$200K Keynote Framework

You are a whole person. You cannot separate the different aspects of the whole you. Body, mind, spirit, diet, environment. They come together to make you. Each part is important. Each part impacts the others, and of course, and they all interact to make you. Today's guest is Dr. Tabatha. She is a board certified OB-JYN, and she has shifted. She spent 20 years in Western medicine, and then she is now shifted to helping people with their whole health, specifically focusing on the spiritual health and how that impacts hormones and weight and stress and everything. I hope that you enjoy this episode. She also interviewed me on her podcast, which is Fast to Faith, so you can head over there and listen to both parts of this interview. Another episode you might want to listen to is Episode 40 of Health with Hashimoto's. In that episode, I talk about spiritual stress, and what it is, how it impacts your overall health, and different things you can do. And that is regardless of if your spiritual beliefs match with mine. I talk about it from a broad perspective. That is Episode 40. I will have a link down in the show notes to that episode, as well as to Dr. Tabatha's podcast, Fast to Faith. Hashimoto's is an autoimmune condition. That means your immune system is attacking your thyroid. But knowing that is only the beginning. This summer series is built in three phases. Phase one was understanding what's happening in your body. Phase two is learning how to think about what you're learning, and Phase three is building your own personal discernment framework with support. So most women with Hashimoto's have a lot of information. But what they're missing is a filter, a way to evaluate what applies to them specifically. That is what this series is now designed to give you. If you want to start with a foundation, check with the show notes for Hashimoto's decoded, new name, Hashimoto's decoded thyroid or immune. In less than one hour, I will walk you through the most common causes and help you identify where to focus. My name is Esther Junkin. I'm a registered nurse, holistic health educator, and the host of this podcast, Health with Hashimoto's. I believe your health is a blend of five interconnected areas. Body, mind, spirit, diet, and environment. Let's work through this together. Welcome, Dr. Tabitha. I have a quote from your book that I want to ask you about. It says, "Intense prayer and meditation permanently changes numerous structures and functions in the brain, altering your values and the way you perceive reality." Now, you are a doctor and you went through all the classical doctor training. They don't teach you to incorporate faith into your practice and talking to your patients about their spiritual health. Can you tell us, "What changed? Why do you now do that?" Oh my goodness. This is really an important thing. I know every woman listening has their own unique struggle. What I've come to understand is that a lot of the trials and tribulations that we go through to build our character and to refine us. These stories, they're not supposed to just be for us. We're supposed to share what we've been through so that other people can have hope and be inspired. Yes, I can actually get through this fire because she did. I am passionate about sharing my story and getting the message out there that the stuff isn't meant to break you or tear you down. It's meant to build you and help you come back stronger. I have had Hashimoto since I was 17 years old. Since I delivered my daughter, I am a teenage mom. I had a very traumatic pregnancy and delivery. I didn't use my voice or speak up for anything. All kinds of procedures were done to me. Nothing was explained. Because I wasn't using my voice and standing up for myself, that blockage, I believe, turned into my thyroid storm after my pregnancy. I found myself losing so much weight. I was almost under 100 pounds. I was having heart palpitations, sweating, profusely, very irritable. It was because I was in this hyperthyroid storm. When your immune system starts attacking your thyroid, it dumps out everything that it has stored in there. They sent me to the hospital, did some procedures on me, didn't really explain anything, gave me a medication and sent me in my way and said, "You're good, you're fine." Unfortunately, that's not how it works. That is not how you can heal and be healthy. I want to encourage every woman here, like, you've probably been told, "This is how it is," or, "This is the treatment that you need, but I promise you there is more to the story." There's more to the story when it comes to your health and there's more to the story when it comes to why this happened to you. The truth of it is that sometimes I believe God allows these things for us to go through so that we can come out better on the other side. When you put metal, gold into the fire, you burn off all the impurities. You come out pure, gold, shining, refined. That is how I'm envisioning my life. Now that I'm looking back, I'm not saying it wasn't hard in the moment. What I'm saying was that I wouldn't take any of it back for anything. I'm so grateful for all of it. That includes getting this diagnosis of Hashimoto's and understanding that God has had his hand in it since the beginning. He has allowed certain things for me to learn about