Hayley Hobson: Hey, my friends, I'm Hayley Hobson, and I am so glad you're here. Welcome to the 10 out of 10 podcast, where I help ambitious women like you look and feel younger so you can achieve a 10 out of 10 lifestyle and unlock financial freedom.
So today we're going to talk about a super trendy, anti-aging topic—cortisol. It is all over the internet right now, buzzing, and for a very good reason. Cortisol is your body's built-in alarm system. It's your body's main stress hormone, and it works with certain parts of your brain to control your mood, your motivation, and even fear.
And when your cortisol levels are too high, your body legit goes into an elevated state and tells all your other hormones to turn off because your body is only focused on saving you. So you're basically in what we refer to—and you have commonly heard of—the term "fight or flight."
So what happens is your metabolism can shut down, your sleep can shut down, your libido can shut down, and it has major impacts on, obviously, your rest, your weight, and your productivity.
So if you're getting older, if you're aging up and you've experienced symptoms like your face is puffy, or you're having sugar cravings, or maybe your eyes are twitching, or your muscles are twitching, or your sleep is poor, you're not getting enough rest, maybe you're gaining weight, or can't lose that—those extra fat pounds around your midsection—or maybe you've just been feeling exhausted all the time, your cortisol levels may be chronically elevated.
So how can you rebalance them? It's the $10,000 question, right? Everyone wants to know. So today I am bringing on an expert who will share why cortisol levels get out of balance and what we can do to rebalance them, including all the juicy science.
So I've been personally working on balancing my own cortisol levels for the last 6 months, and I'm extremely pleased with the results I've been noticing. First, I couldn't believe it, but I lost about 6 pounds around my midsection in 6 weeks without changing my diet or exercise at all. I didn't even know I had weight to lose, but apparently, my cortisol belly just melted away.
Second, I saw a huge uptick in my sleep score. So I actually started doubling the time I was spending in the REM and the deep sleep cycles. And best, I stopped waking up at night, multiple times, hot AF.
So I want to dive into all things cortisol rebalancing with Dr. Todd Dorfman.
Dr. Todd Dorfman is a board-certified emergency physician who’s also trained and certified in age management medicine. He founded Sedalion Health to spend more time and resources with his patients. His specialties include customized health programs, supplement programs under physician’s care, nutrition and fitness guidance, and hormone replacement therapy. I got a lot of questions for you on that, Dr. Dorfman.
He believes that by rebalancing hormones, people will inevitably feel better and reach their physical and mental health goals, and he lives by the mantra: take control of your physical and mental health.
Dr. Dorfman specializes in preventative and proactive care for his patients, and he’s an emergency medicine physician in my hometown, Boulder, Colorado, affiliated with Boulder Community Health Foothills Hospital, which is where my baby was born. He received his medical degree from the University at Buffalo School of Medicine in 1994.
So he's a board-certified, like I said, emergency physician, trained and certified in age management or age medicine, and he's been practicing in Boulder since 1999.
I've got lots of accolades I could continue on and share with you, but his bio will be in the show notes of this podcast episode. I'm just gonna dive in and jump right to it and ask him a bunch of questions.
Hello, Dr. Dorfman.
Todd Dorfman: Hello, Hayley, thanks very much for having me. It's my pleasure to try and answer some questions for you.
Hayley Hobson: Thank you. This is such a hot topic right now, so I'm so grateful that you can come in with your credentials and what you know in this space and really educate my audience and my listeners who are here right now.
Todd Dorfman: I’d be happy to try and help. And you already hit on some of the more important things—cortisol and metabolism regarding your belly fat, cortisol and sleep. So there are lots of tie-ins with cortisol levels and many other physiological functions that are important for health. So yeah, it's going to be great to kind of go through this with you.
Hayley Hobson: Okay, great. So the first question I wanted to ask you is, what do you personally see as one of the biggest concerns for women—and possibly men—entering what we call this midlife cycle now?
