Pod Insights The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett The Miracle Doctor: EVERYONE should start Fasting right now! (NEW SCIENCE) Dr. Mindy Pelz About this episode In this new episode Steven sits down with the nutrition and functional medicine expert Dr Mindy Pelz.
Dr Pelz is a fasting, keto and detox expert, she is a leader in alternative health and a pioneer in the fasting movement. She has worked with a wide range of high-profile clients from Olympic athletes, to Academy Award-winning actors, and Silicon Valley CEOs. Her books, 'The Reset Factor', 'The Menopause Reset’ and most recently ‘Fast Like a Girl’ are bestsellers, she is also the host of two podcasts, ‘The Women United’, and ‘The Resetter’.
In this conversation Dr Pelz and Steven discuss topics, such as:
The power of fasting
The most common myths about food and eating
How sugar is at the root of most health problems
The perfect diets for men and women
You can purchase Dr Pelz’s newest book ‘Fast Like a Girl’, here: https://amzn.to/3NgXOD7
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Transcript 23,857 words · 3 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Feminist women out there are not going to like this. Women are perishing in this modern world more than men.
0:06 Steven Bartlett? Well, that's terrifying.
0:07 Dr. Mindy Pelz? If we want to exist on this planet, we're going to have to.
0:10 Steven Bartlett? Dr Mindy Pelz.
0:11 Speaker 02 Renowned functional health expert, bestselling author. And keynote speaker. One of the leading voices in educating us about our bodies.
0:19 Steven Bartlett? Spending two decades helping millions worldwide. You got pretty famous from talking about this certain subject matter, which is fasting. What do I need to know?
0:28 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Research shows it's going to make me stronger, more lean, 1300% increase in testosterone in men.
0:35 Steven Bartlett? Oh, wow.
0:35 Dr. Mindy Pelz? We see inflammation go down, growth hormone go up. It's the hormone that keeps you young and helps you burn fat. You know where it dropped the most amount of weight?
0:43 Steven Bartlett? Belly.
0:44 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yep. It literally takes cells that are turning into cancer and it gets rid of those. You are tapping into a healing state that you never knew was there.
0:52 Steven Bartlett? I'm sold. Where do I start?
0:53 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So the first place to start is. Menstruation, or the big M, is considered a taboo topic.
1:00 Steven Bartlett? I'm going to say something which is really embarrassing here. I know nothing about menstrual cycles. I'm in a relationship. What advice have you got for me?
1:06 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Well, the first is, do you know her cycle?
1:08 Steven Bartlett? Moving on. Tell me about your childhood.
1:12 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Let me give you gold. First two days, give her some space. If you have any conflict you want to resolve with her, do it between day two and day 12. Her libido is going to be the highest between day 10 and day 15. And then here's the gold. You're going to have to report back to me how this works. Around day 17, this is where you got to.
1:29 Steven Bartlett? Once in a while on this podcast, I have a conversation that I desperately wish I'd had sooner. This is one of those conversations. I'd heard about fasting, but I had no idea, no idea at all of its potentially life-changing impact. Weight loss, your sex life, a woman's menstrual cycle, how to heal from illness and injury, the incredible power of fasting. I'm incredibly happy that you chose to listen to this particular conversation because if you're like me and you've never really taken the time to understand fasting and you don't understand the six types of fasting, then maybe this is the conversation you've always needed to hear because it certainly was for me.
2:13 Steven Bartlett? You are really, really going to enjoy this one. Take my word for it.
2:24 Steven Bartlett? Mindy,
2:27 Steven Bartlett? if you took the full body of work that you've produced over the last, let's say, 10 years and the work that you're going to produce over the next 10 years, and you had to summarize the mission that you're on and why it matters, how would you do that?
2:44 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Wow, that's a great question. I'm trying to empower people to believe in themselves again. And I want to do that through everything that in our lifestyle that taps into our bodies own ability to heal itself. We've gotten so far off course. We don't even realize that we're giving so much of our health power away, our happiness power away. And all we've got to do is come back home to ourselves and learn that every single thing inside of us, every cell, every neuron, everything is working for us, not against us. And we have to stop villainizing our body. We got to figure out how to believe in ourselves again. We're the ones that are going to save ourselves. And we've just lost our way.
3:26 Steven Bartlett? What have we fallen into the trap of believing?
3:29 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Well, in the health world, we've totally fallen into the trap that if I take this pill, if I do this diet, if I do this exercise, then that will cure me. Nobody cures you. You cure yourself. And so you have to start to look at the human body as this self healing organism that's always figuring out how to keep you alive, how to keep you at your best. And if you're not feeling at your best, then the only thing you to look at is that there's an interference. There's a physical, emotional, spiritual, chemical interference that is pulling you away from this power that's inside of you so that you can start to heal. Once you pull those away, you see yourself in a whole new light. And this is
4:13 Dr. Mindy Pelz? what fasting did for millions of people. You just see yourself so differently in what you're capable of doing.
4:19 Steven Bartlett? Where have we gone wrong in terms of our attitude towards what it is to be a human? Because, you know, I often think much of the health advice that is thrown at us these days has this underlying belief that like in some way we're broken.
4:36 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah, oh my, I so agree with you. It's the messaging is like you did something wrong. You have a genetic profile that you're doomed to have, you know, a disastrous outcome. And everything is exogenously blamed at us. And I really think that that comes from not only our healthcare system, and I'm not trying to bash the healthcare system, but we have lost our way. And it comes from, for women specifically, it comes from the messaging we get from, you know, social media and magazines, like everything is outside in. We gotta go inside out now and start asking what we want on a physical, spiritual,
5:17 Dr. Mindy Pelz? emotional level so that we can create the life we want and stop looking outside for the answers. We gotta go within.
5:23 Steven Bartlett? I love that. Inside, inside out?
5:25 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Inside out, inside out living.
5:28 Steven Bartlett? You got pretty famous from talking about this certain subject matter, which is fasting.
5:32 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
5:32 Steven Bartlett? Now, I want to talk about fasting because I've heard about it and I'm sure here I represent a lot of my audience right now. I've heard the term fasting. I've heard loads of people in recent times over the last, I'd say, two years, get really excited about it and say that it's a good thing.
5:47 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yep.
5:48 Steven Bartlett? But that's really the extent of my knowledge on the subject. So let's just start right there. I mean, you wrote a book called Fast Like a Girl. You've got so much content out on the internet about fasting for both men and women. This book was written in two thousand and twenty-two.
6:03 Steven Bartlett? Why? Why? Why are you so focused on fasting? Why do I need to care about it? What's it gonna do for me?
6:10 Dr. Mindy Pelz? It's the quickest antidote to what we just said. If we've got all this physical, emotional, chemical stress coming at us, we've got taste buds we've got to change, we've got behaviors we have to change, there's a lot there. But I can show you how to compress your eating window into a ten-hour eating window, leaving fourteen hours for fasting, something as simple as fourteen hours. And I can show you how you can start to heal yourself without money, without time. It's you are literally tapping into a healing state that you never knew was there. And I think part of why we've had so many people pour on to YouTube and so many women gravitate to the book
6:51 Dr. Mindy Pelz? is that it's it's so, once you learn how to fast, you start to see your body in this whole new way. It can absolutely heal itself. So for me, fasting became this incredible tool that everybody could do. And we just had to learn how to do it. The women that I'm watching that are just dropping, I mean, men and women, hundreds of pounds and medications they're getting off of and mental health that's coming back just because I taught them how to compress their eating window and leave a longer time for rest so their body can repair. That is all each individual is doing that. I didn't do that.
7:32 Steven Bartlett? I'm the type of person that very much needs like stats to believe things. I'm one of those people. And once I've got the stats or some kind of like scientific evidence, then I'm all in.
7:43 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Beautiful.
7:44 Steven Bartlett? What do I need to know? From a scientific standpoint, what research has been done on fasting?
7:49 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Okay, so let's let's go through the basic principle of fasting, and I think this will help everybody. Is that you have two metabolisms. So you burn energy when you eat. And you burn energy when you don't eat. But there are two different mechanisms. So when you eat, like, let's use myself as an example. I had eggs and some avocado for like around 11 o'clock today. So that's going to bring my blood sugar up. Now, as my blood sugar starts to drop, what's going to happen is my body's going to switch over into this other energy system. And I call this the fat burning energy system. I call this one the sugar burner energy system. When it switches over into this fat burning energy system,
8:33 Dr. Mindy Pelz? it starts to make a byproduct called a ketone. And that ketone will go up into the brain and it starts to repair your brain. And what most people don't realize is your brain is needs 50% ketones, 50% glucose. So you're giving a fuel source to your brain that it desperately needs, which is why people, when they fast are like their mental clarity goes up, their cognition improves, their brain fog goes away. Because you're literally giving a fuel source to your brain that it may never had have been given before. It takes about eight, somewhere between eight hours to metabolically switch over into this fat burning place.
9:13 Steven Bartlett? Ah, okay, so if I'm doing a podcast and I want to be sharp.
9:16 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yes.
9:17 Steven Bartlett? I shouldn't eat eight hours before.
9:19 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yes.
9:20 Steven Bartlett? Ah, fuck.
9:22 Steven Bartlett? Did you come back in seven hours?
9:24 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Seven hours?
9:27 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah, sure. I should have given you the memo before we got here. Yeah, so I think of it like a hybrid car. You know, you, you're swi- you switch over into this fat burning place. So at eight hours, you start to make the switch. By about 12 hours, your body's now starting to make a good dose of ketones. The brain is excited, so you're getting that mental clarity. Ketones turn off the hunger hormone. So you also, when you switch over, there's going to be a point in which you're not hungry. And that all happens at about 12 hours. But you're also, if you stay there a little longer, if you stay there and you go 14 hours, 15 hours, so check this out. Research shows at 15 hours, we see growth hormone go up.
10:12 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Okay, growth hormone is the hormone that keeps you young and helps you burn fat. We also see in men, 1300% increase in testosterone, just from somewhere between a 13 to 15 hour fast. 13% increase in natural testosterone stores. And we can explain why that happens in a moment. And then we start to see inflammation go down. So all of a sudden, if you have people who have like joints that are hurting, they start doing 15 hours of fasting every day and they're like, God, you know, my joints just don't have that same stiffness in them anymore. But if you stay in that fasted window, you keep going, 17 hours, your brilliant body
10:54 Dr. Mindy Pelz? turns within and it goes, wait a second, no food's coming in, we better get stronger. So it literally takes the, the bad cells, the cells that are slowing you down, the cells that are turning into cancer, and it gets rid of those. They're called senescent cells. And it, it literally recycles them out of your system. And it goes into the cells that are still usable and it makes them stronger. It fixes the inner cellular parts. We call that autophagy. And that actually was the, if you want stats, the Nobel Prize in 2015 by a Japanese scientist, Dr. Osumi. He won the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology for this term called autophagy. And that's when you go without food. Your cells will heal themselves.
11:39 Dr. Mindy Pelz? That was back in 2015.
11:41 Steven Bartlett? So I want to go into all of that. I want to start with why? Why does fasting help so much? And really, what I'm getting at there is if the effects of this are so profound in so many ways, then where did we go wrong? Because from what I have been told, breakfast, lunch, dinner. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, and then maybe dessert. And then, you know, that's the narrative that I was brought up on.
12:08 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah. Well, breakfast is the most important meal of the day. I've done a lot of research on that phrase. Do you know where it came from?
12:15 Steven Bartlett? No.
12:15 Dr. Mindy Pelz? It was actually, and I don't mean to diss any companies out there, but it was a tagline that they came up with for cornflakes, for Kellogg's Cornflakes, back in the 1970s. They needed a tagline that made people eat cornflakes in the morning. And so they came up with, "Cornflakes, breakfast is the most important meal of the day." And that has continued until this day. I can't find any research, and many other fasting experts, many other blood sugar experts will tell you the same thing. There's just no research showing that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. So that became a myth that we need to bust. Second myth we've been taught is you can speed your metabolism up the more you eat.
13:00 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Six meals a day. Remember that one? Okay, also a myth. There is no evidence that the more you eat, the faster your metabolism will be. If you want a faster metabolism, you need to know how to metabolically switch. You need to know how to go from sugar burner to fat burner. And that's where you start to lose weight. So that's the other myth that I feel like we have to break apart. And then we have this, you know, I can tell you as a mother, and this is not for anybody to have mommy guilt, but what we do as parents is we have certain statements we make to our kids. Like, you know, dinner's being served, the kitchen's closing in an hour. You need to eat lunch, you need to eat breakfast.
13:44 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Like, we are programmed when to eat by a clock, not by our own internal sense. So kids are raised to eat according to a clock, not according to when they want to eat.
13:59 Dr. Mindy Pelz? We don't say, "Am I hungry right now?"
14:03 Steven Bartlett? That's so true. We all wait until one P M. to have lunch.
14:07 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Right.
14:07 Steven Bartlett? And the morning we wake up, we feel like we we have to have breakfast or we're doing something wrong.
14:12 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yep.
14:12 Steven Bartlett? And then dinner time, you know, any time between, I know, six and eight, we have to sit down and eat again or we're doing something wrong.
14:19 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yep. Like if you like, if you just unwind that.
14:23 Steven Bartlett? Yeah. Where did that come from?
14:24 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Right? Usually from your parents and it came from a schedule.
14:29 Steven Bartlett? What did my ancestors do before my parents existed and and the schedules existed?
14:33 Dr. Mindy Pelz? I can tell you exactly what they did.
14:35 Steven Bartlett? What did they do?
14:36 Dr. Mindy Pelz? They came out of the cave. I'm gonna go back to our primal friends. Go back to our cave friends. They came out of a cave. They didn't have refrigerator. They didn't have a pantry. They didn't have DoorDash. They had to go find food.
14:50 Steven Bartlett? Did they have Uber Eats?
14:52 Dr. Mindy Pelz? They didn't have Uber Eats.
14:53 Steven Bartlett? Delivery?
14:53 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah, I'm pretty sure they didn't have Uber Eats. But what they did is they came out of the cave and they went to go hunt food. Sometimes they could make a kill really easily and bring it home and they would feast. Sometimes the kill wasn't as easy and they had to go far to find an animal to kill.
15:11 Steven Bartlett? Exercise.
15:13 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Exercise. But what did they do when they had to go super far and they couldn't get food? They switched over into this ketogenic energy system. And that ketogenic energy system supercharged them because every cell in the human body is the number one priority of our cells is survival. So we were built to make sure we could stay alive in the absence of food. So their ketones kicked in. And when ketones kicked in, they became mentally very focused so they could go find food. They were able to stay calm. Ketones will affect a neurotransmitter called GABA and cause GABA to come on. So you feel calm. You're focused. Ketones will power up your muscles so that all of a sudden you have this incredible muscular energy.
15:57 Dr. Mindy Pelz? All because they were meant to go find food so they can bring it home.
16:02 Steven Bartlett? Okay, so the body, which is orientated towards survival, when you hadn't eaten, it invests a lot of its sort of resources in your brain to increase the chances that you'll catch something to eat. So that's why when I fast or when I haven't eaten, I'm very focused and very articulate.
16:18 Dr. Mindy Pelz? That's right.
16:18 Steven Bartlett? It seems, and I perform at my best.
16:21 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Bingo. That's it.
16:22 Steven Bartlett? Makes sense.
16:23 Dr. Mindy Pelz? And then what what did they do when they got a kill? They came home and they feasted. They didn't necessarily ration it out, they ate. And then they divvied it up amongst the tribe. And then they went out again until when the food was gone. Maybe a couple of days, maybe they'd feast for a couple of days when the food was gone. They go out again. It's called feast famine cycling. It is how humans were meant to be, to live. The challenge we have is we have access to food all the time. That we are, you know, feasting has taken on a really negative connotation because we're feasting on the wrong foods. But if we could go back and just be like our primal friends. And we could learn how to go in and out of this feast famine cycling, using fasting as, as a
17:08 Dr. Mindy Pelz? tool for performance, for healing, and using food in the proper way and eating the right food so that our brains will work well and, you know, there's a whole hormonal pack or sense of, of food that can help support hormones. If we're really conscious about the quality of the food that we eat. We're now mimicking what our primal ancestors were doing.
17:28 Steven Bartlett? Does that also imply that we should exercise fasted? Because I was thinking, if, thinking about my ancestors, they would have been doing the most physical activity when they hadn't eaten yet.
17:38 Dr. Mindy Pelz? That's right. Yeah.
17:39 Steven Bartlett? They would have been doing the most physical activity right before they ate.
17:42 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah. So really interesting point, and, and you and I were talking about this in the beginning. Is that when you exercise in a fasted state. You're going to get rid of the glucose that's been stored in your muscles. So as that glucose comes out, because your body needs it to go, you know, you're, you don't work a hundred percent off of ketones and a hundred percent off of glucose. You're needing both of them at both, at, at, at different moments of your day. So when you're exercising in a fasted state, you're getting ketones. And your muscles are releasing stored sugar. Which is great for anybody who wants to lose weight. Because now you can lean out those muscles. Now let's go back to what our primal ancestors did.
18:25 Dr. Mindy Pelz? When they came home, they ate meat, they ate protein. And they stimulated something called mTOR. mTOR is when you actually create muscle growth. And what we now know is it takes about thirty grams of protein to trigger these amino acid receptor sites in the muscles to cause them to grow stronger. So for you, if you work out in a fasted state, you're gonna release all those stores, you're gonna have those ketones for performance, but then you wanna follow that up with protein so you can build your muscles strong. And that is a hack that has worked incredibly well for so many people.
19:00 Steven Bartlett? Okay. Historically, people have thought that fasting is a one-size kind of fits all technique. And there's one kind of fasting, which is you just, I don't know, you might just not eat for a prolonged period of time. But in your book and throughout your work, you describe these six different types of fasting.
19:17 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yep.
19:18 Steven Bartlett? What are the six types of fasting? And tell me what the difference is in outcome and benefit.
19:23 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah. It's a great question. So again, fasting is when we switch over.
19:28 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
19:28 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So now we're in the fat burning place. At about thirteen to fifteen hours, we start making ketones. This is intermittent fasting. That's pretty much what most people, when they say they're intermittent fasting, that's what they're doing.
19:40 Steven Bartlett? Okay, they take twelve to sixteen hours?
19:41 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah. They're making ketones, testosterone's going up, inflammation's coming down, hunger might be going away, they're kind of having this, they might be, a lot of people lose weight with that. It's kind of the most common fast.
19:54 Steven Bartlett? Does it matter from the window? Does it matter what time I start and what time I end?
19:57 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Uh-uh. You get to choose. You choose what that window should be.
20:00 Steven Bartlett? So I could eat at three AM?
20:03 Dr. Mindy Pelz? You could. There's a whole nother level we can talk about why you don't wanna eat in the dark.
20:07 Steven Bartlett? What's ideal, an ideal window?
20:09 Dr. Mindy Pelz? I really like, it depends on the, on the time of the year. But in the summer, I really like somewhere, if you're gonna do an eight-hour eating window, like eleven to seven in the summer. And then in the winter, because it's darker earlier, you would do more like a, like a ten to five kind of eating window.
20:26 Steven Bartlett? It's not so hard to do eleven to seven.
20:28 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Right.
20:30 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Not hard at all.
20:31 Steven Bartlett? Not hard at all. That's not, that's not fasting. That's, that's just a slight, having a slightly later breakfast and a slightly earlier dinner.
20:38 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah. But it's, it's like being intentional, right?
20:40 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, exactly.
20:41 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Cause you know what, you gotta, you gotta keep blood sugar low. Otherwise, the minute blood sugar goes up, you're gonna switch over.
20:47 Steven Bartlett? Right.
20:48 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So you can't put it, you know, if you walk past the kitchen and put a grape in your mouth.
20:52 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, which is
20:53 Dr. Mindy Pelz? You've pulled yourself up. Yes, yes.
20:56 Steven Bartlett? So that's the first type of the six fasting styles. The second is, I'm gonna try and say this word.
21:05 Steven Bartlett? Oort of Oji, Agi, Oort of, Oortofagi?
21:11 Dr. Mindy Pelz? It's one way of saying it. People say, either call it autophagy or autophagy. People say it different.
21:18 Steven Bartlett? You can tell me I said it wrong.
21:19 Dr. Mindy Pelz? I've kind of landed on autophagy. I feel like autophagy is the best way to say it.
21:24 Steven Bartlett? Autophagy fasting, what's that?
21:25 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So autophagy fasting is about seventeen hours in without, without food. Your cells will turn within and they'll start to heal themselves. And that was what Dr. Osumi's big discovery was, is that the cells clean themselves up. So what's interesting on this one, and this is something I really want to get out to the world, is that when you stimulate autophagy, what you're doing is you're turning on the intelligence inside the cell. And that intelligence is looking around and it's going, hey, there's a virus. There's a bacteria. Get them out. So let's push these infections out of the cell. That mitochondria, it's not working well. We need to repair it. That endoplasmic reticulum inside here, it's, it's lagging. We need to fix it.
22:07 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So it literally goes in and fixes everything inside the cell just at seventeen hours. But one of the greatest studies that was, I've seen in fasting was done during COVID. And it showed that if a virus comes into a cell that's in a state of autophagy, it can't replicate. Viruses have to live off of your energy system. So when viruses go into a cell that's laden with glucose, they have a party in there. They love that. They munch on that and then they go out and they start replicating. If you were in a fasted state when a virus comes in, it can't replicate. There's nothing inside that cell for that virus to take over and it dies.
22:47 Steven Bartlett? Why does that happen? What's the reason for the, that sort of the CEO within my cells looking around and saying, right, let's clean all this stuff up?
22:56 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Well, because it, when, once you've stimulated autophagy, there is one goal for that cell, and that is survival. So everything in there is on high alert.
23:05 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
23:06 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Everything is going to be in your survival interest. So a virus is not in your survival interest. So it pushes it out.
23:12 Steven Bartlett? So it's kind of like an emergency signal because there's not been food for a while. So it's kind of like the last, the last attempt to do everything the body can to help you make it through this period of hunger.
23:25 Dr. Mindy Pelz? That's right. That's right. You've put yourself in this state of extreme healing and it's all based off of this idea that your body wants to stay alive.
23:35 Steven Bartlett? Okay. So that's, are you writing your book that that's good for balancing sex hormones and preventing colds?
23:40 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So, yeah, with, with autophagy, it's great for preventing colds. Here's what's interesting about autophagy for sex hormones is that the major part of your brain, for both men and women, that control hormonal, all hormonal control is your hypothalamus and pituitary. That part of the brain does not have a blood brain barrier. So it's very vulnerable to toxins. So whenever we have massive toxic exposure, that part of the brain starts to malfunction. We see this with polycystic ovarian syndrome, most common hormonal imbalance for women. Well, a lot of that is this imbalance of testosterone and estrogen, and there's a
24:22 Dr. Mindy Pelz? huge toxic piece that has destroyed or interfered with the part of the brain that controls hormones. So when we look at autophagy, there are certain parts of our system that are more easily influenced by autophagy than others. Well, it turns out the hypothalamus and the pituitary are easily influenced by autophagy and can repair themselves when they're in the state of autophagy. The other interesting cellular makeup that is highly influenced by autophagy are the cells around the testes and the cells around the ovaries. Those are the cells that are putting out sex hormones. And if you, that whole system is malfunctioning, when you go into a state of autophagy, those
25:07 Dr. Mindy Pelz? cells will respond and become better cells and be better at producing these hormones because of you dipping in and out of the state of autophagy.
25:17 Steven Bartlett? That really got me thinking because I've been looking at a lot of companies from an investment standpoint at the moment that are trying to solve for this macro decline in male testosterone. You know, I was, I had a few guests come on this podcast and tell me that male testosterone has been declining year over year. And then kind of paired with that, we're becoming more and more sexless. Our libidos seem to be in decline. I've got a lot of close friends of mine that are taking certain hormonal supplements to try and get their libidos back up.
25:48 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yep.
25:49 Steven Bartlett? And for the first time ever in, on a show called Dragon's Den that I'm on in the UK, we had someone come into the den for an investment that was producing a supplement to try and get our sex drives back. It feels like a big macro conversation that we're not having.
26:01 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yep.
26:02 Steven Bartlett? And looking at your work and the work around, you've done about fasting and what you said there, it seems like there could potentially be a link.
26:07 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yep.
26:08 Steven Bartlett? Between the two, the ways we're living our life and what we're eating and our decline in testosterone and our libidos.
26:14 Dr. Mindy Pelz? There's a beautiful book, I don't know if you've read it, called Countdown. And it's about the sperm counts going down in, across the world. And I actually brought her on to my podcast, the woman who wrote the book. And she said that there's one chemical that's reducing sperm counts more than any, and it's phthalates. And phthalates are in fragrances.
26:35 Steven Bartlett? Ah.
26:36 Dr. Mindy Pelz? They're in our colognes, they're in our perfumes, they're in our laundry detergents, they're in our air fresheners. They also are now infiltrated into our water. So they've infiltrated into, they're now being sprayed on our foods. Animals that are drinking the water have phthalates in them. So it's the number one toxin that's destroying testosterone levels. And it's a brilliant book that she wrote.
26:59 Steven Bartlett? You talk about in The Reset Factory, your first book from 2016, chapter 10, you said something which I hadn't quite appreciated. You said that even the things we put on our skin are absorbed into our body, and then they go directly into our bloodstream and into our kidneys. I didn't think, when I read that, it got me thinking because there's so many things that I sort of unconsciously just spray on my body.
27:22 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Right.
27:23 Steven Bartlett? Every day, and I never look at what's in them because I just think it's on the outside and it will wash off.
27:26 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yep.
27:27 Steven Bartlett? But now you're saying that.
27:29 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah. Your skin is a breathable organ, so it's going to push toxins out and it's going to take toxins in. So think about if you've ever like eaten something that didn't react well with you, you might get a rash. That's your brilliant body trying to push that toxin out. But the same thing happens when you put something on your skin. It actually goes into your body. So a good general rule is if you aren't willing to eat it, don't put it on your skin. And beyond that, if we even look at the microbiome, you have bacteria on your skin that protect you, and that bacteria is, are actually talking to the bacteria in our gut. There's actually a connection between the two bacteria.
28:10 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So if you start putting things on your skin that destroy that microbiome, you're actually going to ultimately have an adverse effect on the microbiome in your gut. So what you put on your skin is massively important. And then the smell, we know the hippocampus, which is the seat of Alzheimer's and dementia, is also where the olfactory nerve innervates. So when we smell something toxic and breathe something toxic in, it goes straight into the hippocampus and starts to create degeneration in those neurons that are ultimately can lead to dementia and Alzheimer's. Toxicity is a huge human problem.
28:49 Steven Bartlett? Toxicity.
28:52 Steven Bartlett? When you say the word toxicity, how are you defining that? You're saying like toxic chemicals that we introduced into our lives, on our skin, consume, inhale, have around us?
29:00 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Bingo.
29:01 Steven Bartlett? And that are in our foods, et cetera?
29:02 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yep, bingo.
29:03 Steven Bartlett? What are some of the most toxic chemicals or foods or products that we consume without thinking that you think we need to stop consuming on a day to day basis?
29:15 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Oh, here's the easiest one is plastics, BPA plastic. They say that it's not a matter of if you have plastic in your body, it's a matter of how much. So let's use it in a context of something that people are really motivated by, which is weight loss.
29:32 Steven Bartlett? What's BPA plastics?
29:33 Dr. Mindy Pelz? It's a chemical within plastic that's within our water bottles, it's in our Tupperware. They actually are putting, they're saying that they're now in the microfibers of our clothes and that's being washed out to, it gets really depressing when you start talking about toxins, gets washed out into our oceans. But for the sake of simplicity, it's bottles mostly that you see, but we've got plastic containers, we've got plastic plates, we've got plastic everything and that has BPA in it. And that is a toxin that destroys human health. And the biggest and most interesting thing that BPA plastics do is there was a study around something called a Naguti mouse.
30:17 Dr. Mindy Pelz? And they took this mouse that had a gene for obesity and they were twins. They fed them the same food, they gave them the same amount of exercise, but one of the mice got introduced BPA plastic. And the one that got the BPA plastic, all of a sudden started to gain weight and the hair color started to change. And that was the only difference between these two mice with the same genetic profile. And so then when they detoxed the BPA plastic out, the mouse lost weight. So that was the beginning of us understanding a term called obesogens. And obesogens are toxins that actually make us insulin resistant, actually cause us to hold on to more weight.
31:00 Dr. Mindy Pelz? And that's just one category of toxins.
31:05 Steven Bartlett? Well, that's terrifying.
31:07 Dr. Mindy Pelz? It is terrifying. To be completely, you know, from the center of my heart. This is, it's, this is why we have to educate ourselves. This is why we have to wake up. We have to understand that we are living in the most toxic time in human history. And it doesn't, it's not just mental stress. It's not just social media. It's a barrage of all of that that is pulling us off course. And I can tell you that I have sat with some of the most brilliant doctors who are generally so concerned on the direction of humanity and where we're going because of the abundance of these toxins.
31:47 Steven Bartlett? As you said that, I could see a sadness in your face. Where does that come from?
31:53 Dr. Mindy Pelz? I think it's really easy, when you hear a podcast like this and, and what I'm saying, to reject what I'm saying because it's, it's too overwhelming to understand what the evolutionary mismatch we're in right now.
32:10 Dr. Mindy Pelz? We, so many people are suffering, whether it's physical or mental, mentally, and they don't realize that it's everything from the food to their shampoos to the plastic water bottles. It's, it's so vast and yet nobody's doing anything about it. And, and that's where my heart hurts. It's like, people are suffering that don't need to be suffering. And if they understood that the modern world we're living in has taken us so off course with our health. And we've got to start to, one by one, figure out how to bring it back on course. And, you know, yesterday I sat with, um, Dr. Dale Bredesen on my, and interviewed him
32:55 Dr. Mindy Pelz? on my podcast. He wrote a book called The End of Alzheimer's. And he laid out seven things that we need to do to stop Alzheimer's. And he strongly feels that Alzheimer's is optional. You don't have to, you don't have to get that. And those seven things.
33:14 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Are so intense, like it's everything from detoxing to metabolically switching, to prioritizing sleep, to human connection, to understanding, you know, what the best exercise is for you. And it's easy for humans to look at those seven things and go, I'm out. I can't do all that. But we, if we want to exist on this planet, we're gonna have to do that. That's the new level of health we're in right now. And I'm, I love being the cheerleader. I want to be the one that's like, come on, we can do it. But I also need people to understand that where we're living as humans right now is a very, very
33:56 Dr. Mindy Pelz? dangerous place. And it's just in the existence of moving in and out of grocery stores and restaurants and, you know, and the drugstore. Everything has a toxic insult on us. And it's overwhelming. It's overwhelming.
34:12 Steven Bartlett? Drastic action because we've, we're so drastically far away from where we're supposed to be.
34:16 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yep.
34:16 Steven Bartlett? Where our ancestors were.
34:18 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yep.
34:18 Steven Bartlett? We've built up this society that's full of plastics and toxins and alcohol and drugs and sugar everywhere. And I can't move in bloody New York City, which is where we are now.
34:29 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yep.
34:29 Steven Bartlett? Without someone offering me, you know, every block is, almost every block is really bad food.
34:36 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Horrible.
34:37 Steven Bartlett? But food that tempts the certain part of my brain that maybe is looking to help me stay alive and to survive, whether it's pizza or sweets or whatever it might be.
34:48 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
34:48 Steven Bartlett? Um, so it's, it is difficult and I have a great deal of empathy for anyone that's struggling.
34:53 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
34:54 Steven Bartlett? With it.
34:54 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Me too. Me too. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, we've hit a point where the door out of poor health is multifaceted. It's not just one door.
35:05 Dr. Mindy Pelz? And if you're healthy and you're just like, you know, someone like you just wants to get in better shape, then the path is a little bit easier. But what do we do for the for the person that gets the cancer diagnosis? What do we do for the woman who's suicidal and going through her menopause years? Like, where are we helping her? How are we getting to them? And each time they walk into their doctor's office, they're typically giving getting a pill and not being taught how to live a life that works with their body in this modern world. That's where we have to get to.
35:39 Steven Bartlett? You told me about the first two styles of fasting. The first one was intermittent fasting, which is 12 to 16 hours, which is good for weight loss, brain fog, that kind of thing. The second is autophagy.
35:52 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Autophagy.
35:53 Steven Bartlett? What did I say?
35:53 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Autophagy, but I like it.
35:57 Steven Bartlett? I said autophagy. We can play that back. I definitely said autophagy. And if I didn't, we'll fix it with AI. Autophagy fasting, which is 17 to 72 hours, good for balancing sexual hormones and preventing illness broadly.
36:08 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
36:09 Steven Bartlett? Number three, we haven't spoken about gut reset fast.
36:11 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
36:12 Steven Bartlett? What's that?
36:13 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah, so that's based off a study that came out of MIT that showed 24 hours without food and your intestinal stem cells inside your gut actually start to reboot themselves. Now, a stem cell is a cell that can go to anywhere in the body and repair itself. But at 24 hours, you get a plethora of them in your gut. And in the gut, we've got a damaged microbiome from everything that we've just been talking about. So what I discovered in this 24 hour fast is I could take women that have been on birth control pill for years, people that have been on multiple rounds of antibiotics, people who had been eating horrible food, and I could actually put them through a 24 hour
36:57 Dr. Mindy Pelz? fast once a week, once every couple of weeks. And these stem cells would come in there and they would start to repair. And so now if I teach that person how to eat right, their food is actually starting to build a better microbiome in the gut. So that 24 hour fast became this go to in my clinic where I could take all these gut challenges and I could start to unwind them just because I knew the body had this capability of making these intestinal stem cells. And it was crazy. Like, we got people off supplements. We got people that were didn't weren't making serotonin, which affects moods, comes from the gut. All of a sudden started to become happier. People who hadn't had bowel movements
37:38 Dr. Mindy Pelz? in like three days, all of a sudden, we started to put in these this gut reset. And it was like a miracle. It was incredible.
37:45 Steven Bartlett? Number four, fat burner fast.
37:48 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So the fat burner fast is probably my favorite for those people who want to lose weight. The research was done that 36 hours without food, followed by 12 hours of eating, and then another 30. They actually did it over a 30 day period. But we've been using it in our community, just dosing it in, that at 36 hours, what happens is that's enough time where the blood sugars come down, where all of a sudden, the body, it's so smart, it goes, okay, blood sugar's not coming. We've been in this fasted state, we've triggered autophagy, we've brought inflammation down, we've made you ketones, we're trying to go find food. But this extra weight, it's not serving you. Because remember, you got to
38:30 Dr. Mindy Pelz? go find food. So it drops weight. And it's the most beautiful way to get a person to unstick any kind of weight loss resistance. But most importantly, you know where it dropped the most amount of weight from? Where does everybody want to lose weight?
38:46 Steven Bartlett? Belly.
38:47 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yep. So it is the I probably should have called it the fat burning belly fat burning.
38:52 Steven Bartlett? The belly fat. Yeah, that would have banged. Yeah.
38:55 Dr. Mindy Pelz? But yeah, and so that's what they showed is that actually a 36 hour fast started to unstick weight loss, and it was started with weight around the belly.
39:04 Steven Bartlett? Compelling.
39:07 Steven Bartlett? Number five, the dopamine reset fast?
39:09 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah, so number five, I found some research showing that when people go without food for forty eight hours, the whole dopamine system will be rebooted. So what's important to know about the dopamine system is it is our molecule of happiness. It is the thing that it's actually a motivation molecule and it's a neurotransmitter that allows thoughts, happy thoughts, to go across from neuron to neuron. And so what happens, and I'm sure you've talked about this on your podcast, that we're so dopamine saturated right now, but specifically people who are overeaters, they actually are finding, the study I quote in the book, is that they found
39:50 Dr. Mindy Pelz? that people who had food addiction, people who had extra weight, like obese situations, they were not getting as much happiness out of their food because their dopamine receptor sites were saturated. So they had to eat more food to get more happiness. And, you know, food is a state changer. It does make us happy. So what they found is if they put them into a forty eight hour fast, that they actually rebooted the whole dopamine system and new dopamine receptor sites appeared. So that when they brought food back in to the equation, they actually got more enjoyment out of food with less food.
40:27 Steven Bartlett? This kind of got me thinking about a conversation I was having yesterday with some of my team here. We were talking about how it almost feels like sometimes if I've eaten sugar, I can go into a bit of a sugar cycle. And what I mean by that is I'll have some sugar and then like a couple of hours later, I'll have another craving for sugar and then a couple of hours later, I'll have another craving for sugar. But then at other times, specifically, for example, when I did keto, I was, I did the keto diet for about eight month, uh, eight weeks, bloody eight months, I wish, eight weeks. And throughout that period, I didn't have any cravings for sugar.
40:57 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yep.
40:58 Steven Bartlett? I would, we had some chocolate come into the studio and I walked over to the chocolate and I smelt it.
41:02 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yep.
41:03 Steven Bartlett? And I didn't want any of it.
41:04 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yep.
41:04 Steven Bartlett? It had gone.
41:05 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yep.
41:05 Steven Bartlett? But then when I'm in my, what I call like the sugar cycle, I'm eating sugar, maybe, you know, once or twice a day. And I'm getting like the craving for it, where, which I just can't seem to resist.
41:14 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yep. Well, dopamine's the molecule of more. It's not the molecule of enough. So what it does is when you get sugar, you get this dopamine rush.
41:24 Steven Bartlett? Hmm.
41:24 Dr. Mindy Pelz? And the brain goes, woo, love that. Give me more of that.
41:27 Steven Bartlett? Hmm.
41:28 Dr. Mindy Pelz? And so you can't, you, it's, it's endless. You will never be fully satisfied. It constantly wants you to come back for more and more and more. So when you start to go off the ketogenic energy system, you're getting the same euphoria. You probably felt the same high, the same mental clarity, but you've totally taken this molecule more out of the, out of the picture. It's, it, in fact, dopamine will actually, you know, you, you get those receptor sites that will be repaired. But you're not getting a big dopamine buzz when you're in a ketogenic state. You're getting ketones.
41:58 Steven Bartlett? I was, I was mulling it with my team, how long I had to stay away from sugar to kind of get out of that vicious, give me more cycle.
42:06 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah. My experience has been it's about three days.
42:09 Steven Bartlett? Three days. That's what I thought.
42:10 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
42:11 Steven Bartlett? I think I said four or five, but it's just from experience as well. If I haven't had sugar.
42:16 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
42:16 Steven Bartlett? For three or four days. I mean, like a, like a chocolate, but something significant in terms of sugar. Then after three or four days, the craving for it seems to, to vanish.
42:23 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah, yeah. It's not, it's not, if you think about that, it's not hard if you're trying to overcome a, a sugar addiction.
42:30 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
42:30 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Like just bear it for three days and then that dopamine stops barking at you. And then if you tack fasting onto it, now you're getting ketones. And so you're not needing that as much. Ketones kill hunger and they make you so mentally, mentally clear. They give you this euphoric feeling. So you don't have that urge to go for the, for the sugar.
42:52 Steven Bartlett? And the ketones come from fasting.
42:53 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
42:53 Steven Bartlett? Which is when your body switches metabolic state. Got it. The last and final fasting style, immune reset fast.
43:01 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah, so Immune Reset was built off of Dr. Walter Longo's work. And he did a study on people who had cancer and were going through chemotherapy. And one of the challenges we know about chemotherapy is that it wipes out the whole immune system. And so he wanted to see, well, what if I put somebody in a fasted state as they went through chemotherapy? Would there be a difference? And what he found is after three days of fasting, the white blood cells in our system actually reboot themselves. So what they do is all old white blood cells are sloughed away and new white blood cells emerge. So people were able to come out of that chemotherapy experience and have a stronger immune system
43:43 Dr. Mindy Pelz? as opposed to what we were seeing was that it was wiping the immune system out. So that launched the whole three-day water fast sort of craze. At least here in America, we're seeing a lot of people that are just going after three-day water fasts to prime their immune system. But you also, also at three days, get stem cells, full systemic stem cells. So all of a sudden, your body's got, surging with stem cells going to all parts of the body, repairing it. The great example I always use on this one was I had an Achilles tendon injury and nothing was, nothing was helping it. So I threw a five-day water fast at it. On the fourth day, I felt this buzz in my Achilles tendon and I was like, oh, I wonder what that is.
44:28 Dr. Mindy Pelz? And it stayed all the way through. I went five full days. And about the fifth and sixth day, so sixth day I was entering the food back in, all the pain completely went away and it never came back. I tried everything. I tried everything and that was the only thing that repaired it.
44:47 Steven Bartlett? It does make, again, evolutionary sense that if our body senses we're injured because we're not eating or, you know, some other signal that we are...
44:58 Steven Bartlett? On a course to not survive, to put it nicely. It does make sense that it might set about to repair whatever needs to be repaired.
45:06 Dr. Mindy Pelz? You're getting it.
45:07 Steven Bartlett? You know, because like if I was a wounded human back in on the savannas of, I don't know, Africa or wherever we came from, and I'm laid there and I'm not eating, my body should probably go, okay, Steve might need something fixed so that he can get back to hunting.
45:24 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So you're getting it. So survival, that is the number one priority of the body. So when you go without food, you amplify every resource it has to keep you alive. And if repairing my Achilles means I can now go hunt for food, it's going to do that. It's going to make me stronger. And in the book, I stumbled, when I was writing the book, I stumbled upon a really cool hypothesis that's called the thrifty gene hypothesis. And it said that what it's, it's a theory, obviously, it's hypothesis, it's a theory that the people, the humans that evolved out of the primal days had a very specific
46:05 Dr. Mindy Pelz? genotype. And this genotype allowed us to metabolically flex and be stronger in a fasted state because we had to survive. And the people that didn't make it from that time period didn't have that gene. But think about this for this moment. So they think we all have this gene inside of us right now, this thrifty gene, where we can go long periods without food and we can survive. So what happens when we're eating all day? What happens when we're ignoring and we're not actually activating that genetic profile? So what they are now believing is that diabetes, metabolic syndrome, all of that is largely happening because we are going against the genetic profile that we are now seeing in
46:50 Dr. Mindy Pelz? humans. We're like on the opposite end of this spectrum.
46:54 Steven Bartlett? We're overloading our bodies.
46:56 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
46:58 Steven Bartlett? Which is meaning that the survival gene you referenced there is not being activated to help us.
47:03 Dr. Mindy Pelz? That's right. That's right.
47:05 Steven Bartlett? Interesting. What about, what about coffee? You know, if I'm gonna fast for, I know people are so addicted to coffee, so I feel like I have to ask a question as their representative. If I'm gonna fast, do any of these six fasts that you just mentioned, does coffee break that fast?
47:19 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
47:19 Steven Bartlett? It does break it.
47:20 Dr. Mindy Pelz? No, well, it depends. Okay, so this is, this, I'm just laughing.
47:23 Steven Bartlett? I need a yes or no.
47:26 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Um, I can't give you a yes or no on it.
47:27 Steven Bartlett? That's fine.
47:28 Dr. Mindy Pelz? I'm gonna give you most likely.
47:29 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
47:30 Dr. Mindy Pelz? No, let me give you most likely it's okay.
47:34 Steven Bartlett? Okay, most likely it's okay?
47:35 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yes.
47:36 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, there's not a high degree of uncertainty and conviction there?
47:39 Dr. Mindy Pelz? No. Let me, let me explain myself.
47:41 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
47:42 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So when you drink a cup of coffee, it shouldn't spike your blood sugar?
47:46 Steven Bartlett? It shouldn't?
47:47 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Should not.
47:47 Steven Bartlett? It doesn't?
47:48 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So if it does, it shouldn't. So if you have black coffee and your blood sugar doesn't spike, and you're, you're trying to metabolically switch over into your fasting window, you're good. You're golden. Drink that black coffee.
48:01 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
48:01 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Okay, now, I'm gonna add some sugar to it. Okay, now, now you're not switched, now you've pulled, you've pulled yourself out of a fasted state.
48:09 Steven Bartlett? Uh, okay, so no sugar, just a plain coffee with no milk or sugar in it?
48:14 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Is, is most likely gonna keep you in a fasted state?
48:18 Steven Bartlett? Most likely?
48:19 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Uh, well, I've seen a few occasions where it didn't.
48:21 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
48:22 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Um, this is why we have people test their blood sugar. Like, it, it's unique to you. So you can test your blood sugar, have the cup of coffee, half an hour later, check your blood sugar again. Those numbers should be equal.
48:34 Steven Bartlett? Okay, so for most people, coffee should be fine when they're fasting.
48:36 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yes.
48:36 Steven Bartlett? But there's a couple of anomalies who their blood sugar does spike.
48:40 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yes.
48:41 Steven Bartlett? Um, which means that they're not gonna switch over to the fasted state?
48:44 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yes. Yes, exactly. And, you know, coffee made, creamers, those can be a little more problematic. But some people put full fat cream in there with no sugar. Some people put MCT oil in there. You know, the buttered coffee became very, very common. And that was because of the fasting movement. So. The reason they did that was because when you put a fat in your coffee, you stabilize your blood sugar. And so you were able to stay in the fasted state and switch over.
49:17 Steven Bartlett? I had Glucose Goddess on the podcast who, Jessie, she talks a lot about glucose spikes. It was the first time my eyes were really open to the consequence of living a life where your glucose levels are spiking and crashing and spiking and crashing. And I've invested in this company called Zoe where they give you a glucose monitor, which I attached my arm for 14 days as part of the initial test. And then they give me this big sort of nutrition plan and profile. And that was the first time I got to see, and I was in America at the time, I was in LA for a couple of months. And I, in LA, I mean, I pulled up at a gas station and I was, it's funny, I was walking through this gas station and everything in there was sugar. It's because, because now I was looking.
49:53 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Right.
49:53 Steven Bartlett? Now I had my eyes open because I'm wearing this bloody monitor.
49:55 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
49:55 Steven Bartlett? So I'm about to see the impact within minutes that it has on my body. And I was just looking around thinking, oh, my God. The only thing that I can see in this whole store that I can eat without spiking my glucose is water.
50:08 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So is it a monitor where you can see it, you can scan it?
50:11 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, yeah. So, so they've got two.
50:12 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Game changer.
50:13 Steven Bartlett? Yeah. So they've got two, one of them, you scan the new one they've got, it's automatic.
50:17 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
50:17 Steven Bartlett? Via Bluetooth. So it just keeps constantly updating on your phone.
50:21 Dr. Mindy Pelz? I honestly think we could dramatically change the health of the world if everybody put one of those on.
50:29 Steven Bartlett? Amen. Amen.
50:31 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Because then what you would do is you would just go, because you know, this is like coffee, like you should, it should be so simple for me just to say, yes, drink your coffee, you're fine. But your microbiome in your gut is going to determine what it does with whatever hits that. So it's going to determine your blood sugar levels. Your microbiome, my microbiome, completely different. So food no longer is a one size fits all. There's an individual approach. So you have to know what your blood sugar is doing. You know, like when I eat, believe it or not, when I eat a grass fed steak, my blood sugar goes down. It's amazing.
51:04 Steven Bartlett? Wow.
51:05 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So whereas other people eat a steak and their blood sugar goes super high. And so then again, you go to a thread of this conversation, which is how do we help humanity?
51:17 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
51:18 Dr. Mindy Pelz? And humanity wants the one size fits all. I can't give you that.
51:22 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
51:22 Dr. Mindy Pelz? You're gonna have to learn your own. You gotta learn you. And something like that teaches you you. But you're gonna have to become very curious about you. Like you are. And what's really fun to me when you put one of those things on, it's my favorite thing to do with patients. Is I say, just eat normal, just eat everything.
51:41 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
51:42 Dr. Mindy Pelz? And then, and then every day I have them send me their readings and we just talk it through. I, I just did this with a beautiful patient that I've been working with, who has a long history of eating disorders. And she was counting calories and really wanted the control of being able to keep her weight where she was, where, where it needed to be. And I said, hey, you can count calories if you want, but I just want you to stick this monitor on and let's just eat and let's see what you're doing. And she was vegan and, and this isn't a, this isn't an anti-vegan conversation, but her spikes were up and down and up and down. Like there was like eight of them a day. And her moods followed those spikes too. And so then we started to go, okay, well, let's add a protein here. Could we add fat here? Could we add some more fiber here?
52:27 Dr. Mindy Pelz? And she got to watch for herself and within four weeks, she was free of any food control. And she was off teaching everybody else. It was so beautiful to watch.
52:38 Steven Bartlett? That calorie counting point though. There's a, there's a big school of thought that in order to lose weight and be healthy, all you've got to do is count those calories.
52:47 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah. You know, there's something called a set point. Have you heard about the set point?
52:51 Steven Bartlett? Which is the amount of calories that I need to consume in order to hit my.
52:54 Dr. Mindy Pelz? That's right. So we all have a set point. If you're gonna go down the calorie path, you, you have to understand you have a set point. And the set point is there's a, how much calories coming in and how much calories going out? What's the delta of that? And that will keep you at whatever weight you want to be. So let's use an example. You eat fifteen hundred calories a day, you exercise five hundred, you have a delta of a thousand. So if you want to keep your weight where it's at, you always have to do a thousand calories every single day.
53:26 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
53:26 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Okay. Well, what happens on the days you decide not to work out? So now you have five hundred extra calories that your body's not used to. And so what does it do with those calories? Stores it. So then you all of a sudden start noticing you're gaining weight and you don't really understand why. So you're like, well, let me count, I need to restrict calories.
53:44 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
53:44 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So then you start eating maybe, I mean, I have.
53:47 Steven Bartlett? Five hundred less.
53:47 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah. And then you bring the set point down. Well, that's your new, that's your new set point. You're gonna have to stay at that set point now if you don't ever wanna gain another pound.
53:58 Dr. Mindy Pelz? You see the game?
53:59 Steven Bartlett? Oh, okay, so my set point is moving the crafty.
54:01 Dr. Mindy Pelz? It moves. Because as you restrict and you, if as food restriction goes down and energy output goes up, your set point goes down and now you're like, I feel great. But you can't leave from that set point. You're gonna always have to make sure that that set point is a thousand calories or eight hundred calories.
54:19 Steven Bartlett? So I was told, I mean, this is the school of thought, that I have to have, for me as a male that has my weight, two thousand calories a day. And then if I'm under two thousand calories a day, then I'll lose weight. That's what I was told.
54:31 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah. So you go, now you go to fifteen hundred calories. You drop weight.
54:35 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, to lose the weight.
54:36 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yep, you go back up to two thousand. And for most people, they start to gain weight again.
54:41 Steven Bartlett? Ah, because my, my set point has moved. So now it's one thousand five hundred.
54:45 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
54:45 Steven Bartlett? To maintain my weight.
54:46 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah. Which is why, if you think about it, have we, have we ever seen a calorie restriction diet work long term?
54:53 Steven Bartlett? No.
54:54 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Right.
54:54 Steven Bartlett? I haven't. Long term being the key word there.
54:57 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah. It's short term, it, it works great. But this is why I'm such a fan of metabolic switching. How about we watch blood sugar? We put a monitor like you're talking. Let's put a monitor on so that you keep your blood sugar spikes minimal. It's like what I did with this woman. Is I was like, let's, can we have two, two spikes in a day, not eight? And we just keep your blood sugar at a, at a, at a low level so that when you're not eating, you can switch over and now you can burn fat in the fat burning energy system. So metabolic switching is where you're keeping your blood sugar at a stable place. It's not got all these spikes all over the place. So that when it starts to go down, the body's gonna wanna switch over and it can start to burn fat in the, in, and use that other energy system.
55:40 Steven Bartlett? What do you think our relationship should be with sugar?
55:43 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Hmm. Well, you know, there's only twelve percent of Americans that are metabolically healthy.
55:51 Dr. Mindy Pelz? That means that they have the right blood pressure, the right cholesterol, that their hemoglobin A1C, their insulin, all those metabolic markers are in balance. Only 12% of Americans have that right. That is a huge problem. And that is largely because we're addicted to sugar. So what's the consequence of poor metabolic health? Obesity, cancer, heart disease, mental health challenges. I mean, you name it. Every chronic disease on the planet at the root has a metabolic thread.
56:30 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Now, I hate to bring back a really traumatic topic, but during COVID, when we looked at the people that fell prey to COVID, this is no disrespect. They were metabolically unhealthy. And the people that had less COVID symptoms were the ones that were more metabolically healthy in general. So, and largely because the virus could really replicate if you had a lot of glucose in your system. So the consequence is huge. And the healthcare consequence, the amount of money we pay trying to help everybody put their health back together because they're metabolically unhealthy.
57:13 Dr. Mindy Pelz? If we just started with metabolic health, we would change everything.
57:16 Steven Bartlett? And metabolic health, people think of metabolic health often as being, you know, I'm in good superficial shape, I'd like to think. But that's not metabolic health. You could be, I'm guessing you can be metabolically unhealthy, but also have abs.
57:35 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Oh, oh, yeah. You could, this woman I was telling you about with all the spikes, she was, she's actually a model and an actress.
57:43 Steven Bartlett? Oh, wow.
57:44 Dr. Mindy Pelz? That, that is beautiful. And we had to go back in and really work with getting her metabolically healthy. So, yeah, you, we call it skinny fat. You look, you look skinny on the outside, but you're dealing with excess sugar on the inside that is putting fat around your liver, putting fat in other areas.
58:03 Steven Bartlett? I think a lot of people can relate to that skinny fat concept.
58:05 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah, yeah. So it's, it's a major, major issue. And, and you know, we can look at different things like hemoglobin A1C. It's a marker in the blood. Everybody gets it tested every year when they go to their doctor. It should be under five. If it's not under five, what's happening is all that extra sugar is going around your red blood cells and your red blood cells carry oxygen to your body. So they're gummed up with sugar so they can't deliver things, oxygen to the brain, to your eyes, to your muscle. So you're not getting oxygenated because of the sugar just gumming up these red blood cells.
58:40 Steven Bartlett? In chapter one of your book, you talk about this metabolic health crisis in great detail. You share some stats which I pulled out, which I thought were terrifying. It's page four of your book. You say, according to the CDC, forty-one percent of women and twenty-one and older are obese. Forty-five percent have high blood pressure. Out of two, one out of two will develop cancer in their lifetimes. One out of five will develop Alzheimer's. One out of nine will get type two diabetes. One out of eight will develop a thyroid problem. And eighty percent of all autoimmune conditions occur in women. Why is that, that last one? Eighty percent of all autoimmune conditions occur in women?
59:25 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah, so autoimmunity is a really interesting one. And if you look at what an autoimmune condition is, it's the body attacking itself. And so when we look at where toxins go, we're back at the toxins. Hashimoto's. Why is the body attacking the thyroid? There's something there that needs to get out. So it's usually a toxic issue. So the body's attacking the thyroid. When we look at RA in joints, there's toxins in there, body's attacking that. So it's happening more to women largely because, well, this is, this could go dark real fast, but largely because we have so many influences that are affecting our hormones.
1:00:09 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So the best way I can explain this is something I call the hormonal hierarchy, where our sex hormones are going to be completely thrown off by insulin. So when you get insulin resistant, your sex hormones are off. And insulin is gonna be so impacted by cortisol. So when you're stressed all the time, you're gonna be insulin resistant. And when you're insulin resistant, you're gonna have trouble balancing estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone. But at the top of the hierarchy is oxytocin. And oxytocin is that, we're getting oxytocin right now, just from connecting with each other. And it'll calm, start to calm cortisol down. And then when it calms cortisol down, you can be more insulin sensitive.
1:00:51 Dr. Mindy Pelz? And when you can be more insulin sensitive, now your sex hormones can balance better. So we need that hierarchy as women to be in balance, in order for our bodies to be in balance. But what do we have women doing right now? We have poor diet, lots of stress, and our sex hormones are way off.
1:01:11 Steven Bartlett? Sugar.
1:01:12 Dr. Mindy Pelz? And sugar. You're going after the sugar.
1:01:14 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:01:15 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So women are perishing within this modern world more than men. So we've gotta help a woman bring back more insulin sensitivity. We gotta get her doing better stress management. And when we do that, now the immune system can regulate. Now the immune system can calm down and stop being so hyperactive, attacking all the toxins that are in the body. So it's very complex.
1:01:42 Steven Bartlett? Does that imply that women and men have a different relationship with stress?
1:01:45 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. We're not, I, okay, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna be as bold as to say this. And I know all my feminist women out there are not gonna like this. And I was raised by a strong woman. I am a strong woman. I've raised another strong woman. And I have to tell you that we are not meant to handle the stress loads as well as men. And that's largely because of two hormones. So estrogen makes us very outward, makes us very much an extrovert. And we can handle a lot of stress when estrogen is present in our body. But progesterone, she can't handle stress at all.
1:02:28 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So progesterone will start to diminish as cortisol goes up. I always say, when cortisol goes high, progesterone becomes shy. So now, I mean, the number of women, since Fast Like a Girl came out, that I have heard from, the 20 and 30-year-olds that have no cycle, none.
1:02:48 Dr. Mindy Pelz? That is because they're insulin resistant, they're more stressed, progesterone's not making her appearance, so there's no shed of the uterine lining. That is absolutely a stress issue. And not having a period for a woman is a major problem because that's how we detox. That's how we get these hormones out of us. So if you're not having a cycle, you're not getting rid of estrogen, you're not getting rid of so many toxins and it's just staying inside of you. That's, that's a major problem.
1:03:20 Steven Bartlett? Controversial idea, but it rings true for a lot of people.
1:03:24 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
1:03:24 Steven Bartlett? And I know this because I've had women very close to me in my life talk to me about this exact thing and specifically not having their menstrual cycle and then focusing on the stresses in their life and then
1:03:39 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Comes back.
1:03:40 Steven Bartlett? Their menstrual cycle coming back. People very, very close to me, in fact, that I've, I've struggled with because of this exact challenge.
1:03:47 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yep.
1:03:49 Steven Bartlett? It is a controversial idea though, isn't it? It's a, it's slightly problematic as an idea. Is there any scientific basis for that idea?
1:04:00 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Well, we know based off science that when cortisol goes up, progesterone goes down.
1:04:04 Steven Bartlett? Cortisol is the stress hormone.
1:04:06 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah. So when you're under stress, cortisol goes up. And so if you're, let's say it's the week before your period. That's when you're supposed to have the most amount of progesterone. If, it doesn't matter if you're trying to run a marathon, doesn't matter if you have a work deadline, doesn't matter if you're skimping on sleep, as long as cortisol is going up, progesterone's not going to make her appearance. And if she doesn't make her appearance, then the uterine lining won't shed. That's, that's been proven over and over. Every hormone expert would agree, multiple studies. But women don't realize that. So we, if there's ever a time to mind your stress, it's the week before your period, which is why you don't fast the week before your period. Because that's a, that's a bit of a stressor.
1:04:46 Dr. Mindy Pelz? It's why you shouldn't train for, you know, a big Spartan race or a CrossFitting event or run a marathon. You should be doing more yoga and recovery the week before your period. This is why we should prioritize sleep the week before our periods because we don't want cortisol up. So in an interesting world, this is sort of the vision I have for women right now, is what if there is this moment where the week before our period, we have the capability of maybe not working as hard. Like Spain, they're giving a three-day menstrual leave to women.
1:05:23 Dr. Mindy Pelz? They, with no questions asked.
1:05:25 Steven Bartlett? Before the, before the period?
1:05:27 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Well, it's no questions asked. They anticipated it, that women would use it the first three days of her period, but a woman can use it anytime. I say, use it the three days before your cycle is supposed to come.
1:05:41 Steven Bartlett? Interesting. Have you shared this idea before publicly?
1:05:45 Dr. Mindy Pelz? I've, on several podcasts, I've talked about it. I had a great interview with Kate Northrup on my podcast, and she's an entrepreneur, and she actually maps her whole business cycle around her menstrual cycle. And so we had a beautiful conversation about this. And she said that she doesn't do as many Zoom calls. She tells her team that she's gonna take, get off work a little bit earlier on those days. She slows everything down. Her workload goes dramatically down. And she said what ended up happening is that when her period started, her productivity went up. So see, when estrogen comes in, on, on starting day one, day two of our menstrual cycles,
1:06:27 Dr. Mindy Pelz? estrogen makes us really mentally clear, makes us very verbal. Estrogen's an incredible hormone for productivity. But if you aren't minding that back half of your cycle, and you're not slowing down then, then you're coming into your period and you're having, you hear so many women who are like, "Oh, I'm cramping, I'm bleeding a lot, it's really painful." That's because you didn't mind the back half of your cycle.
1:06:52 Steven Bartlett? And what's the sort of evolutionary basis for all of this? Why is the body doing this? Why is the body not gonna give us our periods? I mean, listen, I don't have a period, but I have a version of it, right? I'm sure men have some kind of-
1:07:04 Dr. Mindy Pelz? You guys, you guys have, you work off a 24-hour cycle.
1:07:07 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
1:07:07 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So every 15 minutes, you get testosterone.
1:07:10 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
1:07:11 Dr. Mindy Pelz? You know we joke about that, right?
1:07:13 Steven Bartlett? What are you saying? You joke behind our backs?
1:07:16 Dr. Mindy Pelz? That kind of.
1:07:17 Steven Bartlett? What'd you say?
1:07:17 Dr. Mindy Pelz? The joke is like, if you don't like what your husband's saying, just ask him in 15 minutes. He might say something different.
1:07:23 Steven Bartlett? That's what you've been saying.
1:07:25 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Just letting you in on what might be going on behind the scenes.
1:07:28 Steven Bartlett? Okay, so what is the evolutionary basis for why, why that is true?
1:07:35 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So think about the ads, let's go back to our primal days. So, you know, testosterone is meant to have you go out and hunt. It's some very motivating, it's you get it every 15 minutes. So, you know, God, this sounds, as I'm saying it, sounds so sexist. But when we look at the body, this is actually how we're built. So you were, your body was driven to go hunt and go find and go achieve. That's the number one hormone that it works off of. For the women, what are, we are meant to be more outgoing before ovulation. Okay, why is that?
1:08:12 Steven Bartlett? Oh.
1:08:13 Dr. Mindy Pelz? We need to connect. We need to start to feel that, that mental clarity. You know, estrogen makes your hair really like full and your skin really glow. And it starts to make us more beautiful, all leading up to, to ovulation. Once ovulation hits, now we have estrogen at our peak. We have a little bit of testosterone and we have a little bit of progesterone. Okay, well, why is that? Because now we, our libido's up, we're motivated to reproduce. We're looking beautiful because we have so much estrogen going through our body. We're verbal, we can connect and we have progesterone to keep us calm. So we're supposed to reproduce when ovulation hits.
1:08:54 Dr. Mindy Pelz? And then the back half, technically, we would be, have a fertilized egg and we would be winding down. And if we didn't get a fertilized egg, then we're supposed to relax. So we can go back and do the extroverted piece of ourselves in the front half of our cycle. So it's all based off of reproduction.
1:09:14 Steven Bartlett? So I need some advice then, because I'm in a relationship and I want to understand. I guess this goes both ways. I want my girlfriend to understand how hormones are influencing my behavior.
1:09:23 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
1:09:23 Steven Bartlett? And I want to know how hormones are influencing her behavior.
1:09:26 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yep.
1:09:26 Steven Bartlett? What advice have you got for me?
1:09:28 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Well, the first is, do you know her cycle?
1:09:34 Steven Bartlett? Moving on, we're gonna talk about sugar again.
1:09:36 Dr. Mindy Pelz? No, no, this is too good.
1:09:40 Steven Bartlett? So sugar, it's really bad, isn't it? Who's to blame?
1:09:43 Dr. Mindy Pelz? No, seriously, no.
1:09:44 Steven Bartlett? Tell me about your childhood.
1:09:47 Dr. Mindy Pelz? No, get to know her cycle. I'm gonna give you, I'm gonna give you gold right now. Let me give you gold. Okay, so day one of her cycle, day one to day 10, she's building estrogen. First couple of days of her cycle, just let her be. Like she, you know, that she's transitioning out of the back half of her cycle. She might be having some heavier bleeding. You know, she's moving into that extroverted place. So the first two days, give her some space. Now, day three, estrogen's starting to build. So you're gonna notice she's more verbal, she's gonna be more present. She might feel more outgoing, she's gonna feel like she wants to connect with you. That's gonna go all the way through ovulation, like in the middle of ovulation,
1:10:28 Dr. Mindy Pelz? which is about day 12, day 13, where all of a sudden estrogen's at its peak. If you have any conflict you want to resolve with her, do it between like day two and day 12 of her cycle. She's gonna be so ready to handle any conflict with you.
1:10:44 Steven Bartlett? Between, let me write that down. Day, day two and day 12.
1:10:48 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Day, day two, like literally.
1:10:50 Steven Bartlett? That's when I pick my battles.
1:10:51 Dr. Mindy Pelz? I had a, I had a dad come to me and tell me that he was struggling to understand his teenage daughter. And I said, well, do you know her cycle? And he's like, no, I don't. I said, well, you would never, ever bring a conflict to her on day 18 or 19 of her cycle. Bring it to her on day 10, and now she's gonna talk to you.
1:11:11 Steven Bartlett? I'm gonna say something which is really embarrassing here. I know nothing about menstrual cycles. At no point in my life did anybody teach me about menstrual cycles. The only insight I have in my life to what a menstrual cycle is, is overhearing my sister when I was younger. Talking about it.
1:11:28 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
1:11:28 Steven Bartlett? And when I say overhearing, I mean, maybe a sentence. And then maybe my girlfriend, once in a while, she'll say, oh, I'm coming into my cycle or whatever. She'll say I'm on my period. That's for most men, that's in fact, the extent of the education we have about the female reproductive menstrual cycles.
1:11:44 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yep.
1:11:45 Steven Bartlett? So talk to me like I'm an idiot about the menstrual cycle.
1:11:47 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
1:11:48 Steven Bartlett? How long is it?
1:11:50 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Oh, I love this. And you know that most women don't know.
1:11:53 Steven Bartlett? Oh, really?
1:11:53 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So, I mean, most women are ignorant to their own cycles. So it's 28 days, anywhere from 28 days to 32. Every woman has a different length.
1:12:01 Steven Bartlett? Okay, and what day does the period come on?
1:12:03 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Day one, so day one is the first day she bleeds.
1:12:06 Steven Bartlett? Okay, then how long, that lasts for what, seven days?
1:12:08 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Everyone's different, anywhere from three to seven days.
1:12:11 Steven Bartlett? Okay, so day, you said day, between day two and 12 is when to?
1:12:16 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
1:12:16 Steven Bartlett? Pick my battles?
1:12:17 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yes, so day two, you're gonna start to see her be, emerge a little more gregarious. She may be a little more outgoing. So, I mean, as you get closer to day 12, you wanna go party with her, you wanna take her out, make her feel good. Like, that's the time to wine and dine her.
1:12:32 Steven Bartlett? Okay, cool, we'll put all the dates then and all the fights. And then after day 12, what am I doing?
1:12:36 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Then after day 12, okay, so day 12 is right when she's ovulating. So you're gonna have to choose your battle there, but ovulation occurs for most women between day 10 and day 15. There's a small little five day window there. That's if, this is, when I, once I figured this out, I was like, why don't, why don't men know this? That's when she's gonna be, her libido's gonna be the highest.
1:12:59 Steven Bartlett? Okay, so we're having sex.
1:13:00 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yes, so if you wanna have sex with her.
1:13:02 Steven Bartlett? I'm just writing this down.
1:13:03 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yes.
1:13:03 Steven Bartlett? Have sex with her around that time.
1:13:05 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Around that time.
1:13:06 Steven Bartlett? If she's willing.
1:13:07 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah, she's gonna be more motivated, because she has testosterone, she's gonna feel more like it.
1:13:11 Steven Bartlett? Okay, then after she finishes ovulating after day 15?
1:13:13 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah, so then there's gonna be a crash of hormones, you might see a change in her personality, she might feel a little low.
1:13:18 Steven Bartlett? Go stay in a hotel.
1:13:22 Dr. Mindy Pelz? But you could ask, you know, like if she's having a bummer day, like or a low day, ask her, do you know what day of your cycle are you on?
1:13:28 Steven Bartlett? Be really nice.
1:13:29 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Be really nice.
1:13:30 Steven Bartlett? Really nice.
1:13:31 Dr. Mindy Pelz? And then here's the gold, here's gold, this is so good. You're gonna have to report back to me how this works.
1:13:35 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
1:13:36 Dr. Mindy Pelz? When around day seventeen or eighteen progesterone's coming in. This is where you gotta give her foot rubs. You gotta be extra special and cater her like, like she's the queen that she deserves to be.
1:13:48 Steven Bartlett? Okay, so all my compliments, that's where I
1:13:50 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yes.
1:13:50 Steven Bartlett? Pull out the notepad.
1:13:51 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yes. But what you need to know is she's probably gonna be like, if you're like, oh, you look so beautiful today. She might at that time be like, no, I feel horrible, I'm bloated, I'm, I don't feel beautiful, but
1:14:02 Steven Bartlett? And I should disagree. I should say, no, you, no, you, you're, no, you don't, you look amazing. Okay, cool.
1:14:07 Dr. Mindy Pelz? And you do that till she bleeds. And you can take amazing care of her in the ba, the week before her period and you will get kudos like you, you can't even imagine.
1:14:16 Steven Bartlett? And then start it all over again.
1:14:17 Dr. Mindy Pelz? And then start it all over again.
1:14:18 Steven Bartlett? Got you.
1:14:19 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah, I mean, just once you understand our patterns. And then it also helps you understand that we're gonna be more outgoing in the front half of our cycle. We're gonna be more introverted in the back half.
1:14:28 Steven Bartlett? What about men?
1:14:30 Dr. Mindy Pelz? You guys, every fifteen minutes, you, you're pretty, you're pretty black and white.
1:14:35 Steven Bartlett? Really?
1:14:35 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah, you're pretty straightforward.
1:14:38 Steven Bartlett? So if she was asking you the same question about me, would you say anything to her about my hormone cycles at all? You'd, you'd just say?
1:14:43 Dr. Mindy Pelz? What, it, it really depends on the issue at hand. So if it's a mismatch of libido, then the best time to have sex with a woman is during ovulation.
1:14:55 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
1:14:55 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Because she has the most amount of testosterone.
1:14:57 Steven Bartlett? Day ten to fifteen of her cycle.
1:14:58 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
1:14:59 Steven Bartlett? It would be really handy, wouldn't it, just to have a little menstrual cycle chart on the wall at home? I know that sounds a bit strange, but just so I know
1:15:07 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
1:15:07 Steven Bartlett? what's going on inside her body.
1:15:09 Dr. Mindy Pelz? I, the first time I discovered this, I started using an app called the Clue app.
1:15:13 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:15:13 Dr. Mindy Pelz? And it shows you in a circle, it kind of shows a little cloud and then it shows you where her PMS clicks in. And it actually has a button that you can share it with people in your life. And I thought, not only does my husband need this, but my staff needs this. They need to understand where I'm going. And what if all the women on my, on my team actually shared it with each other? And we could see where each other was at in the menstrual cycle. We would understand why a woman's moods can be so up and down. It's really, you know, because of these three hormones, our moods are much more volatile than yours. You guys are pretty steady Eddie. We're, and this is general, you know, this is, I hate
1:15:54 Dr. Mindy Pelz? to be sexist in this conversation, but this is hormones and the way they work.
1:16:00 Steven Bartlett? It's actually really helpful to know this because without this insight, it's very easy to fall into the trap of just assuming your partner is moody, or that they are, they have like mood swings, or that they're, you know, people say things like they're too emotional, or they're, whatever it might be. But with this, I actually think it creates a ton of empathy.
1:16:22 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
1:16:22 Steven Bartlett? That's certainly the reaction that I get from hearing that. There's a, there's significant hormone fluctuations in my partner, and they happen at certain periods. It actually now would change my behavior, the way that I receive certain times where I come home, or I'm, I notice that my, my, my partner's just different.
1:16:40 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yep.
1:16:40 Steven Bartlett? And it's almost, it catches me off guard sometimes. I've actually, we've spoken a lot about this, and we're very open. We're, we're very much the same person in terms of our willingness to talk about everything, and very difficult things as well.
1:16:52 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
1:16:52 Steven Bartlett? And there will be times where I come home, or we go through a patch where just a week, you know, things are making her upset, which wouldn't normally make her upset. Tiny things that I'm doing. And I go, I go, what?
1:17:07 Dr. Mindy Pelz? That's it!
1:17:08 Steven Bartlett? Like, yeah, you know.
1:17:09 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So see if you can track that to a certain part of her cycle.
1:17:12 Steven Bartlett? Oh, I'm getting it.
1:17:12 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So like, the week before our period, we're pretty, we're irritable. And every time I say that, men go, well, you said it. I didn't say it. Well, but that's because progesterone, you know, we're meant to be more inner. We're meant to sit on the couch. We're also meant, believe it or not, glucose goes higher the week before our period. So we crave carbs. There's a reason we crave carbs, because we need to bring glucose up to be able to make progesterone. So we crave carbs, we're irritable, we don't want a lot of cortisol, so generally we're a little bit slower. We don't wanna, you know, we don't have the desire to push through stress and push through exercise. And so we're gonna be, we're a little, we're different that week. Where, so if you come up and you just put your hand on our shoulder
1:17:55 Dr. Mindy Pelz? and you're like, I love you, you're amazing, I'm here if you need anything.
1:17:59 Steven Bartlett? Hmm.
1:18:00 Dr. Mindy Pelz? That's all you gotta do. But if you're trying to resolve a big conflict, or you're trying to come at us in, in too aggressive a way, we will shut down the week before our periods.
1:18:11 Steven Bartlett? So interesting.
1:18:13 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Whereas if you have something you wanna resolve with us, make sure estrogen's there, because estrogen makes us great, great verbal, our verbal skills are incredible when estrogen's around. Ask any menopausal woman, she'll tell you what it's like when she loses estrogen.
1:18:27 Steven Bartlett? And I have to say, this is because, you know, women have this incredible power to create life.
1:18:34 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
1:18:34 Steven Bartlett? That us men don't have. It's like, women are superheroes for being able to carry a baby for significant amounts of time and then give birth to this baby. It's just the most magical thing that I can think of in existence. And women have that superpower, and with that comes this cycle.
1:18:50 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yep.
1:18:50 Steven Bartlett? So it's a wonderful thing.
1:18:53 Dr. Mindy Pelz? It's beautiful. And in, in the book, I called it the manifestation phase, ovulation, because when all of those hormones come in, we can manifest anything we want. But it's not just a baby. This is a great time, ovulation's an amazing time to start a new business project.
1:19:12 Steven Bartlett? Hmm, interesting.
1:19:13 Dr. Mindy Pelz? It's a great time, like, as an author, like, I'm gonna write during those five days, cuz my creativity is gonna be at its peak. So we're highly creative. If you wanna, like, you know, talk about something about life and how to create something with us, do it during ovulation.
1:19:30 Steven Bartlett? Your husband. Is behind that wall. Here in my home. And is he aware of your menstrual cycle?
1:19:39 Dr. Mindy Pelz? He is until I started to lose it. I'm fifty three, so I'm starting to go. But yeah, we talk like this all the time and the way I like to, I like to take ownership over my hormonal moods. So I will say to him, after a long day of work, I will say, hey, it's been a testosterone driven day for me. I don't feel like I have a lot of estrogen right now. I can't handle a lot of stress. I'm gonna need to just take some time to myself. We literally talk like that.
1:20:13 Steven Bartlett? We, um. Losing the menstrual cycle, we, the first time I started as a young man that hasn't been exposed to that at any point in my sort of, you know, in the education system or other. The first time I started to understand what menopause was and pre-menopause and perimenopause, all these things was from guests that have come here. And it's such a big, it was such a big lightbulb moment for me. Because I have women in my life that are going through that phase of life.
1:20:40 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
1:20:42 Steven Bartlett? I feel like they are so misunderstood in so many ways.
1:20:45 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Thank you.
1:20:45 Steven Bartlett? And I love hearing about it now because it's gonna help me relate to those women in a better way and have and understand how I can be a partner with them through that phase of life, like, you know, certain members of my family that are going through that phase of life. What do, what do we need to know as men, but also as women about menopause, perimenopause and all those things?
1:21:07 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah, thank you. Thank you for asking. I think that we're the most misunderstood age group of women and the forty five to fifty five year old in that decade is the most common time for women to commit suicide.
1:21:21 Steven Bartlett? Really?
1:21:22 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah. This is why my next book I'm writing right now is on the mental health of menopausal women, because we're struggling. And so, the first thing you have to know is that after forty, our sex hormones start to decline. So estrogen goes up and down. So, one day, you're gonna experience, if you have, if you live with a forty-three-year-old woman, you're gonna experience, she's great, next day, you're gonna be like, who are you? That's because her estrogen is on a roller coaster ride. So, that's the first thing to know. Second thing is that progesterone is plummeting after forty. They actually say now at thirty-five, progesterone is starting to go down. So, as progesterone goes down, we are less stress resilient.
1:22:04 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So, little things are gonna irritate us like they've never irritated us before. And you might be the recipient of that. So, if you find we're very triggerable, it's because we're losing progesterone. So, we need, we just need to have more breaks. We need more nurturing, like I explained in the menstrual cycle. We need to have more love brought our way, because we just can't handle stress the same way. And then, as, as ultimately estrogen finally goes into a place where she's nonexistent, once a woman doesn't have her cycle, we can't hold on to information the way, the same way we used to be able to. We forget things. And it's really frustrating to us.
1:22:45 Dr. Mindy Pelz? And so, when people around us, like I went through this with my team, when I was trying to get my menopausal hormones in check, they would say, well, you already told us that. Yes, you reminded us of that. And I started finding I was repeating myself. And then, I realized, oh, I'm at a new level of low of estrogen. And then, I worked, you know, getting, I'm working with some bio-identicals, working with some lifestyle to bring my estrogen up. But from forty till about fifty-five, that is about a ten to fifteen-year period where the woman's brain has to recalibrate to these loss of hormones. And so, our moods are all over the place during that time.
1:23:27 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So, understanding where we're at, having more compassion for us, not taking us on, and just helping us understand ourselves, which is largely what I'm trying to do through my books, is will be so helpful. But, we don't even understand our own selves. Menopausal moods are treacherous. It's an extreme sport.
1:23:50 Dr. Mindy Pelz? It literally is an extreme sport. It's brutal.
1:23:52 Steven Bartlett? What about after forty five? She said forty to forty five.
1:23:55 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah, so once we actually go a whole year without a period, we actually do better. So the brain is used to the less hormones. So when we get on the other side, postmenopausal, we actually are great. We're women that, once they go to that side of the hormonal process, tend to actually be, you know, we have so much wisdom, I'd like to think. We actually tend to be the opposite of everything I just said. We tend to be more stressed. We can handle stress better. We tend to be more gregarious. Our libido goes back up. As our brain starts to recalibrate, we become a better version of ourselves.
1:24:36 Steven Bartlett? And that's that first phase, that forty to forty five phase. What's that phase called? Is that the?
1:24:40 Dr. Mindy Pelz? That's perimenopause.
1:24:40 Steven Bartlett? Perimenopause. And then menopause is beyond forty five.
1:24:43 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah, the average age for menopause right now is about fifty two, although a lot of women are going in around forty five, sometimes earlier.
1:24:52 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
1:24:53 Dr. Mindy Pelz? But but I think that if there was one thing I want, I could help the world understand is that we're trying to understand ourselves during that time. So be patient with us. Because we may not, we may react much different than you've ever seen us react before. So we have to get to know ourselves from a new lens. That's the gift that menopause actually gives us. And if you allow us to do that, when we make it through to the postmenopausal years, you're going to have a beautiful, wise, wonderful woman on the other side of that. It's just that transition into perimenopause is really a treacherous one.
1:25:35 Steven Bartlett? It's so interesting. It's so, I find it staggering that no one told me this at any point in my life.
1:25:40 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Agreed.
1:25:41 Steven Bartlett? Because irrespective of whether you are a woman or not, and you're going to go through that, you're going to, your relationships with women are going to be integral to your life, unavoidably, your mother, your grandmother, your partner. So having the insight gives me the empathy.
1:25:58 Dr. Mindy Pelz? I love it.
1:25:59 Steven Bartlett? You know, and that's what, that's why I'm so fortunate from having this conversation. It was Gabby Logan who came on this podcast, Davina McCall, who wrote a book about menopause in the end. I knew that I've really helped to open my eyes about that. And.
1:26:11 Steven Bartlett? It's interesting. I just, I don't know what it is. I think growing up, like, men just don't want to talk about periods and menstrual cycles and all of these kinds of things. They're almost taboo.
1:26:19 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
1:26:19 Steven Bartlett? In a weird way.
1:26:20 Dr. Mindy Pelz? I call it, in the new book I'm writing, I'm calling it the cultural hush.
1:26:23 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:26:24 Dr. Mindy Pelz? I think we have a cultural hush around the menstrual cycle, around menopause. I can't tell you the number of men, since Fast Like a Girl that has come out, that read that book and they go to the chapter on women and hormones. And then they come and find me and say, I finally understand my wife.
1:26:41 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:26:42 Dr. Mindy Pelz? I finally understand my daughter. Well, why aren't we talking about that? And then how many women, we don't, we don't talk about like the fact that I'm, I'm suffering because I don't have as much estrogen. It would, we don't have a culture or a society that allows us to talk like that. And that's what I think is shifting right now. So many menopause books are coming out. Big people, you know, Oprah's starting to do a whole thing on menopause. Like, the conversation's opening up, but it's going to take bravery from women to step up. I mean, I'm a very, very capable woman who has a beautiful family and a great business. It's really hard for me to say, I can't do one more Zoom call. My brain can't do it. That feels like failure.
1:27:26 Dr. Mindy Pelz? And then we have the other side of this, which is we have the men that are like, why are you being a bitch today? It's like, because I don't have the hormones to stop me from being a bitch today. So those, those kind of conversations are not happening. But if we did it with more empathy, if we could express ourself like, hey, I just need, I need a break right now. It's just a lot on my hormones. Give me 30 minutes. Give me an hour. I can come back and be a better version. I just need to take care of myself now.
1:27:53 Steven Bartlett? Someone's going to be listening to this and they're going to think, ugh, it's not a problem. You can just go get the hormones. You can just go get some HRT. It's called HRT, right?
1:28:03 Dr. Mindy Pelz? HRT, yeah.
1:28:04 Steven Bartlett? You can go get some HRT, throw that at the problem, then you'll have your hormones back.
1:28:09 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah. So this is, this is the big thing, is that just because you take a hormone, doesn't mean your cells are going to use it. So if you take it, let's use, let's use thyroid. It's a perfect example because so many women specifically take thyroid medication and they don't see any, any, any change in their thyroid symptoms. It's called an exogenous hormone. You bring it into your body. The body registers that it's there. The gut and the liver have to still break that hormone down into a usable form. So if your gut is off or your liver is overloaded, you're not going to break that hormone down. Once that hormone's broken down, the cell has to be able to receive it.
1:28:50 Dr. Mindy Pelz? If that cell is inflamed with a lot of toxic oils and endocrine disruptors, there's no way to get the hormone into the cell. So there are three very pivotal pieces. You gotta, there has to be production of the hormone. There has to be breaking down of the hormone and there has to be receiving of the hormone. So when you take HRT, you're only handling one of those things. You still, and lifestyle, this is why I'm such a, so passionate about lifestyle. Lifestyle can handle the other two. They can take care of the gut and the liver. They can open up the cell so it can receive HRT. I, I've been, I wrote a book called The Menopause Reset and it'll come out and we're reissuing it in June. And one of the things in there is I, I mapped out five lifestyle changes that women should
1:29:35 Dr. Mindy Pelz? do after 40. And in that book, I lived that. I did that through my whole 40s. I didn't start doing bioidenticals till like 52, but I had my lifestyle dialed in first and now bioidenticals are working well.
1:29:51 Steven Bartlett? People are sat there going, five lifestyle changes?
1:29:54 Dr. Mindy Pelz? They want to know what they are.
1:29:55 Steven Bartlett? They're gonna, they're gonna buy the book as well, aren't we? We're gonna buy the book and we're gonna find out right now.
1:30:00 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yes, okay. Well, what do you think the first one is?
1:30:03 Steven Bartlett? Fasting.
1:30:04 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yes, there you go. The first one's fasting. So, and actually Fast Like a Girl came after The Menopause Reset because all the women asked me, well, what if I have a, you know, what if I'm in my 30s? What if in my, in my 20s, how should I fast? So that's, you know, that was sort of the birth of that book. So fasting. Second one is you have to learn to cycle your food. So you, ketogenic diet works really well. At certain times.
1:30:30 Steven Bartlett? Cycle your food.
1:30:32 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Cycle your food styles.
1:30:33 Steven Bartlett? What does that mean?
1:30:34 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So i- if in the front half, if you have a menstrual cycle.
1:30:38 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:30:38 Dr. Mindy Pelz? In the front half, when estrogen's coming in, go keto. Keep carbs low, keep glucose low, you're great. Back half of your cycle, when progesterone's coming in, raise glucose. So don't go keto. But do nature's carbs, do more fruits, do more squashes, potatoes, that's gonna help with building progesterone. So the perimenopausal woman has to learn that there's times to bring carbs down and there's times to bring carbs up. And that's what I explain in that, I called it keto variations in that book. So that's step two. Step three, microbiome. You gotta pay attention to your microbiome. Too many women have been on birth control for decades. They go screaming into their perimenopausal years and their microbiome is completely off.
1:31:23 Dr. Mindy Pelz? We have a whole set of bacteria in our gut called the oestrogolome, which is the bacteria that break estrogen down. So you need to be eating more leafy green vegetables, more nuts and seeds, olives. Chocolate even is great for the microbiome. So I list all those foods out in there. And then number.
1:31:40 Steven Bartlett? And that's for stage two of the three steps to act, these hormone replacement therapies actually working, which is being able to metabolize the hormone, break it down.
1:31:49 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yes, you got it.
1:31:50 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
1:31:51 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah, you got it. You're gonna be a hormone expert after this.
1:31:53 Steven Bartlett? Well, you know. Not just a pretty face.
1:31:55 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah, so then the fourth one is watch your toxic load. So we talked about that. And then step five is my favorite, um, and it's stop being a rushing woman. Yeah, I know, as I tell you from a rushing lifestyle. We need more, as we go through perimenopause, we need more, more downtime. You gotta schedule more downtime. You need to let that nervous system come down. You can't go through your perimenopausal years and thrive if you are go, go, go all the time. It will catch up with you. And so you've got to bring in more mindfulness, more meditation, more yoga, more, more vacations, more no's. That's gotta be a part of your repertoire.
1:32:37 Dr. Mindy Pelz? You might've gotten away with it at thirty five, but you won't get away with it at forty five.
1:32:43 Steven Bartlett? I was thinking then, as you're speaking, I was thinking about how I kind of summarize all of these points into how we should be living our lives as men and women. Because obviously, we've got dragged into a consumerist, workaholic, sugar overloaded, toxin ridden life because of, because we've been unconscious. You know, so that's the way that corporations and media narrative and social media algorithms have taken us. So I was thinking if we could just pause for a second and we could rewrite the blueprint of what it is to be a human and how to live, let's try and rewrite that. So how would I work as a man and a woman? What would be the differences? How many days a week?
1:33:27 Steven Bartlett? What if you, if you were in charge now of rewriting that, which you might be one day?
1:33:31 Dr. Mindy Pelz? I'd like to be.
1:33:32 Steven Bartlett? You'd like to be, okay, so you're taking on the responsibility. So how would men and women work?
1:33:37 Dr. Mindy Pelz? And you mean from a business?
1:33:38 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, like a professional standpoint.
1:33:40 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Okay, well, let's start with a man.
1:33:42 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:33:42 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So, well, both men and women, we have two nervous systems. One that speeds us up, one that relaxes, that slows us down. So you could be in a speed up mode most of the time. I would say you just need to make sure, I mean, it really, actually, I just thought about this right now. The patriarchal work week works really well for men. Monday through Friday, work your fanny off, Saturday, Sunday, take it off. Now you're, you're moving in and out of your parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system and you're giving both of them a break. You are not meant to be working 24/7, seven days a week. You know, like you're not meant to be working all the time and, and never taking a break.
1:34:26 Steven Bartlett? What would you make the work hours for a man?
1:34:28 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Well, I'm, I'm a big fan of working in the daylight and resting. We're supposed to rest when it's dark.
1:34:33 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
1:34:34 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So winter, you would work less, summer, you would work more.
1:34:37 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
1:34:38 Dr. Mindy Pelz? We do the opposite, right? We take more vacation in the summer.
1:34:41 Steven Bartlett? Women?
1:34:42 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So, women, we would design our whole work week around our menstrual cycle. So, we could go full tilt, all the way till day nineteen, day twenty, and then we would, we would take a week off. And we would bow out. So, instead of doing it in a weekly amount, like you guys would be doing, we'd be doing it in a monthly amount.
1:35:02 Steven Bartlett? And how long would you bow out for?
1:35:05 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Well, ideally, it depends on each woman's gonna be a little different, but I would say anywhere from, I wanna say seven days if it worked for a schedule until you bleed. So, day twenty till, you know, if you're, if day twenty-one till day twenty-eight, you would do it for a week. Bowing out might also look like I just am not gonna take on the, the high load that I normally do the rest of the month. Maybe I'll cut it in half.
1:35:32 Steven Bartlett? Mm-hmm. Maybe work from home, or?
1:35:34 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah. Maybe I work from home. Maybe I can't do my workload and my extreme exercise and go socialize with my friends during that week. I just need to start to slow everything down. So, that's what I, I wanna say about bowing out. Is that it's just you're putting yourself first and you're slowing everything down.
1:35:54 Steven Bartlett? Now, eating. Men and women, eating.
1:35:57 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah, so, men, um, I think as far as food, I agree with just keeping blood sugar stable is great. I think you guys really work well off of a meat-based and animal, uh, diet. I don't think you have more, you have more testosterone, which means you have more muscle. We, the way that we build muscle and keep muscle strong is through amino acids, and you get that in meat. So, for men, I feel like that primal diet, the paleo diet, was meat and vegetables and fruit is amazing. I think that's, that's perfect. I don't think refined flours and sugars, um, that we are exposed to. I think that over and in an overabundance, they'll hurt men too. And we're seeing that with metabolic syndrome. Women?
1:36:40 Dr. Mindy Pelz? We do well with meats, I you know, I think we need less of it because we have less testosterone. So we may need less of it, although it is important, protein is important, especially as we age. So I don't want to lose sight on that. Um, but we also need to bring glucose up, so we need more fruits. We're gonna need more squashes, we're gonna need more potatoes. And that's, you know, all built around your menstrual cycle.
1:37:03 Steven Bartlett? And eating times?
1:37:06 Dr. Mindy Pelz? I I'm I'm not a fan of eating when it's dark out because when melatonin goes up, insulin, you become more insulin resistant. So I'm a fan of.
1:37:15 Steven Bartlett? Which means what?
1:37:16 Dr. Mindy Pelz? It means you you so your your body won't process the glucose from that meal as efficiently when it's dark out.
1:37:23 Steven Bartlett? It won't take it away and store it where it needs to be stored as energy.
1:37:25 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Exactly.
1:37:26 Steven Bartlett? It will store it as fat or something?
1:37:27 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Uh, yeah, it's gonna store it as fat if it can't, if insulin can't drive it into the cell for inner energy, it'll store it as fat. So the meal you eat at nine thirty is gonna be stored more as fat than if you have that same meal at five thirty.
1:37:41 Dr. Mindy Pelz? I know.
1:37:41 Steven Bartlett? So night eaters aren't doing themselves any favors?
1:37:44 Dr. Mindy Pelz? No. So we go back to our primal friends, right? Like, let's go back and use that if if if people get lost in these theories. So they didn't have electricity, they sat around the fire. So the most likely they ate during light hours. And then the women, what did the women do? If we go back and look at cultures around our period, we were actually, that's the whole red tent ideas. We were sequestered off into another part of the of the tribe. We didn't have to do as many chores, we went more into an introverted place. If you go back and you study what we did in those days, it was very much along those lines. And we're just not doing that now.
1:38:25 Steven Bartlett? What about supplements? What supplements would you have men and women consuming?
1:38:30 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Uh, well, for women, the most important supplement she could ever take is magnesium. Magnesium makes every single hormone in your body. For men, I would say the most important supplement, I mean, there's a lot of them. Um, but for hormones is zinc, because zinc makes testosterone. Outside of that, for both men and women, the other supplement and the other measurement that we all need to be looking at are vitamin D levels.
1:38:56 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, I've learned this from guests on this podcast, I've started taking vitamin D supplements.
1:39:01 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah, if your vitamin D is under thirty, you are in a critically depressed immune state.
1:39:08 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah, so you gotta get it definitely over thirty. For hormonal health, we need to see it more up in about sixty, seventy to have your hormones be working at their best. So this, this goes back to like the HRT thing. If all, if we're taking HRT, but our vitamin D is twenty, that HRT isn't going to be as effective as, as compared to the woman who has an HRT of like fifty-five or sixty. Or a vitamin D of fifty-five or sixty, that HRT will work better.
1:39:37 Steven Bartlett? Interesting, and vitamin D comes from sunlight, doesn't it?
1:39:41 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Sunlight and sardines.
1:39:44 Steven Bartlett? Sardines.
1:39:45 Dr. Mindy Pelz? It's the food sources are really bad. This is why everybody's low in it. The food sources are, it's sardines, it's like really fatty fishes, um, and sunlight.
1:39:55 Steven Bartlett? And we spend most of our time indoors.
1:39:56 Dr. Mindy Pelz? That's right.
1:39:57 Steven Bartlett? We can't get it from this kind of light, right?
1:39:59 Dr. Mindy Pelz? No, no, and you have to be outside with your, like, skin exposed at the high point of the day of the sun, like twelve, one o'clock. To get the most vitamin D. And if you're in a city where there's more air pollution, study has shown that, that you're not gonna, the rays that come in that turn, uh, that will hit your skin and turn it into vitamin D or less because of air pollution blocks it. Which is why so many people are low in vitamin D, which is why taking vitamin D is a smart thing.
1:40:28 Steven Bartlett? Is that why people are doing these like infrareds saunas and stuff now? Does that produce vitamin D or is that something else?
1:40:33 Dr. Mindy Pelz? It's more detox.
1:40:34 Steven Bartlett? Oh, detox.
1:40:34 Dr. Mindy Pelz? It's pushing infrared sauna, it, what it does is it, uh, simulates a fever. So it burns things out from the inside of the cell out, which is why it's a really good detoxer.
1:40:46 Steven Bartlett? There's a few things you said when I was watching some of your YouTube videos that I wrote down that I found really compelling. One of them was you said about the importance of opening up our, our detox pathways, and you've just mentioned detoxing there. What do you mean by opening up our detox pathways?
1:41:00 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah, so if you look at our lymph system, each, the lymph is, is like, you know, people know lymph nodes because when you get sick, you can feel them.
1:41:08 Steven Bartlett? Mumps.
1:41:09 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
1:41:09 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:41:09 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So the lymph is always carrying toxins out of organs. So liver, the liver has a lymph pathway, the gut has lymph nodes in there that are gonna pull all the toxins that are in there and move them out of you. So we need to keep these lymph pathways open. So the gut, the gut's a great one. You should be having a bowel movement every single day. If you're not having a bowel movement every single day, then the, what, what the body's trying to get rid of is staying inside of you. And it gets congested. Um, a thing we teach women about the armpit, and, and actually would work for men too, is that you're, you should have a pit, not a puff.
1:41:47 Steven Bartlett? What does that mean?
1:41:48 Dr. Mindy Pelz? If it's a puff, like, look in the mirror, and if your armpit is a puff, then that's stagnant lymph. It means that you're not pulling the, the toxins for women that are coming out of her breasts are not getting out, toxins that are coming out from the head down into the, uh, into the thoracic areas not getting out because it's congested.
1:42:06 Steven Bartlett? So if your underarm is puffy and not like a pit?
1:42:10 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
1:42:11 Steven Bartlett? Then you might be storing some of those toxins?
1:42:13 Dr. Mindy Pelz? That's right.
1:42:14 Steven Bartlett? And?
1:42:15 Dr. Mindy Pelz? They're not moving, they're not mobilizing.
1:42:16 Steven Bartlett? Why aren't they? Am I blocking my pathways?
1:42:18 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah, the pathway's blocked, so.
1:42:20 Steven Bartlett? With what?
1:42:21 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Well, there's the question, yeah. With, I feel like people are gonna leave this podcast and be so depressed because there's so many pieces of this, but, uh, deodorant, deodorant clogs that up. And so it doesn't mobilize all of the toxins out. This was a big thing with breast cancer, is a lot of women using toxic deodorants. They weren't getting the toxins out of the breast, and it was clogging in the armpit because of the toxins from the deodorant.
1:42:45 Steven Bartlett? That explains why we sweat in that area, right?
1:42:48 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
1:42:49 Steven Bartlett? Because it's a pathway.
1:42:50 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Why do we even have hair in that area?
1:42:51 Steven Bartlett? I don't know, you tell me.
1:42:53 Dr. Mindy Pelz? It's a detox, it's for detoxing. It's to help get those toxins out.
1:42:57 Steven Bartlett? Oh, so the molecules go down the hair?
1:42:59 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah, yeah. And what do women do?
1:43:01 Steven Bartlett? Shave it off.
1:43:03 Dr. Mindy Pelz? That's right.
1:43:04 Steven Bartlett? So you're saying?
1:43:06 Dr. Mindy Pelz? I I I shave, I I'm I just because I don't, I can't walk, it's just not in my in my nature. But I, you know what I do is I have a loofah in my shower and I just loofah under my arms at whenever I shower to open up those pathways.
1:43:21 Steven Bartlett? What's a loofah?
1:43:22 Dr. Mindy Pelz? It's like a little organic sponge.
1:43:24 Steven Bartlett? Okay, it scrubs it.
1:43:25 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah, scrubs it.
1:43:26 Steven Bartlett? We also have pubic hair.
1:43:27 Dr. Mindy Pelz? We also have pubic hair. We are getting toxins out from the ovaries. The ovaries are the major area for and testes. This is where hormones are being produced. And so as they're coming out, they are supposed to influence our everything biologically, we need them to influence. But then they're also supposed to get out of our system. And so the hair ends up becoming like this way that we can mobilize the toxins out of us.
1:43:52 Steven Bartlett? I never want, I never knew or asked why I grow hair under my arms and in the pubic region. No one ever told me about that. No one ever, I never questioned it. I thought it was slightly inconvenient.
1:44:07 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yes, well, it is for sure.
1:44:09 Steven Bartlett? But the body doesn't do anything to inconvenience you. It does it to increase your chances of survival because I'm the byproduct of millions of years of survival of the fittest and evolution has made me pruned, a sculpted to survive. It's funny because we spend so much of our time, and this goes back to the conversation around sugar. We spend and just weight loss and all these things. We live in a world where we think that our body is against us.
1:44:34 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Right.
1:44:34 Steven Bartlett? It's fighting us, it's it's making me go for the sugar drawer, it's stopping me losing weight. It's growing all these pubes.
1:44:42 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Right. Inconvenient.
1:44:44 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then we fight it, so we shave it off and we, you know, do all these crazy things to fight against our body. But our body is very much, it's it's actually, it's actually for us. And many of the things we're choosing to do are against us. We are against ourselves, not our bodies. Our bodies cannot put a foot wrong.
1:45:02 Dr. Mindy Pelz? You got it. I mean, you got it. It's, this is what I'm trying to bring back is this, this respect for what the body's trying to do. That's what we're missing. We, we, it's all inconvenient. And it's everything from like, even like, weight gain. Why is your body gaining weight? Because it's so brilliant that it decided not to put that fat around your organs, it put it around your belly, and now you're looking in the mirror and you're villainizing it, but your body was trying to save your life in that moment. Like, everything the body is always doing for you, not against you. But we continually discredit what it's trying to do and manipulate it, which is why
1:45:46 Dr. Mindy Pelz? the best thing I can think of is that we're just in an evolutionary mismatch. We're just at, the modern world does not line up with the human body's design.
1:45:57 Steven Bartlett? Something really pissed me off this weekend. I was walking through, um, New York City and I saw a poster and it is for inject, weight loss injections.
1:46:07 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Hmm, yeah.
1:46:08 Steven Bartlett? Have you seen this?
1:46:09 Dr. Mindy Pelz? No, but Ozempic is a, is a drug that's really popular right now.
1:46:14 Steven Bartlett? There's a couple of drugs right now. There's, there's, one of my, my friends were talking about it and we were like, there's a diabetes drug, I think. And then headlines have been that so many people are taking this.
1:46:22 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
1:46:22 Steven Bartlett? Diabetes drug to lose weight, that people with diabetes are struggling. Um, there's another one called semaglutide?
1:46:30 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yep, yep.
1:46:32 Steven Bartlett? This is, this is people injecting things in their body to help them lose weight.
1:46:37 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yep.
1:46:38 Steven Bartlett? And the poster, which my friend had sent me, and I'd, I'd seen it earlier and then he'd sent me the poster as well in our group chat, says, "One shot a week, lose weight," and it has the little URL. Someone thankfully had actually ripped the URL off this billboard.
1:46:49 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Hmm.
1:46:50 Steven Bartlett? Um, what's your take on all this stuff?
1:46:52 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah, the, the, the new medications that are out there right now are creating a weight loss, uh, possibility, uh, when we look at the scale and when we look at how people feel when they put on their clothes. But it's at the expense of muscle. They're actually losing more muscle than they are losing fat. So, yes, you feel thinner, but it's not because you lost fat. You lost muscle. Muscle is the organ of longevity. If you lose muscle as you age, you are gonna be in a bad situation. I mean, we need muscle to get out of a chair.
1:47:27 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:47:28 Dr. Mindy Pelz? You need muscle to perform daily life functions. The other thing people don't realize about muscle is in muscle are insulin receptors. So if you lose muscle, you don't have as many insulin receptors. Which means you're now putting yourself in a more insulin resistant state, which means you have to stay on the medication forever to be able to stay at the weight you want. Because you don't have the same insulin sensitivity. So again, it's like the calorie in, calorie out. Short term result, long term consequence. It's risky, it's risky. And then, you know, every medication has a side effect. But I'm more concerned about the person who thinks they solved their weight loss issue. And all they've done is made it worse down the road.
1:48:13 Steven Bartlett? I've sat here with many a health expert and a fitness expert and nutritional experts, and they all agree with what you just said about muscle. They all said to me, because I asked a question to, I think it was Tim Spector about, it might have been Giles Yo. Asked a question about, does our metabolism fall off a cliff as we age, which is quite a popular thing. And a few of them said the same thing to me. They go, at a certain point further down the line, metabolism does change, but really the thing that changes is muscle mass. And that means that we stop moving as much, which means that we gain weight faster. So he said, the number one thing that you need to do as you age is keep doing resistance training, keep your muscle. And because I was asking him a question about my father, I said, I went down this really steep cliff in Bali a couple of weekends before.
1:48:56 Steven Bartlett? And as I was going down those stairs, I was thinking, my dad couldn't do this anymore. And at the bottom of those stairs was our activity for the day, we were going water rafting. And as I was walking down those stairs, I was thinking, I wanna be my dad's age and be able to go down these stairs. So I can do stuff with my kids. And getting into a place where I'm immobile, you know, by the 60, that is a choice. That is unavoidable, for most of us, that is a choice, and it's one that we can avoid if we keep muscle and we keep, therefore we'll keep fat. And what you said there, from what I garnered from it is, I will actually, if I take those chemicals. And if I inject them into my body, I'll lose my muscle mass. And if I lose my muscle mass, I will be, I will have a higher chance of weight gain and obesity when I'm older.
1:49:40 Dr. Mindy Pelz? And and your functionality.
1:49:43 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:49:43 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So the great, the perfect example that I always stuck in my head is my dad had a knee surgery. And he's eighty six years old. And I remember trying to help him get around a chair that he was sitting in. And he was starting to lose his upper body strength and he literally couldn't push himself up and out of the chair to be able to move into a comfortable position. And I thought, oh, my gosh, that's where muscle is so important at eighty six years old. Is just being able to get up and out of a chair after after recovering from a surgery. But if you think about the functionality of a human as we age. If you want to be able to not do as many activities like you're talking about, just make sure you don't have as much muscle. Like the minute muscle goes away, your functionality goes away.
1:50:27 Dr. Mindy Pelz? But more importantly, the minute muscle goes away, you're more insulin resistant. So you're going to gain weight more down the long haul.
1:50:35 Steven Bartlett? A lot of other people would say, you know, the way to lose weight is just to do lots of cardio. Run a lot.
1:50:42 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
1:50:43 Steven Bartlett? Good idea?
1:50:44 Dr. Mindy Pelz? No, no. So here's another interesting thing, and I'm going to give it through a woman's perspective because we're good. Let's go back to women over forty. So cortisol goes up with extra cardio.
1:50:57 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Uh, calorie set point goes, you know, your more calorie output. So remember, that's also happening and you're changing your set point.
1:51:04 Steven Bartlett? So I need more calories. My calorie set point goes up and my cortisol levels go up.
1:51:10 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
1:51:11 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
1:51:11 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Okay, so what ends up happening is that you actually now are tanking all your other hormones. So let's follow the trail of progesterone. Cortisol goes up because you're you're doing so much cardio. So progesterone goes down. Because cortisol goes up, progesterone goes down. Well, progesterone keeps estrogen in check. So now estrogen can go up. And if you have too much estrogen, eventually what's going to happen is it's going to be stored as fat. So that extra hormone, well, so long term, that's not a great plan.
1:51:43 Steven Bartlett? For women?
1:51:44 Dr. Mindy Pelz? For women.
1:51:45 Steven Bartlett? For men?
1:51:45 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Uh, well, so then the second piece applies to both men and women is if you're doing a lot of cardio, most likely you're breaking down muscle to be able to perform that cardio. And a great example is look at a marathon runner versus a tennis player. You know, or a soccer player. Like even though soccer players are doing a lot of cardio, it's a lot of start, stop, start, stop. But a marathon runner who's done so much cardio is breaking muscle down to be able to do that amount of cardio. So it's okay to do, just not at the expense of muscle. And for women, you can't do it at the expense of progesterone.
1:52:21 Steven Bartlett? So it won't help me to lose weight?
1:52:25 Dr. Mindy Pelz? No, no. You know what's gonna help you to lose weight is more weightlifting. Build more muscles, you have more insulin receptor sites. Fast more, so you can get rid of all of the glucose that gets stored in muscles. Break your fast with protein. And yeah, I mean, that's what we saw, we see all the time in both my clinic and my online world is those three things will get you in the shape that you want. It might not, remember, as you build muscle, you're not gonna lose, the, the, the number on the scale might be that much different, you know, it might, it might not move, but your whole shape is gonna change. You're gonna look different.
1:53:04 Steven Bartlett? So is any level of cardio good for weight loss? Would you recommend that just for the, the broader health benefits?
1:53:12 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Uh, you know, I think cardio is more of a mental health improvement. Improve, you know, you get all those endorphins, it's so good for your mental health. I love to go running, it's my favorite thing, but I do it for my mental health, not to lose weight.
1:53:26 Steven Bartlett? Another thing that I saw online, which was very curious that you said, is you were talking about how to undo the oxidative damage from eating too much sugar.
1:53:34 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
1:53:34 Steven Bartlett? What do you mean by that?
1:53:35 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So think about, think about the cell as an ecosystem.
1:53:37 Steven Bartlett? Right.
1:53:38 Dr. Mindy Pelz? And so inside the cell, there has to be a balance of all the right components. So when glucose goes up, which happens when you eat too much sugar, that balance goes off. And one of the byproducts of that is that your body puts off these free radicals. It creates more oxidative damage within the cell. The more of that oxidative damage, the more it's gonna destroy mitochondria and then, and the nucleus and all the cellular parts. So what you're doing when you're fasting is you're re-establishing balance into the cell. And you're allowing to your body to naturally undo the oxidative damage that happened from poor living.
1:54:17 Steven Bartlett? Got you.
1:54:17 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So it's like a reset, it's like a cellular reset.
1:54:21 Steven Bartlett? People say that there's been a school of thought that fasting breaks down muscle, that I'll lose muscle if I fast. True or false?
1:54:27 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So it appears to break down muscle, it depends on how long you're in a fast. But it will appear as if your muscle is shrinking because it's getting rid of the stored sugar. But when you now bring in a high protein meal and feed it amino acids, it will grow stronger. You'll see more definition because it broke the sugar down, which you don't want in there.
1:54:51 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So it changes the the shape of the muscle.
1:54:54 Steven Bartlett? Makes it more lean, I guess?
1:54:55 Dr. Mindy Pelz? It makes it more lean, but if you follow that up with good eating, you're going to make yourself stronger. Now, the person who decides to go into a fast breaks down muscle and doesn't follow up with good eating. Yeah, you're going to end up with less muscle. But if you follow it up with a lot of protein and you build that mTOR back up. Now you're actually able to build your muscle even stronger. There's two ways to build muscle. One is through weights, lifting weights, strength training, and the other is through food, protein. So all fasting is doing is leaning it out.
1:55:29 Steven Bartlett? And does fasting have an impact on my sleep?
1:55:35 Dr. Mindy Pelz? It can in a couple of ways. Sleep, for starters, if your brain's inflamed, you're not going to sleep. So fasting brings down inflammation, so that would be the first thing. The other thing is that a lot of people wake up, especially women, two, three in the morning. And they kind of get the jolt out of bed. And a lot of times that's because you've maybe had dinner at seven o'clock, glucose is going down. And so the body registers that glucose has gone down. And so it gives you a cortisol spike and all of a sudden you wake up at two or three in the morning.
1:56:06 Steven Bartlett? Is that why some people wake up at? I've got a friend of mine that's an elderly male. And he always tells me, he goes, oh, I woke up at three AM last night. And he's constantly saying it, he's like, I woke up in the middle of the night again last night. And I've always wondered why, and when I'm with him, we do eat dinner particularly late.
1:56:22 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yep. Yeah, so he's probably getting so he has all that glucose. He go he goes to sleep and now the glucose starts to go down. And then there's going to be a point at which the body registers that it hits a new low. And then it triggers it and and all of a sudden triggers cortisol and releases glucose from other body parts. And the the body takes that as we're running from a tiger, get up, out of bed.
1:56:43 Steven Bartlett? Ah, so wakes you up.
1:56:45 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
1:56:45 Steven Bartlett? And to avoid that, what would you do? You'd recommend not eating so late?
1:56:49 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah, not eating so late, but the more you fast, the more you're you stabilize that blood sugar. And you don't have those highs and lows as much. It's it's a it's a way of bringing balance back to the whole blood sugar system.
1:57:02 Steven Bartlett? I have to say, you know, we talk a lot about, I mean, we've talked extensively about fasting today. And one of the concerns I have about talking about the subject matter is the implications it has for people with eating disorders.
1:57:13 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yep.
1:57:15 Steven Bartlett? Because it's quite easy to conflate messages if if if you're not able to fully understand the context of everything.
1:57:22 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yep.
1:57:23 Steven Bartlett? And I'm sure that's a topic you've you've thought about. I mean, I think you actually write about it in one of the later chapters in your book in chapter 10.
1:57:30 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yep.
1:57:34 Dr. Mindy Pelz? It's a it's it's a common, it's it's one that we thought a lot about when we wrote the book. So I I want to say that first, that when the book was put together, that was definitely something my agent, the publisher. Everybody was really keen on how can we tread that lightly? And here's my stance on it. The first is that if you have a severe eating disorder, I'm going to recommend that if you want to learn to fast, you need to bring your therapist into it, you need to bring your doctor into it, you need another set of eyes to help you navigate that. So that would be the first thing that I would say. Second thing, I'm going to go back to this woman that I worked with who had severe eating disorders. And and she's been very, very public about her eating disorders.
1:58:19 Dr. Mindy Pelz? And I didn't start with fasting, I started with food with her. So we started by stabilizing her blood sugar first. And then, once I saw that those spikes on her glucose monitor were in a place I wanted, were more steady, then I introduced fasting. Because she was seeing food as a real healing tool. And then I could put patch on fasting as an adjunct to it. And she's doing incredible, incredible. So there's just a different approach. But I really encourage that you work with your practitioner or your therapist.
1:58:54 Steven Bartlett? Where do I start? I'm sold. You've sold me on fasting. I'm gonna become a faster.
1:59:01 Steven Bartlett? Where do I start, Mindy?
1:59:03 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So the first place to start is you want to think about compressing your food into one eating window. So let me start by asking you, what time do you typically finish eating dinner?
1:59:13 Steven Bartlett? I told you this off camera and I told you not to mention it.
1:59:18 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Sorry. Okay, on a good day.
1:59:22 Steven Bartlett? On an ideal day. So my issue is, I'm gonna be honest, because that's the point of this podcast. The issue I have is I wake up in the morning. I then begin work. And I'll eat my first meal. This is quite shocking, in fact. I'll eat my first meal around, I'm gonna say, between 2:00 PM and 4:00 PM, depending on how busy my schedule is. Sometimes, there's been days, I remember one particular day, it's actually when I found out that I do this, I took someone with me for the day. They were shadowing me for the day. And I got to 7:00 PM and they go, we haven't eaten today.
1:59:56 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Oh, wow.
1:59:56 Steven Bartlett? And I didn't notice. I had no idea that I hadn't eaten that day. So I'm a very late eater. But then the issue is, I will go to the gym, usually in the evening, usually after work, often between 9:00 PM and 11:00 PM. And then when I get home from the gym.
2:00:10 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Oh, no.
2:00:12 Steven Bartlett? I go to sleep like a good boy. No.
2:00:14 Dr. Mindy Pelz? This is where you go wrong. This is it.
2:00:16 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, this is where it goes downhill. Then I'll eat. Then I'll eat something pretty late at night. And that could be midnight.
2:00:26 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So what I heard in that is your eating window is 2:00 to 12:00.
2:00:30 Steven Bartlett? Two to twelve, yeah.
2:00:32 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So that you're in a, you're in a ten hour eating window.
2:00:35 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
2:00:36 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So in, in, if you, in the morning, are you doing coffee?
2:00:39 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, yeah, I do now, mainly because of this podcast, but.
2:00:43 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Okay.
2:00:43 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
2:00:43 Dr. Mindy Pelz? But you're not eating anything else in the morning?
2:00:46 Steven Bartlett? No, not really, no, on, on, no, I don't eat breakfast. There's no days in my life where I eat breakfast, really. Um, the earliest I might eat is midday.
2:00:56 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Okay. So if you choose to make two, your time that you, I call it opening up your eating window, you're gonna start eating. So you would go two to twelve, that's ten hour eating window, not, and we'll, we'll work on your window here in a moment. That, that's leaving fourteen hours of fasting. Um, about fifteen hours, you're gonna start to get the testosterone increase. So I would say, let's, can we make it a nine or an even an eight hour eating window? Especially because you told me your goals and, and your fitness goals. I would think for you, an eight hour eating window would be great. So you have an option, you can either not eat when you get home from the gym. And now we're at.
2:01:32 Steven Bartlett? I'm just so hungry.
2:01:33 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Right. Or you could push it back to three before or four, you said sometimes where you don't, where you don't eat.
2:01:40 Steven Bartlett? What would be ideal?
2:01:42 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Um, well, for, you definitely just don't wanna eat when it's dark out. So ideal would be an eight hour eating window, finishing, right now it's summer, so finishing at nine. And then you would work back, yeah, so you would do like one to nine.
2:02:01 Steven Bartlett? Or twelve to eight.
2:02:02 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Or twelve to eight, yeah.
2:02:04 Steven Bartlett? Or eleven till seven.
2:02:05 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Right.
2:02:06 Steven Bartlett? It's not gonna happen. I'll do, I'll do the, uh, the one till nine.
2:02:08 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
2:02:09 Steven Bartlett? That you said.
2:02:09 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
2:02:10 Steven Bartlett? Cause I go to the gym often quite late in the UK, so that means I can eat after the gym.
2:02:13 Dr. Mindy Pelz? And then here's, here's a little hack, is that, and, and I, I wanna make sure that people don't lose sight. What I just did with you is customize it to your lifestyle, and I think that's really important. You just take that eating window and you figure out what's the best, where it fits for you. Um, I, I do this with people who have families, they wanna sit down and eat dinner. So don't skip dinner with your kids, like, sit and enjoy that. You sound like that, that from a fitness and work level, that's working for you. So let's, let's, let's keep it like that. Let's not move that around too much. But for your fitness goals, one day a week, I'd like to see you elongate your fast, push your fast. Like, could you go twenty hours, twenty-four hours of fasting where you're just having one meal a day?
2:02:57 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Because what you're gonna do is you're gonna put your body into a little bit of a state of stress. Where all the things we've talked about are gonna start to the healing is gonna happen at a much quicker rate.
2:03:07 Steven Bartlett? You're saying once in a while?
2:03:09 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yes, once a week for you.
2:03:11 Steven Bartlett? Once a week, so once a week go like twenty four hours without eating?
2:03:14 Dr. Mindy Pelz? That's right, or we call it one meal a day.
2:03:16 Steven Bartlett? Wow, okay. Anything else I need to know to get started?
2:03:22 Dr. Mindy Pelz? I mean, coffee can be your friend. Putting MCT oil in it can help you get ketones a little bit quicker. So I don't know if you ever put oil in your coffee.
2:03:32 Steven Bartlett? I have MCT oil on my counter at home because I did the keto diet.
2:03:36 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah, so just put it in your coffee, it'll switch you over and it'll get those ketones going a little quicker. There is something I wrote about in the book called a fasted snack. And the fasted snack is pure fat bomb. They're hard to find. It's a fat bomb, so it has no carbs, very little protein, it's all fat. So, an example of one might be an avocado, is pretty fat dense, it has, it does have some carbs. But the one I love, it's something called a keto cup. And it's MCT oil with cacao butter and some chocolate, just pure chocolate wrapped around it. It looks like a little recess peanut butter cups. And you can do those in your fasting window and they'll keep, they won't switch you over because they're pure fat.
2:04:20 Dr. Mindy Pelz? So, fasted snacks can be really helpful, the research shows that you get all the benefits of fasting. But you're popping these little keto cups in your mouth all day long.
2:04:28 Steven Bartlett? What is the most important thing we haven't talked about? In your view?
2:04:36 Dr. Mindy Pelz? You know, I think the most important thing is for people to realize that there's not the perfect path. There's just your path. So take all, everything we talked about. And find the threads that resonate with you. And put those into action. And then maybe you come back and listen to the podcast again and you take another thread. But we have to stop trying to do our diet like everybody else around us. There's your diet. And that's really what I'm trying to get, is that people build a lifestyle that's unique to them. N of one. Be your own N of one. It's really the most beautiful place to live.
2:05:16 Steven Bartlett? N of one.
2:05:17 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah, you know, they'd say in a, in a study, they always say like the N is how many people were in the study. And so they'll say like N of a hundred, N of a thousand. So N of one is one person was in the study.
2:05:29 Steven Bartlett? Be your own study.
2:05:30 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Be your own, be your own study.
2:05:32 Steven Bartlett? Your own experiment.
2:05:32 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Yeah.
2:05:34 Steven Bartlett? We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest asks a question for the next guest. And the question that's been left in the diary of a CEO for you is
2:05:45 Steven Bartlett? interesting.
2:05:47 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Uh oh.
2:05:49 Steven Bartlett? It's, it's actually not that profound or interesting, but, but it's, I feel like you're the type of person that will interpret a deeper meaning than this question maybe is alluding to, but really think about this.
2:06:03 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Okay.
2:06:05 Steven Bartlett? How do you take care of you?
2:06:10 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Hmm, hmm, that's actually, that's a great question. Um,
2:06:17 Dr. Mindy Pelz? I could answer that question on a health level. Like I, I have a really strong health routine. Um, I get up in the morning, I meditate, I have a hyperbaric oxygen chamber at home, I pop in my chamber. Um, I read, like I, the first two hours of my day are for me first, before anybody else. So I have that part of me, but I want to give a, a deeper answer to that. Um,
2:06:45 Dr. Mindy Pelz? I'm really getting to know myself and what my needs are, especially as a 53 year old woman who's moving through menopause and really honoring that how I care for myself is more important than anything else. And what I mean by that is when I say no to things, not over scheduling myself, uh, putting my needs before everybody else's. These are things I haven't done in my life. And right now I'm really working on caring for myself first, so that I can pour love into the world after that. Love me first.
2:07:21 Steven Bartlett? Why is that important?
2:07:24 Dr. Mindy Pelz? I think for me, I have been in the healing profession for so long. I've been a mother, a wife, and I've done everything for everybody else. And I stand here at 53 saying, I'm gonna start doing things for me now. And that feels, that feels like self-love. And that feels like where health is going to live for me. And I haven't, I haven't spent much time doing that in my life. So I'm learning to do it for the first time now.
2:07:55 Steven Bartlett? Mindy, Dr. Mindy, pals, that is beautiful. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for your wisdom. You're a remarkable, engaging, captivating storyteller, author, content creator, and a wonderful practitioner at everything you do. You've helped so many people with your work. And I was so excited when they told me I'd be, have the honor of having a conversation with you today. This is one of those conversations that genuinely will change people's lives. And isn't that an amazing thing?
2:08:23 Dr. Mindy Pelz? It's really cool, yeah.
2:08:25 Steven Bartlett? Isn't that an amazing thing that we can sit here? And all the stuff you've shared will have a significant impact on one person's life, millions of people's lives, hundreds of thousands of people's lives, which will mean that they live a more fulfilled existence. They can kiss their and hug their kids for longer. And that is because of the work you do. So on behalf of all of those people who may never get to meet you in person and thank you themselves, thank you.
2:08:46 Dr. Mindy Pelz? Oh, thank you. I just really appreciate the opportunity to be here for the thoughtful questions and really allowing me to express what I, I hope, hope does exactly that. And I think the purpose of, of living a fulfilled life is touching humans you never actually meet.
2:09:03 Steven Bartlett? Amen.
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