myself, to build my character, and to now turn it from pain into purpose, and go on and help thousands upon thousands of women really tackle their thyroid disease and their medical issues from the root cause. Stop just accepting whatever the White Coat says. I had to realize that getting that medication at 17 years old was not going to heal me, was not the answer. I'm in this huge journey and that's how I'm here with you today. You have to start to believe that there is a bigger source. You have a creator. You're not here on accident. I don't want to live thinking that I'm just like this blip on the screen, this accident that has no purpose who wants to live that way. I truly believe I have a creator who created me for a purpose and I made in his image. He created me to create and I'm here using what he's given me to create purpose and meaning for others and to serve others and to give back. Life is so much more rewarding when you approach it that way. It just is. Absolutely. I have never believed evolutionary theories about you're an accident and you just happened. It's so much more rich to know that you were created with a purpose by a loving creator who knows you inside and out, who sees the bad that happens and can use everything for good. I'm just so thankful for your journey and that you have gone from that teen who got pregnant who was not healthy to now helping, like you said, thousands of women. Absolutely transform their health. So tell us how you incorporate faith. So the name of your podcast, the name of your book, it's fast to faith. How do you incorporate faith into somebody's healing journey, especially if they don't love Jesus? I love this question because when I became a doctor, I got my marching orders from Jesus. I had to come to moment in the birthing room with my daughter for those women who have had babies. They know what being torn means. Like I had a fourth degree tear front to back. It couldn't have been any worse. It changed me forever. But in that moment, God said, don't ever let this happen to any other woman. Like that, you need to get out there and share your message to use your voice. And so I went and I did that. I somehow went back on my GED, went to medical school, became a doctor, did all these things, found myself completely burnt out within the first few years of my medical practice. And had a failed back surgery and laying on my back, I was like, God, why? Why are you not with me? Why is this so hard? Why can't I just help women? Why is my body failing me? And he was like, you left me in that delivery room. You didn't ask me to come on the journey with you. You've been trying to carry the entire burden of your life on your own and that's why your back is broken. You were trying to take care of all the patients, take care of your children. You were ignoring your broken marriage. You were not taking care of the best. that I gave you to do this job. And so I had a lot of epiphanies during this seven days of laying in my bed unable to move. And I started to understand and talk to him about the fact that I'm helping patients but they're not really getting better. They don't actually change. They go back to their old habits. They can't break up with diet coke and McDonald's and all the things. Just like I couldn't. I was addicted to sugar. I was addicted to gluten. And he was like, you have to stop doing this on your own. You were not created to be your own savior. You have a creator for a purpose and let me take on that burden for you. And I started reading the Bible for the first time in my whole life. And that's really embarrassing to say because I was raised Catholic but I never read the Bible. Here I am 40 years old at the time. And I'm reading it, you know, looking at it going, oh my goodness. Jesus said, let me take your yoke. My yoke is easy and light. Like let me take those burdens from you. And so I just started handing it all over. And that felt amazing. And then God was like, now you gotta teach your patients how to do that. And it's not easy when most of the people I was interacting with, they didn't want to talk about Jesus. They didn't want me to pray for them. They didn't even want to tap into that because it's like a can of worms. You open that. You can't close it back. These worms are going everywhere. And here's the thing. When you get that nudge, that whisper from your creator that you're supposed to be doing something if you don't do it, it will eat you alive. It will cause you to feel depressed and moody and even crazy because you're not living in alignment with what your creator wants for you. And so when I finally gave in the depression lifted, the misery, the struggle, just the burden lifted, I stopped having chronic back pain, all the things. And so I was like, okay, there's something to this obedience thing. And that is hard for me to say because I was a wild child. I didn't want to submit to authority. I didn't want anyone telling me what to do. But when I started listening to my creator and doing what he said, my health just improved dramatically. The chronic pain, the chronic fatigue, the depression, the uncontrollable Hashimoto's, it all started to calm down because I was listening to him and he was saying, you need to honor this vessel that I gave you. You need to stop treating it like a garbage can and