#235: 3 Common Women's Health Myths That Are Holding You Back

Hey beautiful, it's Dr. Tabatha.

I want to share something with you that I believe God is doing right now in women's health.

We're in the middle of a massive movement and most people don't even know it. Every single day, 6,000 women in the U.S. enter menopause. That's over 2 million women a year, and by 2030, that's more than 1.2 billion women worldwide. So here's the thing, most of these women feel exhausted, bloated, anxious, disconnected from themselves, and the medical system is Doctors are handing out prescriptions and quick fixes, and no one is helping women heal from the root cause of their issues. That's where Fast to Faith coaches come in. As a certified coach, you'll be equipped to help midlife women balance their hormones, heal their gut, regain their energy, and reconnect their faith, the foundation that so many of us have been missing. And from a business standpoint, woo, this is one of the most lucrative untapped opportunities in the entire health coaching world.

That's right.

The global health coaching industry is expected to reach over $33 billion by 2023, and midlife women are the fastest-growing, highest-spending demographic in that space. Most importantly, these women stay with their coaches. They invest deeply because they are desperate for lasting transformation—

body, mind, and spirit. So if you've been feeling that pull and that whisper that you're meant to do more, This is it.

Now is the time to rise, to serve, and build a purpose-driven business that not only changes other women's lives but transforms your own in the process.

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That's the ripple effect that we're creating with Fast to Faith. So join me, click the link to come watch this webinar. It might be the one thing that really moves the needle for you in this next season.

I can't wait to see you in there. Are you looking to elevate your health to the next level? In the Fast to Faith Community, we use fasting, faith, and functional medicine so that you lose weight and achieve your highest health. Hi, my name is Dr. Tabatha Barber. I'm a triple board-certified functional medicine physician. I help women look and feel 10 years younger by integrating fasting, faith, and functional medicine. Download the Fast to Faith app in the Apple Store or the Google Play Store and start your free 7-day trial. You're going to get recipes, meal plans, and my proven 2-10-20-30 method of eating for weight loss. And the Fast to Faith Sisterhood, which is a nurturing, supportive community of women who share challenges, progress, and celebrate successes together. The Fast to Faith app has everything you need to lose weight while deepening your faith. Thrive with the intermittent fasting lifestyle. On this episode of Fast to Faith— I literally remember eating a bag of, like, Those chocolate stars that you could get in the bulk section at Meijer because there was no fat in them. Or Twizzlers, a bag of Twizzlers, there's no fat in that. And I just thought, I am so healthy, I'm not eating any fat. And what a joke, what a lie. And unfortunately, we learned the hard way. And here's the truth. Fat Is essential for staying thin and healthy and having balanced hormones. Hormone optimization, gut health, faith, fasting, nutrition, beauty secrets, longevity, weight loss, so much more. Welcome to Fast to Faith. Are you ready to look and feel 10 years younger? Let's get started. I'm so excited you're here. Welcome, welcome, welcome.

Okay.

