#236: The Truth About Sugar: Uncovering the Secrets to Real Health

Get ready for an eye-opening episode of Fast to Faith! We're going deep into fasting, thyroid health, and a few surprising things you've probably never thought about with your dental wellness and diet. Curious how these all connect? Or what they reveal about your overall health? Let's just say, you'll want to buckle up for this one.

Here’s what’s on the table:

• Fasting: Can it really reverse health issues like diabetes? And how does breaking a fast the right way play into all this?
• Metabolic Flexibility: Are mood swings and energy crashes your body’s way of asking for help?
• Faith and Wellness: How does faith tie into all this? Imagine walking on water like Peter—what does that have to do with your health journey?
• Dental Health: Wondering how your teeth and sugar fit into the bigger health puzzle? You might be surprised by what’s lurking behind tooth decay.
• Thyroid & Gluten: Could a few bites of bread be sabotaging your thyroid?
• The Protein Trap: High-protein diets are everywhere, but are they hiding something you need to know about your gut and kidneys?

And what about sugar? This sweet stuff goes way beyond what you might think.

If you’re ready to connect the dots between faith, food, and a healthier you—this is an episode you can’t miss. 

Thank You for Listening!

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Find all these transformative resources and more at FasttoFaith.com. Start your journey today!

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Transcript

Dr. Tabatha [00:00:00]:
Yay. I'm so pumped. Oh, my goodness. I totally appreciate you being here and giving me your attention and focus. I don't take that lightly at all. Like, it's a huge honor. And what we need to talk about today is some of our habits. Okay? A lot of us during the pandemic started reaching for a glass of wine or a cocktail in the evenings.

Dr. Tabatha [00:00:26]:
We were under a lot of stress or we were bored. And those habits, for many of us, have continued over the past couple years. And now it's kind of standard of like, oh, I just have two glasses of wine while I watch Netflix in the evening, or I have dessert every night after dinner. Or right now, it's pumpkin spice latte season. So it's like, well, I have to get it. It's only here for two months, and I don't have to just get it once. I have to get it, like, every single day for two months. And I'm here to give you the honest, bad truth.

Dr. Tabatha [00:01:05]:
That one pumpkin spice latte has 390 calories and 50 grams of sugar. So you're like, whatever, that's not a big deal. But here's the spoiler alert, you guys. You're only supposed to have 25 grams of sugar a day. 25 grams. And you just drank 50 with that morning latte. So you've already doubled it, and you haven't even started your day. And that's okay every once in a while, but when that becomes a daily habit, especially in the morning time, it's setting you up to crave sugar for the rest of the day.

Dr. Tabatha [00:01:44]:
So then your brain, because your brain gets addicted to sugar, it actually produces morphine, like chemicals, so does gluten in your brain, and has you looking for sugar for the rest of the day. And so it just sets you up on a downward spiral. But we really do need to start breaking up with sugar and being more cognizant of it because it literally is in everything. And it's added large in part because of the no fat, low fat, you know, diet of the 90s. When they removed fat from food, they had to make it taste good because no longer tasted good. And so they, like, doused it in sugar. And so now we have this elevated level of sugar, and our taste buds have changed so much that we require more and more sugar just to be satisfied and to keep that sugar addiction going. And so the food industry knows exactly what they're doing.

Dr. Tabatha [00:02:45]:
Check. Check your ketchup bottles, your salad dressing bottles. I looked at my tuna fish packet and There was sugar in my tuna fish. Like, come on, are we serious right now? They put sugar in everything. If you just sit back and count up the amount of sugar, one day you will be in shock. And it's really sad. It's not a good shock. So here's a fact that I put in the book.

Dr. Tabatha [00:03:13]:
In the 1800s, a single person ate two pounds of sug year. Like I as a person would eat two pounds throughout the year. Now, in this day and age, one person eats almost 60 pounds per year. So you potentially are consuming 60 pounds of sugar a year. It is the leading driver of inflammation, of gut dysbiosis, and those things lead to diabetes, heart disease, stroke, erectile dysfunction, Alzheimer's. So these chronic diseases, we have created them as a society. And, you know, I'm not asking you to feel bad or even feel guilty because it really is an addiction that you didn't know you were signing up for. Like, we know partly with alcohol what we're signing up for when we grab a drink, but we don't know when we're eating these quote unquote foods from the store.

