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Transcript

  • 02:09 About Dr. Jen Landa
  • 12:10 Why Are Women Crashing and Losing their Spark?
  • 16:02 Hormones and Your Drive, Mood, Energy and Weight
  • 21:51 The CRASH Stressors
  • 25:26 Five Tips for Protecting Your Hormones
  • 42:57 Improving Libido
  • 46:08 The Most Pressing Health Issue in the World Today: Processed Foods

Wendy Myers: Hello! Welcome to the Live to 110 Podcast. My name is Wendy Myers. You can find me at myersdetox.com. Be sure to check out the brand new MineralPower.com. That site is going up pretty soon. Mineral Power is my healing and detox program that I used to heal my own health and that I use to detox clients and reverse their health symptoms and diseases.

Today, we have Jen Landa on the podcast. She’s going to be talking about how to rewire your desire and how to get your libido back, get your mojo back. I know a lot of women, including myself at one time, really struggled with their libido and wonder how on earth are they going to be able to ignite their libido so that they can be the woman that they want to be in their relationship and desire their partners, et cetera, et cetera. So, we’re going to be talking about all the tips and tricks to how to increase your libido on the show today.

Please keep in mind that this podcast is for informational purposes only. Please consult your healthcare practitioner before engaging in any treatment that we suggest today on this show.

I’m so thrilled that my supplement line, Bio Rehab, is finally available on Amazon. You can go find that at Amazon.com. Just search for Liver Rehab. That’s my flagship product that I designed because I think liver health is so important for many people that are trying to heal their health and reverse their health conditions.

Your liver has to be able to work and detox your body and break down fats and make proper amounts of cholesterol, et cetera, et cetera. So it’s so important to support liver function. That’s why I spent a few months developing the formula for liver rehab. So just search for it on Amazon, Liver Rehab or Bio Rehab.

02:09 About Dr. Jen Landa

Wendy Myers: Our guest today is Dr. Jen Landa. She is a respected authority on the subject of women’s health, hormones and functional and regenerative medicine. As author of the Sex Drive Solution for Women co-written with Virginia Hopkins and creator of the Rewire Your Desire in Three Weeks to Endless Energy Programs, she has helped thousands of women regain their health, energy and sex drive.

Dr. Jen specializes in helping women and men balance their hormones, restore their energy and replenish their sex lives. At the heart of her practice is the belief that maintaining one’s health is hard word – that’s my motto as well – and she encourages her patients to make lifestyle changes that will result in increased health and energy.

Dr. Jen is a frequent contributor to the media with appearances in Cosmopolitan, Men’s Health Magazine and the Dr. Oz Show as well as a regular medical column on Fox News to name just a few.
Dr. Landa, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Dr. Jen Landa: Thanks so much for having me, Wendy. I’m excited to be here with you.

Wendy Myers: Why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit more about yourself and your own health journey.

Dr. Jen Landa: So I’m trained as an ob-gyn. It was really only a couple of years into my being an ob-gyn that I started to notice that I was having my own health challenges. As a matter of fact, in my last year of my residency, I was only married for three years, I was only 28 years old and the first thing I noticed was that I lost my sex drive – it was just completely gone!

Of course, it didn’t happen overnight. If I looked back, it happened slowly over some months. I started avoiding sex and sneaking into the bed early and perfecting the perfect snore, so that my husband would know not to bother me basically.

One time, I remember, we were on vacation. Vacation had been a time where we would normally have more sex because we were more relaxed and whatever. So we’re on vacation. We were in Colorado, we were in the mountains. There was a fire in the fireplace and the music was playing and the candles were lit. Everything was just perfect, right? No matter what, I was just willing myself inside my head to try to get excited or something going and nothing was happening.

It was awful! That’s when my husband finally – like it had been the elephant in the room for months. We knew what was going on, but nobody was talking about it. Finally, he just goes, “What is going on with you? Aren’t you attracted to me anymore? Aren’t you in love with me anymore?” I looked at him like, “Yeah! I love you. You’re fine. It’s me.” I felt like I was broken, like there was something wrong with me.

And the worst part for me as an ob-gyn was I didn’t have any idea how to fix it.

So I checked some of the usual things and plodded along. And on top of that, I felt so lonely because there wasn’t really anybody to ask. It wasn’t like I was taught this. In ob-gyn training, nobody told me how to handle a woman losing her sex drive. And so I felt like, “Well, if I didn’t know how to solve it, who was going to know how to solve it?”

So I just plodded along. We plodded along together. We finally got pregnant and then got pregnant again and things just went from bad to worse really. Not only after a while had I lost my sex drive, but then I really started to lose my energy and my ‘get up and go’. I started to just live this life where I was like a mom. I was wearing mom jeans and I got a mom haircut, mom bathing suits. It was really like I started not to be me almost anymore. I felt guilty as a mom because I didn’t want to play with the kids, I was exhausted all the time.

