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Transcript
- 06:27 Dr. Renae’s Story
- 14:45 What is Bulimia?
- 16:19 Underlying causes of bulimia
- 27:54 Vegetarian/Vegan Diets
- 33:38 Detoxing Copper Toxicity
- 35:58 Toxic Relationships
- 42:16 Parasites
- 45:43 Food Mentality
- 53:04 Recovering from eating disorders
- 57:13 Damages caused by bulimia
- 58:19 Detoxification and Bulimia
- 01:00:13 About Dr. Renae Norton
Wendy Myers: Welcome to the Live to 110 Podcast. My name is Wendy Myers. This is a video podcast that you can find on my YouTube channel, wendyliveto110.
And today, I’m really, really excited. We have Dr. Renae Norton. We’re going to be talking about the surprising underlying true causes of bulimia and other disorders as well. She’s a clinical psychologist who specializes in eating disorders and her website is eatingdisorderpro.com.
I found her because I was doing some research one day on bulimia. And unfortunately, I’m sad to admit that I have myself struggle with bulimia since I was a teenager and it’s something that I think a lot of young women are experiencing in dealing with.
They don’t talk about it like myself. I do talk about it with my friends and what-not, but I tend to not want to talk about it and not want to deal with it. Since it’s not a huge part of my life, it’s something would just rear its ugly head in times of stress. I kind of ignored it and brushed it under the rug.
So let’s do the disclaimer. Please keep in mind that this program is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or health condition and is not a substitute for professional advice. The Live to 110 Podcast is solely informational in nature. Please consult your healthcare practitioner before engaging in any treatment or diet that we suggest on the show.
So I have a couple of announcements. I’m going to be a speaker at Dave Asprey’s Bulletproof Conference here in Pasadena, near Los Angeles September 26th to 28th. I’ll be talking about detoxing and infrared sauna. So definitely come down and check that out if you’re in the Los Angeles area.
I’m also going to be a speaker at Jennifer Fugo’s Women’s Gluten Free Summit. You can find that at womensglutenfreesummitonline.com. I’m going to be talking about how to do a food elimination diet. I’m so excited to be a part of that. Dr. Hyman is going to be a speaker and Jordan Reasoner of SCD Lifestyle – so many amazing people. I’m very honored to be considered in their company.
So let’s do our interview. Confessional time.
Dr. Renae Norton became interested in the treatment of eating disorders while still in graduate school. Her primary areas of expertise during her doctoral training were family assistance theory and neuropsychology. She began her practice in 1985 after doing her residency and clinical psychology at Good Samaritan Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Over the years, her reputation as the go-to therapist for the toughest eating disorder cases has spread to other states and professionals around the country. Presently, she offers the only alternative in patient treatment in cases where the individual is severe cases of anorexia, bulimia or a combination of the two often referred to as bulimarexia.
So Dr. Norton, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Dr. Renae Norton: You are so welcome. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. And also, I want to thank you on behalf of all the people who suffer from bulimia because it’s very brave to talk about the disorder. You’re right when you say it’s difficult to tell people about it. Many people hide this disorder.
It’s not like anorexia where you’re sort of proud of the fact that you were able to resist eating – not necessarily proud of having anorexia, but definitely proud of the components of the eating disorder.
With bulimia, it’s not like that at all. There’s a lot of shame associated with it. It’s a very difficult thing for people to reach out and find help. So when we have a famous person or a person in the know who is willing to say, “Hey, I’m suffering myself and I know I need help. I’m going to do whatever it takes to get well,” it’s inspiring for people.
Wendy Myers: Of course, I was very [inaudible 00:04:49] to tell people, tell the audience and even my clients and what-not to admit that because as someone people are looking to follow or to lead them on how to eat right and live a healthy lifestyle, it’s not exactly something that I want to admit that, “Hey, I have bulimia.”
But I think that it’s important to…
Dr. Renae Norton: It is…
Wendy Myers: …to show I’m not perfect. I don’t eat perfect all the time and I decided I don’t need to admit that persona that I am perfect because everyone has their issues, whatever it may be.
Dr. Renae Norton: Exactly!
Wendy Myers: It’s one of those things that I’m just trying to help other people, so I thought I could tell my story and do that.
Dr. Renae Norton: Absolutely! And I find that people are helped just knowing that the person that is helping them has been there. I think a lot of times, if you haven’t been there, if you haven’t had an eating disorder of your own, I think your perspective is just slightly different than someone who has.
Well, it actually can be radically different even if you had years of experience though I think it can be just as different enough. I think it makes a big difference when people understand that I was anorexic when I was young. After I got out of graduate school, I ended up also being bulimic. People tell me over and over again that that was very helpful to them and very meaningful to them.
Wendy Myers: Well, tell us your story. How did you get interested in eating disorders and became a clinical psychologist?
Dr. Renae Norton: Well, as I’ve said, my mother was dying when I was 22 of Cancer. I just naturally lost weight because I was worried about her. I was away at school. People kept saying things to me like, “Wow! You look great! Are you losing weight?” I never considered myself to be overweight before that. And so I connected losing weight and looking great. That was the first problem.
And then later, when my mother died – she suffered terribly while she was dying. Her looks, she was just eviscerated with chemotherapy. Her looks changed dramatically. At that point, I began to make the association (unconsciously, I believe, at the time) that dying meant ugliness and survival meant beauty and also connected the beauty to losing weight and I was just off to the races, right?
However, that wasn’t the classic beginning for anorexia. I didn’t think I was overweight when I became anorexic. I didn’t really even know that I wasn’t eating. After I got into graduate school, I was there on assistanceship and I was earning about $125 on the assistanceship and my car payment was $75.
So I went to work for the Playboy Club as the camera bunny on Saturday nights. And when I weighted in, the bunny mother said, “Now, you know you can’t gain more than 3 lbs.,” I said, “Okay.” And she said, “So you can’t go over 105 lbs.,” and I said, “You mean 135 lbs.?” She said, “No, I mean 105 lbs.” I said, “What are you talking about? I weight 130 lbs.” She said, “No, you weight 102 lbs.”
