Dhru Purohit Show - 5 Key Principles (Some Controversial) to Help You Burn Fat, Build Muscle and Fast The Right Way with Dr. Mindy Pelz

Episode Date: October 28, 2024

This episode is brought to you by LMNT, Momentous, and Levels.  There’s so much confusion around weight loss for women and what truly works. We know an individualized approach is essential, as one-size-fits-all rarely works for everyone. Today’s guest is here to break it all down, explaining how fasting, protein intake, resistance training, and maintaining stable blood sugar can all be integrated into your routine. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with Dr. Mindy Pelz to discuss fasting, weight loss, calories, and protein consumption. Dr. Mindy reveals the latest research that has shifted her perspective on how fasting should be approached. She also explains why glucose spikes and insulin resistance are crucial factors in weight loss, especially as women age. Plus, Dr. Mindy shares practical tips to help shift negative mindsets around aging and weight loss. Dr. Mindy Pelz is a renowned holistic health expert and a leading voice in educating women about hormonal health. She has empowered hundreds of thousands of people worldwide to tap into their bodies' innate healing abilities through her “5-Step Approach,” which incorporates fasting, personalized nutrition, stress management, chemical detoxification, and lifestyle changes to optimize health and slow the aging process. Her YouTube channel, featuring fasting and holistic health tips, has garnered over 26 million views. She is the bestselling author of The Menopause Reset, The Reset Factor, and The Reset Kitchen. Additionally, her podcast, The Resetter Podcast, ranks among Apple’s top 40 U.S. science podcasts. In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Mindy dive into:  How Dr. Mindy’s perspective has evolved (02:40) Why muscle, lean mass, and protein are critical (06:32) Strategies for building muscle (08:30) Who should fast and who should avoid it (16:33) Dr. Mindy’s take on tracking protein and body composition (19:15) Three meals + protein breakdown per meal (26:13) Protein for energy and mental clarity (30:27) Calories in vs. out, glucose spikes, and weight loss (32:26) The mechanism behind weight loss (55:39) Strategies to overcome a negative mindset (59:39) Dr. Mindy’s view on GLP-1 drugs and reducing obesity (01:12:49) Eating for your microbes and gut health (01:21:00) Microdosing hard things (01:30:29) The Menopause Revolution and reframing aging conversations (01:38:09) Also mentioned in this episode: Eat Like A Girl, Dr. Mindy Pelz’s new book  For more on Dr. Mindy, follow her on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, or her Website. This episode is brought to you by LMNT, Momentous, and Levels.  Right now, LMNT is offering my listeners a free sample pack with any purchase. Head over to DrinkLMNT.com/dhru today. Optimize your energy and mental clarity with the Momentous Three: Protein, Omega-3s and Creatine made by and used by the best. Go to livemomentous.com and enter promo code DHRU to get 20% off any order.  Right now, Levels is offering my listeners an additional 2 FREE months of the Levels annual Membership when you use my link, levels.link/DHRU. Make moves on your metabolic health with Levels today.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mindy, welcome back to the podcast. A pleasure to have you here. You know, you have a new book out. And I feel like one of the most important things we have to start off with is why is the individual who really popularize so many aspects and benefits around fasting talking now so much about the importance of muscle, lean mass, and protein, especially when it comes to women? Yeah, it's such a good question because one of the things that happened with fasting. Like a Girl is I would tell people like, you know, I eat. Like just because I'm prophylotizing fasting doesn't mean that I don't have some strong opinions about food and what food should be doing. This book has actually been kind of a lifetime of my work and studying around nutrition. This book was going to be born at some point.

But to answer your specific question, what happened with Fast like a Girl that just totally blew my mind was that so many women got incredible results learning how to compress their food into one eating window, leaving this period of time for fasting. And they were experienced themselves anew. Like they were having these, like, I've never been able to lose weight before. I never had this kind of mental energy, this physical energy. But what came from that is this whole conversation of what do I eat? Now what do I eat? I'm scared to eat. If I go back into food, I boomerang. And then, of course, we had the, if I'm fasting, aren't I going to lose muscle? How much protein should I be having? Do I need carbohydrates? When should I do a low carbohydrate diet? I thought

low carbohydrate diets were bad for women. Like millions of questions came pouring in about this relationship with food. So it was absolutely the right time to birth this book. Are there elements of this that are an evolution of what you've talked about? Oh, yeah. Is there anything inside this book where you've changed your mind? Oh, I love this. And it's not even completely change your mind. Have you doubled down or reprioritize certain recommendations for women?

Yeah. This is such a good question because I'm sure you feel this too, even as a podcaster, is that we put out information and it stays in a book or it stays on a video or it stays. on a podcast, and those of us that are in this to keep understanding and evolving with the new information, we're going to make an evolutionary thought based off of something that we might have thought five years ago. We may think different. And the way that social media works, the way books work, there tends to be this, like,

inability to evolve your thoughts. People want to hold you still. You said this five years ago, so you must still believe that. With that thought in mind, here's my new lens to look at. I still believe in the metabolic switch. I believe we have two different metabolisms, one that gets turned on when we eat, and one that gets turned on when we fast. And knowing how to go in between these two is massively important.

When you're in the fat-burning metabolic switch, making ketones and fasting, you are in a breaking down. Let's just call it autophagy because that's how people know. know this. You are breaking down what no longer serves you. You are literally asking your body, hey, let's get rid of the junk that is no longer needed here so we can become stronger. But then when you switch back into the sugar burner system, that is growth. That is the mTOR pathway. And you are asking your body, please grow muscle, grow hormones, grow neurons, grow neurons in the brain. lot of things you want to grow no matter where you are in your lifespan. And growth can only occur

with food. Growth doesn't occur in this fasted state. So with through that lens, I saw many things. So one, the one thing we need to grow in the fed state is your microbiome. You can get rid of the old bad bacteria through fasting, but then you need to put in polyphenol, probiotic, prebiotic foods. So how you break your fast has become so massively important to me. I saw so many posts all over social saying fasting destroys your microbiome. And then I dove in and looked at the research. And the research showed fasting just got rid of the old, created a new environment. Now it's up to you to grow the new.

So I doubled down on talking about fermented foods and polyphenol foods and the seeds and the nuts and the prebiotic fibers that have come from the earth, the plant-based living that our incredible earth provides us to grow good microbes. Then I looked at the research on, oh my gosh, fasting breaks down muscle. Okay, well, that's interesting. So does that mean that if I fast, I can't grow muscle? No, it doesn't mean that. It means that when you're in the fasted state, your brilliant body is breaking down the parts of the muscle

that need to be washed away that no longer serve you. So then when you go back into the Fed state, you better up your protein. I'm in alignment with the 30 grams of protein, you know, break your fast and make sure that you get those 30 grams of protein and get one gram of protein for every pound of body weight, maybe even more. Absolutely. So I started to see that the food became as important as the fasted state. They're like a combo. They're the metabolic. They're the metabolic shift switch. We can't do away with either end of it. And I would say that when I first started teaching fasting, it was such a powerful tool that people were like, I'm just going to do one meal a day. And I'm here to say one meal a day over and over again is no good. That's where you're going to

start to get yourself into trouble. You got to bring food back into the equation. Let's come back to the first question. Help us understand why muscle and lean mass is so important. especially for a lot of the audience that you talk to, which is women that are in that mid to late stage, perimenopausal stage or full on metapause. So the first thing is I always think about my 90-year-old self. So what is my 90-year-old self? What is my 100-year-old self need? And one of the things she needs is to be able to get in and out of a chair. Like she needs to be able to move around and lift things. And if I want full functionality in those 90- and 100-year-old versions of me, I better have some muscle.

I saw this with my dad when he had knee replacement surgery. He couldn't even get himself out of the chair because he had lost so much muscle in his arm. So we need muscle because we need it to be able to function at optimal levels the older we get. And what happens to the female body is muscle breaks down year after year after year. I mean, you can see it in aging women.

So the first thing... Men too, right? Men too. Men too. But the first thing is functionality because I think the muscle discussion is sort of people are thinking of it as, oh, I look better with muscle, which is great. You should look however you want to look. But my brain is always thinking functionality. And the older I get, the more muscle I need to be able to do the daily activities that I want to do. So that's the first thing. Second thing, everything I'm teaching is metabolic health mixed with hormonal health. And in order to stay metabolically healthy, you need more muscle because you have. have more insulin receptor sites. So you're going to be able to have more, think of it like more storage for insulin and glucose. It's going to make it so that your body doesn't have to store glucose

in fat. It can put it into muscle and it can use that muscle. So muscle is key for insulin sensitivity. That would be the second reason. And the third one is, you know, women fight insulin resistance the moment we hit 40. That fight starts to accelerate. And as estrogen goes down, you're getting more and more insulin resistant. So if you don't want to be 70 and gaining weight, you need as many strategies at 40 to get yourself insulin sensitive. And one of those is build muscle. So there's more places to put glucose in insulin.

What have you found from yourself, your community? What are the top strategies to build muscle, especially for women? Well, I like the protein one because I think everybody thinks, oh, I got a lift heavy, heavy stuff, which you do. But I really like add some protein in because protein accomplishes several things. And we can talk about the difference between plant-based and animal. But if you strategize your protein, right, you're getting amino acids. Amino acids are going to build muscle. But amino acids also build hormones. Amino acids also build neurotransmitters. So one source of food is not just helping you with strength training and muscle, but it's also helping you with hormones

and neurotransmitters. Phenomenal. So we like kill one bird with one stone. So two birds with one stone. That's how we say it. So I like it for that. I'm a huge fan of the lift heavy stuff. I am a huge fan of Stacey Sims. I like her work. In fact, we did a really fun podcast together. I listened to it. I thought it was great. Yeah, because people think we We disagree and we actually agree more on things than we disagree. So people can go listen to that one. But I think you do heavy, heavy weights and low reps. My background was I was a competitive tennis player.

So in my 20s, so I've been doing physical weightlifting forever. And then in my 40s, I fell in love with running and I would run long distances. and then I saw the muscle breaking down even more. And now I'm back doing heavy at 55, doing heavy, heavy weights to try to keep that muscle strength. So I do believe that the heaviness of the weight matters. But I want to add one other piece to the conversation.

