Pod Insights Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz How to Truly Age Like a Girl: a live chat with Dr. Mindy Pelz About this episode Did you know that menopause is your body's way of preparing you for something greater? In this LIVE episode at Life Chiropractic College West, Dr. Mindy shares her transformative research on the neurological changes women experience during menopause, exploring its role as a period of profound growth and leadership. Learn about the evolutionary, neurological, and societal shifts that occur, and discover how to embrace this phase as a time of rebirth and purpose. This recording is a must for women (and the men who love them) looking to understand and cherish the true purpose of menopause.
To view full show notes, more information on our guests, resources mentioned in the episode, discount codes, transcripts, and more, visit https://drmindypelz.com/ep306
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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? On this episode of the Resetter Podcast, I'm bringing you something very different to my podcast. What you're about to hear is actually a live talk that I gave. And it's really fun for me because in the last couple of months, I have given two live talks. One was at 1440 to a group of women. We did a three-day retreat. And this one was for a group of chiropractors in Northern California. And they were both on my Age Like a Girl topics. So those of you that are interested in the new book, you're excited for the new book, you want to know what's in the new book, you're going to hear me talk about
0:42 Mindy Pelz? it. And I'm really excited that I was able to get a copy of this talk, because most of the time when I give a health talk, the platform or the place in which I gave the talk actually has requirements around what I'm allowed to release or not. So thank you to Life West Chiropractic School for giving me the full talk. And you're going to hear a couple of things in here. So you'll hear a big chunk of Age Like a Girl. You're also going to hear me keep in mind that I'm lecturing to a group of doctors. And so, a lot of what I put forward in this particular lecture is a rally cry for all doctors to start to
1:25 Mindy Pelz? support women through this incredibly important time called menopause. So if you were asking, if you listen and you're like, what is she talking about? Why is she talking to me about my patients? I just want you to know that this was to a group of doctors. I think you're going to find it very interesting. You're just going to start to spark your curiosity and understanding of Age Like a Girl, which is out for pre-orders right now. You can please order it. I'm excited to bring it to the forward in December, but the pre-orders are available now. So it's with great honor that I bring you a talk, one of the better talks I've done
2:05 Mindy Pelz? over the years on the new topics that I'm incredibly excited about. So if you're trying to understand how to deal with the mood and memory changes and the weight gain and the energy loss and the irritability and the hot flashes and the sleep challenges, and you want to know how to get your body and your mind back into control and how to be your own leader through this menopausal process and to understand what the menopausal process is about, you're gonna love this talk. So as always, I hope it helps. Welcome to the Resetter Podcast. This podcast is all about empowering you to believe in
2:49 Mindy Pelz? 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.
3:07 Mindy Pelz? It is so nice to be here. And I just wrote a book that will come out on December 16th called Age Like a Girl. And what I'm going to be doing today is teaching from that book. So you are getting it fresh off the presses before it's even in people's hands. And I really want to spend some time today explaining the neurological changes that are happening to women as they go through menopause and why it is the best thing that ever happened to us, this menopause thing. So let me just back up a moment because I always feel like I'm not speaking up here just as Mindy. I actually feel like I have been blessed to
3:52 Mindy Pelz? have a very intimate eye on what the culture is talking about. And I think we all can agree that menopause is having a bit of a moment right now. Anybody asleep to that? The menopausal women are speaking out. They are starting movements online. They don't want to be treated, marginalized anymore. They don't want to be given antidepressants anymore. They want somebody who can facilitate this incredible process they're going through where the whole system in their body shuts down.
4:29 Mindy Pelz? So, little bit of a background on me. I was in practice for 30 years. I had a family practice down in San Jose. And I started to see a trend of women coming into my clinic that would walk in the door and they would say, I've got... They'd list off like five different symptoms that wouldn't go away. They would talk about how amazing their life was. Like, they're like, "My husband's amazing, my kids are amazing, but I can't sleep, I'm gaining weight, I'm depressed, I'm anxious, and I'm sweating all the time. And I don't know what's going on with me." But that became, about 10 years ago,
5:10 Mindy Pelz? this common theme in all these women that came into my clinic. So I started to dive in to try to understand what was happening in the 40s to women as hormones were shifting. I also happened to be going through my own menopause experience, having my own sort of, like, understanding of, "Am I gonna have to go on HRT? Shouldn't I go on HRT? What is HRT? Is it safe?" And then I came up with a statistic that motivated the hell out of me. And it was that between 45 and 55 is the most common time for a woman to commit suicide. Let that sink in for a moment.
5:54 Mindy Pelz? This is not a teenager that just didn't figure life out yet. This is a mom, this is a grandma, this is a community leader. What is making these women kill themselves? That was the first statistic I found. The second statistic I found was that 70% of divorces that happen after 50 are initiated by women.