Todd Dorfman: Well, that’s a very broad question because you have to look at all of the different factors. So one of the ways that I approach a new patient—let’s say someone in their forties, fifties, something like that—is to try and figure out what their risk factors are moving forward. Some risk factors are very obvious. Someone has diabetes—that’s a risk factor. Someone has some other known disease.
But what people don’t recognize—and most doctors don’t measure it, to be honest with you—is certain hormone levels, including cortisol, which is a hormone. You called cortisol the stress hormone, and that’s absolutely true. But it’s almost like that children’s story about the three bears. It can be too much cortisol or too little cortisol, or just the right amount of cortisol. And it’s an important health feature moving forward in terms of disease prevention to control cortisol levels, to address those things.
Too high a level leads to all sorts of problems. Too low a level leads to all sorts of problems. And you want to be able to respond properly. We’ll get into that in a minute. But 70 to 75% of people in this world die of cardiovascular disease. And cortisol levels, if they’re too high, are directly tied to cardiovascular disease.
I do a talk for other physicians about what we call lipid therapies—like you’ve heard of statin drugs and all these different things—and I help other physicians decide how to customize those preventative strategies. One of the things people don’t realize is that stress—as in too much cortisol, the stress hormone—redlining your cortisol levels, actually is one of the major contributors to heart disease. And that is something that absolutely has to be addressed.
Hayley Hobson: Yeah. Well, I think that—what I’ve noticed from at least my community and just talking to people from my age who are not investing in their health to the extent that I do—is that they think they’re inevitable. Not inevitable—immortal.
Todd Dorfman: Yeah, immortal. Sure.
Hayley Hobson: No, and they don’t believe that the heart thing is going to happen to them. And I kind of possibly had that viewpoint as well, until last year or the year before, my husband had a major heart condition at 55 and ended up in emergency surgery. And it was like, holy shit, this is actually real.
What I’ve noticed is that—I don’t want to call it more superficial—but people are always interested in how they look. They’re always interested in what they weigh, whether they fit into their jeans, whether their pants look good on them, how their body looks in a swimsuit. So I do appreciate the science and the information on the severity of what heightened cortisol levels will do.
And I just want to talk about everything involved in an elevated cortisol level. Like, it was so shocking to me that when—well, you know, we’ll get to this later. But you guys who are listening here—my neighbor across the street created an insane product to support cortisol-balancing issues and asked me to be the guinea pig. Like, I went on the product six months ago and decided, sure—I love biohacking everything about my health—let’s see.
And to be honest with you, I actually wasn’t convinced that I was going to notice a difference, because I do so many other things to bring my body to a homeostasis and bring my state of fight or flight to a normal balance. I wear my Oura ring, and I’m tracking my sleep, and I’m taking my supplements and vitamins and adaptogens and all the things.
I was shocked. I wear size 25 pants. I’m tiny—I was like 123 pounds going into this process—and boom, 6 pounds came off my body within a couple of weeks. I’m like, oh my gosh, this is real. Like, we are all—no matter what level of health we’re in, elevated level of health we’re in—we all have cortisol symptoms.
Todd Dorfman: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what you’re talking about, Hayley, is cortisol’s effect on metabolism, really. So if you have too high a cortisol level, it plays a role in regulating your metabolism. And your metabolism—if you have a really high metabolism, you’re kind of like a hummingbird, right? You’re just burning calories left, right, and center.
If you have a really low metabolism, you’re more like a hibernating bear. Essentially, you’re just storing calories. Well, high cortisol makes you like a hibernating bear. It actually increases your blood sugar levels outside of what you eat. So in different parts of your body—like your muscles, your liver—there are these things called glycogen stores. Glycogen gets converted to glucose, or blood sugar, by elevated cortisol levels. That, in turn, increases insulin resistance.
So your pancreas that makes insulin is trying to get rid of the blood sugar, and it has you store that sugar as fat—especially abdominal fat, basically. So that process you just described about taking a product to control your cortisol levels, doing other things—managing sleep, managing stress, etc.—that’s why you lost 6 pounds around your belly. It really just has to do with the physiologic effect of cortisol and what cortisol does.
