#258. How to Heal Leaky Gut & Hashimoto’s Naturally (My Functional Medicine Story)

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. 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. Because when you help one woman heal, you help her family, her marriage, her faith, and her future. 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. Welcome back to Fast to Faith. I am really glad that you are here with me this week, and I know that you've been enjoying all these episodes where I am highlighting Fast to Faith coaches. I know that you've been enjoying hearing their stories and what has motivated them to change and how they've actually done it. I've been getting a ton of feedback, so Thank you for reaching out and giving my coaches all the love that you've been giving them and just letting me know how much you appreciate their stories because it takes so much courage to get on here and share your story. It's scary. I'm telling you, I have been doing this, I don't know, 3 or 4 years. I've kind of lost track of time. You know, that's what happened with COVID but I'm always Nervous to come on here. I'm always nervous to talk to you because I want to serve you. I want this to be a valuable use of your time. It means the world to me that you are like, okay, let me take 30 minutes to listen to Dr. Tabatha. That means everything to me. So I don't take it lightly. I want to know that you're getting value out of this. And if you want to hear about other things, Please let me know. Don't hesitate to send us a DM or email us and let us know what you want to hear about, because I am here to improve your life. I'm actually on a mission. I'm on a mission to help the 10 million women who are going through the perimenopausal transition to go through that smoother, with grace and with ease, and to actually make this The best time of your life. Like, I want you to be the healthiest you've ever been in your life, the strongest that you've ever been, the most confident, have all of the wisdom. Like, let's learn from all those decades we just went through, right? Like, let's create the life that we know that we can have, that God actually designed for us and created us to have. We just need to be able to step into that. There's some things that are preventing that. So Today I want to share some of my story because it's going to help you connect your dots in your story and in your health journey, because a lot of us are going through the same thing or some different version of the same thing. And unfortunately, conventional medicine will have us believe that all of these different things happening to our systems, all of the symptoms that we're having, they're all happening in a silo. They're separate. But that's not actually The case. Our systems are all speaking to each other and all working together like a huge cogwheel trying to move you forward. You have to understand how the dots are connected, how the gut and the adrenals and the thyroid and the hormones and the diet and the movement and the sleep, how they all talk to each other, how they all affect one another. I would love for you to stick around and listen to what I'm going to share with you. and start to think about your life and how you may have gone through some of the things I have gone through, because I really want you to have some aha moments. I want you to connect those dots and be like, that's what's missing, that's what I didn't understand before, that's why I'm stuck. Like, whatever it is, I know you're gonna get something out of this. I always ask the Holy Spirit to speak Through me before I hit record because I don't want this to be about me or my agenda. I want the Holy Spirit to have me say whatever you need me to hear. God knows what you need to hear. God brought you to my podcast for a reason, and so I am here to serve you and help you figure this out. So let's jump into connecting all of the dots, okay? So here's the deal. When I was a child, I had really good intuition. I could hear from my gut. It would tell me when someone was shady, when I shouldn't be hanging around with somebody, when I shouldn't be making the choices that I was making. I had something inside of me saying, that's a really bad idea, or it would just feel wrong. I would get a gut ache, a tummy ache. I would feel like I needed to leave the situation I was in, and you probably had that too. That is the Holy Spirit. That is our intuition given to us from God. Unfortunately, a lot of us were either directly trained or indirectly trained to start to ignore that, to suppress it, to not trust it, to override it because of our interactions with people. We were either made to feel like we were crazy if we would be like, I don't know, my gut's telling me not to do that. People would say, Oh, stop being so dramatic. Just go along with it. That would kind of be the thing that I would hear. Or, you don't know what you're talking about. Let's just do it. And so we stop listening to our intuition. We stop listening to the Holy Spirit who is actually guiding us