Dr Mindy Pelz: And so for the first time, people are losing weight permanently. It is falling off of them because they tapped into a whole energy system they didn't even know was there. And if we could we could probably spend hundreds of years of arguing about food. And and I, you know, I love what you're up to because God, we keep turning food into just plastic.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: And people and I hear so many people like, oh well, I don't have time to eat, blah blah blah. And it's like, yeah, okay, well let's start with fasting. Let's change your microbiome. Let's get you dropping weight and now we can start to work with your food. It's a different door in. And my favourite quote that I I found in in this guy and talking to this guy and helping him lose weight is I really realised that you don't need motivation to lose weight, you need momentum.
Dr Rupy: Fasting is one of the hottest topics at the moment and I had the pleasure of sitting down with Dr Mindy Pelz to dive into this fascinating area. And like I always say to people, fasting is potentially a phenomenal, multifunctional tool that we can use to improve our immune system and our metabolic health. But the dose of fasting, the method of fasting and whether fasting is at all appropriate if you have a pre-existing condition are all questions that are very hard to answer. Adding further complexity to the decision of how and when to fast is the menstrual cycle. And for years, Mindy has been educating thousands of women online on how to make the best use of this tool with the consideration of shifting hormones. We go into a lot of detail today, but as ever, there are so many more things that we need to discuss and we'll probably have to do a part two at some point in the future. We also talk about some caveats of fasting and who fasting is not for in this episode. And this is especially the case for anyone who is pregnant, breastfeeding or who has a history of eating disorders. This is not a tool that I would advise. I'd also highly recommend Mindy's book, Fast Like a Girl. I learned a lot from it and I've been recommending it to many women in my life as you'll hear in the podcast. It's a fantastic, easy to understand and relate to book that I don't think is just for women. I think it's very important for men to read as well. So definitely go check it out and the link is in the podcast description captions. Remember, you can watch the podcast on YouTube and download the Doctor's Kitchen app for free to get access to all of our recipes with suggestions tailored to health needs and do check out the Eat, Listen, Read newsletter that you can subscribe to on the website at thedoctorskitchen.com. We'd love your feedback on the matter of these episodes, so please do let us know on social media, on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and via the feedback forms on the newsletter as well. For now, on to my conversation with Dr Mindy Pelz. Fasting is very popular right now. What are the top fasting mistakes that people make that actually leads them to lose the benefits of fasting and actually potentially even gain weight?
Dr Mindy Pelz: Yeah, it's it's really interesting because it's not what you would think it is. It's fasting the same way all the time.
Dr Rupy: Huh.
Dr Mindy Pelz: So I learned this, this is the biggest mistake and I learned this from my YouTube channel because when Jason Fung's book, The Obesity Code came out, everybody started to realise like, oh wait, calorie in, calorie out, that's not where weight loss is at. We need to think about weight loss from a hormonal standpoint. And he taught the world really how to use fasting to change the hormone of insulin. And so everybody started doing what I call, I call them Omad-ers. They all started doing one meal a day. They got amazing results and at the same time that that explosion was happening, on my YouTube channel, I was teaching something called feast famine cycling, where you kind of go back into mimicking what our primal ancestors did, which is have a feast and then go through these famine periods. And people were losing weight with feast famine cycling and not getting stuck. And all the Omad-ers came on, they like built my channel. Like all those people came onto my channel and they're like, I'm stuck. I lost weight, but now I'm actually gaining weight. My hair is falling out. And it it was it was crazy. We have to vary fasting, which is really difficult for people to understand.
Dr Rupy: Totally, yeah. And I think this blends in quite nicely with what you refer to often as this sort of evolutionary lens as to how fasting has been part of our makeup and part of our our genetic code. How should people think about fasting? So we know, just from what you said, it can't be a a one size fits all, Omad, once a day thing. It has to be varied. So how do people conceptualise that through that evolutionary lens? What what had we had to endure that has led to fasting being something that is is beneficial for us?
Dr Mindy Pelz: Yeah, so it's really interesting. I I constantly in my brain go back to what did our primal ancestors do? Because we are in an evolutionary mismatch, both men and women, especially women with hormones. But the modern world is making us sicker and sicker and sicker. And so if we go back to what they did when it came to food, they came out of the cave, there was no refrigerator, there was no pantry. You couldn't have, you know, DoorDash deliver it to the cave. Like none of that existed. So they had to every day go and find food to be able to survive. Sometimes they would find food very quickly. Sometimes it would take them days to find food. So what's really interesting about fasting is we had to rely on an alternative fuel source, kind of like a hybrid car. We had to tip to go into this fat burning ketogenic energy system in order to make ketones to power up our brain and and and give us energy and it kills hunger. So that we could go find food. And then we would find food, we would bring it back and we would feast. And sometimes that feast, like if there was a big kill, would last a couple of days and then they'd go do it again. So that's how we are built to be. What's really interesting is that in when I was putting Fast Like a Girl together, I found a hypothesis that is really fast fascinating. It's called the thrifty gene hypothesis. Have you heard of it?
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Yeah, and I've actually talked to some genetic specialists like, is there can we actually measure this gene? And the idea is that the humans that evolved out of that moment in time had this genetic profile that allowed them to go without food. The ones that didn't have that genetic profile died. And so there that gene didn't get it didn't continue on in the generations. So their belief is that we actually all have that gene in us now. And when we're eating all day long, we're actually now going against our genetic profile. And they're believing that maybe it's that this thrifty gene that is contributing or accelerating the the the prevalence of diabetes and poor metabolic health.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, so what I'm hearing from you is, um, considering we are taught at a very young age, breakfast, lunch, dinner. These are the three meals that you have every single day. You're meant to eat at certain times. Um, there appears to be this evolutionary mismatch between, you know, how we act today and actually how our bodies are designed to thrive in the world. And putting that all together, how should we be thinking about when we put food in and particularly, obviously, fast like a girl. Why is it different for women?
Dr Mindy Pelz: Yeah. So the first part of that question is we have to start to look at our 24 hour cycle as we have a window in which we eat and we have a window in which we don't eat. This eat six meals a day, it'll speed up your metabolism. There's no evidence that that makes sense anywhere.
Dr Rupy: Where did that even come from? I because I I remember getting a lot of this information, particularly like 10, 15 years ago, it seemed quite fashionable to be like, you know, eat little and often, graze all day. And if you think about it just from the perspective of your microbiome, that needs your gut that needs a rest, you know, it doesn't seem like it has any place.
Dr Mindy Pelz: It doesn't seem logical at all. No, not at all. You know, I thought about this recently that I think what happens is if you're measuring our metabolism, the metabolism will speed up when you eat a meal to match what it needs to do to break that meal down. But that doesn't mean that you're going to lose weight because all your body did is raise its temperature and start to rev up its metabolic system to match the meal so it can process the meal. So that's the only thing I can think is that people were like, oh, the metabolism speeds up, but it's not like it speeds up so much that it's going to go after fat or go after weight loss. It just is matching what it needs to do to handle that that meal. The other interesting one, and this one just kills me, is that the breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: So in the 70s, there was a a breakfast cereal company that was putting out a new line of breakfast cereals and they had to come up with a slogan. And they came up with breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
Dr Rupy: So that came from an advert.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Came from an advertisement.
Dr Rupy: Oh wow. Wow.
Dr Mindy Pelz: And it sticks here we are in 2023 and it still sticks.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.