I'm again thinking about the future version of me. And the future version of me, not only does she need muscle to lift, but she needs muscle to be able to reach something off the top of a shelf. She needs muscle to be able to get in and out of a chair. She needs muscle to carry maybe a bag of soil to the garden. So I've been really thinking beyond just lifting weights, what activities am I going to need to do in my 60s, 70s, and 80s,

and how can I do those with weight right now? So simple things. I just came home from a trip in Turkey and I had a really heavy suitcase and I was going to carry it upstairs in my house. And it would have been easy for me to turn to my husband and say, can you carry it or my 22-year-old son, can you carry it? But my 55-year-old self was like, you carry it. If you can't carry it at 55, what are you going to be able to carry a box at 85?

So I've started looking at like functionality of strength. What types of strength am I going to need in my day-to-day life? And doing bicep curls and lifting, you know, and hang cleans and squats with heavy weights. That's one thing, but it's still a fabricated strength training. What can we do in our day-to-day life that will increase that strength? And that's where my lens and what I'm thinking about now. That's great. You know, you mentioned your interview with Stacy, and she shared something similar to like something that's Cynthia Thurlow, who's also been on your podcast. She's shared on our

podcast. In fact, I think we just did a compilation episode this past week as we're recording this right now, October 10th, where Cynthia, who's also a huge proponent of fasting and she really equates it with it being intermittent fasting, being a thing that took her out of the hospital and saved her life and did this TED talk that went viral around it, the things that they both were saying on our podcast was that one of the reasons they got a little bit more hesitant as individuals that were women who are in that key demographic that you're mentioning as they age, is that even in one round of fasting, they were seeing so much muscle loss that it was so hard for them to put it back on.

So they focused more on time restricted eating in that window versus prolonged fast because of the own individual damage that's there that they were noticing. Now, again, these are their N of 1 experiences in their community. Have you noticed anything like that? And how do your recommendations of fasting that you were talking about earlier layer into it? It's essentially what you write about in the book, who should be doing fast and who should be more cautious about fasting? So the first thing is I look at a 24-hour period is you have an eating window and you

have a fasting window. And that eating window, you get to move it wherever you want to move it. It's completely up to you. So let's use Stacey and I talked about this. Stacey believes when you get up in the morning, you should eat within the first half hour. Now, when we broke that down, what that means to her is collagen powder in an MCT oil and a little, she's plant-based, a little bit of like, I think she does not oat milk, but she does almond milk in her coffee. She doesn't have a full breakfast, at least what she told me on the podcast. She has a loaded coffee.

And then she goes and works out. And so I'm sure she does other things in there. But I thought that was really interesting. I was like, well, yeah. So I started adding things into my coffee. Like what else? There's even something called a carnivore coffee where you can add in an egg into your coffee. I started trying that.

And like, how do I add in pure protein into my coffee? And yeah, I would say that has worked for me in the sense that I have a little more oomph when I work out because I work out in the morning. I definitely notice I'm building muscle quicker, but I've also added in creatine and some other things that are pretty interesting. But I'm with that, if I do a loaded coffee, I'm still not having my first meal until like noon or 11 o'clock. And then the other trick that I've started doing is I've started bringing my last meal down a little bit. So into earlier in the day, five o'clock, have my dinner cut it off, nothing after that. So the only thing that I've changed is my pre-workout, trying a more loaded coffee, and moving my eating window more into the middle of the day.

I'm a year and a half post-menopausal, which I think is really important to state, because where you are in the menopausal journey matters in this conversation. So I'm officially postmenopausal. And so I'm finding that that rhythm is helping me build muscle more and more and more. Do you shoot for a certain amount of protein? Do you track your protein in the day? Are you shooting for a certain amount of grams of protein for yourself in the day? So I did it for a month in February of this year.

I wanted to try, you know, my ideal body weight is 130 pounds. That's usually what I feel the best at. And that's been my whole life when I was a competitive athlete. That's what I was. So I go 130 grams of protein. Let me break that up. I actually started gaining more weight than I wanted to at that moment. So I felt for me that maybe I needed to bring some of that protein down that maybe I was doing too much protein.

Now, that might be startling to people because we've got this message that's like 100, you know, one pound or more. Like I know, you know, Sarah Godfrey's been on your, on your podcast. She's a dear friend, and I love everything that she says. She believes even postmenopausal 2 grams, we could go up to 2 grams of protein. For my body, if I eat that much protein,

I start packing on weight. And if I do that without a fasting window, forget it. So I had to come and find some version of protein that worked for me. And eat like a girl, I really emphasize the end of one. And I think this is really important where we are in social media right now. We as health influencers have this tendency to be saying, this is right, this is wrong. What I teach my community is when you're going through Instagram, when you're going through Facebook, when you're listening to a podcast like this, you are gathering data for your own healthy living. So you might say, oh, protein, one,

gram a protein for every pound of body weight. That sounds logical. Let me try it. But then see if you can do it every single day. See if you get the results. If you don't get the results, then modify it. If you do get the results, then yes, that worked for you. So I really believe, especially the feminine body, we have to be our own end of one and take all these trending topics and apply them to ourselves and then ask ourselves, does that work? Does that not work? Can I double click on something that you said earlier? Because I think this is the perfect format to be able to tease all these things out and ask. We've done so many episodes on this topic, right? And we want to hear everybody's perspective on things.

So you mentioned that you started noticing that you were gaining weight. Yeah. A lot of the people that have been on this podcast and my own individual trainer, they'll often say that the scale itself is not the best measure of if things are working or not. It's actually there's weight loss, there's fat loss, there's body composition. So how are you noticing that when you're eating? eating more protein, were you looking at your body composition?

Because it is pretty common that when people train more, they eat more protein. They do gain weight, right? But there could be a recompositioning of the body in that process. So I know my listener is going to ask me, why didn't you ask her about that? Because was it the scale? Was it body composition? What was it? So I was working with a trainer.

And I was doing three days a week of heavy lifting. And I committed 30 days to 130 grams or more. just couldn't go under that of protein. We did at the beginning of February, we did a body composition analysis. So it was total weight, total muscle, and total and then total fat. And by the end of 30 days, everything had gone up. It muscle had gone up, body weight had gone up, body fat. It had all gone up. And I didn't feel great in my own skin. And I wasn't fasting as much that month. I also was like, well, let me challenge my own belief system. And I just found that I didn't like how I felt.

And that, it wasn't just a number on the scale. It was full body composition. So just another question on that, looking through your lens, right? Because I want to make sure that I understand it from your view. If all those numbers went up and you're not fasting, what do you think is driving the weight gain in that instance? Right? What's driving the weight gain?

It was more food than I normally eat. So the total calories could have gone up. Perhaps. Total consumption of food could have gone up. Yeah. In addition to protein going out. That's right. Okay.

So, and again, this is, I'm going to be really cautious to say this was my experience. For sure. It doesn't mean that what experts like Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, who's incredible, doesn't mean what she's saying is wrong. Doesn't mean what, you know, Dr. Sarah Godfrey is saying is wrong. I'm saying we need, we're at a moment in history with health, where we need to take all this advice and be interest, curious about it for our own bodies, and then find what rhythm works for our own body. For me, where I sit right now, making sure I have a good amount of

protein at every single meal, every single day, or every single, yeah, every single time I put a meal together, I look at how much protein do I have? I want 30 grams of protein in that meal. I can eyeball it now. I also found I need a lot of fiber because fiber helps me break down hormones and get rid of it. That month of February, I wasn't eating as much fiber because I was so focused on protein. Is it possible that that was why the fat went up? Very, very possible. So I look at fiber and then I look at a small amount of carbohydrate. Usually my preferred carbohydrate is some fruit or a sweet potato. I do nature's carbs. So for me, That with every meal tacked on to a 15-hour fasting window,

sometimes I go to 17-hour fasting window, tacked on to two days of weightlifting, tacked on to my new favorite thing, which is rucking the hills here in the canyons of close to where I live, tacked on to eating in the light, only making sure that I'm eating my meals when it's light out so melatonin isn't high, tacked on to managing sleep and stress, that is working for me.

Yeah, that's great. A couple more things on your end of one experience and where you are today, right? So you mentioned that you're shooting for, and again, this is your experience. I think the audience understands that, but they're trying to think about your philosophy, about how you take your teachings and apply them to yourself. And then people can make up their own mind and apply their own teachings and put an amalgamation and stuff. So if you're typically shooting to start eating around noon after maybe having like a more fueled

coffee that's there. So if you're having, you know, three meals or you're trying to get like those 90 grams of protein, 30, 60, 90, like 30 grams around, so you're having about three meals between noon and about 5 p.m. Yes. In that time period. So you're sort of forcing that eating window. Yeah.

And getting three meals in that time period. Yeah. What I will snack on. So I'll have, I'll break my fast with a big meal. I just explain kind of what I put together, protein, fiber, and a little bit of carbohydrate. And then I will snack on beef sticks. I will snack on vegetables. I will snack on protein and vegetables.

Many a day, I've rolled up a slice of antibiotic hormone-free meat with some cheese in it and wrap that around a lettuce, a lettuce of radicchio. And I'll eat that in between. work. So it's usually one meal, a bunch of snacks that are fiber and protein, and then a lighter dinner. My heaviest meal now is the middle of the day. That's great. You know, these go back to these key principles that you've outlined inside of the book. We're going to be jumping around a little bit here and there. And, you know, one of them that we already talked about is that protein is the hero macro nutrient that you want people to be focusing on. And one of the things that you talk about

inside the book, in addition to it being supportive of muscle, lean mass, is that it's also incredibly satiating, which what a lot of people are talking about. You eat more protein. You tend to get more full. You're not as hungry for other things that are there. Do you want to just double click on that for a second? This is really, really important because I don't know if people get this. When you eat a meal first, you should be energized after the meal.

