Pod Insights Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz Age Like a Girl Part 2: Rebuilding Your Neurochemical Girl Gang About this episode In this solo episode, Dr. Mindy breaks down the 12 neurochemicals that shift in menopause and why you suddenly feel different. Learn how to bring back your mood, memory, motivation, and sleep with simple lifestyle tools — and why this neurochemical reset is part of your biological design.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:02 Mindy Pelz? Welcome back to the Resetter Podcast. In this episode, we're picking up where we left off in our Age Like a Girl series and diving straight into what I call estrogen's Girl Gang, the powerful network of neurochemicals that estrogen stimulates to keep your brain sharp, your mood balanced, and your energy vibrant. In this episode, I'll break down who's in the gang, how do they work together to shape your memory, motivation, and calm, and most importantly, how your lifestyle can bring them back online. These are the tools our primal grandmothers used instinctively, and they're all free and available to you
0:45 Mindy Pelz? right now. So get ready. This is where Science Meets Strategy episode that will show you exactly how to thrive through menopause and beyond. Let's jump in. So get ready. Here we go into the lifestyle of the Girl Gang. Let me list the members of the Girl Gang. And the way I like to look at them is that there are nine of them that are true neurochemicals. And then there are three of them that I call honorary members. And they're honorary members because they're not technically neurochemicals, but estrogen affected them. So here are the
1:23 Mindy Pelz? 12 in total. Let's start with nine neurochemicals. Every time estrogen appeared in your body in big amounts, she stimulated dopamine. We'll talk about what each one of these do in a second. She stimulated serotonin, acetylcholine, glutamate, GABA, which calms the brain, BDNF, which helps you hold on to new memory, oxytocin, melatonin, and insulin. She affected insulin. The honorary members, I mentioned them before, are collagen, creatine, and glucose.
1:56 Mindy Pelz? So she impacted all of these. Now, before I go into each one of these neurochemicals and the lifestyle trick that you can use to bring these neurochemicals back, I want to go back to this hormone replacement idea for a moment. Because even if you're on hormone replacement, you're not on the same dose of hormones that you had at 20 and 30. So you're still having the shedding of the neurochemical armor. You're still getting some of the brain fog and brain changes. So even if you are on hormone replacement, these neurochemicals may still be needing a lifestyle tool.
2:39 Mindy Pelz? So let's start with the memory tool. So there are three key neurochemicals that really helped you with memory, and that's the acetylcholine glutamate and BDNF. So acetylcholine is the master regulator of attention, alertness, and memory. And how you can get acetylcholine at this particular moment, there of course are supplements, there are foods you can eat, and there are a lot of supplements that are recommended for acetylcholine production. But what I wanted to do in Age Like a Girl is I really wanted to give you lifestyle tools that are free, that you can do any single time.
3:23 Mindy Pelz? And so like with fasting, you know, fasting was just, we sold over a million copies of Fast Like a Girl. I mean, that thing just took off because you all had now a free tool that you could lose weight. You didn't need to put $800 down every month or $1,000 down for Ozempic. You had a free way of doing this. So I wanted to continue that theme through with Age Like a Girl. And there's a couple really interesting things. I'm not going to go through all of them because the book is dense. There's a lot in there, so I'm going to give you some of the highlights. Storytelling, what the grandmothers did in the primal days is they came home and they did a lot of telling of their past to the younger generation.
4:05 Mindy Pelz? Every time you have to go back and think of a memory in your body, you're asking your brain to dip into a part of the brain that holds memories called the hippocampus. It also happens to be the part of the brain that is where Alzheimer's happens. So the hippocampus, when you have to go back and recall a memory and tell a story, you are igniting the hippocampus. And what ignites that hippocampus is acetylcholine. And you are telling your body to make acetylcholine so you can pull those memories out and speak them. The best way I can explain this is how many of you have that mom that tells the same story over and over again?