Hayley Hobson: Yeah, it's so crazy because I was having this conversation with somebody at my workout the other day. Because, you know, women are just like, "I can't get the fat off no matter what I do, no matter what I eat, no matter how much I exercise—like, I just can't seem to get this off my body." And my response was: "It has nothing to do with what you're putting in your mouth."
Todd Dorfman: That's right.
Hayley Hobson: It has nothing to do with how many hours you spend here in the gym. You have got to regulate your hormones.
Todd Dorfman: Right. That’s right.
Todd Dorfman: And, you know, speaking of that—just to sort of jump from there—I mean, cortisol... There are people that call cortisol kind of the master hormone, if you will, or kind of the pilot hormone, or, you know, they say it directs traffic for everyone else, or the quarterback hormone that directs what’s going on.
Cortisol is intimately associated with other types of hormones that are important. So, for example, it can interact with and disrupt the balance and function of things like thyroid hormone, which again is important for metabolism. Too much cortisol, not enough thyroid hormone—lower metabolism even still.
It can affect estrogen and progesterone levels. It can affect testosterone levels—which many women don’t know they have. Women produce testosterone pre-menopause and tend to not produce it after menopause. And having too much cortisol adds to that effect of low hormone levels.
And we know—if you take it one step further—that having appropriate hormones is really important for lots of things. It's important for bone density. It's important for cardiovascular health, as I mentioned. It's important to decrease the risk of cognitive decline and dementia moving forward. It's important to help with sleep. It's important for mood. So it has a tie-in to all those different features that would make someone healthy and well and feel good, moving forward from midlife on.
Hayley Hobson: So what do you say to people when they come in and they've got these concerns? Do you go through this process explaining to them about—well, first of all, before we actually— I don't want you to answer that yet.
What are the effects? So we talked about what happens when the hormone is out of balance, and we talked about how it plays on so many other things like—you talked about thyroid, you talked about metabolism, you talked about prostate, all of these other things...
What are the effects that people— I mean, I know mine was like, I could not sleep at night because my body temperature was so out of balance. And it wouldn’t happen all day long, but I’d go to sleep and then I would wake up multiple times in the evening feeling like a furnace.
So for me, the effects were not getting enough sleep. But the price that I pay from not getting enough sleep is, I wake up and I feel crappy. Like my cognitive function is out of balance. I'm nasty to my husband. I’m bitchy to my kids. I’m like snappy to everyone around me because I'm not getting enough sleep, so I don’t feel good.
But then also long-term effects of that—because I know what the implications are with sleep—is, when you’re not getting enough REM, your emotions don’t have the opportunity to process through. So you're holding a lot of stuck emotion in your body literally, that’s not detoxing out of your system.
When you don’t have enough deep sleep, your cells are not regenerating. So if your cells are not regenerating, again, it’s like this toxicity that’s happening in your body with a stagnant energy. And so people think like, “Oh yeah, I’ll just sleep tomorrow.” But sleep is the most important function our bodies can do, I think even more so than eating. I mean, obviously we need nutrition and we need hydration, but like, if I had to pick, I want to make sure I get enough sleep because I know I’m going to always be able to eat.
Todd Dorfman: Sure. Sure. Well, yeah, I mean, you bring up a great point. I sort of think of it almost as a vicious cycle. In other words, if you don’t sleep well, your cortisol levels are generally significantly elevated throughout the night when they should be at their lowest.
If you have high cortisol levels, you don’t sleep well—it disrupts your sleep-wake cycle, it disrupts your REM sleep, it disrupts your deep sleep. So the more cortisol you have, the worse you sleep. The worse you sleep, the more cortisol you make. And you get to this almost redlining of cortisol just based on that simple concept of sleep.
And the other thing that—you mentioned a few important parts of sleep—things like solidifying memories, things like resting your brain and other body parts so they can regenerate or reboot for the next day. At different stages of sleep—for example, different phases of REM sleep—you produce certain hormones that are very important.
In certain stages of deep sleep, you produce—for example—human growth hormone. And these are hormones that don’t get produced if you don’t get those adequate sleep stages. So again, it’s really tied into cortisol being kind of the master hormone.