feeding it Taco Bell and Mountain Dew and M&Ms from the nurse's station. You actually have to take care of it. And then I started to just shift and think differently. And I realized if I could help my patients think about their body differently, then they could start having lasting sustainable results. And the truth is you can't heal a body you hate. You just can't. You have to love your body and a lot of women don't know how to do that because they don't feel loved. They're partners cheating on them or nobody's showing up for them or their husband is like their third child or whatever. It's like they're not being poured into. They're not being loved on. And so they're just spent. They're done. And they can't possibly think about taking care of themselves. And that's what I see in so many Hashimoto's patients. And so that is why you need a savior because you need someone to pour into you and say, you know what? You're my daughter. I love you. I'm never going to leave you. I'm never going to forsake you. I am here for you. All you have to do is read my word and believe me because I keep my promises. And once I started just filling myself up with God's love, I was able to love myself enough to make myself a priority and to heal myself. And then I taught my patients how to do the same. And that has been the game changer in my practice and in my patients' lives. Oh. I know that was a long answer, but it's like it's a journey right as they're like, it's a journey. And that's how it's supposed to be. There is no quick fix. There's no quick solution. Like I truly believe that our last day on Earth is when we're done with our journey, when we're ready to move on. And so I'm like, I'm not done with my journey. I'm only half done. Like I want to go to 100, you know? Right. Yeah. We live in a microwave society and everybody wants the fixes in five minutes. But that is not how we work as humans. There's always a journey and always. Yep. Even I mean with your faith, with feelings secure, with the only thing instant is when you confess your sins and believe in Jesus in an instant you are saved. That's instantaneous. Everything else is a journey. It takes time healing your faith. Everything. Yeah. And I'm so glad you said that because people think, okay, if I accept Jesus as my savior or acknowledge my higher power, like all of a sudden, I'm just going to be perfect and everything should shift. And that is not how it works. Being edified, like evolving into your new creation, into your new being takes time. The old you does have to die. And sometimes I look at myself and I don't even recognize myself because like I wanted to be a rock star. I was wild. I like loved to party and dance and do all the things. And I still love all that. But now it's like worship music, Christian music, different things. But that took time. That took time of me cultivating my relationship with God and learning to know him as a good father and supporter of me. And that is how I healed. I really truly believe like, yes, I went gluten free. Yes, I dealt with my gut infections from my stool test revelation. And I regulated my nervous system and did all the root cause things. But the deepest root cause problem that I actually had is I didn't feel worthy. I didn't feel good enough. And I felt like I had to produce in order for people to love me. And God taught me like, no, you're loved simply because you are you. And that is when I could stop and get out of burnout and actually heal. And so many women with Hashimoto's are being driven by these deeper issues in their identity that it doesn't matter what diet you go on. Because you will always self sabotage to whatever you believe you deserve or whatever believe that you are. So that's why women don't lose weight because they don't believe they can lose weight. You know, that's why women don't heal because they don't believe they can. Right. Yes. And then you also said in your book, not just about what you believe, but what your body is trying to do. Let me find the quotes. You said, our body isn't doing this. I think you were talking about thyroid and autoimmune. Our body isn't doing this because it doesn't know how to work anymore. Our body does not betray us. It's doing this as a protective mechanism to maintain homeostasis and divert resources to the areas they are most needed. Can you explain that too? Yeah, that was a revelation I had because in medical school, residency, all the things I was taught that, oh, your thyroid just gets sluggish. It just poops out on you. It doesn't know what it's doing. Same thing with like the gallbladder just stops working. And so as a surgeon, I was taught. We just removed the offending organ. If the organ's not functioning properly, get rid of it. We don't need that. And God had to correct me on this. He was like, I actually gave you all of these parts for a purpose. And they all worked together to do something. And I didn't create them to fail. Everything that you're doing in your life, all of the toxins in the environment, all of the things that you are doing are creating a burden on the body or a deficiency in the body. And so it's not functioning at the highest, most optimal level. But it is created to heal. And I used to think as the surgeon, I was the healer. If I do the surgery, I cut you open. I remove your uterus. I sew