Dr Mindy Pelz: It's crazy. It's amazing that because there's parallels within um uh jewellery. Uh so you know this whole sort of um I'm saying this because I recently got married about a year ago now and I got engaged a year before that. And I remember like chatting to some of my friends about, you know, how much I should be spending on an engagement ring. And what I was told from multiple different sources is a three months wages. That that's how much you should be thinking, which is a lot, right? Where that came from was apparently uh a De Beers advert decades ago. So these kind of like these these advertising slogans, these advertising myths that, you know, are so old, still ring true today in this age of, you know, information overload. So, yeah, it's it's interesting to see how these advertising slogans can have that drastic an impact.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Isn't that crazy? Right now, yeah.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Yeah. And on the on the metabolic one, it's, you know, the the most logical place my brain can go to is if eating six meals a day made you lose weight, then why do we have an a metabolic mess in the world? Why is obesity on the rise? Because that isn't working. If all the dieting we've learned up until this point worked, you and I wouldn't be sitting here having this discussion. My book would have never even come out because it everything would have been working and we would people would be able to lose weight based off of calorie in, calorie out, eating six meals a day, maybe I'll just move my body a little more. The things that we've been taught about food and what it does for weight loss and weight gain, like 90% of them are wrong.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: It's crazy.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: So, I think we have to question where these thoughts get in our heads. So that would be the first thing I'd say. The women versus men, this one is really interesting and I I keep unpacking more and more and more because hormones fascinate me. But if you look at the human body, the number one desire of the human body is to stay alive. It will do everything it needs to do to stay alive. Like one thing I've been saying about weight loss recently is if your stress is really high, I could give you all the fancy fasting tips, but your body doesn't isn't making weight loss a priority because it thinks it's being chased by a tiger. So it's got to get away from the tiger and then it'll come back and drop weight, have you drop weight. The other thing that I always think about with weight loss is that all fat is is your body tried to find store something and it that wasn't it didn't know what to do with extra something, extra hormones, toxins, glucose. And so thank God it put it around your belly and not around your heart.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: So there's so much mismatch there. But with men and women, survival is number one. And then for women, the second priority is reproduction.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: So when we come to weight loss for a man, we just have to make sure that he's like not stressed out. Right. And follow some of the principles like just compress your eating window, leave a little longer timer for fast and you will drop weight like this. For a woman, we have to go, okay, what how do we fast according to the reproductive cycle? And it doesn't matter if you're 25 or a postmenopausal woman, what do we need to do to be able to make your reproductive hormones happy?
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: And that is a complicated answer because estrogen and progesterone, estrogen comes in in the front half of a woman's cycle, progesterone comes in the back half. They have massively different food requirements. Estrogen loves when you fast. So keep glucose down, do a lot of fasts and estrogen is going to thrive. Progesterone is completely the opposite. In fact, you have to keep glucose up. And and you know how we know this? You could any woman you ask will tell you, I am so hungry the week before my period and all I want is carbs.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: And for years we've been villainising this. But your smart our smart bodies were like, bring glucose up so we can make this key hormone so we can shed the uterine lining. And once I identified that, I was like, oh, okay. So fasting has to be timed to these two hormones, which is why we can go into a longer fast in the beginning of our cycle and then as we get closer to that week before our period, we need to stop fasting.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. Before we unpack fasting a bit more because I definitely want to ask you a bit more about what actually happens when a person is fasting for various different lengths. But I don't want to make the assumption that even the women listening to this podcast understand what happens during a cycle because I think there is, you know, I don't want to make the assumption as a health professional that everyone understands the difference between the different phases and all the rest of it. So why don't we go through what happens very briefly during the cycle and also the way I love as well how you've done it in the book, how you've described those different power phases, manifestation phases, nurture phases because I think that it's very emotive and it's it's a a very great way of understanding exactly what's going on during those cycles. And it's definitely helped me, even me, someone who's been practicing for over 15 years, understand a lot more about how someone might be reacting, what emotions are going through and where they're sort of, you know, where they're um uh the advantages are and the disadvantages as well. So why don't we go through what happens in the in in the cycle and then we can go into how you describe it.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Yeah, it's a good. You know, it's so funny is when I went to really break the cycle apart, it's like follicular, luteal. Like, oh my god, the only part that women know or anybody knows is ovulation because we know, hey, you want to get pregnant, focus on that. Don't get pregnant, focus on that. But it there's so much vernacular in in the term in in hormones that aren't isn't easy to understand.
Dr Rupy: Totally. Absolutely.
Dr Mindy Pelz: So I'm like, if we're going to get women to understand this, I need to give better names.
Dr Rupy: Totally. Yeah. I love that. I love that. And I honestly, now I think about it, I'm like, that makes so much more sense because it's more it's less descriptive of the uh the biology, but it's more uh descriptive of the emotions and the process and the actual what actually goes on during that, you know, 28 to 35 day, however long a person's cycle is. So, yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: So so thank you for appreciating that.
Dr Rupy: I appreciate that, honestly, massively.
Dr Mindy Pelz: So, okay, so day one through day 10, I called the power phase. And the reason I called it a power phase is because it starts off with our hormones being the lowest. When our hormones are low, we actually sometimes feel our best because we're just a little more emotionally stable. We can be um we can we can, you know, I don't want to say operate like a man more, but we can fast more, we can eat more, we can go into keto a little more, we can exercise more and we feel fine. But then as we go into like around day five or day six, estrogen is building. So I wanted to call it the power phase because of two things. One, you can power up on all your health habits. If you want to go into a detox, if you want to fast, if you want to push it at the gym, fine. You can even power up at work. If you want to go into a long day of work, do it during that time. If you want to go socialise, do it during that time. So it it it we are really can lean into this powerful part of us in that first 10 days. Estrogen also makes us powerful. Our our ability to access both right and left brain so we can be creative and logical are really important during as estrogen is building. Uh ask any any menopausal woman who loses that, uh you often lose that ability to access both parts of the brain. So there's so much about estrogen that is incredible that we want to power up on health habits and it makes us powerful. And that's the first 10 days.
Dr Rupy: Okay. So during this this power phase, so it it from what you've just described, it just feels that you can tolerate a lot more stress.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Oh, you can handle more stress.
Dr Rupy: And you can push yourself further.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Right. So the and this is just to bring some of my new research in that you and I were talking about. If you look at just estradiol, so for everybody listening, estradiol is the most powerful form of estrogen. We have three types of estrogen. Estradiol is what you need to release an egg. So women that are still cycling, they've they've got estradiol. Estradiol can stimulate five neurochemicals in your brain, which is crazy. Dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine, a a brain fertiliser that we call BDNF and oxytocin. Five of things that make you happy, help you hold on to to um information, can help you learn new information and make you feel connected to other people. So in that first 10 days of your menstrual cycle, you are wickedly powerful. And you're also very joyful. So I always say to the men, like, you want the best of us, go into some deep conversations with us. Like if you want to resolve conflict with us, do it on like day 10. Like we've got all this estrogen in us. We're going to be a lot more wanting to connect with you. We can like we can think things through a little bit better. If I was um if I had a large company, I would put all the the women at certain times of their month in one room together to create new projects based off of this powerful form of estrogen because of all the things she does.
Dr Rupy: So great time to start a business, a new venture, stress, like trying to hit your PB in the gym. That sort of thing. Okay.
Dr Mindy Pelz: This is this is great, I think, because a lot of women that certainly in my life anyway, um putting aside patients, see the menstrual cycle as an inconvenience as a result of, you know, the ability to procreate. It's just something I have to deal with outside of, you know, when I want to actually have kids, if I want to have kids. And this, I think, is completely turning it on its head. It's putting a a new lens, a new spin on it and actually showing someone that they can feel powerful and empower them as to what's going on and why their their body is is is so impressive.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. You you thank you for that interpretation of it because I can tell you as a woman, um yeah, we bitch and moan about our cycle from the day it starts and then when it starts to go away in menopause, we have a whole another emotional experience. But it's just a massive inconvenience until like you said, until we want to get pregnant and then we're happy, you know, it's working right. But it it it did so much. There's so much hormonally happening to us. If if women understood their hormones, they would see how powerful they are and they'd know how to build a lifestyle around that. And they'd be able to go and talk to their doctor at another level. So like, for example, one other interesting thing in that first 10 days is as estrogen is building, so is cholesterol. So you actually have higher levels of cholesterol the first 10 days of your cycle.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Oh, wow.
Dr Rupy: Now, it's good cholesterol, it's HDL's. But that's fascinating.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Yeah.
Dr Rupy: So when you go and you get like blood work, do they look at that?
Dr Mindy Pelz: Absolutely not. No. And I'm just thinking back now, like, you know, whenever I do bloods or any investigations, let's say, I'm not really thinking about that unless I'm looking at specific sex hormones. You know, that's the only time where I think I've even had the consideration of, okay, we've done cholesterol ratios, we've done, you know, HDL, apo little apo B lipoproteins, let's say, I'm not thinking, okay, well, when was this woman, where was she on her menstrual cycle? I've got no and there isn't an indication on the lab either where I can indicate, okay, this this woman was on day 10 or day 21 or whatever it was. And so that that's fascinating because that opens up a whole can of worms, doesn't it? About what other things are we doing at different stages of the cycle that could impact the results and therefore the interpretation of those results that leads to management further down the line.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. Wow.
