Balanced Body, Balanced Weight: Underrated Habits to Get Lean with Dr. Mindy Pelz

Who says you need pricey weight loss drugs to feel fabulous? Dr. Mindy shows how small habits, like getting enough Vitamin D and walking 4,000 steps a day, can transform your body and mind! Join the movement to a healthier you. Because, after all, middle-age doesn't have to mean giving up on your weight goals! To view full show notes, more information on our guests, resources mentioned in the episode, discount codes, transcripts, and more, visit https://drmindypelz.com/ep270 Check out our fasting membership at resetacademy.drmindypelz.com https://resetacademy.drmindypelz.com/. Please note our medical disclaimer https://drmindypelz.com/medical-disclaimer/.

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

• 0:02Mindy Pelz?

  On this episode of the Resetter Podcast, I got a treat for you. I know you all have keep asking me questions about losing weight and I'm here to guide you and support you and give you all the hacks. I love nothing more than somebody falling in love with their body again as they drop weight. So in this particular episode, I'm doing something really fun. So listen all the way through. This is dense. This is a really important podcast for you to understand what allows your body to lose weight and how sometimes it's just a little small tweak that's going to have a big result. And then I'm doing something new with my podcast now where I am answering five questions

• 0:47Mindy Pelz?

  at the end of these solo episodes. One of these might be one of your questions, so make sure you stay all the way through. But as always, I hope that this podcast moves your health forward and has you believing in yourself again because you're worth it, you're worth loving, you're worth enjoying living in your body, and I hope this information teaches you that. Welcome to the Resetter Podcast. This podcast is all about empowering you to believe in yourself again. If you have a passion for learning, if you're looking to be in control of your health and

• 1:23Mindy Pelz?

  take your power back, this is the podcast for you. Now first, I always love to just remind everybody what happens when you gain weight because you are not gaining weight because your body hates you. In fact, it's the opposite. Your body loves you so much that somewhere along your journey of life, there were some imbalances that were created. And some of these are deficits, like some of these little tricks I'm going to teach you today, and some of them are you have too much of something.

• 2:07Mindy Pelz?

  When the body has too much glucose, when it has too many hormones like insulin and sex hormones, and when it has too many toxins, it doesn't know what to do with that excess. So it stores it as fat. It has a decision to make. This is what I want to line you up with your body because what happens is it has a decision to make. It's like there's all these excess, but if I put it around an internal organ like the heart and lungs, then the survival of this species becomes less. So the body puts the excess in fat. It puts it around your belly. It puts it in your chest. It puts it in your back of your arms, your booty, your legs. It's like, hey, I'm trying to help you out here and store and save your life. So I'm going to put it in these areas.

• 2:52Mindy Pelz?

  Now, it also could be too little of something. So I know I've been talking over and over again about the excess, but on this video, I really want to dive into the too little because it may be too little of a nutrient. Like the first one I'm going to teach you about here. It could be too little movement. It could be too little, too little sleep. So we have, we have to remember that the body is always trying to balance itself. It's called homeostasis. And the body is always going to figure out how to get itself back into balance. And if it has too much, you'll gain weight. If it has too little, you'll gain weight. The goal is balance. So with that in mind, here's the very first one I want to tell you about.

• 3:37Mindy Pelz?

  And it is when your vitamin D levels are too low. So take a vitamin D supplement or get some sun. Now I hope that rocks your world here in a moment. Like I, I'll tell you the studies, but I hope that like hits you like so many of you are like trying everything. And you're in this like work harder, do more, shame yourself, guilt yourself. Like, why am I not losing weight? Have you thought, have you looked at your vitamin D levels? Personally, I like to see your vitamin D levels up in the seventies for hormonal health. And weight loss is a hormonal issue. So make sure you're getting that vitamin D up into your seventies.

• 4:22Mindy Pelz?