Like you should eat a meal and be like, who, okay, I'm energized, I'm ready to go. you should have more mental clarity and you should not be hungry. So if those three things are happening, you nailed the meal. But if you're tired, if you're brain, you have brain fog, and you're hungry within an hour later, you didn't nail that meal. And most of the time, what I have found is in order to nail those three things, you've got to have protein. And there has to be a protein.

And there has to be some fat. But I think the fat conversation's been interesting because we went from, no fat and low fat to everybody was when the ketogenic diet first came out. Everybody was like, ah, you got to have all this fat. I disagree. I think we just incorporate, like, I drizzle olive oil over everything, a high quality olive oil as much as I can. So I just make sure I have some fat in there so that my blood sugar doesn't spike and that

keeps my hunger. But if I took the protein out of that, I'd be hungry within an hour. I'd probably be tired within 30 minutes. So play with that. Like that protein absolutely accomplishes all the things you want to accomplish with a meal. And I think we think about food through the lens of our taste buds. We don't think about it through the lens of our blood sugar. And if you want to stop the blood sugar spike, you're going to need to put some protein in that meal.

Yeah. You know, that is one of the other things that is the principles that you talk about inside of the book. I think it's the first one that's there. you're talking about blood sugar and its relationship to calories. What's the principle, if you want to say it out plainly, and then expand on it? What do you want the audience to understand about this principle and how it relates to their life? So the calorie principle, the calorie and calorie out, I do not understand why in 24 we are still so confused on this.

There's a lot of people out there saying the literature says, if you want to lose weight, You want to lower your calorie input and increase your calorie output. Now, Jason Fung was the first one to say, hey, guys, this changes your set point. Losing weight is more of a hormonal issue, and the hormone you want to control is insulin. So I see weight loss through that lens. I buy that principle because that is what I saw in my clinic. That's what I see online, that if you want to lose weight, you want less insulin.

And if you want, in order to get less insulin, you need to have less blood sugar. End of story. You call all that like the hormone insulin hypothesis. Is that the right name? Yes, exactly. Exactly. So, but the second thing that's so important about the blood sugar matters, calories, don't is what can you accomplish?

Stephen Bartlett and I had a really fun conversation on this. The second interview I went on with him, I asked him, and I'll ask you the same question, Have you ever been able to succeed at knowing your calorie output every day and comparing that to your calorie input and getting the delta? Like, have you ever gone through a period in your life where you're like, okay, I have a delta of about 500 calories today? Have I ever been in a period? So I work out with a trainer. Right. I got serious about it when I turned 40, which was about two years ago.

Right. Had a small break in between. But I track all my calories inside of an app. Right. And so it's a program that he's kind of put together for me. Yeah. As somebody who kind of grew up vegetarian and undermuscled, undercalorieed, underfueled, and understanding how important it is to prioritize lean mass. So I track my calories.

I don't want to be under that amount. But your question is, have you ever known what you're sort of, the calories that you should be eating and then been under? Yeah, like do you, like, do you at the end of the day go, I nailed my calorie count? It sounds like you have a good system. Oh, yeah. I'm literally tracking everything that I eat only because I'm trying to make sure my history is of under-eating. Yeah, right. Right.

I was a vegan for a long period of time. I was a raw food vegan. I got used to and I have a small frame. I got used to not eating that much. So I have to make sure that I eat enough if I want to actually gain muscle, gain weight and especially prioritize the protein. It's just a hard measurement is my point. Like if I can do, let's say I take two different women. I'm going to use women as an example.

One of them I put a continuous glucose monitor on. Yeah. And I say, I did this recently with a patient I was working with. I'm like, just eat. She was vegetarian. I'm like, just eat. And what we're going to look at is we're going to look at the spikes, how many glucose spikes you have in a day.

When I first, and I just said eat and she was thin. She was, she's a well-known actress and she wants to stay thin for being in front of the camera. And when we first looked at that, she saw like 10 spikes in a day. And immediately, I was like, tell me what your moods are like. Like if your blood sugar is spiking and then it's dropping, tell me how you feel throughout the day. And she's like, well, many times I'm energized and then I get lethargic or I'm happy and then I get blue.

Like her way of being tracked those 10 spikes. So then what we did is I said, I'm not even, I'm not trying to get you to eat meat. I just want you to add some fat to each one of those spikes. And I changed some things she was doing in her coffee and a few things that were just really causing too many blood sugar spikes. And add in some protein rich vegetables. So we added in fat and we added in vegetables. And immediately, same type of food, different combination, she was now down to five spikes a day. and so we just kept playing with the composition of food and the type of food she was eating so that we got

the blood sugar nailed. She was also worried about being too underweight and we started to see her weight go back up to a homeostatic place where she felt amazing in her skin. She was able to do her job, had tons of energy, her moods went up. That's the power of blood sugar. Okay, second woman, I say every single day you're going to count how many calories that. that you have eaten in food, and you're going to count how many calories that you've been burning based off a not just your fitness, but it has to be everything. It has to be all movement, has to be everything you do in a day. And we're going to count that so that you know if you're going to gain weight or not.

In that scenario, one, it's very difficult to do. I don't know most women, like people will pick up a box and they will say, oh, this has is low calorie, I should eat it, but they don't really understand what that means. So there's not as much scientific certainty as that darn CGM that's telling you real time what's going on with your blood sugar. The second thing is the quality of her food, the combination of food that she's putting together. If she just shows me the total calorie output versus calorie input, that says nothing about metabolic health. That doesn't say anything about Well, was that good food?

Were there obesityans in that food? Were there toxic fats in those food? Like, it doesn't give us enough data to know if the quality of food she's eating is going to stabilize her hormones, is going to help her lose weight, and is going to prevent chronic disease. The blood sugar reader, I can tell you, I was so proud of the work I did with this actress because she came back to me and after a season of the next season of her show, she's like, I've never been happier. I've never eaten more.

I've never had a better relationship to food. Everybody on the set saw a difference in me. Yeah, because I taught her blood sugar. If I had taught her calories, none of that byproduct would have happened. So it's a wider lens that we can, and a more accurate way to look at, our relationship to food and what it's doing to our body, as opposed to counting calories. I think that everybody's got to find the vehicle that works well for them, which goes back to your earlier point that's there.

I think one of the confusing things that is there often for even people like me, like myself, when somebody who's listening hears that like, hey, it's about blood sugar. It's not about calories. They can be left with the feeling that, you know, you can still. consume more calories and lose weight. Like if you take your basal metabolic rate of like what your body would normally be burning during a day and you can come up with that. Usually most people are not trained.

You'll need a calculator. Somebody can help you. You measure yourself over a period of time. Yep. Right? Is that can you actually eat, even if it's from whole food sources, can you eat a surplus of calories? Can you have a thousand extra calories?

Even if it's from whole food sources and lose weight. Yeah. And I think that, you know, it's a lot of the people that I, you know, am having on the podcast who are very open to the blood sugar conversation, they seem to have landed that like, hey, calories are not the full story. Yeah, yeah. There's something a lot more than that. But we can't say that they don't matter.

Just the same way that we wouldn't say like, hey, if your son or daughter wanted to gain weight, right? we wouldn't think that they can gain weight without eating extra calories. Right. Right. So I think that that's the part where actually these long format podcasts are a great place. And I love Jason Fung. He's been on this podcast. David Ludwig, Gary Taubbs, you know, the hormone insulin hypothesis is just the question

of, do you believe that people can actually lose weight without whatever vehicle they do? If they use intermittent fasting to do it, if they use overemintin fasting to do it, if they use overemone, mad, if they use, you know, ketogenic diet, whatever vehicle they do. But ultimately, if they're actually going to lose weight, they got to have a little bit of a reduction amongst how much they're burning. Well, they definitely can't be overconsuming calories. Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, because here's the lens I look through it. And this is maybe because I was in clinical practice teaching lifestyle and weight loss for 25 years. And it became, in order to get people to lose weight, the question was, how do I motivate people?

It doesn't matter what a science article says. What matters is the person sitting in front of you and motivating them to be able to create a lifestyle that helps them drop weight. And what I found was, I tried for years with women. My practice was full of, I call them the mama bears. It was full of 30 and 40-year-old women that had gained a bunch of weight.

when they were pregnant and they couldn't lose that weight. And I started my nutritional side of my practice having these women track their calories. And we got no momentum. And I believe that in order to stay motivated, you have to have some momentum. You have to see some result. We didn't see that result. And if we did see the result, the minute they ate more calories to Jason Fung's point, they gained it back and now they lost their motivation.

Okay. Then I flipped it and I went to these women and I'm like, I just want to do this one thing for a hot moment when I first learned fasting. And I was like, I want you to take all the food you're eating. I just want you to compress it into an eight-hour eating window. And let me teach you how to get to that. Within two weeks, they literally would come into my office and it looked like somebody had taken a coat of fat off of them.

So just to make sure we understand that correctly, they're eating the same food that they're eating, they're compressing it. So what do you believe was the mechanism in that instance that was leading to weight loss? Was it a reduction in calories? Was it stable blood sugar, but they're eating the same food that they're eating? What was leading to that situation where they had actual weight loss? Stable blood sugar. But they're eating the same foods that they're eating?

They're eating the same calories, right? So calories hasn't changed. They are eating. they're within a short window, they're having their blood sugar spikes, but then they had this longer period, 15, 16, 18 hours where their blood sugar was coming down. So you feel that there was a reparative process when they're not eating, and that was the primary driver of weight loss. Absolutely.

What's going on in the body that you believe is happening that that period would be driving weight loss specifically? So let's put it through a metabolic switch. When I'm eating food, I initiate the blood. sugar metabolism. So my blood sugar goes up. The cells use all insulin goes up. The cells absorb all of that. If I eat something that's really high in blood sugar, my blood sugar is going to spike really high. A ton of insulin is going to come in. And all of that glucose and insulin has to be pushed into the cell. Insulin resistance is a traffic jam of too much glucose and

insulin going into the cell. So the brilliant body, what it does is it says, wait a second, I can't get all this glucose into the cell. Let me go store it in fat. So it goes and it stores it in fat. Now you go through a period every day of 16, 17 hours of no food coming in. The body metabolically switches over into the ketogenic energy system, this fat-burning system. And it says, wait a second, I stored something a few days ago in fat. And there's no blood sugar are coming in. There's no nutrients coming in. I should probably burn that fat so I can make a ketone and I can keep the energy of this system going. So in the fat burning state, in the fasted state, you are going and getting the excess that you stored, whether it was yesterday or 10 years ago.