There's so much that health encompasses and we want to give you everything. You know, it's like I've been on this 20-plus-year journey of learning so much and I learned a lot of bad stuff, wrong stuff, and learned a lot of lessons along the way. And then I learned a lot of truths and I just want to give it all to you so, you know, so you can discern like, what the heck am I hearing out in the world? What am I reading? When stuff comes up on social media. And what it comes down to is, as women, we want to feel comfortable in our body. We want to feel good. We want to feel proud. We want to go out and shine our light in the world. And a lot of times, our physical issues prevent us from doing that. And so, you know, everybody— wants to lose a couple pounds. Not everybody, but pretty close. Everybody wants more energy. Everybody wants to sleep a little bit better. And at the core of that, it's because we want to show up better as women in our lives to the people that matter. And that stuff is preventing us. If we're tired, you know, we don't necessarily want to go to the PTA meeting. If we are carrying extra weight, we're not feeling too sexy, we don't necessarily want to like go out and eat dinner and feel 10 more pounds heavier and bloated with our partner afterward. Like, these things prevent us from doing what we're supposed to be doing in our lives. So that's why it's really important to just acknowledge that and not feel shame around it. You know, I think that there's so many superficial thoughts around like, oh, I just want to lose weight, or I just want to feel better in my clothes, or I don't want to get old, those kinds of things. But we're going to unpack the deeper why behind that because there is a deeper why. And I think that will help you feel better about stepping out and making different choices for yourself and being proud of that and not feeling ashamed or not feeling doomed like, oh my gosh, this is my next failed diet. Here we go again, that type of thing. That's like the last thing I want want for you guys, right? So let's get into it. We are going to talk about these faith-driven health principles that are going to help you lose weight, boost your energy, strengthen your relationship with God, all the things. And like I said, it— this is a compilation of me, um, through my training as an OB-GYN physician, um, becoming certified in menopause through the North American Menopause Society Going on to become certified through the Cleveland Clinic Institute for Functional Medicine, and then a bunch of additional hormone training through the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine. So I'm a little bit of a unicorn. I know what all the different areas of medicine are thinking and why they're thinking it and why they approach things the way they do, and that really helps me be able to. See through a lot of lies and things like that. So it's important for you to know why people are saying the things they're saying and where they're coming from. And so I want to help you be able to discern that over this week. It's like when you see something on social media or you hear somebody's recommendation, like, what's their agenda? What is their background? Why? Why are they saying the things that they're saying? You know, it's really popular right now. To debunk the hormone myth, like we used to say estrogen causes cancer. Now everyone is saying that that's a myth, and being able to understand where those myths come from and why they're now being debunked can help you in your decision-making process as a woman, like going through do I need hormone replacement and all of that stuff. So. It is the basis of like today we're going to be debunking some myths. So let's dive into myth busting. This is so important for you guys. Like, you're going to learn so much. I'm excited. So I really did believe the lies when I got into medical school that doctors are the ones that heal. Doctors do the curing. Especially as a surgeon. You know, for 4 years I trained to be a surgeon, and so the mentality or the mindset is that I have to intervene with my hands and do things for you to be saved, for you to heal. The greatest example of this is endometriosis. So endometriosis is where some of the lining inside the uterus that grows for your period every month Gets outside of the uterus and starts to grow outside of the uterus and on the ovaries and the tubes and the bladders and the bowels. And so, as an OB-GYN, it was my job. So I was trained to go into the abdomen and pelvis surgically, remove all the endometriosis and the scarring that I could find. And then put that patient on heavy-duty drugs to suppress the ovaries from functioning, putting them kind of in a like a menopausal state, even though they were often 20, 25, 35 years old, to suppress it from coming back. It always comes back. And so I would say, all right, I'll see you in another year for your next surgery. And that was just What we did, we did surgery every couple of years, put them on these horrible medications. They were miserable, but I thought that's what I was doing was actually healing them. And can I just say that when a surgeon does surgery on you, the surgeon doesn't actually heal you. Your body heals. Your skin grows back together. Your muscle cells grow back together. I put the sutures in to approximate the tissue. But your body does the healing. So I want you to really feel empowered and know that. So once I started studying functional medicine and they started talking about gut health and how it impacted all the other systems in the body, I was starting to think back as my time as a surgeon and how I would spend hours dissecting the bowels off of the ovaries and the tubes and the uterus and the bladder. And there was so much scarring, and we always thought that the endometriosis was like invading the guts and the bowels and causing all of this damage. Like the guts were an innocent bystander in this whole situation. But what I realized was it was the other way around. There was inflammation happening in the gut, and it was seeping through the intestines out into the pelvic organs