Dr. Tabatha [00:04:15]:
We think they're just food, they're just dinner, they're just lunch, but they're not. They're like disease in a box in a bag. And we don't realize that. So I am asking you to just start to investigate, start to look at the labels, start to educate yourself on all this. And luckily, we're doing this call at a time where the food industry is on display. It is being called out. The government is having to really answer for their decisions and their actions. There's somebody called the food babe who is very powerful in social media, and she shares all of the toxins and the garbage that are in our food.

Dr. Tabatha [00:05:06]:
And she has been lobbying and testifying in front of Congress for the past couple weeks, and things are getting banned. It's pretty, pretty incredible. So she's actually gotten things banned that have been banned in other countries for a long, long time. So bromine is a great example. Bromine is a halogen. So halogens, if you took chemistry class in high school or college, are like way over on. Right on the periodic table. And they're all in a fancy row, and they all have kind of the same chemical properties.

Dr. Tabatha [00:05:44]:
They do lots of cool things. So there's like chlorine, which we use to disinfect our water. Iodine, which we use to disinfect in the operating room. We put it on your skin and things like that. There's bromine. These Halogens and fluorine. Fluoride. These halogens are basically used to disinfect stuff, to kill stuff.

Dr. Tabatha [00:06:11]:
They're pretty strong, and in tiny amounts, our body can use them for good things. Iodine is actually the main chemical needed to make your thyroid hormone. So your thyroid makes T4, which means there's four Iodines in your thyroid hormone molecule, and then it gets converted into T3, which is three Iodines. Unfortunately, those other halogens can interfere with your body's ability to make thyroid hormone because it will block and sit in the iodine receptor spot and compete for that area. And so then you can't make your thyroid hormone appropriately. We have an epidemic of women with hypothyroidism in this country, and we tell them, oh, you just have a sluggish thyroid. Oh, your thyroid's just lazy. Your thyroid just doesn't want to function anymore.

Dr. Tabatha [00:07:08]:
And I'm here to tell you, our body doesn't just stop working for no reason. Our body doesn't just poop out on us. That's not how our body functions. There is something preventing you from having an optimal thyroid function. And for me, as a child, fluoride was a huge one in chlorine, because that is when fluoride came out into the school system. And we passed it around every Friday and we switched it in our mouths. And I used to drink it because I thought it tasted good. We had fluorine added to our water because I had well water.

Dr. Tabatha [00:07:47]:
I lived up in the country, and so by the time I was 17, I had a thyroid disorder. And it wasn't because my thyroid was lazy or my body didn't know how to function. So bromine is actually, you know, I said, like, it's used for all kinds of nasty stuff. It's a flame retardant and an insect repellent. It treats the water, but we put it in food as brominated vegetable oil because it's denser than water, and it's used to emulsify and keep things separate. So the most popular places it's in is like, citrus drinks, like Mountain Dew sports drinks. All the orange drinks especially, they put it in baked goods, all the boxed pizza crusts and pastries and muffins and breads and crackers and bagels, cereals. So that was my diet growing up.

Dr. Tabatha [00:08:46]:
I lived on these. This diet full of bromine, full of sugar deplete, and devoid of iodine because I didn't eat any seafood or shellfish or any of that stuff. And that might be part of why you're struggling. You know, we're like, man, my weight just won't budge. My thyroid is sluggish. My doctor says it's not bad enough. I don't need medication. It might be that you just need to get something like bromine out of your diet.

Dr. Tabatha [00:09:18]:
But here's the cool thing. Since, like two months ago or three months ago, the FDA has decided they're going to require this to no longer be used in food. They're. They said it, it's not safe. England, Canada, and China of all places, don't even allow it. Hello. But we have for all these years. But things are starting to shift.