So that was a shock. I had no idea. I recognized at the time that’s insane. I can’t weight 102 lbs. and I began to recover. So I recovered spontaneously, which is very unusual. That almost never happens.
Later, after I got my degree, I ended up with bulimia. I’m an empath and I had a patient who was bulimic. She used abusing laxatives as a way of purging. Many people don’t know that that is a form of bulimia. Abusing laxatives is a form of bulimia.
What you get is that relief when you use, when you overuse the laxatives that people get when they purge, when they vomit. And also, many people try to use the laxative (abuse laxatives) as a way of managing weight.
I don’t think I was using it as a weight managing weight, but I definitely was addicted to the feeling of emptiness. I became addicted to that feeling.
That nearly killed me. That was a whole different ball game. That snuck up on me. That nearly killed me.
And when I realized that I was dying, literally dying of it, I sought help and I became a foodie. I became a health nut. I began to exercise. I made significant lifestyle changes and literally saved my life I have just been getting healthier ever since.
About five years ago in my practice (to end my story), I really noticed really strange things happening with my patient population. They were coming in with all kinds of complications that I’ve never seen before – hair falling out, teeth falling out, obviously, infertility and all kinds of symptoms of autoimmune disorders. I didn’t think I even knew necessarily that they were autoimmune disorders at the time, but I understand now that they were all autoimmune disorders – really severe anxiety, poly-addicted. I mean, addicted to something besides having the anorexia or the bulimia.
I just remember thinking, “What the heck is going on? What is wrong right now?” I began to research on my current book called Below the Radar and what I’ve discovered was that in addition to the growing eating disorder population (which is still fairly small, only maybe somewhere under 10% of the overall population), we were looking at a widespread disordered eating.
So we had eating disorders (a small percentage) getting worse, weird complications. But what I really discovered, I thought I was writing a book about eating disorders, I ended up writing a book about disordered eating. What I really discovered was that there was just widespread disordered eating and people just simply didn’t realize that they had disordered eating.
So that’s how I got to the place where I am right now. I love what I do, but I find that teaching people how to eat clean, which is a significant component in my success rates (it really makes a huge different) is not an easy sell where you live in a society where people – you know, we’re the instant gratification nation and people are overworked and over-tired and over-stressed.
However, I will say that a lot of that stress might be driven by the problems with the food supply. It changes – as you know, it changes the neurotransmitter balance and it changes and damages the endocrine system and it creates a situation where the worse you eat, the more you need to eat and then the worse you eat.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I love the fact that you use food in your recover program because…
Dr. Renae Norton: Oh, yeah.
Wendy Myers: …like you said, it’s not an easy sell when you have a large holistic program that works like my Mineral Power Program. It’s a diet, lifestyle, detox and supplements. There’s a lot to it and it’s not an easy sell, but it works. So for me, I have to [inaudible 00:12:12] what works. I have to offer…
Dr. Renae Norton: Yes, I know. Isn’t that bitch?
Wendy Myers: It is!
Dr. Renae Norton: I mean, don’t you wish you could just give in and say, “Okay, just come. I’ll keep my mouth shut when you’re eating foods that I know are poisonous to you because that way, I can keep you as a client.” But I can’t do it!
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I can’t do it either.
Dr. Renae Norton: I cannot do it. I try to warn people now when they start out in therapy with me. I don’t want to be too over the top about warning people, but I try to warn them this is not for everyone. I do tell people that this is not for everyone. But if you engage, if you grab a hold, you’re going to get better and you are not going to relapse. And there are no programs that I know of that can say that and there aren’t too many examples of that out there.
And the reason there aren’t, maybe 10 or 15 years ago – no, you know what? I’ve been looking at the data for 30 years. The data is the same. I wrote my dissertation on this 25 years ago. How come the rates for recovery are so abysmal in the anorexic population. They are literally abysmal.
And guess what? They haven’t gotten better. In fact, if anything, I think they’ve gotten worse.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I know for myself when I sought treatment prior to meeting you, I have met with a couple of different therapists (probably three different therapists about it) and just talked about it as part of my overall healing. They just really couldn’t help me. The talk therapy doesn’t work just in and of itself.
Dr. Renae Norton: I mean, it’s great to focus on what your life stressors. You have to. I do dialectical behavioral therapy to help people regulate their level of emotional arousal because that definitely raises your cortisol level and that definitely does play a role. But you can’t just focus on that because what happens then is that people are not going to get better.
If they feel better about themselves, if they understand the dynamics that may be causing them stress and they resolve them and they still have a food addiction, they’re still feeling bingy, they still bloat every time they eat, they’re not going to get better and they’re going to think it’s their fault.
Can you hear my dog barking?
Wendy Myers: No, it’s okay. Don’t worry about it. It happens.
Dr. Renae Norton: Oh, good.
Wendy Myers: It happens.
Dr. Renae Norton: I have no idea why the dog is barking.
Wendy Myers: It’s okay.
Dr. Renae Norton: … because I’m in the kitchen, I must be cooking and therefore, you should be down here too. I apologize.
Wendy Myers: Well, why don’t we start with something simple? What is bulimia for all those listening that doesn’t fully understand it?
Dr. Renae Norton: Right! So what bulimia is is eating more than you think you should. So there is a subjective binge and then there’s an actual binge. Most people are really binging, meaning that they’re eating huge amounts of foods in relatively short periods of time. However, there are some people that are not necessarily eating huge amounts of food, but feel as if they are binging because they have defined appropriate eating possibly in a very restrictive way.
But the real thing that makes it bulimia is the purging. There are a number of different ways that you can purge. The most common way, of course, is to vomit. Another way of purging is to over-exercise – so working out, running for two or three hours every day. That is a form of purging, a definite form of purging. Abusing laxatives would be another form of purging. Abusing your insulin is new. Diabulimia is a new form of bulimia.
