age gracefully and enjoy the quality of life you are talking about. So what are some of the things that you think are really fundamental to help balance hormones?

Dr. Anna Cabeca: There are several factors that are combined into what I call my Keto Green Way of doing things. The first thing is when we understand that our hormones are shifting in different ways at different times as we are aging, and which hormones are decreasing, like our reproductive hormones and what hormones are increasing, like our stress and inflammatory hormones.

When we understand that we have to kind of turn the tide and do dietary and lifestyle changes that make a difference and then supplement with hormones so that we raise the baseline. We fill the gaps in our hormonal profile and that makes a big difference in the quality of life as we get older. Trevor, can I share a slide with you so I can just show you what is happening better than I can tell you what is happening and I think it does make a difference. As you are listening to this, one of the key factors that is happening, especially as women are transitioning, one of the first hormones to decline is progesterone. Progesterone is a neuroprotective hormone. It is important for our nervous system, for our brain, for our moods, for relaxation, for our bone, our breast, our sexuality.

This is a really important hormone and in women we rely on the production of progesterone from the ovaries primarily. As we get older and our variant function declines naturally over time, our progesterone level starts to sharply decline. Estrogen follows this, declining with some swings in estrogen, which also creates more of the hormonal shifts and much of the mood swings, et cetera, that we can experience. Hot flashes, night sweats, DEHA starts to peak in our twenties and then starts to decline in our late twenties to early thirties. Testosterone as well starts to decline with the decrease in production of progesterone.

But what is really fascinating, and this is the point I wanted to make, as we are going into this hormonal shift, the symptoms that we experience are the gynecologic symptoms, like irregular cycles, breakthrough bleeding, heavier than normal periods, as well as sometimes symptomatic fibroids and ovarian cysts. But it is also the neurologic symptoms, PMS, mood swings, anxiety, difficulty in sleeping and the weight gain, as well as vaginal dryness, decrease in libido and we are experiencing brain fog, loss of mental clarity and bone loss as well. And what I discovered through my own journey was that the brain fog and the irritability and the mood swings, not to mention the weight gain was absolutely unacceptable.

Dr. Anna Cabeca: And I had been living a very high quality life. But certainly, this transition left me having the symptoms, like my perfect memory was maybe 10% of what it used to be. And I didn’t understand that. But I knew the weight gain was unacceptable. So that is where I really shifted to Keto and then optimize Keto by making Keto Green or Keto alkaline as I initially called it. Getting the alkaline nutrition and lifestyle factors in place because what was happening? Why was I getting that brain fog? Why are so many women getting this brain fog and the loss of mental clarity oftentimes as we age.

Well, the big part here is that glucose metabolism in the brain is an estrogen dependent phenomenon. So as we are losing progesterone a precursor hormone to estrogen and estrogen levels start to decline as well. We have an increase in symptoms because our brain is basically starving and if glucose is a primary fuel in our brain, then we have to shift to using something else. And that is where shifting to ketones becomes really important. Ketones is fuel, but getting into ketosis the right way.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Okay, great. So can you explain to everybody what ketones are, what ketosis is?

Dr. Anna Cabeca: Yes. Ketones are essentially energy molecules from fat, just like glucose is an energy source for our body. I would say glucose is to gasoline as ketones are to jet fuel. There is a difference in energy and glucose we absolutely have circulating throughout our body at all times more after a meal. Especially if there was a high carbohydrate meal, we can have peaks and valleys in glucose as an energy field, but ketones are derived from fat, either fat we are ingesting or our fat stores. And frankly we want to use our fat stores as much as possible. Especially if we have got extra fat stores, which seems like I always do.

I want to use my own fat stores to create those ketones as the fuel source. And that is how it really shifted to have higher brain clarity. Getting into ketosis is getting into that fat burning state, shifting away from using predominantly glucose metabolism from carbohydrates and the benefits of ketosis we have known for over a hundred years that it benefits individuals with seizure disorders and Parkinson’s disease. And this is where a lot of those studies initially stemmed from. But over the last decade, it really revived in interest as we looked at the shocking increase in Alzheimer’s and dementia and being able to shift to ketosis in those clients and seeing an improvement as well.

Dr. Anna Cabeca: This is the area that is really fascinating because there are many ways we can go Keto, in other words, getting into the fat burning state. But there are ways to do it healthfully and ways that can actually hurt us in the long run, especially women.

Dr. Trevor Cates: What are some of the things that make the difference to do it healthy versus not healthy?

