Dr. Beatriz Olson Making Global Impact with New Book: Mind Body Secrets
Dr. Beatriz Olson is a transformational thought leader in the healthcare arena. She is a physician, author, speaker, and artist. She has three decades of experience as CEO and Founder of Integrative Endocrinology and Metabolism, a medical practice that combines evidence-based medicine with integrative mind-body, functional, & age-management medicine to help her clients achieve wellbeing, long health-span, and hormone health for women. As an integrative endocrinologist, who has cared for more than 6000 women and their hormone issues, she brings wisdom and comprehensive approaches to solving the major health challenges we now face as individuals and as a society.
The medical system is currently broken. Both patients and doctors are dissatisfied, people are getting sicker, and face epidemics of inflammation, diabetes, heart disease, depression and loneliness. The concept that we can treat disease only when manifested is failing us. Integrative medicine approaches good nutrition and lifestyle to prevent and reverse manifested disease. Her work has always focused on prevention with education and tools that empower individuals to take responsibility to nurture wellbeing through lifestyle, nutrition, stress management, deepening connection to others, and of course healthy hormone balance- particularly at menopause.
As a Cuban immigrant and woman physician she has triumphed over many life challenges. She now uses these life lessons and professional expertise to lift women colleagues. She speaks and gives workshops on multiple women’s health and hormone issues, weight regulation, gut microbiome and nutrition for wellbeing, as well as workshops focused on empowerment and agency for professional women, particularly those in medicine. Her mission is to help women overcome limiting mindsets and develop the capacity to become antifragile to that which limits our potential and makes us sick. She supports women who invest in their health to achieve immense prosperity in multiple levels of their being. She believes that when we women are well, we guide the path to wellbeing for others, then society thrives.
Her passions are to 1) Reconnect individuals with their innate healing abilities using knowledge, mindfulness and self-empowerment. 2) Return dignity, agency and well-being to womxn physicians and collaborate with colleagues who do the same. 3) Restore humanity to the field of medicine as new science and technology develops.
Dr. Olson is board-certified in Endocrinology, Metabolism & Diabetes, and Internal Medicine from ABIM. She holds certifications in Age Management Medicine and Feminine Power Transformational Leadership. Dr. Olson graduated from Barnard College, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, and did her residency in internal medicine and 3 year research-clinical fellowship in Endocrinology at the University of Pittsburgh. She did her post fellowship work as an educator and clinician-scientist at the National Institutes of Health and later as teaching-faculty at Yale University School of Medicine, and Greenwich Hospital Integrative Medicine Center. She is CEO, and Founder of Integrativebeing.org a teaching company with courses on demand or live courses to develop health and wellbeing in the mind, body and spirit
Her Integrative Endocrinology practice is located in Connecticut. She has been married for 41 years to her medical school classmate, Dr. Eric Olson, who is an orthopaedic surgeon. They have 2 adult daughters, their youngest will be entering an emergency medicine residency fall of 2025.
When you were 11 you arrived in America from Cuba. You got sick, because you ate different foods and became an obese child. Share the impact that made on you and your journey to becoming a physician.
I feel that my arrival to America from Cuba was a formative and central developmental step in my life. First, when one is an immigrant, you automatically become “the other” to people that feel that they belong to this country. Often, you’re disregarded and invisible just because you’re different. I happen to be petite, had olive skin and was very protected by my parents, because they were afraid that bad things would happen to me, so they kept me at home when I wasn’t in school. Secondly, our family did not have a lot of money, so the only food that we had access to was the typical American Diet which included mostly processed foods. These foods are made to last a long time. They have oils that allow for the food to be sold for a longer period after manufacture, but over time these oils become rancid and are biologically destructive to the body. The foods we ate as immigrants had a lot of processed carbohydrates and were sweetened. This diet was very foreign compared to the foods I ate in Cuba. Unfortunately for me as a twelve-year-old, this new diet actually had incredibly negative physical, emotional, and psychological effects. I was a young teenager. I was beginning to have changes in my body related to puberty. My child’s body was transitioning into womanhood and the excess processed foods that I was having, the fact that I was craving them and my puberty made my body change rapidly. Suddenly I became overweight and then obese. I changed so much that I actually didn’t recognize myself when I looked at myself in the mirror. Everyone around me asked, “Why can’t you control yourself from overeating?” that presumably I was doing it to create this incredible change in my body.
My father, who is a pediatrician, did not understand what was happening, either. Members of the family called me all sorts of names like “fatso”, to make me feel bad about who I was and what I was doing. Children can be cruel. So can other people.