Wendy Myers: Not taking it or taking low doses?
Dr. Renae Norton: Yes, yes. Not taking it typically or taking very low doses. But yes, not taking it fundamentally. And let’s see, where did I leave out? Let’s see, over-exercising, purging by vomiting, laxatives, restricting your insulin.
Wendy Myers: I think that’s it, okay.
Wendy Myers: And so it seems on its face that the goal of bulimia is to lose weight, but what are the true underlying causes of bulimia? It’s not just to lose weight and look thin. I mean, there’s lots of underlying causes.
Dr. Renae Norton: Yes, I believe that there are as many… [dog barking] You know what? I have to put him in his room. Can you…
Wendy Myers: No problem. I’m going to talk with the audience for a little while myself.
Dr. Renae Norton: Okay, talk. Okay.
Wendy Myers: One of the underlying causes of bulimia definitely for me is copper toxicity. This is something that definitely has been well-established by Dr. Paul Eck and Dr. Rick Malter who I had on the podcast a few weeks ago about the history and future of hair mineral analysis.
On my Mineral Power Program, which is a mineral balancing program using hair mineral analysis, this for me was a profound way that I use to detox copper out of my body and has really resolved my bulimia to a significant amount.
Dr. Renae Norton: Wow!
Wendy Myers: It’s been pivotal for me without any other intervention whatsoever. My bulimia has been for the most part 90% nipped in the bud so to speak because it is known among the hair mineral analysis community that copper toxicity is a huge underlying cause of mental illness – eating disorders, anorexia, anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, bipolar. Most bipolar is just pseudo-bipolar. It’s just copper toxicity.
Dr. Rick Malter who is a clinical psychologist I had on the podcast a while ago, he used it in his practice for 35 years to cure ADHD and all kinds of other mental disorders that are caused by mineral imbalances and metal toxicities like copper.
Dr. Renae Norton: Right! And those are getting worse because of the nature of our food. So the connection that I make – and correct me if I’m wrong, but the connection that I make is that in the past, our food had far more nutrients than it has right now. Our food is nutrient-deficient now. So copper toxicity, if I understand copper toxicity may have something to do with other issues. I think zinc deficiency?
Wendy Myers: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, because zinc opposes copper. And also, when we have adrenal fatigue, that is indirectly caused by poor nutrient status. It also causes the build up of copper.
Dr. Renae Norton: Absolutely! And I would say, I’m guessing that probably 70% of the patients I see have adrenal fatigue – or possibly more than that. Their endocrine systems are a mess. Their hormones – I mean, it varies from patient to patient.
I started to say before my dog were starting to go crazy and I’m so sorry. You think you can, but “it breaks my heart to hear you cry.”
Wendy Myers: That’s okay.
Dr. Renae Norton: When you say what causes an eating disorder and bulimia in particular, I really think it’s as varied as the people that you see. I believe right now that many people are experiencing eating disorders – and this is the thesis of my book – because of some sort of deficiency or because of something toxic in the environment.
My book is all about food pollution. It’s Below the Radar. The name of the book is going to be Below the Radar: How Food Pollution is Driving Eating Disorders, Obesity, Premature Aging and Killer Diseases in the U.S..
So I’m a hundred percent onboard with your approach that there’s something wrong with the way that we’re eating and it’s driving disordered eating – I think it’s driving widespread disordered eating in the population, but I also think it’s making specific eating disorder significantly worse.
And we also are seeing an increase in the incidents. We’re seeing younger children, older women, more men and we’re also seeing much, much worse complications in the ED community. So it doesn’t surprise me at all that you are finding the zinc deficiency and the copper toxicity. That makes total sense to me.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I think people are literally starving and then they literally do not have enough nutrients for their bodies and their cells. They’re starving and we have this plethora of – that’s why we’re a culture obsessed with food. People become obsessed with eating. They think it’s about will power. No, their body is going to make them eat, drive them to eat until they meet their nutrient requirements.
Dr. Renae Norton: Yes.
Wendy Myers: Most people are eating nothing. There’s nothing in the food that has any kind of nutrient [inaudible 00:21:15].
Dr. Renae Norton: It’s like nutrition-free.
Wendy Myers: Yeah! Yeah, and they are eating food that actually depletes more nutrients (flour and white sugar, that deplete magnesium and other minerals) and they’re starving to death.
Dr. Renae Norton: Yes, I would agree. I absolutely would agree. It makes perfect sense. And the other thing that explains that from my point of view is this idea of a leaky gut. The brain literally does think it’s not getting the nutrients because even if you put the nutrients in –
So let’s say, I have some patients that are really health nuts. They’re foodies. But I supplement. What I would say is, “That’s awesome. That is really important. That is really good. That’s definitely going to help. But if you have a leaky gut and you’re still eating food that are ripping little holes in your gut, your body still thinks it’s not getting the nutrition that it needs. It’s still going to send out the signal ‘find fat and store it… we need fat…’” and it’s going to store it in the wrong places.
It’s a very, very complex problem and people are completely clueless about what is happening.
Wendy Myers: What are some of the other underlying causes? I mean, the classic explanation of bulimia is the controlling father or – can you kind of put some perspective on that?
Dr. Renae Norton: Yeah, the over-protective mom and the critical father. Actually, that is what my dissertation about. I thought that was a gross oversimplification. In fact, it was somewhat infuriating. But I will tell you, I do see the critical dad and the protective mom sometimes, but I also see the critical mom and the protective dad. I mean, you see everything. So I think that was an oversimplification.
But the causes are many and varied. I think there’s a lot of social pressure that comes to bear on little kids these days. I think when you combine the pressure to be thin with the manner in which food is affecting us –
With genetically engineer foods, with GMO’s in our food, they use genetically-engineered food to fatten cows and pigs, they use MSG to fatten rice. To study weight issues, they’ve been doing that MSG part for years. Now they’re using genetically-engineered corn and grains to fatten cows. Well, guess what? It fattens us too.