If it messes up your sleep, and your sleep’s messed up, that’s a great place for people to start: regulating sleep and regulating what they do in terms of sleep hygiene. Making sure they’re relaxed and ready to go to bed, and trying to bring their cortisol levels down naturally throughout the night.
Just so your listeners know—cortisol peaks in the morning when we wake up. And then it slowly kind of dwindles throughout the day. It should be sort of lowest—maybe if you have a normal bedtime, it’s lowest maybe around 1–2 a.m.—and then it starts to slowly ramp up again. So it’s a big cortisol surge upon waking up in the morning to prepare you for the day.
Hayley Hobson: So if your cortisol levels are out of whack, is it spiking in the middle of the night, which is why people are waking up?
Todd Dorfman: That’s exactly right. Absolutely. So here’s a typical scenario that I hear in my office all the time: “Hey, Doc, I fall asleep pretty well, no big deal. Then at 2 or 3 in the morning, I wake up and I start thinking of all this stuff. I start ruminating on—is it my kids this, or my job that, or my spouse this, or money that?” Or they check their cell phone, for example, to see if anyone’s called or emailed or texted between the time they went to sleep and 3 a.m.
Hayley Hobson: Urgency that you—
Todd Dorfman: Emergency, right.
Hayley Hobson: Phone at 1 a.m.
Todd Dorfman: Like, my phone’s on—but yours doesn’t need to be. You know, that’s how it kind of works. So I think the point is, though, you then get in this cycle. And it absolutely just ramps up. And in a time when it’s not supposed to be spiking—at 3 a.m.—all this stuff’s going through your head, you can’t fall back asleep. Then you start saying, “Oh my God, I have to get up in two hours,” and you know the whole day’s ruined. And it’s that vicious cycle that everyone’s been through. So yes, is the answer. It completely spikes during the night—and that’s absolutely not what you want it to do.
Hayley Hobson: Yeah. I don’t think people realize how much your body actually “does” while you’re sleeping. Like, I think based on the comments that I see, people believe that you’re just resting so you can go ahead and repeat the next day. But there’s so much going on in your body in terms of repairing and systems operating that can only happen when you sleep.
Todd Dorfman: That’s—
Hayley Hobson: If you don’t get enough sleep, you’re really aging yourself much faster.
Todd Dorfman: Absolutely.
Hayley Hobson: Those of you out there that are into all the beauty and anti-aging like me—you’re going to literally gain weight, get more wrinkles, all of the things that you don’t want, if you are not resting and rejuvenating and going through those cycles.
Like, I get angry. I have an Oura ring, and I looked at it this morning, and I only slept seven hours last night—which is not terrible, but it’s not amazing.
Todd Dorfman: Seven to nine hours of sleep is kind of the sweet spot.
Hayley Hobson: Yeah. I typically—if I’m going seven-twenty to eight, I know I’m going to be fired up. If I’m under seven, I’m not concerned. But if I get closer to six, I am concerned.
But the reason I was concerned is I only got 53 minutes of deep sleep, and I only got an hour and 19 of REM. And I’m used to getting an hour and a half minimum of both. And when I can get 90 minutes to an hour and 45 of both, I know I’m like a superwoman.
Todd Dorfman: Absolutely. Yeah, sleep is hugely important. We're talking about reasons that sleep gets disrupted. But you mentioned sort of hot flashes in passing when we were talking a second ago. I mean, menopausal-type symptoms are a tremendous cause of sleep disruption. Hot flashes, sweating through the sheets, getting up at night, blah blah blah...
All of that can be fixed and eliminated. I mean, no woman these days should live with hot flashes keeping them up at night. It just shouldn’t happen. And in addition to that, men actually can have hot flashes too. It’s a much more gradual process—the male menopause process, if you will.
But the big picture is—as men’s testosterone drops, they can have hot flashes too. I remember my dad saying, you know, he’s waving his shirt: “I’m having a hot flash.” I’m like—I don’t think men get hot flashes. You know, I was trained at that point, obviously.
But yeah, so there are all these kinds of things that get compounded when we talk about poor sleep. And then poor sleep makes the whole thing worse.
Hayley Hobson: Yeah. And cortisol can be negatively impacting your body without you having hot flashes.
Todd Dorfman: Oh yeah, hot flashes don’t have anything— I was sort of using that, Hayley, as an example of what other things disrupt sleep and can raise cortisol.
Hayley Hobson: Yeah, yeah. Well, the reason I’m bringing that up is because I’ve had so much feedback coming into my own Instagram feed saying, “I don’t know if I have a cortisol issue. I’m not really having hot flashes. I don’t really feel any of the menopause effects.”
And my response—bold as it may be—is: “You have a cortisol issue.” Because you cannot live in our world today with the amount of stimulation that’s going on through our phones, through our iPads, when you walk out the door with traffic—you literally can’t. 5G. You cannot be living in this world today without a cortisol imbalance.
And some people are like, “Well, I need to check with my doctor.” I’m like, “If that makes you comfortable, go ahead. And I promise you—you have a cortisol issue.”
Todd Dorfman: Yeah, I think that’s a very accurate statement. I think most people do, especially if they have other problems that you can associate with it. One of the things I do with patients is I just actually measure their cortisol levels.
There’s different ways to do it. You can do it through blood work. You can do it through saliva testing. Sometimes saliva testing is one of the better ways because you can measure it several times throughout the day—four times, six times—and then it helps me kind of create a cortisol curve for you as an individual. And I can help you tweak what’s going on.
If you have a normal cortisol spike in the morning and it’s going down nicely before you go to bed—great. And then again at 3 in the morning, as my example was, you have a big spike—okay. Now I know how I can help direct your efforts in order to decrease overall cortisol.
Because remember, if you add up all the cortisol you produce in a day, that’s kind of what’s going on. And it’s not just the total quantity. It’s your ability to spike cortisol when you need to spike it—like in the morning, or, like, in our neck of the woods, if we are hiking and a bear is in front of us. Our cortisol is probably going up a little—and that’s normal, that’s what it’s supposed to do.
But then it needs to come back down. It can’t redline the whole time. And that’s the key. It has to have appropriate spikes—not inappropriate redlining of cortisol.
Hayley Hobson: Yeah, got it. Okay. I’m always skeptical—I mean, no offense, because I know that you’re in the medical profession. By the way, my dad is also a physician, retired, and I grew up in a home where we were just in the Western medicine camp. And this was in the seventies and eighties.
A lot has changed in Western medicine over the last decade or so, and there are still a lot of people that are administering tests that aren’t really checking what needs to be checked or getting to the root of the problem. So I’m always skeptical when people say things like, “Well, let me have my cortisol levels checked.” And I’m like, “Okay, go ahead.” But what’s considered normal in our society is not normal.
Todd Dorfman: Well, no, you raise an excellent point. Because if you were to ask me a different question—and that question would be, “What is one of the hardest things to measure in people?” It’s cortisol levels, right? Because there are so many variables we’ve just been talking about.
Like, you could have a perfectly normal cortisol curve one day when you get proper sleep, and you’re not stressed out, and your kids are being nice to you, and whatever. Or you could have poor sleep, job stress, someone calls you—whatever it is—and your cortisol levels will be completely wacky the next day.
So yes, you’re totally correct. It’s difficult. But it does help to gauge certain aspects of the cortisol level. So again, instead of looking at the absolute numbers, looking at the curve throughout the day is also very, very helpful and can help sort of direct people.
But you’re right. The old adage that I was taught by a wise professor is, “Treat the patient, not the labs.” So it is part of the puzzle, but it is not the whole deal. The patient’s symptoms, and how the patient looks, and the patient’s other health features, and the patient’s hormone levels, and the patient’s thyroid hormone levels—all these things go into the mix.
