Dr. Sara Gottfried’s Journey to Functional Medicine

Dr. Sara Gottfried, MD, has a lot of self-described titles. In no particular order, she lets people know that she’s a wife, mother, scientist, researcher, speaker, connector, scholar, seeker, and Harvard-educated MD. Yes, it’s a long list, but Gottfried is an accomplished woman who has been practicing medicine for 25 years. She got her start in mainstream medicine, but like many of us, she found it lacking.

In her own words: “In my thirties, I worked in McMedicine. I saw 30+ patients per day for many years. I was burning the candle at both ends, in couple’s therapy, overweight, and suffered with premenstrual syndrome. Advanced testing showed I was aging 20 years faster than my chronological age.”

Again, like many of us, she went to her doctor to find out what was wrong and all they offered her was prescriptions, pills and painkillers. Three options that seemed to have worse side effects in the long haul than her actual symptoms.

She was appalled that there was no effort made by her physician to discover the root causes of her problems… No holistic approach to her physical and mental health. No review of her nutrition and exercise habits. Nothing.

But where she saw frustration and dead-ends with mainstream medicine, she saw an opportunity to dive into functional medicine. Her first patient: herself.

She shunned the traditional solutions to her issues (more pharmaceuticals and drugs) and did a deep dive on her hormone levels, her blood panels, her blood sugar, her supplements (or lack thereof), her diet and her fitness levels.

In a short period of time, she’d pinpointed many of her issues and began solving them one-by-one with data and targeted lifestyle changes to reverse inflammation, hormone imbalance and much more.

Over time, she “took the solutions to my problems and translated them into evidence-based, personalized protocols for my patients, which worked extremely well on the 25,000+ people I’ve seen in the past few decades of practicing precision, functional, and integrative medicine. This includes men and women, professional athletes, executives, and other VIPs.”

Dr. Gottfried now runs the Gottfried Institute and is the author of four New York Times bestselling books on hormones, health and wellness.

And since it’s the end of the summer, perhaps you’ve over indulged a little bit. Don’t worry, we all have! A few extra drinks here and there, a second serving of BBQ … Ice cream more often than you’d like. It happens. We’re all human. But if you’ve found that you’ve put on a few extra pounds, Gottfried has identified two types of exercise that can help you shed the weight:

2 Strategies to Burn Fat Now

Strength Training

“Strength training increases muscle mass which keeps the metabolism revved up, which improves the body’s ability to burn fat.” – Dr. Sara Gottfried.

High Intensity Interval Training

“Another strategy for burning fat is to bump up the intensity of your aerobic routine— not continuously but intermittently. In a study from 2008, twenty-seven overweight women with an average age of fifty-one and an average BMI of 34 who performed bouts of high-intensity aerobic exercise reduced their waistlines and visceral fat more than women who did not exercise or did only low-intensity aerobic activity. The higher-intensity exercise modulates the mTOR gene and gets your body to produce more growth hormone, which helps to reduce visceral fat.” – Dr. Sara Gottfried

The above quotes are from a much longer piece on burning fat after age 40 from Dr. Gottfried’s website here.

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