So there’s no question that the food is addicting. It’s obesogenic. It’s addictive. It’s carcinogen. It wreaks havoc in our bodies.
Then you combine that with the tremendous need to minimize the amount of time you spend preparing your food. So we are the original instant gratification nation.
People that I treat are literally afraid of going to the grocery store and cooking their food. I mean, I have to go with them often to the grocery store dragging them kicking and screaming. Sometimes, I’m taking them in a wheelchair because they’re so overweight that they can’t navigate a grocery store on their own. They simply can’t do it. All of those people are out of wheelchair now, by the way.
Wendy Myers: It’s just funny visualizing you having to babysit them to go to the grocery store. They will resist it. They don’t want to do it. They don’t.
Dr. Renae Norton: No! They don’t want to go grocery shopping. They don’t think they can. They really don’t know how to grocery shop, many of them. They definitely don’t want to cook.
I mean, grocery shopping is a nightmare especially when I tell them, “You have to eat clean.” They get to the grocery store and they go, “What?! What is that? What does that look like? What does that even mean?” So I send them with grocery list and pictures of the food. I drag them into my kitchen. I take a picture of everything that’s in there and send them out with the pictures.
A friend of mine just said, “Can you send some pictures to my mom of the wrappers of your foods?” because I’ve sent them to him. He knows that’s my favorite way of communicating, “Get this one… don’t get that one.” But yeah, that whole idea.
People have bought in so strongly to the idea that they should – we’re the only country in the world, we used to be the only country in the world with fastfood. We originated fastfood. Most people in most places in the world still, people gather their food and cook it or at least they go to the marketplace and bring it home and cook it.
We really think there’s something wrong with us if we have to do that. We fundamentally believe the rhetoric that we shouldn’t have to spend any time in the kitchen, that we should just be able to somehow miraculously eat the food.
Wendy Myers: We’ve got to go back to the basics, back to how we used to do things.
Dr. Renae Norton: Yes, exactly. We have to be willing to grow a little bit of the food or at least go shopping for the food and pick the right food to begin with.
And everybody at home, I don’t spend long cooking. I don’t bake at all (because you have to follow a recipe to bake and I’m horrible at following recipes), but I cook absolutely scrumptious, delicious meals and I cook them in minutes.
Okay, I do spend some time grocery shopping. I probably spend three or four hours a week grocery shopping. I try to get it down as efficiently as possible. So that’s one thing. That’s one piece of it. We want instant gratification.
A lot of people will argue that it’s too expensive to eat clean. I can prove that it isn’t. The research is there to prove that it isn’t. Now, you can way overspend when you are eating clean. You can do that, but you don’t have to. You can eat clean for the same amount of money that you would spend if you were eating out all the time. Where you really save are on the doctor bills.
I get the lowest healthcare rates you can get. My insurance guys are always like, “Whoa! I wish I could get a healthcare rate like this.” They do all the tests, they’re looking for something and they can’t find anything. So it’s awesome to eat clean and experience the benefits on that end. Especially the older you get – you probably don’t appreciate this yet, but you will. As you begin to age, you’ll realize, “Wow! This could cost a fortune.”
Somebody who is severely obese spends twice the amount of money on healthcare as someone who is a normal weight. It’s just to our benefit to include that in the equation.
Wendy Myers: What about vegetarian/vegan diets? I wanted to touch on that a little bit. You rolled your eyes like I do too.
Dr. Renae Norton: Yeah. I groan every time I get a vegetarian. I usually just say to people who are vegan, “I’m probably not going to be able to help you” because I don’t know what to do for them. I mean, if they’re vegan, their sources of protein are so limited and you’re going to be getting soy somewhere and soy is like 95% right now genetically-engineered in the United States.
I feel that they’re just missing so many nutrients when they eat vegan and vegetarian and it makes it so much harder. It’s so nice to eat a big, juicy steak that is 100% grass-fed. I mean, it tastes so good. It smooths out your blood sugar levels. You can just test your blood before you have the steak and test your blood after you have the steak, your blood sugar level is going to go down. It’s awesome!
And that’s what we want. We want our blood sugar levels to stabilize because when your blood sugar levels are going up and down all the time, you’re storing fat. Your body is looking to store fat. It’s really unhealthy.
Wendy Myers: And you need that protein for the building blocks for your neurotransmitters like serotonin and what-not to stabilize your mood.
Dr. Renae Norton: Hello? You so, so do. And people just don’t understand that. They don’t make that connection at all. It’s interesting. When you see someone who is vegan or vegetarian – I don’t have statistics to back this up. I’m saying this and I should really think about this. I am thinking about it as I’m saying it. In my clinical experience, it seems to me that they’re stressed so much more.
I mean, I think I’ve assumed in the past that maybe the reason you’re stressed is because it’s hard to be vegan or vegetarian. They say it’s not, but I can’t help thinking it is.
So one thing to be aware of if you are a therapist is when you get someone who is anorexic who is vegan or vegetarian, that’s not a coincidence. That may be a moral issue for her now, but it usually starts as a really strategic way of getting people off your back because you don’t want to eat – that’s just a whole food category that you don’t have to justify not eating. So you have to kind of be mindful of that.
I always ask the anorexic individual, “Is this a moral issue for you?” and even if it is, “Did it start as a way of avoiding fat primarily?” And if they say “really, it did start as a way of avoiding fat, but now it is a moral issue for me,” well you have to respect that. It always gives me a groan.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I find for my clients as well, it does interfere in treatment because people are not able to heal their adrenals and thyroid as well without the nutrients and the minerals in animal protein. And I know for myself, I went vegetarian for about 18 months and then graduated to veganism for about six months, I was really shocked. I had the worst bout of bulimia that I’ve ever had in my life where I was doing it every single done, which I have never done and have never done since.
Dr. Renae Norton: It’s your body telling you you you needed protein, right?