This is the work of Sachin Panda with 16-8 fasting. He found that if you took somebody who ate the standard Western diet, which is packed with horrible oils and refined flowers and sugars. And you had them eat in an eight-hour eating window giving them 16 hours to recover from the toxicity of that meal. Their blood pressure didn't go up. Their cholesterol didn't go up. They didn't gain weight. Their liver enzymes didn't change. It was like they were metabolically immune from the damage this Western diet created. That's what happens. in the fasted state is the body repairs itself and lets go of all the excess that it has been storing glucose and toxins and hormones. And it burns that up and he gets rid of it.

I've had such a pendant on. We've talked in pretty depth about his work. Yeah. I think that's one perspective. Another perspective is that he believes that all of our organs have a biological clock, right? The way that we have our full body's 24-hour circadian rhythm. And that our organs individually, especially the ones that are related to digestion, processing, etc., that when we were designed to be eating when sunlight is out, we weren't designed to be eating late night or snacking or other stuff, is that those same amount of calories that happen later in the evening, it's when our organ systems are not optimized to be functioning during that time period.

I've heard it less so as the item that you're mentioning, and I'm only mentioning that for my own clarity. It sounds like it's more about the optimization about what is the ideal time for that organ to be operating at its best. If you feed it at when it's not meant to be operating at its best, then you're going to end up with a more dysfunctional organ trying to process this input that's there. Well, in my conversation with Sachin, we talked about the eating window. What was the proper timing of the eating window? So he didn't talk about the organ systems, but he talked about the eating window. He really believed that you wait an hour

after you get up, that to before you eat, because he said, you need to let melatonin go down. When melatonin is high, it makes you sleepy, but it also makes your pancreas sleepy, was his exact words. So you need to make sure that you wait until the melatonin goes down, now you become, your insulin system becomes much more sensitive. On the back end, the same thing. When it gets dark out at night, melatonin kicks in, and now your whole insulin glucose system, become sleepy again. So we're both saying the same thing. You could take that eight hours

and just chunk it right in the middle of the day. I'm not saying fasting is skipping breakfast. I'm saying when we look at 16-8, take eight hours, let's combine it with another version of his work, which is, and make sure it's in the daylight. And now you're not doing it when the body is in this more repairative sleepy state. As far as the organs go, the repair of organs, I like to look at them through the lens of sleep. As far as repair goes, you know, it's like two and three in the morning.

The adrenals in the liver is, sleep is repairing itself. So each organ has a large intestine repairs at four in the morning. Like each organ system has a different time that it repairs. So during the daylight, as far as when are those organ systems at their best, the only conversation I had with him was make sure it's in the daylight because you're going to be much more insulin sensitive. Coming back to this idea that we were talking about blood sugar and fasting, I sort of look at as like, can they both be true, right? And, sorry, blood sugar and calories.

Oh, yeah. Is that can they both be true. They sure can. And do we need them to be, does it need to be one as the winner or another one is the winner? I could tell you as a male who is not maybe the main demographic that you're talking to. Yeah, yeah. No, I like putting on muscle, eating. and not, like, even for me, like, who is somebody who has never been obese or overweight,

but I've been skinny fat according to my body composition, right? Both through ADECA and through caliber testing. And I've seen firsthand that, like, you put a long pour of olive oil, which I think is amazing food and has so many benefits versus a short pour of olive oil. You're talking about the difference between, you know, 100 calories and like 700, calories. And when I track those things, I can see that even for something like myself, who's not obese, I can quickly put on body fat around my waist or other areas because my trainer measures me every single week. And I think that one of the important things that I've

been on the journey of sharing with my audience is that, and this is coming from somebody who's like, I love CGMs. I'm an investor in levels health. Like Casey is one of my, you know, close friends. And I think largely a lot of those guys would agree too is that, you know, the blood sugar piece relates to mental focus. Yeah. In inflammation on a daily basis. Energy levels that play a role. And like blood sugar is so important and even more important than blood sugar is like getting a regular snapshot of your fasting insulin. Yeah.

And then eventually one day I believe we'll move from blood sugar to insulin monitors. We just don't have the ability to do that right now because that's actually a bit. better predictor or an indication of what's going on inside of the body. Blood sugar is more of a proxy that's there. So there's a lot of reasons to have a balanced blood sugar that's there. But just the same way that I wouldn't tell somebody who wants to gain weight that, hey, you can gain weight by making your blood sugar disregulated, right, instead of eating more calories. Like, hey, you have to actually eat more calories if you want to eat more calories and you're burning. If you want to gain weight. I think it's important for my audience, which is

largely, and there's probably a huge overlap with your audience, is that I see a lot of people who are generally healthy compared to the average population who still don't feel good and they're working through a lot of different things. And then there's this belief and focus, you know, and a lot of them would shop at Air One or Whole Foods or other stuff that as long as they're eating organic and as long as they're eating healthy foods and the occasional snacks or other things, they're not going to be in this position where they're going to end up gaining weight. And I see a lot of those people and they've never audited their calories before. They don't realize that when they're eating something, not that I believe that calories is the whole story, but actually

that thing that they ate that they thought was one serving was three servings. I know because I go through that every single day. Like I'm tracking my calories. I'm like, this pour of primal kitchen, which is my favorite dressing, right? Shout out to Mark Sisson. This poor is actually like two and a half servings instead of one serving. I think that people actually are not really good at understanding how much they're consuming and we live in a day and age that healthy food is so ubiquitous and there's so many healthy snacks. So I look at it in the middle and it's like calories in calories out is not the full story, but can we completely ignore it? I don't know because then it also brings up the question of how are these weight loss? Because I know you have some thoughts on this,

how are these weight loss drugs working, right? Do you have a belief or a vision on how these weight loss drugs are leading to weight loss inside of people? I have lots to say on the weight loss drugs. But first, I want to go back to because I think it's really important that those of us that are educating about health, that we help people find the path that works for them. I can't say that enough. So for you, what I hear is, hey, counting calories really works for my goal of what I'm doing. If you came to me for a consultation and you were like, I want help building muscle.

And you said to me, and I got to tell you, counting calories is really working for me, I would never look you in the eye and say, well, you know, you're full of shit. Like, that's pretty, Drew. You should be counting blood sugar. I would say, awesome, let's work with that. Let's see what we can do because that's already working for you. I had a clinic of women that were beaten up by the calorie in, calorie out dieting that they've been doing since they were 16 years old.

I had women that were, had so much guilt and shame around their relationship to food that they couldn't eat anything unless it said, you know, low calorie on it. They had so much shame looking at themselves in the mirror, but thinking they, they did something wrong, not realizing that it was the food industry that had poured chemicals into the low-calorie foods that were filled with obesityans that were hijacking their stem cells and turning their stem cells into making fat cells. And those women were struggling, and there are a lot of women out there that are struggling. So if we keep telling those women, hey, guess what? You got to focus on calories or you're never going to lose weight.

You are basically saying you have failed over and over and over again. Keep trying maybe one day you'll succeed. I just want to be clear. That's not what I'm saying. Okay. I think what I'm saying is I'm trying to understand your perspective because I'm trying to understand what are the beliefs that lead into it. Like I agree with you that blood sugar is important.

Okay. And I'm asking simply because I'm genuinely interested from my own perspective. Like that's why I want you on the podcast and I'm sorting out my own sort of thoughts on things. I'm asking some fundamental things which are, do you believe that people can gain weight or lose weight without like is it some other other mechanism? This is the part where I'm genuinely curious. Like if somebody loses weight, is there some sort of other mechanism inside of the body, right? And I'm not trained in this.

You are. Is there some sort of other mechanism that's leading to that weight loss besides however they've done it through blood sugar, through intermittent fasting? Like I agree with any vehicle that works for people. is there what is the actual mechanism that is causing weight loss? Is it a reduction in energy consumption or is there something else that's happening? And I feel like one distinction that I've gotten from you is that you actually believe that when people are fasting, there's some sort of repair mechanism that independently of what's being consumed from calories, higher or lower, that is leading to weight loss.

Is that accurate? Yes. Doubling down on like, hey, everybody needs to do calories in and calories out. Like, I don't do that. Right. I'm just talking about my process of working with my trainer. Yeah. It's more to help my audience understand that, hey, what does she believe is actually happening

in the body that's leading to weight loss when it happens? Great. Okay. So this is what's happening. When you're in the fasted state, the longer you stay there, the more your intelligent body figures out what it's stored, where the glucose is that it stored years ago. Where did it put the excess? All fat is is it's excess something.

The body is so well done. designed that what it decided to do instead of putting that excess around your internal organs and put it around your belly, your face, your chest, your back of your arms. And when you go into a fasted state, because the blood sugar is going down, because your body is now in this ketogenic energy system, in order to make a ketone, it goes and finds all the fat and excess it's stored years ago and it burns that up. And so it releases that, which is why when people start fasting, they look like a fat coat has come off of them because the body is now using this other fuel source.

It has to make a ketone, but it can only make a ketone by burning fat. And in that fat is all that excess of that diet you had, the high, you know, high Western standard diet you were eating 20, 30 years ago. So now, is in that also a calorie reduction possibly? Okay, got it. So let's make, yeah, I'm not totally. totally refuting that. But why the principle number one is blood sugar matters, calories don't, is because of the psyche of women. That you feel that ultimately all the data is shown,

meaning not that you feel this, I'm sort of sharing, that a program that people can stick to, so the stats are that 80% of people who lose weight will end up regaining it and if not more afterwards. So really the methodology is what is a program that, that individual, and you're largely talking to a female audience in a particular age group, probably multiple age groups because you have a big following. What is a thing that they can stick to? Whatever vehicle they could stick to, and maybe inside of that is some calorie reduction, but it's you're primarily focused on what can they stick to.

