Transcription of Marcelle Pick for the show Vitality, #82
Dr. Lisa: The nice thing about Maine is it’s a small town, small state feel, but we also have some thoughtful and prolific and intelligent people that work here. We’ve spoken with this individual before. She’s actually a fellow Yarmouth healthcare practitioner and best-selling author of three books. This is Marcelle Pick, who recently came out with her book “Is It Me or My Hormones?” She also is the author of “Is It Me or Is It My Adrenals,” and “The Core Balance Diet.” Thank you for coming back in and having another conversation with us.
Marcelle P: You’re welcome. I’m delighted to be here.
Dr. Lisa: Marcel, we’re lucky to have you because you just came off of a pretty intensive schedule with the PBS Show. Talk to me about that.
Marcelle P: There was a PBS show taken after the book “Is It Me or My Hormones?” The goal for me was to try to get the information out about wellness and health and how much we can actually impact how we age as we get older by changing our diet and that food is a game changer for us and also lifestyle. We have much more impact in our long-term ability to be able to be healthy as we get older than we ever thought before.
Dr. Lisa: You’ve been a healthcare practitioner for a lot …
Marcelle P: For a long time.
Dr. Lisa: Yes, I didn’t want to put numbers on that.
Marcelle P: Do not do that, no a long time.
Dr. Lisa: For many years and so you’ve had a chance to spend time with women who have needed your help. So you’ve seen it isn’t just about diet. It isn’t just about lifestyle, but it’s about bigger things. You’ve had to work through some of this yourself.
Marcelle P: Absolutely, I think we all do and part of what I wrote in the book “Is It Me or My Adrenals?” It used to be called “Are You Tired and Wired?” Is the notion that a lot of us carry a story with us. The story is about what happened for us in our childhood and how we carry that forward. For example, if you’re a perfectionist and you’re constantly expecting high things of yourself that’s going to impact your adrenals and your cortisol level and if it goes on too much and women tend to do this a lot, they’re thinking of everybody else, but themselves. They’re always being very critical of how they look and how they behave and if they’re a perfectionist on top of that, it’s nonstop “I’m not enough.” That impacts our
Mig dee liver of our brain which then sends message to our adrenals.
The bad news with that is as it continues to go on and actually causes cortisol levels to stay elevated which then down regulate our thyroid and our sex hormones and our immune system. So understanding yourself and how you think and how you behave is crucial to that and I understood that. I started doing encounter groups when I was in college to find out more about myself.
I was very curious about why did I think the way that I did? Why did I behave the way that I did? So I’ve always been on that journey.
In 1989, 1990 I was introduced to the concept of the Hoffman Process and the notion is that our biography becomes our biology if we don’t pay attention in understanding about yourself by having an awareness is what the Hoffman’s all about. It’s an eight day program that I found immensely helpful for myself to look at how do I have patterns of behavior that affect my physiology and the way that I think? I became very involved with them and did the process myself or for a lot of my patients there. Again, it’s not the answer for everyone, it’s just a nice solution for some people if they’re finding that they’re thinking is affecting their emotions, which is affecting their adrenals, which is affecting their health. They are in California, also have a program in Massachusetts as well, and the Brookshires.
Dr. Lisa: You grew up in Australia.
Marcelle P: I did.
Dr. Lisa: How is that different from what you’ve encountered here in the United States?
Marcelle P: I grew up in a very, different scenario. We lived outside of Sydney in a place called Bundeena. It was two hours by boat and train to get to Sydney. We didn’t have roads, although we had paved roads. We didn’t have … There were three stores in a little area that I was in surrounded by National Park. I spent most of my day if I wasn’t doing homework, I was swimming in the ocean in the Barrier Reef or I was looking case or I was going to some case with a lot of aboriginal drawings. So I was very connected to the earth and there were deer and all kinds of animals around all the time.
It was my meditation on a regular basis. So I became very sensitive to my environment and was very clear from a very young age that I wanted to have an impact on the world and health related from the time I was very young. More than likely it was because I was so connected to the spirit world in some ways.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was very clear from a right young time that I wanted to make a difference.
Dr. Lisa: This is part of something that you described in each of your books that the need to reconnect with one’s self on a daily basis, at least a contemplative level if not a spiritual level. Is this something you’ve been able to continue to incorporate in your own life?
Marcelle P: I get out generally now, when I was doing the PBS I didn’t, but generally I get up at five and to have a time that I’m looking at my life, I have three criteria that I pay attention to: Did I live? Did I love? Did I matter? Those are the ways in which I look at what do I need to work on today? What do I need to do a little bit differently? Am I staying connected to all three parts of myself on a regular basis? Of course, you’re going to have episodes in which you do that well and episodes in which you don’t. I’m not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m aware enough fact I want to do that for myself in my life so that I don’t lose sight of the other parts.
Dr. Lisa: Are you able to connect back with nature to the extent that you once did when you were younger?
Marcelle P: There are times that you are and times that you aren’t. I was just in the time in which I was incredibly busy finishing the book and doing the PBS. Now I have a boat where I spend a lot of time on the water. The water is really important to me. I’m also a runner so I like to be outdoors and I also like bike. So I’m excited that spring is coming and the snow is starting to melt so I can be outside. Yes it’s important.