Wendy Myers: Yeah. And I think what it was was deficiency of serotonin because I’m not eating the animal proteins that form the building blocks, the tryptophan, which are the building blocks of serotonin.
Your body needs serotonin for many, many things, not just mental health. So your body actually requires – so if you don’t have enough, your body will start to crave sugar. A lot of vegans have voracious sugar cravings. Not everyone, everyone is different.
But for me, I did, voracious sugar cravings. And what that does is you get this rush of insulin and it clears out all the amino acids and the sugar except for tryptophan, so that it doesn’t have any competition to cross the blood-brain barrier and you can make serotonin.
But when I was doing that sugar binge to get that serotonin fixed, I would them compulsively binge and compulsively purge.
I was really concerned about my health and so I went to go seek treatment. And that’s when I just happened to be reading Natasha Campbell McBride’s book Gut and Psychology Syndrome, which is all “eat meat, meat, meat, meat, meat…”
Dr. Renae Norton: Yeah!
Wendy Myers: I was reading in one little section, it said the nutrient deficiencies that are suffered by just vegetarians (forget vegan) and it was reading my medical chart. I had to have $4000 worth of testing. The doc figured out what’s wrong with me. It was my diet. And it had caused thyroid issues and adrenal fatigue. I was just completely out of whack.
There’s major nutrient deficient that contributed and exacerbated my bulimia.
Dr. Renae Norton: And so did you change your diet? I assume…
Wendy Myers: [Snapped], like that. I went out and bought a pound of peppered bacon. It tasted so good because my body needed it. My body desperately needed it.
Dr. Renae Norton: No doubt.
Wendy Myers: And I became very, very copper toxic. That’s the problem. Vegetarian and vegans become progressively more and more copper toxic. That’s why studies actually show that vegetarians suffer more mental illness than meat eaters.
Dr. Renae Norton: Ah, so there is data for that.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, there is. Chris Kresser mentioned the study about that.
Dr. Renae Norton: Oh, yes! That’s right, he does, doesn’t he?
Wendy Myers: It’s like the chicken before the egg theory, but I’m very confident that it’s due to the copper toxicity from eating so much copper-rich foods and zinc-deficient foods.
Dr. Renae Norton: So what do people do when they have a copper toxicity? I’m going to refer some patients to you.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Oh, thanks! Well, number one, supplement zinc and eat red meat a couple of times a week. Red meat is the medicine.
But it’s more complicated than that. There’s other imbalances in the body that need to be rectified and really, the best way to do that is a complete Mineral Power Program where someone does a hair mineral analysis and then we see what nutrient deficiencies they have, what kind of stress patterns they have that are showing in their hair.
And then I design a custom supplement program to correct those imbalances.
And then over time, people, they detox copper. It takes a year or two years, but it happens and people feel amazing afterwards like I do.
Dr. Renae Norton: Right! Yes. Yeah, I’m putting someone or going through the detox part of it. It’s challenging for most people than through myself. It was so much harder. Of course, I encouraged my patients to go to [inaudible 00:34:40]. I waited and waited myself. Who knows why I was waiting? I had no idea what I was waiting for. But when I finally did detox, it was like, “Whoa! This is really hard.”
Wendy Myers: Yeah, it can be unpleasant.
Dr. Renae Norton: It’s awful. But oh, my goodness! The change! I mean, it’s amazing how good you feel afterwards – all the things that changed. It was so many strange things like growing hair and sweating and body temperature. I mean, just all these things that I thought, “Oh, this must be happening because I’m old,” but none of it was because of aging.
And I think that’s really typical of our society right now. We are aging prematurely and we accept it like it’s normal. I have people who aren’t 40 yet pre-menopausal. I mean, my grandmother had her last baby when she was 60.
Wendy Myers: Yeah! And it’s true. I tell people, when I was 40, I thought that I was over the hill because I felt so terrible. Fatigue, people accept fatigue. It is not normal. In hunter-gatherer societies, the men, they are thin, they are healthy, they are fit, they are bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, great memory and all that. It’s not normal.
Wendy Myers: So let’s go back to bulimia. So what role do toxic relationships play in bulimia, in triggering it?
Dr. Renae Norton: Well, again, there are so many things that can stress people out. A toxic relationship is probably as common as anything else. I think often when people are stressed in a relationship, they turn to food. That usually creates more problems than the relationship.
Let’s take, for example, that you’re in a bad marriage and you’re beginning to recognize that you’re in a marriage that isn’t good and that you, at some point probably, need to make plans to get out of it. The last thing you want to have happen is that you are overweight. Unfortunately, most people do lose weight when they get divorced (not that they do it in a healthy way).
Wendy Myers: Yeah, the divorce diet. It’s the best diet there is, the divorce diet.
Dr. Renae Norton: But what happens is you begin to either – if you are still in the relationship and you don’t nokw that you’re going to get divorced, your level of anxiety (and I think these are anxiety disorders, by the way), your level of anxiety increases in ways that drives eating. So eating is just the way we sooth ourselves.
If we’re not problem-solving well, if our level of arousal is going up, we have to find something that if we don’t problem-solve, then the only other option we have is to numb. Ideally, we would learn how to problem-solve.
And that’s where I find that dialectical behavioral therapy is so helpful. It just works so well. It can be life-changing.
Wendy Myers: To get people in touch with their feelings.
Dr. Renae Norton: Yeah, but it isn’t so much getting people in touched with their feelings. My patients know what they feel. It is managing the level of arousal that the feeling drives.
So how this works is we are hardwired for fight or flight. Back when we shoot up on earth ten million years ago, we were continuously in situations where – [inaudible 00:38:16] ice age.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, that was my favorite, “Ice Age Water… I love it!”
Dr. Renae Norton: Right! And she does a commercial for what I’m talking about. But anyway, back when we showed up on earth ten million years ago during the ice age – no, during the ice age – we are hardwired to survive. We were constantly in situations where survival was an issue.
