Episode 28: Dr. Tabatha Barber, OB/GYN, and Fasting for Women

Welcome to Fast Feast Repeat Intermittent Fasting for Life. I'm Jen Stevens, author
of the New York Times bestseller Fast Feast Repeat, and I'm Sherry Bullock,
longtime intermittent faster and health and wellness advocate. Please keep in mind that this
podcast is for educational and motivational purposes only and is not intended to provide medical
or diagnostic advice. Jen and I are not doctors, so make sure to
check with your trusted healthcare professionals before making changes, especially when it comes to
any medical treatments or medications. Whether you're new to intermittent fasting or an experienced
intermittent faster, tune in each week to get inspired, to learn, and
to have some fun along the way. Hi, everybody, we are so
glad you are here today. Welcome to this week's episode of the Fast Feast
Repeat Intermittent Fasting for Life Podcast. Today, Sherry and I are very excited
to be joined by my good friend, doctor Tabitha Barber. Tabitha is a
Triple Board certified OBGI in physician and her primary focus is on utilizing functional medicine
to empower you on your wellness journey and before we get started. I want
to read you something from Tabitha's website that I absolutely love, and this is
a quote from doctor Tabitha. She says, my profound dedication revolves around understanding
the complexity of women's health. I'm fervently committed to educating and guiding women toward
achieving a harmonious balance of body, mind, and spirit. My mission is
simple, yet transformative, to demonstrate how you can attain optimal wellness. Together
will harness the incredible power of food, movement, mindfulness practices, herbs,
supplements, and energy healing techniques as potent tools for healing. By doing so,
we can effectively reverse chronic illnesses and unlock a life that's vibrant, brimming
with energy, joy and the promise of longevity. I had to read the
whole thing because that is, first of all, that's what we all want
in a doctor. But that mission is just spectacular. So welcome Tabitha.
Thank you. Don't we all want that? Doesn't it just sound incredible?
It does. But to know that all of those things work together and that
you don't really need a doctor, it's all within you, you know,
it really is like to guide you, right, that's your job exactly.
You are like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. You have it within you.
Your body was created with innate intelligence to get back into homeostasis, to
be balanced to heal, and a lot of women are still looking to the
white coat for their healing and that's just not where you're going to find the
answers. Yeah, as you were talking, I was thinking, I feel
like all too often people think that they're sort of helpless, like they're just
dealt with the cards they're dealt and that's what they have to deal with.
And if the doctor doesn't give them a solution, when they go in and
say, hey, this is what I'm dealing with, and the doctor doesn't
have the answer, then they think they're kind of stuck. But I like
really feel like if we act like detectives investigators and we stay curious and we
ask questions and we keep researching and we keep trying new things, like we
can figure out what we need to do for our bodies. But you first
have to listen to your body and trust your body absolutely and believe in its
ability to thrive. So you know, if you think back thousands of years,
we didn't have grocery stores on every corner. We didn't have doctors that
everybody went to all the time for their solutions. You really listened to your
own body, and those symptoms are messages trying to tell you, like,
something's upsetting your body, something needs to be removed, some kind of insult
that's happening, or you're missing something you need to replace or add something in.
And if you can get back in tune with them, you don't need
all this outside help. I would love for everybody to watch the Blue Zone
documentaries on Netflix that I watched, because isn't it incredible. Yes, It's
like you look at these countries or these little towns where people are living above
one hundred years old, and they are doing what we've done throughout civilization.
They are living in communities, they're growing their own foods, they are walking
everywhere. They live in big hilly areas. They don't have a lot of
furniture. They're exposed to the soil and the bacteria. And so really,
we just we are mucking things up with our new bound society. We really
are. We're trying to kill all the germs that actually can protect us.
We are isolating ourselves from each other. We are eating frank and food,
which is this like made up stuff in the labs that isn't really food.
And so we're just so far removed from how God creates did our bodies to
thrive. If we get back to that, you can live an amazing life.
And they're not counting macros, counting calories or doing step aerobics right right,
They're just livingly. So they just have naturally active lifestyles as well.
Some of it's just based off of the way they live. But also,
like you know, I'm thinking of is it there was one in Greece?
Is it a Carria, yes? Or in Korea? I think I've said
it wrong my whole life. I think it's a Korea. Like do you
know how many hills these people climb and steps they climb, and so they're
even food, right, Yeah. They don't have the option to just you
know, sit in there lazy boy all day and get in their car and
drive. And you know, lots of these people don't even have vehicles in
these areas. They walk everywhere, and they eat as a community and they
celebrate as a community, and like so much of that's so important. I
don't think people understand how important that is, and the bigger point is that
these communities don't have chronic lifestyle diseases. These people don't have diabetes and heart
disease and cancers and things. It's incredible, like they die because they have
an accident or they break a hip, things of you know, actual old
age and going through something, not a disease that we've created because of our
lifestyle. A lot we can learn from that, and that's really what drove
me to write my book is I wanted people to get back to using their
common sense and believing in their body's ability to heal and getting back to real
food. So I love to explain to people, you know, I was
a surgeon. I absolutely loved being a surgeon. I would go through,
cut through the skin, cut through the fashion, cut through the muscle of
the uterus, deliver the baby out of this there, close everything up.