and directing us. As a child, I had this intuition and I would get gutaches. I could tell when I wasn't supposed to be doing something that I was doing. I was getting that direction From God, but oftentimes I chose to ignore it because I wanted to be the rebel. I wanted to be the wild child. I didn't want to agree with authority. I wanted to be the one in charge and figure it out my own way. I insisted I knew best, so I just started to ignore my intuition. And by the time I was a young teen, I had chronic gut issues. I never had regular bowel movements. I often felt terrible when I would eat. And the time I was 13, I started suffering with episodes of depression. I would have depression so bad, and oftentimes they were triggered by bad choices that I had made, um, in the boys I would date or in my friend relationships, not navigating those things well or doing stupid things like drinking alcohol, skipping school. I would go into depression, and I even had times of Suicidal ideation, and I actually had an episode where I tried to overdose on pills. Luckily, I just threw them up, so, because my gut was such a mess. But what I didn't understand at the time was it was all connected, and that's what I'm going to start to show you. Fast forward, I continue to live a rebellious life, and let me just say I was saved. I acknowledged Jesus as my Savior. I had accepted Him. I loved Jesus. I would talk to Him, but I was not sanctified. There was no change in my behavior. If anything, I sinned more. And we can get into that maybe in another episode where we talk about spiritual warfare and how the enemy comes after you when you declare that you're going to live for Jesus. Things got worse before they got better. So I accepted Jesus. I loved him. I would talk to him, but I made all the wrong choices. So I ate the standard American diet. I would eat Pop-Tarts and drink Mountain Dew and eat the, the Dairy Queen ice cream and the Oreo cookies and all the things. In 9th grade, I went on birth control pills because I was sexually active. Yep, I was way too young, shouldn't have been doing it. Went to the local health department, had an exam that was absolutely cringeworthy, and I was given birth control pills and sent on my way. So I took those for 2 years, and in 11th grade I got strep throat over Christmas break. I had to go on antibiotics, and my boyfriend came home from college over Christmas break, and we had had sex. And I ended up pregnant because nobody told me antibiotics make birth control pills less efficacious. They don't work. And so I got pregnant. I was pregnant through my junior year. My high school counselor pulled me aside and said, I think you should homeschool the rest of the year. I don't want you in school with the other girls when you start to show because I don't want them to think that it's okay to be pregnant. Thankfully, I still had some of that rebellious side and I was like, absolutely not. I'm going to stay and finish out 11th grade. You can't tell me what to do. I did finish out that year in school. I got married before I had my daughter, and then I didn't go back for 12th grade because I had her and I had to stay home and take care of her. Ended up getting my GED and that whole story goes down that pathway. But what I want you to understand is my pregnancy was very stressful. I had to go on Medicaid and food stamps and WIC because my family didn't have health insurance. I couldn't afford this pregnancy, and I was assigned a very old doctor on the verge of retirement who made it clear that I was a second-class citizen, and he treated me horribly. He performed many procedures on me without any explanation, constant internal exams, injections, shots, who knows what I received. And I went 2 weeks overdue, past my due date. And one morning I woke up because my water broke and it was the color of pea soup. It was a thick, dark, ugly green color. That meant the baby had already had a bowel movement inside of me. It was meconium, and that means the baby is stressed out and needs to be delivered. I, of course, didn't understand any of this as a 17-year-old ignorant child. So they brought me in and I had a day and a half long day induction. My delivery was so traumatic, I ended up begging for a C-section. I was in so much pain, I, I couldn't even think straight. He ended up using forceps to deliver my daughter and he tore me a 4th degree from front to back. If you've had a tear, you might relate. But this was all the way through, and it forever changed me. I came to find out later that he was not an OB-GYN; he was a family practice doctor, so he couldn't have done a C-section if he wanted to. He was not a surgeon. I didn't realize that there were any other options or choices for me. I just did what I was told, and I put up with what I put up with because I didn't use my voice, and I didn't ask. For another choice. That was a very defining moment in my life. I remember after the delivery when he was suturing me up, looking at the warmer where my daughter was and just praying to