40% of Us are Constantly Hungry & Exhausted – What Your Body is Trying to Tell You

If you are hungry all the time, exhausted after meals, craving sugar, or suddenly gaining weight around your middle, your body may be signaling something deeper than a need to eat less. In this solo episode, Dr. Mindy explains why nearly four in ten American adults now meet the criteria for metabolic syndrome—a collection of warning signs that can include elevated blood sugar, high blood pressure, abnormal cholesterol, increased waist circumference, and changes in liver health. She breaks down four common drivers that can quietly push the body toward metabolic dysfunction: unstable blood sugar, chronic stress, poor sleep, and inflammation associated with excess body fat. You will also learn why crash dieting, excessive cardio, and relying on appetite-suppressing supplements rarely address the real problem. Instead, Dr. Mindy shares five practical ways to support your metabolism through food order, walking after meals, resistance training, better sleep, and a more flexible approach to fasting. Your body is not working against you. It may simply need a different strategy. In This Episode What metabolic syndrome is and why it is better understood as a group of warning signs The role insulin plays in deciding whether glucose is used for energy or stored Why crash dieting and aggressive calorie restriction may make matters worse Why cardio alone is not the best strategy for improving metabolic health How to build a blood-sugar-stabilizing plate Why resistance training is especially important for women How muscle acts as a storage site for glucose Practical ways to build strength without spending hours in the gym What “flex fasting” means Resources Mentioned FREE Nervous System Questionnaire https://resetacademy.drmindypelz.com/nervous-system-reset?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio&utm_campaign=nervous_system_resetFast Like a Girl https://www.drmindypelz.com/booksMin-Chex by Standard Process https://drmindypelz.standardprocess.com/products/min-chexQualia Magnesium+ https://www.qualialife.com/shop?rfsn=5237174.cd3714Berberine Breakthrough https://bioptimizers.com/shop/products/berberine-breakthrough?rfsn=6550294.35fd813&utm_source=refersion&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_campaign=6550294.35fd813For more resources related to today’s episode, visit the podcast episode page: drmindypelz.com/ep356 https://www.drmindypelz.com/ep356 Connect with Dr. Mindy: Join Reset Academy https://resetacademy.drmindypelz.com/reset-academy?utm_source=libsyn&utm_medium=podcast&utm_term=&utm_content=loc-description&utm_campaign=reset-academyWatch the episodes on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DrMindyPelz?sub_confirmation=1Follow Dr. Mindy on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dr.mindypelz/Subscribe to Dr. Mindy’s newsletter https://www.drmindypelz.com/ Disclaimer: This podcast is intended for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional before making changes to your diet, fasting routine, or lifestyle.

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

• 0:00Mindy Pelz?

  I want to invite you to something that I am crazy excited about. This October 3rd and 4th, I'll be joining an incredible group of speakers at Empower Your Life, a live event at the Alex Theater in Glendale, California. We'll spend two days exploring health, personal growth, mindset, and practical tools to help you create meaningful change in your life. I'll be there alongside speakers like Suzy Orman, Jim Quick, Jamie Kern Lima, Brendan Bouchard, Nancy Levin, and many more. It's going to be an amazing weekend filled with learning, connection, and inspiration.

• 0:44Mindy Pelz?

  I'd love to see you there. I'd also love to give you a big hug. And you can grab your VIP or general admission ticket by visiting hayhouse.com/DrMindy. That's hayhouse.com/DrMindy. I can't wait to see you. Hey, Dr. Mindy here, and welcome to the Live Like a Girl podcast, where I bring you icons, disruptors, educators, scientists, and doctors that show you what can be possible when you love and celebrate the female body you are blessed to live in. Let's dive in.

• 1:27Mindy Pelz?

