Dr. Mindy Pelz: #1 Question to Ask Yourself if You Want to Get Rid of Your Belly Fat & The ONE ingredient to Add to Your Diet that Will Suppress Your Appetite
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What is the worst mistake someone can make while fasting that will make them gain weight? Doing the same fast, the same way every single day. This is the part that I want to scream from the rooftop.

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Hey, everyone. Welcome back to On Purpose, the place you come to to become happier, healthier, and more healed. Today's guest is going to help us do just that from the inside out. Dr. Mindy Pelz is a women's health expert, podcast host, and bestselling author of Fast Like a Girl, The Menopause Reset, and her new book,

eat like a girl. With a mission to empower women by helping them understand their bodies, Dr. Pels has become a leading voice in the fields of hormones, fasting, and healthy living. Dr. Mindy's work provides invaluable guidance for women navigating the complexities of hormones, metabolic health, and nutrition. Please welcome to On Purpose, Dr. Mindy Pels. Mindy, it's great to see you. Yeah, thank you. And thank you for being here. Oh, that's great.

I'm excited. I'm super happy to be here and have this conversation with you. I just want to point out how amazing you are because you're actually here on your birthday, which shows how much you value and deeply believe in the work you're doing to be spending your birthday with us. So I feel even more lucky and grateful to be with you. Yeah. You know, I'm sure it's like your work, you know, it is, it's just,

oozes out of me. So it's not like I had to sacrifice to be here on my birthday. It was more of a joy to be here. So thank you for having me on my birthday. I love it. Well, let's get right into it. I wanted to start off with a big question. When we knew you were coming on the show, we asked our audience for things that they would love to learn from you, things they'd love to know about you. And one of the biggest ones that came up is what is the worst mistake someone can make while fasting that will make them gain weight?

Ooh, this was the biggest question? Okay, this is really great because there's not a one sentence answer. So the biggest mistake for starters is doing the same fast, the same way every single day over and over and over again. Wow. We were meant to vary, men and women were meant to vary our fast.

And here's the way you look at it is that the human body will adapt to what we call a hormetic stress, a little tiny stressor that puts it into a forced adaptation. So you go without food. All of a sudden, you're like, your body's like, wait a second, no food's coming in. We're going to need to go find that food that we stored years ago. And so it will go to the fat storage and burn that fat.

If you do that same style of fasting, maybe it's one meal a day over and over and over again, the body gets really smart. And it's like, wait, no food's coming in. I only get a little bit of food every single day. I'm going to slow my metabolism down.

So the biggest mistake that people make is that they've got to vary their fast, vary the length. You don't fast every day. It's what we call feast, famine, cycling. And it's how the human body was designed to be. I was not expecting that answer. Excellent. Because I feel like everything we're ever told is like, here's the hours. Here's what it is. Do it five days in a row. Maybe you can take a couple of days off a week or a month or whatever it may be.

How do you know then how to structure it to give yourself some sort of system to follow so that you're not just, I guess, completely out of sync as well? Yeah. So first I want to say is it makes logical sense if you go back and you think about the hunter gatherers.

Like they came out of the cave and sometimes they had a meal left over from a kill they made the night before. Sometimes they had a lot of food and then sometimes they had no food. So our body is used to that feast, famine, cycling because that's how we were primally designed. So I want to point that out. Second thing, the way that I see this is that every day you have a fasting window and you have an eating window.

And your eating window, you get to vary. And it should vary for most people based off your lifestyle. So let's use the example of the soccer mom because that was sort of a big part of my practice was all these, I call them the mama bears. And what we found is that they want, the most important meal for them was dinner with the family.

So they needed to skip breakfast and start their eating window somewhere around 12, 1 o'clock so that they could finish that eating window at 7, 8 o'clock. So Monday through Friday, they would make their eating window in the afternoon, evening.

But then on the weekends, like a lot of families want to have brunch on Sunday or maybe they'll go to the farmer's market or maybe they'll go out to breakfast on Saturday morning. So then they would move their eating window up in earlier in the day. So I think you should base it off your lifestyle. And then, of course, base it off of women should base it off their cycle, which is what Fast Like a Girl is about.

Yeah. So I'm someone who loves systems and routines. So I end up eating, I'm a three meals per day kind of person. I have to eat three meals a day. My body reacts in whether it's cramps or fatigue or whatever, if I don't. So if I try and miss breakfast or have a late breakfast, I'm feeling that. If I'm skipping a meal in the middle of the day, I'm feeling that. Like

My body wants it. So I generally end up eating three meals a day pretty much at the same time every day. Is that bad? Am I doing that wrong?

Well, I mean, I always say it depends on your intention. So what's your intention for your health? My intention right now is to gain strength and muscle as I've been training and trying to eat enough protein as someone who follows a plant-based diet. And then you are doing it when you're working out in the morning? Yes, in the morning. Yeah. So for you, because you're trying to up muscle, you're going to want to make sure that you eat before your workout and you're going to want to make sure you eat after.

I'm not doing the before. Yeah. So then what will end up happening, so you go in fueled, you're breaking that muscle down while you're working out, and then you're refueling afterwards. That would be like the perfect way to stack protein. But then where does the fasting window fit in? So the fasting window would probably be more towards the end of the day. And one of the things that I just try to make this simple for everybody is the best thing you can do is always eat in the light.

The minute we start eating in the dark, like at the end of the day, we've got melatonin coming into our body and melatonin causes us to be more insulin resistant. So if you were working out at nine in the morning, I'd want you to have a meal, maybe a small little protein shake at eight. You do your workout, then you follow it up with a recovery meal. Yeah, I would do. Yeah, I would just enough to kind of fuel you. Yeah, you wouldn't need a huge amount. And then-

five, six o'clock at night to pay on the time of year, you shut it down. And then now if you're done eating at six, you would go, you know, six to six all the way till eight. That's a 14 hour fast every day. And that's pretty good. Yeah. So that's pretty much what I do fasting was I stop being at like 630. We always have an early dinner. But I guess, yeah, that means no, no,

None of those late night snacks that if I end up being out till late, if I have to, got to stop those late night snacks. Yeah, that's the challenge. Eating the light. Yeah. So eating the light. And then what a lot of people do because of that night snacking, what a lot of people decide is, you know what, I'd rather delay my breakfast so that I can eat a little bit later because I maybe sit down with a bowl of popcorn and watch a movie at night. And so they'll make their first meal noon. Right.

But this is the whole point of what I'm trying to teach is all of this is customizable. But you should customize it to your intention and your goals and your lifestyle. And if you can do it that way, it's a health habit that becomes effortless over time, as opposed to what we typically do, which is I'm going to get healthy. I'm going to get fit. I mean, I just discipline myself into this new body I want.

And then after a while, we lose the discipline and we boomerang back into our old habits. Yeah. Well, you've already given me something. I'm going to start having that bite to eat before my workouts now. I think that will make a huge difference for me for sure. No, I love that. The second thing that everyone asked about, which was the big one, which is what is the fastest, most effective way for people to lose their belly fat? Yeah.

Everybody wants to know about belly fat. Everyone's obsessed with belly fat. Everybody is obsessed with belly fat. Okay, I want to start with this understanding. What causes your body to gain weight? And that's a better question to ask yourself than how do I get this weight off? Because you need to know the mechanism.

Here's what the body does is whenever there is excess, excess glucose, excess hormones, excess toxins, the body is so well designed that it knows I can't put all this excess around your heart and lungs. I probably shouldn't put this around your liver. I'm not going to go over here and put it around your spleen. I'm going to store it somewhere that will keep you alive.

So it stores it first around your belly. No way. So this is the thing that I'm like trying to free women from is then you look in the mirror and you're like, wait a second. I hate that belly fat. And you shame yourself. You get...

guilt your way into the next diet when your body, if it could talk to you, was like, okay, listen, you just had a lot of extra stuff you've been giving me and I didn't know where to put it. So I started in your belly. Then I put it in your booty. Then I put it around your face and the back of your arms. And for women, sometimes it goes in the chest and I'm putting it there to save your life.

So I think the first step to losing menopausal belly fat is getting in alignment with the body and thank the body for what it's doing because it's trying to save you. Great answer, yeah. So now we have that understanding, we go, okay, well, belly in general, we know cortisol. So we are a cortisol-saturated world right now. And so we got to do something to help with cortisol. Right.

