Moment 147: Stop These Habits That Are Destroying Your Body!: Mindy Pelz

In this moment, nutrition and functional health expert , Mindy Pelz discusses how we often treat our body as if it was an enemy working against us and our interests. Mindy discusses how evolution has actually shaped the human body so that it is constantly looking to increase your chances of survival. However, in the modern world we are getting in the way of our body’s natural defence mechanism, and taking actions that are against our own and our body’s interests, this can include injecting ourselves with weight loss drugs and using toxic deodorants, causing larger health problems later in life. Mindy says that in general we seem to be in a ‘evolutionary mismatch’ with our bodies and need to regain trust in them. Listen to the full episode here - https://g2ul0.app.link/hXIqoyQGOGb Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Mindy: https://drmindypelz.com/ https://www.instagram.com/dr.mindypelz/?hl=en Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Steven Bartlett?

  What do you mean by opening up our detox pathways?

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, so if you look at our lymph system.

• 0:08Steven Bartlett?

  Which is what?

• 0:09Speaker 01

  The lymph is like, you know, people know lymph nodes because when you get sick, you can feel them.

• 0:13Steven Bartlett?

  Mumps.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:14Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  So the lymph is always carrying toxins out of organs. So the liver has a lymph pathway, the gut has lymph nodes in there that are going to pull all the toxins that are in there and move them out of you. So we need to keep these lymph pathways open. So the gut, the gut's a great one. You should be having a bowel movement every single day. If you're not having a bowel movement every single day, then what the body's trying to get rid of is staying inside of you and it gets congested. A thing we teach women about the armpit, and actually would work for men too, is that you should have a pit, not a puff.

• 0:53Steven Bartlett?

  What does that mean?

• 0:54Speaker 01

  If it's a puff, like look in the mirror, and if your armpit is a puff, then that's stagnant lymph. It means that you're not pulling the toxins for women that are coming out of her breasts are not getting out, toxins that are coming out from the head down into the thoracic areas not getting out because it's congested.

• 1:11Steven Bartlett?

  So if your underarm is puffy and not like a pit.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16Steven Bartlett?

  Then you might be storing some of those toxins.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:19Steven Bartlett?

  And.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  They're not moving, they're not mobilizing.

• 1:21Steven Bartlett?

  Why aren't they? Am I blocking my pathways?

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, the pathway is blocked, so.

• 1:25Steven Bartlett?

  With what?

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Well, there's the question, yeah. With, I feel like people are going to leave this podcast and be so depressed because there's so many pieces of this, but deodorant, deodorant clogs that up. And so it doesn't mobilize all of the toxins out. This was a big thing with breast cancer is a lot of women using toxic deodorants. They weren't getting the toxins out of the breast and it was clogging in the armpit because of the toxins from the deodorant.

• 1:51Steven Bartlett?

  That explains why we sweat in that area, right?

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54Steven Bartlett?

  Because it's a pathway.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  Why do we even have hair in that area?

• 1:57Steven Bartlett?

  I don't know, you tell me.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  It's a detox. It's for detoxing. It's to help get those toxins out.

• 2:03Steven Bartlett?

  Also, the molecules go down the hair.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And what do women do?

• 2:08Steven Bartlett?

  Shave it off.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:09Steven Bartlett?

  So you're saying.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  I I I shave, I I'm I just because I don't, I can't walk, it's just not in my in my nature. But I, you know what I do is I have a loofah in my shower and I just loofah under my arms at whenever I shower to open up those pathways.

• 2:26Steven Bartlett?

  What's a loofah?

• 2:27Speaker 01

  It's like a little organic sponge.

• 2:29Steven Bartlett?

  Ah, okay, it scrubs it.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, scrubs it.

• 2:31Steven Bartlett?

  We also have pubic hair.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  We also have pubic hair. We are getting toxins out from the ovaries. The ovaries are the major area for and testes. This is where hormones are being produced. And so as they're coming out, they are supposed to influence our everything biologically we need them to influence. But then they're also supposed to get out of our system. And so the hair ends up becoming like this way that we can mobilize the toxins out of us.

• 2:58Steven Bartlett?

  I never want, I never knew or asked why I grow hair under my arms and in the pubic region. No one ever told me about that. No one ever, I never questioned it. I thought it was slightly inconvenient.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  Yes, well, it is for sure.

