#268: Silencing the Food Noise: The 4 Root Causes Stealing Your Peace (And How to Break Free Before the Holidays)

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. 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I just came inside and it is cold in Michigan, you guys. And you're probably wondering, where the heck is the intro music? Here's the deal, we are skipping the music and all of the things. We are trying to get this episode out to you ASAP because I was on the Candace Cameron Bure podcast. We did a 3-part series and you guys want to know more about food noise. I've heard you, I've listened, and I'm bringing you the truth about what the heck food noise is. So let's dive right into that today. And welcome to the Fast to Faith podcast. I'm Dr. Tabatha, your Christian physician, if you didn't know, if you're new here. I'm here for you. We are all about health and wellness and gut and hormones and fasting and faith. So let's dive into what it takes to silence the food noise. We're gonna heal the cravings, balance our hormones, and nourish our spirit because it's all connected. It all ties together. So let me ask you a question. Have you ever felt like food is talking to you, like, all the time? It was for me when I was an OB-GYN. The donuts would talk to me in the break room, the Twizzlers would talk to me at the nurse's station, or the M&M's in the pre-op room. Wherever there was food, I was thinking about it. And if there wasn't food around, then I was dreaming about What sounded good and what I could eat next. And I didn't realize it at the time because you can't see the picture when you're in the frame. But now I understand that so much of it had to do with my lack of energy, my stressed-out life, and my unhealthy gut and my dysregulated nervous system. So we're gonna dive into the why behind food Food noise, and more importantly, what to do about it. So food noise, let's define it. First of all, it's intrusive thoughts and cravings that dominate your focus, and they often lead to frustration, guilt, and overeating. So my best example is I remember one day there was a box full of donuts in the break room. And I was thinking about them while I was seeing patients and specifically thinking, I really hope that, um, one specific Long John is still there. I want that one with the custard cream filling and the extra chocolate when I get out, but I'm only gonna eat half of it because I don't need the whole thing. I've been eating too much junk lately. And I remember this entire conversation going on while I was seeing a patient, mind you. And I should have been paying attention to her. I'm just being real truthful here right now. I was thinking about this donut. So I finally went and ate the half a donut, and I ate it probably in like 30 seconds. I barely even tasted it. And that's part of the issue is we're trying to satisfy something. And so oftentimes we eat really quickly and we don't savor it. We don't slow down to enjoy it. And then I went on to seeing the next patient and the next patient, and all I could think about was that other half that I left in the break room. And I ended up going back and shoving that down my face. And then the food noise quieted for a minute, and then I started thinking about the other donuts in the box and That was the day I knew I had a problem. Like, this is not normal. I started talking to my coworkers and asking them, like, do the donuts talk to you? Because I feel like they're talking to me. They're distracting me from seeing my patients. And at that time, I knew it was a problem, but I didn't know why it was happening, and I didn't know what to do about it. And unfortunately, it took me a few years to figure that out. It wasn't until I went through full-on burnout, adrenal fatigue, a broken back, a failed back surgery, Hashimoto's that I couldn't get into remission, the whole 9 yards. And I went on this healing journey. I found the world of functional medicine. And when I started studying the root cause of why we have disease, why we have problems, That is when I understood my food noise problem. So I, if you are feeling me in this story, this episode is for you. So let's dive in because I want to reassure you, this is not about a lack of willpower. It's your body's chemistry, your hormones. You have hormones that regulate your appetite, your hunger, your satiety. You have stress hormones that hijack your brain, and you have a microbiome, an entire ecosystem living in your gut that is creating chemicals and sending signals to your brain as well. So we're going to dive into all of that, and I'm going to give you solutions about how to get rid of this food noise because I'm here to say happily, 6 years later, I don't have food noise and I haven't for at least 4 years. When it starts to creep up, I now know that is a message from my body that something is off and I need to deal with it and I know how to tackle it so it doesn't get out of control. So I have