Dr. Tabatha [00:09:43]:
But I encourage you, don't wait for the government to change their mind and regulate things. The government does not have your health in mind, unfortunately. So get educated. Look for potassium bromate or brominated vegetable oil, things like that. The easiest thing to do honestly is to just not eat out of boxes and bags as much as you can. The more you can eat from the periphery of the grocery store, like, stay in the cold section, the refrigerator, the freezer, the deli. As soon as you start going into the grocery store, into the aisles, and things last on the shelves for a long time. The longer they last on the shelf, the shorter you're going to last.

Dr. Tabatha [00:10:31]:
Like, that's how it works. It will kill you sooner. So I personally don't love getting fluoride treatments, especially if you have a thyroid condition. If you're on medications, it's probably going to counteract it and not make much of a difference. But if you aren't on thyroid medication and you know you're struggling, it might be a contributor. So it's something to consider. We thought that we need to make teeth stronger, and that's why they were getting cavities and having all these problems. And it turns out it was because we were putting sugar in everything.

Dr. Tabatha [00:11:10]:
And there's certain bacteria that live in our mouth that thrive on sugar. And between that bacteria and the sugar molecule, they drill little holes into your teeth. So it's more, again, about your microbiome and about your food that you're eating than it is. I mean, think about it. We didn't have toothbrushes and dentists for thousands of years. Like, this is a newfound problem. It's. It's crazy.

Dr. Tabatha [00:11:37]:
So quickly, I'll answer this about thyroid nodules. Thyroid nodules are almost always an autoimmune response. Your own immune system is attacking your thyroid. Your immune system should never attack your own body. It should attack foreign things, things coming from outside of your body. So if your body is attacking itself, that means your immune system is confused and angry and it's because you have a gut problem and you have something triggering it to be angry and confused. Gluten is the protein found in wheat, one of many proteins found in wheat, and it is one of the biggest triggers for a thyroid attack. It actually looks a little bit like a protein in your thyroid.

Dr. Tabatha [00:12:25]:
So your immune system, every time it sees gluten in your diet, it attacks your thyroid. So that is one of the quickest ways to calm your thyroid attack down is to get rid of gluten. So you guys, this is the kind of stuff that you need to know and I need to teach you, but I don't have like all this free time to do it. I'm trying to give you as much as I possibly can, but you need to know this. And honestly, that is why God has put it on my heart to start a faith based health coaching academy. Because you don't need more doctors, you don't need more prescriptions. You need the knowledge that health coaches have from a functional perspective, from a faith based perspective, from a truth perspective. And so, you know, I, I just launched this coaching program and I'm still in awe of what God is doing.

Dr. Tabatha [00:13:29]:
I don't even see the full picture, but I know that I've been called to share this knowledge on a deeper level. And so like, we already have over a dozen women who are going to be going through the coaching certification here starting in a couple weeks. And I can't wait to teach them all of this and just like give them my knowledge. Obviously I'm not going to try and like overload them because it can be overwhelming. But if you get some of these basic foundational principles, like, oh, my thyroid doesn't just misbehave, there's actually a root cause reason. And if we can go through and figure out what that is, like you could help yourself and your friends and your family members. Like, I've had so many patients who go through, they, they go through my comprehensive program and they're like, but my husband, but my kid, you know, my daughter, my best friend, my mom. And so it's like, if you learn these principles, there's so much you can do to help the other people in your life.

Dr. Tabatha [00:14:38]:
So I just so excited about all of this. It's so good. It's like incredible. Okay, sorry. I'm getting on track, a little bit off track, but I want to call on Terry to share with us because Terry was a patient, and she is not even finished. Like, she's still working through all of this, but she knows God has called her to join the coaching certification program because she's gonna. She's blessed, and she's gonna go out and be a blessing. She's gonna help other people see these basic, easy things, like, you just need to change what you're eating.

Dr. Tabatha [00:15:16]:
You need to look out for sugar. You need to kill off some bacteria in your gut that have been thriving from all that sugar. I would love to know why you decided to become a certified fast to faith coach. Like, you were already getting help from me as a doctor. But it's like, are you just env. Like having this knowledge for yourself and being able to share it? Is that what you're like, really loving?