And then it really hit me when I lost my nerve. I lost my ability to handle stress. And stress was kind of one of the things I liked about being ob-gyn. I liked that things usually went really well. But when they didn’t, I could run in, save the day, do the emergency c-section.

But this one time, I remember, I was in the hospital, had just done an emergency c-section and I was so overwhelmed. I just put my head down on the desk at the nurse’s station and I bawled my eyes out. I had just had it! Here I was, I was like guilty and I felt like I was a terrible wife, I felt like I was a terrible mom. And then, I felt like I couldn’t do my job. So, what was I good at anymore? What did I have left? It was kind of this desperate plan where I just knew I had to change something.

So I changed a lot of things actually. I stopped practicing as an ob-gyn. I actually moved my whole family from New York to Florida. And I started doing training in functional medicine. That’s when I started to learn about bioidentical hormones, I started to learn about nutrition, supplements, exercise and just all kinds of things that I could in a natural way where I could really help myself beyond what I had learned.

And really, what I had learned about hormones was just amazing because it was so much more. This is terrible to say it, but it was really a lot more than I had learned as an ob-gyn. I was really thankful for my training as an ob-gyn because it really prepared me to understand the next steps. But it wasn’t until I went deeper with that information that I was able to see how to help myself. And then, I learned how to help my patients.

And slowly, but surely, I saw that this other way was really doing a lot more good than all the prescriptions I could throw at myself or a patient. I then got to be really where I can say now I really do feel like a woman’s health expert. I teach doctors all around the world what I do and I feel so fortunate to have found this other pathway to healing.

Dr. Jen Landa: I totally agree. I, at one point, had completely lost my libido. I never actually had one because I had been on the birth control pill for 25 years before that destroyed my libido I found out later.

Dr. Jen Landa: Yes!

Wendy Myers: And then, at one time, I asked my ob-gym, “What can I do to increase my libido?” and they just automatically give you testosterone cream, which didn’t really work for me, but I think that’s what a lot of ob-gyn’s are doing when they’re invariably asked by a lot of their patients how to ask their libido. So I love what you’re doing to help women who have lost their fire and lost their sex drive to balance their hormone levels and make over their moods and what-not.

Can you explain a little bit more about how you work with women to naturally improve their sex drive?

Dr. Jen Landa: Sure, yeah. So, my story was very similar to yours. I was on birth control pill for years and years. And that really was a big part of what stalled my sex drive – not only that, but led me to exhaustion and even losing my nerve and my ability to do surgery and deliveries and all of that stuff.

So it’s all the same. It’s all part of the same continuum. I look at women’s health now as a pyramid. And the basic bottom of the pyramid is just survival. And then the last rungs up I feel like are weight loss, mood and energy. If you don’t have you your weight where at least where you’re happy with (you find a way to be satisfied with your weight, whatever it is, or your body composition, your muscle and fat balance), your mood and your energy, if you don’t have those things, I think sex drive is kind of out of the picture.

So I picture sex drive as the top of the pyramid. I say sometimes it’s like the cherry on top of the icing on top of the cake. So in that way, it’s kind of the first thing to go and it can be one of the last things to come back. I think we’ve really got to work through those other things.

So when I started out trying to address on a greater scale trying to really see if I could help hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of women, I started with the sex drive part because that was the part I guess where I started. That was where I started my journey. What I realized after a while, after I wrote a book on it or anything, I realized that if I didn’t help women with their energy, that was really the crux of the matter. Most women just say, “I’m too freaking tired. I would personally rather sleep than have sex, period.”

So I realized that I think at least for me, a lot of what I do now is really try to help women restore their energy. That can happen in so many different ways and in so many different forms. Sleep, not sleeping can be one of their biggest issues.

I’m sorry, I’m having trouble with my – let me see if I can zoom it! Okay, let’s see if it’ll stay that way.

So, helping women with their energy, I feel most women have something going on with their energy.
It happened again.

Wendy Myers: Camera problems again.

Dr. Jen Landa: Yeah, camera problems again. Let’s see. Sorry about this, a little technical difficulty. Let’s go with that.

Wendy Myers: That’s okay.

12:10 Why Are Women Crashing and Losing Their Spark?

Wendy Myers: So why are women crashing and losing their spark?

Dr. Jen Landa: So, I think a lot of the reason that we’re crashing and losing our spark is really because of the way modern society is. There are so many demands on women nowadays. I call it the ‘exhaustion epidemic’. Ninety-nine percent of the women I’m seeing are overwhelmed in some way or another. They’ve got too many responsibilities.

