Master Your Eating Window: The Foundational Five with Dr. Mindy Pelz

If you've struggled to master your eating window or feel confused about what to eat after fasting, this episode is your roadmap. Dr. Mindy breaks down her Foundational Five food rules—why your blood sugar matters more than calories, how to eat for your gut health, and why protein and healthy fats are key to balanced hormones. She also dives into her Three Eat Like a Girl meal principles that teach you how to eat to make, break down, and detox your hormones naturally. Whether you've already read the book or you're hearing these ideas for the first time, this episode will help you reconnect to your body, find food freedom, and make eating joyful again. To view full show notes, more information on our guests, resources mentioned in the episode, discount codes, transcripts, and more, visit https://drmindypelz.com/ep313 https://drmindypelz.com/ep312 Check out our fasting membership at https://resetacademy.drmindypelz.com https://resetacademy.drmindypelz.com/ Please note our medical disclaimer https://drmindypelz.com/medical-disclaimer/.

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

• 0:02Mindy Pelz?

  Okay, welcome to another solo episode. I love doing these, I'm gonna call them one offs, but they're basically my thoughts on either things I'm seeing within our community, information that I feel like will be helpful for you all along your fasting journey. Like today, what we're gonna talk about are the principles that I wrote about in Eat Like a Girl. So I'm really excited to share this with you. There are some really tried and true principles that all women should use when looking at their eating window. We're talking about the eating window. And how do you master the eating window? In Fast Like a Girl, what I was really helping women see

• 0:47Mindy Pelz?

  is that there are two windows. There's a fasting window and there's an eating window. And what I realized in that process was so many of you had never thought about the fasting window, which is really cool, and why so many of you got such great results. But then we saw that a lot of you really struggled to go back into your eating window. Food is complex and food has become toxic and our taste buds have been hijacked. And so with Eat Like a Girl, I wanted to give you some guiding principles, just like I gave you guiding principles with Fast Like a Girl. So this podcast and this episode is really about

• 1:30Mindy Pelz?

  an introduction to Eat Like a Girl, which depending on when you're listening to this, will come out. Launch date is October 22nd. It is now, at the time of me doing this recording, it is available for preorder. And what's really exciting about Eat Like a Girl is the front half is all food principles. I have put lists in there that you can go back and reference. I have given you guiding principles to go to breaking your fast and moving into this eating window. And then how do you master the eating window? So that going in and out of fasting window, eating window becomes very effortless. So in this episode, I want to give you two really cool

• 2:13Mindy Pelz?

  guiding principles that I wrote about in Eat Like a Girl. And the first one is called the foundational five. And then the second one is called the three Eat Like a Girl principles. Welcome to the Resetter Podcast. This podcast is all about empowering you to believe in yourself again. If you have a passion for learning, if you're looking to be in control of your health and take your power back, this is the podcast for you.

• 2:50Mindy Pelz?

  Here we go. Here is the five foundational food ideas that really everybody should follow. This one, I've been out doing podcasts, talking about the new book, and this one is really what people say to me in the foundational five is, well, isn't this good for both men and women? And the answer is yes. But again, the lens in which I see my work a lot through is the female body. So these five are musts. And when you lose your way, let's come back to these five. So here they are. Principle number one of the foundational five is that your blood sugar

• 3:30Mindy Pelz?

  matters, calories don't. Now, there are a lot of thoughts right now on calories. It's really surprising to me. If you haven't heard the interview I did with Stephen Bartlett on The Diary of the CEO, we will link that in the notes to this show so you can go see it. But the second episode I did with him, we spent a lot of time talking about calories. And when you look at the science on calories, yes, it's prolific. I mean, there is a lot of research showing that a calorie is a way of understanding the energy that is required to absorb that

• 4:13Mindy Pelz?

  food into your body. And if you take in too much energy,

• 4:19Mindy Pelz?

  And you don't have enough energy output, then yes, you will gain weight. There is a piece of that. And I'm not saying that that is wrong. What I'm saying is that is harder than shit to follow. Like, I asked Stephen this. I was like, nobody that I know of has told me I counted my calorie input and my calorie output, and I did that every day of my life, and it kept my weight where I wanted to be. I'm sure there's somebody out there, but I have never heard somebody say that that worked for them. And this was really what I brought up to Stephen. I asked him, when he said, "What do you think of calorie counting?", I said, "Well, have you ever succeeded at it?"

• 5:05Mindy Pelz?

  And he said, "Well, maybe for a day or two." So, the calorie model is so broken because A, we can't follow it, and B, every time you decrease your input of calories and you increase your output of calories, you change your set point. And this is something that Dr. Jason Fung brought to us when he brought The Obesity Code, which really gets a lot of credit for being one of the original books that said, "Hey, we're looking at weight loss from a really different lens, and it's broken, and we need to look at weight loss as a hormonal issue, not a calorie issue." And he actually, in The Obesity Code, he

• 5:50Mindy Pelz?

  referenced something called the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. And the experiment went something like this. They took a group of men, quarantined them, and slowly started lowering their calorie input. And what they found is that the less calories they ate, the body changed its set point, its metabolic set point. And so, they kept reducing the calories down, and they kept losing weight until they came out of the experiment. I think the experiment went on for close to a year. And these men came out of the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, and they were very, very thin. And then the minute they ate food, they just gained all the weight back.