Hayley Hobson: Okay, great. That’s so informative. Thank you. Let’s—I want to talk for a second, just kind of move the topic to hormone replacement therapy. Because this is a place that—like, I read when I was reading your bio—that you are actively participating in. And there are a lot of women who are going that direction.
And I don’t—I’ve never done it before. I don’t know a lot about it. I haven’t researched a lot. I always prefer a more natural route. But can you talk a little about why people are doing that, what the effects are, and if there is something that you would recommend that is more natural so they don’t have to go that direction?
Todd Dorfman: Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely. So I think hormone replacement therapy—to bring the story back a decade or so—got a really bad reputation because there was this big study called the Women’s Health Initiative that gave women something called Premarin and Provera, which is a synthetic progesterone and an estrogen made of 20-some different estrogens.
Most of those are from horses, actually, and a couple of them were human estrogens. This was a synthetic product, and basically, women had an increased risk of breast cancer and an increased risk of problems.
So the concept of treating menopause really went by the wayside. And a lot of docs, even up till recently, wouldn’t touch treating it because you’re increasing the risk of cancer and heart disease and all these terrible things.
The more recent studies—using what we call micronized progesterone, not synthetic—this is actually a bioidentical progesterone, usually made from yams or peanuts or some plant-based product—and combining that with either just estradiol or a combination of estradiol and estriol...
You have three types of estrogens that a human woman produces—not a mare—and basically, the studies are overwhelmingly in favor of using hormone replacement therapy.
First of all, again—you treat the patient, not the lab. So the patient has to have demonstrable symptoms: hot flashes, for example, irritability, mood swings, night sweats, poor sleep, brain fog, depression—I can go on and on.
But the studies are all very clear. There are even some studies now that say using micronized progesterone may even decrease the risk of breast cancer slightly. But even if you don’t want to go that far, you could say it probably does not significantly increase it. Same with estrogen.
So what does this stuff do for you?
That stuff helps you with lots of different things. It stops the menopausal hot flashes—those are called vasomotor symptoms. It stops night sweats. It improves bone density. There are even studies that show women who go through menopause have a higher risk of cognitive decline or dementia if they’re not on hormone replacement therapy. It’s also been shown to benefit women in terms of cardiovascular disease.
I use it very scientifically, if that’s a good word. I put you on hormone replacement therapy, I use the lowest dose, and I use blood levels. I tie the blood levels to when you start feeling really good, and we use that as our target moving forward. So we use the lowest effective dose—that’s a good strategy, which keeps any side effects down.
Again, women who’ve had a prior history of breast cancer—there are other things we can do. I wouldn’t necessarily give them hormones. But other than that, the majority of women going through menopause treated with hormone replacement therapy for around five to eight years or so around the time of menopause—the overall effect is shown to be absolutely beneficial as opposed to detrimental.
Hayley Hobson: Okay, so the hormone replacement therapy is more—you’re saying—it is more beneficial than detrimental.
Todd Dorfman: Yes, more beneficial than detrimental. Again, if there’s a sweet spot. So I’m not necessarily talking about an 80-year-old who I put on hormone replacement therapy. There are reasons for that. Maybe.
I’m talking about around five to seven or eight years around the time of menopause. The benefits outweigh the risks of hormone replacement therapy—especially if you’re symptomatic.
Hayley Hobson: So why are people wanting to get off of it as quickly as possible?
Todd Dorfman: Because some of the older studies still show an increased risk of breast cancer. And I'm not saying that people shouldn't try to get through it. In other words, it’s like any medicine—you’re using it to treat a clinical syndrome.
Let’s say the clinical syndrome is hot flashes. Okay. If you’re five years out from menopause or something, we might try and slowly taper that down and see if you still have hot flashes. And if you don’t, you don’t need to be on the medicine anymore.
We’ve treated you during the sweet spot of around five years of menopause. We've prevented diseases moving forward. We've helped you feel better. We've helped you sleep better. We've helped you not gain weight. We've helped with any menopausal depressive symptoms. We've helped with sexual function, lubrication, libido, orgasms.
All of those things are tied into hormones. And ultimately, people are just infinitely happier and feel better and are healthier when we use hormone replacement therapy.