In other words, if a wooly mammoth was chasing you, you needed to either throw your spear at it or run like hell. You needed that fight or flight kind of thing. Well, that’s that adrenaline rush. That’s a huge source of adrenaline and also cortisol that we needed.
But these days, we’re almost never in situations where we’re about to die. In fact, when we are, we usually die. We might be in one or two situations where our live is really threatened and typically, actually, something bad happens.
So we don’t really need all that adrenaline, but we still have it. And unfortunately, we don’t regulate it very well at all. So we get stressed, it’s as if something was getting ready to chomp down on us. It’s as if we were going to die and the body reacts accordingly.
And one of the things that the body does when cortisol is released is it says, “Okay, shut everything down that we don’t need.” So as far as metabolism is concerned, shut it down. Stop metabolizing, slow it down.
Well, if you live with stress constantly, if your cortisol levels are constantly being triggered, then it’s exhausting. You have adrenal fatigue and you gain weight.
Back to the toxic relationship, if you are in a toxic relationship and your cortisol levels, you’re always on edge, you are always in that state, physiologically, it’s going to drive you to do something to compensate.
And so what often happens is – well, the brain is already sending the signal, “Find fat and store fat” and the other signal is happening that’s coming across as, “Don’t burn fat,” so already, it’s a double whammy.
What the DBT training allows people to do or teaches people to do is that the good news is that this level of arousal is now language-driven. It’s language-mediated. If you used a word that’s upsetting (even if it’s only in your head), your level of arousal will go up and your problem-solving will go down.
It’s like road rage. Nobody is problem-solving well when they are experiencing road rage. There had been instances of women with little children in the car going after a truck driver that pissed her off – with a baby in the car, right? There’s a baby onboard and she’s going to get the truck driver. She’s lost her mind!
That is an example of poor problem-solving. Well, that’s because her cortisol levels have spun out of control and she can’t help herself.
So the DBT training allows you to mediate that by just using different words. It sounds like it wouldn’t work. It sounds ridiculous. It sounds way too simple, but it works and it’s life-changing.
So if you can take the word that you were using that was driving these really strong negative emotions and turned into a neutral word, your level of arousal goes right back down.
Wendy Myers: I think there’s something to be said also for if you’re in a toxic relationship and you’re near a toxic person and you’re dealing with their toxic energy all the time, then it’s almost like you want to vomit that out. Your body wants to get rid of it and eject it in some way.
Dr. Renae Norton: Yes, absolutely, absolutely. And so, yes. So the binging, you do to numb that pain, that anxiety that you have when you’re in a toxic relationship. And you’re absolutely right, the purging, you do to purge the feelings that you have or the reaction that you have to the relationship, absolutely. It’s a great metaphor.
Wendy Myers: And now what about parasites? I think parasites…
Dr. Renae Norton: Everybody has them.
Wendy Myers: I think they’re one of the underlying causes of bulimia that is not really looked at or talked about.
Dr. Renae Norton: Exactly.
Wendy Myers: But I think when people have a lot of parasites or an infestation, which happens to unhealthy bodies (parasites are opportunistic and they prey on weak host and will proliferate in a weak host), I think that’s also another way where you’ll instinctively try to purge to try to get the parasites out.
Dr. Renae Norton: Yes, absolutely. I would say that about 60%-70% of my patients have a parasites – both bulimic and anorexic actually and obese. I’d say 60% to 70% of all my patients across the board have parasites.
And the reason I say that is because I try to get all of my patients to do a functional diagnostic nutritional assessment and it’s so common. In fact, it’s kind of rare when somebody doesn’t have some form of major dysbiosis of the colon and parasites is the most common.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve diagnosed h pylori. Most people may not know h pylori is, but it’s been associated with – and now we know that it’s associated with ulcers. But what we also know is that if it isn’t diagnosed, eventually, it leads to stomach cancer.
Most people would never have it diagnosed. Nobody tests for it really. It may show up, but it doesn’t necessarily show up when you do a fecal sample. You have to do several days and you have to look at the sample in several different ways.
And that’s what the functional diagnostic thing does. But most people will never have the h pylori diagnosed.
And for years, they have that h pylori, which causes gastrointestinal distress and bloating. That makes people want to purge.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I was diagnosed with that as well. My father died of esophageal cancer. I believe that that was caused by h pylori. People, they get it from a close family member typically.
Dr. Renae Norton: Yes, that’s right. It’s highly contagious. People don’t realize that. It’s highly contagious. And when you have a leaky gut (which so many people do), what happens is with the leaky gut and the h pylori, a combination of the two is that you’re constantly physically uncomfortable in your gut.
And so a lot of my patients say, “I can’t tell you how many times I purged because I just wanted to get away from the discomfort. I felt really uncomfortable as soon as I ate.” Let’s say they ate a taco, so they ate something with white grain, with white flour in it. “I felt horribly uncomfortable as soon as I ate that food.” That’s because it’s partly the h pylori that’s one of the symptoms and it’s also a combination of the h pylori (which also contributes to leaky gut) and the leaky gut, thus your body is leaking, your immune system attacks it – all of this stuff is going on right there in the gut. It’s really uncomfortable and of course, it seems logical to purge.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Oh, yeah. And h pylori can cause low stomach acid also, which aggravates that whole chain of events that you talked about.
Dr. Renae Norton: There you go!
Wendy Myers: That’s what I love about you, that you use FDN (functional diagnostic nutrition) in getting a whole picture of the client, so that you can see what’s going on physically as well as mentally. I think a lot of therapists and clinical psychologists are just kind of like shooting in the dark.
Dr. Renae Norton: They don’t know that they are.
Wendy Myers: Well, they don’t know what’s going on.
Dr. Renae Norton: That’s what’s even worse. And thank you, you’re absolutely right. They have no idea the role that food plays.