• 6:36Mindy Pelz?

  Which was good in their scenario, but it was how we understood that there was this metabolic set point. And if we keep trying to eat less and exercise more, we are at risk of changing the set point. So we always have to eat more, or eat less and exercise more to stay at that space. Now, if you put your lens on blood sugar, you bypass that whole experiment. And so the first principle is blood sugar matters, calories don't. And when you look through the lens of food from blood sugar, how do I put combination of food together to keep my blood sugar stable?

• 7:21Mindy Pelz?

  How do I eat foods that keeps my blood sugar down and I don't end up with these huge blood sugar spikes? If we look at it from that lens, calories don't matter and you will not gain weight. I have seen it over and over and over again, that the minute I can take your focus and I can put it over on blood sugar, now you literally can have your cake and eat it too. Because the combination of foods matters, and we'll talk about that in a moment, like you can take a piece of carbohydrate and put it with a fat and you won't increase, you don't have a blood sugar spike.

• 8:01Mindy Pelz?

  And if there's no blood sugar spike, then there's no insulin required from the pancreas. And if there's no insulin required, then we don't end up in insulin resistance. So when we look through the lens of blood sugar, we start to see we have more options. We have more flexibility. And when we have more flexibility and options within our food, we can sustain that.

• 8:27Mindy Pelz?

  And so what I saw with Fast Like a Girl was so many of you went into this fasted state, pulsing into it, and then you cleaned up the metabolic system. And the people that got the best results with what I taught in Fast Like a Girl, when they switched back into their eating window, they started to notice that they were not gaining weight. And I, you know, I think I've told this story a thousand times, but if this is new to you, when I first started teaching this metabolic switch within my clinic, what I noticed was that people would go on vacation,

• 9:11Mindy Pelz?

  and they would come back in and they would say to me, oh, my God, you have no idea how much I ate on vacation. That was wrong, but I came home and I didn't gain a pound. And that's because I taught them the metabolic switch and how to eat to keep their blood sugar stable and how to tap into the fasted state so that they could keep bringing down the stored glucose and keep getting rid of any glucose that's been stored in fat and make their cells insulin sensitive again. So I really want you to get this because it's freedom. It's food freedom when you just say, I don't, I'm not going to look at calories.

• 9:53Mindy Pelz?

  I'm going to look at everything that I eat through the lens of what is it doing to my blood sugar? As we speak right now, I've got a blood sugar reader on. And I wear one, I used to wear one twice a year, and I'm now wearing it like once a month because I'm just looking and watching how my food combinations are. It just keeps me in check. So it's the greatest measurement. It's better than the scale. It's better than counting calories. It's a measurement of real time action of what my food is doing to my, my blood sugar. So, and I think blood sugar has gotten a lot of attention, which is great.

• 10:36Mindy Pelz?

  I think we are hearing this more and more. You can go and listen to the podcast interview I did. With the glucose goddess and she has brought so many of this message to so many of us in a brilliant way. So there's a lot of people saying this, which is why it had to be the first foundational rule was I need, I want to get you off calories. I talked about it in Fast Like a Girl. I was like, I, I want to get you all off this. But I, it's, I understand that if you've been a calorie counter for a large part of your life, it's scary. Because calories was control. And so now what I want you to do is if you're going to control, want to have some control over your food,

• 11:21Mindy Pelz?

  have control over your blood sugar. And again, we will put links to my favorite blood sugar reader in this. And, and if you want to know more about all the nuance around blood sugar, please message us and let us know. And maybe I'll just do a whole solo podcast just on all the ways you can analyze your blood sugar. But foundational principle, number one is pay attention to your blood sugar. Your blood sugar matters, calories don't. Okay. Principle number two of the foundational five is eat nature's food, not human made food. So this is another one that's not necessarily unique, but it's mandatory.

• 12:05Mindy Pelz?

  Just like, like when I went to go right eat like a girl, I, I was like, we have to get some of the old thinking out of your brain. But I can't just tell you this is bad. I want to replace it with some new thinking. So if you want to control something, control blood sugar. If you are tired of counting carbohydrates, which a lot of us are, or counting protein. And we'll talk about protein here in a moment. It's in the rigidity of counting that I think people go into these diets and they're like, at first they like the, like, tell me the rules. Okay. Like you'll see in my cookbook or in, in Eat Like a Girl, which is a food book at the front section and a cookbook in the back section.

• 12:51Mindy Pelz?

  I was like, okay, how can I get some of you off the counting of the carbohydrates? But I also gave you some guidelines, like I have two eating styles. In this book, I introduced it to you in Fast Like a Girl, one is called ketogenic. And in ketogenic, we keep your carbohydrate level low. And I like it around 50 grams and net carbs, which means you have to factor in the fiber. And the other style is hormone feasting foods, where we actually purposely bring your carbohydrate load up so that you have enough glucose for progesterone.

• 13:30Mindy Pelz?