This time of my life was very difficult because I felt so alone. I felt so unhappy when I looked at my body, which did not look like the other teenagers that were around me. Our family didn’t have money. We even went to the Salvation Army to get my school clothes, which didn’t look like my classmates’ outfits. I began to hide myself, since I was so criticized and there were so many biases against people like me. I began to hide myself. I began to lose “my colors” and over time I began to believe that I wasn’t good enough, that I didn’t belong, and that it made me question my self worth. This would have significant implications for many years of my life until I created the path to freedom.
You’ve made such an impact on women and physicians’ lives with your own practice. Your work goes beyond traditional medicine. Tell us about your approach to medicine.
I’ve been very fortunate. Inspired by my negative childhood experiences, I have educated myself to become a world-class endocrinologist. I’ve been trained at some of the world’s best medical institutions. I have had the possibility of doing basic science and clinical research both at the University of Pittsburgh and the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, MD. My negative adolescent experiences motivated me to really put my energies into identifying the answers to the questions I had as an unhappy girl: What regulates appetite? What do you have to do to be healthy in your body? What are the right hormones that are necessary to accomplish these things?
When I left the NIH, I began a private practice when we moved to Connecticut and I also was faculty at Yale University. When I started my own private practice, I believed that conventional medicine had taught me everything I needed to take care of patients. I soon realized that patients at the National Institutes of Health are very different from patients that came to my office. These patients didn’t feel well yet didn’t not have “established disease.” With my training as a clinician, I was trying to find the causes for their “lack of wellness.” I discovered that while some people did have endocrine conditions many individuals actually had “soul distress.” I didn’t quite know how to solve their problem, despite my superb conventional medical training
I was fortunate at the same time that I found out that Deepak Chopra was having a mind body and Ayurvedic medicine course and both my husband and I went to La Jolla CA. One of the key learnings that I received from mind body medicine training was the thousands of years of medical systems that have taken care of humans without our current modern medicine. I learned that health and disease are a spectrum, and that disease develops as a progressive loss of wellness. For example, you can have a healthy body and if all of a sudden you start eating the wrong foods, your metabolism changes, you gain weight, your periods become irregular, and then you go on to develop pre-diabetes, diabetes and then heart disease. All of these conditions could have been prevented in the first place. By taking time out to address what was making you unwell: stress, diet, or lifestyle. You can then act upon it; you have the capacity to activate innate healing and return to balance and well-being again. Through awareness and prevention, I could prevent and or reverse disease. They did not teach me this in medical school or subsequent training.
This experience changed the way that I practice medicine forever. Since then, I have carried a preventative approach and outlook to everything I do. I can understand that the mind and body are interconnected and create outcomes. When the mind, body and spirit are aligned we access immense prosperity and wellbeing in all aspects of life. I help my patients reach optimal health by addressing the issues that create disconnection between the physical body, our hormones, our mind and spirit.
As we know, the medical system is broken. Share your comprehensive approaches to solving the major health challenges people face.
The medical system is broken right now because the humanity that was necessary for doctors and patients to work together to create healing was taken away by efficiency and profitability. Slowly, overtime, physicians became cogs of a wheel that just churned patients around and both physicians and patients suffered. Physicians lost agency, became morally injured, and lost dignity in their work. We as a group became dissatisfied and burned-out. Many physicians left medicine, and more physicians committed suicide. Similarly, patients became sicker, and epidemics of illness began fueled by food industry and multifactorial stressors affecting lifestyle, security, and wellbeing.
My approach to this has been difficult to implement because we physicians are part of a system that was created a long time ago, which is male oriented and very militaristic. As a result of that, women like me, who now make up an increasing part of the medical workforce, are facing the challenge of sharing and modeling the wisdom we bring to medicine. Currently my work is to collaborate with other physicians and to publicly discuss the issues that we physicians are facing. Through that work we let the world know that genuine caring, time to connect during a patient visit, and sharing the humanity inherent in the patient-physician relationship transforms and creates healing.
One of the first components of developing solutions is to understand & create awareness of the problems. Then we begin to create collaborative approaches to counteract the systemic problem that we’re facing. This is a system problem we are facing. To do this work, I give talks about the journey that we physicians are going through, and I am part of multiple medical societies, such as the American Medical Women’s Association and others, to create, stimulate and inspire motivation for change.
How can we find balance within?