Dr Mindy Pelz: And I and I haven't even studied all the blood work. I did, and I'll send you this article. I did find one graph in on PubMed that was showing all of the amino acid changes, all the neurotransmitter changes, um all of the the pretty much there's about 20 different neurochemical changes that are happening in a woman through her menstrual cycle. And mineral use, vitamin use, all of that changes at different parts of our cycle.
Dr Rupy: Wow.
Dr Mindy Pelz: So like, for example, we tend to use more amino acids post ovulation. Okay, why would you use more amino acids post ovulation? Well, because you need more aminos to be able to make progesterone. Okay, well, let's put that in food food terms. That would mean I need more of a complete protein in the back half of my cycle so that I can actually make progesterone to shed the uterine lining.
Dr Rupy: Wow.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Like you start and then you go, okay, well, what about if you're vegan? Okay, well, then you maybe you're going to need to power up on some amino supplements. These are the kind of nuance that we as a as a society have to get into for women, but we got to find a way to simplify it.
Dr Rupy: Absolutely, because, you know, personalised medicine is certainly having a moment right now. And I think that's what's left out of the conversation is, okay, personalised medicine is great, but like, what about personalising it for women according to their cycles as well? Just like you just articulated there with food and, you know, how you would need more amino acids in that later stage of the cycle. That's fascinating and it's that it's kind of mind boggling. I'm going to have to really go and read about it. So I'd love to hear a bit more about that article.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Yeah, I'll send you the article because it it blew my mind and I'm still trying to pull all the threads out because they looked at so many markers throughout the cycle that I'm trying to interpret it and go, okay, now what how do we make this simple for women? So. So yeah, so that's the power phase.
Dr Rupy: Okay, that's the power phase. And then
Dr Mindy Pelz: The first and I'll explain the first bit, the power phase, yeah. Then ovulation is really interesting. So and again, I'm like, God, the human body is so cool. Like what they what the how we were designed is brilliant. So during ovulation, estrogen peaks. So we are mentally at our best somewhere around day 10. So ovulation is day 10 to day 15. In the book, I called it the manifestation phase. And I did that very purposely because of course, you can manifest a baby if if that's what you want to do. But because of these hormones, you could manifest a lot because you are hormonally locked and loaded for performance during that time. So if you have a new business project, do it during ovulation. You want to go ask for a raise at work, do it during ovulation. You have a conflict you want to you want to play out or work out with with somebody in your life, do it during ovulation. I I had a a man come to me and and chat with me about his teenage daughter and how he, you know, she's so hormonal and I just don't understand her. And um I said, do you know her cycle? And he's like, no, should I know her cycle? I'm like, you should know her cycle because you would never try to resolve a conflict with her the week before her period. Do it during ovulation. She is hormonally prepared to sit down and talk to you. And the reason for that is because you've got estrogen at her peak. You've got testosterone at at its peak. So testosterone for women is is more than libido. It's motivation and drive. So this is why I think a work project would be great during this manifestation phase because you're motivated, you're creative, you're articulate. So you've got all these hormones that can help you fully embrace your brain and and use more parts of your brain. But testosterone, like think about this for a moment. So you guys get testosterone like every 15 minutes or so, it kind of pulses in. You're in a 24 hour cycle. We get it five days out of the month. So now if we get into libido, we're at a hormonal mismatch in libido. So ideally, every if you're if you're married, a man and a woman are married in a heterosexual relationship, you would want to know when your wife's or your partner's uh testosterone is coming in. That's when she's going to want to be with you and she's got all that estrogen, so she's going to really want to connect with you. Whereas as we go into the back half of the cycle, you'll see that you pretty much should leave her alone. I'll explain that one in a moment. So and then the other thing I thought about was, okay, wait, testosterone also helps women build muscle. So why do we have women working out in a week schedule? We should have women do a a monthly workout calendar where during that five day period, she's lifting weights. Maybe one day it's it's um you know, buys and tries, the next day it's you know, legs, the next day it's chest and back. And and she should be lifting really heavy weights if she wants to build muscle to use that testosterone.
Dr Rupy: Right. So there's parts of the the cycle where you would do better overall by focusing your workouts. Not saying that you can't do weights outside of that that that time period, but you'd you'd do better if you focused on muscle protein synthesis, working on heavy resistance, making sure your protein levels are adequate during that time because over overall it's going to lead to a better outcome.
Dr Mindy Pelz: That's right. That's right.
Dr Rupy: That's yeah, that's right.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Because now you're working with your hormones.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, with exactly, yeah. And the the sort of like pattern and the theme that I'm hearing is you have to understand your cycle. It's almost like you have to understand the manual for your body to get the most out of it.
Dr Mindy Pelz: That's right.
Dr Rupy: Which is it it's annoying. I I'm just trying to think of like the devil's advocate because I know my the women in my life will think, well, you can just do it any time you want. You don't have to think about this stuff every 30 days. You have to plan it on your calendar. But for you to get the most out of your body, understanding your cycle and when you should push yourself, when you should go to the gym and do certain types of targeted exercise is going to is is going to have a massive impact.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Yeah. And once you find a rhythm with it, it gets easier and easier to understand this. What I find to the women in your life, I would say, what I find is that when you first hear this, it's mind blowing, which is so silly because it's in our body. We should have been taught this, like the day we got our period, we should have been taught this. But then once you find the rhythm, you're like, oh my gosh, all my health habits have never been easier. Because now I've got them in sync with my hormones and so it just starts clicking and every time you try to muscle through something to get some kind of result in your body, it's now coming much easier to you.
Dr Rupy: Yes, yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Which is crazy too.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, that makes so much sense.
Dr Mindy Pelz: And again, another sort of theme I've I've heard from from obviously reading the book but also listening to you on other podcasts is everyone should understand where you are in your cycle, who's close to you in your life, right? So I should know where my wife is on her cycle, my sister, my mother, not my mother, but you know, everyone should understand where people are. My the sort of devil's advocate and this is definitely not your intention for sure. I think some women might listen to that and feel like, well, that's kind of my business and I don't really want people to treat me differently based on where I am in my cycle and what they believe I will be feeling in that moment. I just want to be treated in the same way as my male counterpart. What what do you think about that?
Dr Rupy: Oh, it's such a good question. I can understand the desire to keep something like a bodily change that happens to you to yourself. So if you don't want to verbalise it, I can I can totally respect that. But I'm going to challenge you, the women listening, to understand your own hormonal profile. So a, you can understand yourself and b, you can help even the closest people understand you. I'll give you an example. Uh progesterone at the end, we'll we'll go into that part of the cycle in a moment. But progesterone wants you to keep cortisol down. If you are pushing through and you're highly stressed and you're not keeping cortisol down, your irritability is going to be through the roof. And most of the time, it's going to come at you, at your at your spouse and you're going to think that it's something that they're doing that is making you irritable. But what you don't know is it's like you've amped up your system, you're going against your hormonal system, so you are on edge and and everything is react you're reacting to. So I'm going to say for your happiness, let's just make sure you understand the ebbs and flows and how to cater to these hormones just for your mental health. And then the other part I would say that is statistically women are not doing well with health. I'm not saying with like business and things like that. Uh we have all the autoimmune conditions. We have 80 to 90% of autoimmune conditions are happening to women. Why is that? Uh you know, most all Alzheimer's and dementia happening to women. Why is that? You know, women gain weight more than men. Why is that? Each one of these I could pick apart and show you that it was a woman that was out of balance with her own hormonal cycle. The uh PCOS, it is I am shocked since Fast Like a Girl came out, how many women with PCOS like have poured onto my socials, sent us message. It is an epidemic. It is the number one hormonal problem for women. And I could break that down and change that so quickly by just showing a woman how to be in in alignment with her hormones.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Yeah, yeah.
Dr Rupy: Can I make a suggestion for another book? I know you're writing one at the moment. You should write a book that's actually written for men to read, to understand more about.
Dr Mindy Pelz: It's funny you say that. It's funny you say that. And I'll tell it here on your podcast first. I even my publisher and agent don't know. Um I that's my intention for the next book. I'm I'm writing the book I'm writing right now is what happens to our brain after 40 as we lose estradiol. But I absolutely agree the book after that will be how how do we understand our personalities with all these hormones so that not only women can understand themselves, but men can understand us too.
Dr Rupy: Absolutely. Yeah. And you know, men being told that we're simple and we're pretty black and white and we're, you know, lucky in so, you know, quote unquote to have that sort of simplicity is great. But then understanding your partner, your sister, your mother, etc. I think that's a real big piece of the puzzle that will will create a a revolution. I mean, you're already doing incredible work at the moment, but I think that level of understanding will really come through even more so when you direct this information specifically tailored to men.
