When Dr. Sara Gottfried speaks with her patients about stress and what it does to the body, she speaks from experience.
"I would park in my driveway, knowing that my precious daughter was inside with a nanny, and that I needed to get in that front door. And I just felt paralyzed. I felt paralyzed because I was so stressed," Dr. Gottfried said in this week's episode of the Behind Her Empire podcast.
A graduate from Harvard and MIT, Dr. Gottfried is a board-certified physician who has spent her career demystifying hormones and helping patients improve their health more broadly with personalized medicine.
Dr. Gottfried said she took it upon herself to go to a lab where she discovered that her stress hormone was three times as high as it should have been. Her body was producing too much cortisol, leaving her testosterone low, and leading to an imbalance.
After finding a natural way of getting her hormones back in balance, Dr. Gottfried wrote her first book and started her own digital health business.
She says one of the biggest myths women entrepreneurs face is the belief that they have to sacrifice their health in order to be successful.
"You had a fantastic raise, in terms of capital, but your relationships are suffering, your relationship with your own health is suffering. To me, that's not success. I think success for women is really about integration. And the core of it, the foundation of it is your health," said Dr. Gottfried.
Sara Gottfried, MD is a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Integrative Medicine and Nutritional Sciences at Thomas Jefferson University and director of precision medicine at the Marcus Institute of Integrative Health where she focuses on career longevity for female CEOs. Her books include "The Hormone Cure," "The Hormone Reset Diet," and "Women, Food, and Hormones."
Engagement intern Joshua Letona contributed to this post.
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