Well, there are things to help with cortisol other than, you know, becoming a monk. There are other things you can do other than sitting somewhere and just meditating, like easy things. A stressful event hits you, the worst thing you can do is sit. Get up and move. Cortisol was meant to make you move. It's that hormone that gives you get up and go because you're running from a tiger. Yeah.

So if you're sitting at your desk, boss walks in and is like, hey, I need this by the end of the day. And you're like, there's no way I can get it. And you're all upset. The worst thing you can do is stay seated. Go move your body. So constantly walking will help bring that cortisol down. Getting out in nature more.

bringing cortisol down, hanging out with positive people so that you're not in an environment where negative people are throwing cortisol bombs at you all day long, where your thinking starts to become one that's intrinsic, that you're starting to like think everything is a threat and you're not safe and cortisol is high. That all relates to belly fat. This is why I'm like going into the detail on this because people want the quick fix, right?

But with the belly fat, the first thing I want people to ask themselves is what is the stress level of my life? And how can I bring that stress level down? And how can I start to work with cortisol? Walking being the biggest one, hanging out in nature, and then getting your body in the right environments.

Then you can look at toxins. So we started this conversation before we recorded about toxicity. We live in the most toxic time in human history. Women are putting over 200 toxic carcinogenic chemicals on their skin every single day. The brilliant body is like, I don't know what to do with all this, so I'm going to put it around your belly and your chest.

And again, then we look in the mirror and we're mad at ourselves because we weren't disciplined enough. So go and look at your toxic load. What toxic chemicals are constantly coming into your body? Start looking into different detoxes because we got to bring your toxic load down. What are the most common places that people are putting toxins into their body? Well, skin is a big one. Food is a big one.

This is horrible. I put a whole thing in Eat Like a Girl and I was so depressed after I wrote it all about obesogens.

So obesogens are chemicals that are in our food. So BPA plastics are what our food are wrapped around. That's an obesogen. Pesticides are an obesogen. There's a long list in the book, like artificial colorings and flavorings, BHT, BHA, all of these synthetic ingredients, what they do, and this is the part that I'm like want to scream from the rooftops.

is what they do is they literally, those chemicals go into stem cells and they reprogram those stem cells to actually make fat cells. And one of the places we're seeing this is in the UK right now because kids have lots of stem cells. And as we get older, we have less. And so what we're seeing is that the stem cells that were supposed to make bone are now making fat.

And so kids are becoming, their height is smaller and shorter than ever before and they're bigger and bigger than ever before. So these chemicals are totally changing our fat distribution and the belly fat is one of them. So what you put on your body and what you're putting in your mouth

start there. Yeah. That's, it's so terrifying. It's terrifying. It's terrifying because it feels like everything you turn over these days, every pack is labeled with a million different things. And if you're not conscious and aware and checking pretty much everything you pick up is going to have one of those things in it. That's right. And the best thing you can do is eat food without a label. Mm-hmm.

Like go to your farmer's market, get healthy fruits and vegetables. If you eat meat, know who your butcher is and like know where that meat came from. Make sure it wasn't packed with chemicals. Like I think we used to think it was like woo-woo and people who ate organic were hippies.

And I would say at this particular moment in history, you should know an ingredient label, you should know those chemicals that are going into your food because they are reprogramming your body and one of the things they're reprogramming are stem cells to make these fat cells and you're double downing on dieting and you're double downing on working out and you don't even realize that it's actually this chemical load that has completely reprogrammed your body.

And so they're conscious of it. Oh, yeah. Oh, well, so the chemicals are there for two reasons in food. One is shelf life. So, you know, much easier for these food companies to make sure that their food, if it sits on a shelf, is going to last a very long time. The second one is that they are hijacking your taste buds.

so that you're addicted to it. Let me give you an example. Years ago in the LA Times, this was like 15 years ago, this three spread page spread comes out in the LA Times, like huge about what it was Lay's specifically, potato chips, what they were doing, what the company was looking at was what kind of chemicals can we spray on the potato chip

so that it hits all the dopamine receptor sites in the brain. But we got to keep that chip light enough that when it hits the stomach, it doesn't trigger a reaction in the brain to kill hunger. So it needs to be light. It has to be salty. It has to have a little bit of sweetness in it so it can hit those dopamine sites. But we can't let the person fill up on it.

So think about that. How many people open a bag of potato chips and eat? It does just that. It does that. You can't just eat one. You're like, the whole bag's gone. And then the next thing you know, you're like, I need more food. And that is what all this Western processed food is doing is it's hijacking our taste buds.

So now we don't even have control over our taste buds. It's so hard when you know that you're being manipulated and programmed and it's been hardwired since such a young age that the habit that we have of

grabbing that bag of chips or the chocolate bar or whatever else it may be. Yeah. It feels like that is us. Yeah. Almost like, oh, but that's who I am. I just, I just love that type of food or that's what I'm used to. And we're trying to go against this deep long-term conditioning. It feels like. Yes. And so breaking that habit is a lot harder. Yeah.

than it seems. Yeah. And, and again, I'm always looking at things through the slant of women's health because what I think women do is that when they don't know this information is that they start to think they can't lose weight because there's something wrong with them.

And they have no idea that the chemicals they've been eating in their diet food that was low fat and they bought because they wanted the lower sugar version actually had a chemical in it that reprogrammed stem cells to make fat cells and hijacked their taste buds so that they're addicted to these foods over and over again. But the woman doesn't know that. She's like, oh, God, I can never lose weight.

It must be my fault. She goes into the doctor's office. The doctor's like, your BMI is really high. And so now all of a sudden, he's, you know, the doctor's like, you got to lose weight. She doesn't know what to do. So she's like doubling down on eating less. She's doubling down on exercise. She's doubling down on shaming herself. And she didn't realize that it was actually the food industry that changed her whole body. And she needs to unhook from that food system in order to get the results she wants.

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Every four years, the world watches every corner kick, every save, every pass. The world watches its most beautiful game played at its highest level. And for a moment, the world stops turning for soccer.

A lot of people, when they're in that position, something they do is people count calories. Do they matter? So this question comes up all the time. So I'm so happy that you asked it because based off of research, yes, calories matter. But

But based off of human behavior, calories don't matter. So this is why in Eat Like a Girl, I have a statement that blood sugar matters, calories don't.

And the reason that I say that is that every single woman I sat with in my clinic and all the feedback we're getting on our socials from women who are fasting is that they don't know how many calories they eat in a day and they don't know how many calories is their output in a day. So nobody can actually succeed at calories in, calories out.

But I can take a CGM and I can put it on the back of a woman's arm and I can say, just eat. And then she can see real time what that blood sugar spikes. How many does she have over and over and over again? And from that visual, she can start to make better choices about her health that affects her blood sugar better. And so that she can start to keep her blood sugar low. I'll give you an example.

I had a patient a couple of years ago that was plant-based and not wanting to change plant-based. I was in honor of her choice. But when we put a CGM on her, she had about 10 spikes of these really high spikes of glucose every single day.

And I asked her, I was like, how do you, like, what do your moods follow these spikes? And she's like, yeah, I'm like up, I'm down. I'm hungry and then I'm not hungry. Like, I feel like I'm on a roller coaster all day long. So what I did is we worked with, okay, how about if we add a little bit of fat?

How about if we add a little bit of fiber? What if we take some of these things like oat milk and let's sort of switch oat milk or maybe if you love your oat milk, let's make sure it's really clean oat milk and let's add a little MCT oil in your coffee. And we started to change how a meal was put together. And she went down to about four spikes a day.

She didn't change really anything she ate. She changed the way that she put a meal together and then the blood sugar changed and then her moods changed and then her weight changed because I taught her blood sugar. That doesn't happen with calories. How many spikes a day is okay? I don't know.

know if there's an average spike amount, but let's say that when you get a glucose spike, the most important thing is that it comes down to its pre-glucose amount, pre-meal amount.

within 90 minutes. So textbook is two hours, but I like to say if we can do like an hour and a half where you have a blood sugar spike and with an hour and a half, your blood sugar is right back where it was before you ate that meal, you're pretty insulin sensitive. If it's taking more than two hours for your body to be able to integrate that glucose, no.