So I would take suture and I would sew those tissues back together. But
they really weren't back together. They were just laying approximately next to each other.
It was the body's own ability for those muscle cells to grow back together
and those skin cells to grow back together. So we think, oh my
gosh, the surgeon heel does he's so amazing or she's so incredible, but
it really wasn't me. I was helping with guiding the body, but the
body does the healing, and that's all getting it wrong. That's powerful.
So Tabitha was a guest on our Life Lessons podcast. It was episode one
twenty in March of twenty twenty three, and in that episode, she discussed
issues surrounding women's health such as estrogen and dominance, the gut hormone, balancing,
weight management, and she also gave really useful tips to help women reclaim
their purpose and vitality and a healthy, happy body. And I just want
to say, if you have not listened to that episode and you are a
woman, or if you are a man and you have a woman in your
life who is struggling, please listen to that episode. Doctor Tabatha changed my
life because I personally was struggling for almost two years, low energy, feeling
awful, weight regain, blood sugar fluctuations that were out of control. I
was constantly hypoglycemic, and I knew there was something wrong with my body.
I kept going to the doctor. I kept telling him there was something wrong
with my body. He just sort of was like, well, you know,
I'm so sorry. This is just what happens when you get older.
It was the information I learned from recording that podcast and one other with doctor
deb Matthews that gave me all the information I needed to advocate for myself,
and whether my doctor wanted me to or not, I forced him to start
me on bioidentical hormone replacement therapy and within thirty six hours, I was a
whole new woman. I was vibrant and brimming with energy again and joy again,
and I mean just changed my life. So thank you, doctor Tabitha.
Oh my gosh, that just feels my heart. Thank you for sharing
that. And unfortunately, that's a lot of women's stories, right. I
remember when I was a teenager watching my mom turn into a completely different person.
I would think, who are you like, I don't even know who
you are anymore. You're crazy, you're mean, you're snappy, And then
she changed physically and I didn't understand at the time, and neither did she.
So it just feels my heart to be able to help women to not
suffer unnecessarily like that. You know, and people argue, well, oh
my gosh, you are a child of God, you are a believer,
how could you possibly be pushing hormone replacement therapy that kind of thing. It's
like God gave me this gift to understand the body and what we can do
to help it thrive till it's last day. Like I'm not going to deny
that. Like he put that wisdom in me. He gave me all these
experiences through my medical professional these decades, and he wants me to spread the
word that women can feel good in the second half of their life. They
don't have to struggle and be miserable. And I want to remind people that
just one hundred years ago, the average life expectancy for women was forty nine,
so we didn't live in this menopausal state the way we do now.
Some of us will live half of our lives without hormones, and that is
crazy to me, because hormones make us who we are. They give us
our personality and our energy and our zest for life, and we literally change
without them. Well, and I think so many people too don't understand how
your female sex hormones affect all your hormones. Yes exactly, I didn't until
guests who told me. Tabitha. I remember we were on the corner.
I feel like I should be singing a song standing on the corner end Park
City, Utah. And Tabitha said, oh my god, you got to
get started on hormone replacement therapy and I was like, what anyway changed my
life as well? Yeah, And the work that you guys are doing with
fasting is so important. But there is this piece that women go through when
they're when they transition and their hormones shift, that what used to work for
us no longer works for us. We can't just like change our diet and
clean things up and and do some fasting. It works for a lot of
things, but sometimes we need to get our hormones back into balance. And
so a big part of the book is explaining this comprehensive approach to women's health
and how our adrenal glands affect our hormones, our gut affects our hormones,
our diet affects our hormones, our sleep, our lifestyle choices, all the
things. Nothing is happening in a silo. Even though conventional medicine wants you
to think like if you have an IBS, you go to the gastreinurologist If
you have PMS, you go to the gynecologist. If you have depression,
you go to the psychiatrist. Literally, all these things are connected. There
are a few driving root causes of all of this, so you have to
be looking at the bigger picture. You have to put them all together,
and a lot of women don't understand this. Thyroid dysfunction is like probably the
best example. You probably get questions on thyroid issues with fasting. There's so
much conflicting information about thyroid, about fertility, about menopause, and fasting,
and literally it comes down to the fact that God created our bodies to feast
and to fast. We have the ability to burn sugar for fuel and fat
for fuel. We should be able to go back and forth and have this
metabolic flexibility. But we've lost that ability because of how we've trained our bodies
to eat every couple hours, to live on frank and foods, all this
garbage, and so our bodies are just confused. We're just sending it the
wrong messages, don't you guys agree? Yes, absolutely so. We get
a lot of questions about women and fasting, you know, especially these are
ramped up since a recent book came out that has as its main premise that
women must fast differently during certain weeks of the month based on their cycles.