you back up. Like I was healing you. And God was like, you don't make that skin go back together. You don't make those muscles go back together. You just re-approximate that tissue with some suture. I do the healing. I created that body to heal. And once I started to really believe that the body is designed to just start healing. Like you get a cut on your arm. In a few days, it is gone. Your body actually knows what it's doing. And so your thyroid is not dumb. If your thyroid shifts into this hypothyroid picture, it is because something is going on in your body and it's trying to change and move resources to heal a gut infection or heal from surgery or you're so stressed out and you're in go, go, go, fight or flight all the time, that it thinks you are going to die. It's in survival mode. It's going to hold on to those resources with everything it has. That's why fasting can be detrimental in this situation because fasting tells your body your starving. I better hold on to everything you got stored in the pantry because nothing else is coming in and we're going to need this to get through the winter. And so it will hold on to your fat even harder. So that was one thing that was really eye-opening to me was I realized we are designed to fast. God created our bodies to go without food and then to feast, to do this feast famine cycle, this hunter-gatherer cycle. But we have to do it smartly and what we are being taught is just eat less all the time and that's not what God created. God created us to eat less often but when we eat we have to eat enough and nourish ourselves with what our body needs. That will make the thyroid happy. That will make it not think you're struggling and starving to death. And so a lot of the things we're doing, we have the right idea, but we just were a little bit skewed and we need to adjust some things. And a lot of it is because it's trendy, but I promise you fasting isn't a trend. It's how your body was designed. You just have to do it in a smart way. - Right, and how does somebody with Hashimoto do it in a smart way? Because you said, when you fast your body is under stress and I've shared on other podcast episodes that I have tried fasting and every time it seems to throw me into Hashimoto's flare. And so I'm trying to ease into it and I feel like every single time I try and I'm sure this is other people's story too, every single time I try, my body is like, what are you doing? This is not okay. - Well, first and foremost, we're gonna call it the obvious. You don't really have weight to lose, which means you don't have a bunch of excess energy stored in your body that you can tap into and use. And your thyroid knows that. Your thyroid knows how much is stored up for those survival moments. Like it looks in the pantry and it sees what we have. And so if you don't have weight to lose, you really do need to be thoughtful about how you fast because we don't wanna put that strain on the body and think that we're starving it. And so I teach this feast famine cycling of really making sure that we're leading with healthy fats, proteins and fiber when you are eating so that you are nourished so that your cells have the ingredients to make ATP or energy. And then when you take the food away, you're already in ketosis. Your body already knows how to burn fat for fuel instead of carbohydrates and sugar. Because if you go from a sugar burner into a fasted state, your blood sugar will drop. You will not be producing ketones and it will not feel good. You'll be hungry and jittery and shaky and nauseous and all these terrible things and get a headache. So you wanna make sure that you're eating enough healthy fats and that your body remembers how to make ketones. And it knows how to do this. It's just that we eat sugar all the time in the society from dusk until dawn and it just gets stuck in sugar burning mode. And I hear so many women, they're like, I don't eat sugar, but they eat almost all carbohydrates. Like vegetarians and vegans especially, if you're eating a high diet of beans and legumes and rice and fruit, that is all sugar. I mean, it is a healthier sugar. There's some polyphenols in there but essentially carbohydrates and starches are all just sugars connected. So as soon as they hit your mouth and your stomach they break down into sugar. And that's what your body uses for fuel. So you're not gonna be able to fast very easily. You need to get into a more ketogenic diet before you try and go into a fasted state. You gotta get those healthy fats in there. And I would be remiss if I didn't say like healthy fats are essential for women, especially women. Men as well, but all of our sex hormones are made from cholesterol. We need healthy fat, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, DHA, that is made from cholesterol. All of the trillions of cells in our body, they are made from a cholesterol backbone. Like they're, the membrane is created from cholesterol. So if you don't eat enough fats, your cells are gonna be broken and dysfunctional. The receptors won't be able to hear the signals from your hormones, especially thyroid hormone, insulin, your blood sugar regulator hormone. And you won't be able to make enough sex hormones. So we're seeing this epidemic of infertility and PCOS and irregular periods. And it's because women are not eating