Recently, I interviewed Dr. Tabatha Barber, and we talked about how fasting and faith can help shift your body into a parasympathetic state. If you would prefer to listen to the interview you can access it by Clicking Here [1].
Dr. Eric Osansky:
I am super excited to chat with Dr. Tabatha Barber. We are going to be talking about her new book Fast to Faith. We are going to be talking about hormones. Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Barber. Appreciate you being here. Really excited about your book. We are going to be talking about fasting, how fasting impacts hormones, and your experience with Hashimoto’s. Thank you so much for joining us.
Dr. Tabatha Barker:
Thank you for having me. This is such an important conversation. I think so many women are going to benefit from this.
Dr. Eric:
I definitely agree. Let’s talk a little bit more about your background. You are a functional OB-GYN/gynecologist. What prompted you first of all to write this book? Also, most gynecologists don’t practice functional medicine. How did that journey begin?
Dr. Tabatha:
It’s a long, convoluted story. I’ll shorten it up. Essentially, I got pregnant in high school, and I had a very traumatic delivery. Out of that experience, I had a come to Jesus moment, where I realized that God wanted me to help other women not go through what I went through.
I was a high school dropout; I went back to school and got my GED. I became a doctor. The idea was I was going to help women have a voice and a choice in their care, and not have to suffer and go through what I went through. Unfortunately, the medical system is not set up for health or wellness, either for the patient or the doctor.
About 10 years into my practice, I found myself miserable. Here I thought I was living into God’s purpose for me. I had done everything I was supposed to do. Yet I was barely surviving. I had chronic back pain. I had Hashimoto’s that was uncontrolled. I had depression and heart reflux and IBS. All these drugs I was on. All these diagnoses. I reached my breaking point and realized this isn’t sustainable. I’m not actually helping women long-term. I can’t continue on this.
I started down the path of figuring out how do I heal myself? That’s how I found functional medicine. I realized what I was doing was a lot of band-aid medicine. I was helping people relieve their symptoms, but I wasn’t really figuring out what was causing it. I was giving birth control pills for heavy periods and mood swings and acne. That was the end-all, be-all treatment. Or I would do surgery.
A lot of women are surprised to hear that OB-GYNs are actually surgeons. I spent four years learning how to do a hysterectomy four different ways, how to do C-sections and deliveries and procedures. I didn’t study hormone imbalances and all the intricacies of the endocrine system and how our gut health impacts our overall health. We look to OB-GYNs as hormone experts, but they’re really not. They’re surgeons.
I found myself in this dilemma of how to really care for women. It wasn’t until I healed myself with functional medicine that I realized what I needed to be doing. About a year and a half ago, I got a download from God. I can’t explain it any other way. He made it clear, “You have a new purpose. You fulfilled that. You’re supposed to be doing what you’re doing. Now we have a new plan. You have to write this book. You have to create this program. You have to teach women how to love themselves again, how to love their bodies back into healing.”
All day, every day, I was seeing women complaining about their bodies, hating their bodies, feeling frustrated. At war with their bodies because of pain, because it wouldn’t do what they wanted it to do, because they couldn’t release extra weight. They didn’t look the way they wanted to look. All the things.
That Is really what I’ve been focused on the past 15 months: bringing women the truth. The functional medicine, everything I learned, I poured it into this book, so women can really start to understand what the heck is going on in their body. Why don’t I recognize myself anymore? Why do I have Hashimoto’s or some autoimmune disease? Why are my hormones out of whack? Why are my adrenals tanked? I explain all of that.
The cool thing is I just lay out a plan that is free and easy, because fasting is free, on how to really get back in tune with your body and listen to it again. That is where the magic happens.
Dr. Eric:
Very eye-opening. OB-GYNs, not a surprise that they don’t focus on the gut, that they don’t have a lot of knowledge about leaky gut, healing the gut. When you said that they’re not hormone experts, because a lot of people have the perception that they will go to their OB-GYN and ask them for a hormone panel, not that some of them won’t order it, but for you to say that they are more surgeons than hormone experts I think will surprise a lot of people.
