Speaker 1- During these stressful times, it’s more important than ever to practice self love. But what exactly does that mean? Well, Dr. Erica Steele from holistic family practice medicine in Virginia Beach is here to explain. Good to see you. Dr. Steele. Yeah. Good
Speaker 2- to see you too, Cheryl.
Speaker 1- So happy you’re here. So let’s get started here. And I know we’re going to talk a lot about today about self love, and then just staying healthy in general.
Speaker 2- Yes, definitely. Yeah, it’s a month of love. We have February. And it’s also Heart Health Month. So it’s appropriate to have this discussion.
Speaker 1- All right, perfect. So we’re going to talk about heart first, and talk about the impact of metabolic health and then how that really correlates with your heart as well.
Speaker 2- Yes, people don’t realize the metabolism is not just about weight gain or weight loss, it’s all of the chemical processes within the body. So if your metabolism isn’t working properly, your body is not going to detoxify. And a lot of times those toxins will, then the liver will dump it into your bloodstream, create anemia, but also create issues with your heart and your bloodstream. So it’s really important to work on your diet, because that’s really the top of it, that your nutrition, what you’re putting into your body is going to fuel your metabolism.
Speaker 1- Yeah, and I love how you look at the total body approach to there’s no tunnel vision here. And so speaking of nutrition, I want to dive into that a little bit. Because how do we know what’s healthy? What’s not healthy? I mean, you hear you shouldn’t have too much fat, but for example, avocados have a lot of healthy fats.
Speaker 2- Exactly. Yeah, there’s a lot of nuance, especially when it comes to fat. And I think people really, it’s important for people to understand fat is fat, right? healthy fat, unhealthy fat, if you’re eating more than 20 to 25% ratio of your total calories, which is your metabolic rate. You know, unless you’re a long distance runner, or unless you’re a triathlete, or you’re hiking, you know, something like that, you know, you don’t need excess fat. And in fact, the more excess fat, that’s what creates issues with your lipid panel, your cholesterol, your triglycerides, things like that, because it’s clogging the liver, the liver can’t handle that much fat plus the gallbladder has to work harder. So a lot of people that have different gallbladder issues is as a result of that high fat diet, and then even removing the gallbladder, if they don’t take an enzyme. After that, they’re going to have a really difficult time digesting fats. So I think we think when we think heart health, immediately we go to fat. But we also have to be mindful that there is a balance between what’s healthy and what’s not healthy. And it’s all data driven. We really focus on holistic family practice on a data. So it’s data from the individual. So we’re not just taking it from generalizations. It’s all specific to the individual patient meme.
Speaker 1- Oh my gosh, okay, so how do we know what to eat and what not to eat?
Speaker 2- So the first thing we do in my practice is we put patients on a metabolic scale that comes over all their body composition. So it goes over their metabolic rate, which is how many calories they need, their fat, their visceral fat, if they need to lose weight, if they need to gain muscle, and then that gives us a number for us to work with, then I’ll look at their lab work and see okay, are they processing glucose? Well, are they not processing glucose? Well as their triglycerides elevated, and looking at their lab work then determines what kind of diet that I want to put them on. And I really focus mainly on macros. So I focus on the metabolic rate, how many calories that the person needs to be taking in. And then I break down the ratios of macros, meaning your proteins, your fats, and your carbohydrates based off of the lab work that I have from the patient,
Speaker 1- you kind of put everything together. And I know you have a course and you teach classes as well about all this.
Speaker 2- We do. We do have a course coming up. It’s a four week course because I get a lot of demand for people asking like, I don’t know anything about nutrition teach me about nutrition. And so I decided to put together a course for anybody. You don’t have to be a member of our practice. You just text holistic nutrition to our office telephone number, and it’s four weeks. So we’ll talk about the role of nutrition. We’ll talk about heart health, we’ll talk about the impact of metabolic health, what’s healthy, what’s not healthy, will dispel a lot of myths, a lot of fad diets out there. We’ll go through that so that people have a deeper understanding so that they can make that powerful choice for themselves, even if they don’t use a practitioner such as myself.
Speaker 1- Dr. Steele, you’re so good at what you do. Thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 2- Awesome. Thank you for having me. All right.
What do you think?