broken up with sugar and been off of sugar for over 6 years. I no longer have the food noise and all of the struggles, and I have created a healthy relationship with food. I don't use it when I'm tired and stressed out and lonely as much. Like, let's be truthful, nobody's perfect, just Jesus. And I still struggle every now and again. I do eat the ice cream at times when I'm lonely, but I at least acknowledge it and I know what I'm signing up So I just want to say that because this journey is not about perfection, it's about progress. And if I can just instill in you some tools and resources to be able to make forward progress toward loving your body and living in harmony with it, with food, with your environment, with your life, then you are winning, right? So let's dive in. Like I said, food noise is that constant mental chatter or cravings driven by a dysregulated brain-body chemistry. And a big part of it is our Standard American Diet. We call it the SAD diet for a reason. It is very sad because it's high in ultra-processed foods that actually Pull out the vitamins and the minerals and all the necessary things your body needs to thrive, and they fill it with garbage, with preservatives, with dyes and chemicals that are very destructive to your body. So it's the SAD diet that most of us are living on. Sleep deprivation was a huge reason that I had food noise. I was exhausted. My body was constantly looking for a source of energy, and I was giving it fake energy. Fake energy is like sugar and caffeine and carbohydrates, simple carbohydrates, whereas real energy comes from eating proteins and fats to make ATP in a long, sustainable form. That is true energy. And then hormones. When your hormones are out of balance, it amplifies the food noise. So women in particular are more vulnerable to this due to our cyclical hormonal nature. We have hormones that are changing all of the time, and that contributes to our emotional well-being. We take on the world's problems, right? We are there for our children, for our coworkers, for our husbands, all the people. And that leads to us neglecting ourselves a little bit, along with chronic stress, chronic stress of self-neglect, taking care of everyone else, not doing your daily centering practices of Getting still, talking to God, listening to God for guidance, trying to carry all the burdens yourself and do everything yourself— those all contribute to food noise. So there are 4 root causes that I want to talk about today, and then we're going to talk about how to address each one of those. So number 1, gut dysbiosis. The wrong bacteria controlling the cravings. So if you have the wrong bacteria living in your gut, they will send chemicals to your brain that make you crave the foods they want to eat. Yeast in particular love sugar. So if you have yeast overgrowth in your gut, you're going to crave sugar all the time until you kill those yeast off. And I want to remind you or let you know if you didn't know that 90% of the serotonin that we make, we make in our gut. Serotonin is our feel-good neurotransmitter. That is the messenger that is activated with antidepressants. They're called SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. So they help the serotonin stay at the receptor longer because you're not making enough of it yourself. And it's most likely because you don't have the right microbiome to make your own serotonin. Another one is dopamine. This neurotransmitter is really important in reward and satisfaction. And we all know about the dopamine hit, right? That is scrolling through TikTok and Instagram and you feel satisfied because you're getting these dopamine hits, like scroll, scroll, scroll, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine. You get that same result with chocolate and sugar and gluten and a lot of things in your food. And so some people, they are low on dopamine because they don't have a healthy microbiome, and they are looking for that feel-good neurotransmitter because 50% of that is made in your gut and travels up the vagus nerve to talk to your brain, and then it tells your brain to create more chemicals that talk back to your body. But if that is interrupted, if you're not making those neurotransmitters, then your brain is going to tell you, give me some of this, give me some of this, and it will tell you to eat those horrible foods. So Number one is you want to figure out what's going on in your microbiome. When I first studied functional medicine, I did a stool test on myself, a functional stool test. It shows you your entire gut microbiome, the good bacteria, the bad bacteria, the different kinds of yeast, parasites, worms, and then it shows you the function of your gut. Is your immune system acting appropriately? Do you even have an Enough of an immune system response? Are you making your digestive enzymes? Do you have active leaky gut that needs to be healed? All of these things show up on the test, and you can