  If you're hungry all the time, exhausted after meals, craving sugar, gaining weight around your midsection, I've got to tell you, your body is trying to tell you something. And here's the interesting fact, most people do not have a weight problem. You don't have weight loss resistance. You have a metabolic health problem, and you are not alone. In fact, we now know that four in 10 Americans, that's about 38% of us, meet the criteria for something called metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome is where we start to see many measurements of your metabolic health

• 2:12Mindy Pelz?

  are off. And in this video, I'm going to show you exactly what metabolic syndrome is. There's four major triggers for it. I'm going to show you how it's been probably going on for a significant period of time. And most importantly, I want to give you five very key things you can do right now to start to change the metabolic health challenge that's brewing inside of you. Sound like a plan? Let's dive in. So metabolic syndrome isn't really a syndrome. It's not really like a condition. It's a set of warning signs, and we just package them into this nice little neat container called metabolic syndrome.

• 2:54Mindy Pelz?

  And typically, it's high blood pressure, high cholesterol, fasting glucose. I know a lot of you here on my channel have been measuring your glucose. Fasting glucose is out of control. Liver enzymes are out of control, and you have your total body weight is up, and especially weight around your midsection. In fact, many of you have probably walked into your doctor's office and had him or her tell you, yeah, you've got high blood pressure, you've got high cholesterol, you're gaining weight, it's congenital, it's genetic. And what I want to show you is it's not. It is an environment that you have put your body in that now has your body holding on

• 3:38Mindy Pelz?

  to weight, raising the blood pressure, creating inflammation, and you can fix it. So let's start with what I call the drivers. What are these drivers that are making you have a metabolic challenge? Driver number one is poor blood sugar regulation. Now, I want to give you a very simple and clear understanding of what blood sugar regulation is. When you eat, your blood sugar goes up. Depending on what you ate, so if you eat something that's really high on what we call the glycemic index, so let's use a banana as an example.

• 4:18Mindy Pelz?

  A banana is pretty high on the glycemic index, and what it can do is you will start to spike your blood sugar really high. As high as your blood sugar goes, is as low as it's going to go within an hour to two hours. So if you have a banana, and you spike your blood sugar, and then it crashes two hours later, when that crash happens, what your body does is give you hunger signals, so that you raise the blood sugar up. So maybe you get the idea at mid-morning that you need a candy bar, or you're going to grab some juice, because intuitively, your body's saying, hey, blood sugar is crashing,

• 5:03Mindy Pelz?

  let's go ahead and bring it up again. And so you go and you reach for a glass of orange juice, or you grab a candy bar or something sweet, because that sugar craving is starting to kick in, because your body's giving you a signal that the blood sugar is low. And so you eat something high again on the glycemic index, and it spikes again. And then, as it goes up, a couple hours later, it drops again. People who have dysregulated blood sugar that lead to metabolic syndrome are on this roller coaster all day long. And every time you get a spike, you are asking your pancreas to release insulin.

• 5:44Mindy Pelz?

  And that insulin escorts the glucose molecule from the food you ate and tries to get it into the cell for energy. But the more spikes that you have, they're going up and down, and up and down, the more your pancreas has to work, and the less cellular availability there is for glucose, and specifically insulin to drive glucose in. So driver number one is this roller coaster of blood sugar, up, down, up, down, up, down. And the good news is you can actually put a combination of food together to change this. But I promise you, this is not about deprivation.

• 6:28Mindy Pelz?

  This is not about eating things that you don't love. This is about knowing how to combine food so you can stop that roller coaster. And I'm going to show you exactly how to do that. But the interesting thing about insulin is that insulin's job is to decide what to do with that glucose molecule. So every time you call on insulin, if it can't get glucose into the cell, you know where it stores it? It stores it in fat. So we need to take the burden off of insulin so that it stops storing it as fat.

• 7:07Mindy Pelz?

  Driver number two, chronic stress leading to non-stop release of cortisol into your system. There was a meta-analysis in obesity reviews that found people with higher long-term cortisol tend to have larger waists. The effect on any one person is modest, but the pattern across tens of thousands of adults is consistent. Chronic cortisol tracks with more belly fat. I've done videos on this, because so many of you are trying to lose weight, especially in that midsection, and you already have driver number one handled.

• 7:49Mindy Pelz?