You know, we also hear other voices in the fasting or women's health community
saying that, you know, fasting isn't good for women, or you know,
it might somehow damage our hormones. And you know, personally, I
am of the belief that what's bad for women's hormones. I mean, of
course there are many things out there that maybe, but over restriction an overly
restrictive way of eating. If we don't nourish our bodies well our stressful modern
world, we don't respond well to overrestricting, over exercising, all of that.
And that's really like we've been taught as women eat less, move more,
eat way less, move way more. You know, that's what I
think is really bad for women's hormones. But there seems to be an assumption
that fasting equals over restriction equals bad for women's hormones, and that seems to
be where the disconnect laws. You know, what do you think about that?
Yeah, so this is a really important topic and we need to make
a few distinctions. For the majority of people, women in particular, we
are healthy enough that we can handle a feast famine cycle. We can have
a regular time restricted eating window, and every once in a while maybe do
a dinner to dinner fast, longer fast and be able to just take the
benefits of that and stay in balance. If you have flat out adrenal dysfunction
or uncontrolled the thyroid issues or something undiagnosed, sometimes that dysfunction will rear its
ugly head when you're trying to do something like a longer fast. It will
present itself. And that is not because your body doesn't know what it's doing.
It's actually the innate intelligence of your body going, oh, here's a
problem, let me show it to you. So I really don't want women
to be afraid of fasting. I truly believe it's one of our superpowers that
we are supposed to be harnessing, because fasting gives us so many benefits,
like you mentioned. For me, it brings me mental clarity and creates more
energy. I mean, if you just look at the biochemistry of food,
we get one atp per carbohydrate and for per gram of fat, So you
get more energy production from eating a gramma fat than you do from eating a
gramma carbohydrates. But you also when you go into a fasting state, you
guys know that you can get into ketosis. You can burn those fats for
fuel and they keep you going way longer than burning carbohydrates or your sugar from
your bloodstreams. So you want to be able to tap into those fat stores
and get into some ketosis. As should you be in ketosis all the time.
No, you should have metabolic flexible. So glad you said that,
right, you should be able to go and eat a piece of toast or
have some for me, it's gluten free pasta. Use that as energy,
burn it off and not store it as fat. Like that's the key for
me is when I eat, I don't want to be storing it all as
extra fat that I'm carrying around. I want to be able to utilize what
I eat. And so we just we get so many confusing messages. But
I really don't want women to be afraid of fasting. Let me just mention
with fertility, right, I've seen this as well. It's like, oh,
you got to eat every two hours to stay fertile. You got to
you know, eat this huge vegan vegetarian diet and like get all of the
carbohydrates in and they really are pushing metabolic dysfunction when we push any kind of
diet that is to the extreme. So we have to get away from that.
And it's just it's a fad, it's a trend. I get it.
You're trying to you know, stay relevant, have an idea or whatever.
So you always should take a step back and say is this right for
me? Because there is no one diet that's right for everybody or food plan.
We all come from different parts of the world, are our genetic ethnicity
makes a huge difference in how we metabolize our foods and how we utilize it.
So my genetics, I can handle a high carb diet pretty regularly without
storing it as fat. Some people they look at carbs and they're gaining five
pounds. So you have to know that about yourself. You have to know
how you function as an individual, So don't jump on the bandwagon of every
diet out there. But if you are trying to get pregnant, you're trying
to regulate your periods. I would say you still want to eat in a
time restricted window because if you are eating until you go to bed, you're
eating as soon as you wake up, You're really stressing the pancreas and your
cells because they are constantly having to hear the signals of insulin to manage the
blood sugar, and that drives insulin resistance, that drives disease. It doesn't
matter. And so I really don't like the idea of eating multiple meals all
day long or anything like that. I do think we're meant to eat in
a window maybe six hours, maybe eight hours, depending on your activity level,
your life, those types of things. But by and large, it's
not going to drive infertility or irregular period. So where's this coming from.
Where is the idea coming from that people have latched onto and saying, you
know, women must past differently at different parts of their cycle, for example,
Where's this coming from? Yes, it comes from the fact that women
athletes typically lose their cycles. Right. This is extreme athletes who are,
you know, doing things that the majority of us are not doing. They're
working out multiple hours a day and that is a high stress situation for the
body. And there's where your nate intelligence comes in and says, oh,
she is really stressed out. She's training for a marathon, she's doing a
triathlon, she's you know, playing five sports, and so the body doesn't
think it's a good time to reproduce, and it diverts the resources from the
ovarian function to other things like managing this metabolism issue, and so it shuts
down your sex hormone production and you stop having cycles. Overall, this is
not a healthy thing. This is not recommended for women long term because you're
kind of in this menopausal state at a young age, and that tects your
brain and your bones and your skin and your heart and everything else. A
perfect example of this, I was just going to say, we have a
girl in our community who was a Division one swimmer. She swam all through
her youth, she swam in college and she never had periods, and she
then had an IUD put in and so then she never had pair. Well,
she decided she didn't want the IDUD anymore. She wanted to allow her
body to have its normal, you know, monthly cycle. And she's been
fasting and she had the IUD removed, and she was concerned because of the
conversations about women and fasting, and she was concerned that she still wouldn't get
her cycle back. But the month after she had her id removed. She
said she had her first normal cycle, and so she more or less was
like, women, don't worry because I haven't had a period in you know,
years and years and years, and I've been fasting for over a year
now and took my ied out and boom, I had my cycle. Yeah,
it's so assive. It was extreme physical activity that her body was enduring,
and it wasn't that her body was failing her. It's that it was
diverting resources and it couldn't handle that chronic stress. So that was one of
those things where I'm saying, like, that's probably not a person that should
do a longer fast until they really get their body back into balance. So
that is what drives that idea or that theory that it's gonna cause hormone issues
because fasting is a mini stressor on the body. But you have to remember
there's good stressors and there's bad stress. Well, exercise is a stress on
the body, Tabitha, And we know that the right amount of exercise is
not just good for us, it's essential. It is essential that we exercise.