Hayley Hobson: Got it. Okay. Well, thank you so much. I have been getting a lot of questions about what I’ve been using, and we can talk about that in a second. Some of the women have been coming to me and saying, “Can I get off the hormone replacement therapy if I do use the natural supplement that I’ve been using?”
So I’ve been using this new supplement that rebalances your hormones. It has a lot of adaptogens in it. I’d love for you to talk—since you’re familiar with it—I’d love for you to talk about the benefits of being on something like that. And I’ll give you guys a link, don’t worry, in a minute.
Benefits of using what I’ve been using—and also sharing, like, if somebody did use this, is there an opportunity for them to get off of hormone replacement therapy sooner?
Todd Dorfman: Yeah, so that’s a great question. I specifically answered in the prior question about hormone replacement therapy. But if you want to ask me my overall strategy in treating women with menopausal-type symptoms—I actually start with the Rebalance Health product. With the adaptogens. With the cortisol-lowering capacity.
Because it’s almost a freebie—in the sense that I’m not entertaining any risk. Even the slight increased risk of breast cancer, if you believe that’s an issue—and it may very well be. Even the slight increased risk of uterine cancer with hormone replacement therapy.
So we always weigh the benefits and the risks. Before I would start someone on hormone replacement therapy, I actually start with the therapy you’re talking about—which is using a natural supplement or combination of supplements or nutraceuticals that decrease cortisol spikes and help your body with adaptogens.
As soon as you bring down cortisol, you naturally raise up estrogen and progesterone. And the Rebalance product actually has a study of a little over a hundred women who were menopausal, and they were given the Rebalance product for three months. And 100% of those women had about an 80% reduction in symptoms. So the product really works.
But there’s room sometimes to use some hormone replacement therapy. In other words, if the product works 80% and a woman is still like, “Look, I’m still having one or two hot flashes at night. I used to have 10 or 20. Now I have one or two. I don’t want one or two.”
I’m like, “Okay.” We either go up on the Rebalance dose—which is usually the first thing I do—and then the next thing is, I might start to add in a little bit of hormone replacement therapy.
That allows me—your question was, “Can you get off it?”—it allows me to use less hormone replacement therapy because I’m getting benefit from this other natural product.
Then, if someone comes to me and they’re on a bunch of hormone replacement therapy and I’m not sure if they need it, I usually start from scratch. I gradually go down on the hormone replacement therapy and see if we can add in the Rebalance product, because it just gives me such a great safety profile. And then I adjust the hormone—kind of balance the hormone—based on their symptoms.
So yes, I use combinations of both. And there are women who can get completely off of hormone replacement therapy while using the product that you’re using. Absolutely.
Hayley Hobson: Amazing. That’s amazing. Alright, so you guys—just real quick—if you want the product that we’re referring to, it’s called the Rebalance product we’re referring to. We've made it super easy for you.
We’re also popping in here a code—well, you don’t need a code—but you’re going to be able to get your first month at half off for listening to the podcast. So you’ll notice that the price is half of what it normally is. So enjoy.
If you’re also tuning in right now, and you’re scrolling through Instagram or Facebook or TikTok—if you ever reply to any of my posts with the word “cortisol,” you’ll get a DM immediately that pops you into a conversation with me. And I will be there manually with you, and I’ll help you get this link.
So jump in there and share today’s conversation or this episode or that link with anybody that you know that is suffering from any hormonal or midlife crises—as I like to call it.
So let’s just quickly, before we go—and I want to respect your time—but I want to talk about what’s in the supplement that’s making this magic potion. Because what I have heard from other people—like other physicians and other people in the biohacking space—is that they have never seen a formulation like this that is so clean, so natural, so pure, and is actually doing what it’s saying it can do.
Can you talk about what you’ve seen with what’s in this supplement?
Todd Dorfman: Yeah, absolutely. So the first thing—I think, before we even talk about the ingredients of the supplement—I think it’s really important to take note of the fact that the supplement is a lozenge. And you basically suck on it like a Lifesaver or something like that.