God, like begging him, don't ever let her go through this. Please don't let her go through this alone the way I am and have all of this pain. And he said to me, you need to get your life together. So that this doesn't happen to her, and you need to figure out how to help it not happen to other women. Seventeen years old, I had this come to Jesus moment. I had this defining moment, and it forever changed the trajectory of my life. I went from wanting to be in a rock band and marry Tommy Lee from Motley Crue to oh my gosh! I need to go back to school. I got to get my GED. I need to figure out how to help women. I tried to go to nursing school, and I really. I needed to actually write the orders and be the one to create the change. And so with God's help, I persevered. I overcame all of that, and I got into medical school and went on to become a doctor. But during this entire time, I was having physical issues in my body. So all of that stress, all the standard American diet I was eating, all the things I was going through, all the vaccines I was getting, those all added up. And so you were sick? were creating chronic gut issues, and that actually caused me to develop Hashimoto's thyroid disease. So after my daughter's delivery, I had this autoimmune flare-up and my thyroid was very overreactive. It was being attacked by my own immune system, which that should never happen. So all of the stored-up thyroid hormone that I had in my thyroid gland got spilled out into my bloodstream, and that felt terrible. It felt like shakiness, jitteriness, heart racing. sweating, excessive weight loss. When I went and told my doctor how I was feeling, he said, yep, you have Hashimoto's, and he sent me to the hospital for a procedure. Looking back now, I realized that I had radioactive iodine treatment where they injected me with radioactive iodine to burn out my thyroid so that it would calm down and not be so quote-unquote overactive. That required me to be on thyroid medication for the rest of my life. I didn't know I was signing up for any of that. I trusted the white coat. I didn't ask any questions. I didn't ask, what is the long-term ramifications of this? Is it necessary? Is there an alternative? None of those conversations were had. Time and time again, I went through this scenario of trusting my doctor, not asking questions, And regretting it afterward because it set me up for lifelong issues. I want you to understand that just because a doctor tells you to take an antidepressant or a blood pressure medication or to have a hysterectomy, an IUD placed, that doesn't mean you have to have that done or take that pill or do any of that. That is an opportunity to have a conversation. to ask why. Is that going to treat it, or is that just going to manage the symptom? Is there any long-term consequence of this? What can I expect in the future? And if you don't have a physician who is open to those conversations, I urge you to find another physician. I didn't know that at 17 or even 25 when I was in medical school. I continued to trust my doctors, and by the time I was in medical school, I was on 5 different medications. I was on an antidepressant, an anti-reflux heartburn medication. I was on Bentyl for my diarrhea and irritable bowel syndrome. I was on a sleeping pill. I was on so many medications, you guys, and they would change and swap them out. I was on my thyroid medication, of course, the whole time. So many things. I went through all of medical school not questioning it, trusting Until I was a practicing physician out taking care of patients, trying to raise my new 2 little babies on my own, having chronic back pain, pain that was preventing me from doing my job. I was struggling to get through deliveries and through surgeries, and I was requiring so much ibuprofen and Tylenol. It was destroying me. My My gut was a hot mess. My depression was out of control, and I was 30 and 40 pounds overweight at times. I thought the weight was because I wasn't exercising. I thought the gut issues were just my lot in life because I've had them for so long. And I just thought my struggle with everything had nothing to do with how I was actually living when it had everything to do with it. The food I was eating, my lack of sleep, my lack of movement, all the toxins that I was putting into my body, and just this busyness, go, go, go, overstressed life was driving all of this dysfunction. And I didn't understand that because that is not how conventional doctors are taught or trained. We are trained to diagnose disease. We're trained to look for disease and manage those symptoms. So if you have heavy bleeding, we do an endometrial ablation or a hysterectomy or give you birth control pills to get rid of the bleeding. We don't ask why. We don't say, why are you having heavy bleeding? I had never even heard the term hormone imbalance in medical school, in residency, in the 10 years I practiced as an OB-GYN. It wasn't until I went on to study functional medicine that I had heard the term hormone imbalance or estrogen