4:49 Mindy Pelz? And you're like, "Oh, God, not again, Mom. Are you going to tell the same story?" Well, once I understood the principles of estrogen and the girl gang, and I understood acetylcholine and how I could bring her back, I started asking my mom more details about the story. Yeah, you've told me that before, but what about this aspect of the story? To try to get her brain to go into the hippocampus, to try to get her brain to go into making more acetylcholine? This is what the grandmothers did. They came home after forging for food in tubers all day long, and they sat down and they peeled the tubers, and they told stories to the younger generation. And they believed that actually the language of the grandmothers was more sophisticated than the toddler's language.
5:34 Mindy Pelz? And so it actually helped build the brain of the toddler as far as our ability to expand into deeper languages and more vocabulary. That was initiated by the grandmother, but her telling the story kept her brain sharp. So it worked both ways. So that's acetylcholine. Again, in the book, I have a lot more. I'm just giving you some highlights. Second thing that they did is they stimulated BDNF. Now, there are a lot, it's called BDNF, is brain-derived neurotropic factor. And BDNF, it helps you hold on to new information. It's often referred to as miracle grow for the brain.
6:18 Mindy Pelz? So BDNF is necessary. I don't know about you, but I know somewhere in my 40s, I had these moments where I was like, gosh, I am reading a book, I'm reading a science article, but I'm not retaining it. Well, that's the dip in BDNF. So there are many ways you can bring BDNF back. Movement is one. That's what the grandmother, that's what the primal, our primal post-menopausal women did is they, they moved their body seven hours every day. So they were getting that BDNF. Also, longer fasts. So when I spent so much time researching fasting, like years and years and years, 20, 30, 40 hours a week, like I was obsessed
7:03 Mindy Pelz? understanding everything I can. A lot of the studies were initially that came out were around BDNF and how fasting can start to stimulate BDNF. Anybody who's been on a longer fast, to me, a longer fast is something that is about 17 hours in this situation. And I do believe that the grandmothers walked, they fasted about 17 hours every day. From my conversation with Kristin Hawks and my conversation and just my research, they went into these long fasts every single day, the primal post-menopausal women. And the longer fast stimulated BDNF along with the movement every single day.
7:45 Mindy Pelz? Now, they were also out, moving in sun. You have receptor sites in your eyes for serotonin. So when you're out midday, getting midday light, you stimulate these receptor sites and tell your brain to make serotonin. They also were walking with other post-menopausal women in collaboration of a purpose. And so they got oxytocin. So they got BDNF, they, from the longer fast and the movement, they got serotonin from the sunlight. And they got oxytocin from doing it together in a group. So when I look at BDNF, it often comes together with other members of the girl guy. Now,
8:29 Mindy Pelz? When we look at these three, the estrogen memory collection, we also have to look at a neurotransmitter called glutamate. You probably know glutamate because monosodium glutamate. It's in some foods as food enhancers. And so, you know, some people have a reaction to monosodium glutamate. And the reaction is very excitatory. One of my biggest pieces of advice for any menopausal woman is get off the ultra-processed foods. It is stimulating glutamate. And when it stimulates, it makes it more excitatory.
9:12 Mindy Pelz? And with estrogen going down, progesterone also stimulated GABA. Those two, as they start to change, GABA goes down. And GABA is the calming neurotransmitter. So you can listen to the podcast interview that I did with Georgia Edie. She is a metabolic psychiatrist. It was phenomenal, one of my favorite interviews this year. She talks about when you go into these fasted states, you get a ketone. And when the ketone kicks in, you get GABA. And GABA helps to balance the glutamate excitatory brain. So if you've gone into your perimenopausal years and you know you've been eating a lot of ultra-processed foods,
9:56 Mindy Pelz? starting to understand how to put these fasting windows into your day. Maybe it's a 12-hour fast, maybe it's a 15-hour fast. You're going to get some ketones, and the ketones are going to make GABA. And it's going to balance that anxious part of the menopausal experience. Because the ketone has the ability to balance that glutamate/GABA neurotransmitter balance out. So we also know that ketones are highly protective. So we want ketones, ketones, ketones. We'll talk about that more in a moment. So when we're looking at things like boosting memory, yeah, puzzles are great, yeah, crossword puzzles, yeah, reading, but let's not lose sight of some daily activities like storytelling
10:40 Mindy Pelz? and going for a walk with friends and fasting and changing the way, getting off the ultra-processed foods. These are core foundational ideas of helping these members of the girl gang that are also going to boost your memory. Again, I have a lot more in Age Like a Girl. I'm just giving you the highlights right now.