Dr Mindy Pelz: I love that. No, no, you must have tapped into my brain because I usually by the time I'm like three fourths through this book and I'm usually about this point, I start dreaming of the another one. Yeah, yeah. Um but I I want to invite men into this conversation because I believe that if men could understand us, then we would have um there would be a we would understand both sexes understanding that there is a difference in how our brains work based off these hormones. It would it would just bring a level of compassion.
Dr Rupy: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. That that level of understanding will definitely be followed by compassion for sure. Because I felt like when I was reading the book and reading it, you know, from the perspective of of a of a man and someone who's worked in in medicine for many years now, I I actually gained a lot more understanding of like my mum and my sister and everyone. And I've never really thought about it in those terms before. I understand the science behind it, obviously. I understand the different phases. Obviously, they weren't called the power and manifestation phase. But, you know, that that really did unlock a lot of um things for me and strategies as well that I could use to have a much more balanced and fulfilling relationship with with my wife and all the women that are most important to me in my life.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Yeah, because when you when you understand the hormonal shifts we're going through, you know, we're not the hormonally the same person.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Every single day. You are pretty hormonally the same every day. You you know, you make testosterone, it goes up into the brain and converts to estrogen. So you only have to focus on testosterone. But sometimes we have estrogen, sometimes we have testosterone, sometimes we have progesterone. And those three hormones make us act different. So one of the things that I've found in just talking to so many women is that we first will turn on ourselves and start to think we're doing something wrong when we like when we're you know, not getting the result we want, whether in work or health or life, we start thinking it's our problem, but we didn't take these changes in hormones into account. And once you do, you start to go, oh, okay, I'm going to kick butt at work day one through day 15 of my cycle. Give me give me the projects, let me go after this. And then as I get closer to like day 20, I'm going to cut my workload down a little bit and recover so that I can come back out of day one and I can be a badass again.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: That's there's a lot more ebb and flow to us. And so I again, I want to be sensitive to the women that don't really want to share their period, their menstrual cycle. A lot of women don't even want to think about it. But you are hormonally driven and it's time for us to start to understand this. I don't know why it took till 2020.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: So I haven't figured that out yet.
Dr Rupy: I I think, you know, this conversation, I'm glad we're having it in such a frank manner. Um but it's I guess it's slightly unfashionable, isn't it? Right now.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Well, right now for sure. We actually have uh we have an app that we we are launching, we it's out in the world. People can use it now. It's Fast Like a Girl app. And you can go and put the day of your cycle in and it'll tell you what fasting length, what food, what supplements.
Dr Rupy: Oh, brilliant.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Yeah, it's it's really in the in the beginning stages.
Dr Rupy: When did that launch?
Dr Mindy Pelz: Uh we launched it with the book and it was very minimal. So um it now each month we're upgrading it um because just based off the information. So um but our biggest challenge is we can't really store the information because it's personal private information.
Dr Rupy: Of course. Yeah, yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: So it would be nice if it could track you and keep you tracked, but that's a whole another next level of complication.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. I know you can do that. We can talk about that. Oh yeah, okay. I only know this because I've gone through my tech journey at the moment and privacy is a big issue because we, you know, people who use our app, um uh put their health goals in. Um so, you know, if your health goal is brain health or we're adding uh um menopausal health as well, it has to be on the phone and we don't have access to it. And if we do see anything, it has to be completely anonymised and there's quite strict rules with Apple and Google and all the rest of it. So there is a way around that. Yeah, yeah. But that's super exciting.
Dr Rupy: But I but I know. So so we're trying to we're trying to bring it to and make it a lot easier for women to understand. But the the but the comment about it's not fashionable, it's like, I yes and I'm going to go back to the statistics on women's health. Women are not thriving. Even infertility. I mean, since Fast Like a Girl came out, I cannot tell you the number of 20 and 30 year olds that don't have a cycle. So I'm I'm trying the best to make this as as cool and fun to look at as possible.
Dr Rupy: Totally. Let's let's go to the the next back to the power phase, right? So you've had the manifestation phase and yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Yeah, so you come out of manifestation, it ends at day 15. Um and then your hormones drop again. So I gave that another power two. I call it the second power cycle. So you can fast as much as you want. I encourage you to go low carb. Like we're back at, you can work out, everything you could do in power phase one. And you that one's a really short phase. It goes about day 16 till day 19, 20. And then day 20, we move into the nurture phase. And this is what this is the whole like the game changer for all women at this point. And this is why I called it nurture. I originally thought about calling it the chill out phase because I was like, okay, we're all the rushing women in the world, you need to just chill out during this time. But I really wanted women to know that nurturing starts with themselves. You have to start by nurturing yourself. And one of the things we know about progesterone outside of glucose needing to be high, if cortisol is high, progesterone becomes shy. She does not come to play.
Dr Rupy: I love that saying.
Dr Mindy Pelz: It's the easiest way to remember it. Yeah. So we look at all these 20 and 30 year olds that are not having their cycle. I if I had to do a hormone test on every single one of those women, I would probably I would tell you most likely progesterone is tanked.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. I I need to rewind there a bit because I think as health professionals, we we assume that everyone knows what cortisol means and why high is bad. So what what is cortisol and and why would high cortisol lead to low progesterone?
Dr Mindy Pelz: Yeah, so high cortisol happens when your body perceives stress. So the crazy thing about cortisol, there's so much we could go down on cortisol. You don't have to be doing anything to have cortisol go up. You could be thinking something. You could be remembering or thinking about your stress of your life and cortisol goes up. And it's the it's the hormone that is meant to make us move. So when cortisol comes on, it's supposed to agitate you, you know, energise you so that you go run away from the threat. But what's happening right now to us is that we're getting all these cortisol surges and we're not moving. This is a big problem with why people in general gain weight is that the body just stores all that cortisol because it's not being used. So stress is a very interesting one because it's not just like I have my to do list is too big. It's uh this is this is another reason the next book has a lot a huge emotional piece to it because we've got to start working on some of the emotional blocks that hold us back because it's raising cortisol all the time. It's just pumping up cortisol and pumping up cortisol.
Dr Rupy: Absolutely. It's interesting like I know you're a proponent of using CGMs. Um you know, I I tend to tell people to use CGMs um intermittently rather than the entire time. Um just to give someone an idea of how they are processing certain foods and and all the rest of it. And I've had a few patients now uh who happen to be women um where we've just seen like high levels of glucose and we've matched that to when they're at work. And they they haven't been snacking, they have they generally have a very good diet, but you can just see these like little spikes here and you just know there that's the cortisol that's released from your glands that dumps sugar into the bloodstream because you're perceiving that sabretooth tiger or whatever that threat is that you need to run away from. And that for for me has been another level of the CGM sort of movement here that's giving people a lot more information about exactly how their body is thriving um in this very unusual world that we find ourselves in, you know, thousands of years after.
Dr Mindy Pelz: It's a it's such a good it's such a good point. I the first time I started to use CGMs in accordance with fasting, I was on a three day water fast and I was in the second day of fast. So I haven't eaten now in two days. I had a CGM on and my teenage daughter walked into the kitchen where I was sitting and barked something at me. And like irritated and we got in a, you know, this sort of mild fight. And then I scanned my CGM and my blood sugar went through the roof.
Dr Rupy: Wow.
Dr Mindy Pelz: And I was like, oh my god, I haven't I'm not even I haven't eaten in two days. But to your point, that's exactly what happens. When stress goes up, the body releases all that glucose. And if we go to the to to a huge motivating factor for women that are trying to lose weight is that every time you're in this stressful environment, spiking glucose, when the stressor comes down, all that glucose and cortisol now has to be stored somewhere. So it's going to get stored as fat. So cortisol is a huge piece of this. And that's why progesterone, you got to keep you you need glucose to be up and and we can chat about what foods would do that, but you've got to keep cortisol down. Now, the trick is, how do we do that in this modern world? So I think it's I think it's like you might decide to not do your most extreme workout and your most extreme if you if you got a lot of work at work, you wouldn't mix all the cortisol rich, you know, experiences of life together at the same moment. Could you say no more during that time? Could you turn down social engagements more? Like there it's just just allowing yourself a little more nurture time. Sit on the couch a little more and and really go inward. We progesterone makes us more intuitive. So we're actually a little more inward the week before our period. If we're irritable, it's because you're asking us to be more outward.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: And we want to be more inward. We intuitively want to be a little more in, you know, uh in a recovery mode, even the most I'm an extrovert and I still the week before my my cycle, when I had one, was like, yeah, I'm kind of happy sitting on the couch. But what we're taught in this world as women is to keep pushing on through.