But using that same example of someone who is a endurance athlete loses their
period, that's not good for your body. You could say, oh,
well, well that shows exercise is bad. Everybody exercise exact women like they
used to tell women not to run or whatever, women shouldn't wear pants or
vote run we're delegate, but we could take that same lesson of exercise over
exercises bad. So therefore no woman should exercise. But it's extreme exercise that
damages in our bodies. That's what researchers do with studies. They extrapolate data
and they warp it to meet their agenda, and so they use information in
the wrong way and give us the wrong messages. So I always encourage women
to just like, do your own researcher. Unpack this a little bit,
listen to these conversations, ask questions. And so if a woman is cycling,
if a woman is cycling normally, then she has evidence that it is
not negatively affecting her hormones. Right. Absolutely, Our periods are our fifth
vital sign. So we have like our blood pressure and our heart rate and
our pulse and our respiratory rate. Our period is our vital sign. It
tells us whether we're balanced and healthy until we go into menopause. So when
we mask that period with hormonal birth control, hormonal IUDs, or if you're
pregnant or breastfeeding, then you don't get that feedback. But if you have
a period every month and it's not being interfered with, that is amazing feedback
from your body to say, Yep, I need to back it off on
the longer fasts, or Nope, I'm doing good. Maybe let I just
need some extra healing, let me get into some atophagy, let me try
a longer fast, and really listen to your body. You know, it's
interesting because over the years that we've worked with fasters, we have heard so
many stories of women who were told they were infertile who end up pregnant,
like after fasting, oh my gosh, I've been fasting for three months,
but I have to stop because I just found out I'm pregnant. We have
heard women who say, oh my gosh, I've been irregular my whole life.
My periods are never consistent, YadA, YadA, YadA, and suddenly
they're having consistent monthly periods. I can't remember other than people who initially start
fasting, and usually we hear from some women, like during their first two
cycles after they start fasting, that they may be their cycle link maybe lengthened
a little bit. It wasn't like dead on twenty eight days like it had
been. Maybe it was thirty three, one month or whatever. But then
they always come back and say, Okay, you know, I'm in my
third month and everything's normal now. But yeah, we don't. I've never
had a person come in and say, hey, guys, I can't fast
anymore because I stopped having periods now that you mentioned. Ever, you're right,
shering. Never, I've never seen anybody come in and say that,
and you know they would have shared that with us. What's happening? Yes,
And you hit the nail on the head that the majority of infertility,
especially in this country is from PCOS palacysticovarian syndrome, where the most common symptom
of that is not having a period every month. It's like you have your
period every three or four months or twice a year or something like that.
That is an insulin resistance problem. It's not actually an ovary problem. Your
ovary is responding to your blood sugar issues and fasting correct PCOS. And I
was gonna say, so this advice to not fast and to eat frequently throughout
the day is actually, all you're doing is fueling that problem exactly, and
you're driving up inflammation. And I don't know of a body that wants I
mean, like, your body knows what's best for it. Your body's not
going to say, oh, hey, this is an ideal state to get
pregnant. In our blood sugars are out of control, you know, our
insulin is high, inflammation is high. Let's get pregnant exactly. Exactly.
So if I have a patient with PCOS or they look like they might be
going down that road, I incorporate intermittent fasting as one of the healing modalities.
Well, it just is so frustrating for this advice to be out there,
you know, for women to not fast certain weeks of the month,
or that we shouldn't do it or that. Like there's even a group that
I was following for a while on Instagram, the Menopause group, and they're
like, Nope, women postmenopause shouldn't fast. And I'm like, what you
need to wake up in the morning and pound protein. That is probably can
So let's talk about protein. Okay, let me just say fasting is the
best thing for menopause. A wind a great game changer because everything slows down
in menopause, how quickly your kidneys metabolize things, even protein, and so
you need to do things differently. You need you can't eat like you did
when you were thirty after menopause. So yes, there's a new trend now,
like pound the protein as much as you can lift the heaviest weights until
you can't you know, pick them up anymore. Once again, we've gone
to an extreme right. And some of these things work well for some women,
but by and large, the majority of women, they can't eat that
much protein. If you're trying to get in more than one hundred grams a
day, you are going to feel full and not well. Like I personally
can't even ingest that much protein. And a lot of times we get gut
issues, especially when our hormones change and go into menopause, and we can't
even digest or break down that much protein, so we're not utilizing it.