  So both of those eating styles are, are carbohydrate like driven. Like I have some real strong feelings about how we want to make look at these two different eating styles through a carbohydrate lens. But before I could introduce ketogenic and hormone feasting to you in a very detailed way in Eat Like a Girl, I really want you to get out of counting carbohydrates to a point in which it is, it is now become a rigid, rigid, disciplined food principle that you can't stick with over time.

• 14:14Mindy Pelz?

  And I wanted to introduce this idea that we need, carbs are good sometimes and they need to be nature's carbs. Human made carbs are absolutely what's killing us. And another way that we say it is ultra-processed foods. Ultra-processed foods are incredibly high in refined carbohydrates and they will spike your blood sugar. And so let's just move to that second principle of when you go to pick a carbohydrate out, ask yourself, you know, did this come from the earth? The earth didn't make anything that wasn't helpful to us.

• 14:58Mindy Pelz?

  So a banana that's really high in carbohydrates, there's a time and place for it. We need bananas when we need potassium. We need bananas when we need to make progesterone, which is why it makes it a very, very good hormone feasting food.

• 15:15Mindy Pelz?

  But when we want to lose weight and stabilize our blood sugar, we might need to bring, get the banana out of the diet and go more ketogenic and bring that, take a different lens of that carbohydrate. So in this conversation I feel like I'm having with all of you, I really want you to see that carbohydrates are not bad. But when we move to refined carbohydrates, now we have a problem. And there's so much coming out right now about ultra-processed foods. I'm really feeling encouraged that so many people are calling this toxic food out. But where I think we're lost is in nature's carbohydrates.

• 15:59Mindy Pelz?

  And to go one step deeper into this, what I want to tell you is that ketogenic works really good for estrogen. It does not make you more estrogen, but it makes you insulin sensitive, which creates a beautiful environment within your body to allow your age-appropriate estrogen to be produced by your body. When you are in a state of insulin resistance, that's when we see estrogen have challenges. And a perfect example of that is the woman going into her perimenopausal years.

• 16:37Mindy Pelz?

  Estrogen starts to go low and then it creates a more insulin-resistant environment. And you need to make sure that you keep your carbohydrate low so that you don't start to gain weight. And I saw this so many times in my clinic where people were doing just fine with their diet until they went into perimenopause. And then they went into perimenopause and that diet didn't work anymore. And so we had to pull some lower carb days where we don't bring the banana in. We don't bring mangoes and the tropical fruit. But then, like I told you in Fast Like a Girl, on other days, we needed to bring those tropical fruits back

• 17:19Mindy Pelz?

  and we needed to bring the sweet potato back and bring glucose up for progesterone's needs. So this is the nuance of the female body is that our two major sex hormones actually have two different environments that they like. And it's, you could almost look at it like, I can use myself as an example. Like, I'm a very social human. And sometimes I like environments that are very outgoing and have lots of people around. And then sometimes I like environments that are quiet and no people. So, we need to hold both those truths. Which is what I did with a ketogenic lens.

• 18:02Mindy Pelz?

  I said, "Hey, sometimes the female body needs lower amounts of insulin production in order to support age-appropriate estrogen." But then other times, your body needs more glucose to support progesterone. So I gave you hormone-feasting foods. And just to make it easier for all of you, the way that I divvied up these recipes in Eat Like a Girl is there's a whole section on the ketogenic ones and a whole section on hormone-feasting ones. So that when you have this book in your hand and you're making these recipes, you know what they fit in. But you'll see, I didn't put macro counting on each recipe

• 18:47Mindy Pelz?

  because I want to free us from macro counting. It's gotten a little obscene now. And my lens is always freeing women from the constraints of health that have been placed upon us. We've already been told, "So you do this, don't do that." And all I'm saying is, "Okay, let's focus on blood sugar, and now, let's focus on nature's carbs. Let's just lean in on nature's carbs. And when you want to help support estrogen, we eat the lower glycemic nature's carbs, so we don't spike glucose. And when we want to cater to progesterone, then we eat the higher glucose nature's carbs." But they're both nature's carbs. Okay, so that's principle number two.

• 19:29Mindy Pelz?

  I wish I could see all your faces to see how, because this is really important. It takes us out of this fighting that seems to be happening in the nutritional world of do this, don't do this. Women, as women, we've had enough do this, don't do this. Like, the last thing we need is more friggin' food rules that shame us and make us feel guilty. Like, I'm trying to give you a new relationship with food, and food is healing. And when we want to heal our estrogen system, we lean into the foods that are lower on the glycemic index. And that means carbs that are more like lettuces. And you'll see I have lists after list in here of, here are the carbs that estrogen

• 20:14Mindy Pelz?

  loves. And then, when we go over to progesterone, here are the carbs that progesterone loves. And now, we have more to work with, and we're not in this rigid mindset. Okay, so that was number two. Now, number three, this one I love, and I really want to continue to bring this home for you all, especially those of you that are struggling with sugar addiction or carb addiction. I want you to hear this really clearly. The third foundational five principle that I wrote in this book is eat for your microbes, not your taste buds.

• 20:56Mindy Pelz?

  Now, it would be easy, in that discussion, to feel like I'm telling you to eat tasteless food. I'm not saying that. Wait till you try these recipes in this book. They were performed by two different chefs, celebrity chefs that are celebrity in their worlds. One is a plant-based chef, Chef Leslie, and then one is Chef Jeff, who is an expert in all styles of eating, but also has a unique lens through looking at meat and cooking meat in an incredibly tasty way. So, when we look at eating for your microbes, what we need to understand is it's your microbes that determine your taste buds.