6:20 Mindy Pelz? I'm not trying to keep everybody married, but I want to say for the men in the group, your ears should be perking up. Because with those two pieces together, what I started to see was this massive change, neurological change that was happening, not just to me, not just to my patients, but happening to so many women. Now, at the time, I was teaching fasting and eating and exercise. I was teaching cycling women how to look at their menstrual cycle and apply their lifestyle. I wrote a little book called Fast Like a Girl. Anybody read it? Yeah.
7:05 Mindy Pelz? I'm very proud of that book. She has gone out into the world and been in over a million people's hands, which is just really beautiful. And I think is really a testament to how thirsty women are for this kind of knowledge. But it was the post-menopausal woman that came to me through messages, through interviews, over and over and over again, saying, "What about us? We keep getting forgotten in the health conversation." So for about the last three years, I've been trying to answer the question of, "What's the purpose of menopause?" There is nothing the body does by mistake. Why would it shut down
7:50 Mindy Pelz? a whole organ system and then leave us alive for 40% of our life?
7:58 Mindy Pelz? It must be preparing us for something. We are the longest living species on the planet. We live the longest post-reproductive compared to any other species on the planet. So I wanted to answer that question. I also, as I was out educating the world on hormones and lifestyle, this was as little as like five years ago, we weren't talking about menopause. And a lot of you, by the way, if you went through menopause when nobody was talking about it, you deserve a crown. Because you suffered in silence and you weren't allowed to express what you were going through. And those of us that have either gone through it
8:40 Mindy Pelz? or in the process of going through it are trying to change that. And so in just the last three to five years, we've gone from this place of like, "Oh God, don't say menopause. That's what happens to older people. And they get really hot and irritable and gain weight and we don't want to talk to them." That is what it used to be like, to what I now call cultural chaos. Where women go to their news feed on Instagram and they're like, "Okay, wait, I'm supposed to eat more protein. Okay, wait, I'm also supposed to lift more weights. Oh wait, I'm also supposed to get off blue light at night so I can sleep. And then I gotta get off alcohol. And I'm supposed to make sure that my room environment is completely clean."
9:24 Mindy Pelz? And, and, and, and, and. And we've gone into this place where women are just like, "Enough already." Anybody feel that way? Again, I have a team of people that look at, we have millions of comments that pour onto my socials every single month. And I have a team of people that bring me all those comments. And I cannot tell you that enough, that women are in a state of confusion. So when I first went out and was teaching hormones on socials, like, nobody was doing that. There was like Sarah Godfrey, anybody know Sarah Godfrey? I call her the OG of Dr. Authors. She was teaching.
10:07 Mindy Pelz? I had another dear friend, Carrie Jones, that was teaching. But nobody was really teaching hormones on socials. And then all of a sudden, you started to see that a lot of the medical doctors stepped in to teaching hormones. Hormones on socials. And what we discovered as they taught hormones on socials is that they know how to teach symptomatology. They don't know how to get to root cause. They don't know why the body's giving these kind of symptoms. And so I started to see there are people, anybody read The New Menopause by Dr. Mary Claire Haver? Oh, you should read it, it's a great book. It's about how do you go into your MD's office and get hormone replacement therapy, which is helpful for people who want that.
10:51 Mindy Pelz? But what I started to see is all of these medical doctors come in and that the message that has now gotten out into the public is that you're suffering. Don't suffer, because you can take some hormone replacement therapy and we're going to make it all go away. What I want to show you is that what happens when estrogen goes down is there is a massive brain change that happens. There is a neurochemical reboot, all working to put us into the best place we have ever been. Go ahead, yeah, go ahead.
11:33 Mindy Pelz? So, as I go through this, some of you are going to hear me from I'm a menopausal woman kind of, kind of lens. Some of you are going to hear me, I'm married to a menopausal woman, you should, you should really be taking notes. And some of you are going to be like, I treat menopausal women. And what I tell every single podcaster that I go out and talk to is every time I sit across like a big podcaster and I say, tell me who your audience is, they say, well, it's pretty much 35 to 65 year old women. Well, so that segment of population, we have problems and we have money. And so we, and we want to fix things.
12:17 Mindy Pelz? So this is, if you, if you can't hear me from a heart level, hear me from a financial level. And 1.2 billion of us by 2030 are going to be in menopause. So you're going to want to know from a neurological level what is happening to us. And I can tell you from a healthcare standpoint, these women are really looking to be led. They want a partner in their healthcare process.