Dr. Tabatha:
I had very minimal training in how to handle a menopausal woman. I was definitely trained on what preventative tests to order, like a colonoscopy, a mammogram, a lipid panel to test your cholesterol.
I was explaining this on a podcast earlier today: The medical system was created out of an acute care problem. We were trying to treat infections and save people’s lives and do lifesaving surgeries and things like that. The whole world of medicine comes from the idea of pathology and disease. It doesn’t come from a standpoint of health and wellness.
We’re just looking to the wrong people for answers about how to get well, how to reverse disease. That’s not what doctors are trained to do. They honestly don’t know that. I didn’t know that. I was really well trained. That’s not what you learn.
It wasn’t until I went on and got a ton more training that I actually started to understand and comprehend the idea that I was practicing Band-Aid medicine. If you came to me with typical symptoms of thyroid disease, my only solution was Synthroid. That’s honestly all I knew. Or you need to go have your thyroid removed, if it’s acting up and overgrowing.
As a surgeon, we are taught to remove the offending organ. The uterus is bleeding too much; just remove it. The gallbladder is creating stones; just remove it. The appendix is inflamed; just remove it. That’s the mentality. It breaks my heart that I used to think that way and practice that way.
I wasn’t until I had failed my back surgery, and I was laying in bed for seven days. The third or fourth day, I realized I hadn’t eaten at all. Why am I not hungry? Why don’t I even care about eating? Then I remembered when I was doing my surgery rotations, one of the first things we learned as a student was how to write NPO orders. We would tell the nurses, don’t feed this patient who just had surgery. You cannot feed them until we give you an order, and then you can feed them. As surgeons, we know that fasting is part of the healing process. My body was doing that innately. It was not wanting to eat because I was trying to recover from this back injury.
I’m laying in bed. I can’t do anything else except talk to God. I got so much clarity that week. Wow, when I stop giving into all my bodily cravings and desires, and just let my physical desires drive everything, my mind can open up. I can actually reestablish that connection with my creator and get so much clarity, and I can heal.
You know this. When we eat, we need resources. It requires energy and supplies to break down the food, digest the food, absorb the vitamins and minerals from the food. It’s a very active energy-heavy process. If you’re eating all the time, you can’t heal and take care of other things throughout the body. If you fast, you can divert those resources to where they need to go. It’s a pretty incredible process.
God said, “Teach people how to do this.” That is the innate intelligence of your body to heal.
Dr. Eric:
I agree. When it comes to fasting, there are different types of fasting, like 16/8 fasts, 24-hour fasts, three-day water fasts. What do you practice yourself? What do you typically recommend to patients?
Dr. Tabatha:
Great question. My program is 40 days long. I developed it after listening to my patients over and over and watching them work with the nutritionist and seeing where they were struggling. Time and time again, women would tell me, “I can’t fast. It’s too hard. That’s too long.” They would have symptoms.
What I realized was they were stuck in sugar burning mode. They were eating a lot of carbohydrates and using that immediate blood sugar to get through their day, for their energy. Whatever was left over, they would store it as fat. That’s what we do.
Women aren’t eating enough healthy fats and protein, one because we were told fat makes you fat for decades, which is absolutely not true. Women are afraid to eat healthy fats. When you use fats to burn fuel, you are satiated longer, so you’re not as hungry as quickly. You don’t ride the hangry rollercoaster of the blood sugar issues. You can go into ketosis, which sets you up for success with fasting.
The process of fasting, we have to retrain our bodies how to do the innate intelligence it was designed to do because honestly, when we were created forever ago, we didn’t have grocery stores on every corner. We didn’t have access to unlimited foods 24/7. We didn’t have DoorDash and all this crazy stuff. Our bodies know how to go quite long time periods without food. How to feast, how to famine again.
All you have to do is break up with snacking, break up with sugar, get back down to your normal three meals a day, and then you can start to shrink your eating window. Then you can start to drop off a meal and go only a dinner and maybe a lunch, or do a 24-hour fast.
It’s like learning how to run. People don’t just get up and run a 5K very often. The ones that do, that’s pretty awesome. Most people do a couch to 5K. They get the training manual and every day, they slowly increase what they’re doing and add onto it.