• 21:43Mindy Pelz?

  I want to say that again. Your bacteria in your gut tell your taste buds what to crave. An incredible example of this is Candida. Anybody who's ever had Candida has a massive sugar addiction. Because Candida is a fungus inside the gut that tells the brain and the taste buds, eat more sugar, drink more alcohol, in order to keep that fungus alive. But if you starve out that fungus, you no longer get those signals. And I am living proof of it. When I was in my twenties and I had chronic fatigue syndrome, the first thing I did was go on a Candida diet. And when you get Eat Like a Girl,

• 22:28Mindy Pelz?

  I wrote a beautiful acknowledgement to the doctor that taught me this. Because I was craving carbs, and carbs were causing me to gain weight at this time. And they were suppressing my immune system, which was causing Epstein-Barr virus to accelerate within my body. And this incredible doctor put me on a Candida diet, which was meat and vegetables, basically. And within two weeks, I started dropping weight, and I started getting my energy back, and my taste buds changed. I stopped craving sugar. So if we go and make choices through the lens of the microbiome,

• 23:10Mindy Pelz?

  then now we are repopulating the microbiome. And the microbiome is so key for breaking hormones down. When I feed more and more of the bad bacteria, I get more and more bad cravings. There's also some really interesting research on chocolate. They've found the strain of bacteria that makes you crave chocolate. I also found a study, and if you listen to the episode I did with Dr. Kate Shanahan about fat, I found an interesting study that fats, and you'll go listen to that episode.

• 23:53Mindy Pelz?

  We dove into the study to see if it was toxic fats. They didn't say, my suspicion is it's toxic fats. The toxic fats... Start to change the microbiome and cause an upregulation of bad bacteria that shut off GLP-1, which is this semaglutide that everybody's all excited about because if you can upregulate GLP-1, you can kill hunger. But the part of the story that's not being told is it was in the fats that changed that semaglutide within your gut. So now you're having a different experience with food.

• 24:38Mindy Pelz?

  You're wanting to eat more. So the foods we eat change the microbiome. And as the microbiome changes, it tells us to eat more of either the right or the wrong foods. So you get to pick. What do you want to do? Do you want to crave more of the right foods? Or do you want to crave more of the wrong foods? It's up to you. So as you're eating and going around day after day after day, you are building a microbiome that tells you what you should crave. One of my favorite original introduction to fasting was through the lens of a researcher who wrote a book called The Every Other Day Diet.

• 25:23Mindy Pelz?

  And she took a group of people that were addicted to toxic food and were overweight and had incredible metabolic markers that were all off. And what she did is she said, okay, eat whatever food you want to eat one day and then the next day fast. And then the next day, eat whatever food you want to eat, and then the next day, fast. And what she found is she did this for a year. That's why it's called The Every Other Day Diet. And she found that the days off from the toxic food let the microbiome repair itself. And throughout the year, not only did the metabolic markers change for the person, like hemoglobin A1C came down, blood pressure came down, and liver enzymes healed and cholesterol changed.

• 26:07Mindy Pelz?

  But what surprised her is their food choices changed. And those of you who have heard me talk about the story of the young man Todd, who I helped overturn a food addiction and he lost 175 pounds, we applied this. He was addicted to Western food. And so instead of taking that Western food away, I taught him to fast. And then I taught him to add in like fiber and add in good foods, prebiotic, polyphenol, probiotic foods that would help to create better bacteria in his gut. So now changing his food habits isn't a discipline issue. It is actually an innate feeling inside of him because his taste buds changed, because

• 26:51Mindy Pelz?

  his microbiome changed, then he made different food choices. I hope you're getting this because it's huge when we go and feed the microbiome. And I have all kinds of lists in here about different foods that really do a good job feeding your microbiome, specifically the Estrobalome, which is the set of bacteria that break down estrogen, which is really important for perimenopausal and menopausal women. Okay. Principle number four is protein is the hero macronutrient. Now this one is really important because protein is having its day. And there's a lot of conversation on protein.

• 27:36Mindy Pelz?

  You've probably heard me even talk about protein a lot here on this channel and on my podcast. But we're back at counting again. We can't keep counting. So the rhetoric that's getting out there is one gram of protein for every pound of ideal body weight. That's what we should be focused on. But it's hard to sustain that. So I want to just flip that and say protein is the hero. So when you're looking to put food together in combination, and when you're looking at a day's worth of eating, ask yourself, do I have protein at every meal?

• 28:19Mindy Pelz?

  This is why I love beef sticks and my favorite is Paleo Valley Beef Sticks. I walk around eating that all day. This is why I love eggs, hard boiled eggs. I've gotten really back into tofu. For those of you that are plant-based, hanging out with Chef Leslie has just gotten me thinking about tofu and tempeh. And I'm bringing back a lot of different sources of protein, knowing it's the hero nutrient. But I'm not counting because I know I'm gonna lose focus and I can't sustain the count. So when we come to the protein model, we want to make it front and center. It's like the main actress that we're looking at when we look at a meal.