We're not absorbing the amino acids the way that we need to. I love
to tell women focus on high quality protein and diversity of protein, like change
it up, eat the legomes a little bit if you can handle it,
but get in the high quality red meats and the fish and the seafood and
the different types of protein. Pea protein is a lovely protein. It's got
all your amino acids that you need in it and really give your body high
quality what it needs. It's not about quantity. It really isn't. And
I haven't seen that to be beneficial to women. I get a lot of
complaints that I can't eat that much. I feel full all the time,
I feel bloated now, I'm like feeling like my food's just sitting in my
stomach. They don't tolerate all the protein powders and things like that. So
I mean, I've tried it and patients don't like it. Right, Yeah,
But it's confusing because that's an another message. There's really ramped up over
the past couple of years more so, and we know that. I think
it's founded on solid reasoning, Like we know that as we age we want
to maintain and build muscle mass. But there's some kind of an idea that
you eat protein in your body just sticks it on your muscle or something.
Right, protein in muscle build. But Jason Fung says something that's funny that
I love. He said, if eating protein is all you needed for muscle
building, then here in America we would have a muscle epidemic. Not an
obie to take a paraphrasing, but you got to work your muscles to build
the muscle. That's absolutely so. Protein is just a bunch of amino acids
connected together. I think of them as lego blocks. Like you eat this
big fancy thing of legos. You break them down into individual pieces, and
then your body takes all those amino acids, those individual legos and builds new
proteins, builds new enzymes and things that your body's going to do with it,
including supporting your muscle growth. So your body has to go through a
gazillion processes to utilize those amino acids and make its own new proteins. So
you're right, You don't just eat protein and slap it on the muscle.
That's not how it works. Your cells have to be functioning and able to
do all of these processes to make proteins from the protein you ate. And
it goes back to can you digest the protein? Can your gut absorb it?
Is your gut healthy? Are your cells healthy? Do they have the
vitamins and minerals needed to code that DNA and make that new protein. There's
way more going on, and we know testosterone has a huge part to play
in that, and so many women are deficient and testosterone and so they can't
build muscle and get stronger if they ate two hundred grams of protein a day,
it's not going to happen. And so we are always looking for the
quick fix and this is the newest trend and that's all fine and well,
but just know that that's not the complete answer to everything. It's just not.
Yeah. I want to add too, if you really feel like you're
not eating enough protein, I challenge you to track your macros for a couple
of days, because I think people really they look at protein and they're looking
at Okay, I had a four ounce piece of meat here, and I
had two eggs here and whatever. Nobody is counting their plant protein, right,
And I was remiss in doing that for a long time. And then
I started really realizing that when I really would truly log every plant I ate
that day, and the nuts and the seeds and everything, I mean,
I could make a bootable and have sixty grams of protein in it and no
meat. Yeah, I agree, so, yeah, you're getting your protein
from so many more sources than just animal products, and I think that's really
important to keep in mind. Yeah, I love that. So, Tabitha,
you have got a new book coming out called Fast to Faith, and
I have seen a copy of it, and tell us a little bit about
your book and who it's for and why you wrote it and all of that.
Yeah. So the subtitle is Reconnect your Mind, Body and Soul for
lasting weight loss, sustained energy, and Unstoppable Faith. It is really geared
toward women who feel like what has been working is no longer working. They're
feeling disconnected. They've tried every diet and they just they regain the weight and
they feel like something is missing. And what's usually missing is that we're still
hating on our bodies. We're still having this fight with our bodies, like
it's not doing what I want, It doesn't feel or look the way I
want it to look. And so you're in this constant fight of hating on
your body. And as soon as you shift things and learn to appreciate your
body for how incredible it is and what it really is trying to balance and
do for you all at all times. And really get into a state of
gratitude and honoring God forgiving you this body. Then you can really start to
shift how it functions because you're no longer fighting against it, you're supporting it.
And I would love for people to realize that every time we think a
thought or have a feeling creates a chemical reaction in our body. Those chemicals
go throughout and they send either healing messages to ourselves or damaging message inflammation,
things like that. And so we take that protein that everybody's telling us to
eat and we code these genes for either inflammation or healing. And so if
you are eating one hundred and fifty grams of protein but you're hating on your
body the whole day, you're going to use all of that protein to drive
an inflammation process. And so it doesn't really even matter because you have to
stop the negative thoughts and the negative feelings that you're having about food. Oh
my gosh, especially women, we eat when we're stressed, we eat when
we're angry, we eat when we're lonely. Like, find out what is
triggering you for your behaviors. I take women through a guided journaling of figuring
out what is driving their behaviors, they're eating patterns, and what is their
relationship with their body? And then we flip it on its head and we
figure out what do I want my body to look like? How do I
want my body to feel? Like? All this future gazing with God where
you sit down and you see yourself through God's eyes, Like, how incredible
are you? You just were able to like do this, this and this
today and handle all these things and focus on what you want your body to
look like and your life to look like and then work toward that. And
that mind shift has been transformational for my patients and everyone who's gone through this
program. And I'm so appreciative to Jin for supporting this book because she's such
an expert in this fasting space, and fasting is super important, and like
I said, it's one of our superpowers. But tapping into like healing your
soul, well, healing your body next level. I love that. We
know that stress drives inflammation. Yeah, but it'd be safe to say that
if you constantly have negative thoughts in your head about your body, about your
success with weight loss, YadA, YadA, YadA, that that is creating
internal stress absolutely, and it's creating chemicals that send signals throughout the whole body.