Dr. Anna Cabeca: I have to share my experiences, how I came up with my entire Keto Green program and when I hit age 48, I was struggling. I experienced what my patients and your patients come in to tell us about, they would say, Dr. Anna, I am gaining five, 10 20 pounds overnight and I am not doing anything different. And I would be like, yeah, sure, you’re not. Surely you are doing something different. And lo and behold, God will make me humble. I gained 20 pounds, in what it felt like overnight. And honestly, I had not been doing anything different.

So I knew, because I had been well over 240 pounds at some point, and I kept 80 pounds off for nearly a decade. And then the weight gain started climbing back up. So I was panicked, because who knew when it would stop. I might be over 300 pounds when that weight gain stopped, not to mention I was irritable. I was a single mom and dad to my kids, a child in elementary, a child in middle school, a child in high school. It was a really hectic and stressful time of my life. And I had retired from my clinic so I could take care of my kids predominantly at that point of my life. And so this waking was terrifying. I went strictly to keto and I put patients who have had seizures or Parkinson’s in my practice on keto before. And I had also used a very similar approach to my clients with Candida or systemic candidiasis.

I have been familiar with that and I recall as I was experiencing what I call going Keto crazy because I knew not to get Keto flu, but I was experiencing Keto crazy. I hit a wall so to speak. I was irritable, agitated, and that is not a good place to be as a mom of teenagers for sure. We don’t want to be that way. I needed to understand why, so I did what I have my clients do. Check urine, pH and ketones. I started checking my urine pH and I was as acidic as the test paper red. So who knows exactly how acidic my urine was. And I consider urine pH testing a vital sign, just like our weight on the scale, and for blood pressure, just like our pulse.

It is a vital sign telling us how we’re interacting with our world, nutrition and environment. And it really is a barometer in so many ways. But I was acidic so no wonder I was feeling inflamed and on edge. So I shifted to get more alkaline foods in my diet. So doubling up on beet greens and kale and collards, and encouraging more low carbohydrate, alkalinizing, dark leafy vegetables as well as cruciferous vegetables into my diet in a way that really made sense. And doing ketosis through intermittent fasting, no more snacking and really increasing the insulin sensitivity so my body could shift into ketosis quicker.

Dr. Anna Cabeca: It was hard initially. It took me three to five days to get into ketosis, but getting alkaline was a priority. And when I did that, the combination of getting both a urine pH seven 7.5 or higher and in ketosis at the same time, it was like a light bulb went off. I had mental clarity, my memory returned. I experienced what is talked about in the Bible, the peace that surpasses all understanding like nothing in my external world had changed but yet I was calm, centered, peaceful and within a few weeks the weight had all fallen back off.

That just opened my eyes because I had been working with menopausal hormonal patients for decades. So I started incorporating this in my most difficult clients. I know you have some too, that are over 50 and no matter what we do, we can’t move the needle. I put them in what I called my keto-alkaline plan. Now it is Keto to Green, and honestly within eight weeks a hundred percent of them had success and not just in weight loss but in mental clarity and just a sense of enjoyment in life and no more aches and pains. We check symptom scores and we have seen as much as 90 to 100% decrease in symptom scores and individuals on average. And so that is really beautiful. In my new book coming out, Keto Green 16, I made a 16 day condensed, kick-butt program to really help us get there as quickly as possible.

Dr. Trevor Cates: That is amazing. Thank you for sharing your personal story in this. I know a lot of times if we don’t experience it ourselves, it is hard for us to know what our patients are going through. Thank you for sharing and for being willing to adjust the way that you work with your patients to realize what’s best for them too. Tell us more about intermittent fasting and how that plays into this. Because I know it is really popular right now to talk about fasting and intermittent fasting and there is a lot of confusion or questions about how exactly this should be done. So how do you incorporate that?

Dr. Anna Cabeca: What I know is that research has shown that even if we have 12 and a half to 13 hours between dinner and breakfast, the study was published in 2016 that looked at clients with recurrent breast cancer. When they had fasted 4.5 to 13 hours, they had significantly reduced the rate of recurrent breast cancer. Breast cancer clients were tested and inventoried and if they were intermittent fasters just even for that 12 and a half to 13 hours, their risk of recurrence was significantly less. That is just a beautiful finding. There are many reasons for that.

One, it creates insulin sensitivity, so we become more insulin sensitive, which decreases inflammation in our body, decreases circulating glucose and certainly improves our cardiovascular panel and inflammatory markers all the way around. So insulin sensitivity is critical. As physicians, this is something every patient knows. If we have asked you as a doctor, and said, okay, go get fasting blood work in the morning at least 12 hours between dinner and breakfast. Why 12 hours? Because honestly, it takes that long to really get to your baseline. It is not two hours, not four hours. It is 12 hours. And from wearing a continuous blood sugar monitor, sometimes clients will find that maybe it is even longer for them, depending on how insulin resistant they are.