• 29:00Mindy Pelz?

  But then we need supporting actresses too, which is why we need things like fiber. So one of the things that I really focus on when I put a meal together, and we're gonna talk about how to put a meal together for Eat Like a Girl, is you wanna build a meal around protein and then put the supporting actress, fiber with her. And if you're doing that at every meal, now you're in sync with your hormones. But again, I've said this over and over again, but it's such a good quote, which is you don't need motivation to stay healthy, you need momentum. And when we start counting all this stuff, we lose motivation over time.

• 29:41Mindy Pelz?

  I want you every year to get a little more momentum and a little more momentum with making good food choices. So protein is the hero and then fiber is the supporting actress that needs to be with protein. So for example, I was putting a meal together for myself and I had a bunch of greens and I really loved, I have like some cool greens I'm mixing together. And I was looking at my options for protein in my house and I found a can in my house of sustainable tuna that I, we are starting to, you know, I studied heavy metal toxicity for many years in my clinic. We did tons of heavy metal toxicity. And the minute I learned about mercury and how much mercury is in tuna, then all of

• 30:26Mindy Pelz?

  a sudden I was like, no more tuna. But then I learned about- Certain tunas coming from certain waters don't have as high mercury content and these tunas have been tested. So now I'm like, I'm bringing tuna back because tuna has some other nutrients in there that can be really helpful. So I, and I'm always varying my protein sources. So if you are a meat eater, like I will look at like, they have some really cool meats that are like ancestral blends where they like put grass fed beef with some organ meat in there. And it's a great way to get the organ meat in because, I don't know about you, but the organ meat's not very tasty for me. So you mix it in with other things. So there's also buffalo meat and there's different types, you know, there's several different types of poultry.

• 31:10Mindy Pelz?

  And so the goal with protein is this diversity of it, of like bringing in as many as, as much different sources because the amino acid profile will be different. But then also making sure that we're putting fiber with it because fiber, as I've taught you all, acts like a net where it slows down the glucose response. So, and then it feeds the microbiome. It was a really yummy salad and, but I, I put it together through this lens of these things I'm teaching you. And one of them is proteins, the hero, macronutrient. Okay. Now, number five. This one is really important because some of you still are in this lane.

• 31:54Mindy Pelz?

  And I, I feel like as a culture, we're starting to get out of the lane, which is fat doesn't make you fat. But the wrong fat does make you fat. So just like I'm trying to re-pattern the way that we look at carbohydrates. Let's stop the counting. Let's focus on natures. With fat, the low fat movement is, was the beginning of the obesity epidemic.

• 32:24Mindy Pelz?

  So what we want to do is we want to make sure we engage in the right fats. And I've brought you lots of people on this podcast, one being Kate Shanahan, to talk about the impact of bad fats and to lean into the good fats. And again, make sure you go and listen to that because she has a list. And we talk about it in the podcast interview about what are the appropriate fats? And I also put lists of bad fats and good fats in Eat Like a Girl. But let's not fear the carbohydrate and let's not fear fat. Let's just get educated on those.

• 33:06Mindy Pelz?

  So when you eat the right fats, you are providing a nutrient that your body needs. So one of the guiding principles I wrote in Eat Like a Girl is called the Key 24. And in the Key 24, these are the 24 nutrients that you need to be able to make hormones. And one of those nutrients is omega-3 fatty acids. So you need omega-3 fatty acids in order to make hormones. But then you also need polyphenols to support the set of bacteria that break that hormone down. And one of the best polyphenol-rich foods is olive oil. So we don't want to fear fat.

• 33:49Mindy Pelz?

  We just want to, in our brains, separate out that there are fats we avoid and there are fats that we lean into. Same concept, right? There are carbs we avoid and there are carbs we lead into. It's rhythmic. I hope you see there's a pattern here of rhythm. Sometimes we fast, sometimes we don't fast, sometimes we work hard, sometimes we rest. Right? Like, everything is cyclical. So fat doesn't make you fat. You need fat. You need the right kind of fats, not the wrong kind. And this is the thing, if those of you that are in my Reset Academy,

• 34:29Mindy Pelz?

  I've been really talking recently a lot about, stop making a reel on socials, these 90-second clips. Don't build your health habits around these 90-second clips.

• 34:45Mindy Pelz?

  And the reason I say that is because they should be aha's. You see a 90 second reel and you should be like, oh, that's interesting. Let me go and find the deeper information. And I think I've done this on a, on a solo episode with you all before. And the reason that we lose our way when we start to look for soundbite information is because you're not getting the nuance that I'm now giving you. So it's in, it's in episodes like this that give you that depth of information so that you're able to make smarter decisions for yourself. The last thing I want to say on fat doesn't make you fat is that I will continue

• 35:30Mindy Pelz?

  to be the champion for your body. And when you are eating the wrong foods, your body will tell you by storing fat, by you gaining weight. What your body's saying to you when you gain weight is you have been giving me too much of something I don't know what to do with. And it's harmful to the body. So what I want to do is I want to store it in fat to protect your internal organs. And then we go to the mirror or we go to the scale and we start getting upset. And your body's over there like, hey, hey, hey, like I'm saving your life.

• 36:15Mindy Pelz?

  Don't be mad at me. So we have to learn how to read the clues that the body is giving us. And those clues, one of them is you're gaining weight. And you're not gaining weight because you were undisciplined. You're gaining weight because the food system wants to keep you addicted to toxic food, that your brilliant body is now taking all those toxins and storing it as fat. So we want to look at it as a message from the body to eat differently. And not as a message to your own brain that you messed up. So please relieve yourself of that.

• 36:57Mindy Pelz?

  So those are the five foundational five principles that I put in the book. Again, I have so many lists to help back those up. Like I'm looking right now at the book and there's like one page where I put a whole list of, how do you eat to support your microbiome? I have a whole list of carbohydrates that support estrogen and carbohydrates that support progesterone. So within these principles, I've put lists to help guide you. So now, if you and I are having a discussion about, how do I master this eating window? I just gave you the foundational five. Let's start the conversation there.

• 37:41Mindy Pelz?

  Now, once you have those five, and what I would encourage you to do is just write these five down. Blood sugar matters, not calories. Nature's carbs, not human-made carbs. Eat for your microbes, not your taste buds. Fat doesn't, protein's the hero macronutrient, and fat doesn't make you fat. Write those down. Put them on your refrigerator. Put them somewhere you can see so that you're always guiding yourself through that foundation. If you get any of those steps off, your metabolic switch may get rusty and fasting could get hard. And losing weight could be difficult and your hormones may be out of balance. But we got to start there. Okay.

• 38:26Mindy Pelz?

  Now, now that you know the door into food is that foundation, what do you do when you put a meal together? And so in this, what I did is I came up with Eat Like a Girl, the three principles of Eat Like a Girl. And this was really important to me because in the hormonal discussion, one of the things that I'm seeing over and over again is everybody's like, I need more hormones, especially menopausal women. They're like, put a patch on, put cream on. I'm not saying those are, you know, those are, we've, hopefully you've heard me say this over and over again, that hormone replacement therapy, in whatever lens you're looking at, is an individual journey.

• 39:10Mindy Pelz?

  And you are adding hormones in to a body that is depleted in those hormones.

• 39:17Mindy Pelz?

  And that journey should be a unique one that you take with the doctor that is putting you on these hormones. So, don't do it like your bestie, don't do it like your sister. Your hormonal journey is unique to you and how you bring these exogenous hormones into your body. But, that's only chapter one of the hormone conversation. Chapter two of the hormone conversation is, once you have hormones, your body has to break it down in order to make it usable to the cell.

• 39:56Mindy Pelz?

  So, it's a little bit like, if you have a big file on your computer you're sending to somebody, you have to compress that file so that it's sendable. The same thing with hormones, whether your body makes the hormone, or an exogenous source brought the hormone in, it still has to go through a reformat in order to get into your cells. So, what does that look like? And I'm gonna go through the three principles here in a moment. Then, once your cells use all those hormones, it has to detox it, it has to off-gas it, it has to move it out of your body.

• 40:40Mindy Pelz?

  And if it doesn't move it out, then it stores it in fat. This is estrogen dominance. Estrogen dominance is you got a form of estrogen in your body that the body didn't know how to break down and detox. So, it stored it. And then, that's where we start to see accumulation of belly fat, this is where we see some of the hormonal cancers. So, can we just go into chapter two and chapter three of the hormone conversation? And chapter one is, you gotta make the hormone. Chapter two is you gotta break down the hormone, and chapter three is you have to detox the hormone. So, when we are looking at through that lens, the three eat like a girl principles are,

• 41:24Mindy Pelz?

  eat to make a hormone, and I'm gonna talk about what that looks like in food, eat to break a hormone down, so you're reformatting it so your cells can use it, and eat to detox those hormones. And you can accomplish this in one meal. So I'm going to walk through what each principle looks like through a food lens. And then I'm going to show you how you put it together in the meal. Because the three Eat Like a Girl principles to me were an instruction guide for putting a meal together to support your hormones. So principle number one, eat to make a hormone. Okay, well, what does that mean? And it's really simple. It's so simple.

• 42:07Mindy Pelz?

  We need to diversify our food choices. If you and I were sitting face to face right now, I have no doubt that you would be, tell me that you eat pretty much the same 50 to 100 foods over and over again. I've sat with enough patients to know that this is the truth. People have a food preference. They eat the food, same food over and over again. I even have to force myself to get out of that. So if we have 24 key nutrients that are needed to make hormones, we need to open up and eat a wider diversity of food.

• 42:52Mindy Pelz?

  So this goes back to what I told you before, which is if you eat grass-fed meat, try eating buffalo. Try eating lamb. Try doing venison. Like, open that up because each one of those foods is going to give you a different set of amino acids, different sets of minerals. So now, we want to use food to get these nutrients into our body so we don't have to use supplements. So just keep asking yourself, am I eating the same foods? And how can I open that up? So I get more diversity of food. Same thing with the fruits and vegetables you eat.

• 43:33Mindy Pelz?