The benefit to a lozenge versus something you swallow is that your stomach acid is incredibly powerful—you could probably dissolve a little piece of carpet if you swallowed it, honestly. So a lot of things get to your stomach as a natural part of digestion, hit the acid, and boom—they’re absolutely destroyed.
But when you use a lozenge system, you don’t have that acid effect of breaking down the product. The product gets absorbed much better into your system. And we’ve shown that—there are some studies that show that. It’s called the “direct line delivery system.”
So the first reason someone asks me why the product works so well—I think it has to do with how it gets into your system. That’s a sort of novel approach compared to most supplements and things you swallow.
Then, it’s a combination of adaptogens—things like ashwagandha, which is primarily for reducing cortisol levels—and a number of other Ayurvedic herbs and traditional Chinese medicines. All of them are tested, they’re all pure—we make sure it’s all pure sourcing.
The key to that combination is that it was put together by a number of naturopaths, physicians, hormone experts—people who all work with patients, like I work with. And we kind of came up with what we thought was the best possible combination of products to lower cortisol and help to boost testosterone, boost estrogen and progesterone naturally.
And then we did the study that showed that it works—works exceedingly well. I was able to present the study at the North American Menopause Society. So it was peer-reviewed—in other words, a bunch of other scientific experts thought it was a great study. They accepted it for presentation and review.
So this is a product that really works. Trying it is a freebie in the sense of side effects—we have no bad side effects known. It certainly doesn’t increase any risk of any disease that we know about. So as opposed to hormone replacement therapy, it’s a great first place to start. And it’s accessible without a physician, it’s accessible without blood tests—you should just start on it.
And do other things to control your cortisol. Think about better sleep. Think about meditation. Think about proper exercise. Think about proper nutrition. All the things that you do, Hayley—and all the things that everyone should be doing to be healthy moving forward.
Hayley Hobson: Yeah, and the thing about this product is it actually helps your sleep. So you're not just balancing your cortisol levels. But you know, I noticed the one I’ve been using has the option of having melatonin or not—some people don’t do well on melatonin. But either way, my sleep cycles did stabilize and actually get better since I’ve been taking the product.
Todd Dorfman: Yes.
Hayley Hobson: I’m so glad that we were able to catch up, and you were able to clarify this for me. I’d love to get that peer result that you’re talking about. And if you guys can send it over, we could even attach it to the podcast episode. That would be amazing.
Todd Dorfman: Absolutely.
Hayley Hobson: Yeah, it’s so crazy how much of an impact cortisol can have on your health. Just so grateful. Thank you so much for sharing all of this knowledge.
Todd Dorfman: Yeah, you’re very welcome. We hardly scratched the surface—I could talk about this for hours.
Hayley Hobson: Oh, I could talk about it for hours.
Todd Dorfman: Yeah. Well, if you'd like to talk again, I’m happy to.
Hayley Hobson: Yeah, maybe we can bring you back for a part two. That would be really fun. But I know people’s attention span is like 30 to 40 minutes.
Todd Dorfman: Yeah, I know—mine is too. But yeah, there’s just so much stuff. It’s hard for people who don’t really have a great flavor to understand all the implications of cortisol across all areas of your health.
Hayley Hobson: Well, I would love to invite you back for a part two. We’ll get in touch with you. In the meantime, I love how you’ve broken down honestly complicated science in such an easy-to-understand way.
So before we wrap up, I want to just drop the link for you guys one more time—the link to the cortisol-regulating, natural adaptogenic supplement or lozenge that we talked about today is at hayleyhobson.com. Again, if you’re tuning in right now and you’re scrolling through IG or Facebook, you can go to @HayleyHobson on either account. Comment the word “cortisol” on any post—I’ll see it, I’ll DM you immediately.
And if you loved today’s conversation, please share this episode with somebody that you love—because this gift of health and midlife regulation is meant to be shared.
And big thanks to you, Doc. And until next time, my friends—I will see you online.
Todd Dorfman: Thanks for having me. Nice to see you.
Hayley Hobson: You too.