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Getting and Keeping Those Unwanted Pounds Off - A Birthday Gift for Oprah
Patients: Oppose Wyeth & FDA Actions to Limit BHRT Access!
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Getting and Keeping Those Unwanted Pounds Off - A Birthday Gift for Oprah |
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Dr. C.W. Randolph says, "Oprah and Bob Greene are on the right track, but are missing a key first step. Menopausal women across the country can now finally lose the weight that just never seems to come off." Dr. Randolph has developed a plan that will keep the weight off, too.
Today is Oprah Winfrey's birthday. C.W. Randolph, Jr., M.D., author of From Belly Fat to Belly Flat, celebrates her success story, her courage to give information that inspires and encourages, and her commitment to use her talents and funds for a wider global good. Now Oprah is partnering with her trusted personal trainer Bob Greene, in an effort to get one million people across America to lose weight. But, according to Dr. Randolph, "The odds are that a good number of those people will either not lose their unwanted pounds or, if they do, they will rebound." Mr. Greene (and Oprah's) premise that small but significant health lifestyle changes are the best strategy for weight loss has a great deal of merit. Unfortunately, says Randolph, it is missing a key first step.
"From my experience in treating thousands of overweight women and men, I can safely say that - if a person's hormones are out of balance -- then even the strongest willed efforts to make lifestyle changes and lose weight will be sabotaged at a cellular level," says Randolph.
As a board certified gynecologist, Dr. Randolph has safely and successfully treated women and men with hormone imbalances for more than a decade. "My clinical experience has been that most women over 30 and men over 40 experience a shift in their hormone production that causes those pounds to start to pack around the middle. In fact, weight loss research proves that because of shifting hormone production the average person will add one to two pounds around his or her middle between the ages of 35 and 55. As long as the body's cellular metabolism is compromised by an untreated hormone imbalance, those extra pounds around the middle will be nearly impossible to lose no matter how healthily you eat or how much you exercise."
Dr. Randolph, who also authored From Hormone Well to Hormone Well, says hormones work against women as they age. He works with tens of thousands of women showing them how to get rid of those unwanted pounds and keep them off as they age.
Like many women, Oprah really works hard to lose weight and keep it off by eating healthy and exercising. But admittedly has suffered some weight gain rebounds. Over the years, viewers have watched Oprah work with several diet and nutritional gurus. They have offered good guidance points on their programs, but what they do not address is the underlying physiological reason.
Here are some ways to tell if your hormones are out of balance:
Age: Oprah will turn 54 today. All women begin to experience a shift in hormone production in their early to mid-thirties. This shift causes an imbalance between the body's levels of estrogen, progesterone and testosterone resulting in a condition of estrogen dominance that can continue long after menopause. Multiple medical studies link estrogen dominance with weight gain, particularly around the waist, hips and thighs.
Weight: Oprah reports that she has had a life-long struggle with those extra pounds. Unfortunately, her weight loss efforts are most likely being sabotaged at a cellular level. The bad news is that too much estrogen circulating in the body increases body fat and then that fatty tissue produces and stores even more estrogen. Medical studies indicate that, if you have been ten pounds overweight for a year or more, you will be caught in a cycle of increasing estrogen dominance and your body will be predisposed to store more fatty tissue. In other words, at a cellular level the belly becomes a "fat magnet".
Stress: Dr. Randolph says that Oprah probably suffers from a degree of stress in her life because, in her magazine column What I Know For Sure, she frequently discusses her challenges in managing her busy schedule, multiple professional ventures and her cherished personal time. Stress does a number on hormone balance. Chronic stress causes the levels of the hormone cortisol to surge. High cortisol levels compromise the body's metabolism and cement even more pounds around the middle.
Sleep: Bob Greene's The Best Life Diet focuses a great deal on how emotions can trigger unhealthy eating patterns. From Dr. Randolph's professional medical experience, he contends often people who struggle with emotional eating habits have grueling daily schedules and do not get enough sleep. Too little sleep negatively impacts hormones. "When you get too little sleep, levels of the hormone ghrelin become elevated while the levels of the hormone leptin become depressed. High ghrelin levels cause you to feel hungry no matter how much you eat and low leptin levels cause you to never feel full,” said Randolph. "Lack of sleep that disrupts hormone levels and balance can be a contributor to emotional eating struggles."
In Dr. Randolph's just released new book, From Belly Fat to Belly Flat, he provides his medically-proven Three-Step Belly Flat Plan.
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Analyze the patient's hormones and put her on a regimen of bio-identical hormone replacement personalized to eliminate her underlying condition of estrogen dominance and restore her optimum hormone balance at a cellular level.
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Follow his 30-day nutritional program, including four essential belly-blasting food groups and recommended supplements, to help the body naturally excrete and eliminate its extra estrogen load.
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Eliminate stress and lack of sleep as hormone-balance saboteurs. Says Randolph, "Based on the lifestyle program Genie (my wife and co-author) outlines, I recommend several practical stress management tools and some simple lifestyle options for sleep enhancement."
If you share Oprah's weight loss struggle and can self-identify yourself as a high-risk candidate for hormone imbalance, Dr. Randolph's books can help you.
Best wishes,
C.W. Randolph, Jr., M.D., R.Ph. and Genie James, M.M.Sc
Dr. Randolph is a practicing gynecologist and an internationally recognized expert in the field of in bio-identical hormone replacement. He is the Medical Director for the The Natural Hormone Institute of America and is also the author of From Hormone Hell to Hormone Well as well as From Belly Fat to Belly Flat (to be released in January ’08).