dominance or chronic fatigue or adrenal fatigue. Like, these terms don't exist in conventional medicine. I got to a point as an OB-GYN where I was in so much pain I couldn't function. I said that one day I couldn't walk away from the OR table. I finished a C-section. It was like 2 or 3 in the morning, and I was literally in so much pain I had just bend over and hang there for like 10 minutes while my back finally released so that I could walk out of that OR. Finally went to the orthopedic surgeon and I said, okay, I can't live like this. I need to be fixed. And so I broke down and had back surgery. I took 6 weeks off of work, even though I thought the world was going to end because I couldn't take care of my patients for 6 6 weeks, but I did what I was told. I didn't ask for alternatives. I trusted the surgeon like I always had, like I told my patients to do. I came back after 6 weeks, and my 3rd night on call, I reinjured my back and I couldn't move. What am I gonna do now? I went back to the surgeon and he said, it's no problem. Back surgery is like Lay's potato chips. You can't have just one. We'll put some rods and screws in your back. It's fine. You might herniate above and below and need further surgeries for those different areas, but you'll be fine. I just heard God clearly say to me, time out. You need to ask. You need to use your voice and ask for another choice. And I said, what are the alternatives? And he said, well, you can live with this pain. You can be on Vicodin and And chronic pain meds to try and help you just live with it. And my intuition came back so strong that day. I heard the Holy Spirit say, this is not how I created you to be. Your body knows how to heal. You need to figure this out. And I did the unthinkable, you guys. I took 4 months off of my work, and I was the chief of the department. I was the head physician in my practice. I was on call every other night. I was the breadwinner for my home. I was the bill payer, but I took 4 months off of work because I knew I had to figure this out and do something different. So I started learning. I listened to every podcast. I read everything I could, and I quickly found this world of functional medicine. And I'm telling you, I had never heard that term in my life as a physician. I was like, what is functional medicine? I found the Institute of Functional Medicine from the Cleveland Clinic, and I started taking courses. Once I realized there was a whole world of health and wellness that I knew nothing about as a physician, I got angry, and then I got to work. I was like, I will heal myself. And the first course I took at functional medicine was learning how the gut is the gateway to all health or all disease. Almost always the gut determines your health or it determines your sickness. And it blew my mind that I wasn't taught this as an OB-GYN or even in medical school. Like when we did the GI system class, We talked a little bit about the gut microbiome and digestion, but we did not get any kind of understanding that it's the gateway to everything that's happening in the rest of your body. So if this is a new concept to you, please go back and listen to my gut episodes. Listen to my episodes where I talk about leaky gut, your microbiome, why we develop food sensitivities from our diets. All of these Root cause issues that I really need you to understand because your doctor probably doesn't understand, but that is where the answers lie. So it turns out that when I was stressed out as a young child, making bad choices, feeling shame, feeling guilt, it was driving a lot of destructive chemicals to be made. Excess cortisol, epinephrine, things like that were Causing me to have leaky gut. They were destroying my good bacteria. Then I was eating a standard American diet, which was feeding yeast overgrowth, and I had parasites that I didn't realize until later. My mom would just give me a pill from the pediatrician and not tell me anything until 20 years later when I talked to her about it. I had parasites. And so all of these things were driving chronic gut issues and inflammation in my body. And when I was pregnant and I had that extreme stress, that extreme cortisol issue and situation, that traumatic delivery, it activated my autoimmune genes that I had been carrying. So genes are not your destiny. They are potential issues. They are just data sitting in a database. They don't get pulled out and transcribed and activated unless you have a perfect storm of chronic leaky gut and a stressful situation and a trigger that activates those genes to be turned on. So Dr. Mark Hyman likes to say that your genes are the gun and your environment pulls the trigger. So my delivery activated that autoimmune process called Hashimoto's thyroid disease. If I would have known at 17 what I know now, I could have avoided having my thyroid destroyed and requiring lifelong medication because I would have told my 17-year-old self, we just need to get your stress under control. We need to change the food that you're eating and we need to love