• 3:14Steven Bartlett?

  But the body doesn't do anything to inconvenience you. It does it to increase your chances of survival because I'm the byproduct of millions of years of survival of the fittest and evolution that has made me pruned, a sculpted to survive. It's funny because we spend so much of our time, and this goes back to the conversation around sugar. We spend and just weight loss and all these things. We live in a world where we think that our body is against us.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:40Steven Bartlett?

  It's fighting us, it's it's making me go for the sugar drawer, it's stopping me losing weight. It's growing all these pubes.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  Right. Inconvenient.

• 3:49Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then we fight it, so we shave it off and we, you know, do all these crazy things to fight against our body. But our body is very much, it's it's actually, it's actually for us. And many of the things we're choosing to do are against us. We are against ourselves, not our bodies. Our bodies cannot put a foot wrong.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  You got it. I mean, you got it. It's, this is what I'm trying to bring back is this, this respect for what the body's trying to do. That's what we're missing. We, we, it's all inconvenient. And it's everything from like, even like, weight gain. Why is your body gaining weight? Because it's so brilliant that it decided not to put that fat around your organs, it put it around your belly, and now you're looking in the mirror and you're villainizing it, but your body was trying to save your life in that moment. Like, everything the body is always doing for you, not against you. But we continually discredit what it's trying to do and manipulate it, which is why

• 4:51Speaker 01

  the best thing I can think of is that we're just in an evolutionary mismatch. We're just at, the modern world does not line up with the human body's design.

• 5:02Steven Bartlett?

  I was walking through, um, New York City, and I saw a poster, and it is for inject, weight loss injections.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  Hmm, yeah.

• 5:11Steven Bartlett?

  Have you seen this?

• 5:12Speaker 01

  No, but Ozempic is a, is a drug that's really popular right now.

• 5:17Steven Bartlett?

  There's a couple of drugs right now. There's, there's, one of my, my friends were talking about it, and we were like, there's a diabetes drug, I think, and the headlines have been that so many people are taking this.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:26Steven Bartlett?

  Diabetes drug to lose weight, that people with diabetes are struggling. Um, there's another one called semaglutide.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  Yep, yep.

• 5:36Steven Bartlett?

  This is, this is people injecting things in their body to help them lose weight.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 5:41Steven Bartlett?

  And the poster, which my friend had sent me, and I'd, I'd seen it earlier, and then he'd sent me the poster as well in our group chat, says, one shot a week, lose weight, and it has the little URL. Someone thankfully had actually ripped the URL off this billboard. Um, what's your take on all this stuff?

• 5:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, the, the new medications that are out there right now are creating a weight loss, uh, possibility, uh, when we look at the scale, and when we look at how people feel when they put on their clothes. But it's at the expense of muscle. They're actually losing more muscle than they are losing fat. So, yes, you feel thinner, but it's not because you lost fat. You lost muscle. Muscle is the organ of longevity. If you lose muscle as you age, you are gonna be in a bad situation. I mean, we need muscle to get out of a chair.

• 6:31Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  You need muscle to perform daily life functions. The other thing people don't realize about muscle is in muscle are insulin receptors. So if you lose muscle, you don't have as many insulin receptors. Which means you're now putting yourself in a more insulin resistant state, which means you have to stay on the medication forever to be able to stay at the weight you want. Because you don't have the same insulin sensitivity. So again, it's like the calorie in, calorie out. Short term result.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  It's risky, it's risky. And then, you know, every medication has a side effect. But I'm more concerned about the person who thinks they solved their weight loss issue. And all they've done is made it worse down the road.

• 7:16Steven Bartlett?

  I've sat here with many a health expert and a fitness expert and nutritional experts, and they all agree with what you just said about muscle. They all said to me, because I asked a question to, I think it was Tim Spector about, it might have been Giles Yo. Asked him a question about, does our metabolism fall off a cliff as we age, which is quite a popular thing. And a few of them said the same thing to me. They go, at a certain point further down the line, metabolism does change, but really the thing that changes is muscle mass. And that means that we stop moving as much, which means that we gain weight faster. So he said, the number one thing that you need to do as you age is keep doing resistance training, keep your muscle.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 7:53Steven Bartlett?