In fact, my approach is viewed somewhat as quackery because the National Eating Disorders Association takes a very strong stand. The stand that they take is that everyone should learn to eat in moderation, that encouraging, looking at this problem from a food addiction model or looking at the idea of abstinence from any food is going to drive more disordered eating.
In other words, where they’re coming from (and they’re thinking primarily I think about anorexic), where they’re coming from is if you give the anorexic individual an excuse to restrict, which telling people, “There are foods you just shouldn’t eat, we should learn to avoid,” if you tell people that, that gives some people the excuse they need to restrict.
I understand the logic, but it’s absurd. If they’re going to eat foods that are toxic to their endocrine systems, that are going to cause bloating and weird weight gain and metabolic syndrome and all kinds of other problems, surely, we have a responsibility to let our patients know that their healing process is going to be compromised, that they may never heal. They may never recover.
The recovery rates for anorexia are 30% and they are a little bit better than that for bulimia. And bulimarexia, the combination of the two, forget it! Nobody gets bulimarexia done. Nobody gets those people well.
This approach works. This approach does it because when you heal – what happens when you encourage people and teach people how to eat clean is they can trust food again. They get the supplement, they detox, they heal their gut. They get the supplements they need so their brains are working again.
Wendy Myers: The brain fog lifts and then the [inaudible 00:47:59] go away.
Dr. Renae Norton: Oh, absolutely! The anxiety people feel before, they go into bio-identical hormones and the relief from the anxiety that they have after they have been on the bio-identical hormones (I mean, that’s assuming they needed them of course).
Now, people get confused about bio-identical hormones and hormone replacement therapy. I’m not talking about hormone replacement therapy. That’s dangerous. It causes cancer. Don’t do it. I’m talking about bio-identical hormones. These are not dangerous. They make a huge difference in adjusting and normalizing hormones that are being attacked all the time and it is life-changing. It’s simply life-changing.
I kept thinking, “Wow! I’m such a good therapist. My patients don’t even have – they come with these horrible anxiety disorders. I get them and I work with them for a year and then they just don’t even have an anxiety disorder anymore. They don’t have to take medication or anything,” what I realized afterwards is it’s because their serotonin levels are so healthy in comparison to how they were before.
Unless you go through that yourself, unless you experience the anxiety you have when your serotonin levels are all screwed up versus the anxiety you have when they’re restored to normal, it’s just amazing!
Wendy Myers: And I know on most program, eating disorder programs where therapists will use anti-depressants and other medications – what do you think about that and its effectiveness?
Dr. Renae Norton: I don’t like it. For one thing, they do a lot of damage. I mean, I’m not against medication per se. If somebody really needs to be on medication, I say of course. If she’s suicidal for example and [inaudible 00:49:43] and/or stay alive, then of course, we need to get her on medication.
But I say, let’s evaluate where her serotonin levels are. Let’s use a natural approach if we possibly can. Let’s use a holistic approach. Let’s change her food. Let’s change everything we can before we conclude that the only thing that’s going to work is an anti-depressant or an anxiolytic.
Wendy Myers: I love it that you don’t typically use anti-depressants and you get to the root cause of what’s actually causing the serotonin or the neurotransmitter imbalance because again, I think a lot of practitioners are just shooting in the dark when they just automatically write a script if they have depression or anxiety. It’s just automatic.
Dr. Renae Norton: Right!
Wendy Myers: …without any kind of investigation or whatsoever.
Dr. Renae Norton: For years, the favorite treatment for anorexia was Zyprexa and Abilify. Both are atypical anti-psychotic medications and are really damaging. Just really, Zyprexa can cause type II diabetes. I mean, it just is the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.
It would make the patient gain weight, but then as soon as she could, she’d get off of it and lose the weight and more. I’m not a fan of anti-depressants and anxiolytics. I think they may be necessary for some people, but I think you can heal so much of what’s wrong with clean food.
Clean food is medicine. We were designed to eat clean and eat clean food works brilliantly in our bodies, just brilliantly. It really and truly – it’s not neutral, it’s healing.
Wendy Myers: And so are there any other causes of bulimia that you wanted to discuss, that you could think of?
Dr. Renae Norton: No, not off the top of my head. I mean, my main focus, as you know is the toxic nature of our food. I think stress in general. I think it’s hard to separate.
I don’t look at causality in a linear way. I look at causality as multiply determined – cyclical and multiply determined. And so I think that there are in each person many things that came to bear that resulted in the individual having the eating disorder.
That’s why you have to use a very patient-centered approached. That’s why the functional nutritional and I also like the functional fitness and that’s why the holistic approach is so very important.
But again, it’s a hard sell. I’m so happy to find people like you and other people like me out there who are willing to take a position that obviously isn’t very popular sometimes. Sometimes, it’s hard for people to understand because there is an element of our society right now that wants this information, that really gets it, that really wants it. It’s just that the vast majority of people, this really is below the radar for the vast majority of people.
Wendy Myers: And so how does on recover from bulimia? Do you have any kind of approach that you use?
Dr. Renae Norton: Well, my best strategy, I think the thing that worked the best aside from the fact that I teach people to eat clean (which is enormously helpful for them in terms of staying recovered), the best strategy for me is when I tell them, “You can binge as much as you want. You’re not going to have to worry about gaining weight. Binge away. You just have to promise me that you’re binging on clean food.”
And also, you get to eat really fatty portions of delicious meat. You get to slather stuff with really delicious oils. You make popcorn, then put butter on it and coconut oil on it. It’s delicious.
Wendy Myers: That sounds good.
Dr. Renae Norton: It’s so good. You can make kettle corn in minutes without ruining a pot or a pan to do it. You can make fudge that is so good for you that it could be considered a supplmenet. You get to eat all kinds of organic fruits and vegetables.
So you can binge to your heart’s content. You can eat all day long if you want to. You just have to eat clean.
So most people are like, “I could probably do that.” So that helps a lot. The worst thing you can do is tell somebody who’s binging to stop binging. It’s amazing how many therapists say to their patients, “The first thing I want you to do is stop binging.”