Now we may have a little bit metabolically resistant, insulin resistant body. So it's your recovery from the meal that matters more than anything else. Interesting. Oh, right. Okay. So 90 minutes is what we should be aiming for. That's my personal standard. Like what most doctors will say is two hours.

But I like it to be a little quicker than that. Got it. So that's what we should be measuring. That's what we should be looking at. And then the other thing is one of the greatest studies done on fasting is 16-8. And Sachin Panda was the leader of that study. And what he found is that if you ate all your food in an eight-hour eating window, leaving 16 hours for rest and recovery...

that you basically became metabolically immune from the harsh metabolic consequences of a processed diet.

So what that meant was I can take all the bad food and I can put in an eight-hour eating window. And if I give my body 16 hours to rest, then the metabolic system rebooted itself and was able to continue forward without seeing insulin go up and hemoglobin A1C go up and inflammatory markers like CRP go up. So when I look at the spikes, I want to see the recovery of the spike and

And then I want to see that part of the day, you're just not eating anything, that there's no spikes. Right. Does that make sense? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense.

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One of the things that I found fascinating that you talk about in Eat Like a Girl is you talk about eating for your microbes, not your taste buds. And I find this to be the constant kind of challenge that people in my life have when I'm talking about healthy eating or healthy habits when it comes to food. We generally eat for our taste buds or eat for our emotions. Yes. Talk to me, before we talk about eating for your microbes, talk to me about how our patterns

patterns of our taste buds have changed over time. Yeah. Because I feel, again, we're not aware of the root of where this started. Yeah. And this is the reason I put that as a real foundational rule is, again, I'm trying to free women and help women have a better relationship with food.

And there's so many women that just find out, like, let's use carbohydrates or sugar or alcohol. They'll say, I just crave it. I can't, I can't uncrave it. I just, it's like the tub of ice cream just calls me.

Well, if you actually look, there can be microbes and there can be fungus that lives in your gut that is doing the calling. So those are the ones that are sending a signal to the brain, feed me. So we have trillions of bacteria in our gut and they all want to stay alive. And so they send signals to the brain and they tell the brain, feed me this, don't feed me that, so that it can stay alive.

And then on top of that, we add this dopamine response we're getting from the chemical food. We are actually not really in control of our food choices when you look through that lens. So let's go to your friends. Your friends who are like, I have no willpower or I don't know how to get over my sugar addiction.

Well, the first thing is make sure you're eating chemical-free. Get back to nature's food because nature didn't create food that made you addicted. So get off those processed foods. And then let's look at feeding your microbes. Let's give your microbes more food. Like what I found in my clinic is people were eating the same foods over and over and over again, like the same 20 foods.

And now when I opened it up, their whole food window and said, hey, how about instead of iceberg lettuce every night, what if we try a spring mix with a little parsley and maybe some dandelion greens so we can support your liver? Like all of a sudden we just opened up the foods they were eating and the microbes changed. And if you mix that with fasting, the greatest study that I love, one of the greatest that was done on fasting was the Every Other Day Diet.

And what a researcher did is she took a group of people that were metabolically challenged, had food addiction and had cardiovascular challenges and said, you can eat anything you want one day. And then the next day you don't eat. And the next day, eat whatever you want. Next day, don't eat.

And what she found was that, and they had to do it over a course of a year. By the end of the year, everybody's metabolic markers improved. Everybody lost weight, which is what she thought would happen. But what surprised her was that everybody's choice of food, what they were craving, changed. So when I look at those people struggling with, like, I can't get over my cravings, we've got to change your microbiome.

and we've got to put you in some fasted states so you can start to have a different experience with these cravings. And it's a combination of those things. How do we detox the bacteria that's calling out for the sugar or calling out for the fats or carbs or whatever it is? How do we detox those? You starve them out. Really? That's the only way? Yeah, you start starving them out. Wow. And that's why, I mean, I've spent a lot of time

really asking myself, like, why did Fast Like a Girl connect with people? What was it that was in there? I mean, we have, across all the audio and the e-book and the hard copy, over 800,000 versions of Fast Like a Girl was purchased. And I think... Congratulations. Yeah, thank you. I think what happened...

is that people finally were able to take a break from food and they saw the result and they started to starve out the microbes and they started to go after all these places that the body stored excess and they started to see a result. And I really believe if you want to be healthy, you don't need motivation, you need momentum. And once you have momentum, the motivation comes. Yeah.

So one of the things that we do when you're looking at these microbes that are controlling your taste buds is let's just start tacking on some fasting windows every day where you just give the microbes a break and they will start to die off.

And the longer you fast, the more they die off and your food choices will change, which is what happened in that study. I've experienced that personally. I always talk about how my wife trained me off of sugar because when I met her, I was addicted for sure. I was that friend. And I can empathize with it because I know how strong it was for me because I grew up eating four chocolate products a day. And now I'll have one dessert a week. Yeah.

Amazing. And it's taken me, or like one refined sugar product a week. Yeah. And then I'll only eat natural sugars, like fruits and things for the rest of the week. And I think it's been such a journey for me, but you're so right that it had to be starved, had to be substituted, and then eventually...

I eventually, I started realizing how many other things were impacting my desire for sugar. I, it was a lack of workout. It was poor sleep. It was a lack of the right vitamins and supplements, which means my body had low energy. So it turned to what I thought gave me energy. And so you started realizing how interconnected all those things were rather than it actually being about my addiction to sugar. That's right. That's right. When, like when people are like, I, like I've had so many over the years, people were like, I could never fast. Yeah.

And I'm always like, oh, actually sit with me for a hot moment because there hasn't been a person I haven't been able to train to fast. You just trained your body to eat. And you could look at the same thing with the food you're eating when you're like, I can't overcome my sugar addiction. No, you should rephrase that.

and you should say, I've trained my body to crave sugar. I would like to train it to crave something different. And that's what you did is you found out what we would call a multi-therapeutic approach. A lot of different things came into play so that you could literally train your body to crave something different. Yes. And still doing it today. It's a practice that

Has to continue and last. No, for sure. There's another thing that you brought up, which you talk about protein being the hero macro ingredient. Yeah. And right now I feel like protein's like the hot talking point everywhere. It's having its moment for sure. I wanted to ask you about, you know, no one seems to be getting the amount of protein that everyone says you should be getting. So how much protein should we be getting? Yeah. And how do we actually get there? Well, to me, the protein is very much like...

when we were counting carbs or when we were counting calories. Like they're fun to do in a moment and then nobody sustains it over time. So I'm in alignment with everybody, what everybody's saying, which is one gram of protein for every pound of body weight. Like I think that's a good measurement for you to look at. I've heard some people even say you need, you know, two grams of protein for every pound of body weight if you're trying to grow muscle.

So I think in theory, that's great. And then we have things like make sure you have 30 grams of protein per meal so that you can open up amino acid receptor sites to grow muscle. I think that's all great.

Now let's talk to the woman in the Midwest. Let's talk to the single mom in the Midwest that's working two jobs. And she's like, I'm just trying to stay afloat. And now you want me to count how many grams of protein I eat every day so that I can be optimally healthy?

This is why I put in there, what I want her to know is just know protein's the hero macronutrient. It has amino acids in it, and amino acids are going to make you hormones and neurotransmitters. So at every single meal, I want you to look at the protein source first, and how do you get as much protein in that meal, and then build the carbohydrates around it and build the vegetables and everything around it. Don't skimp on the protein. Every meal has to have a protein.

That is a more doable like language and for a woman who is, or, and man who is like so busy, because again, I don't know if people are successfully counting this day in and day out, unless they're really making a priority. Yeah. I don't, my appetite wouldn't even allow me to eat that much protein. Like I, I struggle with two things. One is I don't think I can eat that much protein. I've tried. And second of all,

it's heavy on my gut, it's hard on my gut. Like that much protein just, my gut can't process it. So how do you work out those two things? This actually came up in another interview and I explained that this February of this year, I decided to try the protein theory and I was working out with a trainer. I was lifting heavy weights. I'm 55 as of today. I was 54 at the time, I'm post-menopausal. And I was like, okay, let me experiment with this protein thing.

In January, I was still with the trainer. I was still tacking on my fasting window. And I was really doing what I talk about in the book where I would have keto days and I would have hormone feasting days. But I wasn't as focused on protein. In January, I lost weight and I built muscle.

In February, same thing, I just upped my protein to one gram per pound of body weight. By the end of February, I had put on more fat than if I had been doing none of that. And I was like, this isn't working for me. This is too much protein for my body.

And I went back to just protein with every meal, Mindy. Stop trying to get it to a certain amount. That was my experience. Now, other people will say, oh, I've built so much muscle with it. Amazing. But I talk about this in the book that we have to go back to N of 1.

N of one means you can hear us talk about protein and now your job is to figure out if it works for you. Didn't work so it was hard for you, it sounds like? It was hard for me. It's been hard right now. I've been practicing with it for like three months maybe. Yeah. Experimenting. So it was hard for me, whereas other people are like...

this works perfectly for me, which is great. So I just think protein with every meal, we have to prioritize protein. And then you've got to find what pattern of the amount is going to be best for you. Yeah. The point is to remember it's the hero ingredient. That's right. And then build around it. That's right. And don't worry if you're not getting 30 grams per meal or 40 grams or even

depending on your body weight, 50 or 60 grams per meal, it's a lot. Do you remember the Zone Diet? I do, yes. Okay, so Barry Sears, this was back when I was in university, so this was back in the 90s. He was the first one to say when you put a meal together, and he used pasta as an example, he was like, the worst thing you could do is have pasta with red sauce and no protein because that is all glucose and you'll get this incredible glucose spike.

But actually, if you put a meatball in there and you drizzle some olive oil on it, now the metabolic cost to you will be much less and you will lose weight. And his whole thing was like, stay in the zone. You got to stay in the zone. So the protein conversation to me, I feel like needs to evolve to protein at every meal,

And let's make sure we're putting it there with fat and some of nature's carbs and some fiber and how you put that meal together is gonna have a bigger effect on you than just the protein amount. Yeah, that's very helpful. Yeah. That's very helpful. And I hope everyone is listening and watching

kind of, you know, eases up on it or finds a way that it works for you. I think that's, yeah, that's the point. When does, you know, I think we've been talking a lot about belly fat and fat in general. When does fat make you fat?

That's a great question. Okay, so toxic fat makes you fat. What is a toxic fat? So our canola oils, our cottonseed, corn oils, soybean oils, partially hydrogenated oils, vegetable oils, highly processed sunflower and safflower oils. Those are the biggies. Those are toxins. So let's go back to what is fat. Fat is a storage place for things your body doesn't know what to do with.

those oils, your body doesn't know what to do with. So it's putting it around your belly. It's putting it in fat. So stop giving it to your body because when you give it to your body, the body's so smart. It's like, I'm just going to go store it over here.

If I come over and I do now avocado oil, olive oil, olive oil is like the hero oil, even some MCT oil or even some of the nut oils like walnut oil or some seed oils like sesame seed oil.

Your body knows what to do with that. It knows how to integrate that. It doesn't cause cellular inflammation. And so it'll kill hunger. It's going to help nourish your brain. It's going to stabilize your blood sugar. You need these oils to make hormones. So totally different beasts. One makes you fat and the other one actually will make you healthy and can actually help you lose weight because it kills hunger. Mm-hmm.

When we're also talking about our fat intake, is there a time of day that's better for us to be eating fat versus others? Or is it something that needs to be spread out across the day? I think of fat as like a blood sugar break.

So let's use today as an example. It's like, what, 3 o'clock in the afternoon? And so I had my first meal. I worked out in the morning on an empty stomach. It was just where I decided to go today. I had some collagen powder in my coffee and a little bit of raw cream. And then I went out and worked out. And then I had my first meal around 11 o'clock.

And one of the things that I made sure I did is get a lot of protein and a lot of fat because I knew I wasn't going to eat again until tonight. And I was coming here for this podcast. So I didn't want my blood sugar to spike at one or two and then show up in your chair and have brain fog and be unable to focus and my energy low. So I made sure I had extra fat on

my breakfast and extra protein so that my glucose stayed very steady. So I like fat when you are not trying to... you're really trying to minimize a glucose spike. So performance is what I just explained or I don't want to be hungry in two more hours, I should use some fat.

Or I don't want to crave that chocolate at 10 o'clock at night. So I should have some more fat with my dinner because all of that stabilizes blood sugar. And then those cravings and those brain fog and that lack of energy doesn't show up. That's really helpful because I think-

Again, it comes to if we have the time and energy to be that mindful with what we can plan. Yeah. But especially when it comes to big events, big moments, big meetings, big high performance moments in our life, it seems like that's

that's something good to be mindful at those times. Oh yeah. That's why I love olive oil. Just start drizzling it on your meal and you will be shocked at how it kills hunger and you'll be shocked at how you're not hungry for hours afterwards and your brain power is completely online and focused. It's the easiest thing to add. Yeah. Me and my wife were joking about how often what happens is

you end up eating smaller meals, but then you end up eating junk afterwards. Yeah, right. And that happens so often because we're like, oh no, I want to be mindful of my portion size or whatever it is. And then at 10 p.m. you want a dessert. But the idea of sprinkling something as simple as olive oil onto your meals to help curb a craving later on. And then, you know, olive oils are high in polyphenols and polyphenols feed the good microbes.

So when you're drizzling olive oil on your meal, you're stabilizing blood sugar and you're feeding the good microbes. So those good microbes are going to keep giving you signals to crave good food. So it really is multifactorial. But let's go back, just so we don't confuse people, let's go back to the calorie in calorie out. Because some people are like, wait a second, if I put too much olive oil on top of my food, that's a lot of calories. Right.

But I'm back at...

Does the calorie in calorie out? Is it working for you? I'm more interested in you feeding your body through the lens of metabolic health so that your blood sugar can be stable. I'm interested in food being a performance enhancer for you. And I care a lot about your microbes because not only do they control your cravings, but they control your immune system, your neurotransmitters. Like they are the thing that is driving your health if you actually look into it.

So olive oil, you drizzled it on your meal and like magic happened in your body. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. You know, we all have those moments where we feel like we're not really showing up as our true selves. Maybe it was a recent meeting or even a casual hangout with friends, but you just couldn't shake the feeling that you had to put on a mask.

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In Eat Like a Girl, your new book, you talk about how we need to eat to make hormones, especially for women. Walk me through the importance of that because I don't think I'd ever heard that before. Yeah. So this came kind of out of my frustration with women feeling like if I have low hormones, then I just need to take an exogenous form of hormone and put it into my body. And what I wanted women, I'm not saying that's wrong.

I'm just wanted to say, can we have a conversation first before you start to feel like the challenge with your female body is you don't have enough hormones? Can we look at your food behaviors and ask ourselves, are you getting enough nutrients in to be able to actually make hormones? So I look at it like if you were making bread.

You have to have a certain amount of ingredients. You've got to have flour, you probably have to have yeast, you have to have some baking soda. Like there are certain ingredients that need to go into bread in order for it to rise and for it to be able to be bread. Same thing with hormones.

And what I did in the book is I spent a lot of time researching, well, what are those nutrients that we need? And I came up with what I call the key 24. You need these 24 nutrients every single day to be able to even make a hormone.

And when you look at those 24 ingredients, like nine of them are amino acids, which takes us back to protein. And you got proteins where you're getting amino acids from. And one of the major one is omega-3 fatty acids, which takes us back to olive oil.

So if I'm a woman who is like, let's just talk about, I'm sure this is going to come up because it keeps coming up. Let's talk about the weight loss drugs. Let's say I'm taking a shot that kills my hunger. So I'm not eating very much and I'm losing weight.

But if I'm not getting food in with enough nutrients into my body, I don't have enough of these vitamins and minerals and fatty acids and amino acids to make hormones. So down the road, something's going to give from my lack of intention around a diverse meal. So that's why I put it in there was like, can we start looking at food as hormonal medicine?

Food isn't just pleasure, food isn't just energy, food is actually feeding these hormones, but you've got to get a good variety of food in order to do that.

Is there any indication to women's health at age 20, 30, 40, 50, where different hormones and different foods are more of a priority in the different decades? Yeah. Well, in the younger years, I mean, again, what we're talking about is gold. And Fast Like a Girl introduced something I called the fasting cycle, which is where the front half of your cycle, you're going to keep your glucose low. And then the back half of your cycle, you want to bring your glucose up.

And I showed that through the lens of fasting. In this book, in Eat Like a Girl, I really want women to see front half of your cycle, you're really catering to estrogen. And estrogen likes glucose to be low. So the keto diet, the low-carb diets that you were on, they'll work in that front half of the cycle. Just again, keep diversifying your food choices.

Whereas the back half of your cycle, progesterone is showing up and progesterone actually wants you to keep glucose higher. This is why every single woman craves carbohydrates or chocolate or something sugary the week before her period because her body is so intelligent. It's like, I need you to bring up glucose so I can make progesterone so that the uterine lining can shed and you can have a cycle.

So for those women, 20 and 30, this is the message they need to know. Front half of the cycle, lower carb, back half of the cycle, higher carb. That's as simple as I can make it. It's more detailed in the book. Now let's go into perimenopause and menopause. Estrogen is going away. And when estrogen goes away, that woman becomes more insulin resistant.

So I can't tell you how many women will tell me, I haven't done anything. I'm 43 years old. I haven't done anything different and I am gaining weight. That's because you're losing estradiol. And estradiol kept you insulin sensitive.

And so now you have to find other ways to keep yourself insulin sensitive. And fasting is one of the best ways that I know to keep yourself insulin sensitive. And then you're probably going to need, again, as you move through perimenopause, you're going to need a little lower carbohydrate diet mixed with splashes of a higher carbohydrate diet.

So this is why in the book, I'm like, here's your, I call it ketobiotic is when we want to go lower carb, but keep enough fiber in there. And then hormone feasting is when we want to go higher carb so we can cater to progesterone.

It sounds confusing. No, no, not at all, yeah. But think of it like gas pedal brake. There's a rhythm to a female body, so you're just going to understand the rhythm of your hormones so you can match the foods and the fasts according to that. What are our greatest misunderstandings of the female body?

And in what decades are we so confused about or uneducated about that you'd like to point out? Oh, thank you for asking me that. The female body is highly complex. It is highly rhythmic. So it's constantly having ups and downs to it. If you look at our hormones, we are meant to have moments of where we're in complete joy. And then there are moments where we're crying. And there are moments that we

We're rushing to the gym and we're so excited to go work out. And then there's other moments that we can't get off the couch. And that's all because you live in a female body that is driven by different hormones. So the first thing I want women to know is your hormonal system makes you highly complex.

And a male's body isn't that complex. This is the way I've been saying it. And I always say like, you know, no offense to men, but like you guys are like a ukulele and we're like a violin. Like it's just, we are a very, our body is a very sophisticated instrument and

And because of our sex hormones, we require more rest and recovery. We don't do as well with toxicity. When we become insulin resistant, we start to become infertile and we start to get things like PCOS, polycystic ovarian syndrome, and our menopause symptoms will be off the chart like crazy. Right.

So that doesn't happen so much to men. So we're just a more sophisticated body we're living in. What are some of the things you would encourage people to be mindful of at different stages to spot those signs early and to respond? Because it seems like we don't really talk about the difference that clearly. We don't. And we expect the same things in the same areas or decades of life. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I think the thing that we have to look at is that lifestyle impacts both men and women.

But for women, really, we've got to dial in a lifestyle for women. Go to lifestyle first before you go to the antidepressant, before you go to the hormone replacement, before you go to the weight loss drug. Ask yourself, have I dialed in my lifestyle? And what that means is there needs to be a rhythm of where I'm maybe working out a lot and then I'm recovering. I'm maybe going low carb and then I'm feasting on healthy foods.

So we need to have a rhythmic lifestyle. And that's like new conversation that's just coming up in the last couple of years. Whereas men don't have to worry about that as much. You guys are a lot more resilient. You have one hormone to think about, which is testosterone.

You operate off a 24-hour cycle. We operate off a 28-day cycle. So we're just a lot more complicated, but that's why lifestyle is so important for women. And this is like my rally cry.

Like, oh my gosh, when we look at autoimmune problems, when we look at the menopause symptoms, like, please, can we have a conversation about lifestyle as being the first line of treatment for women before we start medicating the shit out of us? No, I love the rally cry. And I think it's so important. I'm so glad that you're sharing it so passionately here because-

I couldn't agree with you more. I've heard so many women recently when I've been at events or listening to panels or I've been hearing so many women talk about perimenopause, menopause. And what I found so fascinating when I was listening was that

I was, obviously I was like, okay, I knew I had no clue. Right. But a lot of the women in the audience were like, oh my gosh, we didn't know either what we were going through. And so I think there's such a need for it because there seems to be the misinformation or to be honest, no information. That's right. And so we're just turning towards

pharmaceuticals. Right. So on that conversation, when I first started teaching this cycling of fasting and food on my YouTube channel, nobody talked about menopause. And then I started getting people pouring in and asking me like, well, how do I do this for perimenopause and menopause?

At that time, I was like mid-40s. And so I just shared, hey, here's what I'm doing. I actually put it in a book. It's called The Menopause Reset. I was like, here are the lifestyle changes that I've made and they've worked really well for me during perimenopause.

Okay, fast forward to today. We've gone from a cultural hush around menopause where we're like, oh, she's a little irritable. Let's not like poke the bear and get her all upset because she might be menopausal. But we don't want to say that to our face to cultural chaos today.

where women are like, finally, like the conversation of menopause is emerging. And that part is amazing. Like there's been a lot of authors. There's been a lot of influencers. There's a lot of people that are cracking that conversation open, which is so good. But what we have turned the conversation to now is you are suffering in the perimenopausal experience. And so you need to think about hormone replacement therapy.

I'm not opposed to that, but every woman who goes on hormone replacement therapy has a different path to it. And that's because alongside hormone replacement, whether it's HRT direct or bioidenticals, needs to be a lifestyle change. And the diet you had at 35 doesn't work for you at 45.

and the stress load you were able to do or handle at 35, you're going to need some breaks and some new tools at 45.

So there's a lifestyle that I'm just still trying to bring in. Like, hello, the answers isn't in the patch. The answer is not in the pill. Those are good support systems, but let's make lifestyle the change that happens once you go into those perimenopausal years. What would you say are the top three lifestyle changes that changed everything for you or were positive for you? Yeah. So in the menopause reset, I wrote five.

I started fasting, that was a big one. I started varying my foods, which is what I teach in Eat Like a Girl, I went low carb, high carb. I started feeding my microbes, because the microbes break down estrogen, so I wanted to be able to increase the diversity of my microbes so they could break down the less estrogen I was getting.

I did a massive detox. I detoxed my whole house. I started detoxing myself throughout my whole 40s. Detox became my obsession. And then the last one is something called the rushing woman syndrome, which was actually coined by a woman, Dr. Libby Weaver, who showed biologically why women that are constantly in a state of stress end up having hormonal problems.

So I started saying no to more things. I'm a competitive athlete. I was a competitive tennis player in my early 20s. And I started learning how to do more yoga. I started learning how to walk more. I started getting out of that mentality of I've got to push my body. And so I just started looking at how I could recover a little bit more. And those were the five I changed. And it was like gold. Yeah.

It's so refreshing to hear that they're all interconnected as well with Eat Like a Girl and Fast Like a Girl. And it seems that

It seems that what we need to do is simple, but it's so hard because of our wiring, because of society's expectations, because of maybe our own pressure on ourselves. What gave you the permission to just say, you know what, I'm going to unsubscribe from all of this and I'm going to find a way. What was that for you? Because I feel people are really looking for that breakthrough. And you said it's not motivation, it's momentum, but it's almost like, how do you give that

stone or that rock a push down the hill so that it gains momentum the best door in is fasting this is why i started with fast like a girl like that is the quick if you want a totally different experience with your body learn how to create an eating window and a fasting window and it's interesting because my practice was built by what i call the mama bears and

There were like these women who would bring their families to me and who would come in to learn about detox and hormones and food education and lifestyle. My clinic was built, was like a lifestyle clinic, teaching people how to live a lifestyle to build health.

And it was the mama bears that I got to experiment on, you know, I put that in like, you know, a loving way. I got to take these principles that I was studying and using on myself and try it on them. And I remember with weight loss, one of the things that blew me away is once I started teaching women how to fast, maybe two weeks would go by and I didn't see them and they walk into my clinic and it looked like a fat coat had been taken off of them in two weeks. Wow.