* Please Note:
Because legally we
are unable to provide prescriptions for
telephone consultation patients unless they
have been previously seen in my office,
should you require a prescription for a more
comprehensive panel of bio-identical hormone
replacement, my nurse practitioner will
advise you how to locate a physician and
compounding pharmacy in your area.
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Patients: Oppose Wyeth & FDA Actions to Limit BHRT Access! |
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Two weeks ago Dr. Randolph and Genie James informed you via their newsletter that on January 9, 2008 the FDA agreed to support Wyeth in their campaign to end access to compounded hormone medicines and announced that it will “halt” compounding of hormone treatments that contain estriol. Estriol is a common and criticalcomponent of many bio-identical hormone therapies (including Bi-Est and Tri-Est). It has a monograph form the U.S. Pharmacopeia and meets standards that were established for compounded medicines in Congress’s 1997 FDA Modernization Act.
“If I were Janet Woodcock, FDA’s Chief Medical Officer, I would be embarrassed,” says Dr. Randolph. “Not only does the FDA not have official jurisdiction here as compounding medications are regulated by state boards of pharmacy, but more importantly, the FDA’s position paper about estriol includes several egregious errors.”
“I’ll address two flaming misstatements here. 1.) According to the FDA ‘no drug containing estriol has been approved by the FDA and 2.) The safety and effectiveness of estriol is unknown. Actually, in the 1970s there was an FDA approved drug on the market called Hormonin that contained the active ingredients estradiol, estriol and estrone. I know about this drug because I was a licensed pharmacist before I returned to medical school. The company manufactured Hormonin here in the U.S. was acquired and today that drug continues to be manufactured in Great Britain.”
“As for the question of estriol’s safety,” Dr. Randolph continues, “I would have thought that Dr. Woodcock would have done her homework. There are over 300 published medical (Pubmed) references indexed ‘estriol/therapeutic use’ going back more than 30 years and yet there are no reports of any adverse effects associated with estriol usage. Most of the references refer to the favorable effects estriol has been shown to have on health parameters such as blood lipids and beneficial effects on menopausal symptoms. In fact, results of recent research at both the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta and the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha actually show that estriol can have anti-cancer effects.”
“I am deeply concerned that access to safe and efficacious bio-identical hormone replacement therapies (BHRT) could be at risk,” says Genie James, Executive Director and Dr. Randolph’s co-founder of The Natural Hormone Institute of America. “Even more, I am horrified that Wyeth would once again so brazenly attempt to use its corporate wealth and power to twist the facts, manipulate the research and, ultimately, push their mercenary agenda through a federal governing body.”
“In light of Wyeth’s most recent petition, I am forced to ask several seminal questions: First, does the pharmaceutical industry regard women’s health as a sacred arena of medicine or does it simply see women – particularly baby boomer women – as a burgeoning target market to be exploited via product sales? Is it any coincidence that Wyeth’s own Premarin is the brand leader in the synthetic estrogen product market? Can physicians and patients trust the FDA to be fair and unbiased in addressing this issue if the agency’s drug evaluation center receives over $300,000 per year (approximately half of its operation budget) from pharmaceutical companies, including Wyeth? Finally, is the power of pharmaceutical profit so great that even the FDA can be manipulated to turn a blind eye to the fact that the rate of female cancers continues decline in lockstep with the decline in the sales of synthetic estrogen products?”
“I can’t speak for the conscience of the FDA but I can speak for physicians like myself who have for years relied on BHRT to successfully and safely treat patients suffering from hormonal imbalances,” says Dr. Randolph. “I can also presume to speak for the tens of thousands of patients who have found that BHRT gave them not only relief from symptoms but a feeling of having “their life back”. In speaking, I hold out these truths:
- BHRT is a safe and effective option for treating hormonal imbalances. Side effects are minimal, if any. Unlike synthetic hormone therapies, there has been no evidence linking BHRT to any carcinogenic effect or increased risk for heart attack, stroke, blood clotting or Alzheimer’s disease.
- Clinical studies have linked prescriptions of Wyeth’s Premarin with an increased risk of breast and uterine cancers, heart attack, stroke, blood clotting and Alzheimer’s disease.
- The FDA often regulatory decisions based on industry-sponsored studies and research. In presenting their research, pharmaceutical companies often only publish selective results, even presenting the same selective findings in several different journals. The FDA had no control over this selective publishing. This practice is not unbiased research and evaluation of pharmaceutical products; it is plain and simple spin marketing.
- There is a need for more research on BHRT. While there are many credible and clinically significant published studies evidencing the efficacy and safety of BHRT, there is not enough data to once and for all squash the promotion of synthetic hormone therapies. Why not? Think about it. Who funds most clinical research? You got it: the pharmaceutical companies like Wyeth.”
“This is not the first time the FDA has attempted to prohibit doctors from prescribing compounding medications to their patients,” says Ms. James. “A similar attempt was made by Wyeth Pharmaceutical and the FDA in 2005 but over 70,000 persons (physicians, pharmacists and lay people) contacted the FDA and voiced their strong disfavor of such a move. Now we face that same challenge to raise our voices and insure that one-size-fits-all manufactured synthetic hormone therapies do not replace the much more safe and individualized option of prescribe bio-identical hormone replacement.”
“We are raising our voices to battle for the truth about BHRT and the dangers of synthetic hormone therapies. You can too. I urge you to voice your opposition to the Wyeth Complaint by going to IACP and telling the FDA your story. “
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