It’s important for all of us because I think so many times I think we forget the connection that the earth has for us and the rhythm of the earth and the rhythm of the moon and the sun. Those of us that live in Maine, we’re more connected because we’re so appreciative when the leaves are starting to come on the trees and the snow is melting. We do pay attention to that, probably in more ways than other people do.
Dr. Lisa: When I was reading “The Core Balance Diet,” I was interested to see you reference your relationship with your mother and having to work through that.
I don’t know if she’s still alive?
Marcelle P: She’s not. She actually died in 1999.
Dr. Lisa: Having to work through that and having to work through that as how it impacted your old physical self, it seems as though these books have been intensely personal to you, not just written from a healthcare provider standpoint.
Marcelle P: I’ve come to understand when you write anything, it’s important to connect with your audience to help people in the audience understand that we all have these journeys that we are working through. I don’t know that they were books that I wrote because of my personal, it’s just that my personal came into it as well.
I think it helps people if you personalize a book. I’ve written three now so I understand how to do that. It helps people understand that they can see themselves in the book too many times and I also tend to have a lot of stories of patients in there, too. So I wasn’t writing the books to work out my stuff. I was using myself as a reference point to help people understand that many of the journeys, we all have them and I’m different.
Dr. Lisa: That’s clear. As I was reading, it wasn’t like Marcelle is doing therapy as she’s writing.
Marcelle P: Or she’s stomping her foot.
Dr. Lisa: That wasn’t what I was getting. What I was getting was it came from a place of purity. That there was a very good reason that you thought it was important that you write this and also that you could relate to other women who might be having similar things in their lives.
Marcelle P: When I wrote “The Core Balance,” I remember being in high school and I was one of those young women that just ate one meal a day and I still was not very thin. I realized at that time, I had done Weight Watchers once and I was weighing and measuring everything. Everybody else in line is losing pounds and going, “Oh I cheated last night,” that there was something that was off and we now call that weight loss resistance. I knew when I had figured out pieces to that puzzle, I was going to write a book about it and that’s what “The Core Balance Diet,” is about.
It’s a book about health, but it’s a book about what happens to those women that are doing everything they’re supposed to do, and they’re still not losing weight? There’s many things that we understand now that we didn’t understand before. I even know more than I did when I wrote the book. I wanted to have people not have to struggle in the same way that I had for so long because everyone was saying, “You’re eating bonbons in the corner.” I was like, “You have no idea. That is so not true.” That then gave people the opportunity to look at what’s blocking that? The body’s not working? What’s wrong so we can figure out upstream what the problem is, instead of always coming up with the diagnosis of “you’re eating bonbons in the corner” because it’s not true.
Dr. Lisa: One of the things in “The Core Balance Diet,” and I like the way that you gave a,
I guess essentially it was a questionnaire and you enabled people to find areas that they were unbalanced in. Then it seems as though you were able to expand upon one of those areas and write what is now “Is It Me or My Adrenals?” Then another area is “Is It Me or Is It My Hormones? I like that. That there is a progression from “The Core Balance” to let’s talk here a little bit more about …
Marcelle P: More in-depth, yes.
Dr. Lisa: In the “Is It Me or Is It My Hormones,” you even talked about again, your own personal experience with trying to eat a certain way and things not being quite right with your hormones and you couldn’t quite figure this out. Then as time went on, you went, “Wait, there is a relationship and there is a relationship also for my patients.” Talk to me about that because I’m very interested in that, given what we know with especially young women and their eating habits.
Marcelle P: The part that’s always so amazing to me is that when I have my patients change their diet and it sounds so easy to do, but it’s more complicated because of our desire for sugar and our rushed life and it’s a fast food industry and all those things, but when you get back to basics and just do breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner and you do protein and whole foods, it’s a game changer. It really impacts because the three major hormones we have are not estrogen, progesterone and testosterone. It’s insulin, cortisol and adrenaline. Those things, though stressed and what we eat actually impact our hormones more than anything else.
I think that’s a surprise for my patients it was certainly a surprise for me. As I cleaned my diet up my cortisol stabilized and as I cleaned my diet out many years ago, everything else went into balance. That’s not the only thing we need to do, but it’s a great place to start. So many people don’t know the power of that. When I would say on the PBS show “It’s a game changer” and it really is. Even now, we know from Epigenetics and Neurogenomics that if we change the food we eat, we actually impact the expression of genes. Oh my god that’s so powerful because it doesn’t mean any more if you have heart disease as a history or if you have diabetes as a history it’s just a matter of time. It’s so not true. It gives power back to us, instead of thinking it’s just a matter of time, it isn’t and that’s amazing.
Dr. Lisa: When you talk about cleaning up your diet, you’re not talking about becoming a strict vegan.
Marcelle P: I’m not. It’s interesting. I have many magazines that are calling for interviews now. The interesting part for me and many of my contemporaries is and again, I’m sure there’s exceptions to every rule, I don’t find that many people can stand being a vegetarian long-term. What happens to many of them is they have no energy. They have fatigue. The difficult part for all of us is that we do need protein and often times, beans are not enough and tofu is not enough.