Balance is what we all seek in life. This means that all of the forces that push away and towards us are in perfect equanimity. I view balance as a way of coming home to one’s self, to one’s authenticity and to one’s sense of well-being. As you can see, most of us in this world are out of balance. We’re often in our minds, thinking about what’s to come next, having fears, and not in the present. We engage in unnecessary things that interfere with our capacity to mindfully take care of ourselves and those we love.
Self-care is a key answer. Connecting to those who love us unconditionally is second.The next best secret is the concept and practice of meditation. Spending time with ourselves, connecting to our breath and where we’re sitting. Just being in the presence of our breath gives us a sense of peace – it reboots the computer of our brain and creates a calmness in the body. As a result, we’re not as reactive to the world that we’re living in and we’re more responsive to create the world that we want to have.
Tell us about your work as a Life Coach and working with larger groups on Transformational Leadership.
I have been both a doctor and life coach for nearly three decades. I became certified in feminine power transformational leadership 5 years ago. Each one of my patients is supported individually, positively and personally to achieve their highest levels of well-being given their mindsets and what their bodies are requiring. Often this affects their private and professional lives.
I created a not-for-profit educational integrative medicine community in 1998, Lotus: the Educational Center for Integrative Healing and Wellness. This community brought allopathic physicians and practitioners of different healing traditions together. It included naturopathic and chiropractic doctors, psycho therapists, body workers and energy healers. We came together monthly and discussed our individual approaches to addressing patient complaints and illness. While we all went about doing this differently, I learned to respect all my colleagues because they cared to make a difference and improve wellbeing in all of our patients. Being at the helm of this community for 17 years further transformed my life. I truly understood that different healing traditions may bring incredible wisdom and healing to any one individual. and that there are many ways to activate innate healing.
After 30 years of taking care of women, I have come to recognize that we women need a different approach to healing. We generate life. We give life. We are collaborative. Yet, we have unique ways of thinking that often holds us back. We are affected by assumptions, expectations and cultural biases. I became a transformational leader because I wanted to change the thinking of a larger number of people than I could see as individual patients. Consequently, I have been in the process of creating large conversations with women at different levels. I intend to inspire, give information, and provide resources and tools to these women, so they too can transform their lives for the better. I have created on-line, on-demand programs so women can learn how to take care of their bodies, their minds and their spirits. I have also created a program that helps women in medicine to learn how to practice integrative medicine and the benefits to their wellbeing, patients, and profitability. I am a mentor-guide to women who are willing to invest in their health to create immense profitability and satisfaction in their lives. These women, in my selective coaching group, are successful women who desire to be fully well in their bodies, their emotions, and finances by working with like-minded women, under my expert guidance, to move past barriers that have limited them from feeling truly satisfied with their lives.
Your book, “Mind Body Secrets: A Medical Doctor’s Spiritual and Scientific Guide to Wellness” is making a profound impact on lives. It has been a book in the making for 20 years. What was the catalyst to bring your book to fruition and what is your book about?
I felt that I needed to write “Mind Body Secrets” during the COVID pandemic. At that time, I thought I was going to die, and I felt, “if I die, what would I regret?” One of the things that I would regret would be that I left this life with an incredible amount of hard-earned knowledge and wisdom that had not been shared sufficiently with all those who could benefit. I felt that I needed to write something that would be a guide, or a timeless human owner’s manual, for creating wellbeing now and for future generations.
The first part of the book, The Mind, addresses the mind because every decision that we make creates how we act and what we do. I felt that if we could really understand Many of us are stuck in. pattern of behaviors that we are not consciously of and these affects the enjoyment and possibilities in our lives. If we tackle the working of the mind then we can understand our emotions and how we have child-like protective mechanisms that often interfere with our function as adults. Understanding of our minds is empowering. A prepared mind is required to help the body change for the better.
The second part of the book, The Body, informs everyone, in simple terms, how their bodies work. If you understand where you get your energy from (oxygen, water and food), and if you know how your digestive system works and communicates with your brain and the rest of your body, then you will naturally make choices that will make you healthy and happy.
The third and last part of the book, Care of the Soul, has to do with imparting my personal experience of taking care of women for three decades. Women are complex in the sense that our bodies, hormones, moods and family experience are tightly intertwined with nature and our connectivity to others. We are trying to create balance despite ongoing major changes in our lives. We are often care-takers and yet fail to include ourselves in our circle of care. This section of the book discusses how we can create and use generative conversations in order to present our view and be appreciated by others. Lastly, I engage in the concept of spirituality and how we can care for the soul as our individual life work. The journey is about the learning and the compassion that we have acquired and the love and difference we have made in the lives of others.