Terry [00:15:44]:
Well, I do love that, but also, it's been laid on my heart way before I even found your practice, that there's a ministry to be had in helping God's people have the best health they can so that they can serve God. You know, health, women's health especially, has been a special interest of mine since I began my health journey several years ago with a whole lot of stuff that I've unraveled. And I've been working with naturopaths, with functional practitioners for a long time. But. And this is the way I've kind of described it is I have had a. I've had, like, all the puzzle pieces. I needed to put the puzzle together, but it's like they were turned over on the black, on the dark side with no picture on it. So the practice and all the information you share and the resources you have provided have helped me flip those puzzle pieces over so that I can see how they're supposed to fit together.

Terry [00:16:52]:
And, I mean, I would have probably signed up for the coaching program just for the knowledge, but I feel like God is calling me to help heal his people. I meet women left and right who are battling chronic issues that I believe can probably be reversed. And I hate seeing women seek more and more medication. What I see is, I mean, I have friends. Friends that when we travel together, carry a toiletry bag full of medicine with no toiletries in it. And, you know, it is. I'm taking this medication, but this medication causes me to have this. So I have to take this medication.

Terry [00:17:49]:
And, you know, I do everything that I can do not to have to take a medication. Number one, I do not believe that. I mean, I believe medications are for chronic issues. I'm not chronic issues. For acute issues and for Me to have to take a medication every day for the rest of my life. I can't imagine the havoc it wreaks on my kidneys, my liver and all of that. And so I truly believe that pursuing good health is not necessarily going to increase my longevity of life, but it's going to increase the quality that I have for whatever time I have available here on this earth. And I feel like that is me being a good steward with my health that allows me to be a good steward with my time in order to serve God.

Dr. Tabatha [00:18:50]:
You are such a beautiful soul, Terry. Thank you. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. So much good stuff right there. And I know that you're going to be an amazing coach, but you hit on something super important. You said, like, I almost did it just for the knowledge, for the information. And like, that's what God was talking to me about this morning was He's.

Dr. Tabatha [00:19:16]:
He was saying, like, there are women on this call who, they don't necessarily want to go out and change the world being a health coach, or they're not feeling comfortable or confident enough to step into that yet. But keep showing them that they can at least gain the knowledge. They can have the, you know, knowledge and the power to transform other people's lives while they're transforming their own. Because I used to always just focus on, like, let me help one woman. Let's do the comprehensive healing. Let's turn all over the puzzle pieces. I loved your analogy, but really, like, if you could do that while becoming certified as coach, why wouldn't you just go that route and have all that information and have the certification and have the coaching and business pieces behind it, just in case that is what you're being called to do. So.

Dr. Tabatha [00:20:21]:
Oh, I just love that so much. So let's just talk a little bit more about blood sugar. It's super important because I looked at the American Diabetes association website yesterday. I wanted to see if they've changed because they are notorious for telling diabetics to eat three meals and two to three snacks a day. Essentially, they want them eating from dusk until dawn every couple hours to maintain their blood sugar, quote, unquote. This is the absolute worst recommendation you can give a diabetic. So guess what has happened since they really implemented that? The number of diabetics has continued to increase and their control has continued to worsen. They're requiring more medications, they're very expensive.

Dr. Tabatha [00:21:16]:
You've heard of the thousand dollar injectables. And so at this point, 38 million Americans have type 2 diabetes and 97 million are living with pre diabetes. That's one in eight. So what I want you to understand is that diabetes is one of the leading drivers contributing to weight loss, resistance, mood swings, fatigue, bladder leakage, trouble sleeping, waking at 2 or 3am, issues with your vision, vision changes, brain fog, inability to finish a thought, heart attack, neuropathy, dementia, and here's the kicker. It's all reversible, it's all preventable. So I really want you to embrace the idea that you're not your diagnosis, you're not destined for anything. Just because you're trending that way. Pre diabetes does not mean you're going to have diabetes.

Dr. Tabatha [00:22:20]:
It will if you continue to do what society is telling you to do. But if you choose to step out and do different and, and believe in your body the way God created it to function, then you're going to reverse that and you're not going to get diabetes. So fasting is actually a God given superpower to heal. And I learned this as a first year surgical resident. So, you know, I would do surgery on a patient, the first order I would write to the nurse is npo. Do not feed my patient until I tell you to. Because I knew and was trained that eating prevents healing. So fasting is the quickest way for your body to send resources to the area that needs to be healed.