That’s fasting. You have to retrain your body on how to burn fat for fuel instead of sugar for fuel. We use all of it. We begin by getting into ketosis and burning fat for fuel. We play around with that eating window. 16/8 is the most common. That’s where most people feel good long-term and have long-term benefits.
I don’t think our bodies were created to eat 24/7. They just weren’t. You should not. It’s too hard on the pancreas; it’s too hard on the body. You should be eating in a 6-8-hour window on a regular basis. Then we can add in longer fasts, depending on your goals. Are you trying to lose weight? Are you trying to get mental clarity? Are you trying to heal from an injury or reverse a disease process? What is your motivation behind it? I teach all of that in the online version of my program.
It’s been such a game-changer for women. Nobody is talking about this! People are like, “Well, we can all fast the same. You should be able to do it.” People feel like a failure if they just can’t get on board with the trend and do it. It’s not a trend. It’s actually how God created your body to function. You just have to remind it what to do.
Dr. Eric:
It’s more about losing weight. Obviously, fasting can definitely help people to lose weight. You mentioned healing overall. It could benefit people with all different conditions. Most people listening to this have autoimmune thyroid conditions. You dealt with Hashimoto’s, so I imagine fasting is a big part of patients you see with Hashimoto’s.
I would say that most people who fast, at least initially, a lot of people are doing it to lose weight, but it goes way beyond just losing weight, if I understand you correctly.
Dr. Tabatha:
If you do it right. Weight loss is a side effect. It’s a benefit of getting healthy. I’m hearing a new trend where people are poo-pooing fasting if there is any kind of thyroid disease. “Oh, you shouldn’t fast. You have an autoimmune condition. Or you have hypothyroidism.” That’s really not true. That is not how our physiology is designed. It’s actually beneficial for people with thyroid conditions and autoimmune conditions.
The key is to do it in a way that your body doesn’t think you’re starving. We know that thyroid, being the master gland it is, is trying to regulate all of our resources. It’s taking in information from our adrenal glands, our gut, our immune system, our sex hormones. It’s trying to keep everything in balance. It affects your thermostat, your metabolism, how quickly your bowels move, how quickly your hair grows. It affects everything. It responds to all the stimuli coming in, the environmental stimuli, the internal stimuli. It decides who gets the resources.
This is what I love explaining to women: Your thyroid doesn’t just become sluggish and fail you. Your thyroid is actually protecting you. It’s doing its job a lot of the times. When it’s shifting resources, or “downregulating,” I call it, where you kind of look like you’re going into a hypothyroid picture, and nobody is checking your full lab panel.
Your reverse T3 is really high, and your free T3 is really getting on the lower end. It’s because your thyroid is responding to something that’s happening, either a gut imbalance, an infection, heavy metal exposure, a virus you just got, an autoimmune attack on your thyroid. If you can just remember that your body is working for you, and it’s doing its best to actually keep you in balance and protect you, and stop being mad at it, then you will be able to know what it needs and pull it out of that situation.
When I see women coming to me with hypothyroidism, and they have gained weight, they immediately focus on losing the weight. We have to figure out why is your thyroid downregulating and sending out resources elsewhere? It’s because you have gut dysbiosis that we need to treat. When you treat those root causes, a lot of times, I see the thyroid shift and go back into balance because it’s no longer worried or trying to treat this infection or deal with something else.
You have to start listening to your body. We do this as children. We are strong with our intuition. We hear what our body has to say, but we get trained by grownups to ignore it and cover it up with medications and over the counter stuff. Just think of it as a nuisance.
When your body is giving you little signs in the beginning—your skin is a little dry, you’re getting a little constipated, your brain isn’t functioning very well—we just keep ignoring all the symptoms instead of going, “Hmm, I wonder what’s got the thyroid angry. Maybe we should evaluate why is the thyroid shifting how it’s functioning.” When we do that, we can figure out the root cause and treat it. Oftentimes, we can finally release the weight.
