Raena Morgan: Hi, I’m Raena Morgan and today we’re visiting with Dr. Hyla Cass. She’s the author of 8 Weeks to Vibrant Health. There are a lot of questions that we have for you Dr. Cass about women’s health. One of the things that is really important to women is managing their weight. Could you address that in the natural sense? Dr. Hyla Cass: With this much bigger issue, as it were, women realize it’s not a matter of just how many calories you eating it’s how your metabolism is working. And that depends on exercise because your metabolism is going to go up with exercise, your thyroid function, your adrenal function, your stress level. If you’re stressed your cortisol goes up, and if your cortisol goes up that affects your weight, and your ability to lose weight. There are many, many factors that go into weight—it’s not simple. Allergies, food allergies, have a role to play as well. All of these issues require some detective work. First of all, on behalf of the individual, and I have questionnaires at the beginning of 8 Weeks to Vibrant Health for women to be able to determine what area their problems may lie in, which metabolic area. And you don’t have to know about this in advance, you just fill out the quiz and then you turn to the right section of the book, which will tell you what you need to know about that particular condition, and what natural means you can use and it’s generally diet and supplements to remedy those problems, and you can do a lot of it on your own. Then, if there are other issues that you need to deal with, lab tests, for example, there are even some you can do on your own, you can send away for certain lab tests. And then if you need a health practitioner, you can ask the right questions. You will educate yourself enough so that you can speak really intelligently with your health practitioner, whether it’s a doctor, a naturopath, nurse practitioner, chiropractor, whomever. Yeah, I think what’s interesting about medicine is that it’s so specialized, it’s ridiculous. The psychiatrist, you take your brain to the psychiatrist. You take your heart and your blood vessels to the cardiovascular doctor. You take your hormones to the endocrinologist, and on and on, just ridiculous because we are one person. In fact, we’re mind, body and spirit. But just dealing with the body alone, we can’t separate it all. You know if your blood sugar is low, you’re going to be depressed, you’re going to be tired. You may have rapid heart rate. You may feel kind of agitated, and all of these things are because your blood sugar is affecting every single organ of your body. And so everything that affects your whole metabolism is going to have symptoms in each of the systems. So it doesn’t make sense to keep going from specialist to specialist without having someone take an overview of your whole self, all your systems combined. That is what holistic medicine is. Holistic medicine isn’t going to a chiropractor, going an acupuncturist. Holistic medicine is looking at the totality of who we are, and our environment, and our relationships, what we eat, our lifestyle and all the systems of the body. Then we can figure out what’s going on and then we can know what the solution can be. Raena Morgan: Well, thank you for joining us today, Dr. Cass. Dr. Hyla Cass: Excellent. It’s a pleasure. Raena Morgan: I’m Raena Morgan with iHealthTube.