And I was like, oh my God, like fasting got you that in two weeks. So I think this is why I'm like the evangelist for fasting. Is there anyone who should never fast or shouldn't fast? It's a great question.

I always say if you're pregnant or nursing, it's a no, that's not your tool. And I write about that in both books. If you have an eating disorder, you need to be working with somebody who can work alongside you because there's little tricks that you can do to line yourself up for that.

Certain cancers don't do well with fasting and certain cancers do incredibly well with fasting. So going to a specialist that knows that. Outside of that, everybody else can fast. I just want to point out the person I didn't point out who couldn't fast is the diabetic. Mm-hmm.

This is the one that shocks everybody is the type one and type two diabetic when done right and done with doctor supervision actually does really well with fasting. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, that is surprising. Right? You wouldn't expect that. No. There's a trend right now of women eating meatballs in order to lose weight. What's your take on that? Is that all they're eating? Or at least a big part of it. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I mean, they're just trying to dose up protein. So what I would say is if you're going to dose up protein, make sure it's a clean protein. What would you define as a clean protein?

and you really want grass-fed because it has higher omega-3s. So it needs to be a clean source of protein. I'm also a real fan for women specifically of fiber because fiber feeds those microbes that break hormones down. So if you're only going meat,

you're missing out on the vegetables, we need more fiber. But from a metabolic standpoint, from blood sugar standpoint, meatballs, if you didn't have a lot of fillers and stuff in them could be really good. Are they losing weight?

Yeah, that's what I said. Meatballs. Yeah, meatballs. Sorry, not balls. It's my accent. It's my accent. Yeah, yeah. Meatballs, yeah. My accent. Meatballs. Okay, meatballs. Bowls, yeah. Like B-O-W-L-S. Yeah, B-O-W-L-S. Okay. Sorry, it's my accent. No, no. You say it better than... Yeah, no, no, no. Oh, my God. Yeah.

So what kind of meat? Is it a variety of meat in there? I believe so. I mean, it's basically just these bowls that people are having that just like are ground beef, essentially. Yeah. Like good grass fed ground beef. But it's like the main thing that they're eating like lunch and dinner. Yeah. Are they eating any fiber at all or they're just eating that? I think it's like very minimal like carb. Okay. Okay. This is interesting. And let's dive into the mechanics on this.

So protein stabilizes your blood sugar. So if I'm only eating a meat bowl all day long, then what ends up happening is I'm really not... Those blood sugar spikes we talked about, I'm not getting very many of them. So that's good. If you don't have a lot of blood sugar spikes, you're not asking your body to make a ton of insulin.

So from a metabolic standpoint, that is really fascinating. From a gut microbiome standpoint, and this is really controversial and I still stay by this to this day, is the carnivore diet. The carnivore diet kind of had its moment and then people were like, this is crazy and it went away. Well, what we saw in my community and in my clinic and in the research that I dove into is that when all you do is eat meat,

you actually can stimulate a immune cell in your gut called your T regulatory cells. And your T regulatory cells make sure that your immune system isn't too low and your immune system isn't too high.

So in my clinic, I would do something called carnivore fasting, which would be like a therapeutic process for a patient who had an autoimmune condition for like two to three weeks. They would just eat meat and they would fast about 17 hours every day. And the rest of the time, all they did is eat meat.

And what I was trying to do is calm the immune system down and help them drop weight because they weren't spiking their glucose. It worked. It absolutely worked.

but especially for things like SIBO, small intestinal bacteria overgrowth, like it was phenomenal. And so you got the benefit of fasting and you got the benefit of meat. It's just not something you sustain. I would do it two to three weeks to balance the immune system with my autoimmune patients. And then we would go back into fiber because we need that fiber to be able to break those hormones down. So it became a therapeutic tool. Interesting. Thank you so much. Yeah. I love what you do by actually explaining what

is going on behind the scenes. Yeah. Because to me, that's the part which A, makes it click and then it's not just a hack. Yeah. It's like, oh, I actually understand how my body's working and why it's doing what it's doing. Yeah. And therefore now when I'm having that feeling or that experience or that craving...

I can actually talk myself through it. That's right. If that makes sense. Yeah. I mean, so here's the, this is like, like another big pet peeve and rally cry for me is that you should learn how to do health from your health professionals, whether it's your doctor, your fitness trainer, your, the, the, your favorite health influencer. But if we go into this place where we're like, eat this, don't eat that, but we don't know why we're never empowered to

Doctor means to teach. Mm-hmm. So, you know, O'Reilly cried all the doctors out there. Are you teaching your patients or are you just prescribing to your patients? You have to teach to them how the body works and why, if prescription's your path, why prescriptions work, why food works, because now you have an empowered human. Mm-hmm.

And big pharma is not going to like us empowered and big food doesn't like us empowered. But that's what we should create as empowered humans. The only way we can do that is by teaching people how their body works. Sometimes life can seem challenging and overcoming problems can seem impossible. But when you focus on your problems, it can keep you from seeing the good in your life. One thing that helps me when I need a change in perspective is acknowledging the small wins in life.

I encourage my team to pay attention to small wins because it helps them see positive outcomes and the steps that they're achieving on the road to a bigger goal. Use the power of small wins to shift your outlook and you will start to see positive changes. State Farm is also there to help you find personal wins and celebrate the small things in life.

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Yeah. For people who talking about, you know, giving, making people feel empowered for people who don't have access to expensive technology and want to know, you

their muscle fat percentage, body fat percentage, et cetera. Like how, how do they get that information in a way that's affordable and accessible? Because it seems that so much of that data and that insight you need to be empowered is expensive. Yeah. So, you know, all the wearables are really exciting right now. The CGMs and all that, the continuous glucose monitor is really exciting, but they are expensive. Yeah.

So in the book, I put a list of symptoms you would experience if you nailed your meal. If you got your meal right, if your lifestyle was working for you, this are some of the symptoms. And I'll share with you some of them. After you eat a meal, you should be energized. You shouldn't be sleepy. If you're sleepy, we got to go back and look at the makeup of that meal.

After a meal, you should have better brain clarity. You should feel uplifted. It should be like something that puts you into an enhanced performance state. You also, it's not normal to be hungry every two to three hours. So those things become really important. The other piece is that you should be able to control your cravings. You should be able to be like, hey, I'll use me as an example. I used to have a sugar addiction too.

And I had a moment where when in the height of my sugar addiction, where if I looked at a piece of sugar, I couldn't control myself. I remember that. Yeah. Yeah. And it was like, I know I'm not supposed to eat that, but I'm going to eat it anyways. Once I started doing fasting and eating windows...

like that craving went away. So I now have a better relationship to food. I don't feel like I'm eating food because I can't control myself. So there are symptoms we can look at and all the biometric wearables, they're great, but I wanna help.

The woman in the South, you know, that's working two jobs. The story I tell a lot is that during the pandemic, I had a high school principal in South Carolina reach out to me. She was watching my YouTube channel and she said, my high school teachers are about to come back to school and they're super scared about their immune system.

and COVID. And so can you give us some ideas on how we can keep our immune system high? Well, I come from a family of teachers and I was like, "Oh, yeah, can I give back to the teachers and teach them? This is really exciting." So I pop on this call with about 100 teachers at this high school and I go into all, "You should take this supplement, you should eat this oil and you should do all these things."

And I get to the end of the presentation, it was all done on Zoom, and this really brave man raises his hand. And he's like, I hear what you're saying, but if I'm at the supermarket and I'm looking at nut butters, the nut butter with the right oil in it is $8 more than the one with the wrong oil. I don't have that $8. And then another woman raised her hand and said, I'm up at four in the morning.