It can be even longer to get to a steady state baseline level of glucose, which is fascinating. So with my program, I do 16 hours. I push it up to 16 hours. I start at 12, move to 13, go up, don’t just cold Turkey into it. Like every other exercise, it takes time. Muscles need to be encouraged and fasting is a muscle. Think of it as a muscle that you are exercising. So increasing the duration in Keto Green 16, to 16 hours can really make a difference. It turns on autophagy. The longer we fast, the more likely we are to turn on a system called autophagy, which is our body’s own caretaking system. Get rid of the bad, remove the old and restore the new to help regenerate our own self health.

That is where intermittent fasting comes through. My program is different Trevor, because it is not just about the intermittent fasting itself, it is about no snacking. So I don’t believe in these speeding windows, at least not for women. Men have 10 times as much testosterone as women, but we need to maintain insulin sensitivity to have higher quality of life. We have almost 2.6 times the risk of men. And we will definitely double the risk of men for Alzheimer’s. So the more insulin sensitive we can become, drop our hemoglobin A1C closer to five the lower risk we are going to have for Alzheimer’s.

We need to do everything as proactively as possible to do that. And not to mention hot flashes will absolutely go away. So that is an added bonus. That is the reason why I encourage people to alkalinize first thing in the morning when you get up. Do a quick shot of an alkaline, a tall glass of alkaline water and then break fast. If we were doing a 16 hour, eat by six, definitely by 7:00 PM in the evening break fast between 10 and 11:00 AM and let that be your lunch, let that be your healthy meal. You are breaking fast with healthy fats, fiber and quality protein. Then wait until dinner to eat another Keto green meal and then go over that.

In my program we actually created a Keto calculator. So individuals can take notes and check there and see what your results are. It is a Keto calculator. Go to drannacabeca.com and you will have a link for it. It is where you can measure out your macros based on your size, based on your activity level and whether you want to lose, gain or maintain rate. It will show you a Keto green day. So what does that look like for you on Keto green day? How do you alkalinize in the morning? How do you break fast, what would a Keto green meal look like for you based on your macros and caloric needs to a degree. And it gives you a visual of what that looks like. I am a visual person so I wanted to create these bonuses to help people see how easy it is to live Keto green and get that visual so we can incorporate it into our life.

Dr. Trevor Cates: That is nice. And it sounds like it is a way to kind of help adjust and tweak it for your own needs. Is that true?

Dr. Anna Cabeca: Yes, absolutely.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Great. You mentioned hemoglobin A1C. For people who are not familiar with what that is. Can you explain that and is it something you think everyone should be tested for? And if so, how often?

Dr. Anna Cabeca: Yeah, I absolutely think it is one of those markers we all need to watch. That is one of my primary things I want people to know. I like them to know that number, like their weight on the scale. I want them to know their hemoglobin A1C. It really doesn’t matter how old you are, it is a good idea to get it. Certainly if we are over 30 we should at least start looking at it and depending on what the number is, monitor it regularly. Where we want to see that number as close to 5.0. What we say in medicine, if it is six to seven, you are prediabetic. Seven is diabetic.

By then it is way too late. You have got so much to reverse. You still will reverse it. I have seen clients with hemoglobin A1C of six go down to 5.4 in as little as one month. That is soon to check, but she is a physician and she was monitoring regularly and she had been at 6.0 for 10 years despite doing everything she could do exercise. And so within one month going Keto green, she shifted it from six to 5.4. I mean that is a huge difference for anyone listening to move it. 0.1 percentage point is a huge improvement. So we know that we certainly want to get it below 5.3 so as close to 5.0 as possible. But definitely below 5.3. What the research shows is that when we are above 5.3 every point above 5.3 5.4 or 5.5 et cetera increases our risk of Alzheimer’s exponentially. That is really an eye opener because this is something that we do have so much control over.

Dr. Trevor Cates: And so hemoglobin A1C for people who aren’t familiar with that, it is your blood sugar over a period of time rather than just getting like a fasting blood sugar that just tells you that moment in time when your blood blood is drawn. But hemoglobin A1C gives us an idea of how it is over a period of time. And that is what, about a month?

Dr. Anna Cabeca: Typically two months. So to see a change in one month was a surprise.