11:05 Mindy Pelz? Okay, the mood boosters. What are the mood boosters that estrogen stimulated? Well, there are three in particular. The estrogen stimulated dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin. So when you were drugged on estrogen, I just love that because I think so many of us resonate like, woo, yeah, estrogen was awesome. And then she went away and she took all those friends with her. And all of a sudden, I just feel like yelling at everybody. Well, we have to come back to the pieces of the menopausal puzzle. And what we know about dopamine is dopamine is the molecule of more. It is the molecule of motivation.
11:48 Mindy Pelz? It is the neurotransmitter that gets you to go do something. And I've heard, sat with a lot of women who just felt like their motivation tanked when they went through the menopausal experience. Well, that's because dopamine goes down. So we gotta go find it somewhere else. I'll share a couple of ideas. Serotonin, serotonin is that beautiful neurotransmitter that just says, everything's gonna be okay. Now, I don't know about you. When I went through menopause, nothing in my body said, everything's gonna be okay. And that's because serotonin left the building. And there's some ways you can bring that back.
12:29 Mindy Pelz? And oxytocin, phenomenal, such a powerful neurochemical, made us feel like connecting. And we actually have, women's brains have more oxytocin receptor sites in the amygdala. Check that out. Women have more oxytocin receptor sites in the amygdala. And there is research from a woman named Shelley Taylor, who said that it gives women access to a whole nother stress response called tend and befriend. And so when we had estrogen, all of a sudden oxytocin came with her, and we felt this desire to connect with others.
13:11 Mindy Pelz? Well, when estrogen goes away and oxytocin starts to decline with her, then all of a sudden, the way we connect is different. And the women I've sat with, a lot of us say it like this, "I can't do superficiality anymore. I need to go deep. I can't be around relationships that don't feel safe anymore. I need my relationships to be rich in oxytocin." And all of a sudden, we go seeking oxytocin in new ways, not in caregiver ways, but in human connection ways. This is the MOI of the Okinawa women. They are, they come together to share resources, A, because that makes sense.
13:53 Mindy Pelz? But they come together to share resources because they're all getting oxytocin from each other. Estrogen doesn't give it to them as much, so they've got to have oxytocin. So when we look at these moods, if you're going through this process and you're just like, "Wah wah, I don't feel really good", start asking yourself, "How do I get more dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin?" And here are some ways. So dopamine loves novelty. So what can you do that's new? You're creating a new identity, a new life. How do you get something new so you can get more dopamine?
14:32 Mindy Pelz? I can tell you, I have a friend who, one of my closest friends, literally called me on her way up to Lake Tahoe and was like, "Hey, I'm going fly fishing today." And I was like, she's 58 years old. I was like, "Do you fly fish? I've never heard you fly fish." And she was like, "No, but I read about it and it excited me and I wanted to go try it." So she hired a guide and she went out and went fly fishing. And I will tell you, those two days she was on the river, she came home and called me. She was lit up. She was so excited because she did something new and novel and that upregulated dopamine. Personally, for me, I've been trying, I've taken on a new sport of surfing.
15:17 Mindy Pelz? And I just stumbled onto it because another post-menopausal woman told me about it. And so I went surfing with her and all of a sudden, and I, and I, and I'm not great at it. But I was out in the water, I was connecting with my friend and every day was this dopamine hit of trying something new. So I got oxytocin from being with my friend. I got dopamine from every day being new. And I got serotonin because I was out there without sunglasses on, getting these receptors through my eyes, getting sunlight into my brain, stimulating serotonin. So trying to do something new, having a purpose can bring dopamine and serotonin in.