Dr Rupy: Absolutely. Absolutely. I can I can see that, you know, with patients and and the women close to me in my life of constantly trying to keep at a level the entire time. So whether it's your exercise regime, whether it's your fasting regime, whether it's, you know, uh performance at work, just constantly and and being present for friends, going to social events, all that kind of stuff. And this is why I'm quite excited about your app actually because that little nudge, that little notification, that little reminder of, you know what, this is time for you to be a little bit more introverted, a little bit more introspective. Actually, this is a time where you can um you know, take time for yourself and feel good about that and actually shut, you know, believe as you are that you're doing good for your body in the long run. Like that that's that would be a very powerful.
Dr Mindy Pelz: And this is where the words come into play. What if what if the whole world could just say, hey, I'm nurturing myself today. I can't I can't make that social event. I'm just nurturing myself. What is somebody going to say? Like, what do you what do you mean you're nurturing yourself? Like it's a compassionate way to talk about hormones as opposed to like, ah, it's the week before my period. I'm just not in the mood. Which is what we do now.
Dr Rupy: Absolutely. I wonder if there is like a social experiment that you could do where you actually match uh a woman's work um month and just see the levels of productivity and happiness if you were able to essentially uh gifting is probably the wrong word, but it's the one that I'm I'm I'm going to use. Um gifting that that time off during that period and then the rest of the time period, you know, you know, you're on like higher hours or the same amount of hours as everyone else.
Dr Mindy Pelz: I I have been trying to to figure that one out. I I absolutely agree with you. I've been trying to figure that one out because you would need the the the corporation or the company to know that you're not asking women to be lazy during that time. You're giving her recovery so when she comes out of the gates, she is she is ready to go on day one, day two. Now, I I I think it would have to be, we've we've actually talked about it quite a bit uh with in our company. And the what we've come up with and um it was a couple of years ago, Spain actually had a menstrual leave that they and maybe it was for the government officials, but it was that three days out of the month and they wanted to do it when a woman's cycle started that a woman could take three days off at the beginning of a month when her cycle started. And no questions asked. It was a it was a menstrual leave. I think that's how you do it. But maybe you have to do it for both sexes. Maybe you have to say, hey, everybody's got three days, you get to decide when you use them. And then and then a woman could use them the week before her period.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. Well, I think what's getting more fashionable these days, just thinking wider is this uh concept of the four day work week. There you go. And then universal basic income of which there are some really interesting experiments going on in Finland and India and we've had Professor Guy Standing on the podcast before who uh has studied universal basic income in a lot more detail. And I think there's parallels there that we could essentially use when it comes to, you know, improving productivity and happiness within the workforce. which could actually be at the benefit of a corporation as well, you know, who are financially motivated.
Dr Mindy Pelz: I'll tell you, I um while I was here in London, I went and spoke at Amazon headquarters.
Dr Rupy: Oh, nice.
Dr Mindy Pelz: And they have a a menopausal group. And so they wanted me to come and talk about the menopausal changes. And the woman who was leading the group told me that they are seeing that if women are not given through menopause, if they're not given enough understanding by a corporation, they're leaving the corporation. And that ultimately that destroys the profits of the corporation. It's costing them money to have women leave.
Dr Rupy: Absolutely. Particularly senior women who've got experience, if they're managerial skill, etc, etc.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Yeah. So, I mean, it it's so crazy when you start to think about this. I mean, it's for menstruating women, menopausal women, if we all just brought this hormonal conversation to the surface and have collaborative conversations like you and I are having right now and figure out what would the workplace look like? What should exercise look like? What would food and all the things that we're talking about and come together and brainstorm this, we would we would not only save women's lives, we'd not only get the best out of women, but now we're looking at profits in the workplace. It's that important.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. It's a confluence of all those different things. Health, happiness and productivity in the workforce that everyone I believe can get on board.
Dr Mindy Pelz: That's right.
Dr Rupy: Um I can't believe we've got to this point in the podcast and we haven't really dived into.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Yeah, we know. It's so fascinating, right?
Dr Rupy: I think yeah, I think it's really important to give people a like a a level playing field of like, okay, these are the cycles, this is the different phases, this is why you need to be a lot more aware of the ability of how much stress you can tolerate. So let's let's go into actual fasting. So what why are you such a huge proponent of fasting? When did this come on onto your radar? And what and and maybe as a secondary question, what goes on when when we fast?
Dr Mindy Pelz: Yeah. So I always laugh that I I I was I never set out to be the poster child of fasting. It's kind of funny like if if the 20 year old version of me could see me right now, she'd be like, what are you doing? Um because I was the hangry person. I I carried food with me everywhere I went. I did the six meals a day. I ate breakfast the minute I got out of bed. I never left home without a snack. And then I went into perimenopause and in my early 40s, all my old tricks were not working for me anymore. Like I I was a competitive athlete in my younger years. Like I ate really well. I was doing every health habit right and I was gaining weight, I wasn't sleeping, my moods were all over the place and this was at about 43. So I went looking for what the heck just happened to me. And about that time, do you know the do you remember Dr. Osumi's work? Um he's a he was given the Nobel Prize in 2016 in medicine and physiology for
Dr Rupy: Oh, so the Yakanama uh was it the Yakanama factors or am I thinking of something else?
Dr Mindy Pelz: I don't know if you might be more in the detail of the study, but uh it was based off autophagy.
Dr Rupy: Gotcha. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: And he figured out that when you actually take food out of the equation for a certain period of time, the body will actually become stronger. I think that's the first thing everybody has to know. You're going to become stronger. And this term autophagy came to the surface. He won a Nobel Prize for it. And it was basically that the body turns within and it cleans up the cells. It detoxes the cells and makes the cells stronger. It pushes out, it kills cells that maybe are cancer cells, gets rid of them. And so I thought, wow, that's the body does that without food. Like here I am, the hangry person. I'm like, how is that going to work? So then I started the term intermittent fasting started to emerge. And I thought, okay, I could try it for one day. Let me just try intermittent fasting for one day. 15 hours. I brutally pushed breakfast back. And I and when I got done with that day, I was like, okay, well, let me try that again. Within a week's time, my 3:00 p.m. crash every afternoon and that was, I don't know when when you were in practice, if you saw that, but my afternoon was the most packed time of my clinic. And so people would be pouring into my clinic and I was always wanting to take a nap. That went away after one week of intermittent fasting. So then I was like, oh my gosh, what else is there? And I just started playing with the principles and then I got obsessed with the science.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. How intermittent was intermittent for you back then?
Dr Mindy Pelz: Uh it was about 13 to 15 hours.
Dr Rupy: Oh, okay.
Dr Mindy Pelz: And it was every day. I didn't know to do it to the cycle then.
Dr Rupy: Gotcha. So it wasn't like an aggressive fast. It was yeah, 13, 15 hours, which I think is a doable for a lot of people.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Very doable. One of the best studies we have on women and fasting was women going through breast cancer treatment. If they came out of conventional traditional breast cancer therapies like radiation and chemo and they put a 13 hour fast in place, they had a 64% less reoccurrence of breast cancer compared to those that were didn't do the fast.
Dr Rupy: Wow.
Dr Mindy Pelz: That's crazy.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: That's every woman could do that.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: So, yeah, so I just became obsessed with the science and then I was doing it on myself. I I kept uh I had a lot of patients at the time. I had a functional medicine clinic and I had a lot of patients at the time that were trying to lose weight, mixed with thyroid problems. And I I'd never seen anything work so well.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Like unfortunately at the time, my supplement sales went down, but that's okay because people were getting well by using their own bodies.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: And then I just became obsessed.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. So autophagy, I think is this term that that you've explained well there where, you know, you're essentially looking inward, recycling these old cells, getting rid of the the the cells that are sort of old hanging around, these senescent cells, you're clearing them away and then you create some brand spanking new ones. There are some other elements of fasting that I find quite interesting as well. So you're giving your gut a rest. What other things are going on when you're in that fasting phase? Are there things that sort of peak your attention that you always like speak to to clients about?