onto the tubes. Tubes in the ovaries because they're not compartmentalized; they all live together and touch each other. And so, the gut was driving that inflammation that was angering the pelvic organs and contributing to this disease process. But I didn't learn that in conventional medicine. I learned it when I studied functional medicine some ten years later. And so, I want you to realize that. What seemingly might be your diagnosis or the truth that you've been given about your medical history, your health, your body, it might not be the whole truth. There might be some really big missing pieces. And I'm not even asking, like, I don't want you to be mad at your doctor. I didn't know as an OB-GYN. I just didn't know. I was ignorant because I was trained in a very broken archaic system that Is the major system of this time. But now that I know better, I need to share it and do better, right? So I don't even want you to be upset. But if you're having these struggles, you've been given these diagnoses. Like I know some of you are like, I know I've been through five laparoscopy surgeries. That was me. Don't even be mad at it. Because I just think we all have a journey on this earth that we're trying to learn stuff and be prepared for things. And so let's take this time to be like, what can I learn from that? What am I now understanding that I didn't understand before? Or how can I move forward and share my story with somebody I know so they don't go through what I went through? You know, that's the biggest piece I Want you guys to feel empowered to say, "Hey, you know you're talking to somebody and they're starting to say everything you went through." Be like, "I know a better way. I did all of that. You can bypass all of that. I can save you the heartache and the pain and the money and the time." I hope that makes sense. But really, God did create our bodies to heal and thrive, and functional medicine might be a brand new term for some of you. And really, what it just means is. That it's looking at how the body is created to function down to the level of the individual cells, how the cells create organs, how organs create systems, how the systems all work together, how the body, mind, and soul all work together. And then super important, how the inner environment works with our body for bad or good. The food, the toxins, the sunshine, All of it. So that's functional medicine. So if you know how your body's supposed to function, then you can know what nutrient it needs, what enzyme it's missing, what toxin is, you know, preventing it from functioning, what imbalance needs to be addressed. Is there a bacteria invading it and causing an infection or some kind of imbalance? Like we literally have more bacteria DNA than human DNA in our body. That's how much bacteria comprise us. There's more bacterial DNA. It's it's wild. So, yay! Let's jump in to myth number one: Your metabolism slows down with age. It's just that's what happens. There's nothing you can do about it. I hear this from women all the time. They go to their doctor. They're like, oh. Yeah, you, you're gaining weight. You're just getting old. There's nothing you can do about it. So that one is kind of a lot to unpack, but at the basis of it is just because we're getting old doesn't mean that our metabolism is slowing down. The body has amazing innate intelligence, you guys. It's so cool. How many of you know that when you go into menopause and your ovaries stop producing estrogen, that your fat cells actually get more metabolically active and make more estrogen for you to protect your bones, your cardiovascular system, and your brain? So that fat gain that you have at menopause is actually Innate intelligence from your body trying to protect the rest of your body from this new menopausal state that you're now going into. So we are mad at our body. We're like, we hate you. You're, you're betraying us. Why are you doing this to us? But it's not. It's actually so wise that it's like helping you still have enough estrogen around in the form of estrone. To slow down those disease processes. So if if who knew that? Like is that brand new for anybody? Because when I first learned that, I was like that is genius. Like it's it's a beautiful thing what our body is always doing, and we always take it the wrong way. It's like when who's who's got the kind of husband who takes everything the wrong way? Like that's how we are with our bodies. We assume the worst. We assume our bodies betraying us and falling apart. And getting old and doing all these things when it's really not. It's really not. So if you don't want weight gain at menopause, part of the thing that you can do is to get on hormone replacement therapy and give yourself the estrogen your body so wants to make. That will help you prevent that extra five pounds. The other piece of it, a big piece that we see nowadays. Is excess cortisol, our stress hormone. So in good small amounts, cortisol helps you heal and thrive. Like if you've ever been super sick, you might have gotten a prednisone pack or a 5-day steroid pack. That's a big fat dose of steroids for a couple days because in small amounts it helps you heal. But if you took that cortisone pack every single day for months on end, It would suppress everything and you would start to break down and have destruction. So when we are stressed out all the time, and this does not have to be mental stress, it could be a gut imbalance or infection that hasn't been taken care of, or a tooth issue or heavy metals or something that's stressing your body, causing excess cortisol for long periods of time. It's very destructive. And that is causing weight gain around the midsection. And we see this really topple over during the perimenopause menopausal time because we no longer have our sex hormones to balance that and protect us against that. So as soon as the ovaries like tap out of the game, they're like, we're done. We're no longer going to function. We're going to go shrivel up over here. And they actually do shrivel up. As a surgeon, I could almost never find ovaries in menopausal women because they