Dr. Tabatha [00:23:13]:
And sometimes, you know, a mess needs to get cleaned up before the healing process can even happen. And so it needs a lot of resources. And so you get tired, you need to rest more, you don't need to eat. If you're super sick, you don't even want to eat. So I want you to understand that. And fasting is free. And it's freeing because like I talked about earlier, like the mental clarity that you gain from burning ketones, it's so good. But here's the thing.

Dr. Tabatha [00:23:46]:
Fasting isn't intuitive in this day and age because we have lost our metabolic flexibility. We have really mucked up how our body is designed to function. So our body's like drowning and struggling and we really have to help it reset, hit the reset button. So if you're like, I can't fast, that, that would be impossible to go without food, or I get hangry, jittery, shaky. All those things you need it the most, like, those are signs that you have lost your metabolic flexibility. So this is one of the biggest things that I teach in the coaching certification program is how to regain your metabolic flexibility. Because if you can go between eating fats and protein and carbohydrates and keep your blood sugar and your weight stable. Like, you win.

Dr. Tabatha [00:24:46]:
You win because your moods aren't all over the place, your energy levels aren't all over the place. Your weight and you know, needing to get different size clothes. Like, none of that's happening when you have control over your metabolic flexibility. So, you know, really fasting is the gateway for all of that. So what I would love for you to do is a lot of you already said that you do fasting, so I want to see, like, how long is your typical eating window? And here's the kicker. A lot of you aren't eating enough healthy foods when you are eating. Like, some of you got the fasting down, but then you go to eat and you feel bloated or tired or horrible when you eat. So now you're just avoiding eating because you're not digesting properly or you're eating the wrong foods and so you're not being nourished by it.

Dr. Tabatha [00:25:42]:
And it's a constant struggle. So a lot of times it's about learning what to eat when you are eating, how to break your fast appropriately, how to break it with fats and proteins versus sugar. So I want you to understand that when you start with carbohydrates, you're just going to be on the sugar roller coaster all the time. If you're focused on fats and protein, you're going to regain that metabolic flexibility and be able to nourish your body when you are eating and easily do a longer fast and do this feast famine cycle that I love teaching about, because that is where the magic happens, especially for women. So when we talk about fasting, the other component of it is the faith peace. So we have another superpower that we just don't tap into enough, and that is faith. So I was thinking about the story of Peter when Jesus asked him to walk on water, if you want to read about it. Matthew chapter 14.

Dr. Tabatha [00:26:52]:
So, you know, Jesus sent the disciples out into the Sea of Galilee. He said, I'll be there later, you know, I'll see you in a little while. And then a storm broke out. And he later came walking on the water. And they thought Jesus was a ghost. They couldn't believe what they saw. And Peter said, if it's you, like, let me walk on the water. And Peter walked on the water until he noticed the wind.

Dr. Tabatha [00:27:28]:
When he got distracted, he started sinking. And he begged Jesus to save him. And of course Jesus did. But that story is just such an important reminder that we are often not walking in faith. We're not trusting, we're saying, okay, God, I trust you. Here's my new medication, let's let me fix this. And then we immediately doubt and we look for reasons to doubt. And when we don't focus on the faith, we focus on the doubts.

Dr. Tabatha [00:28:05]:
Then we don't walk on water. We don't get the power that God wants to give us. Like it literally is in you. He has given it to you, but you're not using it, you're not tapping into it because you're not believing, you're not activating that faith. Does that make sense? Like as soon as you take your eyes off of God, you start to sink. And so if you're like trying to walk with God on this faith journey, you got to keep your eyes on him. You have to keep trusting and keep that faith. It's like absolutely essential.

