Why Hormone Therapy Is Important for Women

Sam Ridgeway, owner of Viking Alternative Medicine, speaks with Laurie Miller, the new representative for women at Viking. Laurie shares her struggles with weight and menopause, describing how her symptoms worsened during her late 30s and 40s. The challenges she faced led her to Viking, where hormone therapy has optimized her health, energy, and motivation. Sam emphasizes the importance of having people who understand the struggles of being overweight and the difficulties women face, especially with the societal expectations placed upon them. The conversation delves into the transformative effects of hormone therapy, and how combining it with proper exercise and nutrition can yield optimal results. They advocate for the comprehensive approach, emphasizing that all three pillars (hormone therapy, exercise, and nutrition) are crucial to achieve the desired outcomes.

Transcript:

[00:00:00.000] – Laurie Miller
I had gotten up to 205 pounds and I was.

[00:00:03.710] – Laurie Miller
Terribly miserable.

[00:00:04.700] – Sam Ridgeway
I’m going to need some pictures of that.

[00:00:06.290] – Laurie Miller
I know.

[00:00:07.340] – Sam Ridgeway
Because I throw my fat pictures out there. Hello, everyone. This is Sam Ridgeway, owner of Viking Alternative Medicine. Today I’m here with Laurie Miller, who is the new representative for women at Viking. I had a video before, and Laurie came out and gave a little bit about her journey, but I wanted to dig into that a little bit more and go a little bit more in-depth with it because I think it’s important that you know who you’re working with. The whole premise behind this is if I have a personal trainer, what I’m going to do the very first time is I’m going to say, I want to see your fat pictures. That’s what I’m going to do, because if you’ve never been fat as a personal trainer, then you have no idea what I go through, the struggles that I go through, because I’ve been 400 pounds. Food was my drug of choice. When I was happy, I would eat. When I was sad, I would eat. It was what I did instead of meth or whatever else to get me through the day, but it was still addictive just like anything else. The only difference is you don’t need meth to live, you need food.

[00:01:12.380] – Sam Ridgeway
That’s where the problem comes in. I want someone who has fought the battle of being overweight so they understand what I’m talking about. I want someone who’s been through, from the female side, who’s familiar with menopause or all of these depression, anxiety, and I don’t expect you to share beyond what you’re willing to share. Just understand that, but go as far as you want to talk to people. I’ll just give one more example and then we’ll get into it. But I don’t want a financial advisor who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. I’m fine with that. I’m not saying he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I want some guy who did it on his own and came up the ranks by himself and invested and did these things by himself and got to where he is because he’s good, not because he had somebody put him in that position. I want a financial advisor that if the shit hits the fan, he’s living in a box with me out on the sidewalk. That’s who I want. I want those types of people in my corner. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to get you in here once I had talked to you and heard your story, because you follow those lines with me.

[00:02:13.320] – Sam Ridgeway
You understand where these things are, how people feel you can not only sympathize but empathize, or whichever way that goes. You know what they’re talking about. I want to give it to you a quick background story, but I want to know the good and the bad. Where did you come from? Have you weight-wise, battling mental things and so on. How did you come up the ranks to get to where you are today? Because obviously you’re doing a great job today. Go ahead.

[00:02:40.040] – Laurie Miller
Thank you. I’m really excited for this opportunity because I have been there and it has really given me just a passion for doing this. I’ve been a nurse for 25 years, and this whole experience has really caused me to shift gears and look a little differently at my career now and take a different turn to help people with wellness and health, and mostly really help women because I know how this feels, and it was a measurable experience. I want to help other women avoid it and come out on the other side successfully if they’re already in it. I’ll just really briefly. I had been able to usually lose weight when I wanted to. I did a lot of emotional eating too, and all that. But I would get on the heavy side and then I would be like, Okay, that’s enough of that. I would drop a bunch of pounds. But as I got on into my late 30s and definitely in my 40s, it became very hard to lose weight. That last time that I was going to do that, no weight was budging. No weight was budging. I was doing all my usual tricks, and I was like, Oh, my gosh.

[00:04:04.110] – Laurie Miller
I said, as I was saying before, on top of that, I wasn’t sleeping anymore. I went several months without sleeping. Then I started having hot flashes and like, Well, that’s weird.

[00:04:17.200] – Sam Ridgeway
You’re like, Could this get any worse? What else is going to happen?

[00:04:20.930] – Laurie Miller
Listen, I still had not made the connection because like I said, I somehow thought menopause wasn’t going to happen to me. I was just going to avoid all that. This never dawned on me. I’m still very young and that couldn’t be what was going on. But as these symptoms kept adding up and adding up, and I went to research the insomnia and then it listed all my symptoms as menopausal symptoms. It was like ding, ding, ding, ding. At that point then, I contacted Viking and I had my labs and all that, and they explained what all that meant to me and just we were really thorough, a really patient, a few different conversations. Because I had some questions and I had some hesitancy and I am in healthcare. Women have heard all these stories about hormones and how they can cause so many problems for us. It benefits to go ahead and look into that yourself because a lot of that, like I said, has no basis, in fact. In those studies, it was the Women’s Health Initiative, and they were very badly interpreted and they were very badly done. Anyway, I looked at all that for myself and ended up deciding to risk benefit.

[00:05:43.850] – Laurie Miller
For me, the benefit has far outweighed any risk that there could possibly be. It’s brought me. I feel so much better. It’s like optimize my health. It’s like optimize my energy and optimize my motivation and my drive. That’s the only word I can really use to describe it. I’m like optimal functioning now in all kinds of levels. My experience with it has just been nothing but remarkable, and it just continues to be so. The team at Viking has been wonderful. I had gotten up to 205 pounds and I was. terribly miserable.