I’m someone that believes that eating food from the ground, plant-based in terms of half your plate vegetables and fruit and perhaps not that many foods if you’re a little bit sensitive or insulin resistant, and then having protein and some carbohydrates, whole carbohydrates, lower glycemic carbs. That balance more of the Mediterranean type diet, we know scientifically it’s fantastic for your health and we know that it keeps blood sugar stable, moods stable, neural transmitters stable, all the hormones stable. It’s amazing what it can do for you. So no, you don’t have to have juice five times a day and all those things.
The part that’s so important for people to know is it can be simple. I don’t want people to spend all their day in the kitchen. I don’t have time for that and that’s why in all my books, all the recipes are 30 minutes or less. I just don’t have time to cook in the kitchen. Sometimes I’ll spend time doing it. It’s fun, but I wanted people to have real food that was really healthy that the whole family that is made from scratch.
Dr. Lisa: The vegan-vegetarian piece is hard as you talk about in your book, is hard for people to give up sometimes because it is something that we get attached to this idea that we have to rid our plates of all animal products. You have experience with this. I think on the phone you were telling me that you did a macrobiotic.
Marcelle P: I was a macrobiotic for 15 years, absolutely. There was a place in which I hit a wall and I had no energy. I couldn’t think clearly and I added protein and fortunately, I remember going to a store and just looking at the steak going,
“Oh my god.” I got some organic meat. It was amazing for me and started looking at some of the literature and the research. I see it often in my practice.
I have people that are vegetarians and I’ll say, “I think you need to have more protein.”
I’ll tell them and they’ll come back and I wrote about it in the book, and they’ll say, “I feel fabulous and I hate you” because they are so much wanting to not do the meat. I get it. I understand that. It’s finding out for them what works and it’s an individual issue. We all are going to be different. We don’t all have the same needs. Physiologically, we’re going to have differences as well.
Dr. Lisa: For people who listen to this show on a regular basis, we’ve interviewed functional medicine practitioners before, but some people may not be familiar with the ideas behind functional medicines. So tell me a little bit about that.
Marcelle P: Function medicine is probably for me, it’s what changed the way I practiced.
I’ve been doing it for 25, 26 years, a long time. I was always curious if I had a problem with a patient and I was trying to come up with a diagnosis and then treat it, it didn’t seem to get rid of the issues. So functional medicine is more about looking at the body like a cobweb, trying to understand all the pieces that make up that web. Is it the endocrine system? Is it about the mitochondria and is that producing enough energy? Does it have to do with lack of energy for nutrients? Is it lifestyle? Is it emotions? Is it what they’re eating? Is it lack of love and joy? What is going into the equation that’s causing the problem? So I’m a detective. I’m trying to figure out it could be a little of this and it’s a little bit of that and it’s a little bit of this. Toxicity is another part that we don’t ever talk about it the conventional world, all of which we now know affect people.
The part that’s wonderful is when you figure out the pieces and you see people change, it’s dynamic because that have people that have never felt better. With mialgias, from chronic fatigue, to even ITP, which is a blood disorder, people are on medication and they still don’t feel well and ultimately, you change all these things and they’re no longer on medication and they feel better than they have in years. That’s amazing, but it is how it works because it’s getting to the root cause of the problems.
Dr. Lisa: You’re still seeing patients at Women to Women in Yarmouth?
Marcelle P: I am.
Dr. Lisa: You have recently published, “Is it me or my hormones?” You just had this PBS special. You have a radio show that happens on Thursdays from six until seven. You have a busy and exciting life. What’s next on your horizon?
Marcelle P: I also have a very big online presence with the newsletter that I write called It’s at womentowomen.com. They’re asking me to do another book proposal actually right now. I have to think about whether I want to do that or not. I was thinking I’d take a little time to breathe a bit here. I don’t think that’s how the industry goes. More than likely, another book will be coming as well and I may be doing another PBS. We’ll see. They’re pushing me to do that as well so we’ll see.
Dr. Lisa: Marcelle, how can people find out more about “Is it me or is it my hormones?” Or “Is It Me or My Adrenals?” Or “The Core Balance Diet.”
Marcelle P: The website Womentowomen.com that’s a place you can order the book itself, going to MarcelPick.com as well. We have lots of resources on Women to Women. The goal for me many years ago was to help teach people how to be their own midwives. To learn about themselves so that they could then take that information and get healthier which is my goal for people. So that they’re not on 15 different medications by the time they’re 70 with 100% drug interaction and needing more because they’ve got so many side effects. That’s what we need to teach people is they can change so many things by changing the way they live their lives.
Dr. Lisa: We’ve been speaking with Marcelle Pink is the author of multiple books and most recently “Is It Me or Is It My Hormones?” I am so glad that you are a resource for the state of the Maine. That you are right in my own home town of Yarmouth and I appreciate your coming in and spending time with me today.
Marcelle P: It’s delightful to be here, thanks