Part of it is that fasting stops all of the stuff happening in the gut. The gut is the end-all be-all. It’s where all disease and health begin. If you’re constantly feeding your gut, and you have leaky gut and autoimmune conditions, it’s like fuel on the fire. It’s taking lighter fluid and shooting it at the tiny little embers, and it starts to flare back up again. You get the food sensitivities all angry again. You get the leaky gut going again. You get the immune response flared up. You’re driving more thyroid dysfunction instead of actually giving it all a rest.
Fasting is one of the quickest ways to heal your gut. If you really want to calm things down with an autoimmune condition or thyroid condition, you want to incorporate fasting. That gives your body the ability to divert resources over and start healing.
It can start doing the process of autophagy, meaning we have cells that we send out through our body that eat and kill other bad cells that need to leave. They need to be done and gone. If that process doesn’t happen, those cells sit there, and they go rogue and turn into cancer and disease. We have to give that autophagy a chance. We are just continuing to spiral down with more conditions and more conditions.
Dr. Eric:
Fasting is important for overall health, especially for gut healing. Like you said, we might need to go beyond that. If you have gut dysbiosis due to some type of infection or other imbalances/other triggers, we need to address that. Fasting helps with the gut.
You’re known as the Gutsy Gynecologist. What is that connection between the gut and the hormones?
Dr. Tabatha:
I first started noticing this as a surgeon. I did a lot of stage IV robotic endometriosis surgery. Endometriosis is where the cells inside the uterus that grow every month in response to estrogen grow and then bleed, which is what’s called a menstrual period. These cells get outside of the uterus into the abdominal cavity, and they can start to grow on top of the uterus, the ovaries, the tubes, the side walls of your abdomen and pelvis, on your bowels and bladder. It was my job to go in as a surgeon and try to separate all the adhesions and the scarring that was taking place. The bowels and bladder and ovaries were growing together essentially from this disease process.
It was never taught to me that the gut was involved at all, but it was obvious looking through the robotic lens that how is the gut not involved? The gut is literally scarred to these pelvic organs, and I’m sitting here peeling bowel off and taking down adhesions for two hours at a time. The gut has to be involved.
When I started studying functional medicine, I really began to understand that all of the things happening inside the intestines, the lumen, the tube where the food is being digested and broken down and turned into stool, those processes, chemical reactions are happening. They don’t just stay in the lumen. They cross through that one cell layer into our bloodstream and through the serosa out into the abdominal cavity.
If you have inflammation in your gut, you’re producing cytokines and interleukins and all the bad stuff that we heard about through the pandemic in your gut. They’re seeping into the pelvis the same way that the pelvic stuff is seeping into the gut. It’s impossible to heal endometriosis without healing the gut. It’s impossible to stop fibroids from growing and fertility scarring and issues like that without healing the gut. As long as you have inflammation processes and chemical reactions happening from all the bad bacteria and the overactive immune response, you just can’t stop it.
When I made that connection, it was lifechanging for my patients. As soon as I started with the gut first, so many of their GYN problems just went away. We weren’t dealing with them directly. All the painful periods; the crazy, heavy, irregular periods; the disease processes, they start going away once you heal the gut.
It’s way more in depth than that. There are certain bacteria that live in our intestines that will make an enzyme called beta-glucuronidase. This enzyme cuts the garbage tag off of the estrogen that we are trying to remove from our body. If I’m done using my estrogen that I just made, I want to get rid of it. I put a methylation group on it, send it through the liver, send it to the urine and stool for removal. This enzyme from the bacteria will cut it off and help you reabsorb it through your intestines.
Again, I believe it’s our body’s innate intelligence because almost every single day, I see menopausal women with really high beta-glucuronidase levels. I think their body is trying to reabsorb as much estrogen as possible because they are so low in estrogen, and estrogen is protective.
We also see that with fat cells. Women get so angry that they gain five or 10 pounds at menopause. Every woman almost. That is your body’s way of protecting you because you no longer have enough estrogen to protect your heart, bones, and brain. Fat cells make estrogen, so we add some more fat cells to bump up your estrogen, just enough to give you that protection.