Really, we’re expected to start excel in the workplace. We’re expected to raise our children now, the whole helicopter parenting thing. If you don’t have your kid in ten different activities and if you’re not on top of them, constantly, you feel this pressure that you’re doing enough or you’re not doing it right. That’ll overwhelm you whether you are working or not working. And then, on top of it, you’re expected to be the maja rahaja sexy wife when you get home. And it’s just too much in a lot of ways. So that’s stress. And that’s what I would call emotional stress.

But what I find on top of that is that there are physical stressors, stressors that are happening every day that we’re actually causing to happen in a lot of ways that we’re not even aware of. And when you heap all of that emotional stress and all of that physical stress on top of our system – basically, our stress system which was designed for fight or flight. We all know that fight or flight response. The fight or flight system, it was developed for emergencies. So if there’s an emergency, I’m going to run from the emergency and either whatever it is that’s going to get me or I’m going to get away.

And so now, what are the modern day types of emergencies? God forbid, I guess, some purse robber was running after you or you get in a car accident. Those are the modern day severe emergencies that our fight or flight system is supposed to deal with.

The problem is that we’re all functioning at 80% car accident all day every day. Our system just wasn’t built for it.

So I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Well, what am I going to do about the fact that society is the way it is and I have kids and I have a husband and I have a job and I have all these things?” That part may not be so easy to deal with. And there are definitely tips I have for dealing for some of that. But what I think I want to focus on today more are what are the physical stressors that you can get off your plate so that you have a little bit more bandwidth leftover for that emotional stress.

Wendy Myers: Yeah, I really like that you’re trying to focus on women’s energy because I know for myself, when I didn’t have a libido and then I kind of figured out how to fix my health with my own Mineral Power program (and it took about two years to heal my adrenal glands before they could start producing sufficient amounts of hormone), I was like, “Whoa! What’s happening down there?” because my libido came surging back.

It was really interesting. I was like, “Now, I know how men feel.” But I was really, really happy though because it was a new thing for me. I hear a lot of my girlfriends talking about their libido and everything. And so, I was happy that I finally had developed my own libido. But it took a couple of years of work of doing the foundational resting and sleeping and taking supplements and nutrition, et cetera, before that happened. So I see what you’re saying, that it’s kind of like the cherry on top of the icing on top of the cake.

16:02 Hormones and Your Drive, Mood, Energy and Weight

Wendy Myers: So I understand that you’ve personally experienced losing your spark in this. So how are hormones related to our drive, mood, energy and weight?

Dr. Jen Landa: So what you just said, Wendy, is so true, that you have to work on it step by step and then things come sorting back. So, I talked about this whole fight or flight system, right? And to get a little sciency, that’s something that we call the HPA axis. I’m sure you’re aware of it. It’s the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis.

So that’s the fight or flight system essentially. And when you’re in a fight or flight situation, the HPA axis is upregulated. And sometimes, what happens is when you live in that fight or flight situation, you’re 80% car accident all the time, the HPA system, what it does is it creates adrenalin and it creates cortisol.

And cortisol is a hormone that we’ve all heard. Too much of it is bad. It will put belly fat on you, it will increase your blood pressure, your blood sugar and all kinds of bad things. It’s also toxic to your brain.

So your brain being smart as it is, your brain says, “Whoa! Wendy,” or Jen or whoever, “this is too much. Eighty percent car accident, not working for you. So I’m smart, I’m a brain, I’m going to turn down the level that you’re able to respond for this HPA axis.” And that’s what we used to call ‘adrenal fatigue’.
Now, we’re starting to go into all different kinds of names for it, hypoadrenalism. But really, it’s HPA axis dysfunction. That’s really what’s happening.

But what happens before that is that 80% car accident, that’s what we use to call ‘adrenal stress’. That’s what I call ‘burning up’.

When you’re burning up, it’s when you’re firing on all cylinders, but you’re so go, go, go, you can barely relax. You’re overwhelmed all the time, you’re feeling stressed out, you’re craving sugar, you’re eating, eating, eating, you’re running, running, running all the time. You’re a pretty good multitasker, but you may get these crashes in the middle of the day. You have to do like caffeine and sugar and keep go, go, go, go, go. And so, that’s the initial stage of this HPA axis dysfunction that I call ‘burning up’.

But then what happens over time is, like I said, the brain is smart. The brain will downregulate your ability to make cortisol and you start to get into categories like burning low and burning out. And when you start burning low and burning out, that’s like me when I started to lose my energy and then, eventually, just cried at the nurse’s station because I had no ability to handle stress anymore. Fight or flight, my fight got up and went. It was done!

All I wanted to do was sleep all the time. I felt exhausted all the time. Libido, forget about it. That was long, long gone. And I see women at these different stages burning up, burning low and burning out all the time in my practice, in my community. And that really is what robs women of their mood, their libido and all of these things.