enough healthy fats and getting into ketosis and then creating this fasting lifestyle. So if you can't fast, the first things you have to ask yourself are what am I eating when I am eating? Am I actually giving my body what it needs so that when I remove the food, I can handle it? And am I getting into ketosis when I am eating? And if I'm not, let me work on that first before I start to incorporate intermittent fasting. - That is super helpful. Thank you. - Yeah. - Yes. If somebody wants to learn more, I know you have a ton of resources. You've got your book, you've got your podcasts and how else can people work with you? There's a lot of ways. - Yeah, so I have a 40 day program. And when I first created this program, it was only the fasting piece of it. And women had amazing results. They would lose weight, they would feel good, their thyroid would finally feel safe and calm down. And I'll tell you, when I first got diagnosed with Hashimoto's, my numbers were over 1,000. They wouldn't even give me a number. I just had over 1,000. And now they're in the single digits. 7 and 5 or something like that. But it took the process of reminding my body that it's safe to do its job and then giving it what it needs to actually do it and removing what was ticking it off. So in this 40 day program, it is an anti-inflammatory food program that reminds your body how to go from a sugar burner to a fat burner. And then how to slowly introduce fasting as a lifestyle. We do this accordion thing where we change how long we're fasting because if you just do a 16-8 all the time, I promise you your body is brilliant. It is so genius. It will say, oh, that's her new set point. I guess we're gonna live here now at 16-8. And you will stop losing weight. You will stop reaping the benefits of fasting because your body's always trying to find that homeostasis point. So you have to shift it. You have to change it up and keep it guessing. And so we teach you how to do that. And then God told me to add the faith piece in here because so many women have emotional wounds and blockages and identity issues that are preventing them from feeling motivated to even make the good food choices to move their body, to work out, to do any of this stuff to actually take care of them. So it's just five or 10 minutes in the morning teaching you how to journal and connect your higher power and really start to believe in your body's ability to heal and thrive. And just reconnecting your mind, your will, your emotions, all of it to what's going on in your body. So it's a really healing program. Women usually have breakthroughs in the first five to seven days. They're like, oh my gosh, I'm dropping weight for the first time ever. Or this is my favorite one. I have never felt a piece like I feel since I've started this program. I am telling you, we are feeling disconnected and sad and frustrated and we just need to get reconnected and feel that piece of like, I am enough. I can do this. My body was created to do this. And so that's what the 40-day program is all about. There's live calls with me every Monday. I teach all kinds of stuff. I answer all the questions. It's really transformational. That is awesome. I will have the link to your website and to that definitely in the show notes. And if you're listening to the podcast in your podcast app wherever you're listening, you can subscribe right now to Dr. Tabitha's podcast, which is fast to faith. And yeah, connect that way too. And learn. I just love learning. Sometimes I forget to implement. But I love learning. And I'm getting better about the implementation part too. You have to. Yes, that is so important. I'm glad you said that I know we're out of time. But this infobesity is real. Like now a chat GPT. There's no excuse for you not to know something like you can literally learn how to play the piano or do whatever you want or learn the details of a topology from fasting. But if you do not have the drive and the motivation that comes from wanting to be better, you will not implement. You will not change your life. And you will fall deeper into this pit of like shame and regret and resentment. And I just there's no reason for that in this day and age. I want to help you get out of those feelings and break these bad cycles of being your bad self. Like there is a better version of you waiting. And I can help you get there. Absolutely. I heard an analogy once of you have two feet. And to walk in a straight line, you have to take both feet and go forward. And if you're always learning and never implementing, you're just walking with that right foot and you're turning in circles, you're never going anywhere. And if you're always implementing, but never learning, then you're always going in circles the other way. You have to learn and you have to implement. Thank you so much, Tabitha, for helping people do both things. I really appreciate it. And thank you for coming on the podcast. This podcast is for informational educational purposes only. Please discuss any changes with your trusted healthcare provider. To take your next step, join our school community and explore the courses available there. You do not have to figure your health out alone. So that is schoolsk.ol.com. And it is the Health Hashi Modos community. I will see you next time on The Health Hashi Modos Podcast.