I've literally never met a person on this earth that has created the body
that they love while hating it. You've heard the quote, We've all heard
it. You can't heal a body you hate. You can't. I didn't
make that up. I don't know where it came from, where it originated,
but it's true. Yeah, yeah, you know. And I've told
some people in the community before, and they're really down their selves. I'm
like, you can't hate yourself then, no, you just can't do it.
You can love yourself then, but you can't hate yourself then. Yeah.
But I've seen a lot of women love theirselves to wellness, love themselves
to weight loss. Like that is the game, Shager. And if you
learn how all of the systems can work together to get you into balance,
you will stop the cycle of regain. You'll stop this yo yo dieting and
everything because sabotage, the self sabotage. You'll figure out what triggers you,
what drives you to do things, and you can stop that. You have
to break the vicious cycles going on in your head, because at the end
of the day, your brain is a computer and Your mind is just a
computer program. It's been programmed since early in your life by the things people
have said to you, the things you've read and chosen to believe, subconsciously
or consciously, and those recordings just they play over and over and over,
and you have to put new recordings in your computer program to get a different
outcome. Right, because whatever you think is what you're going to be.
And so if you believe that you're chronically going to be fatigued, like if
you take on your diagnosis I have chronic fatigue, I am you know,
diabetic, then you always will be. But if you believe I am wonderfully
made, I am capable of healing, I'm capable of being in balance.
And you create new programming in your mind, you'll make new choices, you'll
make different decisions, and you might not realize it, it might be all
subconscious, but those are what change your life and your health. That's powerful.
And so your program, it's like it's forty days. It is fired
by days led by lend Jesus walk in the wilderness being tempted by the devil.
Because what I found is we are not that strong as human beings.
We give into all kinds of cravings and desires. We live in our flesh,
so if we feel something, we act on it typically, And so
if you can tap into the power of not relying on your strength, but
on your creator's strength, then you will be able to get through some stuff.
You will get over those cookies sitting in the kitchen and realize that you
want something else a lot more than you want that cookie, and you can
break these addictions. That's how I broke my addiction to gluten and sugar,
and so that can be really powerful. But you have to acknowledge that willpower
only works and tell the cookie shows off like really it does. We have
the power to make new choices going forward. And you know, I think
that it's so important to note that every major religion has fasting as part of
it, every every major religion. So for anyone who follows any major religion,
fasting is considered to be a gift that you give to your body absolutely,
and it's not always about like changing your physical appearance really but resetting your
mind to realize what you really are capable of. Like I said, you
stop listening to all the bodily desires because we are more than our physical body.
This is a temporary vehicle for this experience on earth. But you know
there's more to you than your physical body. You can tell you have a
soul and so we need to nourish that. And I just think if you
work on fasting and faithing, it's really powerful. And being a surgeon,
I've known the power of fasting since residency. The first day of my surgery
rotation, I couldn't believe these people were going multiple days without eating after surgery.
But I came to understand that was what was needed to heal their physical
bodies. They didn't need to be digesting all this food and sending all their
energy to their gi system. They needed to like heal their hip or heal
your abdomen or whatever they just went through. And that's really powerful. But
if you want to take it to the next level and heal some emotional stuff,
fasting is incredible for that, and that's why it is incorporated into every
religion. You know. That's exactly why I started the Life Lessons podcast because
after my years of fasting, and I felt like fasting helped me heal so
much of that negative self talk, and I taught me to have faith and
trust in my body exactly, and that just translated like to the rest of
my life. And then it was like, Okay, so I've tackled this
part of my life that took up so much energy for you know, so
many years, decades, and now I don't have to focus on that anymore
because it's all working flawlessly and I feel really good. Where else can I
wreck that energy? What other areas of my life need healing? And it's
just this trickle down effect that you know, really, I feel like fasting
once you once you start doing it and you know, and once you have
the faith in it, and once you start seeing results in the confidence,
now you can apply that to other areas of your life that need healed.