12:43 Mindy Pelz? So, I love throwing people under the bus that didn't think deep enough, but I'll give you a conversation I had a couple of years ago. As I was trying to understand what the purpose of menopause was, I actually brought Dr. Daniel Amen onto my podcast. Anybody heard of Dr. Amen? He did a bunch of brain scans, he's written a bunch of books. He's the man, he's the brain man. And so I brought him on and I said to him, "Hey, Dr. Amen, what's the purpose of menopause? Why are we left 42.5% of our life post-reproductively?" And he's like, "Oh, oh yeah, no, you weren't supposed to live that long."
13:27 Mindy Pelz? I'm like, "Wait, what? I'm like a mistake? Like my reproductive system shut down and I'm a mistake now? I'm just supposed to like hang out until I die?" That upset me quite a bit. So then I brought onto my podcast Dr. Lisa Moscone. Anybody read The Menopause Brain or followed her at all? Yeah, she's a brain researcher. And so I brought her on, I said, "What's the purpose of menopause?" And she taught me about something called the grandmother hypothesis, which I'm going to teach you today. Who's heard of the grandmother hypothesis? Excellent, okay, handful of people. This is a big part of the brain change that's going on. And so she started to explain to me that there are three times
14:10 Mindy Pelz? in a woman's life where her brain reorganizes itself. The first time is at puberty. You actually have neurons in the brain that get pruned away when estrogen comes in, so that those neurons go away. And these were the neurons that kept you dependent on another human for life and for living. But now that you have a period, you could get pregnant. So therefore, you need to be prepared for the next phase of your life, which is independence. So the neurons that kept you dependent on your mother or your caregiver get pruned away so that you can grow new neurons so that you can live a life independently. Okay, can we just stop and go like,
14:55 Mindy Pelz? "How fucking cool is that? The body did that? Oh my God, I thought my teenage daughter just hated me all of a sudden. Oh, she actually needs to get prepared for independent life. Wow, I wish I had known that when my daughter was 13, 14, 15 years old." Second time that a woman's brain repairs itself is that it repairs itself postpartum, after it has a baby. And so that drop in hormones again becomes this signal that tells the brain to get rid of the neurons that helps you understand where your keys are, that can keep the task list, that sound familiar? The task list in your mind, so that you're like, I gotta do those five things, and then
15:39 Mindy Pelz? all of a sudden you can't remember even one of them. Anybody ever go through that when they were pregnant? But the drop in hormones purposely does that because you can't use your brain energy for task lists. You need to create new neurons in your brain because your baby doesn't talk, so therefore you need to have an intuitive sense on how to read your baby's cues. So the intelligence of the body actually got rid of the neurons that you didn't need for the job of being a mother. What? This brain researcher is teaching me this on Zoom.
16:23 Mindy Pelz? I'm like, what? We are so well-designed. Okay, what happens during menopause? We are being trained for something new. So all of a sudden, the neurons in our brain that kept us people-pleasing, that allowed us to care what you fucking thought of us, that wanted to wrap ourselves up and like look really good so that you would tell us we're worthy, those neurons left the building. They are not there. And okay, where are my perimenopausal and menopausal women? Is that not right?
17:05 Mindy Pelz? We are, it's like, I don't know if anybody's watching this social media. This woman in Florida just picked up her phone and was like, "I just want to tell you all the reasons I don't care. I started a club. It's called Do Not Care Club, and here are all the things I don't care." And I'm over there like, "You're not, you're designed not to care." Yes, yes, that's it. You're not supposed to care anymore. So the neurons that kept you overly obsessed and hyper vigilant on pleasing everybody else, those go. And new neurons form. And you know what those new neurons are forming to do? Leadership. And I'm going to show you that, not only through Lisa Moscone's work, but through
17:47 Mindy Pelz? the grandmother hypothesis, that the major brain change that happens to women as they go through menopause is because we're meant to stand in a place of leadership and lead, whatever, the tribe, our community, our family, the world. We're meant to go into a place of leadership and find purpose. Is that the message we got? So Lisa's work came out, and it was really exciting, and everybody got a hold of it. And they're like, "Oh my God, the brain change." And all, I don't know if Big Pharma got a hold of them or what, but then all of a sudden, all the menopausal doctors out there were like, "Oh, yeah, the brain change.
18:30 Mindy Pelz? This is why you need hormone replacement. This is why you gotta get on all pellets and patches, and you gotta start injecting yourself with weird shit so that you can actually go through this massive hormonal shift." And the reason that I bring this up before I dive into all the explanation of what's happening to us is because this is where we sit right now, and I'm really mad about it. I'm really mad about it. It's like, all of a sudden, we got menopause all over social media. And what women are being told is, yes, you don't need to suffer. You just need to get on some hormone replacement. So, once again, women are being taught to keep giving their power away to the doctor.