We look at this like our body’s failing us. Our body hates us. Why is it doing this? That’s not what’s happening. That’s what’s supposed to happen, unless you go on hormone replacement therapy, and then that little belly fat you gained goes away because your body doesn’t need to make estrogen. You’re taking it.
You have to understand and believe that your body is always working for you. It’s not working against you. It doesn’t hate you. We just don’t understand it.
Dr. Eric:
You mentioned beta-glucuronidase. It sounds like you do comprehensive stool tests to look at not only to see if they have dysbiosis but see if they have an elevated beta-glucuronidase. Do you also use dried urine testing to look at the estrogen metabolites?
Dr. Tabatha:
Every day, yep. I love when women do my Healthy Her program. You have to take a comprehensive approach. You have to see what’s going on in the gut. You have to see how your hormones are being metabolized. You need to see what your adrenals are doing. You need to look at that 24-hour cortisol pattern and see how are your adrenals handling your daily stress in your life?
It isn’t until you see all of these pieces of the puzzle to see the picture clearly. Then you can start to understand, “Oh, that’s why my thyroid’s behaving that way. This is what’s going on.” “This is why I went into premature menopause.” “This is why I’m infertile.” Absolutely.
I try to get most women to do my program, which is stool testing, food sensitivity testing, Dutch, hormone, and adrenal testing, all upfront.
Dr. Eric:
I’m glad you brought up adrenals because one question I have for you related to fasting: Any concerns with the adrenals and fasting? If you look at a Dutch test, and someone has cortisol levels that are sky high or depressed, along with, say, depressed total DHEA, should that person fast, or should they avoid fasting?
Dr. Tabatha:
That’s a great question. This is one of the biggest things that I address in the program because it comes up time and time again. Either women have no idea they have an adrenal issue. They have never heard of this. Or they have a Dutch test, they know what their 24-hour cortisol panel looks like.
I would say the only real concern is when you are in stage III adrenal dysfunction. We used to call it “adrenal fatigue.” You look at your pattern, and it’s flatlined. You don’t have a nice cortisol awakening response the first 30 minutes of waking up in the morning. That means your body is losing resiliency. It’s losing its ability to respond to and give you the cortisol production that it needs to function.
Fasting is a little bit of a stressor. It’s a good stressor. The same way exercise is a stressor. Moderate exercise is good. Triathlon training, that’s probably excessive and bad. You have to think about it that way.
Fasting is a good stressor, but not in someone who doesn’t have the resiliency to be able to respond appropriately. If your cortisol is flatlined, you want to start with getting a more ketogenic diet and really shrinking up your eating window. Then staying there and making sure you’re having high feast days, where you’re reminding your body that you’re not starving because your thyroid will respond.
If you eat low calorie day after day after day, it will say, “She’s starving us to death. Let’s turn down this production here. We can’t lose any more weight. She’s going to starve us.” You have to make sure you’re eating enough when you are eating. That’s where a lot of women are falling short. They’re trying to calorie-restrict while also fasting. That’s not the most beneficial way to do it.
I would say if you haven’t had Dutch testing, you don’t know what your adrenals are doing. Ask yourself some basic questions: Can you get out of bed in the morning? Can you get going without coffee? Are you requiring naps during the day? Are you pretty much sleeping at night? If those things are really messed up, you probably want to get your adrenals tested.
Dr. Eric:
Just to clarify, if someone does have that low cortisol pattern, it sounds like it’s a good idea to fast, but you want to make sure that you’re getting enough nutrients, calories, and protein during that eating window.
Dr. Tabatha:
Right. And you really need to start loving your body and giving it rest time and helping it restore and repair. It’s in a state of severe stress. What we are trained to do is push through, keep going, drink more caffeine, get more sugar, do whatever it takes, take stimulants. That is not the answer.
I go through this in the book. We have two parts of our autonomic nervous system. We have this sympathetic, fight or flight. If you’re afraid, you’re going to run. If you’re stressed out, you’re going to fight. There is the parasympathetic, rest and digest. You can’t be in both stages at the same time.