  I will tell you at the time of doing this video, it's, uh, and this podcast, it's, it's in the fall. And I came out of in 2024, the first six months of 2024 were all more work than I, yeah, I was, I was trying to slow down and instead everything sped up. I was traveling all to lots of places and I wasn't getting out in the sun as much and I started feeling like I was gaining weight. So when I got home in the middle of June, I was like, I'm going to spend this summer taking care of my circadian rhythm, getting out in the sun, moving my body, resting my nervous system. And I really took three months and just put myself back into

• 5:07Mindy Pelz?

  a good rhythm. And part of that was getting more sun. So I started walking in the morning when the sun was coming out. Um, or in like, in the, I, I like to walk like 10 or 11 in the morning. So I got some good sun. So it does, this doesn't have to be, and I, and I started to notice I dropped weight. I like, I love living in my body right now. It's like, like I, I fell in love with the process again. So whereas the beginning of summer, I wasn't loving it so much. I didn't love, I felt like I was gaining weight for no reason. So sometimes we have to tap into these little things like getting vitamin D. Now, something really interesting is that the Journal of Nutrition Research found that 42% of Americans are clinically deficient

• 5:50Mindy Pelz?

  in vitamin D. And that's clinically deficient is like under 20. Nearly 80% of us have levels below optimal, which I said should be in this, in the seventies. We also know that 92% of the day is spent indoors or in a car. So take a, take an inventory of yourself and see if you're one of those people who's spending too much time indoors. From a weight loss perspective, the International Journal of Prevention Medicine gave overweight women either 75, 70 use of vitamin D or a placebo. So we, we took two groups of overweight women.

• 6:31Mindy Pelz?

  One group got 7,500 I use of vitamin D and the other group got a placebo and they did that for six weeks. Both groups followed the same lifestyle tools, the same diet, everything else was the same. But the vitamin D group lost more than a half a pound a week, while the placebo group showed that there was no change in weight loss. That's how important this vitamin D is. So how do you raise your vitamin D levels? Well, going out into direct sun 10 to 20 minutes a day is important. So try to get it naturally from the sun. Just make sure you don't get sunburnt and don't, you know,

• 7:13Mindy Pelz?

  when you go out into the sun for 10 to 20 minutes a day, you don't want to put sunscreen on because you're blocking the, the light from turning into the UV light. It's actually UVB that goes into your skin and then interacts with the melanin in your skin to create a chemical reaction that makes you vitamin D. Kind of like if you've ever heard me say, when you eat a food, it has, it's the gut bacteria that take the, the nutrients from that food, specifically vitamin B, vitamin K, and pulls them out of the food and puts them into the system. The same thing, the melanin cells in your skin are doing the same thing. They're taking light, UV, UVB light,

• 7:57Mindy Pelz?

  and they're turning that in, making it into vitamin D. That's, that's like a chemistry experiment on your skin. That's how cool the body is that you live in. So, but again, don't get burnt. Make sure you're doing it earlier in the day. I wouldn't do it at the high point of the day, like between one and three or 12 and three, do it earlier in the day. And make sure you're not getting sunburnt. Okay, habit number two. Okay, remember we have, weight can be too much or it can be too less. So number two, the underrated habit to lose weight is drink a glass of water before meals. So this is really interesting because I have found in my clinical experience that

• 8:41Mindy Pelz?

  most of my patients were drinking way too little water. And so, you know, dehydration can show up as stiffness in the body, dehydration can show up as changes in the skin, and dehydration can absolutely show up as stubborn weight gain. But why I want you to put it before your meals is because a lot of times we think we're hungry and we're really thirsty. And when you have it before your meals, it adds a little bit of fullness in your stomach that actually tells your brain it's more full, full. So you're not going to eat as much with your meal if you have a glass of water before your meals. So like, I would just take like, you know, I'm sitting here with water, I have this is

• 9:25Mindy Pelz?

  like a pint glass of water, if you're watching this on YouTube, you take the glass of water, I would drink a whole glass of water right before a meal. This glass, by the way, has amino acids in it, so you could even put a little, put some amino acids or some minerals in there to get a little added nutrition before you actually dive into your meal. So, but if you, if, if that's too hard to believe, let me tell you some interesting study. So this was a 2019 review, and it was a Spanish medical journal, and it found that drinking more water helped people lose weight. The researchers found that the water reduced food cravings and feelings of hunger.

• 10:07Mindy Pelz?

  So again, it's the weight in the stomach, and so it really changed the brain's perception of what was going down there. Now remember, what happens when you eat? When you eat, there's a heaviness in, in the stomach, there's a registering of food coming in from the stomach, and then that stomach takes that message and sends it up to the brain and says, hey, food's coming in, food's coming in, and then it will slowly start to change your hunger levels. What if you put water in there first? And you gave, created that heaviness in the stomach, it's a little bit of trickery for the brain. To tell the brain like, hey, yeah, I'm full already and you're not going to eat as much food.

• 10:51Mindy Pelz?

  This interesting Spanish medical journal found that people who drank water lost an average of 5% of their body weight in fat. That would be the equivalent of seven and a half pounds for 150 pound person. Are you drinking enough water? So remember, weight gain is too much glucose, too many hormones, too many toxins. It can also be too little, too little vitamin D, too little movement, too little water. Which takes me to my third thing. I gotta gave it away. Walk 4,000 steps a day. 4,000 steps a day will absolutely start to bring cortisol levels down.

• 11:36Mindy Pelz?

  So remember, when cortisol is on the scene, we do not lose weight. So we've got to find ways to bring cortisol down. When cortisol is surging through your body, what is happening is that your body's like, it's not safe to let go of this weight. We're running from a tiger right now. We're just trying to stay alive. And so there is this, the, it like ignores weight loss. This is why people who fast too much, people who work out too much, people who diet too much, people who work too much, stressed too much. That is how, again, we're back at too much, too much cortisol shuts down fat loss and all that cortisol has to go somewhere, so it goes straight to the belly.

• 12:17Mindy Pelz?

  So when we walk, just something as simple as 4,000 steps a day, now what we're doing is we're actually getting movement and we're moving the body, bringing cortisol down. So we're helping the too much, but we're also moving in a way that starts to support effortless weight loss. So there was a study done, a 2017 study out of the Journal of Nutrition that found walking just 20 minutes a day for 12 weeks caused people to lose a half a pound every week versus those that didn't. Now, I want to point a couple of things out in this study. So, the time, it's just 20 minutes.

• 13:03Mindy Pelz?

  But they did it every day for 12 weeks, so it's the consistency. That's what I'm saying about these three underrated habits. It's not like all of a sudden you're gonna do it and then, poof, the weight falls off. This is about small, little micro steps over time so that you can start to drop weight. There was also another interesting study that showed, this is out of the American Journal of Health Promotion, found that they took a group of people, and remember the 10,000 steps a day? However, we were like all excited about 10,000 steps a day and everybody was counting their steps and then it went away? I don't know why it went away, maybe it was too hard to keep 10,000 steps a day? Shouldn't be. But what they found was that 10,000 steps a day for six months,

• 13:48Mindy Pelz?

  they wanted to see what happened to people's weight loss. And what they found is, on average, the participants walked 4,000 steps a day, which is a mile. And so they didn't hit their goal, but they still lost half a pound a week and they kept it off. So, if you actually translate that out, 4,000 steps a day, every day for a year is equivalent of 25 pounds lost during that year. That's how powerful something like walking can be on your body's overall system.

• 14:26Mindy Pelz?

  It doesn't, and I want to untrain you, I want to get you out of this mindset that weight loss has to be some really big thing. And it can be the small things, like what I'm teaching you here, it can be a fasting lifestyle, like what I taught you in Fast Like a Girl and Eat Like a Girl. Those two put together, those two books put together are my gift to women to understand how to improve their metabolism through a female lens. How do you drop weight through this female lens? Now, let's add on top of that little habits like the ones I just gave you and all of a sudden, you don't need the weight loss drugs, you don't need to spend $800 to $1,000. To be able to drop weight, you know, to, to lose weight, like the weight loss drugs.

• 15:11Mindy Pelz?

  You don't need the trainer. You need a weight loss lifestyle. Nobody ever taught you. And there's a lot, it's like, think of it like the toolbox. It is a weight loss toolbox that I'm giving you in all of this. So, hope that, I hope that really sets with you because one of the things about weight loss, when you do it in a natural way, like I'm talking about, not in a way where you inject it for, with a, with a weight loss drug, is that you get the credit. There's this like bravado that you walk around with that you're like, I did this for myself. Nobody gets that with the weight loss drugs. You actually get that self-satisfaction when you're doing little tricks like this

• 15:53Mindy Pelz?

  and you're actually putting in the work to be able to get the results. There is a whole nother level of confidence that comes with that. You don't get with all of these weight loss drugs.

• 16:07Mindy Pelz?

  Okay. With that all in mind, I want to move into a new part of my podcast that I'm doing. These are what we call solo episodes and I'm answering your questions. So if you want your question answered, please just put solo episode in your, with your question and my team will grab these and we will keep adding these in if this is a style that you like. So here's the first question, which is how important is it to know your ketone number? Okay, it's a really good question because I like, when I first started teaching fasting to my patients, I really like to know the ketone number to keep everybody safe.

• 16:47Mindy Pelz?

  So if you are prediabetic or diabetic, the ketone number is very important because we don't want your ketones to go above 7.0. Once your ketones are above 7.0, you are in danger land. Now, prior to fasting, one of the challenges that we had was that when we said ketosis, everybody screamed. And when the ketogenic diet, when fasting came around and people were like, you want to get some ketones, all the doctors were like, no, no, no, no, you don't want ketones. But once again, again, the nuance was really important. So we started to say nutritional ketos, ketosis, we want you in nutritional ketosis.

• 17:30Mindy Pelz?

  So 0.5 to I like 0.5 to 5.0 is the sweet spot for nutritional ketosis. I think most people are thriving, their mental clarity is up, their hunger is down when they are around 1.0. So if you're not prediabetic, if you're not diabetic, then knowing your ketone number is not very important. And the last thing I want you to do is spend money on a piece of equipment that you're never going to use. But if you're prediabetic and diabetic, we need you to know where you are with your ketones. Now, I do, I have found over the years that when people see that they get into that 0.5 and above,

• 18:13Mindy Pelz?

  they're now into ketosis, it's very motivating and they want to keep going. So if you're needing motivation, then the ketone number becomes important. And my favorite ketone reader is called Keto Mojo. I will leave links in this video, I will leave links on my podcast for it in the notes. But Keto Mojo is incredible and a great one. So when I personally work with a patient, what I do is I have them get a continuous glucose monitor for the back of their arm so we can really look at what their food is doing. And then I get a ketone reader so we can see in the fasted state, how well this fat burning energy system is working.

• 18:53Mindy Pelz?

  So if you're motivated and you're not prediabetic or diabetic, you may not need to spend the extra money. Question number two is, does being in ketosis mean I'm in autophagy? AKA, what's the difference between ketosis and autophagy? Oh, this is so good, so good. Okay. Let's go back to my metabolic switch. So when we are eating, we are raising our blood sugar up and down. We call this, we call this the sugar burner system.

• 19:27Mindy Pelz?

  Within the sugar burner system, one of the major cellular processes is a pathway called mTOR. mTOR is a pathway of growth. So you can grow muscle. This is why we keep talking about protein. This is why in Eat Like a Girl, I have so many protein recipes, whether you are in a state of, if you're a plant-based or omnivore, my chefs did incredible, giving you protein-rich foods. But mTOR is really important for building muscle. But too much mTOR, where there's too much glucose, can actually make it so that you gain weight. Remember, we talked earlier about the excess? And it can also feed tumors, if you're eating the wrong foods.

• 20:10Mindy Pelz?

  So, we don't want to be an mTOR all the time. So when we switch over into the fat-burning energy system, the longer we stay there, we are switching into autophagy. Autophagy is the opposite of mTOR. Autophagy is where we are breaking things down. We are breaking down things that no longer serve us. So when your blood sugar comes down, and it's been down enough, and there have been no nutrients coming in, your body triggers this autophagy state. And that autophagy state now is one where you're getting rid of the bad.

• 20:55Mindy Pelz?

  The name of the health game is to have times when you're building the good, which is mTOR, and making sure that you're dipping into times where you're stimulating autophagy to get rid of the bad. Autophagy typically kicks in around 17 to 72 hours of fasting.

• 21:18Mindy Pelz?

  What will pull you out of autophagy more than your blood sugar is nutrients. So, one of the things that we know is if you get a lot of amino acids coming in from protein, you can pull yourself out of autophagy. And you head back into mTOR. But you may not, when you're over here in the fasted state, you actually may still be in ketosis. Because in order to burn fat, that is the state of ketosis. So when I metabolically switch over into the fat burning system, I am metabolically switching into the ketogenic energy system.

• 22:03Mindy Pelz?

  And as long as I don't raise my blood sugar too much, usually too much is about 10 points, I can stay in ketosis. But if I bring in like, people who do, like, here's a perfect example. I see people who will start to do bone broth. And they stay in ketosis because it keeps their blood sugar stable. So their body doesn't register to move back into the sugar burner system. And so, but it has so many amino acids and protein in it that it flips them out of autophagy and they go into mTOR. So they're two different, autophagy and ketosis are two different mechanisms that happen in the fat burning state.

• 22:48Mindy Pelz?

  But autophagy, you will flip yourself out of autophagy when the nutrient load goes high. This is why, again, I'm not really in the longer fast, a big fan of, of too many supplements. Okay, I hope that helped. Question number three, why won't my ketones go up?

• 23:08Mindy Pelz?

  So the challenge with ketones not going up is really a challenge with the liver. When blood sugar goes down, there is the microbes in your gut. What they do is they send a signal up the portal vein to the liver. And they say, hey, no food has been in here for a hot moment. We don't sense any blood sugar coming in. So you're going to want to switch over into that alternative foods fuel source called the ketogenic energy system. And the liver goes, okay, I'm on it. I'm making ketones. And so it starts to make ketones by burning fat.

• 23:52Mindy Pelz?

  If that switch is not happening, if that message is not getting up there, then what's what's happening is it's either a problem with your microbiome, which is very possible, or it's a problem with your liver. So if your ketones are not going up, I want you to work on breaking your fast with the three Ps. I have a whole chapter in Eat Like a Girl on this. Break your fast with that. The first meal matters. I've been talking about the first meal matters. It's all that was a big premise of Eat Like a Girl is when you go back into the food, into food, let's make sure that you are feeding those microbes and you are making sure that the microbes are getting healthy. There are three major food categories and I have lists and recipes for you and Eat Like

• 24:37Mindy Pelz?

  a Girl, but just for the sake of this conversation, polyphenol, probiotic and prebiotic foods. So let's check your gut. The second organ we need to say to look at if you're not getting ketones is your liver. And this is a little bit harder. You got to look at your toxic load, make sure you're not eating a lot of toxins. This is why I don't recommend things like, like, like diet sodas, because those chemicals and there are toxins to the liver, even though it's a diet, it's not going to help the diet. It's not going to help you with losing weight because the liver is the organ that burns fat and makes ketones. So from by burning fat. So let's make sure the chemical load is down. Let's make sure we're nourishing the liver with food when we go into the eat it,

• 25:22Mindy Pelz?

  the, the, our eating window. So dandelion greens, radicchio, ginger, lemon, lemon. I have tons of liver supporting foods listed in Eat Like a Girl. So the liver is really, really important. The last one I will also say to you is there is an emotional, the liver is the organ that collects anger. So if your ketones aren't going up, I have seen this time and time again, where there needs to be some emotional healing around anger. So make sure you're checking in on that for yourself. And then the last part of ketones not going up is there is a connection from the small intestine into the large intestine or into the liver that goes beyond the portal vein.

• 26:06Mindy Pelz?

  And that's called your common bile duct. And the common bile duct is where the liver dumps toxins out into the small intestine. This is where things like castor oil packs help, where coffee enemas help, because they open up that common bile duct so that the liver can get the toxins out and so that it can, the, then the bacteria in the small intestine can start to get the toxins away. I have seen people with liver congestion struggle to get ketones to go up. So there are three things you gotta look at. What's going on with your microbiome in your gut? How healthy is your liver? And have you opened up your common bile duct? Okay.

• 26:47Mindy Pelz?

  This is fun because you could, hopefully you all can see why a 90 second reel is not gonna ever give you all the information you need to lose weight. Like this is why podcasts and videos like this are really important. Okay. Question number four is how do I maintain ketosis after breaking a fast? And this one's really interesting too, because you can stay in ketosis for days. The trick is to not get your blood sugar too high. So eating meat, eating vegetables, keeping your carbs down. So you go back into food, eat ketogenic.

• 27:28Mindy Pelz?

  This is the style of ketosis that you had a ketogenic diet that I started years ago because I wanted people to understand the biotic part. When you're in ketosis, make sure you're feeding your microbes so that they stay healthy. We don't want to bring our carbohydrate down too low. So ketogenic, I look at about a 50, the macro is like a macro nutrients should be like 50 net grams of carbohydrates is will keep you that day. Total for the day will keep you in the keto, keep your ketones going. Now in Eat Like a Girl, I have a whole section on ketogenic. I have over 50 recipes for you just on ketogenic.

• 28:12Mindy Pelz?

  So if you're looking for food ideas on the ketogenic recipe or approach to food, please go watch or go get that book. I also have a chart in the book where I show when should you be going low carb ketogenic? And when should you be going high carb, which is hormone feasting? And so I map out your symptoms and then you know how to pick your eating style according to that. That's also in Eat Like a Girl.

• 28:38Mindy Pelz?

  Okay. Number five is why do I often see my weight stay the same or go up while I'm fasting? Shouldn't it always go down? If your weight is staying the same while you're fasting, it's a detox pathway issue. Detox pathways are the way that your body takes the toxins away from organ systems. So a classic one that I have people check all the time is check right above your clavicles. There is, we call these the toll booth, like if you're stopping at a highway and the toll booth is controlling what direction you're going, how much you're paying to be on that highway.

• 29:18Mindy Pelz?

  The toll booth for the brain and detoxing the brain and the face is right above your clavicles. So look, and I check these all the time and make sure that they're not too puffy, that they're not, if they get puffy, it's stagnant detox pathways. The other detox pathways I recommend a lot is looking under your arm. You want a pit, not a puff in here. I've talked about that. Those of you, check your inguinal area, like right above your, right next to your hip bones. How are those, is that puffy? Because that can be an indication that you are, that the lymph is not moving around your system. The other detox pathways is make sure that you are, you have a bowel movement every day.

• 30:00Mindy Pelz?

  My favorite hack for not having bowel movement is magnesium, especially for menopausal women. Make sure you're having magnesium on a daily basis. I will put a link in both of these episodes, whether you're watching this on YouTube or you're listening to on the Resetter Podcast, I'll put a link for my favorite magnesium. So you can go find that. But again, circulation, movement, and both Eat Like a Girl and Fast Like a Girl have long lists, too many that I can, it's hard to add here on, in this kind of format, of all the different ways we can improve detox pathways. And I like to create checklists. So you can be like, yep, I'm doing that. Yep, I'm doing that. So there are detox pathways checklist in Eat Like a Girl. You'll find those.

• 30:45Mindy Pelz?

  So, so there you go. I love, I feel like these questions, this new format for me is really exciting because I feel like I'm getting into some deeper information with you all. So as always, if you have questions, leave them, leave them in, leave them anywhere. Just say solo episode and my team will gather them and I'll be sure to answer them here. But the most important thing is please don't give up on yourself. Everything I'm teaching here is how to work in alignment with yourself, how to drop weight in alignment with yourself. Not pushing against it, not muscling through it, not, not shaming yourself or guilting yourself. This is about putting yourself in alignment with you so you can effortlessly lose weight. And that's what I hope this video and podcast did for you is

• 31:29Mindy Pelz?

  just give you a different perspective on this. And if it did, share it with somebody, share it out into the world because we have a world of people that are metabolically unhealthy and they're not sure why and they don't know the path out. So this is why we have this increase in weight loss drugs is it's like, people don't know. They don't know why they gained weight. They don't know how to lose weight. So that's what I'm trying to teach you on all my channels and all my books. And hopefully it's sinking in. So leave me, let me know. Put it, if you're watching this on YouTube, let me know, give me feedback on how this is connecting for you. So as always, I hope that helps.

• 32:05Mindy Pelz?

  Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we'd love to know about it. So please leave us a review, share it with your friends and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.