If we have a good understanding of our mind…finish the sentence…if we don’t then…
If we have a good understanding of our mind we can create possibilities in life that are unimaginable. We have freedom. Our mind has the capacity to manifest well-being in our bodies and embody new horizons.
If we don’t have a good understanding of our minds then we suffer. Our minds can get confused and get engaged in story loops that do not serve us, inhibiting our goals and vision.
What are some of the questions you answer in the book?
Often we get stuck in different mental states that block our ability to be healthy, be loved, be happy or prosperous in our lives. This book allows the readers to identify the gap between where they are and where they wish to be. I give the tools and steps needed for all of us to transform ourselves and our limiting self-identity. Through this process and journaling prompts, we can all evolve to a level that is truly supportive of what we’re meant to be and do in this lifetime.
Another series of question that the book addresses includes,
“How should I take care of my body?”
“How can I lose weight?”
“Why am I not successful with everything that I’m trying to do, even though I try so hard?”
In this book I instruct and educate individuals as to why it is that our bodies respond to the inputs that we give it or receive from our environment in such unexpected ways. For example, diets that are not healthy for us. I explain how the standard western or American diet is profoundly unhealthy. We are ancestral beings that have been created over millennia to survive scarcity, yet over the last 100 years the world has changed around us, there is abundance of food, but our biology has not changes
A central question my book addresses is
“What does my mind have to do with my body or my body with my mind?”
“Why does spirituality matter?”
“Why should I care?”
The mind, body and the spirit are intimately interrelated and these interactions are central to our wellbeing, longevity and satisfaction in life. Conventional medicine only focuses on the body or parts of the body that are hurt or not working well. While conventional medicine has solutions or band-aids for illness, it does not address prevention, reversal of disease, or acknowledge that mind body interactions profoundly affect the potential of transforming illness back to wellbeing
In Chapter 9 you were very vulnerable. Take us through the importance of this chapter.
What makes Chapter 9, Spirituality for A Healthy Lifespan & Soul-Satisfying Life, different?
Throughout Mind Body Secrets I tried to combine evidence-based medicine and mind body medicine regarding concepts that will never change. I’ve been very thoughtful over the years to identify mind-body truths and to find evidence that support them.
In this last chapter of my book, I take a personal risk to let go of the reins of what is proven versus what we all intuitively know. Spirituality and the power of our connection to the universe is something that is hard to measure and hard to give evidence for. So unlike my usual behavior of trying to justify what I’m saying by convincing people that there is evidence, in this last chapter I share my soul’s experience as a human, as a physician, as a mother, as a wife, as an immigrant, a child, and someone who has gone through a journey of finding my heart through truth and wisdom. I give this chapter my heart and my soul to reach my reader. I express things that doctors don’t normally share about themselves when they’re writing to a public audience.
You are a gifted keynote speaker. What topics do you share with audiences?
For the last 30 years I have spoken about many topics:
The value of integrative medicine
Mind Body Medicine for Women in medicine
Patient-centered care
Hormone Replacement with Bioidentical Hormones
Testosterone for women, why and how it works well
Endocrine Hormone Health
Women’s Health
Food as Medicine
Elements of well-being
Weight regulation for Health and Wellbeing.
The microbiome and immuno-metabolic dysfunction
Empowering women
Vulnerability, Shame, Perfectionism
Creating our own agency as women
How to overcome all of the limitations and hard ceilings that have prevented us women from thriving
How to be free to create your own boundaries and schedule
Physician well-being not just for women but for society
Wellbeing equals Immense Profitability
How to transform the way that we practice medicine, so we love our work and serve our patients well
Earlier this month, as chair-elect of the nutrition committee for the American Medical Women’s Association, I educated women at the Women’s Health Care World Congress about the importance of food as medicine. I discussed how the food we eat alters the experience of our microbiome’s gut bacteria and how much the types of bacteria we nurture affect our health. If we feed these gut-bacteria vegetables and fruits we get great outcomes, but when we eat the processed foods and sweets of the standard American diet we cultivate bacteria that are more effective at digesting and extracting calories from our food. Predominance of these bacteria creates disease and depression for us humans. What kind of food would you choose if you had known this?
I educated many young doctors to prescribe good whole foods as medicine. This can transform the well-being not just of this generation but future generations to come.
What do you want your legacy to be?
I would like to be remembered for being a loving mother, for being kind and generous, for being a voice for change in our world and bringing humanity back to medicine.
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