Review of Feeling Fat, Fuzzy or Frazzled?: A 3-Step Program to: Beat Hormone Havoc, Restore Thyroid, Adrenal, and Reproductive Balance, and Feel Better Fast! (Hardcover)

It's not always easy for thyroid patients -- and our practitioners -- to understand how interrelated our hormones can be, along with their critical impact on health. Specifically, when we have a thyroid condition, the relationship to adrenal problems and our reproductive system and hormones, is critical, but it's so rarely addressed.

This makes Drs. Richard and Karilee Shames' new book, "Feeling Fat, Fuzzy or Frazzled?" particularly useful.

Using their unique "Endo-Type" categorization system, you use questionnaires and self-tests to determine which glands -- your thyroid, adrenals or reproductive glands -- are causing your primary imbalance.

And then, the book helps you restore balance, help rebalance the glands, and ensure that all three types of hormones -- the 3 legs of the "stool" metaphor that the Shames use in the book -- are all equal, and therefore able to support you without tipping over.

The Shames recommend readers find a great practitioner and partner with him or her for your health care. And they dedicate an entire section of book to direct communications with practitioners -- letters you can copy and share with your practitioners or endocrinologists, and will hopefully help you get the care you need.

Ideally, you'll find a great practitioner who can help you implement the program with the guidance of the Shames book.

But if you need to follow a self-guided program, you will find the resources and information -- including options on where to order your own tests, and what supplements and nutrients you may need -- to pursue a self-care program.

And another helpful option is that you can contact Dr. Richard Shames for a phone coaching session to help customize the program to meet your specific needs.

Short-term and longer-term approaches are offered, which is especially useful when you are talking about hormones. You'll have things you can do right away, along with longer-term goals and objectives that will help you maintain improvements in your health.

Concept Summaries and Action Summaries at the end of each chapter help you focus your efforts on those practical actions that can have the greatest impact on your health.

Overall, Drs. Richard and Karilee Shames have achieved the near impossible - a clear, comprehensive, practical and integrated roadmap to restore and rebalance our hormones. I highly recommend the book!

-- From Mary Shomon, Thyroid Patient Advocate and author of "Thyroid Diet" and "Living Well With Hypothyroidism"

Product Description
An expert physician/ nurse team offers a practical, hands-on program to restore thyroid, adrenal, and reproductive balance-and feel better fast.

You're exhausted, and you've gained weight; you feel mentally fuzzy much of the time, and don't feel that you handle day-to-day stress as well as you once did. Worried, you visit the doctor, who orders the typical battery of tests. Two weeks later, you're assured that everything's fine.

Sound familiar? If you're one of the 33 million Americans suffering from hormone-related metabolic problems, the answer is a resounding yes. Feeling Fat, Fuzzy, or Frazzled? is the first book to expose and address the delicate, life-altering balance among the thyroid, adrenal, and reproductive hormones. This multi-gland approach-missing from other hormone-related books-can make the day-to-day difference between feeling awful and feeling good. If left untreated long-term, this imbalance can cause heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, infertility, and severe menopause.

Practical and hands-on, this book offers readers: an innovative, integrated self-care program to identify their thyroid, adrenal, or reproductive-related metabolic disorder (through easy, inexpensive, noninvasive diagnostic tests and questionnaires); a "5-day jumpstart program" to help alleviate symptoms of weight gain, low energy, or frayed nerves fast (through vitamins, minerals, and nutrition); and a long-term plan to achieve optimal health, complete with advice for finding and partnering with the right doctor.

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Review of The Automatic Diet (Hardcover)

"Muscle mass is the body's most ancient furnace." ~Charles Stuart Platkin

Charles Stuart Platkin's "Breaking the Pattern" helped me to analyze my self-sabotaging behaviors and again in The Automatic Diet, he presents strategies for overcoming negative patterns in eating.

The Automatic Diet presents ideas for promoting overall health, controlling weight and enhancing your self-esteem. Charles Stuart Platkin unveils misconceptions about weight control and shows you how to have long-term success.

The Diet Detective takes you through your eating behaviors and you can decide if you want to include behavior modification strategies to your everyday diet. Through self-analysis you start to break negative patterns and destructive eating tendencies. He explains how most diets deliver temporary results and most people gain the weight back. How is this diet different?

This is not a diet where you have to give up chocolate (Who could give up Leonidas Belgium chocolates?) or your favorite foods. What the author seeks to encourage is a healthier lifestyle. Since most diets don't bring the results we are looking for, Charles Stuart Platkin advises a lifestyle change. In most cases, he doesn't take away foods like popcorn and carrots; he shows you the best choice. There are a few lists of "items you ought to think about throwing out." These include the usual suspects - sugar, soda, ice cream. I was a little shocked to learn about the calories in the Starbucks Classic Coffee Cake.

I still think in moderation, you can handle a little ice cream, although I must say I feel terrible if I eat too much sugar in a day and it can produce the feeling of chronic fatigue for 24 hours. The author recommends good protein sources, a good variety of vegetables and healthy starch choices.

I am happy to see that another author is talking about the muscle mass issue, because this could help many dieters over the initial hurdles of initial weight gain when you start to exercise. The author also explains why a drastic reduction in calories triggers the body's famine-survival mechanism. This of course slows down your metabolism.

There are also ideas about "excuse busters" and self-talk is definitely your friend or enemy. My most recent self-talk to increase my exercise includes telling myself how good I'm going to feel after I exercise and eat my fruits and vegetables. Being proactive and buying clothes that are too small also seems to be good motivation. I also threw out any clothes that are too big for me, so I simply will have nothing to wear if I don't exercise.

Another idea is not buying anything that you know you should not be eating and buying lots of things you know you should be eating. Then, when you are home and hungry, you make better choices. Doing Yoga also seems to help because it generally puts you in a much calmer state of mind and you feel more in control of your choices.

If you are heading towards 40, then you may also want to read The Metabolic Plan to learn about amazing supplements and how you can stop the aging process, increase muscle mass and feel younger each year.

~The Rebecca Review




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