your body back into healing. And that would have reversed that entire autoimmune process. Stopped that attack on my thyroid, and my thyroid would have been able to function again, and I wouldn't have needed medication. So there's so many things I would love to tell my 17-year-old self. The birth control pills were causing chronic leaky gut because those are synthetic hormones that do that. They were causing major vitamin and mineral deficiencies. I was so depleted in B vitamins, that's why I was reaching for sugar all the time for energy, because I was depleted, and it was preventing me from making serotonin, which is my feel-good hormone. And that is why I was so depressed, because I didn't have the right bacteria helping me make my serotonin. So I took a pill to help with that. I started connecting all of these dots when I was studying functional medicine, and I saw my entire life for what it was, how my health got to be where it was at that point in 2019 with chronic back pain, chronic knee pain, out-of-control thyroid disease, chronic reflux disease, 30 pounds overweight, stuck on an antidepressant, depressed quite a bit of the time because of all the connections that had started in my childhood. The cool thing was it was still all repairable and reversible because once you go back and you start treating the root cause of stuff, you pull those roots out. Sometimes you got to pull the roots out, especially if they're weeds. But sometimes you need to replace the soil. You need to really work on healing those roots so that the tree can come back alive and look better and bear fruit and do all the things. So I want you to understand that your health at this point didn't happen overnight. If you've been told you have prediabetes, if you've been told you have any kind of autoimmune condition, if you have been struggling carrying 30 pounds or more of weight or 20 pounds or whatever it is, that did not start yesterday. That did not start last month. It has been going on for a long time. It's a slow burn. It's an accumulation of things. They build on each other. So my chronic gut issues, started to build, and then I added chronic stress to them, and then I added a terrible diet and malnourishment and vitamin and mineral deficiencies. And my body got to the point where it was in survival mode. My immune system was overreacting trying to protect me, and I was trying to function without the necessary ingredients to be able to function. So that could very well be what's happening with you. First things first, we have to get an actual real assessment of the situation. Have you even had the full lab panels to see what you have going on? And I promise you, when your doctor says they checked a full panel, that is not a full panel. That is the panel for insurance to cover that annual visit. It tells you nothing. If you got your TSH checked for your thyroid and that was it, that tells you nothing. TSH is actually a brain hormone. It's not even a thyroid hormone. So you are not getting an accurate picture of what's going on. We need to do a complete evaluation, and most likely you need to heal your gut. You either need to heal it empirically with a gut healing program like Fast to Faith, where we're just like cleaning up the diet. We're getting rid of the standard American diet. We're eating faith foods, the foods that God gave us to eat. Or we're actually doing stool testing and seeing what needs to be killed off. Do you have parasites, yeast, bad bacteria? Do you have active leaky gut that needs to be healed? Do you need digestive enzyme support or more stomach acid? What's your immune system in your gut doing? All of these things, those are tests tests that cannot be done through conventional medicine. They don't know anything about them. Insurance doesn't pay for them, but they are the game changer. And so I did all of that, and I put my Hashimoto's into remission. I got off 20 years or more of antidepressant medications. And I promise you, don't do that alone. That requires A physician who knows how to wean you off of them safely, and you have to heal your gut before you can go off your antidepressant. I no longer have the heartburn, the bloating. One of the things I realized was gluten was one of the biggest triggers that was triggering my Hashimoto's thyroid disease. It was triggering my depression. It was preventing me from losing weight, and so giving up gluten has forever changed my life. But I learned all of these things, and that's what you need to do as well. So I'm hoping that something has given you an aha moment today. And if not, if you know, like, I just need to get testing done more than my doctor has done, that is where we can help at Dr. Tabatha. I have a virtual medical practice. I'm licensed in over half the country, and even if I'm not licensed in your state, I can still get you these functional medicine tests and help you heal. I just can't prescribe you medications and things. Please reach out if you are sick of struggling. If you're sick and tired of sick and being sick and