Dr. Trevor Cates: I was surprised to hear you say that. Interesting because I guess even in two months you could even perhaps change it within a month.

Dr. Anna Cabeca: Yes, and I think of what you said, about the frequency of testing. If we are above 5.3 I think we really want to look certainly every three months so we can see that number go down. We want to see that improvement again. I have had clients in their eighties and we can see improvements in that number and it does make a difference.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Okay, great. That is a really important one. Let’s talk about the immune system for a little bit. There has been so much concern about the Coronavirus, and of course just in general we want to keep our immune system strong no matter what. Whether it is a new virus or it is the typical flu that is coming through. As we get older, we are also at higher risk for complications associated with any kind of infection. We want to keep our immune system strong and people may not realize the connection between our hormones and our immune system. Can you shed some light on that?

Dr. Anna Cabeca: Yes, definitely. Every single one of our hormones has a role in our immune system. Certain ones that can build it up and others that can tear it down. Progesterone, one of our neuroendocrine hormones, this neuroprotective hormone, really helps support our immunity and it makes a really big difference. When we are stressed, we deplete progesterone and as we age and especially women, it naturally declines. This is where I am a really big fan of exogenous progesterone and even pregnenolone support is something that I use in my patients and it can make a big difference also for our immune system. DHEA is another very important hormone.

We know that sounds like a hormone of resilience. It is also taken down by stress. It is a hormone produced by our adrenal glands and also testes in men and ovaries in women, but it is a marker of resilience. So checking our hormone levels as we get older is important. And doing the things naturally we can to improve our body’s natural production. I address this in my book because our nutrition, the way we nourish our body and our lifestyle impacts that. Because, like we talked about a hemoglobin A1C, the more insulin resistant we get, the higher hemoglobin A1C gets. Just as we age, insulin starts to creep up anyway.

Insulin interacts with testosterone, with progesterone, with cortisol in so many ways it can affect our immune system and bring us down. It tears us down because it is a life saving hormone. Same with cortisol. It is a catabolic hormone, it breaks us down. It is a life saving hormone. We need it, but we have to bump out of the lifestyles and the dietary habits that increase or exacerbate in cortisol. And that is critical. We need to do things to boost our immune system, create more insulin sensitivity, like going Keto green to balance cortisol. Add the alkaline into your system, test your urine pH, don’t guess, because that makes a difference. So you are balancing cortisol. That is all going to boost our immunity because when we need it, when we are attacked by a virus, we are attacked by bacteria. Our immune system needs to respond.

If it is on call all the time, our soldiers get tired. That’s just the way it is. And sugar also puts our immune soldiers in a comatose state, so to speak, for a time period, even after a can of soda. We can’t risk that anymore. We have to keep a strong guard, so to speak, in our immune system. So optimize our body’s natural production of our resilient, beneficial and neuroprotective hormones, progesterone, DHEA, testosterone, and create an optimization of insulin. So creating a body that is more insulin sensitive. In other words, it responds very quickly to glucose, and tucks it away versus insulin resistant where we need higher and higher levels of insulin to do the same thing. We don’t need that. And then also creating a lifestyle through nutrition and meditation, getting out in nature. Watching sunrises and sunsets, getting a good night’s sleep. I mean all these factors that help our bodies, circadian rhythm and cortisol and that way we have a stronger immune system. You talk all the time about herbals and nutrients that can help promote a healthy adrenal status and immune system as well.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Yes, thank you for talking about that. I think it is so important for us to be thinking about all the ways that we can support our immune system. Certainly having that be a part of it. Tell everybody where they can find your book and learn more about you.

Dr. Anna Cabeca: Thank you. At my website, dranna.com

Dr. Trevor Cates: Thanks so much for coming on today and sharing your valuable information. Stay healthy and we will have to have you back on again sometime.

Dr. Anna Cabeca: Thank you Trevor. Great to see you again. Thank y’all.

Dr. Trevor Cates: I hope you enjoyed this interview today with Dr. Anna Cabeca. To learn more about her you can go to TheSpaDr.com. Go to the podcast page with her interview and you will find all the information and links there, and while you are there at TheSpaDr.com, I invite you to join the spa doctor community so you don’t miss any of our upcoming shows and information. Also, if you haven’t taken the skin quiz, I invite you to do so at theskinquiz.com to find out what information your skin might be trying to tell you about your health and what you can do about it. Just go to theskinquiz.com. Also I invite you to join us on social media. The Spa Dr. Is on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest. You can enjoy the conversation there and I will see you next time on The Spa Dr. Podcast.