That's right. Yeah. What can they stick to? That's the only thing that matters because how many women, and again, my lens is women, how many women have gone on a diet, lost weight and only and regained it back again. And men too. Yeah, men too. Right?

This happens to everybody. This happens to everybody. Yeah. But what happens, the difference that I see with women is that women turn on themselves. And instead of like men might be like, hey, that diet didn't work. Oh, I fell back into my old habits and typically will move on. I'm not saying that they don't turn on themselves, but I know because I've sat in the trenches with so many women, they turn on themselves and they go, I must have done something wrong.

Let's pause right there for one second. In all your experience, in all your years, and this might be the most important topic we talk about here. And there's so much more to get to, by the way. And thank you for like going deep. You know, this is the purpose for long format podcast. Great. You know, and my audience, it's not like one week I talk about, you know, there's a lot of podcasts that cover different subjects each week. Yeah.

We're kind of more narrow here. Yeah. So my audience wants to go deep. So I'm gathering questions from them. I'm gathering my questions that I have for my own confusion. So I appreciate, I acknowledge you. I want to thank you for coming on and going through these things. These are things that are genuinely confusing to a lot of people.

What have you uniquely seen, because you've mentioned it, what do you think is going on that women are more likely to do this, turn on themselves? And what are the best strategies that have you've seen that can lower, dissipate, or hopefully ultimately remove that behavior? I'm just going to call it negative for lack of better. word. So we'd love your thoughts on that. The sheer reality is we live in a patriarchal world. And I don't, by patriarchal, I don't mean men. I mean a power, a system over us. And that system says a woman is worthy when she is beautiful and when she is sexy. I will tell you, as a 55-year-old

woman who has lived in that system, so much of our worth comes from looking a certain way that is appeasing and likable to the patriarchal world. You're a size this, you weigh this, then you are beautiful and I accept you. So many women are fighting every single day to lose weight so they can feel worthy. That has to stop. That is what drives me, is that when we keep saying, the reason you gained weight is because you ate too many calories, or it's your genetics, or you should be, your BMI should be this. You are telling a woman, you are worthy when you hit that mark. I don't want a woman's worthiness to be based off of how she looks. I don't want a woman's worthiness to be based off a number on a scale. I want her to feel worthy from the inside out. And the way that I have watched that and

seen that happen is by helping her understand her blood sugar because she can control that. And as she learns to understand her blood sugar, then she starts to see, oh, wait, I'm in control here. I can tack on these fasting windows and I can start to balance this blood sugar out. I can feel a little leaner, and then I can have this really cool relationship with food that's not built around the calories that I've been trying to count for 50 plus years that never worked for me. I can look at a banana and go, there's potassium in there. And that, oh my God, that's going to help me build certain hormones. So it's different for men and women because of how the culture treats us. We are not treated kindly when we're not beautiful. And so many women are running around with, I'm not enough, I'm not worthy.

I have to change how I look in order to be worthy and palatable to the culture. This is the problem with menopausal women right now. Menopausal women are so scared of being tossed aside by a society that says you're old and you're worthless, that we're freezing our faces, we're putting toxins in our body, we're dyeing our hair, we're going to be. plastic surgery is like skyrocketing because 50 and 60 year old women are now hitting that age and they're like, but if I'm not beautiful, what am I? That's horrible. That has to stop. And this is what I'm coming up against every single day when I'm in the trenches trying to redefine women's relationship to food. I'm really helping her redefine the relationship to her body

and let her know you are powerful, you are worthy. If you don't fit the BMI, but you're happy and you have energy and your blood work's looking pretty good, then great. Worthiness, find worthiness somewhere else. You're never going to be a size two. Maybe you're going to be a size eight and you are completely balanced and healthy and that makes you worthy. So it's deeper emotional for women.

What have you seen in addition to the period of just using the words that I heard from you, I might have gotten it wrong, so please correct me. The vehicle of sort of having a better relationship with food through blood sugar. Yeah. Is there anything else that you've seen on the mentality front? Other tips and tricks, who you surround yourself with that you've also seen make a difference in this area that we're talking about? Who you hang around matters.

It matters for two things. the first, I'm a big believer, that who you hang around is who you'll start to think like. So be very careful. Look at the people's lives, the closest people to you, and ask yourself, do I want to think like them? And if you don't want to think like them, go find some people you want to think like and hang around them. So that's the first thing. The second thing is when you're in any kind of relationship, whether it's an intimate one, whether it's a friend one, you should always leave an interaction with a human feeling like you've been lifted up. Where are the cheerleaders? This is another thing that women do we do to each other, and it's horrible, is we cut each other down

and we compete with each other. Why are we not cheerleaders for each other and lifting each other up? As humans, we should be lifting each other up. Look at social media. It's, it, some days I have this big following, and some days I'm like, I'm not sure I want to participate in this game anymore. I don't want to watch names being called. I don't want to watch people cutting each other down. What are we doing? Like, health isn't just your blood work. Health is your environments that you're putting yourself in.

And I think especially for women, because women have been constantly told, be this way, be more of this, not enough of this. Like society has a very clear way that women should show up. And when a woman's putting her health back together, the environment in which she's doing that in matters and the people she's hanging around matters. Because as long as women are competing against each other, as long as we're cutting each other down, we're going to be unhealthy.

And that doesn't get talked about enough, I think. Well, I'm glad we spent a little bit of time on that. I mean, if I do like a whole series on that. Thank you for letting because it's really, it's really, really tugs on my heart. You know, there was a very powerful book that I read a few years ago, and it's the researcher's name is Luann Brizden, I believe. I read it. The female brain?

Yes. One of the key concepts inside of that book is that there are neurological differences, and she wrote another sister book, The Male Brain, Between the Male Brain and the Female Brain. And this is not about a battle of the sexes. It's more about understanding what is the evolutionary, potentially, what is the evolutionary mechanism behind these shifts in the brain? So one of the things that she talks about inside the book, you've read it, you know it, know it, but I'll just share it for the audience, is that women have more neuro connections

from the left to right hemisphere and the right to left hemisphere than men do. Yeah. Men have more for oversimplistic reasons. They have more front to back. Yeah. So that leads to often in young boys, you see that boys tend to be obsessed with things. Yeah. And young girls tend to be obsessed or focused on people.

So from a young age, whether it's Barbies or G.I. Joe's, young women will play with things that represent people. They're more aware of people. This is why you have recommendations of educators today that potentially depending on the age of your son and the time of the calendar of the year that he's born, there's a lot of recommendations to hold boys back a year before starting school. A lot of my friends in my men's group over here,

them and their wives have decided that, oh, we're going to wait the next year. Because women are so much more mature. everybody hears this. Yeah. It's not just a stereotype. It's real. Women are so much more mature at a young age.

And bio-evolutionary, the sort of theory inside of that is that women from a young age played a role and were designed in society to be the caretakers and the peacekeepers, right? Amongst many other things, like many, many things. Like they literally are the only sex that can create life, right? So not to diminish it and just put it that. There's so many things that, you know, female biology is designed for. And because that, there is a lot of focus on being aware of what other people think of you

because your brain is wired to be focused on the interpersonal relationships. That's right. I'm not just your relationship to other men, other women, everybody, right? And in our modern world, that sort of mechanism has been hijacked because we live in a day and age where we have so many more people. people that don't have your long-term interest, men and women, that you're seeing examples of. Media, you know, celebrity, whatever it might be. So we're designed the system with this thing that was literally one of the keys of success in addition to grandmothers, right? I've heard you

talk about this before. We've talked about this before. Get grandmothers being, you know, a huge part of why the human race is successful and menopause and human beings being one of only a few species that go through menopause, and that our modern world, social media in particular, is designed to unfortunately hijack that comparison component, right? Whether it was done on purpose, whether it's a byproduct, it's accident, it's whatever, it leads to this thing of being more protective, right? The recommendation is that women be more protective in the men who love them. And there's going to be arranged. There's probably men who have more of a, you know, a brain that might operate that way, right? And there's so much.

many variations that are there, but to be careful about letting influences in because you're immediately going to start to, and I would agree that this happens to mend too, you're going to start to prioritize opinions of people that you actually may not care about. But your brain has thought it should care about them. And I think that I understand what you mean by your definition of like the patriarchy component, but I think that the element that I would add into that is that we never designed this system intentionally, and so we live in this de facto system. Agreed. And it could be called a lot of different things, but it's up to us to design what does our new

world look like? Yeah. Right? For everybody's health. Men, women, kids, adults, everybody involved. It's so interesting because my next book is really looking at what the brain changes are that happen to women after 40 as we go through menopause and actually how it's working for us. how it's actually working in our favor.

I'll come back when that book's written. But there's something I want to say that ties into what you just said. There's a feminist philosopher. Her name is Carol Gilligan. And she wrote a book called In a Different Voice. And she said, if you go to a boy or a girl at 11, and you ask them, since we're on the topic of food, you ask both the boy and girl, what do you want?

What do you want to eat at 11? Both the boy and the girl will give you definitively, this is what I want to eat. Now, fast forward to 13, 12 and 13. You ask the same boy and girl, what do you want to eat? And the boy will tell you what he wants to eat. And the girl will say, I don't know, what do you want? What are you eating? That relational brain kicks in when the hormones kick in. And all of a sudden, the female brain is looking at everything through the relationship of or through the lens of relationship. So now I'm 35 years old.

My hormones have changed my brain to really function from a place of I want to make sure I'm in relationship with everybody. I go to a trainer. Trainer tells me to work out, tells me to eat a certain way. I don't get the results that I wanted to get or that the trainer thought I would get. In order to be in relationship with the trainer now, instead of, of blaming the trainer, I'll blame myself. I must have done something wrong. You know, how many women walk around, they go, oh, I'm so sorry. I'm sorry. Oh, I'm sorry. Oh, I'm sorry. Oh, sorry. I'm sorry.

Oh, sorry. Like, I catch women all the time, like apologizing for, they shouldn't be apologizing for. When we look at food and this relationship with our body and this relationship to food and how we set women up for success, we have to bring in the relationship brain, which is why you will hear me say to women over and over again. Like, you're powerful. You can do this. The end of one is so important. You find your path. Let's work together. I always tell women that, like, I'm the doctor that's link in arms with you and we're going to do this together. I'm not going to stand over you and tell you what to do because what's important right now is that we get your relationship brain in relationship with you, not in relationship with me. Because if you're going to try to please me,

if you're going to try to put me, I always tell me like, I don't want to be a guru. I just want to deliver a message that lifts women up so that they start to see how powerful they are to themselves and stop creating this system where they are constantly comparing themselves to the rest of the world because that's how their brain is programmed. So I want to zoom out because I know you have some thoughts on this. Give me your perspective on some of the GLP-1 drugs that are out there. I don't know if you've seen this stat, but for the first time in the history of the United States, we had a lowering in the obesity rate.

Right. It's been kind of traveling around social media. Not a ton of people have been talking about it, but there's definitely been a reduction in the obesity rate for the first time. And I think the upward trajectory of basically since we've been looking at the stats, it's been going up every single year. There's been a small dip. And most people have been attributing that to, you know,

the millions and millions of prescriptions that are out there, especially for people who have quite a lot of weight to lose. Yeah. And using some of these gLP-1 peptides that are out there. What does your perspective give us your your ideas and your sort of range on this subject? So the first thing I'm going to have to go with is how convenient and profitable is it that the food industry poured toxins into our system that made us. There's literally something called nobisogen that I talk about it and eat like a girl that turns a stem cell that was going to make bone and turns that stem cell into making fat. So we've been pouring chemicals into our food.

We've been hijacking everybody's dopamine, their taste buds by making all these foods hit the dopamine sensor systems. And people are gaining more and more weight because of the food system. So then along comes Big Pharma, and Big Pharma now has the solution. So this marriage between big food and big pharma, I know Casey talks about it, is too incestuous, and it's ridiculous. Okay? So that's my overarching feeling that we need to just understand what's going on here.

Okay, second thing. It's been a miracle for some people. Absolutely. Like, people who couldn't get out of that weight gain cycle that the food, big food industry put them into, they can take these medications and they can start to lose weight for the first time. That's a hallelujah moment. And these medications should be left for the obese.

They should not be for the person who wants to lose 10 pounds. They should be there for the person who's like, I just need some momentum. And I've seen it work amazing for that. And the goal of every drug should be get on, do the thing that it was meant to do, and get off. Which would mean that everybody taking these weight loss drugs needs to change their lifestyle. So that's where I look at the fasting lifestyle. Learning how to tack on a fasting window to an eating window every day, that kills hunger. I've seen it over and over and over again.

So my dream for where we are right now is that we use those drugs as a momentary crutch to be able to get so momentum while we teach people this metabolic switch and how to be healthy while we get the toxins out of our food system. If we can do all of that, then what we should see 10 years from now is a reduction in the need for these drugs.

So I really want to point that out. Last thing I want to point out on this that I don't think is being taught enough is that these drugs are adding in this GLP1 hormone that your microbiome naturally makes. You naturally, you and I make this GLP1 hormone. As you get older, you make less of it. But when I dove into recent research, this is like in the last three months, I found a very startling article that showed that how the microbes, in your, gut that help to produce GLP1 hormone, what destroys those microbes is fat. Okay, then, of course,

I had to dive in and be like, which fat? And sure enough, have you dive deeper, it is the toxic fats. It is the canola oils. It is the cottonseed oils. It is the corn. It is all these inflammatory oils that big food has permeated into our system has destroyed the microbiome so we stopped producing the GLP1 hormone. Now we have to take the weight loss drug to add it back in. that's the crime. So, okay, knowing that, if you're on a drug, if you're thinking about going on to the drug, the first thing you got to do is make sure you do not eat the toxic fats at all. Like that should be your number one food move.

Second thing is let's start building you a fasting lifestyle so you can keep your hunger down because when you get little doses of ketones throughout the day, the ketones go up and shut off the hunger hormone. So let's get you some small doses of ketones by tacking on these fasting windows. And then what's your exit strategy? How are you going to get off of that? That to me is the more complete view we need to look at it as opposed to I failed at every diet. My doctor prescribed this for me.

Now I'm going to take this. I've lost weight, but I got to stay on that. There's no empowerment in that. People are happy they lost weight, but they don't walk away and go, oh my God, I did something amazingly hard for myself and I overcame all these obstacles. There's no internal growth that happens with that, which is why I think it should be a band-aid, get in, change your diet, get off. You're the healer, not the medication. When they do lead to weight loss for people who are on them, what are your thoughts about

how that weight loss ends up happening? Is it just people are eating less? Eating less. They're eating less. Okay. So there's the calorie in, calorie out, you know? So you're eating less calories for sure. Okay, but what happens when people get off of them? They gain it back because the set point is so little. So if we can teach them to eat and do this fasting window, so they're not just eating little bits all day long that they're actually like have an eating window. Maybe they pick a four or five hour eating window and they're eating, they're getting enough nutrients. And the other thing I'm worried about, I put this and eat like a girl, there's 24 nutrients

the female body needs to make a hormone. If you're only, if you're like the people I've met that are on these drugs, they're eating like a snack. They're eating a small amount of food. So how are they getting all the nutrients to be able to make hormones long term? So what if we teach them eating windows, fasting windows? We give them a shorter period. We teach them high density quality food.

Like you're going to need to make your food. count. You got to make sure you're getting good food and maybe you're doing one meal a day. You got to make sure that meal counts. And then we teach them how to use this metabolic switch. We teach them what we've been talking about, eat in the light. We teach them prioritize sleep and movement and we get them a whole lifestyle. They'll be off that medication shortly. That's the dream I have. It's clear that a lot of people are using them and it's clear that a lot of people may ultimately not want to use them forever. And that's why this conversation is super important.

And I love asking individuals because it's the reality. People are using it. Regardless of our opinion, you're not an opinion. They're using it. And how can we help steer people in a healthier direction or at least make them aware of things that their doctor isn't talking to them about? Which you've shared a few of those things. All right.

We still have a couple more principles that I want to talk about here. As we still have some time together. One of the key principles that you have, I believe this is principle number three is eat for your microbes, not your taste buds. Yes. Okay. This is another one. I first saw it.

I was like, okay, I know this is what you're saying, but I also know Mindy's going to teach us how it can be both. Because this is a cookbook. I keep calling a food book. Like the front half of the book is what I wrote, the back half. And it was 53,000 words. So to give you an idea, that front half is 53,000 words. Fast like a girl was 83,000 words. So just the front material is a book onto itself.

But then I hired two chefs, a plant-based chef, an omnivore chef, professional chefs that killed it with the recipes. So I'm hoping people will look at and see that eating is fun and tastes really good. And they can merge the two of those. They can eat for their microbes and they can eat for their taste buds too. But let's start off with what you meant by that, like eating for your microbes. Yeah, your microbes control your taste buds. That's what I want people to know.

your microbes in your gut control your taste buds. Like they have been able to measure the, and I don't know it off the top of my head, there is a specific microbe that makes you crave chocolate. We know a fungus called candida, a lot of people have had it, will make you crave sugar. So you think, and I'm going back through the lens of women,

you think that you're undisciplined because you can't stay off of sugar. You can't get away from alcohol. You can't get away from your favorite food that, you know, your bag of Doritos. But what you don't realize is that inside the gut is an ecosystem. And that ecosystem has a variety of different microbes that are pulling the little levers telling you, feed me. If there's a fungus called Candida, it's like, give me some carbs and sugar and maybe

some alcohol so that I can stay alive. if it's the chocolate bacteria, then it's saying, hey, feed me chocolate so I can stay alive. Doritos bacteria? No, the Doritos, I think, was actually, is more dopamine. We're just wanting more of the dopamine hit that the chemicals that have been sprayed on there. So I want people, and making that statement, I want women every single meal to look at a meal and say, am I feeding my microbes? What am I feeding my microbes with?

okay, well, what do we feed our microbes with? This is plants. This is your green, green leafy vegetables. These are you adding new microbes in with fermented food? I don't know any expert that will tell you, oh, fermented food is bad except for maybe a CBO expert who will tell people to stay off of it for CBO. But everybody, fermented foods, add good ones in. Prebiotic foods.

Not to promote your wife's amazing seed business, but I started using those seeds. Every time I was putting them on everything, I could feel my stomach gurgling. And it was like, I almost was like my microbes were like, yeah, thank you. You just gave me a good variety of seeds because it's a prebiotic for your microbes so that your microbes can start to grow. So instead what we do is we go out to dinner and we're like, what are you in the mood for? We look at a menu. What are you in the mood for? When I look at a menu, I literally go, what on this menu have I not eaten?

because I need to eat something different. Like I was in Turkey recently. I was in Istanbul and there was goat, brazed goat on the menu. And I was like, oh, wow, I haven't had goat. I thought about to say goat brain. Not goat brain, yeah, no. I would have passed on that one. But brazed goat.

I'm like, I wonder what the amino acid profile of brazed goat is. Like, I don't know. But I don't ever eat it. I should probably eat it. And then I look at, okay, what am I feeding my microbes in this meal? So there's always something that is usually fibrous. That's the best thing. like what vegetable am I including? You would never see me eat, rarely see me eat a meal without some

kind of vegetable in it. So the point of that was, don't forget your microbes. And the interesting study that I have been talking a lot about was something called the Every Other Day Diet. It was actually a researcher that this is when fasting first came out. What she did is she took a group of individuals that were massively overweight and had horrible metabolic markers. And she said, this is what you're going to do for a year. Every day you eat whatever you want, or one day you eat whatever you want. And most of them are eating the horrible Western diet. And the next day you don't eat at all. You're going to fast. And the next day you eat whatever you want. And the next day you're going to fast. So every other day you're fasting. At the end of the year, what she found was not only did all

the metabolic markers change, but what surprised her was their food choices changed. because in that fasting, you're getting rid of these bad bacteria. And so over time, those bacteria stopped giving signals to the brain to feed it the wrong foods, and they started choosing better foods. Now, there's where we look at women and we're like, oh, my gosh, what if we could do that for women? Where all of a sudden, it doesn't take willpower, it doesn't take discipline to make the right food choice. They actually crave the right food choice. I can tell you my microbes crave salads.

If I don't get a salad a day, I'm not, I don't feel complete. Now, that's not because I'm like a health nut or anything like that. It's because I have been feeding my microbes for years now. And those microbes want more fiber to be able to stay alive. I love that. Can I add one layer to that, which is that, you know, just like we're talking about, I've seen in this sort of functional integrative space, which I've been a part of for a long time. We also have our own ways.

And I'm putting myself right in this bucket, right? even though I'm not a clinician, we have our own ways of just like women, because we're talking about women right now, right? It can happen to men and women. But just like women can hyper-obsess about calories. Yeah. Right? The one thing that I have seen that I've been doing more of talking about on the podcast is that

when we talk about just focusing and doubling down on the basics, which I know you believe in two, right? Eating the right amount of protein, making sure you're not under-fueled, especially if you're trying to be more active, not being sedentary, focus. focusing on your sleep, surrounding yourself with good community, hydrating, all the basics that are there. A lot of these other components from what I've seen, they start to sort themselves out. I do see just like there's that hyper focus on calories in the functional medicine space, there can be this hyper focus that if a woman feels that she's craving something sweet,

it's like, oh, I immediately have candida. I want to say like my microbes are in a great state. I still crave sweet stuff. Of course. I'm not saying you won't. And I'm not saying you don't say that. I'm saying that this is just another underneath the lens that I'm adding to the conversation, which I know that you would agree with. Yeah, I agree.

It's not to go against anything you're saying, it's to build on top of what you're saying, is that when you do a lot of the basics, a lot of that stuff starts to sort itself out. That's right. And nothing tastes as good to pull from a Tony Robbins quote as being healthy feels. And it's okay to crave sweet stuff. It's okay to have these components or things or whatever. you know, there can be things that just take time to sort themselves out because we're nailing the basics that, you know, you talk about on your podcast.

Yeah, this is such an important point because we've overcomplicated everything. This is why the first thing I put in the book is these foundational five ideas. Like, just follow these five, like focus on these five. So you don't lose your way. So I agree with you. There should be a basic. Second thing is health isn't deprivation. So when we are like, oh, I can't have that.

because I don't eat sugar. Let me tell you what I, you know what I ate a lot in Istanbul? Tell me. What do you think I ate a lot? Dates. I did eat a lot of dates. Baclava. Baclava.

There we go. I don't even eat gluten, but I'm like, I'm in the land of Baclava. I am going to try every little bit of Baclava that I could try. I was there for two weeks. I wanted the full experience. I didn't beat myself up. And then I came home and I noticed, because I've had Candida before, you know, I was craving a little more sugar.

I'm going to be a little stricter now with no sugar so I could get that system back on track. Do you think it was genuinely in that short period of time? I'm asking, right? I'm not being confrontational or anything. This is genuinely my curiosity, right? Do you think that you actually change your gut microbiome in that period of time and your candida grew? Or is it like your palate just got used to having something sweet? Or is it a little bit of both?

It's probably a little bit of both. Now, the thing that I don't talk about a lot and I probably should talk about it is I had a major sugar. addiction in my early 20s. And I had massive candida that led to massive Epstein bar virus that gave me chronic fatigue at 21 years old. Wow. So I know when I, that brain is like, oh, it's the end of a meal. You should go get something sweet. Like there's certain patterns that I see for myself that I'm like, ooh, I'm falling back into that sugaraholic world. So like with the baklava, you know, after like four or five days of it, I could feel myself now wanting it everywhere I went. And I was like, maybe I'd take a day or two off. But that's just because I know myself and I know that sugar

addiction. Yeah, you were saying when the old sort of patterns come back. Yeah, exactly. And my wife craves sweet stuff after a meal. And it's like, great, here's a bowl full of berries or other stuff. And sometimes it's an indulgence. Yeah. But this goes back to your personalization is that depending on your goals, you have to find out the right strategy that's there for you. That's right. Yeah, exactly. And part of my strategy is, I love experiences. Yeah. So when I go to like, you know, a country like Turkey that I've never been to, I want to

I want to experience all of it. And so I'm not going to be like, I'm gluten free. They didn't have gluten free, baklava. Totally. I was just like, let me, I just want to experience this. And it's new for my body. And there's love for my body. I don't like white knuckle it or beat myself up.

I just embrace the experience. Yeah. And your body should have, okay, I'll be careful with the word should. but the body was designed for range. That's right. Right? Just like I really appreciated your, I've listened to a bunch of your episodes and I think you do a great job.

And you also invite on people who have different viewpoints on things. And you guys, you know, talk about it and talk about where you align, where you don't. You know where Stacey and I really aligned on? I've got to give you a little backstory on the Stacey thing. So so many people were tagging Stacey and I saying, could you two get together because you're disagreeing on fasting for women? And so I was like, yeah, let's talk. Like, I'm not, I'm not, I think this is the beautiful thing of a podcast is we can have

these really healthy discussions and not have to all. Yeah. So I bring her on. She comes on and, you know, it was on Zoom. And the minute I see her, I'm like, do you know why you're here? And she's like, I know why I'm here. I'm like, are you getting tagged? She's like, I'm getting tagged.

I'm like, okay, let's have this conversation. And what we finally came to was, for starters, Stacey's lens is always through the very active woman, a woman who's doing centuries and marathons and like really... Or wants to get there? Or wants to get there. Yeah, we're talking somebody who's really prioritizing fitness at a higher level. I would say my people are people that are also doing that, but they're also, I would say the majority of them are the people that the health care systems tossed aside, the people

who have dieted forever and haven't succeeded or are finally looking for. for a way to lose the 30-pound menopausal belly weight that they gained 10 years ago. So our demographics is a little bit different. The second thing is that we agreed on hard. I don't know if you remember that from the conversation at the end. She said, we both agree in hard. I agree you should work out hard. You agree you should do hard through fasting.

I feel like you shouldn't put those two hards together if you're a menopausal woman, and I would agree with that. And now I remember exactly what I'm going to. was going to bring up, which was you were talking about for a long time in sort of the space, I've even had people on this podcast repeat it. It was really advice directed towards women. Don't work out too hard. That's going to spike cortisol. Cortisol leads to belly fat. But that's not the complete story. No, it's not. Right? That's a partial story. Just like a lot of things that we've been talking about here, it's like, hey, can it be a little bit of both? Yeah. Right? And then people are

sort of trying to navigate and understand both of those things. It's that the part that you guys came to on together is that actually pushing the body, even for women, right? Women are stronger than men. Like, they should be able to push their bodies in a way that is designed for them in sync with their cycle, which is a big part of what you talk about. But if you don't challenge the body, what are you losing out on? That's right. And in that same way that, you know, your body should be able to go to Turkey, have some bucklava, come back and reach, you know, go back into your homeostasis and your pattern and your habits that are there. In that same way, a tough workout, like a resistance training workout, everybody's talking about it

these days, your body should be able to handle that. Yeah, right. That's right. And it's not done the right way. It should actually leave you with more energy afterwards. You're not smashed like a Barry's boot camp or something like that. You actually have more energy that's there. So we want to push the body, men, women, everybody.

We want to push the body in a healthy way to build up some of that resilience because then we take that into our later years in life. It's the people that have not been physically challenged, especially that unfortunately you see it, I see it, it leads to just this general sense of frailty. That's right. Man or a woman and this fear of movement. I have a family member and I love her so dearly. And the fear is, even with a fast-paced walking, that all of a sudden her heart is beating faster. And then there's a worry that I don't know, is this going to lead to some sort of stress on my heart? Am I not supposed to be tolerating this?

I don't like this feeling. And obviously that's a little bit mental. It's a little bit physical. But we want to bring back in this resilience to be able to challenge the body. That's right. And there's obviously a lot of different ways to be able to do that. Yeah. I call it microdosing hard.

We need to microdose hard. If you think of the old model of aging, it was like, you hit retirement day. You had a party. and then you sat around and you watched the football game every Sunday and you hung out with all the same people and you drove the same way to the supermarket and bought the same foods and you did hung out with the same, same, same, same, same, same. Make it easy now. You're retired.

Okay, that's the fastest path to aging. If you want to age fast, hang out with the same people, eat the same food, watch the same news channel, drive in the same pattern, just keep doing the same thing you've done for 60 years, and you will find, and make your life easy, you're going to find you're going to age quicker. The best thing we can do when we get into our 50s and 60s is new. This is why I went to Turkey. I'm like, plot me in a foreign country that has got many different rituals. I mean, prayers are going off five times a day over the loudspeaker.

The food is different. the language is different. Like, it wasn't always easy every day. I didn't always get the food I wanted. Like, I wasn't always fasting. Didn't always have the Turkish coffee day after day. But in that hard, my body had to adapt and become stronger. So putting ourselves, whether it's fasting or food or travel or hang out,

here's a good one for this day and age, how about we go hang out with somebody who thinks politically different than us? What if we sit down and have a conversation, a humane conversation with somebody who completely sees where this country should go in a different way? You know what would happen to both of those individuals is neuroplasticity. You would be forced to have to grow new neurons in that conversation. But what we're doing is, you don't believe what I think? Boom, I don't want to hear you cancel culture, you know, just going to shut this down. I'm going to hang out with my people. that is the worst thing we can do.

If we're going to stop aging, you want to be a pro-ager is what I call it, start putting yourself in little environments that are uncomfortable. And if they're uncomfortable, you have a better chance to go under 100. Well, I can think of something that is an environment that would induce a little bit of stress and also a little bit of uncomfortableness. And that is, you know, you've always had a flourishing career. and you've been a writer, a podcast, or other things. But since the last time you go on this podcast, your profile has grown incredibly.

Yeah. What are some of the best things that come along with that? And maybe we even start off with this. You can take into whatever, you know, first, second, or whatever you want you want to do. What are some of the toughest things that come with that? Oh, that's good. Well, first, I don't think I've ever said this to you,

but you were the catalyst, a big catalyst to my growth. When Fast Like a Girl came out, I was going on podcasts that would have me. You know, my YouTube channel was doing well as like 400,000 subscribers. And people knew me. And then Fast Like a Girl came out. And we were looking for some big podcasts to take a chance on me. And you were the first. And then do you know what happened with that podcast?

Yeah. Then my friend Rungen heard it. And he asked for an introduction to you. That's right. And then I think Stephen Bartlett heard that. Then he asked for an introduction from Rangan. Yeah. And then it all went from there.

Yeah. So thank you. Well, I mean, it's been great to be a small part of that, but ultimately at the end of the day, you're the talent. You're the individual that had a different message. And if I look back on that original episode, the things that I feel that really stood out is that we were still in the early days. You know, we're in this menopause revolution that's happening right now.

We're so many incredible voices, including your own. and some of the people that we've mentioned, Cynthia, Stacey, Dr. Gabriel Lyon, J.J. Virgin, many others are speaking up to an audience that largely felt that they were being forgotten about. Yeah, agreed. Right? Yeah. And when you came on and you were sharing, you know, men often get made fun of about how little they know about the female body. Yeah.

But as somebody that also has two sisters and like has 18 first cousins, which, the vast majority of them are female. Wow. I can also tell you that women also were not really taught about the female body. No. Right? Like, they're hormones and what works and cycle sinking and all these aspects. Yeah.

So yes, men are definitely dunces in that department, but if women are being honest, they weren't being taught a lot about it too. So hearing from you that there's these aspects that are aligned with your cycle, there's a different way of going about stuff. And you're giving some options to consider a whole group of individuals. reached out after that episode and said, I was hearing something that I wasn't hearing fully in that way. So obviously that comes back to you.

Yeah, thank you. And your message that was there. So happy to play a tiny, tiny role in that process. And of course, happy to have you back on to talk about this book. Yeah. You know, doctor means to teach. Every doctor of every background should be teaching how the human body works. And if you are a true, in my lens, a true.

heart-centered doctor that wants the best for your patient, the best thing you can do is teach that patient how not to need you. That is the best thing you can do. And we don't have a system that has that. So everything that I did in my clinic from taking these mama bears, I took these mama bears to the grocery store and I would show them how to read a label. We would do recipe nights in my practice where people would try out different recipes and we'd share different cooking strategies. The whole goal, we would detox and scan all everybody's beauty products so that women could learn what part of their lifestyle was helping them and what part of their lifestyle was hurting them. I took the concept of doctor to teach as deep as I could in my clinic

and then I took it to YouTube and then I took it to the books. So perhaps that's what we're not getting. and my message to all doctors is, it's time to rise up. It's time to put the ego away. The patient, and on that healing journey with the patient, linking arms, teaching them how to be the best version of themselves should be the message. You should not be the one that wants the accolades. So this leads into the biggest problem that I've had since the big growth. I thank you to all the people who see me in public and they come up to me and thank me.

one of the statements that hurts my heart the most is when people come up to me and say, you changed my life. And let me tell you why, because I didn't change your life, you changed your life. Don't give me the power. My whole message is to give the power back to the individual in their own healing journey. If we're going to say health is your responsibility, then guess what? Your health, you get to be the winner of. Not the doctor, not the diet, not the health influencer.

So I think the hardest thing for me has been to stay true to that message, help people continue to see that message. Don't give me the credit. But I also have to say I've gotten plenty of arrows. I never knew what a bully was until I got this big. Bullies that call me names on the internet. I'm like, we're adults. You're a professional. I'm a professional, and you are calling me names and tagging me on socials.

That is atrocious. We should be all the health influencers and doctors should be banning together and supporting each other and lifting each other up for the benefit of the patient. And when the patient wins, we should stand back and go, you did this, not us. That's the world I want to see in. And I feel like even let's just go into the menopause conversation. I'm very concerned about the menopause conversation right now because what's happening is the message is getting to women

that you you're suffering and you can stop suffering if you just take HRT. Now, for some women, that's exactly what happens and it's beautiful and it's great. But for some women that doesn't happen, they take HRT and they get worse. It didn't do anything for them. So now they're left to think,

oh, it must be my problem because it didn't work. for me. What we should be saying is at 40, there is a lifestyle change that needs to happen because your hormones changed. And in that journey, you have a lot of responsibility. You need to change when you eat. You should think about what you eat. You should think about detoxing. You should think about moving your body. Let's have a conversation about stress. Like there's a lot of things that should probably change as you're going through this menopausal journey. And in that, yeah, some of you are going to do really great with HRT and some of you aren't going to want that. And that's totally fine because it's a very individual process. How about we all work together to help these

women find their individual path through menopause? As opposed to what's happening is HRT, we got it wrong, every woman needs to go on it. We've still lost the woman in that conversation. And I think that's where my heart sits today with where we are on this conversation, because we've gone from a cultural hush on menopause to cultural chaos. It's in the nature of topics that haven't been talked about for a long time for them to kind of ebb and flow and swing left to right. And generally it seems, because this isn't unique to HRT, it's going on in wellness. People will say it's going on between the vegans and the carnivores, every single subject. Largely it seems that more people speaking up and more direct voices and people being able to

hear from you and also somebody being able to hear from somebody that disagrees and has a different perspective. If in that process, we can teach the world to be more civil, amazing. But I am, I don't want to say that I don't think people are going to come together. I just think that everybody truly believes their side. And they're sort of defending that side. Yeah. And I don't know if it's so easy. And nor would we want, I mean, you've changed your mind on things. I've changed my mind on things. And it's because somebody didn't let go of that idea or vision that it kind of convinced us

maybe ultimately one day that's there. But I think the thing that can happen is I think practitioners like yourself and this should probably be like a whole course that you could teach, they go out there and they speak directly. People are smart. They can hear from a lot of different subjects,

a lot of different people. They can see that people disagree. They can see that some people are a little bit nicer about it. Some people are not nice about it. And they can make up their own mind and decide who they want to listen to and try things on. You know?

Yeah. And it's so great that you are going out there and talking about these things because people are smart. They see it. Right. And they just want all the options that are available to themselves. They want all the options to be able to decide. I kind of agree with this. I agree with that. My experience is this. And wow, this is something new that I never would have thought of before if it wasn't for, you know, Mindy or this other person speaking up. You know what we should be thinking, those of us that are writing books and doing podcasts and we should think that we're opening up conversations. I feel really, like, proud that I got to be a part of opening the cycling conversation up,

that you cycle different things according to lifestyle habits according to where your menstrual cycle is. But then once that was open, look at all the people that are coming into that conversation right now. That's beautiful. And then I feel blessed to have been part of the conversation opening up about menopause and lifestyle. Hey, there's some things you can do lifestyle-wise to help them on. menopuzzled journey. Amazing. But now we have so many people going into that conversation, and it's great. Let's just all, let's have a conversation about it. I'll tell you the conversation I'm going to now that I'm going to open up. Tell me. Is aging? I think anti-aging is killing women.

The need to be against aging. Why aren't we pro-aging? We're aging. What does it look like to naturally age and through a woman's lens? And that's going to be the next book. How actually for women, and Lisa Mascone taught us this in her book, is that the brain changes that are happening to women in menopause actually set her up for her best life yet, her happiest life yet. But you have a culture of women that are like, no, and I want anti-aging tool, everything.

And I want to flip that and start the conversation and say, guess what, aging, especially for women, is a true gift. And that's a whole other conversation. That's right. With a lot of layers to it. Mindy, I'm so thankful for you to come on here and really to take subjects that even people who consider themselves to know a lot about these topics still find themselves confused about.

And if you're listening, and I think a lot of my listeners are not confused enough not to take action. I think that's the old way. There's enough people that are speaking up, yourself included, that are saying, these are the basics that we want everybody to double down on. Yeah. Right? These are the basics that we want everybody to prioritize. and there's an overlap that's happening amongst the space

where even people who completely disagree on other subjects, they largely are doubling down on the same basics that are there. They might have a few things here and there that they disagree with, but the basics, sleep, community, not being sedentary, doing tough things, resistance training, protein. These are the things that you're hearing from a lot of individuals and these are a lot of topics that you've talked about in the book in addition to many other subjects.

And on top of that, just like people watch sports and are into certain subjects, or they have a favorite TV show or they're very curious about a topic. I think of my audience as being individuals who are like, they want to get into the weeds of stuff. Yeah, love that. And these long format conversations where people are willing to come on and say, hey, this is what I'm hearing people say, this is where I'm confused about.

Give me your perspective. I understand it's your own experience and it's the experience of your community, but our audience wants to hear that. And I feel that we accomplish that today. So I want to acknowledge you. I want to thank you for all the work that you're doing on behalf of women that are out there and the men who love them. Thank you.

And I wish you nothing but future success on top of everything you've accomplished with this next book on the world. Tell people the title again. It's called Eat Like a Girl. It's available everywhere. Yep. Yep. Amazon, we have a link in the show notes. You can pick it up.

And two of your favorite recipes. Oh. Oh, there's a salmon for khaki that chef Jeff. Chef Jeff actually trained under some of the best chefs that you know, like Jose Andres, and he trained with this group of women. in the mountains of Spain and learned how to make meat. And so his salmon, he puts this glaze on top of it. It's super quick and easy. Love that one.

And then chef Leslie, my plant-based chef, made a kimchi etymami bowl that is like got quinoa and soybeans and kimchi and watermelon radishes and an incredible sauce on top of it. Those are my two favorite. I love it. I love it. Well, pick up the book. Get those recipes. Mindy, thank you for coming on.

Thank you, Drew. Hi, everyone, Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share it with a friend. Share it with a friend who would benefit from listening.

Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about. It's my weekly newsletter. and it's called Try This. Every Friday, yes, every Friday, 52 weeks a year, I send out an easy-to-digest protocol of simple steps that you or anyone you love can follow to optimize your own health. We cover everything from nutrition to mindset,

to metabolic health, sleep, community, longevity, and so much more. If you want to get on this email list, which is, by the way, free and get my weekly step-by-step protocols for whole-body health and optimization, click the link in the show notes that's called Try This or just go to Drew Perot.com. That's D-H-R-U-P-U-R-O-H-I-T dot com and click on the tab that says, try this.