  You've stabilized that blood sugar, but you can't seem to be able to get the cortisol belly to go away. Those of you who have not downloaded my nervous system questionnaire, it's a new thing I created for all of you. It's free, so you can start to measure your nervous system and see if that midsection is actually coming from chronic cortisol release. The important thing that I want you to understand is, especially for those of you that feel like you're doing everything and you can't lose weight around the midsection, is that it could be a chronic stress situation. The interesting thing about cortisol, just like insulin is meant to store glucose into

• 8:34Mindy Pelz?

  the cell and get glucose into the cell, cortisol has one job, and that's to make you move. So if you're under chronic stress over and over and over again, and you're sedentary, you are more likely to store that cortisol as belly fat. Again, we're going to talk about how you can unwind that. Driver number three is poor sleep. Pretty much goes with chronic stress, and I'm going to give you some really concrete street of sleep advice. But what I want you to know is that the science is saying poor sleep and weight gain, especially around the midsection, is very, very common.

• 9:15Mindy Pelz?

  A 24 meta-analysis in obesity science and practice pulled seven long-term studies and found that adults who habitually slept less than six hours a night, six hours a night, and had an 8% higher risk of developing abdominal obesity over time versus people who are getting normal sleep. I saw this in my practice all the time, where people were doing everything right, except prioritizing sleep. Sleep is when you burn fat. Sleep is when your body starts to get rid of that cortisol.

• 9:56Mindy Pelz?

  Sleep is when the brain starts to wash itself with something called cerebral spinal fluid that starts to move toxins out of the brain and reset the brain from the stressful day. Prioritizing sleep is incredibly important for losing that belly fat, and I'm going to show you how.

• 10:16Mindy Pelz?

  Number four, and this one's really interesting. We have not talked enough about this here on my channel, which is when you are carrying extra weight, that actual fat starts to release what we know as inflammation. So it becomes this vicious loop. Your blood sugar is off, your cortisol is high, you can't sleep, and so you're gaining weight. And now that fat that is accumulated around your midsection, that fat is releasing inflammation. And when that fat releases inflammation, what ends up happening is it makes you even more insulin resistant. It starts to throw your blood sugar off even more.

• 11:01Mindy Pelz?

  It starts to stress you out even more. It makes it harder to sleep, and you're going around and around in a circle. This, in my opinion, is why we are seeing this 38% of people having metabolic syndrome because of these four drivers. So before I go into what you should be doing, I want to talk about what you shouldn't be doing because so many of you are trying the old diet tricks, and you're not getting a good result. So these that I bring to you right now are absolutely what not to do. So trick number one, crash dieting, restricting, or extreme calorie counting.

• 11:44Mindy Pelz?

  Calorie counting tells your body it's not safe. When your body is not safe, it will start to move into an insulin resistant state. What your body will do when it feels like it is under a threat is it starts to take glucose and move it into your larger muscles, your legs, your arms, so you can run away from the threat. So crash dieting and extreme calorie counting are not going to be helpful. It only tells your body that is under threat. Second thing I don't want you to do is only do cardio workouts. Remember back in the 70s and the 80s?

• 12:28Mindy Pelz?

  We thought cardio was queen. Cardio is not queen now. Muscle strength is queen, and making sure that you are building muscle. I'm going to show you specifically how to do that in a way that will help you lose that belly fat. But one of the things that we know is it may feel productive that you are actually getting on a treadmill, and you're going for an hour, but you can actually put yourself into more of a cortisol-rich state. You can break down more muscle. I remember years ago being at the Olympic Museum in Geneva and looking at this big picture of all these women that were gold athletes in their sport. And when you looked at the marathon runners,

• 13:12Mindy Pelz?

  they were completely thin. They had no muscle tone in it. And when you looked at people doing other more balanced activity, they had beautiful bodies with extra muscle. Muscle is like a pantry for glucose, and you need it. Unless you plan on running marathons the rest of your life so you can have that uber-thin look, if that's what you're going for, cardio in general is not going to be a great weight loss tool for your belly fat. So let's find a different way. Trick number three, and this one, you're going to hear me say over and over again, detox teas, appetite suppressant supplements. There is no supplement on the planet

• 13:56Mindy Pelz?

  that is going to help you lose that belly fat and help you lose weight. You can't take a supplement and expect to get a massive result. Now, there are supplements that are helpful, but they're helpful to go with the healthy lifestyle I'm going to map out for you. And right now, we have a really interesting situation because of the weight loss drugs. A lot of people are looking for that perfect supplement that is going to help them stop the food noise, stop the hunger. And what I find so interesting about that, a big popular one right now is berberine. Berberine's not bad, but it's not a solution. It's a supplement.