  And because I was asking him a question about my father, I said, I went down this really steep cliff in Bali a couple of weekends before. And as I was going down those stairs, I was thinking, my dad couldn't do this anymore. And at the bottom of those stairs was our activity for the day, we were going water rafting. And as I was walking down those stairs, I was thinking, I want to be my dad's age and be able to go down these stairs. So I can do stuff with my kids. And getting into a place where I'm immobile, you know, by the 60, that is a choice. That is unavoidable, for most of us, that is a choice, and it's one that we can avoid if we keep muscle and we keep, therefore we'll keep fat. And what you've said there, from what I garnered from it is, I will actually, if I take those chemicals. And if I inject them into my body, I'll lose my muscle mass.

• 8:36Steven Bartlett?

  And if I lose my muscle mass, I will be, I will have a higher chance of weight gain and obesity when I'm older.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  And and your functionality.

• 8:46Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  So the great, the perfect example that I always stuck in my head is my dad had a knee surgery. And he's eighty six years old. And I remember trying to help him get around a chair that he was sitting in. And he was starting to lose his upper body strength and he literally couldn't push himself up and out of the chair to be able to move into a comfortable position. And I thought, oh, my gosh, that's where muscle is so important at eighty six years old. Is just being able to get up and out of a chair after after recovering from a surgery. But if you think about the functionality of a human as we age. If you want to be able to not do as many activities like you're talking about, just make sure you don't have as much muscle. Like the minute muscle goes away, your functionality goes away.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  But more importantly, the minute muscle goes away, you're more insulin resistant. So you're going to gain weight more down the long haul.

• 9:39Steven Bartlett?

  A lot of other people would say, you know, the way to lose weight is just to do lots of cardio. Run a lot.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:46Steven Bartlett?

  Good idea?

• 9:47Speaker 01

  No, no. So here's another interesting thing, and I'm going to give it through a woman's perspective because we're good. Let's go back to women over forty. So cortisol goes up with extra cardio. Uh, calorie set point goes, you know, your more calorie output. So remember, that's also happening and you're changing your set point.

• 10:08Steven Bartlett?

  So I need more calories. My calorie set point goes up and my cortisol levels go up.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 10:14Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  Okay, so what ends up happening is that you actually now are tanking all your other hormones. So let's follow the trail of progesterone. Cortisol goes up because you're you're doing so much cardio. So progesterone goes down. Because cortisol goes up, progesterone goes down. Well, progesterone keeps estrogen in check. So now estrogen can go up. And if you have too much estrogen, eventually what's going to happen is it's going to be stored as fat. So that extra hormone, well, so long term, that's not a great plan.

• 10:47Steven Bartlett?

  For women?

• 10:47Speaker 01

  For women.

• 10:48Steven Bartlett?

  For men?

• 10:49Speaker 01

  Uh, well, so then the second piece applies to both men and women is if you're doing a lot of cardio, most likely you're breaking down muscle to be able to perform that cardio. And a great example is look at a marathon runner versus a tennis player. You know, or a soccer player. Like even though soccer players are doing a lot of cardio, it's a lot of start, stop, start, stop. But a marathon runner who's done so much cardio is breaking muscle down to be able to do that amount of cardio. So i- i- it's okay to do, just not at the expense of muscle. And for women, you can't do it at the expense of progesterone.

• 11:24Steven Bartlett?

  So it won't help me to lose weight doing cardio?

• 11:29Speaker 01

  No, no. You know what's gonna help you to lose weight is more weightlifting. Build more muscles, you have more insulin receptor sites. Fast more, so you can get rid of all of the glucose that gets stored in muscles. Break your fast with protein. And yeah, I mean, that's what we saw, we see all the time in both my clinic and my online world is those three things will get you in the shape that you want. It might not, remember, as you build muscle, you're not gonna lose, the, the, the number on the scale might be that much different, you know, it might, it might not move, but your whole shape is gonna change. You're gonna look different.

• 12:07Steven Bartlett?

  So is any level of cardio good for weight loss? Would you recommend that just for the, the broader health benefits?

• 12:15Speaker 01

  Uh, you know, I think cardio is more of a mental health improvement. Improve, you know, you get all those endorphins, it's so good for your mental health. I love to go running, it's my favorite thing, but I do it for my mental health, not to lose weight.