19:14 Mindy Pelz? "Oh, your hormone replacement's not working for you. You found the wrong doctor. Go to the wrong doctor. You got the wrong dose." No. Hormone replacement's not working for you because you're in this massive transformational moment in which you're about to step into leadership and your best life ever. So, you're not meant to go through this process completely easy-breezy. You're meant to start to shed parts of you that no longer work for you, and so that you can go into a new identity with a new purpose. That's what happened back in the primal days, and that's what needs to start happening now.
19:59 Mindy Pelz? So, I don't like to beat up the patriarch too much. So, I started calling the patriarch "power over," just so you're gonna hear me say this. And I'm really trying to work on getting people into more of a power within understanding. And I'm not, and just so we're clear for the record, I'm not anti-hormone replacement therapy, but it is not the quick fix, just like all the pain meds and all the antidepressants that there's a bigger conversation here. So, I decided to dive in to really understanding this from a brain perspective. What is going on? Why are we forgetful? Why do we have the brain fog? Why are we depressed? What's going on with the anxiety?
20:44 Mindy Pelz? And I wanted to look at this from a big, big lens. So, I decided to drop into four masters. I started to look at the evolutionary explanation, which I'll explain to you today in a little more detail. I spoke with an American anthropologist who is a champion of the grandmother hypothesis. I've had many conversations with Lisa Moscone. I've been deep in the science, understanding that actually, we're not just losing estrogen, progesterone, and maybe testosterone. Estrogen actually stimulated 12 neurochemicals. And when she left, those 12 neurochemicals started to leave as well.
21:28 Mindy Pelz? And I will show you these chemicals. I call them estrogen's girl gang. Because it's like, when she left, all of a sudden, the gang's like, where's our leader? And things like dopamine, and serotonin, and oxytocin, and glutamate, and acetylcholine, and all of these neurotransmitters are needing a lifestyle change in order to keep them balanced. Otherwise, you'll start to lose those neurochemicals as well. I'm going to show you that. I also found, I think I brought this to you all last time. I found some really interesting science from a feminist psychologist, who, back in
22:04 Mindy Pelz? the 1980s, wanted to understand what was happening to girls around puberty, specifically in how they were voicing their opinions. And what, anybody heard of Carol Gilligan? She's like, she's in her 80s. She's a professor at NYU. I'm trying to bring her out to interview her, because her work is profound for us as women. In the 1980s, she started to study girls and listen to them. And what she heard was that if you asked a girl at 9, "What do you want to eat?" We're just going to use that as an example. "What do you want to eat?"
22:45 Mindy Pelz? Both a girl and a boy will tell you exactly what they want to eat. You ask that same girl at 11, boy and girl, "What do you want to eat?" The boy's, boom, "I'll tell you what I want to eat." And the girl's a little shaky, a little like, "Well, okay, I want this." Now, you ask her at 13, when her hormones have completely come in, and you ask them both what they want to eat, the boy still says what he wants to eat, and the girl says, "I don't know, what are you going to eat?"
23:20 Mindy Pelz? Right? So what Carol Gilligan found was that girls were being taught, as estrogen came in, or what I like to call when we got drugged on estrogen, that when estrogen came in, all of a sudden, we flipped into more of a relational brain. A brain, and I'm going to show you this today, a brain that can be able to use both the right and left hemispheres for every single decision. So the culture, the power over culture, started telling us, "If you, just don't speak up too much and then you'll be loved. If you're a size two, you're beautiful. Don't, don't, don't be too, don't be too much, too loud."
24:05 Mindy Pelz? I got that a lot. "Don't be too loud, don't be too much, or all of a sudden, you're a nuisance." And the culture taught girls how to wrap themselves up in all these little ways so that we're like, "Do you love me now? How many, I mean, this, how many people, do you love me now? I, I lost 20 pounds, do you love me now? I made, I, I cooked you dinner over and over and over and over again, do you love me now? I'm the best mom in the world, do you love me now?" That is the messaging that happened to women when estrogen came in, and that's Carol Gilligan's work. And what I am hypothesizing is that when estrogen leaves,
24:46 Mindy Pelz? we can no longer wrap ourselves up to meet societal needs. We, all of a sudden, estrogen left the building, and what Lisa Moscone says, is Lisa Moscone says, "Well, estrogen left and you went from a relational brain, using both hemispheres, to a lateralized brain, where all of a sudden now, you're either operating from your right hemisphere or your left hemisphere." You can do it, and I'm going to show you this because it's really pretty powerful. You can actually give us a task when we're in those post-menopausal years, and we can focus on that, we can be totally into that task. And then you can sit on the couch with a girlfriend for five hours and go deep into communication and connection.
25:31 Mindy Pelz? We can move from right to left without using both sides of our brain. And so, all of a sudden, the rules society had for us completely changed. Because our brain changed, and we can no longer bring both hemispheres into every bit of communication with the world. We'll go deeper into that. But Carol's work is really important, because we start to see this societal lens that women have been trained to behave in a certain way. And menopause, we can't do that anymore. And then, anybody know Clarissa Pinkola Estes? You can't write a book on aging women without referring to her.
26:13 Mindy Pelz? So I wanted to look at a more mystical approach, and I'll show you a little bit of what she believes is happening as we go through menopause. Okay. First thing, the evolutionary explanation. And the best way I can explain this is by telling you what happened to the menopausal women in the primal days, our hunter and gatherer days. We have examples. Kristin Hawks, who's the big champion of this, she actually went and lived with a Tanzania tribe, or has a tribe in Tanzania, and like, observed these grandmothers. And, you know, I just want to point out, you don't have to be a grandmother, you just have to be a post-menopausal woman to be a part of this purpose-driven experience.
26:58 Mindy Pelz? So, that was a tricky thing when I wrote the book. I understand, not everybody's grandmothers. So, but what this hypothesis says, is that what happened in the primal days, when a woman stopped her period, is she got moved to a different position in the clan. She got moved to a position of leadership. Because what happened in the hunter-gatherer life, is that there was two ways they got food. One is through a big animal kill, and one is by foraging for plants and tubers around the tribe and the cave. We'll just call it the cave.
27:42 Mindy Pelz? And so, what was happening on a regular basis, is that the men and the strong women, I've also seen some interesting things that a few of the grandmothers, went out for the big animal kill, and they were gone for weeks.
27:57 Mindy Pelz? And when they came back, they only came back with food 3% of the time. So most of the time, they failed. They didn't come back with a big animal kill, except 3% of the time. Meanwhile, you have all the fertile women who are giving, birthing babies, they were nursing babies, they were caring for little toddlers, they needed food. So who went and found them food? The grandmothers. So the grandmothers would gather every morning, together in collaboration, and they would go and walk seven hours every single day, to go, in a fasted state, by the way, to go and find food.
28:42 Mindy Pelz? Then when they found food, most of the food was tubers, so they had to, they didn't have hip replacements. They had to like bend down and get their hands in the ground and bring these tubers up. And then they would take the tubers back to the, to the cave, and they would start peeling them, cutting them, and they would tell stories, this part's important, they would share knowledge, tell stories to the little kids as they were making foods. Meanwhile, days would go by without the men coming back with a big animal kill. And they believe, Kristin Hawks, Lisa Moscone, many experts believe that we would not be sitting here right now as humans if the grandmothers hadn't foraged for food.
29:26 Mindy Pelz? So in my book, that makes us an evolutionary heroine. The fact that we are all here is because of the post-menopausal woman. Right? Thank you. Thank you. I feel like we all need crowns. The other thing that they believe is because the grandmother would share knowledge to the kids, that they would, the, the brains of these kids grew, and they believe that our, our expression of language that came out of those days and the growth of the brain, one of the contributing factors was because the grandmothers told stories to the little kids, which helped form new neuronal pathways and grew these little kids' brains. So, great, we know this, we are in a modern world.
30:12 Mindy Pelz? But this was the evolutionary explanation for menopause. Is the tribe was like, "We need you now. Go find food, because we're kind of sucking at this big animal kill thing. So we're gonna come over here, we need you to go find food for us." The actual hypothesis says that we get three things returned back to us when we go into this state. Our fitness improves. Anybody post-menopausal feel that? Your fitness is supposed to improve, because you gotta go hunt for food every day. Your cognition improves on the other side. And your social, the way you collaborate with other women,
30:56 Mindy Pelz? it really comes together, instead of competing, because we don't care of what's going on with the seed of the man who went off and found some, we don't give a shit about that anymore. We need to go find food. So we gotta collaborate with each other and go and get food. This is not the message that we're giving women right now. We are not being like, "Oh, thank you for saving the species. You're post-menopausal now." That's not what's being discussed. And we're gonna change that. Okay, second thing is what Lisa Moscone taught us, which is, all of a sudden, instead of having this relational brain, where every time I do something, I gotta take your opinion into consideration.
31:40 Mindy Pelz? Anybody married to a menopausal woman that's brave enough to say, "Yeah, all of a sudden, she seems like she didn't want my opinion anymore." Yes, thank you, one brave man. She wasn't designed to ask your opinion anymore. She doesn't care. She was drugged on estrogen, and now she's not drugged on estrogen anymore. So she can use her own brain to think. So estrogen, we have a bigger corpus callosum. It connects the right and left hemisphere, and estrogen activated it.
32:16 Mindy Pelz? And then when estrogen goes away, that connection between right and left operates very differently. And we go more into a lateralized brain. I call it the brain remodel project. We're in process of our brain changing. It's remodeling, it's messy. But then we're going to go somewhere where it's bright and shiny and we can really stand in a place of purpose in the culture. That's what we're designed to do. The estrogen's girl gang. Let's see if I put it up here. There are 12 neurochemicals. Well, they're not all neurochemicals, but for the sake of this conversation, we're just going to call them that. 12 neurochemicals that estrogen stimulated. So just think about this for a moment.
33:00 Mindy Pelz? When estrogen left, all of a sudden, acetylcholine, which is our memory neurotransmitter, goes. Glutamate, which is our excitatory neurotransmitter, all of a sudden gets amplified. BDNF, which is our ability to hold on to new information, it's gone. Dopamine, which is our motivation and our desire to go do something, she left the building. Serotonin, who told us everything was going to be okay and we were fine and we're doing a good job, she's out. Oxytocin, the thing that made us want to connect you, gone. GABA, the thing that calmed us, she's gone. Melatonin, gone.
33:43 Mindy Pelz? Estrogen controlled our whole circadian rhythm and all of a sudden, she's gone. You actually have estrogen receptor sites in the part of the brain that actually controls, keeps the inner biological clock. So any menopausal women that wake up at 2:00 in the morning and they're like, "I could run a marathon. Why the heck does my body think that it's like 10:00 in the morning?" It's because that internal clock got so messed up with estrogen gone because your pineal gland doesn't know when to secrete melatonin. And then something that I wish I had known in practice, which is she stimulated collagen and creatine, which is why that if you're dealing with women who are in this age group that have pain and those injuries are not going away.
34:27 Mindy Pelz? It's because she doesn't have as much collagen, not just, you can't just see it on her face, you see it in the joints. And she doesn't have as much creatine, and that's what supports brain function and supports muscle function. So, this is really important, because what I'm gonna show you here in a moment is how we can use lifestyle to bring this back. This is not hard. The grandmothers, in the hunter-gatherer days, didn't have phones. They weren't wearing Oura rings to tell them what kind of sleep they got. They weren't counting calories, they didn't have a scale. They used their lifestyle to bring these things back. So when a woman comes in and she says, "I'm so sorry I missed my appointment, I totally forgot what time it is."
35:11 Mindy Pelz? Your brain should be like, "Oh, okay, acetylcholine. She's low in acetylcholine, how can we help bring that back?" Or the woman, like the women in my practice that came in and they're like, "I don't know, on paper my life looks good, but I'm so depressed." Oh, she lost dopamine. Or the couple, the family that you're working with, and all of a sudden, they start to feel less connected. They may have been married for 25, 30 years, and all of a sudden there becomes this disconnect. Yeah, because she doesn't have as much oxytocin. We gotta find new ways to bring oxytocin back. So the part of the conversation that's not being had on menopause is that it's not just a loss of estrogen and progesterone, and maybe testosterone, it's all of this.
35:56 Mindy Pelz? And we can bring this all back through lifestyle. Yes, yeah, you go ahead. I mean, it's like, I'm a 55-year-old woman, and what I use every day, I'm like, "Okay, I'm feeling a little blue. I gotta go get some dopamine, what can I do? I'm feeling really disconnected, I need to figure out how to go get oxytocin." Because I know these neurochemicals now, and I know the power of my lifestyle, and I know that these neurochemicals are inside of me. I don't need an exogenous thing to take to make it, I can make it myself. Right? And this is what you can do, once you understand this. So, we already know Carol Gilligan.
36:38 Mindy Pelz? I really want to say that a lot of women, one of my favorite things that I heard this summer, and I freaked out, and like at 11 o'clock at night, messaged my agent who was on the East Coast, and I'm like, "Oh my God, did you see this in the New York Times?" And, this is not a political statement, but Michelle Obama, anybody heard her on Work in Progress? She got so much flack, because she didn't go to Jimmy Carter's memorial, and she didn't go to some inaugural event, and everybody thought she was leaving Barack. So she goes on this podcast called Work in Progress, you can go listen to it, and she's like, "I'm a 61-year-old woman.
37:21 Mindy Pelz? I'm a grown-ass woman," is literally what she said. "I've given my whole life over as First Lady. I am finally doing what I want to do, and when I look at my schedule, I will fill it up with what I want first." Anybody else had that experience? There's the grandmother hypothesis. That's what, she's standing in a position of power, where she's giving back to herself, and she's leading as example. She went on to actually say, that one of the reasons that she was standing in this new place of independence and power, and she was not leaving Barack, was that she wanted to model that for her girls.
38:03 Mindy Pelz? Yeah, and that's the purpose of the grandmother hypothesis. So we have example after example. You have Pamela Anderson, that's like, "I don't really want to put makeup on anymore, I'm done, y'all." So, we have Jane Fonda, that's like, really, the only person I want to hang out with my girlfriends, "I'm tired of trying to find connection in my marriages." You have story after story after story. Once you start to see the pattern, you start to see all these women that are standing into these new identities. And that is the purpose of menopause, is to stand into this new identity. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, woman who run with the Wolves, wrote a book called The Power of the Crown.
38:50 Mindy Pelz? Really good book. Crown means crown, by the way. So if you, the first time somebody told me to read that book, I was like, "Fuck you, I am not a crown." And then they were like, "Mindy, did you not know I meant a crown?" I was like, "Oh, oh wait, yeah, I want a crown." So she believes in something called the life-death-life cycle. Meaning, you had a life when estrogen was around. You shed things you no longer want to carry with you. You shed identities, you shed people-pleasing, you shed wrapping yourself up to make yourself beautiful so that you feel worthy.
39:31 Mindy Pelz? There is so much shedding going on when this neurochemical switch happens in your body. And you're meant to be reborn into a new life. Sounds like the grandmother hypothesis? Sounds like Lisa Moscone's brain remodeling? And now we have a mystic. And then, again, I couldn't get to Carol, to ask Carol what she thought of menopause, but I can tell you, if society told us to do it one way when estrogen came in, we really want to do it different when estrogen goes out. Because we were designed, I thought about this the other day. I was like, you know, teenagers, when they go into puberty, we all go walk around and we're like, "Oh yeah, they're changing, that's teenagers.
40:15 Mindy Pelz? They're supposed to be a little cranky, they're supposed to be that way." And we give cultural grace to teenagers. But we don't do the same with menopausal women. We don't say, "Oh my God, my wife, it's so amazing. She no longer wants to hang out with me, she doesn't make me dinner anymore. It's really cool to watch." You know what she's doing? She's becoming a new version of herself. How cool is that? Anybody had that dinner conversation? But it's an identity change, it's a transformation. That's what's supposed to happen. And we're supposed to not be the same. I'm 55, I'm not supposed to be the same at 45. I'm supposed to be different.
41:00 Mindy Pelz? That is my evolutionary explanation, that is neuroscience, that is what's going on here. So if I look different, if I act different, it's because I'm supposed to be different. Right?
41:16 Mindy Pelz? So there are five ways, I really want to point out, five ways you can help these women that are in your practice. First, understand this. Stop cursing it, stop looking away from it, stop even trying to supplement the heck out of it. Honor that she's going through this experience. Get to know that the neurochemical armor is dropping. Help her when she's like, "I had so many women that would come in and they're like, 'I don't know, I just can't do it anymore. I can't do all the things that I was doing. I can't do it.'" Any woman ever feel like that? So many sat there and they're like, "I can't do it." And then as you watch this experience change, they come over here and they're like,
42:01 Mindy Pelz? "Oh my God, I'm living the happiest life I've ever lived." That's what's supposed to happen, but we have to shed the things that no longer serve us. So help her understand that that's part of this beautiful experience of becoming a new version. And get to understand the neurological shift. I only had a handful of time here, but I've got a new book for you that has it all written in there and hopefully we'll explain it. You can go to my YouTube channel where I'm starting to teach it. My number one, my purpose, my new identity, let's go over here, Mindy. My new identity is to wake women up, to wake the culture up. This is a natural transition that is supposed to happen.
42:47 Mindy Pelz? Okay, the second thing is she didn't get the wrong dose of HRT. She was not taught you can bring your memory back by telling stories. When you go and you start to tell a story, anybody have the mom that tells the story a thousand times, over and over and over again? When I started to look at acetylcholine, I was like, "Wait a second. That story that my mom tells me all the time, and I'm like, 'I know, Mom, I know.'" Actually, her telling it to me is causing her to go into her memory bank in the hippocampus and pull that memory out. And what she needs as a neurotransmitter to do that is acetylcholine.
43:30 Mindy Pelz? So I should just let her tell me stories all day long so we keep that acetylcholine level up? We also know that you can improve memory through social engagement. So have you ever been standing in line at the grocery store with somebody in their 70s or 80s? If you engage with them and you connect with them, all of a sudden you're helping their acetylcholine. Mood. Mood. When we look at dopamine, dopamine needs purpose? Dopamine also needs novelty. So when you look at a lot of women as they go through their menopausal years, they need a change. They can't keep doing the same thing over and over again, or the depression kicks in.
44:12 Mindy Pelz? A lot of women move, a lot of go back into the workforce. So help her understand how to bring some novelty back into her life. I just recently moved to Santa Cruz and I started surfing. It's like, I've never, I've never, I've never loved something that I suck so bad at. But every day I go out there, I'm like, okay, what do I do now? The waves are different, the temperature's different, the lineup's different. And I just keep thinking, oh, the dopamine. The dopamine out here is so good because it's all new and different. That's how we want to get them thinking. Nature. Nature is beautiful at bringing serotonin into the picture. Movement.
44:55 Mindy Pelz? These grandmothers walked seven hours every single day together. They were getting oxytocin, they were getting dopamine, they were probably telling stories and getting acetylcholine. They didn't need to have these things medicated because they naturally did that. Musculoskeletally. You've just got to change your workout. I was a competitive athlete and I had to stop running on a regular basis. I had to look for different workouts. So when you have that really hyper, you know, type A woman that's just working out over and over again, injuring herself, it's because she lost collagen and she lost creatine when estrogen left. So that doesn't mean you need to sell her more supplements, although that could be
45:39 Mindy Pelz? helpful, but you need to get her to think about changing her exercise and varying it so that the joints can have a different experience and not keep pounding on those joints over and over again. We also know for sleep, estrogen left. So your internal clock, how will your internal clock know where it is during the day when estrogen's gone? Well, you gotta, you gotta see light, you gotta move, you gotta look at your timing of your food, you've gotta get the body other clues so that it knows where it is in day. That could be as easy as get up and see the sunrise, get out in the middle of the day, at the end of the day, go see the sunset, because light is a big initiator of the circadian
46:24 Mindy Pelz? rhythm. But you might, you could've gotten away with it at 25, but you can't get away with it at 55. You gotta start to use those lifestyle clues to be able to get these neurochemicals back. Number three, is you got to start to teach her that when she's in a brain fog state, when she's in a depressed state, it's temporary. Guess what? Your brain's remodeling itself. So of course, every remodel has a little dust, has a little confusion, but it's temporary. The most important thing for this is to help her see that she's not going crazy.
47:05 Mindy Pelz? It is a natural process that's happening, so that she can go somewhere that's gonna be amazing. Number four, is educate the family. So we, most of us, I would hope, have family practices. I don't know about you, but when the mom came in, pretty much everybody else came in after that. And so we're interacting with every member of the family, and one of the things that's happening to menopausal women is they feel like they're going crazy. They feel left out, their connection to their kids are changing, their connection to their spouse is changing, they're not sleeping. If you can sit with the family, this is my favorite thing that I keep saying over and over again, she is not broken.
47:50 Mindy Pelz? She's becoming something new. And if you stick with her through that process, you're gonna see that this new version of her is maybe even more magnificent than the one you met when you guys were 20. But help the whole family, to me, this is a whole family experience. In the book, in my new book, I actually have a whole appendix to men. Because as I was out educating about hormones, I had so many beautiful men come up to me and say, "Thank you, I really appreciate it. I can understand my wife better. I feel like I can connect to her better. You really helped me. When are you gonna write a book for men?" "No, no, no, I got too many women books to write for men." So I gave you an appendix.
48:35 Mindy Pelz? An appendix in my book. And it says, "Ben, we need you. We need you. We need you to walk this with us. We don't need you to ridicule us. We don't need you to tell us how great we were at 20 years old. We're not 20 anymore. That's when we were drugged on estrogen and we cared what the culture thought of us. We don't care anymore. We're becoming something new. And we're emerging. Ask questions like, "Who are you becoming? What did you like that you don't like anymore? What are the new things that you're finding?" These kind of conversations start to invite her into this natural process that is happening whether she wants it or not. She is changing. And so if you ask questions about what that change looks like
49:19 Mindy Pelz? and how you can support it, we're gonna end this divorce rate. We're gonna end the suicide rate once the whole culture understands what is going on and how we can all be facilitators in it. Thank you. The last thing I will say is that the most important thing that this woman needs, and this starts, by the way, at 35, and it's complete somewhere around 52. So you're talking a really long time. So at 52, she's a different person. So we need cheerleaders. We need advocates. We need to know we're not going crazy. The last thing I will tell you is that if you want more of this,
50:03 Mindy Pelz? this I've just been spending the last year of my life to hold up in Santa Cruz writing this book. And it will come out on December 16. I go into every single member of the Girl Gang. I go into all the evolutionary neuroscience. All of it is in there. Super excited to get it out. I would love for you to preorder. Preorders mean the world to me. ...world to me because all of a sudden, and I'll finish on this one. I have a beautiful publisher, Hay House, and my goal is just to open this conversation up so that we can all step into it and we can watch 1.2 billion women stand in their most authentic version of them yet.
50:49 Mindy 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.
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