  Just when I make a salad, I'm put as many different things in it as possible. I just had some friends over for the weekend and I was showing them how I make a salad. They're like, this is the greatest salad. And I'm like, yeah, because the salad kind of acts like a smoothie where you can put nuts and seeds and you can put different forms of proteins and different types of lettuces. And all of a sudden, you look at this salad that has like over 25, 30 ingredients and it's meeting, as you'll see, it'll meet all three of the principles, but it definitely meets eat to diversify. And those of you that are plant-based, this is like when we're looking at our protein

• 44:13Mindy Pelz?

  sources, like we've got tofu and we've got tempeh and we've got garbanzo beans and we've got hemp seeds and let's bring it in from all different levels. I'll tell you, in putting this book together, I've really questioned and challenged my belief system on, you know, plant-based versus omnivore. Can you get the right amount of protein that you need to build muscle in a plant-based diet? And I've come to the conclusion that the answer is yes. I mean, Stacy Sims came on and said that here's an extreme menopausal athlete and she's plant-based. So in the book, I give you the amino acid profiles of the different types of plants

• 44:57Mindy Pelz?

  and of proteins, so you can start to see that when it comes to protein, we have a diversity of choices. But with people who are plant-based, we really need to make sure that we're doing beans and we're doing soy and we're doing plants, seeds and nuts that have all these different types of nutrients in it. So we meet rule number one, which is eat to make a hormone, which translates in to diversity. Eat as many diverse things as possible.

• 45:28Mindy Pelz?

  Okay, number two is eat to break down a hormone. And this is also fairly easy. It falls into the category of feed your microbiome. And when you want to feed your microbiome, I introduced this concept in Fast Like a Girl. You want to follow the rules of the three Ps. Polyphenol, probiotic, and prebiotic foods. That's the diet of your microbes. The more polyphenol foods, probiotic foods, prebiotic foods you eat, the more you feed these microbes, the more they're able to break down your hormones so that they're in the right format for the cells. So this also, now we have diversity.

• 46:12Mindy Pelz?

  We're not ignoring diversity, but we're looking at food through the lens of, okay, how do I get more nutrients to my microbes? And that all falls under one category as well, which is fiber. This is nature's foods. To help you break down your hormones, we need to bring fiber into every single meal. So these are your lettuces. This is fruits and vegetables. Nature has provided fiber for you. So with every meal, we're also adding in fiber so that we're feeding microbes that can break down these hormones. Okay, and then the third principle is eat to detox hormones.

• 46:57Mindy Pelz?

  And this is really interesting because this is all about your liver and your gut. And there's a little bit of overlap, which is why I want to kind of bring the conversation home by showing how these three concepts come together in one meal. So we need that liver to help us break down estrogen specifically into a format that allows the body to detox it.

• 47:25Mindy Pelz?

  So if, like I said before, if we do not detox estrogen, we store it. And those of you trying to get rid of the belly fat, this is really important because your body's storing it in the belly fat. So I love my, I've commented a lot on the liver supporting foods. It's like ginger and lemon and radicchio. It's the bitter foods. I even do things like beet kvass, where you can drink, you know, different drinks that will help with supporting the liver so it could do its job. This is where we look at things like bone broth. The bone broth goes in there and it creates this beautiful healing to the inner lining of the gut. So the microbes in there can not only break down it, your hormones for the right format,

• 48:10Mindy Pelz?

  but can also help to move those hormones through your stools, move it out through your body and get out of your system. So, and again, I've got lots of lists. I walk through the detox organs because they're important. Kidneys, how are we feeding the kidneys? You need to be drinking water to support the kidneys. You know, the, there, I put in there some other outside food things, like we need to be dry brushing and, and working with our lymph. And so I do have a few other principles that aren't food related that match that third principle. So, just so I don't lose you, I want you to think about this. You're putting a plate together. And I want you to look at that plate and go, okay, I need to eat to make a hormone.

• 48:54Mindy Pelz?

  Is this food, a food I haven't eaten yet? Like, do I not like the tuna last night? Like, I don't eat the tuna a lot. So, okay, that met principle number one. I also had in there some microgreens that were really unique, that I don't typically eat. I'm like, okay, that's, now I've, I've, I'm putting this salad together. I'm like, yeah, there's, there's principle number two. And then I put in some radicchio, because I love radicchio, and I broke it down and cut it up into the salad. And I'm like, okay, now I'm supporting my liver, which matches principle number three. And if this is new for you, don't worry, I got lists for you.

• 49:36Mindy Pelz?

  And when the book comes out, we're gonna have a lot of community experience with putting that plate together. But whenever we come to a meal, we need to ask ourselves if it's diverse enough, if it has enough fiber, and if it's supporting the liver and the gut for detox. Let me give one of the favorite meals that I've shared with you all, which is, I used to love to break my fast with a half avocado, hemp seeds, sauerkraut, and then sometimes I'd chop up chicken. Lately, again, I've been experimenting with things like tofu.

• 50:17Mindy Pelz?

  And I'm like, okay, now I've got, I've got the fiber, and I've got the probiotic, and I'm coming back into food, and it's matching these three principles. So it makes food fun when you start to look through that lens. It's like, you can have your cake and eat it too. Just make sure that your cake is, is organic, it has the right ingredients, and that it's breaking the right foods down. You'll hear in the episode that I did with Chef Leslie, that one of the things that I found interesting about her food style is when I first met her, I was coincidentally wearing a CGM, continuous glucose monitor.