Dr Mindy Pelz: Yeah, so I think the easiest way to understand this, if you've never heard fasting, is that we have two energy systems that we will use. One is when glucose goes up, which is you eat food, it's often referred to as sugar, but by sugar, I think you and I both mean in this conversation, you know, it's just your glucose going up in your body. Um and the other one is by burning fat. So I call it sugar burner, fat burner system. So when we go at least eight to 12 hours, there's a there's a variable because we're all a little different, without food, our body starts to switch over into the fat burner system. Once it goes over into fat burner system, what it does is it literally burns your own fat to make a ketone. And a ketone is you can only get it, I mean, there's exogenous ketones, which is a whole another thing, but the the main way you get it is by going without food. I don't think you can manipulate your diet a little bit, but that's the hardest way to do it. And when you get a ketone, it goes up into the brain and it turns off hunger. This is mind blowing because this is why the more you fast, the easier it gets.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Now, let's just take that one principle. How many diets that you lose weight on does it get easier with time? I don't know any. So you get into this fasted state, you're burning fat, you're making ketones, the hunger goes down, the brain clarity goes up, but the longer you stay in that fat burning system, the body kicks into self repair. So you start the autophagy kicks in and the cells will start to uh push out the bad ones, make the the the ones that are kind of so so, make them stronger. Uh you get growth hormone going up. So when growth hormone goes up, you'll balance all other hormones out and growth hormone slows down aging, it burns fat. Your whole microbiome repairs. So all the bad bacteria will be sluffed off and good you create a new environment for good bacteria. So all the good food you put in there can actually start to feed these bacteria. You you reset your whole dopamine system where and you'll get new dopamine receptor sites that that form and if you stay in there long enough, you'll reset the whole immune system. We I mean, during the pandemic, we should have just put everybody on a fast. It's like magic over there.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: And the longer you stay, in the book I I lay out six different length fasts. The longer you stay, the more healing happens. And then you get your little dose of healing and then you switch back to food. And the way you're teaching food is like, yeah, now we pair like your teachings and and how important food is with these six different level fasts and we're talking this concept is called metabolic switching. You're going food, fasting, food, fasting. And now in both those states, you are healing.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: This is what I find quite refreshing about your approach actually because we've we've covered uh ketogenic diets quite a bit on the podcast. We've had a dietitian that does a lot of ketogenic diet therapies for um treatment refractory epilepsy, for example. We've interviewed parents. It's a pretty phenomenal diet. It's very, very strict. It's hard to stick to. You know, and when you're treating children or patients who are experimenting it for a variety of reasons, whether it's chronic pain or whatever it might be, you're on a very, very high fat diet, you're on a very limited protein and very limited carbohydrate diet. And that can have ramifications, you know, you can it can destroy your gut microbes, you're not giving them any substrate and any any sort of food to to thrive on. Um it can lead to kidney stones, it can lead to constipation, low loads of issues. Your approach is sort of like a nice hybrid and blend of both. It's like, let's get some of those ketones going here. Let's stress your body, let's, you know, dip into some of those beneficial uh impacts of fasting. But then let's also enjoy some of the carbohydrate rich foods, good carbohydrates, all those whole foods, etc, later on where it's a lot more appropriate for you to to examine. So it and this is, you know, people just want like a plan to follow the entire time. And so it goes against that thinking, but overall, it's beneficial.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Yeah. Yeah, it's so well said. I mean, here's the bottom line. There's a lot of good diets out there. There there's no one human diet. There's a lot of of possibilities. And one of the things that I think we got wrong in the diet world is that there was a one size fits all diet for everybody. And then if you take this to women, one of the challenges that we have with women is that to your point, like just give me the one thing that's going to make my my, you know, myself like feel good. But if I if I I can't give you that one thing because estrogen wants a specific way of eating and progesterone wants a specific way of eating. And they're opposing.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: So the beautiful part of that is that, okay, we need to take a lot of and I don't know if you found this in practice, I found so many people ate like a hundred foods and that was it.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Like and they ate those foods over and over and over again.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Well, if you just look at the microbiome, that creates a monoculture. You're only feeding, you have trillions of bacteria in your gut. You're only feeding a small amount. So really what one of the big things about food for both men and women, we got to open up our food choices. Every time I go to a restaurant, I look at a menu and I'm like, what on here do I not eat? And I'm going to eat that because I know then I'm going to feed a different set of bacteria.
Dr Rupy: Totally.
Dr Mindy Pelz: So we've got to be able to open up and enjoy food again and we're not. We're we're like in ruts or or a lot of women with eating disorders are trying to control or we're counting calories. But we should if you want to control anything, control your blood sugar and then just open up your food sources.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, totally. I I love the list in the book actually of all the different diverse food sources that you can consume at different parts of your cycle. And we were just talking, I I just got back from um Penang in Malaysia and the green section in the supermarket is vast. Like there's all these different braskers that I've barely seen in supermarkets here, like things like kailan and bok choy and, you know, uh all these weird and wonderful names, dam see, all these different things. And I'm just like, wow, this would be great. And that's exactly what I was doing. I was just grabbing them from the supermarket. I was cooking them in the Airbnb. I was trying to inject them with all these recipes that we're creating. So that that I I I completely get on board with. I guess one of the pushbacks that a lot of people have of fasting and, you know, the work of Satchin Panda who's been on the podcast, Walter Longo, is some people try and explain the benefits of weight loss, feeling better, better skin, etc, etc, of, well, that's just calorie restriction. You know, if you simply just do a calorie restrictive diet, you know, stick to that, you'll get all these benefits. So what's the big fuss about? Why is and I know it's not that. So why don't you explain to folks at home, why can you not simply explain the benefits of fasting, particularly fasting like a girl, through the lens of calorie restriction alone?
Dr Mindy Pelz: It's a great, it's a great question. So hopefully everybody knows that calorie restriction changes your set point. Have you talked about that?
Dr Rupy: I don't think people understand. We have talked about it with Nick Fuller who does something called interval um weight loss, which is where you go on a very, not a very low, you go on a very slightly low calorie deficit and you plateau and then you do it again. So you're working with your set point rather than like creating a a drastically different one. But
Dr Mindy Pelz: So at least there's some variation. We're back in variation. Exactly, exactly. So so with a set point, what happens is when you try to keep your calories low and then you exercise to put your calories high, you change your set point. So a good example would be like if you ate 1500 calories in a day and you exercised and and had an expense of 500 calories, your set point would be 1000 calories. So your body needs that 1000 calories every single day to keep where you are at with your weight. But if you want to lose weight, now you got to get an a set point lower than 1000. If you eat more than 1000, you're going to gain weight. So this is why calorie in, calorie out doesn't work because our set points as they keep changing, then now we have to sort of match our behaviour to it. With fasting, you're not changing your set point. You are changing when you eat. And when you when you do open that eating window up, eat. Eat eat like in even in the in the book I call it uh ketogenic. So even if you're doing the ketogenic diet, I put the biotic piece to keto because what I'm saying is eat nature's carbs. Bring eat fruits, eat vegetables, mix that with protein and and let's just open up how the the types of food and the diversity of food that you're eating and use your fasting window to drive you into ketosis. So I I and and it's you burn fat when you're in ketosis. That's the only way to make a ketone is to burn fat. And once you burn fat, fat typically doesn't come back. But I could go on a calorie restriction diet and I could look great for two weeks, maybe a month, but then as soon as I go back to any old habit, I'm I'm going to be right back at that at gaining weight again.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. And it's a it's a common complaint from people and patients that I know who have been on multiple different diets that are essentially variations of a calorie deficit diet and are usually quite short term as well, whether it's 60 days or 90 days, however long it is. And then you just look at the trajectory of their weight and you just notice it's trending upwards. And it's because your weight set point is changing and when you go back to the same level of eating, even if you're eating the same calories after your your diet or whatever it might be, because your weight set point is a lot lower, that's when you're going to gain more weight. And there's also, you know, the issues around losing protein, muscle mass, all that kind of stuff when you're on these on these diets.
Dr Mindy Pelz: The other thing I would say, this is a maybe a good reframe for people to think about is if you go back to this metabolic switching thing, okay, when you eat, you're eating for your hormones, you're eating for your microbiome, you're eating for antioxidants and all the minerals, amino acids, like there's a there's a lot of ways as you know that you can use food to accelerate weight loss and and just support your overall healthy body. When you switch over and you're fasting, that's where you're focused on weight loss. That's where you're burning glucose, you're burning hormones, you're burn getting all the toxins out of you. And then you dip back and you're like, okay, now I'm over here and I'm I'm nourishing my body and I'm giving it what what it needs. And then boom, now I'm over here, okay, now I'm losing weight. Whereas what we do right now is we go into all these toxic foods and all of the these chemicals, we've pulled all the fat out of foods, we've manipulated food to be able to make it so that people would lose weight. The the way to lose weight is to start to dip in and out of this fasting window as and and metabolically switch. That's how you lose weight.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Right?