And I drive to get my classroom set up at 5. I don't take a lunch break. And by 3.34, I'm driving home exhausted. And the only place I want to go is through the drive-thru at fast food. Okay, we will never, ever get our country healthy until we help those people.

because they're on a limited income and they are trying to be healthy, but everything in front of them is leading them towards chronic disease. This is why fasting became my tool because everybody can afford it and everybody, even the busiest person can do it and people, it works for the majority of people. And then they have that momentum. So that's what, you know, the fast food lady,

Okay, so let's eat your fast food in a compressed eating window. The nut butter guy, it was like, okay, well, maybe nut butter isn't your go-to. Let's figure out how you can look at maybe getting some oils from food that you're getting upping your omega-3 and other oils. We just found lateral changes. Yeah. How do you train someone to not eat for a period of time? Because

I think we've talked about fasting, but actually it's really hard when someone has to do it. How did someone train themselves to do that? Yeah. So you start by pushing your breakfast back. That's what I typically do. You can push your dinner up if you want, but most people, I start with breakfast. So I tell people, push your breakfast back an hour.

Most people will say, well, can I have my coffee? Yes, you can have your coffee, but not your creamer. Like if you're putting like some kind of sugar creamer in there or you're putting oat milk or almond milk in there, those tend to spike your blood sugar a little bit too high. So cow's dairy, goat's dairy does a little bit better. So just make sure, or black, have your coffee black. Push your breakfast back an hour.

is going to be uncomfortable. That's the first thing. It's like, this is that moment. You're going to be like, why did I listen to Jay Shetty's podcast where that crazy lady came on and told me to push my breakfast back an hour? Now all I want to do is yell and scream because I'm angry. I'm hangry. But if they stay with that the next day and then the next day, by the third or fourth day, that hour is going to feel like nothing.

So when it starts to get easy, now you're going to push it back another hour. So now you're two hours back. And then maybe a couple, you go a couple days with that, and then you're going to push it back another hour. And everybody that I've done with this, within two weeks, they are effortlessly fasting somewhere between 13 to 15 hours. Hmm.

You're just taking all that food and you're just compressing it into an eating window. But you're gently moving your body into that place. I've had people just out of nowhere go on three-day water fast, but that's a lot more suffering involved if you do it that way. Yeah, definitely. Is there anyone who should eat as soon as they wake up? There's a lot of theories on this.

Um, like Sachin Panda, who is the premier, you know, researcher on circadian rhythm, he came on my podcast and he likes that you wait an hour after you wake up if you're going to try to get into the proper circadian rhythm, meaning your melatonin and your cortisol are, are being secreted at the right moment. So he would prefer that you would wait an hour.

Dr. Stacey Sims, who is an expert and one of the leading experts in exercise and menopause, came on my podcast. And she strongly feels you need some kind of nutrients coming in the minute you wake up, the first half hour you wake up, to trigger the hypothalamus to start hormonal production.

When I broke that down with her, she's also plant-based. When I broke that down with her, she said, I put collagen powder in my coffee every morning and a splash of... Vegan collagen powder. Yeah. Vegan. Yeah. So she probably uses a vegan, a vegan one, or maybe a Marine one. I didn't ask her through the vegan lens if she did, if she did fish. Yeah. Um,

And then she does MCT oil and then she does a plant-based cream. And she does like a loaded coffee and that on some mornings that's how she triggers this hypothalamus. So I tell you all that to say that here we have two leading experts. One says wait a half hour, the other one says you need some nutrients in very quickly.

I think everybody's got to be their own end of one. Yeah, yeah, definitely. What works for you. Yeah, it's hard to know. And I think that's why so much of this is also being able to listen to our bodies and our minds because I think so much of our food habits are driven by our minds, not our bodies. Yeah. I mentally crave something, emotionally crave something. Yeah. Whereas when you actually listen to your body, kind of like what I was saying to you earlier, that when I'm listening to my body, I'm like, this amount of protein just doesn't feel right. Yeah. Even if I'm trying. Yeah.

- On that, I just wanna point out, because again, I'm always gonna be the voice of women's empowerment. What I'm discovering in women is we are massively disconnected from our bodies. So we look at Instagram, we look at magazines and we're like, I wanna look a certain way so then I will manipulate my body to look that way. We are not clued into the rhythms and cycles of our body.

And often you could end up looking that way, but because the internal setup isn't right. Like we often think it's also, oh, I don't have self-worth or self-esteem, but it's completely chemical. That's right. Right? Like it's just a hormonal imbalance. It's not even, it's not this mental idea that, oh, I don't believe in myself or I don't love myself. It's like, well, of course, if I've been shifting my

body and diet and everything to look this certain way. It could be that my hormones and nutrients and everything are so imbalanced that I can't sustain a healthy mood. Yeah. Something I've deeply thought about is that when we look at the woman who's size two or the woman who's a size four or size zero, like we look at that, we say, that's what I'm supposed to look like because the magazines, Instagram, everybody says I should look like that.

But actually, if you look at what estrogen does to the female body is it makes us, it's what I call a little more padded.

It gives us a little more of a cushion of fat on us. And that might be what's normal for us. We just have this skewed view based off of what we're seeing on social media that we're supposed to look that way. But if you ever stopped like for the women listening and asked yourself, is that the healthy way?

I mean, one of the things that came out of Fast Like a Girl that really disturbed me and motivated me to write Eat Like a Girl was how many 20-year-olds and 30-year-olds don't have a menstrual cycle. And they don't have a menstrual cycle because they've been manipulating their diet. Their diet's too low calorie, their weight is too low because they're trying to look a certain way that the culture says this is beautiful and when you're beautiful, you're worthy.

But actually, is it possible that the female body is meant to have more fat on it? And trying to be the skinniest version of you is actually making you sick and destroying your hormones. And I think it would be really interesting if we had better conversations around that. So what do they do in that scenario when they've ended up creating that situation with themselves? Yeah.

Well, the first thing is, we're back at the calories, is let's make sure you're eating enough calories. For the thyroid, you have to have 1,200 calories a day consistently. So if you're eating 900, 800 calories a day, you're causing thyroid challenges.

and that could be a hyperactive thyroid, that could be... I mean, so you could end up with a faster metabolism which would eventually lead to a hypothyroid situation. So let's get the calorie in that person who's in deprivation. That would be the one spot I would say let's make sure we're above 1,200. So that would be the first thing. The second thing is I think it's really interesting, I don't even for you and men in general is like,

When we eat and we're hungry, do we ask ourselves, like, am I hungry or am I bored? Am I hungry or am I sad? Am I hungry or do I need energy? Like, make sure we're seeing that the food and the emotional response, like we're pulling those apart. Right.

So I think that's a really important one because people eat and don't eat for a lot of different reasons. And then that leads to the last thing with this person who might be a little bit thin is I think for a lot of women it's control. Like if I can control my body a certain way, then my life will be in control.

And as you know, control is an illusion. And maybe there's something else you can control. This is why I like the continuous glucose monitor. Control your blood sugar.

And then that'll lead you down the path of health. Control your symptoms after you eat. Control the amount of sleep you get. Like there's other things to control. But if you're trying to control your weight, you're raising cortisol and you're leading yourself into this dysfunctional relationship with your body. So well said. How do you manage fasting and weight?

are working out? Like how do you fit it in and when should you be fasting and working out? Do they happen at the same time or do they need to be stacked? Yeah. Again, I'm going to go back to what's your intention. Do you remember the book Body for Life? I don't. No. Okay. That book came out when I was, again, when I was in college. So it must've come in like the late nineties, early two thousands. And this, it was a fitness trainer and he offered up a million dollars

to the person who could lose the quickest weight, the most weight in the quickest period of time. And he had a whole formula. And the number one formula that he said is you never work out after you've eaten because his whole theory was when you eat, you've brought glucose up and then you go to work out, the body uses that glucose.

Whereas if you work out when the glucose is not spiked, your body has to go find the glucose it stored years ago in fat. So it's actually going to burn fat more quickly. This was how we worked out for years. I taught people, women and men both in my clinic all the time this strategy. It is an incredible way to lose weight.

Here's the challenge is that it can break down muscle. And muscle right now is, like we said, is in vogue. It's the thing we're talking about.

So when we are looking at do you fast and exercise in a fasted state, I think you have to ask yourself what your objective is. If you're trying to lose weight, yeah, I think it's a great idea, especially on the days, not your weightlifting days, but the days you're doing cardio. Yeah, and yoga and yoga and we don't eat two hours before a yoga session. Those are great times to go in in a fasted state.