[00:06:28.690] – Sam Ridgeway
I’m going to need some pictures of that. Yeah.

[00:06:30.210] – Laurie Miller
I know.

[00:06:31.820] – Sam Ridgeway
Because I throw my fat pictures out there. You know what? The whole thing is that’s where I was, and that’s like a message to other people that you can be here.

[00:06:44.730] – Laurie Miller
Yes.

[00:06:45.160] – Sam Ridgeway
And you can do something about it. If you can fix me at 400 pounds.

[00:06:49.750] – Sam Ridgeway
You can fix the person that’s 40 pounds overweight.

[00:06:53.310] – Laurie Miller
Yes, and it gives people a concrete. I was speaking to some nurses yesterday over in the ER, and we were talking, and she said, Well, can you make this look like that? I said, Hold on just a minute. Scrolled through, found that picture. She said, Oh, you were a big girl.

[00:07:09.360] – Sam Ridgeway
That’s what you want to hear. I don’t mind it anymore. At first it was awkward. I get through. It’s a shame thing, but I don’t really look at it like that anymore. I look at everybody has their vice. It might happen to be food, it might happen to be yo- yo, dieting with the weight, but I was always relatively successful. I didn’t have a problem with it. There were so many blessings in my life that was one of the things that needed to be fixed. I just looked at it as that’s just my cross to bear, and I have to do things. But if I were to go to a gender between men and women, and I would say, Okay, who’s going to be helped more from hormone therapy? It’s women, bar none. You don’t have another menopause system as you go through as far as weight. Here’s the reason why, because me as a guy, I can apparently, as society says, gain 50 pounds, bald head, and I’m just distinguished. You guys get crucified. It’s not crucified by men, it’s crucified by other women. That’s the thing. You guys tear each other apart. It’s vicious.

[00:08:09.840] – Laurie Miller
It can definitely be that way.

[00:08:10.950] – Sam Ridgeway
You ever see that Sahara thing where the cheetah and the antelope, you guys are far worse than that. But anyway, the whole hormone therapy really caters better to women. It helps for men, but it really does. That whole high flesh, my wife was doing the thing. The doctor said, That could be 8-10 years. She’s like, Like hell it’s going to be 8-10 years. I am not doing this 8-10 years with the Viking because I’m like, Babe, we own a hormone clinic. She goes to Viking, gets it, a month later, never another hot flash sleeps, all the rest of that stuff. Got her hormones balanced, libido through the roof, which thank you, Viking, for that. Just all around. I need a way, and the reason why I said, Laura, let’s do this, is because I need a way to tell women about this. Without being some 270-pound guy, the women are like, You don’t know. You haven’t lived a day in my shoes. You have no idea what I go through on a daily basis. And you know what? They’re right. I said, I’m not the best spokesperson for this, so let’s find one, and here you are.

[00:09:10.570] – Sam Ridgeway
I can’t even think of a better spokesperson.

[00:09:12.930] – Laurie Miller
It’s been really perfect because I am right at this juncture in my life, like I said, where I wanted to… I am veering off into more advocating for this whole set of optimizing your health. And so it’s given me – I’m just so excited because I can reach the people around me and I can reach my patients here locally and I can reach people online to a certain extent. But this has given me a really great platform and a way to say we have the tools right here. I’m part of this whole operation that has the tools to help me.

[00:09:51.610] – Sam Ridgeway
You have a testimony. You did it. You went through it. This isn’t some conceptual pie in the sky thing. Would be nice. I heard my aunts, cousins, sisters, grandma got help. You are a perfect example of exactly what a woman at your age wants to be. I think that if we can bring that in and we can say, This person can help, because you’ve got exercise, nutrition. If I get the components, it would be hormone therapy, exercise, and nutrition. Those are the three pillars, if you will, that are going to make a woman successful. By successful, I mean more energy, higher libido, better looking, fits in a dress better, confidence, brain fog, all of these menopause gone. All of these things that women want, all of it happens over and over again with the right balance of hormone therapy, exercise and nutrition.

[00:10:46.230] – Sam Ridgeway
It’s not something-

[00:10:47.040] – Laurie Miller
Those build on each other. I’m excited to work with women because people think they have no idea where to start. You just start where you’re at. You start where you’re at and go from there. It is those, what you said, is those three pillars, but they all build on each other.

[00:11:06.310] – Sam Ridgeway
One without the other, the table falls. I’m not saying you can’t do something and get through menopause or whatever, but if you truly want to be the person that a lot of women aspire to be, that one that seems like she can just go do the stuff. She’s cognitively, she’s all there. She looks great in a swimsuit. All of the rest of these things that women would look at someone and say, Okay, that’s where I want to be. All of that is achievable if you do this, but if you leave a part out, you’re only going to get partial results. It’s different, and I’ll give one more example in my taxes and stuff. I want a place where I could put money. My accountant said, You got to go to a financial advisor. I go to financial advisor,I ask about what are the implications of this? He’s like, I don’t know. You need to go to your… I get bounced back and forth between these two different places and nobody gives me a straight answer. What I want is one place I can go and get all the answers that I need for everything.

[00:11:57.090] – Sam Ridgeway
One entity that says, Here’s how you do it. Here’s hormone therapy, here’s nutrition, here’s exercise, the three pillars. If you do this like I say you’re supposed to do it, you, in six months are not even going to recognize yourself. That’s exactly what I want to bring out, and I think this is exactly what it does.

[00:12:12.910] – Laurie Miller
It’s perfect. It’s awesome.