Dr. Tabatha [00:28:43]:
And so it's not selfish. God wants to have a relationship with you. He wants to give you all the desires of your heart. Like all this is biblical. He wants to heal you. You know, he asked the paralyzed man who laid by the pool of water for decades wanting to like miraculously be healed, do you want to heal? Like there's a big differentiator between yeah, I want it, and yeah, I'm willing to believe enough to make it happen. Like there's a big difference there. So do you want to heal? Do you want to be well? Do you want to thrive and fit into your clothes and feel good and have as much Energy as your 13 year old? Yeah, I do.

Dr. Tabatha [00:29:30]:
And I'm going to do what it takes. When I figured that out, like everything shifted. And here's the cool thing, it's a domino effect. Once you start taking control of your health, all of a sudden you're like, man, I need to get control of my relationship with my partner or my finances or my dogs. Like, that's my still ongoing thing I'm trying to get control of. But like, do you understand what I mean? Like all of a sudden you realize like a lot of this stuff that we feel like we don't have any choice in the matter, we actually do. But we've put God in a box. We haven't allowed that power to shine out in our lives.

Dr. Tabatha [00:30:18]:
And so like, let's partner with God and let's ask him to come in and do this with us because he wants to get all the glory. And so he's going to heal you. He's going to do amazing things. He's going to turn around your finances and your Health and all of that stuff. But we have free will. He wants us to want him. He wants us to ask for help. He wants us to trust him.

Dr. Tabatha [00:30:45]:
Of course, this is not as easy as it sounds. Nothing ever is. But it's absolutely worth it. So we still need to quickly talk about fitness or functional movement. God created us to move our bodies throughout the day. If you think about the time of Jesus, like, they chopped all their vegetables. They carried their water from the well. They, like, did all this physical labor.

Dr. Tabatha [00:31:12]:
And now I don't even chop my vegetables. I buy them chopped up. Like, I literally don't have to move my body at all if I really don't want to. And that is not how our body is created. Our body is created to move regularly, so we have to be cognizant of that. And I have to, like, thank goodness for my dogs. They make me get up every hour. As much as I feel frustrated that they're quote, unquote, distracting me, my body does need to move, and my dogs are smarter than me when it comes to that.

Dr. Tabatha [00:31:42]:
And they're like, let's go, mom. We. You got to move your. Your body or you're going to become, like, decrepit. So I really just want us to get back to how we were created to be. If you are not doing something every single day with your physical body, you are on the fast track to disease and decline. Like, they have deemed sitting as the new smoking. It really does kill us.

Dr. Tabatha [00:32:09]:
So find something that you love. Find something you enjoy. You should not be stiff and in pain. You know, I said I almost had to have a sunken back surgery, but now I run and do Pilates and lift weights and do all of these things with no back pain because I've figured out what my body does need and what it enjoys and what I needed to remove from it. So that's all the kind of stuff that we get deep into with the coaching program. I just, like, I just want to teach women all of this stuff. And moving your body is actually good for your mental health. We produce chemicals when we physically move our bodies, and it's like us taking out the mental trash.

Dr. Tabatha [00:32:58]:
So if I don't work out for a few days, like, the trash starts to build up and I can't even think clearly. I can't handle stress. I just feel like I'm drowning all the things and then I go work out and I'm like, oh, I took the trash out. I feel so much better. So I'm not saying you have to go lift heavy weights and eat 500 grams of protein. Like, there's so many fading recommendations out there right now. Fad diets, fad workouts. We don't have to be extreme.

Dr. Tabatha [00:33:29]:
Like you can lose weight just cleaning up and managing your diet, but you can't get strong and protect your bones and all of that without moving your body. So exercise is really not the best way to lose weight. We, we thought it was when we watched Biggest Loser and watched people like almost kill themselves. But losing weight and maintaining a healthy weight is based on your diet and your toxic burden. Moving your body is for longevity and for physical and mental health, but it's not for weight control. I hope that makes sense. It's like another mind blowing truth, but it's true. Like when I want to lose weight, it's not because I need to exercise more.

Dr. Tabatha [00:34:20]:
It's because I need to stop adding garbage to, you know, my mouth, usually in the form of drinks that are like just pointless calories, pointless sugar, things like that. So sometimes we just need a wake up call. I needed a lot of slaps in the face, I'll tell you. Like, this stuff was shocking to me when I learned it as a conventional OB gyn. Absolutely shocking. So just know that these high protein recommendations are coming from women who work out for one and a half to two hours a day a lot of the times who are very physically fit and in shape and they're not trying to lose weight. Because even though protein is healthy, proteins are like little building blocks. I think of Legos.