And one of the big reasons is because the HPA axis – now follow me on this one – there’s another axis called the HPG axis, the hypothalamic pituitary gonadal axis. So, that’s the brain telling the ovaries (or the testicles in the case of a man) to make hormones. And our ovaries make, of course, estrogen, progesterone and testosterone.

When the fight or flight axis is so overtaxed, it actually shuts down the HPG axis because when you think about it, if you were running from an enemy, the last thing you would want to be doing is lying down, having sex and creating a baby, reproducing, right? And estrogen, progesterone and testosterone are your reproductive hormones. And unfortunately, we’re not really thinking about all of these things and controlling our hormones the way we, believe it or not, we actually could.

So when we’re in this fight or flight state, it makes it harder and harder to make what I call the ‘yummy hormones’. I tell people to protect their hormones. It’s an acronym. Protect is PR for progesterone, O for oxytocin, T for thyroid, E for estrogen, C for cortisol and T for testosterone. All of those hormones play a role in all of these different things we’re talking about (weight loss, mood, energy, sex). All of it, they all play a role. So when your stress system is haywire, it messes up your hormones and you’re not protecting your hormones.

That was a long answer, but I hope that brought it all back together.

Wendy Myers: No, it’s very, very good. I was going to say that with myself, my libido had come back full force at one point. And then, I went through a very stressful three month period and then, bye bye, it was all gone. It reduced sufficiently. But there you go! The minute you’re stressed, your libido will reduce. And so I had to make choices, which I think women, they have to do if they want their libido to come back. You have to learn to say no and reduce your stress levels in other areas of your life if you want to have a libido.

I think we’re under so many stressors today – not just physical or emotional stress. We have heavy metal toxicity, we have EMFs. There are so many different kinds of stressors that we need to be aware of and try to reduce as much as possible.

21:51 The CRASH Stressors

Wendy Myers: But can give you the listeners about five tips about how they can PROTECT your hormones?

Dr. Jen Landa: Yeah. Can I throw out another acronym just right along the lines of what you were talking about, all these others stressors like EMFs and heavy metals and things that you were saying are coming at us? I created this other acronym called CRASH. It’s basically why you’re energy is crashing, why your mood is crashing, why your sex drive is crashing. CRASH basically stands for some of the things that I think are the physical stressors that we’re up against that we can get control over.
So the first C for CRASH is just ‘cortisol overload and depletion’ that I just referred about with burning up and burning out.

The R is for food reactions and food sensitivities. And I think that is a really big issue that a lot of us are dealing with these days, but a lot of people still have no idea. We hear all about gluten-free and this and that, but there really is some truth to that. We can come back to that if you want.

The A is for ‘adrenal toxins’. One of the most common that women are sucking down every day is tons and tons of caffeine. And then, on the flipside, sometimes, we’re almost doing the upper-downer thing. With the caffeine, we’re going up. And then, at night, to relax, we do some alcohol to come down. I’ve definitely, I have to say, caught myself in that in my own little world on that, whirlwind on that. Like you said, you had a three month stressful period, I noticed just after a weekend away now, if I go away for the weekend and I had too many drinks one night and then the next morning, I need to function so I have some coffee, I notice after I do that for a couple of days, uh-uh-uh. Caffeine and alcohol both are adrenal toxins.

And then the other one is sugar. That pretty much brings me to the S, which is the ‘sugar rollercoaster’, the idea of your blood sugar going up and down. So whether it’s from eating a sugary food or a carbohydrate-leaden food, your blood sugar goes up and then your blood sugar comes down. Your blood sugar coming down, your body sees that as a fight or flight emergency. It kicks in that whole HPA axis over and over again. And the same thing with alcohol and caffeine, by the way. Why am I calling them ‘adrenal toxins’, it’s because they kick the HPA axis in.

I know a lot of people love their caffeine and they don’t want to hear that, but if your energy is perfectly fine all day long and you never have any problems, then fine, keep your caffeine. And I know, there are health benefits to coffee, so you’re sitting there going, “But Dr. Jen, the New York Times says coffee is healthy.” I get it, I know. But for women who are having trouble with their energy, I think they will do well to cut back on that because of the way it activates the whole HPA axis.

So that was the adrenal toxins. The sugar rollercoaster was the S. And H is for hormones. We kind of talked already about how you have to protect your hormones.

So before I got to any tips, I just wanted to explain where these tips are coming from.

Wendy Myers: Yeah. And I think it still begs the question that women have to make choices. Do they want to get their sex drive back or do they want their stimulants and relaxants and all the other yummy things that prevent us from meeting our goals, which, for many women, is having a healthy sex drive so they can perform in their relationships.