16:01 Mindy Pelz? Having shared experiences, like, think about the grandmothers, think about the Okinawa women. What did they do? They did things together. Because that neurochemically connects us and upregulates these neurochemicals that started to decline as estrogen declined. This is why I'm like such a fan of women collaborating in their post-menopausal years. Not competing. We were designed for collaboration because when we collaborate, we upregulate the girl gang. Specifically dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin. Okay, let's talk about the next set of the girl gang. Why, why did the primal grandmothers not gain weight?
16:46 Mindy Pelz? Well, that's because they relied on a different fuel system, specifically the fat-burning fuel system. So now I'm going to bring in a little bit of Fast Like a Girl, where we knew that we had, like years and years and years ago, I mean, it's been a known fact that there are two metabolisms. We have one that we initiate when we do the sugar burner and eat food, and one when we are fasting and we are burning fat to make a ketone. And I taught you all that we are meant to metabolically shift between these two. Now, what I want to bring forward is that the fasted state,
17:29 Mindy Pelz? let's really talk about this because I don't want to confuse you, but moving into the fasted state was your primal design as you go into your post-menopausal years. You were designed to fast longer. And this is what we see. I have a community of millions of women, and over 60 to 70% of them are post-menopausal, and they can rock their fasts and they can fast like a queen. And their mental sharpness, they all talk about, "Oh, my God, I am so mentally clear when I fast." So they move into the fat-burning system so that they can start to make ketones
18:14 Mindy Pelz? so they can get their mind supercharged. Now, I want to bring something up before I dive into the sugar burner system and what we should be eating. And I want to just say that a lot of you have reached out and said, "But Stacy Sims says that menopausal women shouldn't be fasting." Stacy Sims is looking at the menopausal woman through an endurance athlete.
18:41 Mindy Pelz? And you can hear her podcast. I brought her on to the Reset Her Podcast. We had a great interview. And she talks about what she does for breakfast, which is a loaded coffee with collagen powder in it, creatine. She's plant-based, but with a little bit of, I kept forget which milk she uses, but a plant milk. So she has, she has what we all often use for our fasted state. She does, there's some overlap there, but she's looking at fasting through the lens of the endurance athlete. What I'm bringing forward in Age Like a Girl is when we look at a ketone and fasting through the lens of mental clarity.
19:25 Mindy Pelz? It makes sense that we would want to go into a longer fast so we could get this ketone to supercharge our brain. Our brain is remodeling. Our brain energy is changing. So it's really important that we also look at fuel sources that can help with this brain energy change. Your brain is less sensitive to glucose. It is less sensitive to glucose. So you've got to rely on the other fuel source, which is ketones.
19:59 Mindy Pelz? And you need to also make sure that your diet is in alignment with not raising glucose too high, because your body doesn't really know what to do with all that glucose. This is Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's has been labeled as type 3 diabetes, and that is largely happening because your brain doesn't know how to use glucose as much. Glucose is a part of the girl gang, and you're not as insulin sensitive. So you've got to rely on this ketone to supercharge the mitochondria in these neurons so you can think straight, and you can bring your brain back online. The chapter I did in Age Like a Girl called "Changing Your Fuel Source",
20:43 Mindy Pelz? it's powerful. I show you the research behind a ketone and why it's so important for the menopausal brain. So I'm really excited to get you that. Now, the food we should be eating is what we call the prime, or I'm referring to as the primal menopausal diet. And it's not, it's not challenging, it's not hard. It's literally like the Mediterranean diet with a focus on these tubers. There's something really miraculous about these tubers for the post-menopausal women. They're high in magnesium, they're low in the glycemic index. They, they, they can give you that starchy carb energy that you need
21:27 Mindy Pelz? to be able to do your activities. So I really want us to start talking about tubers. And their tubers are sweet potatoes and potatoes and sun chokes. And there's turnips, and there's a lot of really cool tubers. In the book, I have list upon list upon list. But what we want to start doing less of in this primal menopausal diet is we want less grains unless it's an ancient grain. We want less pasteurized dairy unless it's a grass-fed dairy. We want less refined sugar unless it's something that came out of nature like honey. And we want less processed oils. We want to lean more into the positive oils like olive oil and avocado oil and MCT oil.