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Can't you see it from your food lens?
Dr Rupy: Absolutely. Yeah. And I I I'm glad you mentioned food addiction because I think that you that was a bit of a taboo term. Like people, you know, couldn't see how you could be addicted to food. I mean, we all need food, you know, it's not like people are breaking windows so they can get some money so they can go to get a hamburger. Do you know what I mean? But we understand what happens with the dopamine pathways. Food addiction is a real concept. It's something that neurobiologists are all uh looking at with a lot more detail. And you mentioned it with clients and you can definitely see signals of food addiction within people. One of the fasting regimes you talk about is a dopamine fast. I'm wondering if we could dive into that a little bit more detail because I think that's that's an interesting concept that perhaps needs a little bit more airtime.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Oh, it's so good. It's such a good one. Um so I found this in my research and then experimented with my my following, which is really fun because you get to like try things out and go.
Dr Rupy: Oh, you get real time feedback. I mean, I've seen those comments on the YouTube channel and they are phenomenal. You know, the results people can have.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Yeah. So the research is that people who are obese actually are dopamine resistant. So just like we become insulin resistant, we can become dopamine resistant. And but it's a little bit different. And the way it works is that people who are obese often find they're not getting the same enjoyment out of their food. So they have to eat more of the bad food, eat more food to get the same dopamine response that somebody else who's not obese or has a food addiction. And I know you could have a food addiction and not be obese. So I want to be sensitive to those terms. But the the study was done on on obesity. So think about that for a moment. I I hope that anybody who's struggling to lose weight, that that gives them compassion for themselves. Because when you eat, you may not be getting the dopamine high today that you got two years ago because the way that insulin resistance works is it starts to block and the more you've accessed that dopamine surge, you're just not getting the same dopamine experience. So the dopamine system needs to be cleaned up for you to enjoy food differently. So I tested this out because what the article showed was 48 hours without food. And this was done, this was actually done on humans and it was done in a hospital setting. And what they found is after 48 hours of of um of no food, that new dopamine receptor sites emerged. So there's two many different types of dopamine receptor sites, but the D2 uh receptor sites, the body and the brain made more of them and the whole dopamine system gets a reboot. Okay, let's think about why the body would do this for a moment. If you're in disbelief on this, you're 48 hours without food, you need to survive. So you better be motivated to go find food.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: So our body actually reboots the dopamine system so that we have an increased motivation to be able to go find food. And so when I started to realise that, what I did is I started taking people who told me, I can't get off of sugar, I can't I can't seem to unstick my weight. Um I'm nothing I do is making me happy. We took those group of people that appeared to have a dopamine saturated sort of uh experience with life. We put them on a 48 hour fast and sure enough, when they came back into food, of course they appreciated it more because they were off of food for 48 hours, but that appreciation, that love for food continued for weeks after that. And the mood people with mood disorders actually noticed that they were much happier, they were getting a lot more enjoyment in life.
Dr Rupy: That's so interesting because I was literally just thinking about what about people with mood disorders and whether a fasting protocol could uh theoretically have an impact if you are increasing the number of those D2 receptors.
Dr Mindy Pelz: I I mean, it's it's such a subtle shift that can have such a massive impact. And and you know, think about it, um I was just telling my husband the other day, we we just bought a new car. And the first two weeks I got in the new car, I was dopamine, dopamine, dopamine. I was like, oh my god, I love this car. And then about four weeks in, I was like, yeah, I like this car. And now we're on, you know, we're four weeks away from our home and I'm like, oh my gosh, when I go back to that car and I get in it, I'm going to have a dopamine research.
Dr Rupy: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: It's the same thing that can happen with food. But with mood disorders, it there is a dopamine uh challenge because we're dopamine saturated. Our phones are giving us dopamine. If you just think it like the way that we can sit on our couch and watch a series over and over, we don't have to even have to wait till the next week. We can binge watch a series. We can pick up our phone and we can order food and have it delivered to our front door. We can chat with our friends, we can get likes and follows and we are just being flooded with dopamine. So a large part of the mental health challenge is that we're not taking a dopamine rest.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. Yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: So if you just go 48 hours without food and then if you want to put your phone down during that time, if you want to like go into a spiritual place and go really inward, you have really reset your whole dopamine system. And it's not just temporary because you have these new receptor sites that form.
Dr Rupy: Absolutely. Yeah. It's it's interesting, isn't it? Because um this whole concept of dopamine fasting um that Andrew Huberman did a podcast on is made quite popular in the mainstream is so applicable to different areas. And that that concept of uh hedonic adaptation, I think it's called where by, you know, you have a new phone or a new car or whatever and you have that like absolute hedonism the first time you you use it or you move into a new place or whatever. And then you gradually adapt. You adapt, you adapt, you adapt. And you know, I'm constantly trying to like pull out what that hedonic adaptation looks like in my own life, you know. The fact that I complain about my phone, for example, sometimes when it crashes, you know, I have to always remind myself to be grateful for the fact that I've got the phone because, you know, it's allowed me access to people like yourself, you know, watching TV on the move and all that kind of stuff. So it's almost like periods of fasting, literal fasting and fasting from the gadgets and all the things that give us pleasure is something that we all need to enjoy uh and and endure to sort of reignite that appreciation.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Yeah. It's such a it's such a good point. And it and it kind of ties into a lot of the themes here, which is rest and recovery.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: We are we have too much coming at us.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: So it's in the rest and the recovery that maybe torturous because you're going to want that dopamine addiction. But in the rest and recovery, we actually heal ourselves. And so whether it's a rest and recovery from food or from the phone or from TV or from your new car, like it's where we heal. We can't heal in the chaos and we can't heal in the dopamine, really. Dopamine, to me, the way I look at it from a health lens is dopamine is that molecule that will get you going on the health path. But then you're going to need to put her aside and start to like rely on serotonin a little bit more, some of the other neurochemicals because dopamine is seductive. The minute you get what you want, it says, okay, let's go get more.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. I think I've heard you say the dopamine is the molecule of more, not enough.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Yeah, it's not the molecule of enough.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: And and I I mean, I'm like you, I I constantly check my dopamine and go, okay, if I can't sit here without looking at my phone or enjoying nature, it's time to really train myself to reset dopamine.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. Have you read that book um by Michael Easter, The Comfort Crisis?
Dr Mindy Pelz: Oh, no.
Dr Rupy: Oh, you should definitely read it. I think you'd really appreciate it given this interaction. Um Michael Easter is a journalist who's written about how uh we're we're not enjoying uh or engaging with boredom enough in today's world. And so he does these experiments where he goes hunting and he's like out in nature for three or four days and he's like, it's the most boring experience because you're literally just like waiting in the bushes, you know, for something that's coming around the corner or like, you know, an antelope or whatever that they're trying to hunt. And if you think about it, on a day to day basis, uh we're never really not being entertained. I'm listening to podcasts, I'm, you know, watching a TV show, I'm doing computer work, I'm, you know, when I'm walking even, sometimes I'm not even present. I'm I'm doing my to do list. And I've tried to and and actually Johan Hari who's also been on the podcast, um uh has talked about this in one of his books uh focused on technology and how technology has basically eroded our boredom basically. And enjoying boredom is something that I'm trying to do a lot more consciously and combining that with gratitude. It's like it's almost like the antidote to dopamine, the molecule of more. It's the these are the molecules of enough.
Dr Mindy Pelz: That's right. That's right. And then you and then you'll get dopamine in the boredom.
Dr Rupy: Exactly, exactly. You reset those dopamine.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Yeah. One of my favourite um uh women that I met last year was Sarah Blakely.
Dr Rupy: Oh, brilliant. Really? Oh, she's phenomenal. Yeah. I'm a big fan of her.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Yeah, I am too. And I'm actually a part of a mentorship group. Her husband had hired me to teach him fasting.
Dr Rupy: Oh, amazing.
Dr Mindy Pelz: And so I got to know him, Jesse Itzler. He's amazing onto his own self. He's a serial entrepreneur.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah.
Dr Mindy Pelz: So he gathered a bunch of us and brought Sarah and so Sarah
Dr Rupy: What a power couple by the way. That is a proper power couple.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Yeah. And so he he said that when he met Sarah, she was the first CEO that he had ever met that took so much time off.
Dr Rupy: Really?
Dr Mindy Pelz: And she and he's like, I was shocked. I was like, you're going on vacation again? What do you mean you don't work Friday afternoons? What's happening? And she said, that's where I create. And so then she went into say, when she takes her afternoons off, what she does is she's like, I sit, kind of like the comfort crisis. I sit on my on my in my backyard, I sit somewhere and I look out and I just let my mind wander.
Dr Rupy: Amazing.
Dr Mindy Pelz: And I think there's something about the wandering mind. It's like when we're on socials, we're actually trying to stuff information in. But when you're just staring at nature or you're just hanging out, the mind can wander and you have no idea where it's going to go.
Dr Rupy: Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm really trying to lean into the mind wandering because you're right, as soon as I pick up my phone, the interaction is, okay, I got to go to an app and then I go to, you know, uh social media app or whatever. And then you're just being bombarded with this junk food diet of information and it kills that creativity in your mind. And you know, being in a creative sphere field as we both are, you have to protect that as much as possible. And when when you do like uh lean into mind wandering, thoughts just appear. I have to I have to get like a pen and paper and write them down. It's particularly when you're like writing a new book and you know.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Yeah. Yeah, and and if you don't grab them and write them down, they'll go away. And then in fact, the the part that that you said about um the next book that I want to write, that actually came to me a month ago in a massage.
Dr Rupy: Really?
Dr Mindy Pelz: Yeah, like literally out of nowhere. I wasn't even thinking about it and then boom, I was like, I have to write a book that brings men into the conversation.
Dr Rupy: Brilliant.
Dr Mindy Pelz: And I'm like, okay, but we have to help women understand herself. So how do I do that? So and then all of a sudden it was like the whole book came through me through the massage.
Dr Rupy: Totally.
Dr Mindy Pelz: I'm like, oh, wow.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. Mo Gawdat, who's a he's a friend of the pod and um he's the Google CFO. He's written a fantastic book about solving for happiness. He um he writes prolifically in the morning. He writes like one or 2,000 words every single day. He'll just write, write, write, write. And uh I haven't actually dived into that myself, but I I definitely want to do that because that that morning time is a very protected creative time for myself. I'm not too sure if it's the same for you as well. But that's when I do my best work.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Yeah. Um so if you look at the brainwaves, there's a reason for that. So and I learned this from Bruce Lipton. I brought him on my podcast and I was like, okay, do affirmations work? And he said, they work if you do them in the right part of brain of where your brainwave is at. So his first thing was when you go to sleep, you're going like right now we're in beta brainwave. When you go to sleep, you start to go into alpha, then you go into theta, then you go into delta. And so you're go back into this sleepier brainwave. When you're in alpha and theta is when you can reprogram your brain. So he's a believer like affirmations should be like you should listen to them as you're going to bed. Or like Joe Dispenza taught us that create your day kind of thing. So one one habit I learned or I changed after talking to him is instead of getting into bed and and thinking about all the things that went wrong that day and all the things I have to do the next day, I've trained my brain to start to see think about all the wonderful things that happened that day and obsess on that as I'm going into this this deep state. But the same thing happens when you come out of sleep. You go from delta to theta to alpha to beta. So my best writing time, if I can do it, is get up at like early, like 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning and I'll go from my bed into my office and before my brain is even in beta state, I just start seeing what pours out.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, totally. Yeah. I'm going to put that into action, you know.
Dr Mindy Pelz: And and by by like noon, forget it. I can never write in the afternoon. It's all in the morning. Then maybe I'll go get a cup of coffee and I'll come back, but even I'm still maybe in low beta at that point. It's when you're in stress, you're in high beta. And when we're in stress, we're working from our amygdala and so we're in this concentrated part of our our brain and we don't access our prefrontal cortex. So that prefrontal cortex is where creativity happens. So the name of the creative great game is never become stressed. And then try to get yourself, keep yourself in that kind of woozy brain state because you're going to get downloads.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. Mindy, I could literally speak to you for so long. You're just full of gold and I feel like we could go on loads of different tangents as well. Totally. Um but we've only got another like 20 minutes or so. So quick fire. Okay. Uh I hope this is going to be quick fire because they're probably going to be like really um really nuanced questions again. Evening and morning routines to help burn belly fat.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Ah, okay. So belly fat, it's two hormones. It's cortisol and it's and and for women and well, even men, it's estrogen. So it's where think of your belly fat, if it's growing, it's where hormones are being stored. So with that in mind, when we look at morning and evening, we got to sync you back up to your circadian rhythm. So make sure that you're getting up with the sunlight, you're seeing sunlight in the morning, in the day, in the middle of the day and at night you're getting out into the sun like sunset.
Dr Rupy: Great.
Dr Mindy Pelz: So sync your whole, I have a book called The Menopause Reset and I put a whole chapter in there on how to resync your circadian rhythm.
Dr Rupy: Epic. Uh if I fast, will I lose muscle mass?
Dr Mindy Pelz: Ah, love this one too. So uh you it will appear as if your muscles are shrinking while you're in the fast. But what's happening is sugar, stored sugar is being released out of the muscle into your bloodstream. So it's cleaning that muscle up. If you add protein, the first meal you go back into is protein, you build that muscle strong again. So one of the greatest fasting hacks is work out in a fasted state, let's really dump all that glucose out of the out of the muscle and then go home and power up on protein so you stimulate a process known as mTOR that actually builds that muscle strong again. So it it will feel like it's shrinking, but it's not. And then I always so on this one, I always point out that when you go to work out, what you're doing is you're breaking muscle down to build it stronger. When you're fasting, you're breaking muscle down in a different way so that you can now use food to build it stronger.
Dr Rupy: Supplements. Can I take supplements when I'm fasting?
Dr Mindy Pelz: Uh shorter fast, it's a great question. Shorter fasts, yes, under 24 hours, yes. Longer fasts, no. And here's why. The longer you go, the more you're honouring the wisdom of your body. And I really feel like the more external influences we put in, the more we're trying to manipulate that inner intelligence. After 24 hours, just just see what your miraculous body can do. So don't manipulate it with supplements. Now, if you have medications you're going to have to take, take it. Um but with supplements, you'll be fine for two days without it.
Dr Rupy: Okay, great. Look, I with there's so many topics that we haven't touched on. I wanted to go into a little bit more detail on um the menopause, fasting and women over 50, for example, fasting in other specific contexts. But like we'll have to do that on another day. And you've got tons of information on your on your channel. Um uh but I just wanted to commend you on like the the amount of information you put out there over the last few years. You know, I think I I heard from your husband, uh it's over 2,000 videos now. All this information is really accessible. There's hundreds of thousands of success stories that, you know, are littered all over the comments. It's great to see people like yourself with the wealth of experience you have and the way you articulate yourself as well uh on on various mediums. So I just want to extend my gratitude to you.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Thank you. Thank you. I it's a it's a passion project and um I don't know if you felt this as as a doctor, like there was a point somewhere in my clinic career that I realised like if you look at the word doctor, it means to teach. And why would I it was almost like a bit selfish of me to take what I knew and keep it within the walls of my clinic. And so I just wanted to start to teach people about how their bodies work and then we just have this beautiful thing called YouTube and all the social media and I started to see that people were thirsty for it. But I think really the highest place we can go as humans and especially as doctors is as servants of information. Like what we know shouldn't stay in our head. It it should it should be permeating every possible place we can get it to so that people become inspired. And if you just look at what happened in the pandemic, everybody went into retraction and fear. Why did they go into fear? Because they didn't know anything about their immune systems. They didn't understand how their body worked. I there was not a single day I was in fear during the pandemic because I went into action because I understood the immune system. And and I got it, I got through it, it was fine. And I think the biggest problem that we have is that people don't understand themselves so they continue to fall prey to big food, big pharma, all the all the fear tactics out there. And we just got to give the individual the power back and that's what I'm on a mission to do.
Dr Rupy: Amen. I love that. I can't wait to do this again one day. In the studio and I'll cook you some food as well. I'm going to break your fast with that.
Dr Mindy Pelz: Oh, we know what we'll do. I'll come back and we can do a whole breakfast.
Dr Rupy: Oh, I'd love that. A breakfast. That would be awesome. I didn't even ask you which foods that you break your fast with, but we'll get to that.
Dr Mindy Pelz: That would be amazing. Thank you.
Dr Rupy: Awesome.