Adrenal fatigue is you were in sympathetic/fight or flight for so long that you can’t even function anymore. Now you have to be in parasympathetic to heal. I don’t want anybody to get to that point. The more you pull yourself over to the parasympathetic nervous system and really nurture that side of you, the quicker you’re going to heal.
To me, fasting with faith is one of the quickest ways to get into parasympathetic mode because you’re meditating on scripture, you’re trying to listen to what God has to say for you. You’re slowing down and understanding that you don’t have to figure it all out. You don’t have to carry all the burdens. God’s got you. He already has a great future lined up for you. You need to trust in him.
When you start reading that truth, the words of the Bible, you really can shift into that parasympathetic nervous system and start to heal. It’s beautiful and incredible. Women’s DHEA levels will increase. DHEA is like our anti-aging, keep us young and healthy hormone. We need that. So often, we start to get it really depleted in that stressed out, over-adrenaled state.
I was just thinking about this this morning. Everybody used to say, “How are you?” You would say, “Good. Fine.” Now the answer is, “I’m really busy.” Like it’s a badge of honor, something to be proud of. God does not want us to be busy and overly productive. We don’t have to earn our salvation or our place. We have to take a step back and just relax a little bit. Realize that we are worthy just because we are. We don’t have to produce and perform and do all the things to earn our place.
I think we get stuck in this busy mindset. I hear this every day from women, “But I can handle it. Everybody’s doing it. That’s just life.” Okay. Your mind can handle that stressed out life, that overactive life, that busy life. But your physiology can’t. Your thyroid can’t. Your adrenals can’t. Your gut can’t handle it. Your physiology still responds with a chemical reaction every time you are in a stressful, sympathetic state.
That’s just the truth of it. You study rats and pigs and people. That’s just the response that happens. You get a stimulant. We release cortisol. We release epinephrine. We release cytokines. All these inflammatory processes happen. Then our mind is like, “Oh, that’s fine. Don’t worry about that. We got it.” The physiology already happened. The inflammation already happened. We just killed all the good bacteria. We just caused our leaky gut. It just happened. It doesn’t matter now.
We need to be more mindful about how we’re living and take some authority and responsibility over the fact that what we are doing all throughout the day is completely impacting our health. We have way more control over it than we want to admit. We want to think doctors are the answers. Doctors are going to help us and save us. Really, your body is totally created to heal.
I tell people as a surgeon, I will cut your skin open and fascia and muscle and pull the baby out and sew everything back up with sutures. I know it’s kind of graphic. I didn’t actually heal you shut. I literally put some suture in there to approximate those tissues, so that the muscle of the uterus laid next to each other.
If those stitches broke, you weren’t healed shut. Your tissues have innate intelligence that they grow back together. The cells regrow together. That is what we are not believing in anymore. We are not believing that our body has any ability to heal or do what it’s supposed to do. I really want women to understand that there is so much more of it in their control than they realize.
Dr. Eric:
We’re essentially assisting with the healing. Like you said, it’s innate intelligence.
Today, I had two patient consultations. We were talking about why the endocrinologist can’t be more open-minded. They bring up a diet for cases of Graves’ or Hashimoto’s, “No, diet won’t do anything.” You need the thyroid hormone replacement, or in the case of Graves’, antithyroid medication or radioactive iodine. So negative when it comes to diet.
There is an underlying cause behind everything. Like you said, our job isn’t really to fix the person; it’s to give them the guidance and have their body take over, that innate intelligence. I’m glad you spoke about that.
Parasympathetic, I want to talk a little bit about that. When it comes to spirituality, religion, and the overlap between that and mind/body medicine. For example, when I have a conversation with a patient, I ask them what they’re doing from a stress management perspective. If their response is praying every day, which is important, do they need to go beyond that? Your book talks about that probably, and you’re talking about that now. How much do they have to incorporate mindfulness? How much overlap is there between religion and meditation and yoga? Anywhere you want to go.