22:11 Mindy Pelz? So I put a bunch of lists in there. But there are two changes that we look at from a fuel source because you are more insulin resistant when you go into those menopausal years. Because when estrogen declined, your insulin resistance went up. So eat different and start tacking on these longer fasting windows so you can get those ketones and your brain will come back online.
22:38 Mindy Pelz? Now, one thing I thought a lot about when I looked at this girl gang was, why did the primal grandmothers not get hip replacements? Why did they not get osteoporosis? Well, when I looked at collagen and creatine specifically, I love that we're making creatine this hero right now because there's some really cool information out about creatine. And creatine is really this huge boost that can help fuel your muscle and your brain. Your brain's a muscle, by the way. So when you do higher amounts of creatine, I have tons of protocols in the book. You start to give your your muscles more muscle juice and you give your brain more energy.
23:23 Mindy Pelz? Collagen is protecting your joints and your skin. And so when estrogen started to decline, those two started to decline. So, yes, adding in collagen and creatine-rich foods, which by the way, are mostly animal-based. So if you're not getting enough protein, you know you're not getting enough animal protein, or you're a vegan or a vegetarian, then yes, you're going to want to make sure you supplement in with collagen and creatine. But the other side of that conversation is one, we need to talk about changing the way you work out. I am a competitive athlete. I played competitive tennis. That was my university experience.
24:08 Mindy Pelz? And I love to push my body, but I couldn't push it in the same way when I started to go through my perimenopausal years. I kept getting injured over and over and over again. So changing and doing things like hiking, I'm starting to surf. It's less pounding on the joints. And yes, we should be strength training and we need to think about flexibility and and balance, and we need to think about grip strength. These are all things I wrote about in the book, so you can see it. I'm a big fan of wrecking. I love the research on wrecking and osteoporosis. Really cool information that I mapped out for you all. But for the sake of this conversation, everything changes.
24:53 Mindy Pelz? Estrogen needs to change. You need to add in collagen and creatine. And you need to think about what you're going to do as an activity now that gives you the same endorphin rush, keeps you fit the way you want to stay fit, and follows your biological change that's happening as as you went through menopause.
25:15 Mindy Pelz? Okay. The last one I want to talk about is sleep. Because estrogen had a powerful influence on melatonin. And so when estrogen kicked in, she stimulated, whenever she was around, she stimulated a part of the hypothalamus called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, which is the clock inside your body. That part of your hypothalamus is sensing where you are in the day. And then it tells the pineal gland that it needs, what it needs to do as far as secreting melatonin. So that estrogen had a huge influence on your circadian rhythm.
25:57 Mindy Pelz? Well, as she declines, now you need to find other ways to map to your circadian rhythm. So a couple of my ideas, the first one is light. You gotta get that morning sunrise with the red hues. You gotta get the midday light and you gotta get the sunset with the red hues. Those are three pivotal times that tell your body where it is within the day. If you can't get the red light at those times, this is where red light therapy has come in handy. Movement. I already told you, they get up and the primal design was to get up and move in the morning. I do believe we are meant to move more in the morning. The cortisol kicks in in the morning, testosterone kicks in the morning.