25:26 Five Tips for Protecting Your Hormones

Wendy Myers: So why don’t we go back to the five tips for how women can protect their hormones.

Dr. Jen Landa: Well, I definitely will do that, but I want to just pick up on what you just said. It’s so important that women make this their priority. It’s really all about what you’re doing every day. It’s your habits! It’s really just your habits.

Habits are automatic things that we do every day. And this is all about just changing your habits.
So I created a program called Three Weeks to Endless Energy because most of us know that it takes three weeks to change a habit. That’s what the research shows. And changing a habit is really just as simple as shining a spotlight on a behavior and making the conscious choice to change it. But to make a conscious choice to change, you really got to have a why.

So you want to have a better libido, but why? Because you want to have an amazing relationship with your partner, right? You know why you want to get in better shape. More than just because I want to be happy with what I look like when I look in the mirror, maybe you want to fulfill a lifelong goal of some kind to do a race, complete a 5k, complete a 10k or whatever, climb a mountain or whatever it is.

I think it’s really important to have a strong why when you’re starting out on trying to make these changes.

So the changes that I think are really important, the changes that I ask people to make in my Endless Energy program, they’re 5D steps. They all start with D. I’m trying to make everything easy with acronyms or things that start with the same letter to make it really easy.

The first D step is to ‘drink a protein shake in the morning’. I know you might be saying, “Oh, no. I don’t like protein shakes. Yeah, yeah, I’ve tried that before,” but honestly, I think it’s one of the most important steps. I personally drink a protein shake every morning. I am totally a shake girl. I have so many of my patients who start their day off with their shake. They call it their ‘power shake’. Actually, I have this 88-year old lady at my practice who calls it her ‘power shake’, which I think is just so awesome.

The protein shake is so important because, let’s face it, breakfast is the hardest meal of the day I think to get right. Most of us are running into Starbucks and are getting a muffin and a frappuccino or something like that. Uh-uh, you’re not getting any protein, you’re getting high sugar, you’re getting bad fats and you want all the opposite. You want low sugar, low carb, good protein, good fats. That’s going to start your day off right.

And if you start the day off right, that gives you the right message. It gives your body the right signals to do all the right things for the day.

Sorry that the camera keeps jumping. I’m just trying to follow it.

Wendy Myers: And I know if you skip breakfast in the morning, that really puts a big stressor on your adrenal glands and people release more cortisol. You do not want to skip meals if you are trying to heal your adrenal glands and your libido.

Dr. Jen Landa: Well, what happens, Wendy, as you know, overnight, you’re not eating anything. So because you’re essentially fasting, in the morning, your blood sugar is really low. And when your blood sugar is low in the morning, your body is hitting that panic button.

So if you don’t eat breakfast, that is the worst thing that you can do in terms of your weight, your mood, your energy, your libido. It’s literally the worst thing you can do, skipping breakfast. So whether you’re having a high sugar breakfast, low protein breakfast and especially if you’re skipping breakfast, eating breakfast with some protein with some good fat within an hour of getting up is super important.

Now, yes, you could have some egg or turkey sausage or something like that. Yes, you could do some of that. But I just find the shake is so easy. It’s quick. I can do it in my car. You can do it on the way to work. You can have it mixed up from the night before and just throw it in the blender that morning. And I think they can be truly delicious. You’ve got to find the right shake for you, but I think they can be really awesome. So that’s the first D step.

The second D step is D for dine. How you eat, I can’t stress it enough, how important how you eat is for how your hormones behave. Like I said, you need to get hold of this HPA axis dysfunction. You need to get hold of this burning low, burning out sort of situation. And when you get hold of that situation, that helps your body naturally make your yummy hormones again, the ones that I talked about – the estrogen, progesterone, testosterone. You need a balance of all of those for your sex drive, not just the testosterone. You need a balance of everything.

You eat within an hour of getting up, I’ve explained already. And then, really, every three to four hours. When you’re trying to heal this whole HPA system, you really need to keep your blood sugar stable. And some people, to do that, need to eat even every two to three hours. And maybe I think three hours, about three hours for most people works pretty well, getting a small amount of protein, a small amount of good carbs, a small amount of good fats. It’s super, super important.

And there are lots of choices around that to make. One of the biggest things is to try to eat whole foods, not processed foods to really try to get away from the packaged, the bottled, the frozen, all of those things. Foods that come in packages, you want to get away from that. You want to try to eat whole foods.

So that’s some of my tips around the dine aspect. You really need to know the details. I include these details in my programs because it’s just so important. I find that even when I sit down with my patients – and I see my new patients for an hour at a time and there’s not enough time in that hour of visit to explain everything. So that’s why I kind of committed it all to a program, wrote it all down because I think it’s so important.