get super tiny. So the adrenal glands have to do all the work for you after that when it comes to your steroid hormones. And so you have to rely on your adrenal glands after menopause. And if you're going into menopause as a hot mess, you're overstressed, your cortisol production's through the roof, and now you're asking your adrenals to work twice as hard. Oh my gosh, like, it's a lose-lose situation. So we pack the weight on, but your body's doing it as a protective mechanism so that your adrenals don't burn out, so that your bones don't thin, so that your arteries don't harden and your brain can continue to function and do what it needs to do. So I would invite you to just start thanking your body for how wise it is and how incredible God really created it to be. And just be like, thank you. And start thanking the pieces that you've been mean to, because I have been so mean to my body. Oh my gosh, like probably the meanest out of everybody here. Um, I hated my body for being in so much pain and not being able to function. And like, I would be stuck at the OR table at the end of a surgery and not be able to walk away because my back was so spasmed and locked up. And I would just curse it. And it was my fault. It wasn't my body's fault. It wasn't my back's fault. So I started thanking my back for carrying all these heavy burdens and trying to carry this load under everything I was doing. And I promise you, I healed my back. I prevented a back surgery. They told me I needed rods and screws and all this metal. I haven't had that second back surgery. I run, I do all the things. I have an amazing, healthy body because I started to love my body and appreciate it for what it was trying to tell me. And I stopped abusing it and I started giving it what it needed. So I hope that gives you hope that you just need to figure out why your body's screaming at you. My back was screaming at me. And I was screaming back instead of listening. So if we could just get into this posture of like, what do you need from me? The way we talk to our small children, you know, say to your body, what do you need from me? It will tell you. My body said, I need you to go the F to sleep. I need you to stop carrying the weight of everybody's problems. I need you to stop taking extra call shifts every Other night, like it told me I just had to listen. So if nothing else, I need you to leave this call with hope and and trust and belief in God's ability to shift your health, your finances, your relationships, your life, whatever it is that you need, all of it honestly. So okay, myth two: eat less, exercise more to lose weight. This couldn't be farther from the truth. If you've ever watched Biggest Loser, you know it works for a hot minute, okay? If you starve yourself and work out a ton, you will lose weight, and then you will gain it all back because your body thinks you're starving it to death. And so it will start hoarding and holding on for dear life because it wants to be in balance and do its job and do what it needs to do. So it will only do that for so long, and then it will rebel and say, nope, I'm in charge. Here we go. So I want you to release that mindset if you still have it in any way, along with the eating fat makes you fat myth that we were told in the '90s and 2000s. I literally remember eating a bag of like those chocolate stars that you could get in the bulk section at Meijer because there was no fat in them, or Twizzlers, a bag of Twizzlers. There's no fat in that. And I just thought, I am so healthy. I'm not eating any fat. And what a joke. What a lie. And unfortunately, we learned the hard way. And here's the truth. Fat is essential for staying thin and healthy and having balanced hormones. Because here's the deal. Fat is actually the main ingredient to make your steroid hormones that we were talking about— your estrogen, your testosterone, progesterone, even cortisol, um, and DHEA and aldosterone, which regulates our blood pressure. So that low-fat, no-fat diet of the '90s sold a lot of blood pressure medication. And a lot of statins. It's insane. Like, you don't even want to know the truth of that. But fat is essential, and fat is actually the main backbone of all of our trillions of cells. So our cells are like little water balloons, and they are encompassed with this phospholipid bilayer of fat, and that's how things get transported in and out of the cells. So if you don't have healthy fat, things can't get in and out of the cell— energy, vitamins, minerals, amino acids to make and break proteins, all the things. Okay, and then nerves. Our nervous system is a hot wire. It's an electrical system. They're hot wires sending signals. They have to be coated with fat, just like All the electrical wires that you see, your phone charger has a coating on it. We have fat coatings called myelin sheaths. And so if we don't eat enough fat, we get tons of nerve damage. Our nerves cannot fire and wire and send their signals properly. And that causes heart arrhythmias and brain loss, memory loss. Numbness and tingling in the fingers, and you name it, like all kinds of stuff, you guys, and dysregulation of our nervous system, of our organs, and then constipation because our gut doesn't work, like literally everything. So please eat fat. And if you want to dive deeper into this, my favorite book is Eat Fat, Get Thin by Dr. Mark Hyman. He is one of the pioneers of functional medicine. He was literally just in Washington, D.C. last week at the Ways and Means Committee lobbying to get the junk out of our food. Our food is so toxic, and he's really working hard along with some other very powerful people to finally bring this to light because it has to stop. It has to stop. So Let's see. Calories in, calories out. I already talked about that. Like, you don't get the same information into your body if you eat 2 donuts or a cup of broccoli. You know, a broccoli and a donut might have the same calorie count, but they don't have the same information for your body. Your body uses food for information, for fuel, for vitamins and minerals and amino acids to make other proteins and other