• 51:01Mindy Pelz?

  So she's making the food, and I'm testing everything on my CGM, and I'm coming back to her, and I'm like, look at what this did. And she had never seen her food in real time. But the food that brought my glucose down the most was a chocolate cake. And she had put MCT oil in it, and it was so yummy. And it had so much fat, it had a really healthy cacao, and she had put some fiber-y, I can't remember, oh, avocado, she put avocado in it. And so it stabilized my blood sugar really well, but it also had this variety of ingredients that I don't typically put with chocolate.

• 51:42Mindy Pelz?

  And so I had this yummy experience to my taste buds, but also a healthy experience for my body.

• 51:50Mindy Pelz?

  So checklist, my friend. You know, let's look at the five foundational principles. Ask yourself if on a regular basis you are following that. And every meal you put together, you're doing the three Eat Like a Girl principles. You're looking at diversity, you're looking at fiber, and you're looking at the liver and gut supporting foods so you can detox this out. And then there becomes a language that we are now having an experience with and talking about. And they're they're principles, they're not rigid have tos. So I'm really looking forward to your response on all of that. I can tell you that the front half of the book is a book on to itself.

• 52:32Mindy Pelz?

  What some of you may end up doing is I did go in and read the book. So you might listen to the front half in Audible and then get the main book for the recipes. And I have sort of a vision of you reading, listening to the book while you're cooking a meal or listening to a podcast like this. Because when I came to this idea of writing this cookbook and hiring these incredible chefs and providing yummy recipes for you, it just was really important to me that I taught you what I know about the eating window for women. Because I taught you what I knew worked for the fasting window. But in Fast Like a Girl, I didn't have the ability in that book

• 53:16Mindy Pelz?

  to really go deep into the eating window. And so now we're going deep. And you just got the you just got Eat Like a Girl Course 101. And how you can use this book. And honestly, I look at these two books as as sisters. They're companion manuals. We've got Fast Like a Girl that taught you everything you needed to know about the fasting window. And now you have Eat Like a Girl to really dive into the principles of the eating window. And and then you have some incredible recipes to put it all in action. So I really hope that helps. I really wanted to and will continue to be on a journey to make eating easier and fun and for women

• 54:00Mindy Pelz?

  and to pull you out of the have tos and to take you away from the shame and the guilt. Because food is medicine. You know, I had I'll tell you another beautiful story. I had a friend here for the weekend and she looked at a jar of kefir yogurt. And it was $22. And she was like, you spent $22 on this? And I said, read the bacteria that are in that jar. And you know, it was kind of fun to hear her read it because it's hard to pronounce microbes. And I was like, all of that is coming in a live food.

• 54:40Mindy Pelz?

  And that live food is now going into my body and is meeting the requirements of what it's like to eat like a girl, just in one yogurt. And I could also go and do a, buy a supplement that might give me those same bacteria. But the challenge we have with supplements is that it has been freeze dried. It has been altered. It has been put in a capsule. And just because it says it has certain bacteria on that jar, doesn't mean that that same intensity is in the supplement. Whereas this jar of Kiefer coconut yogurt, it's live food. You can taste it. It's sour.

• 55:25Mindy Pelz?

  It's, it's been living. It hasn't been freeze dried. So I look at that $22 jar of, of Kiefer yogurt as medicine. And if I look at it as medicine, now the $22 doesn't, doesn't become as big of an issue. It, you know, I understand for some it, it's not approachable, but I really feel saddened that we're not giving, giving food enough credit. Like the supplement business? Oh my gosh, people will spend so much money on supplements, hoping it's going to create some change in their body that they don't even know if it will.

• 56:09Mindy Pelz?

  And then eating crappy food. Let's come back to food is medicine. And let's look at it through that lens, which is what I just gave you. And let's dip into the fasting state so we can learn how to allow our body to heal itself. So fasting is allowing the body to tap into its own healing mechanisms. And eating is adding medicine into the body for healing. They're both healing states. We cannot ignore them. So it's really important that we approach both windows through that lens. And now you've got Fast Like a Girl, so you can understand how to heal your body with fasting.

• 56:53Mindy Pelz?

  And you have Eat Like a Girl, so you can understand how you can heal your body with food. So I hope that helps. Send me messages, tag me. I love when you guys tag me on Instagram and the other platforms. Like I see it when you hear a podcast like this and you tell me, hey, this really resonated with me. It means a lot to me because now I know that I'm speaking a language that is getting in deeper so that you can make better choices for yourself. So I love your feedback. I love your reviews. I can't wait to get this book to you. It's a gift that I really, from my heart, that I hope will clarify food for you. And then the recipes are off the hook amazing.

• 57:36Mindy Pelz?

  They're so tasty and I can't wait for you to experience them. So those of you that have the book, thank you for ordering it. Those of you who haven't, I hope you order it if you feel moved to and share it. Let's make food, let's make all these principles easy for women to thrive with their health. So then we're back in control of our own health. We don't have to be at the mercy of a healthcare system that really, truly has left us behind. So with I Say All That, big hug, sending you so much love and I hope this episode helped.

• 58:13Mindy Pelz?

  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.