Wendy Myers: Yeah, abstinence.”
Dr. Renae Norton: Then my patients go and say to me (because they’ve been to these therapists), I’m thinking to myself, “Oh, okay. Right! I’ll just stop binging.”
Wendy Myers: “Yeah, I haven’t thought of that before. I haven’t tried that.”
Dr. Renae Norton: “Yeah, why didn’t I think of that? Thank you so much” and then they never go back to that person. But it’s amazing how many therapists think they can just tell the patient, “Okay, don’t binge anymore.”
You obviously can’t tell the patient not to binge anymore, but what you can tell the patient, what you can reassure the patient is that if she eats clean or he eats clean, the longer you do it, the less you’re going to think about food, the more you’re going to see food as fuel. So that’s one thing.
Wendy Myers: I love that you have recipes on your site as well, that you’ve got tons of recipes and you have videos on there, cooking videos. You’ve got a podcast. You have lots of support that you provide your client. I love that.
Dr. Renae Norton: Yes, thank you. And then the other thing is you do have to find out what damage you’ve done and you do have to correct the damage. I haven’t seen anybody without a leaky gut. So you’re going to have to identify what’s going on in the gut (and that’s the functional diagnostic thing, the FDN thing) and then you’re going to have to take the steps to correct it.
And it takes a while like you said earlier. You’re going to detox. Most people want an immediate fix. They want instant gratification. They want to go to the doctor and get the pill.
So I have to tell them all, “I don’t really work like that.” You’re going to come to me. I’m going to tell you, “Well, we’re going to try this… and then we might try that… and depending upon what happens with these two things, then we’re going to maybe do this.” They’re going, “What? No, I just want to know what do I need to do. What do I need to do right now?” and the only thing I could tell them right now is, “Eat as much as you can clean and that’s a tall order.”
So I really don’t even want people to necessarily – I tell them, “You can binge as much as you want as long as it’s clean.” I don’t expect people to start eating clean right away because it’s too hard. It’s just too hard.
So it’s important that they extend their own patience and they have a sense of, “This is going to work out. I’m going to get well and I’m never going to be sick again” and that they’re willing to put the time in to learn a new –
And I hate the word ‘lifestyle’. I always groan when someone says, “It needs to be a lifestyle change.” I really hesitate to use that word. But they do have to learn new ways of living their lives and manage it.
Wendy Myers: So what are some of the damage that is caused by bulimia? I think that’s something when people know kind of the damage that they’re doing, it can be a motivating factor to stop. A lot of people, they just don’t want to know about it. They just turn a blind eye to it.
Dr. Renae Norton: Well, we’ve been talking about some of it like the whole leaky gut, the mineral imbalances. It can do esophageal damage when they purge. They can absolutely ruin their teeth. I’ve had patients who don’t have enough bone left in their jaw. Those are usually bulimarexic individuals who don’t have enough bone left in their jaw for even implants. Of course, they’re messing with a neurotoxic. And therefore, neurological issues can be part of bulimia.
I mean, anything that the endocrine system touches, you can be damaging. It’s really hard to – I mean, there are as many different complications of bulimia as there are toxins in the environment. It just depends on what your favorite toxin is.
Wendy Myers: So do you use detox as part of your program?
Dr. Renae Norton: Oh, definitely. It’s really part of the FDN thing that I really want my patients to go through, the functional diagnostic. I support them through that. I refer to someone else for that, but I will support them through that.
Wendy Myers: That’s really unusual. I didn’t realize that you encourage that. It’s very unusual for a therapist.
Dr. Renae Norton: Oh, yeah. It’s really important. It’s really helpful. I mean, otherwise, I’m treating the psychological parts and I’m really strongly encouraging them to eat differently and we don’t know enough about what they specifically need to do to get their guts healthy again and to avoid the foods that they are allergic to. They become not necessarily allergic, but they become sensitive to so many different foods because they’re leaking out their guts.
Unless you know which foods they’re sensitive to and eliminate them, you’ve got all that inflammation. And inflammation is horrible. It causes Alzheimer’s. It’s been implicated in many of the major diseases that we are seeing today, major chronic diseases that we’re seeing.
So yeah, I definitely really believe in a holistic approach.
Wendy Myers: Well, Dr. Renae, thank you so much for coming on this show. I so appreciate it.
Dr. Renae Norton: You’re so welcome. Thank you for having me. It was wonderful. And thank you for the work you do.
Wendy Myers: Thank you, thank you. My only hope is that this one person is helped by listening to this podcast, so it’s worth it. I applaud the work that you’re doing as well. It’s just really on the cutting edge, frontier of how to truly tackle the underlying causes of eating disorders to abolish them. I just love the work that you’re doing.
Dr. Renae Norton: Yeah, that’s awesome.
Wendy Myers: So why don’t you tell the listeners about where they can find you and consult with you and what you have going on.
Dr. Renae Norton: Yes, you can find me at eatingdisorderpro.com. You can email me [email protected]. I do have a Blog Tech radio show that airs every Wednesday night. It’s also called the Eating Disorder Pro. Please join us there as well. I have really good handouts on my website – lots of recipes, lots of videos on how to do things. There will be more in the future. And Twitter and Facebook, it’s @drrenae on Twitter and Facebook.
Wendy Myers: And then your book is coming out at some point?
Dr. Renae Norton: Yes, the book will be out in the spring of 2015. I’m so pumped!
Wendy Myers: That’s great! That’s fantastic!
Dr. Renae Norton: So I’ll come back on your show right before it comes back out.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I would love that. I would love that.
Dr. Renae Norton: Great!
Wendy Myers: Well, Dr. Renae, again, thank you so much for being on the show.
Dr. Renae Norton: You’re so welcome. Thanks for having me, Wendy.
Wendy Myers: And listeners, if you want to learn all about detoxification and the Modern Paleo diet and my program, Mineral Power, go check out myersdetox.com.