So the next D step is ‘ditch sugar’. I know, you’re thinking, “Oh, what is she talking about? Man!” I know because literally, I’m thin, I’m fit, whatever, but you can’t even imagine how hard I have to work to stay this way. Both of my parents are diabetics, I have a terrible sweet tooth. I know what it’s like to have the sugar urge thing. But the good news is that it doesn’t really take that long to have those – you have those bad sugar cravings, but it doesn’t take that long to really ditch sugar, to get rid of sugar.

A lot of people ask me about stevia. Stevia is a decent substitute if you need a substitute. Even better, I love Lo Han Guo. I love Lo Han Guo because it’s a plant-based sweetener, but it’s actually been used in Asia for hundreds of years to treat diabetes. It doesn’t raise your blood sugar at all.

So when I really have to have something sweet, I usually put a little bit of Lo Han Guo in something. I make some little chocolate mixture with 100% cocoa. I make these little truffle balls sometimes just from coconut oil and cocoa powder and a little bit of Lo Han Guo and a little bit of cashew butter. You mix that, roll it up together, it’s like a little truffle. It’s so yummy.

So you can tell I’m a sweet tooth girl and I definitely need my dessert. So I’m not telling you that you can’t ever have dessert again. Like Wendy said, it’s a choice. It’s a choice. If you want your libido back, if you want your mood back, if you want your energy back, if you want your weight better, you’ve just got to make that choice to go with things that are different, things that are going to help you rather than the things that are going to hurt you.

Wendy Myers: And I think women, I know for me, it took me a long time to kick my sugar habit. I had a lifelong sugar habit. I know there are a lot of women out there really struggling. For me, it was my biggest hurdle that I had with my health and healing my adrenal glands. But it can be done!
And I still have a treat every once in a while, but it’s just one of those things I think that women have to just try every day. Like an addict almost, you have to take it one day at a time.

Wendy Myers: It’s absolutely an addictive thing. They’ve even did studies. They did this study with mice and cocaine versus Oreos. Believe it not, they got more addicted to the Oreos than they did to the cocaine as insane as that is. So it is truly an addiction.

So I’m not saying it’s not an addiction and I’m not saying that just because I’ve gotten off of sugar that I’ve never gotten back on because it happens and it happens fast. But it’s a matter of nipping it in the bud faster and faster each time. If you go off the rails for a day or two or three or four or a week for a vacation, it’s a matter of just getting right back on the wagon, so to speak.

Wendy Myers: Yeah, Rome was not built in a day. You have to continue working on it every day.

Dr. Jen Landa: And I think sugar is a lot worse than cocaine or heroine or anything else because most people run into sugar a lot more often in their day than they’re going to run into something like cocaine. You can run into your 7-Eleven and go buy handfuls and gobs of sugar. So it’s everywhere.

Wendy Myers: I know! I try not to even look at it. I try not to even look. You get those cues and then things start going off in your brain.

Dr. Jen Landa: Oh, yeah! Totally! There are places we should even avoid altogether. If you know you have a trigger place like Dunkin’ Donuts or something, don’t go. Starbucks, stay away.

Wendy Myers: Yes, yes.

Dr. Jen Landa: Anyway, so that’s the D for ditching sugar.
And then a D that’s obvious from everything I told you before, D for ‘diminish alcohol and caffeine’. So I’m not telling you to quit altogether. Personally, I love my wine. I’m not a big caffeine person, but I do do green tea.

Keep in mind that tea has only about a third the amount of caffeine in each cup versus coffee. So if you like to have that hot drink and you like the ritual around that, consider switching to green tea because you’ll right away, cut your caffeine by a third or cut it by two-thirds actually because you’ll get down to a third of what you had. So that’s one way to do it.

Or of course, you can do half caf and half decaf, but I ask people to try to cut down slowly because you don’t want to bring on those headaches, that caffeine crash and stuff like that. So, even if you’re at 16 ounces right now, cut back to 14 ounces this week. And then, maybe next week, cut down to 12 ounces. Go slowly with it.

Basically, a lot of my patients are really shocked when I tell them that for women, drinking three drinks or more is considered binge drinking. A lot of my patients are really shocked when I tell them, “Yeah, you actually are binge drinking on the weekends whether you realize it or not.” And like I said, I like my wine. I like hard liquor. I like all kinds of alcohol, so I definitely binge drink in my life. It’s just a matter of trying to control that on a regular basis.

People always tell me, “Well, I drink like eight drinks on the weekend or something” and I say, “Well, actually, I’d rather see you have those eight drinks spread out over the course of the week.” It actually makes a difference on the whole HPA system. Like I said, it’s an adrenal toxin. It’s a problem with the HPA axis when you do alcohol and caffeine.