• 14:40Mindy Pelz?

  And why we call it supplements? Is it supposed to supplement a healthy diet? Berberine on its own is not going to help you start to lose weight, especially around the midsection. So with that out of the way, what should you do? You ready? Take notes. If you have a piece of paper, write this down. Number one, I want you to start to learn to stabilize your blood sugar. So what that looks like is the first place you stabilize your blood sugar is on your plate. When you are putting a meal together, I want you to look down and ask yourself, do I have vegetables? Do I have a protein? And do I have a good fat?

• 15:23Mindy Pelz?

  Years ago, there was a great book that explained this like 20... No, it was like 30 years ago because I read it when I was in college. And it was called The Zone Diet. Anybody remember The Zone Diet? And he used to say that he used to use measurements in fists. And I think this is really helpful when you're putting a plate together. Can you do a fistful of vegetables? Can't match that with a fistful of protein? And then a half a fistful of fat? Now, some of you might be like, well, what about carbohydrates? What you're going to hear over and over and over again on these videos from me is how important it is to put your carbs

• 16:07Mindy Pelz?

  after you do this blood sugar stabilizing trick, where you're doing fiber in those vegetables, you are doing protein to kill hunger, also stabilizing, and you're doing fat. Now you are feeding your microbes, you are stabilizing your blood sugar so it can't go into a big spike, and then you can do your carbohydrate. So the order in which we eat is really important, but the key part of putting this plate together that I'm recommending is the fiber and the protein and the fat. What this might look like even for breakfast could look like, I do this all the time. I do eggs, I do greens, microgreens, and I'll drizzle them with olive oil.

• 16:52Mindy Pelz?

  This morning, I put some really yummy tomatoes on it, and that is a very common breakfast that I have. You'll notice I didn't have a carb. I save my carbs for the end of the day. But in the morning, when I need stable blood sugar, that's what I put together. Okay, second trick you can do to help with your blood sugar is to make sure that you go walking after your meals. Think about it. You're eating, and all of a sudden, your glucose is rising, and insulin is trying to find that glucose to be able to get it into the cells so it could use it for energy. If you go on a walk, what will end up happening is that your muscles will say,

• 17:36Mindy Pelz?

  hey, send the glucose to me, insulin. Put that glucose to me because I need that glucose. So for this activity called walking, whereas if you're sitting and you're eating, then all of that glucose, the insulin, will put it towards fat. So walking is an incredible tool that you can use to stabilize your blood sugar. Step number two. I alluded to it a little bit over here. Okay, I have something I've got to say that I really think a lot of women need to hear. If you've ever followed a health program and it didn't work, check this out. This is not your fault. I promise you. Let me explain.

• 18:20Mindy Pelz?

  Most fitness programs, most fasting protocols, most dietary advice, it was researched on men. It was designed for men, and then handed to women with a shrug, and I hear you go, hope this works for you. But here's the thing. You operate on a 28-day hormonal cycle. The foods you eat, the length of your fast, even the intensity of your workouts, all of it needs to be timed to where you are in that cycle to actually get a result. This is the science I teach inside my Reset Academy. This is the science that I have researched for over a decade. And inside my academy, every month, I walk you through it in a very practical

• 19:04Mindy Pelz?

  and actionable and way. And it's actually built for your body, for a feminine body, so it's going to work. I promise you, I see it over and over again. This is a moment to get back into relationship with this beautiful body that you are so blessed to live in. So if you're ready to finally understand this incredible body of yours and work with it instead of constantly fighting against it, come find me over in the Reset Academy. That's resetacademy.drmindypelz.com. I'll see you there. You are doing protein and fiber at every meal. Remember how your grandma used to say, eat your vegetables every meal? She was right.

• 19:46Mindy Pelz?

  So every meal, I want you to make sure you have protein and fiber. If you are a vegetarian, you can do legumes, no problem. But I want that salad, I want those vegetables, put those berries together. And it's really interesting because the science says that when you order your food up, that's the way we approach it now, is food order. We've gone from counting calories. Anybody been on this nutrition path for a while? Counting calories to counting macros to the order of food. I think this is a way better approach to food than when we were counting calories and we were counting macros. But research is consistently showing that the order you eat your food

• 20:31Mindy Pelz?

  and a short walk after your food blunts how high your blood sugar will go. So step number two is I want to make sure that protein and fiber goes first. Step number three, we are going to build muscle. Now, I want to talk about the best ways to build muscle because one of the best ways is through something called resistance training. So when you pick up a weight, what ends up happening is if you pick it up and then you do like an overhead press. When you're pushing that weight up, you're having to actually exercise the muscle on the way up.

• 21:14Mindy Pelz?

  But what do most of us do on the way down? On the way down, we let those weights fall. And as we let those weights fall, you are not building muscle. They call it a concentric contraction and an eccentric contraction. And there's only one way to get consistent contractions from both of those. So you're getting the front of the muscle and the back of the muscle. And that's with resistance training. A push-up is a resistance training. You push yourself down and then you got to push yourself up. Resistance bands, TRX is a great tool where you're having to actually do a movement

• 21:55Mindy Pelz?

  in one direction and you can't slack in the opposite direction. So resistance training is key for building muscle. It's one of the most efficient ways. And what the science is saying is two to three times a week, 20 to 30 minutes of resistance training. This can be rows, this can be presses, this can be light dumbbells that you just don't let fall down. It can be body weight squats where you have to squat down and then squat back up. And if you combine that with 20 to 30 grams of protein after that workout, within an hour, you're fueling those muscles back up, making them bigger. The bigger they are, the more storage for glucose they have.

• 22:40Mindy Pelz?

  If you have more storage for glucose in your muscles, then your body doesn't have to store that glucose as fat. Here's what the science is saying. A 22 meta-analysis in the BMJ Open Diabetes Research and Care publication looked at over 20 randomized trials evaluating over 1,100 people. And what they found was that resistance training significantly dropped hemoglobin A1C. And the more strength people gained, the bigger the drop. So I don't want you just lifting weights. I want you doing this form of resistance training so that we can make sure we get you as strong as possible again

• 23:24Mindy Pelz?

  so we can bring that hemoglobin A1C down, but we can create more usage for the glucose that your body wants to store. Number four is sleep. Now, if you're menopausal, I get it, sleep is hard. I've been there. And there are hacks you can do. So let me give you some of them. For starters, it's really important that you wind your day down. Now, I didn't say wind, I said wind, W-I-N-D. We need to get you to start to slow your day down at the end of the day. You can't go rushing in from work and family and then put your head on the pillow and fall asleep, especially as if you're in your perimenopausal years

• 24:08Mindy Pelz?

  or into your post-menopausal years. So you've got to train your body to start to know that it's time to go to sleep. You can do this with red light. I have red light bulbs that I put in my lamps up in one room. That is my get ready for bedroom. And I put on chanting music, chanting music. That repetition starts to prime the parasympathetic nervous system. Sometimes I do yoga. Yoga has been researched that it can bring down cortisol levels. But create an environment where you can start to wind down. Second thing that I want to, and probably one of the most important things you can do

• 24:52Mindy Pelz?

  is keep your room cold. This isn't just for menopausal women, but it's especially important for menopausal women. So you need to have a significant temperature drop when you get into bed. And one of the best ways of doing this is to take a hot shower before you go to bed. It's going to relax the nervous system. And then keep your windows open in your room so it's nice and cold in there, depending on where you're at and where you live, and then get into bed. That temperature change tells the body it is time to go to bed. There are signals we can send to the body over and over and over again.

• 25:36Mindy Pelz?

  My third recommendation for sleep is expose yourself to the light during the day. When you see morning light, it has more red to it. When you see midday light, it's a full spectrum light. When you see a sunset, it has a lot of red. Those three things tell your brain where it is in the day. If you're inside with LED lights all the time, what ends up happening is you disrupt your circadian rhythm. And your body doesn't know if it's night or if it's morning. So we have to train your body to wake up in the morning to red light, to see that midlight, and then go to bed to red light.

• 26:20Mindy Pelz?

  And that's how your body knows how to secrete melatonin. So sleep is about training your body to get to sleep if you're really struggling with that. And I promise you, it can be trained. I'm a living example of it. Step number five, and my favorite, which is flex fasting. Now, flex fasting is a new term I've been using to help you understand that you control your eating window and your fasting window. And you control how long of a fast you are going to do. Those of you who have taken the nervous system questionnaire, if you scored on the questionnaire that your nervous system is maxed,

• 27:04Mindy Pelz?

  I want you to keep your fasts lower. I want them to be no more than 15 hours. Keep them 12, 13, 14 hours every single day. Except women who are the week before your period, we do not fast. So everything I wrote in Fast Like a Girl still applies. But the reason that flex fasting is so important for this situation is if you do know your nervous system marker and how it's doing, then you know how to map fasting to it. So if you are maxed out and you just stress is building, then you keep those fasts lower. But if you're not maxed out and stress is not building,

• 27:49Mindy Pelz?

  then I really want you to go into some of the bigger fasts that I wrote about in Fast Like a Girl, like 36-hour fast. It is one of the best for losing belly fat. But I don't want you going there if you have a maxed nervous system. I want you to stay into a lower fast. And we know, there's, I mean, research after research, this is what this whole channel was built off, shows that fasting is incredible for improving metabolic syndrome. There was a 24 randomized controlled trial in the Annals of Internal Medicine that followed 108 adults with metabolic syndrome, this exact topic that we're talking about.

• 28:31Mindy Pelz?

  And what they found was that they put one group that just ate all day and one group that ate in an eight to 10-hour window, leaving the rest of the time for fasting. And that group in the eight to 10-hour window showed the most amount of improvement in hemoglobin A1C compared to those that just grazed all day longs. I have been here on YouTube teaching you all how to fast for over a decade. I have written books on fasting. This book sold over a million copies. And I am still a fan of fasting.

• 29:09Mindy Pelz?

  My new elevation of teaching is make sure you map it to your nervous system state. Now, what can you do today? That was a lot of information. So here are the five things I want you to do today so that you get the result you deserve to get. Your very next meal, go ahead, whatever the next meal is, you're doing protein and vegetables. After your biggest meal, number two, you're going to go on a 10-minute walk. Number three, you're going to go look into your pantry or your desk, depending on where you're watching this, and you are going to remove one processed food item. Chips, crackers, desserts, candy, just one.

• 29:54Mindy Pelz?

  I'm not telling you to remove them all. I'm just telling you to remove one and get that out. You might swap it out. I know it's not considered the most tastiest swap compared to the ultra-processed foods, but get to know carrots and celery and hard-boiled eggs and nuts. Over time, you will crave that because you will feel the difference. Number four, tonight, before you go to bed, 60 minutes before you go to bed, no phone, no scrolling, no talking. Let's start to train the nervous system. It's time to go to bed. And tomorrow, when you wake up, I want you to push your breakfast back an hour so we can start to work on compressing your eating window

• 30:39Mindy Pelz?

  and getting you fasting longer. Now, two little bonus things I want to mention. I always say food and lifestyle first. But I know a lot of you love supplements. So I'm going to give you two if you are a supplement fan, but I'm not telling you you need to have these. I'm giving them as options. So one for the nervous system is called Min checks. By standard process, I'll put the link in here. It starts to calm your nervous system along with magnesium by Qualia. I'll put that links in here. Those are great for those of you who are crazy stressed out. Take them before you go to bed at night and it'll start to calm the nervous system. Most importantly, don't give up on yourself.

• 31:22Mindy Pelz?

  You are not out of answers. You just need a new strategy. As always, I hope that helps.