tired and you're ready for a change, you can shift. That was 6 years ago, and I am here to tell you, at 50 years old, I am the healthiest I've ever been. Strongest I've ever been, the happiest I've ever been, and the only medication I'm on is a little bit of thyroid medication and some hormone replacement therapy because I'm in menopause. I cannot emphasize enough that you can get your health back. God created you to heal. I want you to hear this from me right now, that God says so many amazing things about you And you need to start believing them if you're not believing them. Because one of the reasons it took me so long to change was I was believing the wrong things about myself. I believed that my body was destined to stay in pain, was working against me. I hated my body. I wasn't loving my body. It was— I was mean to it. I didn't like that it was scarred up, that it was You know, overweight. It was aging, all the things. But I started reading scripture and what God says about me, and I started believing what God said about me, and that helped me invest in myself and make these changes. So let me just like read a few of these. Genesis, it says that you are created in God's image. Psalms says that you are fearfully and wonderfully made by God. John says you are a child of God. Romans says you are loved unconditionally. Peter says you have been chosen by God. 2 Corinthians says you are a new creation in Jesus Christ. Ephesians says that you are God's masterpiece, you are his handiwork. 1 Corinthians says that you are a temple of the Holy Spirit, therefore honor God by honoring your body. Ephesians says you are forgiven, and a lot of you need to forgive yourselves because that was where I was stuck for a long time, was I didn't want to forgive myself for being a wild child, for making such terrible decisions. I was so ashamed. I was a cheater. I was a liar. I was a thief. I was all the things. And it wasn't until— like, I already knew Jesus forgave me, but I couldn't forgive myself. Like, really? I think I'm that important that I can't forgive myself, but Jesus can? Like, what a slap in the face to him. I finally truly forgave myself, and that is where freedom came. So I want that for you if you are not there yet. And Colossians says you are redeemed. You have been rescued from darkness and brought into God's kingdom. The fact that you're listening to this episode right now or watching it on YouTube, this is not an accident. You have been praying. You have been asking for help, for a sign, for guidance, for an answer, whatever. I am here to tell you right now, God has fully equipped your body to be healthy, to heal, to thrive, to be at an amazing ideal weight, to feel good, to have contentment and joy and peace no matter what your circumstances. He has actually created you. That is in your DNA as a believer of Jesus Christ. But we need the trigger to activate that DNA. And the trigger is reading the Bible and believing what God says about you. So God says you're redeemed. You have to believe Him. You have to start walking and talking differently and making different choices because He said you're a new creation, so start acting like it. Start believing it. And we are here for you. If you need help, if you need guidance, please reach out to us. Come see us at Dr. Tabatha. Get into Fast to Faith. It's a free app. We have an incredible sisterhood of women who want to support you, who want to lift you up, who want to pray over you and show you that there is a better way to live. God has called us higher. And we need to live in his kingdom, in his ways, and not the ways of this broken world. I hope that resonated with you today. Please share this with at least one woman, a woman that you know is struggling, a woman that you know has been to 10 doctors and has lost hope, or someone who you think has it all together on paper or at face value, but you feel like, hmm, God's telling me to send her to this person. You might not even know why. Like, God has literally told me to send podcasts to people I haven't thought about in 2 years, and I'll just send them the episode and say, hey, you were on my heart when I was listening to this. I don't know why, but I think it's for you. And I will get an answer back every time, oh my gosh, this is exactly what I needed to hear today. Like, God knows what he's doing. We don't see the bigger picture. We don't see everything. We don't see other people's point of view. So trust him. Trust those nudges. Trust those whispers. Just lean in and be obedient to what God is calling you to do. And if he is calling you to invest in yourself and take time for yourself and to shift how you are showing up for yourself, Then you need to do that because He knows what's coming. He knows there's a bad diagnosis ahead, and He's trying to prevent that from happening for you. God prevents so many things we don't even realize. We take all of this for granted. So listen to your intuition, listen to the Holy Spirit, and trust that God's got you. All right, I'll see you next week.