Alright! So the final D, get ready, the final D is ‘drop gluten and dairy’. So I know that’s a big one. I know that’s a big ask. And personally, back when I told you when I lost my libido and was doing really not so well, I was eating a big bagel in the morning, every morning, a cinnamon raisin bagel (a huge sugar rush). I was drinking a Diet Coke because like I said, I wasn’t a coffee person, but I needed some kind of caffeine. So I was doing Diet Coke and cream cheese. So I was breaking every rule, just about, that I told you.

I never knew that I had any kind of sensitivity towards gluten or dairy. And just because you don’t know it doesn’t mean you don’t have it.

And nowadays, I’ll tell you, I do these real cool motorcycle trips with my husband. My husband is an excellent motorcycle driver. I read the back. I will tell you, recently, it came to light to me how sensitive to gluten, dairy and sugar I was in terms of my energy.

So we were riding along one day and they do coffee stops. This is in Europe. So, of course, the coffee is amazing, right? They have these amazing lattes and these amazing scones and butter and creams. I just couldn’t resist. So at a coffee stop, I had a scone with butter and cream with coffee and milk. It was a hot steamed milk. It was amazing! And within an hour of getting back on the bike, Wendy, I’m not kidding, I thought I was giong to fall off the bike. I said to my husband, “I think I’m in real trouble here.” I felt drunk. I felt like I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore. It was just awful.

And seriously, when you’re off (because I have been off of gluten, dairy and sugar), it’s when you really start to realize what they’re doing to your body when you try them again. So I promise you, you will never know what these things are doing to your body until you get off of them. And if you get off them for three weeks, you may see a huge difference in things you never would’ve imagined.

First of all, the weight loss could be amazing. Just getting people off cream in your coffee, like half and half in your coffee, I’ve had people lose 10 lbs. just by doing that in a few weeks. It’s amazing! So your weight, you might see changes in your mood, your energy. You might see changes in your skin, changes in your nasal congestion, all kinds of things that you never thought would be related to these foods can definitely be related.

So it’s not like a Gwyneth Paltrow says to get off gluten sort of thing. This is not a phase. There is tons of scientific research that validates the fact that probably a couple to a half of us have this gluten sensitivity and probably the same for dairy.

And there are other foods that could be involved too. I know for those of you who are watching this, you know all about food sensitivites. You might be saying, “Dr. Jen, what about soy? What about this? What about that?” Yes, there are soy, corn, peanuts. There are other foods that you might be sensitive to as well. But I find the two most common are gluten and dairy.

I find that, believe it or not, they’re not so hard to get rid of once you learn a couple of tips and a couple of tricks. Believe me, I used to be addicted to chocolate pudding with whipped cream. And if I could never have chocolate pudding with whipped cream again, I would be very unhappy. So I learned how to make non-dairy chocolate pudding and whipped cream – and it’s amazing! Coconut is a big part of it. I happen to love coconut, so that works really well for me.

Wendy Myers: Yeah, there are always alternatives and substitutes. For me, I used to hate the 80% dark chocolate, but I learned to like it. And especially in the absence of milk chocolate or other things, it tastes really, really good. But yeah, you have to find your fudge balls and you have to find those yummy substitutes. They might not be quite as good, but they are exploding with flavor when they’re the only thing you’ve got.

Wendy Myers: I actually think that your taste buds, you can reprogram them and you can change them. I’ll tell you a substitution I did when I was really young. It was not a good one. But I was afraid that when I went to college that I would gain the freshman 15. So not knowing any better, I changed from Coke to Diet Coke thinking that that would help save me from the freshman 15. It turns out, the research is not with me on that one.

But anyway, it was amazing to me. At first, I thought Diet Coke tasted like dog food. I thought it was terrible. And then I was able to really enjoy it and not like Coke anymore. And I find the same thing with what you just said about, “I used to love milk chocolate. I used to love M&Ms, Hershey’s, Hershey’s Kisses,” whatever. Now, I don’t like that stuff at all anymore. I used to be addicted to Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. I don’t even like them anymore.

Wendy Myers: Not uncommon.

Dr. Jen Landa: What you said about the 80% chocolate, I was 70%, but now, I’m all the way up to – there’s one that I love that’s 88% and I absolutely love it! I don’t enjoy milk chocolate anymore at all because you get to this point where like now, even an apple tastes ridiculously sweet to me because my taste buds are just not used to that high sugar content.

42:57 Improving Libido

Wendy Myers: Dr. Jen, is there anything else that you want to add to our discussion about improving women’s libido.

Dr. Jen Landa: Wendy, I want to come back to something that we kind of just glanced over in our conversation. I talked a lot about physical stressors that women need to be taking off themselves. But emotional stressors are a big deal too in terms of the fight or flight system. I find that learning to say no is probably one of the most important things that we need to do to take back our lives.

As women, we’re nurturers, we’re caretakers. We tend sometimes to give too much of ourselves and to put ourselves very last on the list. When self-care is low like that, resentment is high. And when you feel like everybody else around you is just putting so much on you and you feel overwhelmed and overburdened, sometimes, it’s time to take a look inside and say, “Hmmm… what am I doing that’s not caring for myself? How can I maybe say no to some things and start saying yes to me to start making myself feel better and to start decreasing my stress?”

I find that there are so many people who feel that their stress is so out of control, but they’re not really doing enough to make themselves enough of a priority. I really just want women who are listening today to hear – and men too. Believe me, there are a lot of men who are guilty of the same thing that when you are taking care of other people to the exclusion of taking care of yourself, if you’re doing things for other people that they could and should be doing for themselves, start saying no a little bit. You’ll be surprised at how your stress can really decrease and how you actually can feel a lot more loving toward the people around you.

I find that this can be a big issue with women’s libido. You asked me any links or whatever, I created a program called Rewire Your Desire for women with low libido. I created some free videos. They’re at RewireDesire.com. It’s a free three-video series and it’s all about how I help women bring back their sexuality and more than just the stuff we talked about today, but some of these relationship stuff that I’m talking about now and other things.

And if you want to find out if you’re burning up, burning low or burning out, I’ve got a quiz at Three Weeks to Endless Energy. You can take the quiz, you can find out where your adrenal system seems to be at and I’ve got some free information for you there as well.

Wendy Myers: Thank you so much, Dr. Landa. That was really, really informative. I know that there are so many women out there that they’re trying to be superwoman, they’re trying to be everything to everyone. And you do, you have to take care of yourself first and learn to say no. I think that’s such an important message. I know there are so many intelligent, independent women that’s listening to this podcast. That’s my primary audience. And you do, you have to take care of yourself first if you’re going to be able to take care of everybody else.

46:08 The Most Pressing Health Issue in the World Today: Processed Foods

Wendy Myers: So, Dr. Landa, I have a question I ask all of my guests. What do you think is the most pressing health issue in the world today?

Dr. Jen Landa: I think it really is the food we eat. I think, unfortunately, processed food has become the norm to such an extent that it’s really hard to tell people that this isn’t the way that we were meant to eat. This isn’t food. This is processed junk. And that processed junk is just wearing away at us. It’s increasing our risk of diabetes, of heart diseases. It’s increasing childhood obesity and childhood diabetes. It’s a huge, huge issue and we really need to go back to basics in a way. I’d say if your great grandmother wouldn’t have recognized something as food, then don’t eat it.

Wendy Myers: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree with you. Even when you’re trying to eat healthy, you are still constantly being offered or see or go out to restaurants. There’s just such a plethora of processed foods. It can be really, really challenging to avoid those foods. We’re just constantly exposed to it just like sugar.

Dr. Jen Landa: Yeah. And it’s also really confusing. The education just isn’t out there. Look, I know so many people who are trying really hard to make the healthier choice or be healthier. And the marketing messages are wrong a lot of times. They’re telling things are healthy that aren’t healthy and so it’s really confusing. Moms raising kids think that juice is healthy, but juice is really just a lot of sugar. They don’t realize that juice isn’t healthy. People are shocked all the time when I tell them that juice isn’t healthy and they shouldn’t drink juice. They’re like, “Really?!” It’s shocking to them and I understand why.

I live in Florida. Of all states, I live in the orange sunshine state and I tell people, “You shouldn’t drink orange juice.” They’re just shocked when I tell them that. Even my own son, he wanted some orange juice and I told him, “Look at the grams of sugar.” I’m training my kids to look at the packages and look at the foods and understand and evaluate and they couldn’t believe it. The container of orange juice he wanted was 44 grams of sugar which is double (he knows) the amount of sugar he’s supposed to have an entire day. He knows that, but most kids don’t know that.

Wendy Myers: Yeah, and that’s almost as much as a can of Coke. I mean, you might as well just enjoy the Coke.

Dr. Jen Landa: Yeah. It’s scary enough.

Wendy Myers: Well, Dr. Landa, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. I know all the listeners are just going to eat up what you just revealed on the podcast. I really appreciate you coming on the show.

Dr. Jen Landa: Thanks so much for having me, Wendy. I really appreciate it too. And sorry for the crazy camera, everybody.

Wendy Myers: No, it’s okay. Having some technical difficulties, but it’s okay. But everyone, thank you for listening and watching. If you want to learn all about detoxification and my version of Paleo, the Modern Paleo Diet and about my healing and detox program, Mineral Power, you can go to myersdetox.com and also at MineralPower.com. I have a new website going up soon for Mineral Power. So thank you so much for listening to the Live to 110 Podcast.