But when you're trying to build muscle on the days you're strength training, let's have a little protein before and let's have some protein afterwards. So just different days, different workouts, different things you're trying to accomplish. Great. Dr. Mindy Pals, it's been such a joy talking to you today. You've

Given so much valuable insight, this is one of those episodes that I feel I'm going to recommend to all my friends. Thank you. I'm going to be encouraging a lot of people to listen to it together. And I think everyone who's been listening and watching, I hope you pass it on to a friend. I hope you listen to it with a friend because...

I just think it's at the heart of so many of our issues today is how we eat, how we think about our bodies, how connected we are to our bodies. And I just love how structured, thoughtful and methodical all your advice is. So thank you so much for writing this incredible book and bringing so much value to our community. We end every On Purpose episode with a final five or a fast five. And no pun included.

And we'd love you to answer each of these questions in one word to one sentence maximum. Okay. Okay. So Dr. Mindy Pals, these are your fast five. The first question is, what is the best health advice you've ever heard or received or given? Don't eat in the dark. I love that one. Only eat in the light. It balances almost every hormone.

I love that. Second question, what is the worst health advice you've ever heard or received or given? Low fat, low calorie foods are going to help you lose weight. Wait, let's dive into that tiny bit. I think we covered it, but I just want to make sure.

For anyone who's choosing low-fat, low-calorie food, thinking they're going to lose weight, what are they getting wrong? Let's use a diet drink. It has aspartame in it. Aspartame is an obesogen, and it stimulates appetite. So you chose the low-sugar...

I don't want to use brand names, but the diet soda, you chose that thinking it's going to help you lose weight. But actually what it did is it's an obesogen that is making you gain weight and spiking your appetite. Got it.

Crazy, right? It's crazy. It's absolutely crazy. It's like, this is why conversations like this need to be had because there's people out there thinking they're doing it all wrong. Totally. Totally. And you're doing all of that and you're going, why? And you're looking in the mirror and you're so mad at yourself. Yeah. Yeah. And then you turn on yourself. Yeah. Meanwhile, big food is doing it to you. Yeah. Why are we not being protected?

Like why, why is it, why are we allowed to put obesogens into our body? And why are we allowed to put all these toxins, plastics into our body? I think it's a really good question. And it starts with the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration. And I have some quotes in there in the Eat Like a Girl that are really important. And for starters, why do we have food and drugs in the same administration? We

We should have a food administration and we should have a drug. And then within the FDA, there is a category of food called gross, generally recognized as safe.

And what that means is that if they're going to put a new food product, a synthetic food product into the food system, they're going to assume it's innocent until proven guilty. It takes a lot of money to prove that these ingredients are harmful and carcinogenic. One of the ones that I love to point out is partially hydrogenated oils.

About 20 years ago, they identified that partially hydrogenated oils fell into this gross category, that it was generally recognized it's safe, but they hadn't really seen research telling them it wasn't safe. And then the research showed up.

And the research said that these partially hydrogenated oils were actually contributing a major contributor to heart disease and should be taken out of our food system. So what the FDA did is they say, okay, food industry or food companies, you have 20 years. It was like 20 to 25 years to get this carcinogenic heart disease.

challenged food out of our food system. And it was by 2025, which is next year, that will be out of our system. But why did they give them 20 years? How many people died in those 20 years that when they discovered that this food was causing cardiovascular problems?

That kind of bullshit goes on in the FDA all the time. They care about profits. They do not care about our health. End of story. Mm-hmm.

So, so worrying and so sad. And that's why we have to do it from the bottom up. That's why you have to be, you know, responsible. I always say, and I really want people to take this to their heart, where you sit with your health, if it's not what you like today, and you're hearing this podcast and you're like, whoa, nobody told me all this. Yes, your poor health, your trouble losing weight is not your fault.

But now that you've heard this, it is your responsibility. Your health is your responsibility. And in this day and age, if you're doing nothing, you're not reading ingredient labels, you're not waking up to conversations like this, you are choosing chronic disease.

I promise you, the statistics are showing that if you're just eating with a blind eye, you are choosing chronic disease because the FDA cares more about making profits than your well-being. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah.

Uh, question number three, how would you define your current purpose? It's been the purpose I've had for a while and it's to reconnect women to their bodies and fall in love with their bodies again. Um, I'll, I'll share a story on that one. I was running around my neighborhood a few years ago and this little lady, like 70 year old lady with his cute little hat and a little, and she was walking her dog and she had a cane. Um, I kept running past her.

And the third time I ran past her, she waved me down. And she said to me, I bet it's amazing to live in your body. And it was like to have a 70-year-old woman reflect that back to me made me realize that there's only one goal with health specifically for both men and women, but especially for women is I want women to love living in their bodies. I want women to have a really positive relationship with

food. I want women to feel empowered when they go into their doctor's office so that they're not gaslit and told that their BMI is so high, they better go get on some low-calorie foods. I want women to understand the gift they're living in and love it. That's my purpose.

I love that. Question number four, you say in the book, when women heal, the world heals. Why? Thank you for pointing that out. We are the nurturers. We're the community builders. We are the leaders of our family and their health. I mean, it's very, even though we have a lot of men staying at home now, women in general are the ones that make the health decisions.

And we are also the over givers. When you take amazing care of us, we can turn around and take amazing care of you. So when women heal, then all of a sudden the family heals. And when the family heals, now the community heals. And when the community heals, then the state heals and it just keeps going out. But if that woman is sick...

Now it's a house of cards. And actually Marianne Williamson's a dear friend of mine. And she sent me a message and with that quote, and she said, this is what you're doing. And I was so grateful for that. And I, that's why I put it in the book. It's like,

We need to heal women now. We're half of the planet and we are sick and we are struggling and we are reaching out and we need to heal women so that we can turn around and heal everyone else. Absolutely. Couldn't agree more. Fifth and final question. If you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be? Oh, eat real food.

Eat real food, nature's food, food without chemicals. That would solve everything. Without packaging. Without packaging. If everybody was forced to eat a potato versus a potato chip, things like that would be so much better, but eat real food.

End of story. I love it. The book is called Eat Like a Girl by Dr. Mindy Pelz. If you don't follow Dr. Mindy already, please subscribe to our podcast, follow her across social media, and of course, grab a copy of Eat Like a Girl. I could not recommend this book more. I promise you there are so many great insights, tactics, tips inside of the book.

And I really, really hope that you take charge and accountability of your own health after listening to this. Please send this episode to a friend. I know there's someone in your life who will benefit massively from listening to Dr. Mindy Pelz's advice. And Dr. Mindy, thank you again, honestly, for coming on the show. I hope you'll become a friend of the show and come back soon. I would

Because I just feel there's so much value that you're giving to the world. And I'm grateful to have you be a part of our platform. So thank you so much. Yeah. And thank you. I mean, I should have probably started off and tell you, like, I listened to your podcast for years. And I love the way you show up and the guests you bring and the authentic voice you give us all an opportunity to live in that authenticity. And it's just really enjoyable. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much.

If this year you're trying to live longer, live happier, live healthier, go and check out my conversation with the world's biggest longevity doctor, Peter Attia, on how to slow down aging and why your emotional health is directly impacting your physical health. Acknowledge that there is surprisingly little known about the relationship between nutrition and health. And people are going to be shocked to hear that because I think most people think the exact opposite.

What's up, y'all? This is Questlove. And, you know, at QLS, I get to hang out with my friends, Sugar Steve, Laia, Fontigolo, Unpaid Bill. And we, you know, at Questlove Supreme, like to nerd out and do deep dives with musicians and actors and politicians and creatives. People that we feel really deserve that attention. We learn, we laugh, we fall down rabbit holes. Listen to Questlove Supreme on the iHeartRadio app, podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Suprema!

In 1982, Atari players had one game on their minds: Sword Quest.

because the company had promised $150,000 in prizes to four finalists. But the prizes disappeared, leading to one of the biggest controversies in 80s pop culture. I'm Jamie Loftus. Join me this spring for The Legend of Swordquest. We'll follow the quest for lost treasure across four decades. Listen to The Legend of Swordquest on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Essie Kupp, and I've spent my career interviewing people about politics, presidential elections, and some really tough breaking news. But now I need a break. I think you do too. So on my new podcast, Off the Cup, I'll still be interviewing people, usually famous and most likely my friends, but about life. You know, the stuff that consumes us when we're not consumed by politics. So come join me every Wednesday for some conversational self-care.

Listen to Off the Cup on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.