enzymes and other processes in your body to happen. It can't do that with donuts. It needs real, God-based food, okay? The last piece is that you just have to accept weight gain as a part of aging, especially with fatigue, like being tired. And here's the deal. I want you to think about the fact that we all have little buckets inside of us. These are theoretical buckets, but we, we all do have an ability to hold a certain amount of toxic burden. So toxins from our Glade plugins, our candles, our perfumes, our creams and lotions and sprays, all the stuff, all those chemicals get absorbed into our body through our lungs or through our skin or through our mouth. And our body has to do something with it. It doesn't have the ability to easily remove it because these new chemicals have been created in a lab in the past 100 years. They didn't exist for hundreds of thousands of years prior to this. They're very new to the body. The body is struggling to remove them. And so it will sequester them and it will try to hold them off, especially in your fat cells, because that's the safest place to put toxins, better than your brain or your kidneys or your liver. And so sometimes we carry around extra weight because we have too much toxic burden. Our buckets are overflowing with toxins, and your fat cells are actually protecting you From brain fog and headaches and dizziness and all of the neurological things that come from too many toxins in your body. And so, yet again, we can't be mad at our fat cells. We have to focus on decreasing our toxic burden. And first of all, sometimes we have to actively help our detox pathways because some of us don't have the best genes and our pathways don't work the best. And some of us, we have to stop the ongoing influx of the toxins. We have to change out the stuff that we're exposing our body to on a regular basis. So that's a deeper discussion, but it's super important when it comes to weight loss resistance in particular. So we do have a PDF called Decrease Your Toxic Burden that we can share with you. It will go over all the basics of what you should be looking for and starting with. And just know that it can be a little overwhelming and actually frustrating. Like, I was angry when I first learned about toxic burden because I didn't realize how toxic the world was. And as a physician, I didn't learn any of this. And so I was super angry that I should have known this as a doctor, especially like in the medical system. I'm working in the hospitals. We use plastic like it's going out of style in the hospital system because everything's got to be sterile, right? So everything's in plastic. We're heating liquids in plastic that we're putting in people's bodies. Those plastics are forever in your body. We're injecting with anesthesia and all of these toxins. And then we're not talking to the patients about detoxing afterward and removing them from the body. So it's like the people who are trying to help you might be causing the most damage. It's like we're giving you all this extra radiation for these extra tests. And like, it's just, it's such a toxic, broken world. So I would love for you to get ahold of that download and give that a look. But if you're starting to feel overwhelmed by all the toxins around us, take a step back and know that God's got you. And he sees what we're doing to the world. And as always, God always shows us a way out. Like, he might not take you out of your trouble, but he'll show you a way out. So just know that and start to feel empowered. Like, oh, well, I can do this little bit this week and this little bit next week. And that's something you can just tackle slowly over time. Like, do you need to change out the pots and pans you cook with? Do you need to stop heating food in the microwave that's in plastic? That's probably the biggest thing that you can stop doing today if you're doing that. So I really hope that you guys are finding this valuable and I'm like giving you new information that you haven't heard. Like, it's more than just like clean eating and walking your body. That's a huge piece of it. But we have some foundational stuff that we really need to understand as women and as faith-based women. So I'm pumped. I can't wait to keep pouring into you and like really think about what does God say about me? What does scripture say is the truth about me? Because we all have these things in our head who we think we are, like we're not good enough, we're too old, we're too young, we're too fat. We're too far gone. We have too many medical problems. We're on too many meds. Like, those are all lies. Let's just be honest. Those are all lies from the enemy. None of that is the truth. The truth is that your body is a temple given to you by God. 1 Corinthians 6:19-20. And your body is a temple for the Holy Spirit. So if you've been saved, if you have said like, I surrender to you, Jesus. You are my king. I live by you. The Holy Spirit lives in you, and so you're called to actually honor your body. You were bought at a price, so therefore honor your body. That scripture gets me every time I read it because it is the truth. So 2 Timothy 1 says, God did not give us a spirit to be timid. He gave us a spirit of power and self. Discipline and love, and that means love for our own bodies and ourselves. So we're called to have self-discipline and to act differently than the rest of society. So that's what I'm calling you to do this week, is calling you higher to act differently than everybody else around you. And I'm going to leave you with this, Mark 5:34. He said, daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace. Your Suffering is over. So invite God into your health journey. Your faith will activate healing. I promise you, I've never been this healthy or felt this good in my entire life, and it's because the Holy Spirit is alive and well inside of me. So that's what I want for you. If you haven't yet accepted Jesus, something to consider, something. To consider. So I love all of you so much. I'm so glad you're here. I'm so excited to hear just the breakthroughs that you're going to have. Love you guys.