Dr. Tabatha BarberI teach women how to fast their way to a faith-filled, hormonally balanced, fabulous life!

Stress Steals Your Hormones & Causes Diabetes #shorts

1 Apr 2026 · 2 min

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1:58

In this short video, Dr. Tabatha Barber explains how chronic stress, especially in women, can silently drive hormonal imbalances that lead to pre‑diabetes or diabetes. She notes that many women underestimate their stress levels, but objective data from a DUTCH hormone test often reveals elevated cortisol. Elevated cortisol signals the liver to release more glucose, keeping blood sugar high, promoting belly fat, and increasing diabetes risk. Barber emphasizes that managing stress isn’t just about diet; it requires shifting the nervous system from a sympathetic (fight‑or‑flight) state to a parasympathetic (rest‑and‑digest) state. She outlines that the Healthy Her program teaches nervous‑system regulation, hormone balance, and inflammation reduction as core strategies to counteract stress‑induced metabolic dysfunction.

Chapters

We can see women go into like pre-diabetes, diabetes from their stress. Well, and women don't actually realize how much their stress— how much stress they have. So sometimes they're like, well, I'm not that stressed, you know. They think it's normal and they just keep up-leveling that normal. So I think that's what a lot of times we see is women do the Dutch test and they realize like, crap, that is stressing me out that I have kids stuff going on in my work and my husband. And so then they realize they've got to make some changes. So because we, we could look at her, you know, we could look at you and say you're stressed, and you're like, no, I'm not. But like, the data tells you the truth.
Cortisol tells your liver that you need more sugar, more blood sugar to do whatever you're about to do. So your body thinks you're fighting or running, and so it's constantly pumping sugar into your bloodstream. And so we can see women go into like pre-diabetes, diabetes from their stress. So if you have a blood sugar issue, you have got to get control of your cortisol production, your stress. Like it's a game changer and it shows up as belly fat. If you have belly fat, if you have the muffin top, the tire, whatever you wanna call it, it's not just about changing your diet. It really is about, How can I navigate the stress through my day? Because it's not going to go away magically, right? But there are ways to pull yourself out of the sympathetic nervous system, which drives that cortisol production, into the parasympathetic, which decreases that cortisol production. So that is a huge part of what we teach and focus on in Healthy Her is nervous system regulation. Hormone balance, like systemic healing of— and decrease of inflammation.