Dr. Tabatha:
If your listeners are anything like me, I was raised Catholic. I had a lot of confusing messages being in religion and in the church. I really pulled away from it for a long time. I always knew that I believed Jesus Christ did walk the Earth, and he was my savior. I had that belief in the back of my head. I treated God like he was a genie in a bottle. I would just wish and pray and wish and pray. Why won’t it happen? I’m waiting for things to magically happen within the same day of me asking for it. That’s a really scarce mindset and a weak and fearful way to live.
I don’t believe that’s strong faith. I had to learn to actually trust God and believe him before I see it. We always want to see and then believe. You actually have to believe and then see it. When I shifted how I was praying, and I shifted to a state of gratitude, like thank God first, and then come to him with my issues and requests, that was a gamechanger.
That changed everything because what I realized was you can’t be anxious and worrying and in a state of gratitude at the same time. Just like you can’t be in fight or flight and rest or digest at the same time. If you are staying, “Thank you, God, for this incredible body that got up and went to Pilates this morning. Thank you for my sweet dog giving me attention when I get home. Thank you for the warm cup of coffee that I’m drinking right now,” you can’t actually be worrying about stuff at the same time.
You start to shift the chemicals that are created in your body and how you feel. When we are in a state of gratitude, we produce oxytocin, which is our love hormone. It actually helps us feel good. We produce more serotonin and melatonin and all of the good chemicals.
When we are in a state of anxiety and worry, we tend to remember past events. As soon as we remember something, our brain is hardwired to feel those feelings and create those chemicals again.
Say you got in a really big fight with somebody. Somebody did you wrong. You could probably relive that in your head right now and feel all those feelings and get the heart racing and get sweaty and get jittery and pumped up, like you gotta talk about it. You’re making chemicals from that thought response, those feelings.
What I teach women is in order to change your body, you have to change your mind. It all comes back to Romans 12:2, “You have to renew your mind in order to be above any of this physical reality that you’re suffering through.” Your brain is a computer. Your mind is a computer program. It’s just doing what you’ve trained it to do. Unfortunately, most of the programming was done when we were young, or it’s done subconsciously without much of our thoughts. Paying attention is just happening to us. People say things, and we record them, and we play them over and over and over. We create these new nerve pathways that just get ingrained and driven deeper.
It’s not until you start to make new pathways and think new thoughts and break those old thought patterns that you can create new chemicals to send a new signal to your cells that are healing and health-restoring.
It all does begin in your mind. Anything that happens in the world, somebody wanted to create an airplane and get us to fly. That had to first happen in his mind before he developed the airplane physically. If you want a healthy body that isn’t overweight, that isn’t in pain, that isn’t exhausted, you have to first envision it in your mind.
I do this whole thing called Future Gazing with God. I walk women through the process of figuring out: What are they struggling with? What don’t they like? How do they see themselves? Then I help them envision, “Imagine seeing yourself through God’s eyes, through your creator, who has plans for you. Imagine what he sees you as. How can you get to that woman of your dreams that you envision yourself becoming?”
Then we work backwards. What is that woman doing every day? How is she waking up in the morning? How is she moving her body? What choices is she making about food? How does she manage her stressors? When you get that kind of clarity, you can start creating new thought patterns and reprogramming your mind. That will change your behaviors, and that will change your body.
It’s a lot. I get it. But it’s life changing. It’s transformational. Watching women go through this has just been the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done. It lights me up.
Dr. Eric:
I asked you that question because it happens a lot. I’ll talk about stress management, and a woman will typically say, “I’m praying, and that’s my form of stress management.” I always give a positive response because I think that’s great and is helping, but it sounds like many times, they do need to go beyond that, to go deeper to get into that parasympathetic state.
Dr. Tabatha:
Unfortunately, a lot of prayer is actually bad repetitive thoughts. It’s a negative feedback loop of worrying and praying and asking God to fix something that he doesn’t necessarily want to fix. He might want to be teaching you a lesson. He might be showing you all kinds of doors you’re supposed to be going through. You are so stuck in that symptom that you can’t see it. Sometimes, we have to get a fresh, new perspective.
When I was so overworked as an OB-GYN, I worked in a small town. I was on call every other night. I was exhausted. I couldn’t remember my patients’ names from the delivery the night before. I literally could not remember stuff. I had to rely on my assistant.