actually actively heal your gut, shift your microbiome, kill off those bad guys. And that is how I broke up with sugar and started to silence my food noise. So healing your gut. Is profound. It is so helpful. We can try empirically to do this by getting rid of the standard American diet. Stop eating out of boxes and bags. Focus on real foods that God gave us— real animal proteins, healthy fats, vegetables, fruits. If it looks like what it was when it grew or came out of its mama, Then you can eat it. If it is processed and it's got an ingredient list that you can't even pronounce, you should not be eating it. It's contributing to your food noise. So cut out those ultra-processed foods, break up with sugar, start eating fiber, protein, healthy fats, all those good things. Your microbiome will start to shift. But I do— I mentioned the stool test because some people really clean up their diet. They are eating so clean and so healthy, but they have yeast overgrowth that if it doesn't get killed off with actual herbs or medications, they can't shift their microbiome. So sometimes testing is necessary. I just wanted to throw that piece in there. And for me, it was because My gut dysbiosis had gone on so long that changing my diet just wasn't going to cut it. It wasn't enough, honestly. And then we want to use intermittent fasting strategically to reset our microbiome, because when we starve off those bad guys, we don't feed them, they will die off, and then the good guys can start to multiply and take over. And so fasting is one of the quickest ways to actually break up with sugar and reset your microbiome. I love intermittent fasting, but there are a couple issues with it. If you have insulin dysregulation, cortisol dysfunction, then it might be challenging to fast. So if you have struggled to fast, I want you to stay and listen to number 2 and number 3 of the root causes of why we have food Noise, because it's hard to fast if you're dealing with these next 2 things. And I wanted to mention 1 Corinthians 10:31, because a lot of us, we eat our feelings. And what scripture says is, whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. So we glorify God when we feed our bodies the food that he gave us to nourish ourselves with. We do not honor him and glorify him when we eat all of these processed Frankenfoods, I call them, because they're not real foods. We just took food parts and put them all together in a new way and created Frankenfoods like Frankenstein, and it's very depleting to our body. Our body actually has to expend energy to handle all of these toxins and food dyes and pesticides and preservatives. It actually has to use energy to process all of that. So you're not helping your energy levels, you're making them worse, especially when you're like eating fast food, pop, all of that kind of stuff. That's taking it to a whole nother level. Okay, so number 2, stress hijacks your cortisol hormones. So cortisol and adrenaline are really important when we talk about food noise, and chronic stress creates chronic excess cortisol production, which sticks you in a fight-or-flight Sympathetic dominant state. So your nervous system is always upregulated, ready to fight or flee or run or hide. And then you get stuck in this vicious cycle of now you're wired. And so every time you have another stressor come on, you pump out more cortisol, more adrenaline, and that keeps you stuck in fight or flight and you can't get into rest. Digest, and repair. That is sympathetic dominance. So your nervous system gets involved and you get nervous system dysregulation from this chronic cortisol-adrenaline situation. And let me just mention that stressors don't have to be emotional or mental. It doesn't have to be you fighting with your boss or your spouse, or you running late for work. It can be a gut infection. That is an internal stressor that tells your adrenal glands to produce more cortisol and your nervous system to get upregulated, and then it tells your immune system like it's time to fight and they get upregulated. So it's like this horrible domino effect that really happens. So I want you to understand that piece. It's, it's not always about the external stressors. Maybe it's An infected root canal, or like I mentioned, yeast overgrowth, things of that nature. Or hello, just the perimenopausal transition. Just that natural decline of our hormone production is a huge stressor on our body because estrogen regulates all the systems in our body, keeps our immune system calm and stable. And when estrogen continues to decline, our body gets hyper-responsive. We see an upregulation in autoimmune conditions, new diagnoses of rheumatoid, lupus, Hashimoto's, these different autoimmune conditions, they pop up at menopause. More women have shingles outbreaks and Epstein-Barr, chronic fatigue that pops up, and new things that they never dealt with before because of that decline in hormones. So these internal stressors are hijacking