Absolutely. I love it. It's so awesome. And I also think fasting
forces us to connect deeper way to ourselves and our emotions because you know,
some of us may have been trained from infancy. If you have an uncomfortable
feeling, you're soothing it with food, right, you know, from from
the time you're little, or you know, maybe your mom gave you a
cookie when you were crying, or you've had a hard day and your dad
and a lotipopper. Yeah, exactly. So we that program that you've gotten
from all of that. Those messages as a child were huh, difficult,
feeling soothed with food. But when we're fasting, suddenly we have our you
know, our eating window and were our fasting time, and during that fasting
time, food's off the table. We don't have that ability to sue with
food anymore. So we have to dig deep and we learn how to cope,
and we learn how to feel our emotions also instead of stuffing them down
exactly. And that's what I do in my program is I give women a
scripture every single day for forty days, and that is what they should meditate
on and go to for their strength. Instead of going for the food,
you go to the word and you find your strength in that because the answers
are all in that book. The Bible's pretty incredible. Like if you've got
a problem, even in this day and age, the answers in there.
And so if we can just have those tools in our toolbox, we really
can get through this and grow so much and stop relying on food to suthe
us. We should be able to enjoy food, but it shouldn't be our
crutch exactly, yeah. Well, so we have some time where we want
to take some of our listeners questions, and we really are much Can we
have such any that we? Yeah? That are that? A lot of
them we've already answered. Do you want to go down to the gallbladder?
One? Because I think the other two we kind of got. I do
want to ask one question though, because this comes up a lot, and
I have read a couple different things on this myself, like this person says,
I have read that women who no longer have a cycle should take a
break from fasting the week following the moon cycle, so stopping at day twenty
one and then starting again with the new moon. What please address this?
Thanks where I have read that probably the person who can fast the safest in
regard to hormones and such are postmenopausal women. Yes, so I've heard this
as well. The idea is that after menopause there is a trend to try
and get menopausal women to still be on a cycle on the moon cycle.
Because the moon is a twenty eight day cycle, it lines up with women's
periods. I think there's some magic in the universe that's how that all works.
But in general, I have not seen any literature that this plays out
because our ovaries are no longer cycling the way they were before menopause, So
trying to sync up with the moon is not going to change how your ovaries
are functioning. What is happening is we have the hypothyletmic pituitary ovarian access.
You have two glands in your brain and your ovaries, and they're in constant
communication. During your reproductive years. The brain makes hormones like FSH and LH.
The ovaries make estrogen, testosterone, and progesterone, and that talks to
each other. This communication happens after menopause. The ovaries stop making all those
hormones to the levels that the brain can hear, and so the brain chemical
levels go way way up. So our FSH goes up and it stays up.
It's like fifty sixty seventy instead of five or ten, because it's yelling
at the ovaries. Produce, produce, and the ovaries aren't responding. So
the idea is, well, let me just get these ovaries to function in
this cycle with the moon, and I will have better hormones. The ovaries
aren't coming back to life. They're retired, they're done, they're retelling.
They've done their job. They're not looking at the body no longer wants to
reproduce. They make a low level amount, but nothing like when you're reproductive,
not a cycling level, not enough for that FSH to ever come down
back into the single digits. So you can cycle with the moon all you
want, but those ovaries are not going to come back online the way that
they used to be. So I encourage women focus on your metabolic health,
focus on your blood sugar and insulin regulation because that is where the magic is
for menopausal women. And if you need hormone support, then you should talk
to a hormone expert about that. But I will tell you a big piece
of it is how your adrenal glands are working. Because our adrenal glands are
backup ovaries, they make something called DHA and that gets made into estrogen and
testosterone. So if you go into menopause with adrenal dysfunction or adrenal fatigue and
you're not making enough DHA going into menopause, your sex hormones are going to
be even lower because you don't have the backup ovaries. And what would cause
that adrenal fatigue. Our way of living more than anything. Women who are
working twelve hours a day, stressed out from dusk until dawn, not sitting
down to eat. You know, they're driving while they're eating, or they're
eating while they're stressing out and fighting over emails, or you know, taking
their kids everywhere, and they're never processing their thoughts and their feelings. They're
not sleeping well. All of that chronic stress that is very inflammatory and destructive.
Remember we talked about good amounts of stress. This is destructive stress when
it's chronic and ongoing. And our body, because again it is so intelligent,
it will downregulate your adrenal production. It will say, I'm done with
you acting crazy. We're no longer going to pump out cortisol and adrenaline twenty
four to seven. You're done, and it will stop responding to your craziness.
And you will be tired because your body is trying to say, slow
the f down, okay, So the son would be you're tired. You'll
know because you'll just feel so tired with low energyhausted exactly. We hear from
people again, That's why I want to make sure to emphasize this. People
are like, oh, fasting causes you to have a drenal which causes we
hear that so much. But if you are feeling good, correct me if
I'm wrong, Tabith, because you're the expert with this, with the hormonage.