Dr. Tabatha [00:35:16]:
Legos are a bunch of different blocks. They come in different colors, different sizes. Those are amino acids. Amino acids build all together into different shapes and forms called proteins. We eat them, we break them down back into their little single blocks of amino acids. And then our body uses those amino acids to make new proteins and new enzymes and new things out of those amino acids. So your body can only do that so much. It needs other ingredients to, to make and break proteins and to process them and to utilize them.

Dr. Tabatha [00:35:56]:
And so if you are eating 150 grams of protein and you're not going to the gym and lifting heavy weights and tearing those muscles to the point of muscle fatigue so that they need to be repaired and new proteins built, all that protein's sitting around and your body's got to do something with it and it's going to store it and you're going to gain weight. And so there's a trend right now, just eat more protein and you'll lose weight. And that's just, I Would love to hear a woman who said that they do that. And it worked because it's not true. Like, unless you're really working out and you're using that protein, you're probably not going to lose weight, and you're probably going to have a little strain on your kidneys trying to process all that protein and everything else. And here's the bigger kicker, you guys. We have an epidemic of gut issues. So a lot of women are eating all this protein or drinking these protein shakes or protein bars.

Dr. Tabatha [00:36:57]:
They're not even digesting it properly. They feel like crap. They're more bloated, they're more fatigued, because we need to heal our guts. So although I agree we don't eat enough protein as women in general, overall, going to the extreme is not the answer. The answer is healing our guts and getting rid of the other stuff that's causing our gut issues, like chronic alcohol use, too much sugar in the diet, gluten, those types of things, and then teach women how to incorporate protein in a way that they're actually going to absorb it and utilize it appropriately. I don't want to scare anybody, but there is evidence that if you have pre cancerous and cancerous microscopic cells in your body, cancer does use amino acids and proteins to grow their cancers. So you have to be careful that you're not just like, oh, let me just do more of this, because it's the trend today. And I say that very respectfully, because some of these are my colleagues and my mentors that are preaching this, and I get where they're coming from, that they're coming from a good place of.

Dr. Tabatha [00:38:14]:
They really want you to maintain your muscle mass and protect your bones going into the second half of your life, because that is the stuff that kills us. But we have to be careful and just comprehensive about what we're doing and not just blindly follow the pack. Like, that's not what we're called to do. We're called to questions like, oh, does this make sense? I don't know. So that's my two cents on that. Yeah, I could just go on for hours. So here is my thing for you guys. I asked you to replace one of your habits, but I have a question that I want you to think about for the rest of the today.

Dr. Tabatha [00:38:54]:
Like, if you're suffering from any stuff like headaches, eczema, bloating, fatigue, anxiety, depression, weight loss, resistance, or if you have an autoimmune condition, I would love for you to really commit to six weeks of breaking up with the most inflammatory foods out there. Gluten is number one. Sugar and gluten are kind of equal. You might even want to add dairy and soy in there, but that might be 90% of your problem. And so I would encourage you to talk to God about that and see if you could give yourself six weeks of just the easiest thing. What I found is like, I'm just not going to have grains for six weeks. If you don't have grains for six weeks, then you miss out on a ton of the added sugars. Unless you're like a candy, straight up candy fiend.

Dr. Tabatha [00:39:55]:
But like, make a choice. Make a decision that feels good for you because I have no doubt that those symptoms will completely be gone or really start to dissipate, depending on what they are like. We hear this all the time in our practice, so I would encourage you to consider a six week elimination. And six weeks, we choose that because that's how long it takes the immune system to calm down and stop being confused. But it's also how long you really need to establish a new habit. So by the time you get through that six week elimination, you could be totally broken up with sugar. Think about that, have a private conversation with God, and just start to love your body back into a healthy state. So thank you, ladies.

Dr. Tabatha [00:40:49]:
I truly appreciate you so much.