your nervous system, and that affects your ghrelin and your leptin. So you get on this hunger roller coaster, because if you disrupt leptin, your satiety hormone, you never feel full or satisfied. And if you disrupt ghrelin, your hunger hormone, like, grrr, ghrelin, Then you get these false hunger signals. And so it's really important that we regulate our nervous system, get our adrenals to respond more appropriately, and help calm the roller coaster of perimenopause and menopause as much as we can. Symptoms that this is one of your food noise root causes is belly fat. If you're starting to gain weight around the belly, that means your cortisol is out of control. Or if you're feeling wired and tired, like you're dragging all day and then you're up at night and you can't sleep, that's often a cortisol issue. So we need to shift your nervous system and calm down your adrenal glands. That looks like micro breaks. Put in five minutes of prayer in the morning. What I do with my Fast to Faith women, if you're not in the group, oh my goodness! You need to be in the group. But we do Lectio Divina. That is meditating on one scripture for five to ten minutes, and we journal about it, and we talk to God about that one scripture, and that puts you in a parasympathetic rest, digest, and repair state to start your day. That way you're not in fight or flight and you're not pumping out excess cortisol. Breathwork works the same way. Walking, gratitude journaling, so powerful. And let's talk about some other things. Prioritizing sleep. So sleep is a whole nother episode, but if you are getting good quality sleep, Then you can start to heal your adrenals and your cortisol production in your nervous system. That's super important. You want to limit your caffeine. Did you know every time you drink a cup of coffee, you produce cortisol? Cortisol is a response to that coffee you drink. And so if you're already making too much cortisol in the morning and then you're adding caffeine and Coffee on top of it, you're going to produce more and more. And some women, they're like, why do I feel so jittery? Why is my heart racing? Why do I have palpitations? Why am I exhausted by lunchtime? It's because they've been pumping out cortisol all morning. So try and stick to 1 cup of coffee or less and be done by noon. That will help substantially. And then the last thing is if you incorporate a fasting practice, we want to focus on the healing properties of fasting and not the deprivation. This is not about depriving you. It's about supporting your body's healing ability. That is what— that is why God created our bodies to fast, to heal your nervous system. So This reminds me of Matthew 11:28. Come to me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. If you meditate on that scripture for five minutes in the morning, just give it a try tomorrow. You will start your day so much better. Your adrenals will thank you. Your nervous system will thank you, and you will. Put a brake on that food noise. That will help so much. Okay, number three root cause for food noise: insulin resistance and blood sugar spikes. And a lot of you have this, and you don't even know it. It's estimated that 96 million Americans holy cow have prediabetes. And insulin resistance. And most of us don't know it because our doctor doesn't do the labs to check it. So you want to get a fasting insulin level and you want to get a hemoglobin A1C level. That is an average blood sugar over the past 3 months. And you want your fasting blood sugar to be like 80 to 90. So if your hemoglobin A1C is above 5, then that usually means your average blood sugar has been too high over the past 3 months. Insulin should also be around 5 or less in a fasted state. So think 5 and 5, and do it fasting at least 12 hours. If your levels are higher than that, we need to consider this as a root cause for your food noise. You are on this blood sugar rollercoaster. Coaster. So you eat— you can eat carbohydrates and they turn into sugar. You can drink them, and it doesn't have to be table sugar. It doesn't have to be straight-up candy or pop. Carbohydrates like bagels and crackers and baked goods or those fancy coffee drinks, they're all full of carbohydrates. As soon as they go into your mouth, they turn into sugar. So your blood sugar increases when you do that, and then your body has to make insulin from your pancreas, send it out, and insulin takes that sugar and knocks on the door of your cells and says, please store this or use this to produce energy. And if your cells are already full and there's too much sugar to process or store, Then your cells won't listen to the insulin signal. Or if your cells are inflamed because of a high toxic burden or gut infections or other things, they also won't hear the insulin signal. And so what your pancreas does is it makes more insulin. It says, let's flood those receptors because we're obviously not yelling loud enough and we need to yell louder. So you make more insulin to take that sugar out of the bloodstream. And eventually you create this insulin resistance where your insulin is high, your blood sugar's high, nothing is moving or going where it's supposed to. And that leads to food noise. So get those labs done, super easy to do. You don't even need a doctor to order them anymore. You can go to ultalabtests.com and get those lab tests yourself. So the other way that your blood sugar can be elevated is from cortisol. Again, when you wake up first thing in the morning, you have a natural cortisol awakening response. That's a good thing. That is how we get out of bed and we get moving for the day. It's like our body's natural cup of coffee. But we also produce glucose or sugar in our liver and put it in the bloodstream to get moving. So you don't have to eat carbohydrates or sugar in the morning for your blood sugar to increase. It is a natural thing that your body does to get you going. And then if you add the cup of coffee, it can increase it more. So I actually take care of a lot of women who tell me they don't eat at all in the morning, yet they're so stressed out that their cortisol is so high that their blood sugar is high. So I hope this correlation makes sense to you. And for some of you, this is going to be like the game-changing golden nugget. Oh my gosh, that's my problem. So there are ways to deal with this, I promise you. We have to get off the stress roller coaster. We have to get realistic and evaluate what is your body even doing. So I say, test, don't guess. Let's figure it out. Let's look at that hemoglobin A1C and fasting insulin, get a 24-hour cortisol pattern, see what your cortisol is doing in the morning and throughout the day, and then we can create a plan to help you shift, okay? So high insulin levels, they lead to blood sugar crashes. So your blood sugar can be really high And then it can drop really low. And if you're like most Americans, you are eating every 2 hours or so. You're putting candy in your mouth, or you're sipping on a pop or a soda. You're sipping coffee with stuff in it all throughout the day. You're constantly topping off your blood sugar. It's staying high, and your pancreas is constantly producing insulin. And anytime it starts to drop, you feel hangry, you feel irritable, you, you are like, oh gosh, I don't like how I feel. So you go and you grab more sugar, and that is a setup for disease and a setup for disaster. But that is how I lived for 40 years of my life. And, and I just want to put this caveat: kids can live that way because they're going Nonstop. At least, you know, my daughter, she's busy, physically active from dusk until dawn, and so she burns through all those carbohydrates she puts in her body. But if you're not physically active and burning through all of that, then you have to store it as fat. And the first place it goes is your liver, around your vital organs, which increases your risk of heart disease, and that gives you that muffin top that you don't want. So there are ways to get you back into sync, and that's the whole idea around the Fast to Faith program, is leading with healthy fats and protein to get you out of this sugar-burning mode. I've talked about this on multiple episodes, but we want to increase that insulin sensitivity again, get those blood sugars down. That will start to calm down your food noise. And here's some encouraging words from 1 Corinthians 6:12. Everything is permissible for me, but not everything is beneficial. I will not be mastered by anything. So when you regulate your body's chemistry, your food stops being your master and it becomes your fuel, meaning you can eat whatever you want, but that doesn't mean you should. It's time to have some discernment and really be intentional around how you're nourishing your body and what you're putting in your mouth. And I'm going to give you this tough love because I did it myself and it shifted everything. So I know you can do it. I broke up with gluten, with sugar, all the things, and my life has never been better. The 4th reason Behind our food noise is actually emotional hunger and spiritual hunger. So many cravings are actually emotional needs. I mentioned this at the beginning— comfort, peace, connection, control. We're looking for all of those things. We're lonely, we're frustrated, we're overwhelmed, we're too busy. All of that, those are emotional needs not being met. And when we numb with food, which we often do, we don't get to hear from our soul. We aren't asking, we're not giving it what it's really asking for. Our soul, our spirit wants rest, love, reassurance, connection, all of those things. And we numb Those aching feelings with food. And unfortunately, it only lasts 20 to 30 minutes. So that's why we end up wanting to eat all the time. And, and we just have this food noise going on in the background. So again, I love Fast to Faith because fasting quiets that food noise long enough for you to hear your heart and ask God to shift your heart and make you more Christlike. And you can actually start to hear from God again and nourish your soul and give it what it needs. So here's what you can do before you eat. You feel the hunger, you go reach for something, pause and ask yourself, am I hungry or am I hurting? And then journal your way through those emotions. You'll be amazed at what comes out onto the paper. You will shock yourself, I promise you. Give it a try. It is so worth it. And then ask God to help you through this, help to give you the strength to overcome your fleshly desires. If you can start to replace those emotional eating moments with spiritual nourishment and, and God and his love and his presence and his joy and his peace, then you will shift. That is why God says in the Bible to pray incessantly. All throughout the day, nonstop. A great thing that I love to do, I not only meditate on scripture and study the Bible and learn the stories to see how God works through people's lives, but I— oh, there goes my estrogen drop. I just had a brain fart. I memorize scriptures. I memorize the word of God so that when I am in a time of struggle, I can pull that up and start speaking it over my body and over my mind and get control over those fleshly desires, over those cravings. So just even 5 scriptures that feel powerful to you, if you memorize them, that is like, um, a sword. It is your protection. God tells you to gear up and To guard yourself and guard your heart, and that is how you do it. So Matthew 4:4 is an amazing scripture to memorize. Man shall not live on bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. That's an easy one. I know you can memorize that, and if you do, and you start speaking it over yourself when you hear that food noise. And ask God to change your mind. Renew my mind, Lord, like you tell us to in Romans 12:2. You command us to renew our mind. He will do it. You will stop that food noise. I I promise you. Okay, we're gonna tie it up with this. I created a three-step faith-fueled reset. There is a little guide that you can download. It's free, and it's going to teach you how to fast with intention, how to feed your body with purpose, and how to faith it forward. Okay, so we're gonna fast intentionally. A lot of us fast unintentionally, meaning we just forget to eat because we're so busy and life just life's on us. That's not what we're gonna do. We're gonna have control over our body and our decisions of when and what we're going to eat. And then give your body and spirit grace and space to heal. And then we're going to feed with purpose. We're going to choose faith foods, I call them. These are foods that God has given us since the beginning of time to nourish our bodies, not Frankenfoods. And then lastly, we're going to faith it. You're going to replace those noise cravings, those food noise cravings, with the stillness of prayer and truth. I have a whole faith it method. You could see it if you're watching the video. F is fast for focus. A is ask for guidance, ask God. Ink it for clarity. Thank God for what he hasn't even given you yet. Hear his plans for you. Initiate action and trust his timing. I go through the Faith It method in my book, in the Fast to Faith program. It is so powerful once you Put it to work. Okay, so some journaling prompts. You can come back to this later, and that's why I love the podcast because the recording is always there. So tomorrow morning or this afternoon, when you have that food noise, you can journal and ask yourself, "What am I craving right now? What might this really mean?" Where do I feel empty or out of control? And how can I invite God into my hunger? Journal on those things. It will be eye-opening. Okay, and then meditate on Psalm 46:10. Here's another one to write down: Be still and know that I am God. When the noise gets loud, stillness Is your medicine. God will heal you, I promise. Okay, so let's close this up because food noise isn't your fault; it's just a message. Your body's trying to tell you it's out of balance, and your spirit is reminding you it's time to return to peace. So I hope this blesses you. Download the food noise guide, follow it, consider joining us. In the Fast to Faith Sisterhood. We would love to support you and give you nutritional guidance and all of the support for your gut, your hormones, all of the things, pray with you, help you get unstuck. And let's end with prayer today because I'm just, I'm feeling so convicted about this because I have overcome food noise and I know that you can. You absolutely can. You just have to do the work and invite God to do it with you. So let's pray. Lord, help us tune out the noise of these cravings, this chaos, this confusion. Help us tune into your voice, the voice of truth, of peace, and of healing. We're so grateful for you, for you, Lord. We praise you in Jesus' name. Amen. Thank you, ladies. I will see you next week. Go be Christ's hands to serve.