But if you feel good and have steady energy, and fasting feels good,
and you feel good when you're fasting, and you feel good after you
eat, then you can trust that fasting is not giving you a drenal fatigue
exactly. Good. If you have undiagnosed a drenal fatigue and you try to
take up a fasting lifestyle and you all of a sudden feel wiped out,
that's because you had a drenal fatigue that wasn't diagnosed, Okay, and now
you know you have it, but you know you feel wiped out. If
you're feeling good, then you know that that you probably don't have a drenal
fatigue exact But is the answer to not faster, is the answer to practice
stress management and get your stress under control. So it's both. You want
to get into parasympathetic mode and get that stress under control. And it took
years to get into adrenal dysfunction, and so it's going to take many many
months or maybe years to get out of it. So it's not an overnight
switch. You need a lot of support to get those adrenals to come back
online and function well. You do want to be in a time restricted eating
window if you call that fasting, so be it. I don't recommend doing
a multi day fast, and that the time restricted eating would would not add
A daily eating window should be supportive. Everybody needs that. Everybody needs a
day to love that window. I agree. I agree that because a lot
of people do say adrenal fatigue caused by fasting, and so you're saying,
no, that is not the cause. No, not unless you are doing
a forty day fast like Jesus, And we do not recommend that. No,
nobody's recommending that. So that's totally different. Yeah, okay. So
another thing that comes about, especially with women, is they have concerns about
fasting in their gallbladder or that fasting itself causes gall bladder disease. What is
your take on that? That is definitely not true. Fasting does not cause
gall bladder disease. Fasting is beneficial for all of our digestive organs. That
is why as a surgeon I was trained to make people fast after surgery.
Their digestive system needs a break. Every time you eat something, your gallbladder
has to work. Your stomach, you're pancreas, your intestines, they all
have to do jobs. So the gallbladder's job is to store bile. Bile
is something made in the liver and it's used to break down fat that you
are eating and absorb it. It's also used to transport things into your intestines
to get them out of the body, usually toxins used up hormones, environmental
toxins into your body, things like that. So bile is a transport product
and it helps to absorb fat. So the gallbladder has estrogen receptors in it,
just like the stomach does. Just like the intestines, they have estrogen
and progesterone receptors. And the most common scenario we see is a woman in
her early forties who is overweight, who has had recent pregnancies, gets a
gall bladder attack and has her gall bladder removed. Like that's the classic scenario
for a Colli systectomy, because what's happening is you are in an estrogen dominant
state. You got too much estrogen going on and your gallbladder stops contracting every
meal to squeeze the bile into the intestines. It stays sluggish, and that
bile sits in the gallbladder and turns into hard stones, and those stones eventually
can get big enough to get into a duct and block it and cause excruciating
pain, or you just have this chronic achiness every time you eat because you've
got this bag full of stones instead of a nice, liquidy bile that can
get you squeezed out. So it's really common for women with estrogen dominants who
are overweight to have sluggish gall bladders create these gall stones and then end up
with an attack and have it removed when you start fasting. If you already
have gallstones and you tend to eat more fats, especially like if you want
to get into ketosis, a lot of times your gallbladder will try to squeeze
out extra bile to absorb all that fat, and if you have stones,
that's going to send you into an attack. And so it's really common to
see women try to get into a ketogenic diet and all of a sudden have
a raging attack and ended up in the er. It wasn't the ketogenic diet
that caused it. It just finally came to light because they're eating more fats.
I saw this the first time I ever ran a fasting program. Like
half of the women had write up or quadrant pain within the first week of
getting into this fasting situation and eating in a more ketogenic way. So it's
not that fasting causes it, it's that it just comes to light because before
that, if you're eating carbohydrates the majority of the time, or you're always
eating, your gallbladder is just kind of stagnant and not doing anything. But
if you stop eating for twenty four hours or even eighteen hours and then you
start eating again, your gallbladder goes from a resting state to trying to function
again and it squeezes those stones. It's going to feel miserable. So if
your gallbladder was already clogged up and not doing well, that might wake it
up. Way for people to understand, as gallbladder disease doesn't happen overnight.
You didn't have like a complete healthy gallbladder, and then you started fasting and
two weeks later you developed a you know, less than optimal gallbladder function.
That's that's not how it happened. Stones took probably a couple of years to
develop. Right, that's good information. Well, we are coming to the
end. So this has been such a good conversation, Tabitha. I'm so
glad that you came one today. Tell people where to find you and your
book and all of that good stuff. Yes, so you can always find
us at doctor Tabitha dot com. It's three A's no I. The book
is coming out for Lent, which is actually in Valentine's Day this year,
February fourteenth, So that's cool. We're going to do an online run of
our fasting program together, but you could check out the Gutsy Gancologist Show and
listen to Jinn's episode on Intermittent fasting. But I just love sharing all this
wisdom with women of like why is conventional medicine failing them? Why are they
being dismissed and confused like Sherry was when she went to her doctor, Like
we unpack all of that. So that podcast is a great resource, and
I just truly appreciate you ladies having this honest conversation with for women because it's
so needed. Well, thank you for busting those myths. Yes, In
summary, fasting is not going to mess up your hormones. You do not
have to fast according to the moon. You do not have to fast differently
surrounding your cycle. You just need to fast, feast, repeat, nourish
your body well right, and a daily eating window is not going to be
aful approach for women. No, it's how God created us to function.
Fabulous. Thanks so much for listening today. We would love to have you
join us in the Delayed on Tonight community, where you can interact with both
me and Sherry, plus the most supportive bunch of intermittent fasters you'll find anywhere.
Go to Jenstevens dot com slash community to join us. Don't forget to
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Thanks for listening,