That was really eye-opening for me to understand that none of that was ever going to change until I decided that it was no longer something I was going to tolerate. I was going to put some boundaries in place. I was going to shift my mindset about things. I believed I was supposed to be exhausted and overworked. I was trained to think that you hold your bladder and don’t eat and just struggle through and keep on going, and you always put the patient first. That was my mindset. That was my belief.
It wasn’t until I realized God gave me this body, and I am not honoring him by treating it like a garbage can. I need to shift and change how I’m treating myself because that’s going to be sustainable. You cannot continue to pour from an empty cup. You just can’t.
It wasn’t until I shifted my internal mindset to believe that I can have boundaries. I can work less. I can sleep more. My patients will survive if someone else takes care of them. I had to shift so many beliefs. Once I started to do that, and started focusing on me and my health and my body, that’s when everything changed. A lot of people need a new perspective unfortunately.
Dr. Eric:
I definitely agree. Dr. Tabatha, you shared a lot of great information. I know people are probably really excited to read your book. Before you talk more about where they can get it, is there anything else that I should have asked you that I didn’t ask you? Anything else that you want to talk about?
Dr. Tabatha:
I just want people to know that you’re never too far gone. I had a 70-year-old woman do the online program for Lent last year. She had uncontrolled diabetes at 70 years old. She had a wound that wouldn’t heal because her blood sugar was so elevated. Her hemoglobin A1C was 8.5 going into the program; that is really uncontrolled. She decided she was going to give it a try.
She didn’t believe that she could do the whole thing, but she started believing she could at least do the day. We took it day by day. By the time we got to an extended fast, she was like, “I think I can do this.” She completely did it. She felt so empowered. It absolutely shifted everything.
This is a woman with fibromyalgia and chronic pain and non-healing wounds, everything you can imagine. A list of drugs she was on. By the end of it, her hemoglobin A1C was down in the 6s. She was out moving her body like she hadn’t in years.
She was the greatest example to me because she thought she was too far gone. She was believing the lies, “It’s too late. I can’t heal. My body can’t change at this point.” I was a little skeptical. She was 70. That is a lot of comorbidities, right? I know it works in 40- and 50-year-olds. Man, did she make me a believer.
I love that story. The fact that I had Hashimoto’s at 17, and my antibodies were sky high. Now, they’re down in single digits. You can reverse stuff. Your body wants to be in homeostasis.
It wants to heal. It is always trying to heal. It’s in a constant state of healing. It’s only us interfering that it gets into a state of not healing. If you just shift and choose to believe, and know with all your being- Just as the sun rises every morning, you know the sun is going to rise. Just know your body is going to heal. Your mind will start to find those solutions and those opportunities for healing.
Like listening to the podcast today. “Oh my gosh, I’ve never thought of fasting. Let me try this. Let me see.” God gave you a new possibility. That’s what I would say: You cannot give up hope.
Dr. Eric:
Wonderful. Where is the best place people can get your book?
Dr. Tabatha:
Go straight to FastToFaith.com. Right now, if you get the book, we’re giving awesome bonuses with it. We’re giving $20 to the supplement store. We’re doing extra scripture bonuses. I am doing a really awesome master class where I am doing a deep dive called Ultimate Transformation. It’s only for the people buying the book right now. I’m really excited about that conversation. You get to interact with me one-on-one and ask questions. All that good stuff.
Dr. Eric:
Once they buy the book, they get access to that master class you mentioned?
Dr. Tabatha:
Exactly. They just put their order number in, and we’ll send it to you.
Dr. Eric:
Check out Dr. Tabatha’s amazing podcast, The Gutsy Gynecologist Show. Also, there is a free guide, The Gutsy Gynecologist’s Guide to Balancing Your Hormones. This was a wonderful conversation, Dr. Tabatha. Thank you so much for your time. Appreciate it. Best of luck with your book. I’m very excited about it and think it’s going to do amazing.
Dr. Tabatha:
Thank you. I’m so honored that everybody just took the time to listen today, and they stayed with us. Thank you so much.