26:39 Mindy Pelz? So we have a lot of these, these, these neurochemicals that actually are meant to make us move in the morning. So I highly agree with that. I also believe in food timing. I've talked a lot about the importance of making sure that we are eating in the light. If you eat in the light, then melatonin, it helps with the melatonin production. So that would mean taking your fasting window and maybe it would be 10 to five, or I'm sorry, your eating window would be 10 to five, leaving the rest for fasting. But when you eat in the dark, we start to throw circadian rhythms off. So. That's melatonin. Now, that's just a little nugget of what I put in Age Like a Girl,
27:25 Mindy Pelz? but what I really wanted to go into this book was understanding these neurochemical changes so that you can then use your lifestyle to balance out whatever you needed. This is not saying you don't do hormone replacement. I'm not saying that. I'm saying let's tack on a lifestyle that works with the estrogen's girl gang. I'm also not saying get on an antidepressant or don't get on an antidepressant. I've just seen a lot of people get on antidepressants. That it doesn't work. Well, that's because your neurochemical system changed and you're perhaps seeing things in your life that need to change. So change them. That's the part of menopause that is a gift for you.
28:10 Mindy Pelz? So what I want to go into next is I want to talk about the transformation. I specifically want to talk about five phases of transformation that you may recognize yourself in. And this is part three of the book. So that you can start to step into this most authentic version of you. You can step into this new identity that you were designed to have. Okay, here we go into part three. So part three of Age Like a Girl is really how do we use menopause to initiate ourself into a new version? And I spent a lot of time, like I mentioned at the beginning of this podcast or wherever you're listening to this, really trying to understand the heroines,
28:55 Mindy Pelz? the hero's journey, understanding people who have mapped out transformational journeys like Clarissa Pinkola Estes. And I saw a commonality. And it's basically five steps. And the five steps really look like this. Step number one is the hunch. I'll talk about this in a moment. There's like an inner knowing that we're not, we don't want to be doing the same thing anymore. The second step is what we call the shedding. And this is where like pieces of old you are coming off. And so whether you like it or not, there are a lot of them are coming off. Some of us are peeling those pieces off. The third step is called the grief. This is where we're like mourning it.
29:39 Mindy Pelz? I mean, it's not easy to transform into a new identity. I mean, we, we got a lot of, we got a lot of worthiness. We got a lot of, um, love from pleasing everybody. And now we have to turn that on ourselves and become love for ourselves. And self-love that needs to come towards us. And, and we need to get love and worthiness through our being not disappointing ourselves and starting to be our most authentic selves, which is what the shedding is. And then, and then the last, and then we go into this initiation where we come out a new person and then we go into what we call the return, which is you as a new identity. Stick with me as I go through this. Somewhere along this year, I came across a podcast that rocked my world.
30:24 Mindy Pelz? And it was put out by Michael Mead. He's a, he's a mythologist and he was telling a different version of the butterfly that I had never heard. And the version goes like this, that a caterpillar is born with what we call imaginal cells. They are the genetic blueprint of the butterfly. It's in the caterpillar. And it's purposely, these imaginal cells are there so that they can go and become the butterfly when the time is right. The caterpillar goes along and munches on grass all day long.
31:04 Mindy Pelz? And when it gets bloated and tired of just consuming, there is this key hormonal, yep, the caterpillar has hormones. There was a key hormonal moment that, a shift that tells the caterpillar, it's done being the caterpillar and it needs to be something else now. And this hormonal change tells the caterpillar to build a chrysalis around it, which is like a hard shell to, to create a, a container in which it can transform.
31:41 Mindy Pelz? And within this container, the caterpillar starts to dissolve itself. And it starts to get, goes, it literally goes into a goo that it no, no longer resembles the caterpillar. But in order to completely put itself into this goo, into dissolving itself, what it needed to do was actually resist its own transformation. I love this part. So it had a hunch, that's step number one of my five step process, is that I don't want to be this person anymore. I don't want to be the caterpillar anymore. I don't want to make, you know, a lot of women are like, I don't want to make your dinner anymore. I don't want to balance work and family anymore.
32:26 Mindy Pelz? I, I, I don't want to be in this relationship. I don't want to be at this job. I don't care what size I am. These are all hunches that are starting to percolate in women. And so like the caterpillar, we start to shift and change and we shed these old identities. And then inside the caterpillar, inside its chrysalis, what it does to make sure it can completely dissolve is it has to resist its own transformation. I wish I could see you all right now because how many of us have resisted change? We don't want to change. We don't want to move away from the old version of us that got so much worthiness, but we can't do it anymore.
33:12 Mindy Pelz? And so the caterpillar resists its change and that resistance is necessary. Because when it resists its change, it, oh, it amplifies its own immune system so that the immune system can start to attack the caterpillar so it dissolves into the goo until the only thing left is the imaginal cells, the, its original blueprint of who it was supposed to be.
33:39 Mindy Pelz? And what's fascinating, I thought, as I was listening to this podcast, was like, "Wait a second. The caterpillar goes into the chrysalis, resists its change, and there's an autoimmune reaction." It leaves me wondering, Sarah, those of you who know Dr. Sarah Sazal, as soon as I found this, I sent her a message. I was like, "Sarah, what if all the autoimmune conditions that are out there in the world, why they're happening to women is because we're resisting our own transformation, and so our body is attacking itself? How much of the autoimmune experience is a resistance of our own change? And so it resists itself, it dissolves.
34:22 Mindy Pelz? The imaginal cells then become the genetic blueprint for the butterfly, and then the butterfly emerges. So with that in mind, when we have the hunch, that is the point where the caterpillar's like, "I'm done eating all this grass. I don't want to eat all this grass anymore. I'm bloated, I'm tired, I have a hunch, imaginal cells, I have a hunch I'm supposed to be something different." How many of us feel that? Somewhere in our 40s, we're like, "I'm going to be something different. I don't want to do the same thing over and over again." Then it moves into the shedding, second stage. The shedding would be analogous to the caterpillar making a chrysalis.
35:05 Mindy Pelz? It wraps itself up in a container in which it can start to dissolve into goo. And I like the idea, I call it the shedding, because I think for us, when we go through menopause, we just take pieces off. We just start taking pieces off, so that we can just like, "I'm going to take, I'm not going to be the one that, you know, makes dinner every night. I'm not going to be the one that cares what everybody thinks about me anymore." We just start taking these pieces off, because we're dissolving, like the caterpillar dissolved inside the goo.
35:39 Mindy Pelz? Then inside that goo, the resistance is the grief we go through as we let go of these identities. I think a lot of us grieve the loss of being, you know, the primary person that our children relied on. They don't need that anymore. Some of us are grieving our younger bodies. Where did my, my, I don't know if a lot of us had six-pack abs, but we might have had two-pack abs. Where did my abs go? Where did, why can't I fit in my clothes anymore? There's like a grief in that. Where did my, where did my filter go? I can't, I've heard so many women that are like, I don't know, I just say it and I can't, I can't hold myself back. But there is, we need to go through grief.
36:20 Mindy Pelz? Grief is really important because grief starts to rewire the brain. It brings the default mode network down. And it tells the brain to ask the question of, who am I now? When we're in the hunch phase, when we're listening to that inner part of us that is like, I can't do this anymore. We're actually activating our prefrontal cortex, which is pulling us out of that fear center of the brain. And we're like, I, I don't know what this feeling is, but I can't do it anymore. When we go into the shedding, what we're doing is we're creating these new baby neurons. Where our brain is like, okay, we're not that, but what are we?
37:02 Mindy Pelz? And then we go into the grief where we're like, well, I don't know what I was. But I know, I don't have a sense of what I want to be. And that's when the default mode network, which is that part, it's the belief system. You know, default mode network is the part of the brain that has all the beliefs everybody told you about who you should be or how you should stand up. That comes down and goes away. And all of a sudden, we start asking ourselves, who do we want to become? And that's important in the griefs, like I'm, I'm grieving this old, old version, but I, I'm not yet the new version. And the prefrontal cortex tries to, to make sense of that. And then we go into what I call the initiation, where we're like, I kind of think I'm a new person.
37:46 Mindy Pelz? And I'm, I want to show the world what I am and who I am and how I'm showing up now. This might look like, I always say that I lived in a house where all children were welcome. Everybody could come. I didn't care if my house was messy. I just loved having kids around. And then I went through perimenopause and all of a sudden I was like, I can't take a messy house. And so there became the hunch of like, I'm not even feeling great in my own home. And then it became, I'm shedding the identity of the, of the super mom that just let every kid show up at her house and spend the night and do, and we were that place. I had to shed that identity. And then I had to go into grief because I really loved the kids that grew up in my household.
38:30 Mindy Pelz? I loved them, but I could no longer take the messiness of the house. And then I initiated myself into a place of, this is who I am now. I'm a woman who likes a clean house. And then I went into the place of what we call the return, where I came back as a new person and the language became, I love having you here in my house. I just need my kitchen to stay clean. And I can't have you sleeping on my living room couch every night. And we started having new conversations. So that's an example. Some, some women are, I can't stay in this marriage anymore. But it's the, you know, the shedding of that life and the grief that you go through in that process. I have several friends who have gone through that and it's really hard. And then you go into these dark nights of the soul.
39:15 Mindy Pelz? And then you come into this place where all of a sudden you're a new person. We all do it different. You don't have to blow up your life to, to become a new person. But you, but menopause is asking you to become something different. And the process looks something like that. I actually spent some time really trying to understand if we have any research on what wisdom looks like. And when I started to look at what parts of the brain light up with wisdom and when, when we know somebody is wise. I started to see that they mapped to each one of these five steps,
39:58 Mindy Pelz? that we had to listen to that inner calling, the hunch. We had to start to go through a phase of difficulty where we let go of old things that we no longer wanted to be attached to. And with that came a lot of pain. We had to go through the grief. We have to go through the resistance. We have to start to come into this new version of us. And then we land in the return. And that is how we create a wise brain. So when I look at the conversation that's happened in the menopausal world, we went from, "I don't want to talk about this," to, "Oh, my God, you've got symptoms? I've got symptoms.
40:42 Mindy Pelz? This is bullshit, this process we've gone through." And then we went to a phase of, "Oh, you don't need to suffer through it if you just do hormone replacement." And I strongly feel like we're now at a phase where we can integrate all of those thought processes. And we're at a phase where we can stand up and say, "Oh, shoot, after 40, my brain remodeled. My neurochemical armor came down. I crawled into the chrysalis. I let go of what didn't serve me and I came out a butterfly." And that process can take 10 years. And you can do that with or without HRT. You can do it with or without some of the lifestyle tips. But that's where you're going.
41:25 Mindy Pelz? You're going to be a butterfly if you allow the menopausal moment to lead you there. And that is the whole premise of Age Like a Girl, is how the heck do we butterfly ourselves? How do we take this, what feels like a very daunting experience, and make it work for us? Because menopause is working for us. When I've given this talk that you all have just heard, when I've given this talk at retreats and I gave it to a group of doctors the other night, so many women in their early, late 30s come up to me and they go, "I can't wait to go through menopause." And if we can reframe it that way... If we can see it as our freedom moment,
42:09 Mindy Pelz? the moment to come into our most authentic version of ourselves, then we will stop suffering through it. So, there you go. That is a synopsis of Age Like a Girl. It shows the world that we're ready to change the conversation and make Menopause One about how do we not suffer through it? And make it a conversation around how do we fully step into it? So we can finally be our most authentic, powerful selves. That is the purpose. That is the conversation I'm hoping to open up with Age Like a Girl. And I am so excited to bring to you something that I have been living
42:52 Mindy Pelz? and I have been researching and I finally found words for. And I can't wait for us all to be on this journey together. Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we'd love to know about it. So please leave us a review, share it with your friends, and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.
Previous Age Like a Girl Part 1: The Real Purpose of Menopause Next Why Relationships Change in Midlife: Menopause, Awakening & the Marriage Reset with Jillian Turecki Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated