Pod Insights Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee BITESIZE | 5 Food Rules To Balance Hormones, Boost Energy & Transform Your Health | Dr Mindy Pelz #544 About this episode CAUTION: This podcast discusses fasting, and its advice may not be suitable for anyone with an eating disorder. If you have an existing health condition or are taking medication, always consult your healthcare practitioner before going for prolonged periods without eating.
“If you change the way you eat, you may feel completely different” - Dr Mindy Pelz
Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests.
Today's clip is from episode 474 of the podcast with nutrition expert and best-selling author of ‘Fast Like a Girl’ and ‘Eat Like a Girl: 100+ Delicious Recipes to Balance Hormones, Boost Energy, and Burn Fat.’, Dr Mindy Pelz.
In this clip, Mindy shares how food can be a powerful tool to support your health and wellbeing, and we explore her ‘foundational five’ health principles, which include actionable strategies that anyone can implement.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:20 Rangan Chatterjee? See all details at drinkag1.com/livemore. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 474 of the podcast with nutrition expert and bestselling author A Fast Like a Girl and Eats Like a Girl, Dr Mindy Peltz. In this clip, Mindy shares how food can be a powerful tool to support your health and wellbeing, while we explore her wonderful foundational five health principles.
2:02 Rangan Chatterjee? Now, please note, the advice in this episode may not be suitable if you are suffering with or recovering from an eating disorder. Also, if you have an existing health condition or are taking medication, always consult your healthcare practitioner before going for prolonged periods without eating.
2:23 Speaker 01 Food is actually a tool to give you the life that you want. It can take away from the life you want, or it can give you the life you want. It is one of the greatest tools we have access to. We just haven't been taught about it.
2:38 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah. So I just love to help people understand what are these foods that we need to focus on? Like foods we need to avoid and foods we need to bring in.
2:47 Speaker 01 Right. So the first that I call it the foundational five. So in the new book, we talk about there are five guiding principles that every woman needs to follow. I would say men probably need to follow these too. But I do feel like female bodies are not as forgiving. And the large reason behind that is because a male body's number one priority is survival. A female body has two priorities, survival and reproduction, just so we're clear. One of the things I'm very concerned about in the health world right now is we have overcomplicated food. Right?
3:22 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah.
3:23 Speaker 01 So when I put these five principles together, I literally thought if I was sitting with somebody who knew nothing about nutrition, was a part of the whole cultural zeitgeist of eating foods to lose weight, diet foods and not reading ingredients, what would I say to them? And these were the five.
3:42 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah, I love it. Well, let's go through these foundational five then to people. You know, start where you want to start.
3:47 Speaker 01 Okay, well, number one, I hope you see why I put number one on there.
3:53 Speaker 01 So number one, for those of you who are not seeing it, is blood sugar matters, calories don't. Now, let's, I thought about that sentence a long time. Because a lot of people are like, calories still matter. Okay, yes, if we lived in a perfect world where everybody could scan their calorie output and their calorie input every day and figure out exactly how many calories they needed to eat every day, then the calorie would matter. But we don't do that. We don't have, nobody knows how many calories, they can even chart it. Nobody's going to keep that chart forever to even figure that out. It is not an attainable health target. Blood sugar is.
4:35 Speaker 01 And with blood sugar, one of the things that we can do is we can get a CGM. We can get like a little keto mojo, blood sugar reader, something like that. But we've got to find ways to help women that have no money. And what you can do is ask yourself, how do I feel after I eat? Am I energized? Am I focused? Do I want to take a nap? Am I hungry again? If within two hours after a meal, your energy drops, your brain fog kicks in, you're hungry again, you didn't nail the blood sugar rule. You didn't get that blood sugar combo right.
5:17 Speaker 01 And that's what I unpack in the book is what does that look like with food? So you should be energized after a meal.
5:24 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah, I love that. That's a very simple way that doesn't require people to spend any money.
5:30 Speaker 01 No.
5:32 Rangan Chatterjee? They can self-assess. And I think it speaks to, you know, this wider societal problem at the moment with respect to food, which is we're so far removed from how we're meant to eat, how our bodies are meant to eat. But many people think it's normal to feel hungry every two hours.
5:52 Speaker 01 Right. Yes. Or sleepy in the afternoon.
5:55 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah. They think it's completely normal. And I get it's the norm for them. It doesn't mean it's normal.
6:02 Speaker 01 Right.
6:03 Rangan Chatterjee? And eating in a way to stabilize your blood sugar is arguably one of the most important things you can do for your short-term health, your long-term health, and for how good you feel.
6:14 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:15 Rangan Chatterjee? I will put a CGM on at this stage, maybe twice a year. A CGM being a continuous glucose monitor. They last about two weeks. I can learn which are the foods and which is the style of eating that keeps my blood sugar the most stable, whether I have it on or not. When I'm eating like that.
6:36 Speaker 01 Yep.
6:36 Rangan Chatterjee? Consistently, I feel great.
6:39 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:39 Rangan Chatterjee? I sleep well, my focus is great. I don't feel hungry much. I find it easy to resist temptation. And that's, I think, the other thing which people forget, Mindy, is if you eat in a way that stabilizes your blood sugar, you're having to resist temptation less.
6:57 Speaker 01 Yes.
6:58 Rangan Chatterjee? Do you know what I mean? If your blood sugar is plummeting because you had a sugary cereal at 7:00 AM and at 9:30 or 10:00, you're feeling jittery and hungry, your blood sugar probably is dropping. And you do need to have that bagel. You're going to struggle.
7:15 Speaker 01 That's right.
7:15 Rangan Chatterjee? But it isn't, that isn't the issue. The issue is what you had two to three hours beforehand.
7:20 Speaker 01 That's right. I had a really interesting situation. I'm sure you have this with your kids, you know, when your kids are in different sporting events, you end up hanging around the parents that are on the sidelines. I got to know this one woman really well. She would always ask me questions around nutrition. And every time I would tell her what I ate or what I did, she'd be like, I couldn't do that. I can't do that. I can't do that. After about a year of this, she said to me one day, she looked at me and she said, okay, I've watched you almost every weekend, three days a week, you know, after school, our kids are here. And I've finally come to one conclusion about your nutritional theories. And I'm like, oh, okay, tell me what that is. She goes, you are not deprived. I said, I'm not. I'm not deprived at all.
8:05 Speaker 01 I eat amazing food. I feel so good after I eat. I sleep so well, like food is medicine for me. And I am not depriving myself at all. And I'm not over there eating like granola bars all day. And like, food can be incredibly satisfying if we look at it from these five angles that we're going through.
8:29 Rangan Chatterjee? Okay, so keeping blood sugar stable is an important principle. I would have to say that your foundational five, they're pretty sensible.
8:39 Speaker 01 Thank you.
8:39 Rangan Chatterjee? What I mean by that is you'd struggle, I think, to find people these days disagreeing with those principles. And I love principles because I think there is too much confusion out there. I think we have to get to the point where we can listen to experts, but then tune into our own expertise.
8:58 Speaker 01 Thank you.
8:59 Rangan Chatterjee? Right? We have to be able to go, okay, that expert said that, that other expert said that. I like them both. I trust them both. Let me figure out what works for me.
9:10 Speaker 01 Yeah. And one of the things I know from my community is that I have a lot of plant-based people and I have a lot of omnivore people. And this is what you do this with your podcast. Let's bring everybody into the conversation and let the listener go, hey, when I pull out that tool, that works for me there. And then I put it down and I pull out this tool and that works for me there. I think we will free people from being either frustrated and confused or from people just going, you know, I feel like I'm failing it at all, which is what I hear a lot of women say is like, I'm just failing at it. I'm failing at health. Well, you're failing at the culture's idea of what health should look like for you.
9:54 Speaker 01 How about we start asking you what your intuitive sense is around your body? And now we have, just in that question, now we have taken a woman and we have put her at the beginning of a health path. And that is what I know you and I are trying to do.
10:10 Rangan Chatterjee? Okay. Eat nature's food. That's number two, right?
10:14 Speaker 01 Yes. Okay. So this was another interesting one that I saw is that everybody started, instead of counting calories, we got obsessed with counting carbs. And it got to the point where even the food industry has gotten so sneaky, they started to see that, oh, keto is popular. Let me go ahead and create keto foods or let me create gluten-free foods that everybody's going to want to eat because they're like, oh, it says it has these buzzwords on it. And so I started to tell my community like, okay, here's, let's just make it easy for you. The carb that is going to be the healthiest one is the one that came out of the earth. If it came out of the earth, there is a good chance it has fiber in it, which will help with
10:57 Speaker 01 rule number one, which is support your blood sugar. So it's getting really difficult to teach people how to read an ingredient label now. The food industry is really crafty at how they put headlines on things. So I needed to find a new way to explain this. And we got like so many messages of like, oh, today I ate 60 grams net carbs. Is that going to mean I'm going to gain weight? And I thought, oh, God, this is not, we, we need to free women. I don't want women counting carbs instead of calories. So let's just all of a sudden look at a carb as, is it nature's or is it manmade? If it is nature's, it's probably a great tool for me.
11:40 Speaker 01 If it's manmade, not a great tool. So the more we alter nature's food, the further away we take its nutritional value.
11:48 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah.
11:49 Speaker 01 So if you keep going back to what was the original source that nature provided this? And am I, how close can I get to that? We're going to be able to be in a place where we avoid chemicals and we stabilize blood sugar. So I, I have a really interesting concept that would apply to both men and women. And have you ever gone bowling with your kids?
12:11 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah.
12:11 Speaker 01 Where they, you put up the bumper rails?
12:13 Rangan Chatterjee? Yep.
12:14 Speaker 01 Okay, you do that so that the ball doesn't go into the alley. So I think we should do that with food. It, it is a crime at this particular moment, what's going on in our food system. And if you don't have a personal value system, if you don't implement rules for yourself, you are putting yourself on a collision course with chronic disease, men and women, end of story. That is the moment we're living in.
12:40 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah. Maybe it's an uncomfortable truth.
12:44 Rangan Chatterjee? But it's a truth nonetheless, certainly the way I see life, is that in the modern food environment, if you don't have some sort of framework that you apply around foods, I think most people are going to struggle because the food is going to encourage you to eat more, you're going to crave more unhealthy foods.
13:05 Speaker 01 Yep.
13:05 Rangan Chatterjee? You have food available all the time, everywhere you go.
13:09 Speaker 01 Yep.
13:10 Rangan Chatterjee? On an evolutionary level, we've never had this before.
13:12 Speaker 01 Never. We are living in the worst food time ever.
13:15 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah, it's not necessarily your fault or the fact that you are weak, that you can't resist.
13:20 Speaker 01 Thank you.
13:21 Rangan Chatterjee? Humans, if you take our hunter gather ancestors and pop them in this environment, they'll also get sick.
13:28 Speaker 01 Yes.
13:28 Rangan Chatterjee? But it's not as if they have more discipline than us, it's just they're in a food landscape where they're not having to make all these choices. So I think we all need to figure out certain rules that work for us. And I think that's why so many different diets can work for people because that diet or the name of that style of eating, low carb, low fat, whole food plan, this, whatever it might be, it gives people a framework and a structure, which means that they cut other foods out. And I know people don't like to talk about restriction, but I just don't really see how you do navigate this modern food environment without a degree of restriction.
14:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, no.
14:08 Rangan Chatterjee? Do you know what I mean?
14:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's why I go back to nature's carbs, not man-made carbs or human-made carbs. If you looked at every food you went in contact with and you said, okay, how close to this, if we're going back to that original conversation, how close to this is this to nature's food? If it appears very close, you're probably going to get it right.
14:27 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah.
14:27 Speaker 01 But if all of a sudden you're looking at especially the box stuff that's in the center aisles at the grocery store, you're going in there and it has a list of 20 plus ingredients, there is a good chance that one of those ingredients has not been fully vetted for your health. It's been vetted for as a preservative, it's been vetted as a taste enhancer, but it has not been vetted for your health. Now, here's where it gets crazy, and this is why I'm so irate about this, and this was a huge motivator for writing Eat Like a Girl, was that when we look at so many of the chronic diseases and we look at these horrible toxic foods.
15:08 Speaker 01 They are ones that many people are eating every single day. And they are known carcinogens. They are known to change your direction with obesity. The food industry has infiltrated with so many chemicals that if you're just constantly going into this toxic food, you are setting yourself up for chronic disease.
15:31 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah.
15:32 Speaker 01 But you have to understand that the modern world is taking you off track.
15:35 Rangan Chatterjee? Exactly.
15:36 Speaker 01 And that's what I don't think people are getting yet.
15:39 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah. Point number three of the foundational five, eats for your microbes.
15:45 Speaker 01 You know, do you know why I'm saying that?
15:47 Rangan Chatterjee? I don't know. Hit me.
15:49 Speaker 01 Okay, this I love too. So whenever we go to choose a food, what do we usually do? We say, what am I in the mood for? Every time you say, what I'm in the mood for, you're asking your taste buds. But what controls your taste buds?
16:04 Rangan Chatterjee? Your gut bugs.
16:05 Speaker 01 Your gut bugs. So your gut bugs are telling you what kind of food to eat. So the bad gut bugs are going to tell you to eat the sugars. The bad gut bugs are going to make you crave the processed foods. So when you actually ask yourself, what do I need to eat right now to feed my microbes? You flip that whole scenario on its head. And as you start to feed your microbes with things like fiber and seeds and nuts, I put lists after lists in the book of polyphenol, probiotic, prebiotic foods. What happens is your taste buds now change. And the greatest study ever done on fasting was the every other day diet. This was years ago.
16:51 Speaker 01 And the every other day diet said, took people who ate toxic Western food and basically said, you eat those every other day. So eat whatever you want. If you're going through fast food, eat whatever you want, but on the days off, you're not going to eat. And what they found, and they had to do this over a course of a year. What they found at the end of the year was that not only did everybody's metabolic markers improve, but what surprised them is their taste buds and what they craved was massively different a year later. And that's because in the fasted state, especially when you go a full day without food, you are killing off those old bugs and you're creating an environment where new bacteria can grow.
17:34 Speaker 01 And those new bacteria give you new signals to your mouth and make you crave new things that are healthier so that they can stay alive.
17:42 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah, this is where the idea of listening to your body gets a little challenging, doesn't it? Because if we want, we want people to tune into themselves and listen to what their bodies are telling them, but sometimes we can get waylaid by that, right? So if you have an unhealthy balance of bugs in your guts, you may well be craving foods because of that gut dysbiosis.
18:10 Speaker 01 Candida is a great example of that. Candida is a fungus that lives in your gut and it makes you crave sugar, alcohol, carbohydrates. This is what I had when I had chronic fatigue syndrome. I had massive candida. So it kept telling me to eat these toxic carbs over and over again. So the diet that this doctor put me on was one that was absent of all those foods. Now let's talk about what happened the first couple of days I went on that. That fungus just screamed at me. I want more carbs, more sugar. So the first couple of days are hard as those gut bugs start to scream at you, but then they quieted down. And after a week, as little as a week, I started to actually crave the things that I knew supported my health.
18:55 Speaker 01 It's a little bit like you fake it till you make it.
18:59 Rangan Chatterjee? You have to ignore those until you get through it.
19:02 Speaker 01 That's right.
19:03 Rangan Chatterjee? And then you can tune into your body's cravings and desires at that point.
19:06 Speaker 01 Yes.
19:08 Rangan Chatterjee? These principles so far all seem to be just as relevant for men.
19:13 Speaker 01 Yes.
19:14 Rangan Chatterjee? As they are for women. And of course they are, right? Stable blood sugar, eat natural foods, eat for your microbes. And the last two, which we're going to get to, protein is not just for men and fat doesn't make you fat. Okay, these, these foundational five, as you call them. I think just as relevant for men
19:31 Speaker 01 Yep.
19:32 Rangan Chatterjee? as they are for women, broadly speaking, when it comes to diets, what are those core differences? What are the things that men can do and maybe thrive on, but women can't?
19:46 Speaker 01 Well, let's go back to the gut bugs.
19:48 Rangan Chatterjee? Okay.
19:49 Speaker 01 The gut bugs are breaking down estrogen. So, men, we talked about this on the last one, they make testosterone and testosterone goes up into the brain and converts to estrogen.
20:01 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah.
20:02 Speaker 01 So estrogen is, its whole process is different in a male body than a female body. You need to have good bacteria in your gut to metabolize estrogen. If you are 43 years old and you're going through perimenopause and you have a decimated gut microbiome and you are trying to hold on to every little bit of estrogen that your body's giving you, if you don't have these gut bugs that will help break down estrogen, your symptoms are going to be worse. That doesn't happen to men.
20:34 Rangan Chatterjee? So women need good amounts of fiber to help nourish their gut microbiome, which is going to help with the metabolism of hormones.
20:42 Speaker 01 That's right.
20:43 Rangan Chatterjee? But men also need good quality gut bugs for other things.
20:48 Speaker 01 Yeah. Maybe they'd be a guiding light for a man. For a woman, they are an absolute. Like, we've got to use these as, that's why I called them foundational. They are a foundational part of a woman's health.
21:01 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah. Let's go back to the final two of your foundational five. Okay. Protein is not just for men.
21:08 Speaker 01 Yeah.
21:08 Rangan Chatterjee? Please explain.
21:09 Speaker 01 Yeah. So, you know, it's interesting. I think protein is having its moment and it's beautiful. You know, I think for women, we haven't prioritized protein. In general, women, I mean, we have a lot more bodybuilders and a lot more fitness advocates. But in general, women don't think of protein as an crucial nutrient. So if I'm listening to somebody say, you need more protein so that you can have more muscles, so that you can be more insulin sensitive, your brain As a woman may actually translate that into, well, I don't. Every time I build muscle, my clothes are tight. Every time I build muscle, the scale goes up and I'm addicted to the number on the scale. So all of a sudden, you dismiss protein.
21:53 Speaker 01 And amino acids come in the form of different forms of protein. What I'm saying is let's expand the conversation and say your hormones need those amino acids. Please make sure you're eating protein with that remeal. So when we keep it in the conversation of men, we tend to keep it in the conversation of muscle. And I'm asking us to even go beyond that and put it in the context of your hormones want you to eat protein.
22:19 Rangan Chatterjee? Do you think it's starting to change with women, the idea that protein is important?
22:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think it's a conversation that's gaining momentum for sure.
22:28 Rangan Chatterjee? One thing I haven't asked you yet, which I've been asked to ask you by someone who's a fan of yours is what should somebody eat when they're breaking a fast?
22:39 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
22:40 Rangan Chatterjee? I know you cover this.
22:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, and eat like a girl. Yeah, I did a whole chapter on this, so I'm going to make it really simple. There are three things you need to think about. If you want to improve your microbiome, like we were talking about, you need to add in more fibery foods, fermented foods. I call them polyphenol, probiotic and prebiotic foods. But they look like a lot of salads and a lot of seeds and nuts. So I have lists in the book. Second thing, you want to eat to make sure that you keep your muscle in good shape. That's protein. We talked about protein. And the third is you want to bring fat in. So fat curbs the appetite. It turns off, it turns off the hunger hormone. It stabilizes the blood sugar.
23:22 Speaker 01 So when you put that meal together, ask yourself, like, is there enough fiber here? Is there enough of the polyphenol, probiotic, prebiotic foods? Do I have some protein here and do I have some fat?
23:33 Rangan Chatterjee? So you put it with something with healthy, natural fats like avocado or nut butters or something like that?
23:40 Speaker 01 In the book, I lay it all out. I have recipes, but that's a general guideline for the sake of this podcast is it should be intentional. The first meal matters. It is the most important meal of this whole conversation is that first meal in. So what healing do you want to keep going? And if you keep that in mind, I've got to feed my microbes. I got to put protein in here. I got to put some fat. You can never go wrong.
24:04 Rangan Chatterjee? Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. And if you want more, why not go back and listen to the original full conversation with my guest? If you enjoyed this episode, I think you will really enjoy my bite-sized Friday email. It's called the Friday Five, and each week I share things that I do not share on social media. It contains five short doses of positivity, articles of books that I'm reading, quotes that I'm thinking about, exciting research I've come across, and so much more. I really think you're going to love it. The goal is for it to be a small, yet powerful dose of feel-good to get you ready for the weekend.
24:46 Rangan Chatterjee? You can sign up for it free of charge at drchattity.com/fridayfive. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back next week with my long-form conversational Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.
Previous Rewiring Your Brain for Better Mental Health: How Small Actions Can Transform Your Health with Dr Camilla Nord #543 Next Breaking The Sugar Cycle, How to Use Food as Medicine, The Science of Metabolic Health & The Truth About Detoxification with Dr Mark Hyman #545 Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated