Dhru Purohit Show - What Women Need to Know About Fasting and How to Do It Correctly with Dr. Mindy Pelz

Episode Date: January 2, 2023

This episode is brought to you by Birch Mattress by Helix and InsideTracker. Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru sits down with holistic health expert, and one of the world’s leading experts on fasting, Dr. Mindy Pelz to talk about the benefits of fasting and how women, in particular, can cultivate a fasting routine in a way that honors their hormones.  Dr. Mindy is the author of three bestselling books—The Menopause Reset, The Reset Factor, and The Reset Kitchen—and her members-only Facebook group, The Resetter Collaborative, includes over 50,000 active members who regularly participate in Dr. Mindy’s exclusive monthly “Fast Training Week” programs. Her newest book, Fast Like A Girl, is a definitive guide for women everywhere to harness the benefits of fasting while making sure they are supporting and caring for their hormones throughout the different stages of their cycle and throughout perimenopause, menopause, and postmenopause.    In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Mindy dive into:  -Top misconceptions around fasting as a tool for women (3:25) -The impact of estrogen and progesterone on fasting (6:40) -Why women should approach fasting differently than men (14:21) -How rising progesterone levels impact fasting leading up to menstruation (20:28) -The impact of perimenopause and menopause on fasting protocols (23:54) -Why it’s important for women to personalize fasting (30:19) -The benefits you can get from fasting beyond losing weight (42:40) -The “do’s” of a prolonged fasting window (52:46) -The “don’ts” of prolonged fasting (1:05:07) -How to properly break a fast (1:10:06) -A few testimonials from Dr. Mindy’s clients (1:15:01) Also mentioned in this episode: -Dr. Mindy Pelz's YouTube channel -Dr. Mindy’s podcast, The Resetter Podcast -Dr. Mindy’s Facebook group, The Resetter Collaborative For more on Dr. Mindy Pelz, follow her on Instagram @dr.mindypelz, Facebook @drmindypelz, and YouTube @DrMindyPelz. Get her new book, Fast Like A Girl, here.  InsideTracker provides detailed nutrition and lifestyle guidance based on your individual needs. Right now, they’re offering my podcast community 20% off. Just go to https://www.insidetracker.com/DHRU to get your discount and try it out for yourself. Birch Mattress by Helix is made from organic latex, organic cotton, New Zealand wool, and American steel springs. To get $200 off your Birch Living mattress plus two free Eco-Rest Pillows, head over to https://www.birchliving.com/dhru today. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Progesterone cannot handle one meal a day. Trouble sleeping, highly anxious, gaining weight back. We've done some fantastic episodes on this podcast about the healing power of fasting and how revolutionary can be for your health. We've also had on some incredible women's health experts and advocates who've talked about some of the potential dangers around fasting, especially for women in their fertility years. Where is the nuance and how can women still take it? advantage of the healing power of fasting without throwing the baby out with a bathwater.

Welcome to the Drew Proet podcast. Each week we explore the inner workings of the brain and the body with one of the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset. This week's guest is Dr. Mindy Pels, and she's going to be breaking down fasting in a way that you might have not heard of before. Mindy is a renowned holistic health expert and one of the leading voices in educating women about their bodies. She's on a mission to start a women's health revolution, and she truly believes that fasting is one of the most important tools in that toolbox of wellness. Dr. Mindy has a new book out. It's called Fast Like a Girl. And the subtitle is A Woman's Guide to Using the Healing Power of Fasting to Burn Fat, Boost Energy, and Balance Hormones. And Dr. Mindy believes that women,

at most stages of their life, of course, we're not talking about fasting. for minors or anybody under the age of 18, but at every other stage of life, there's a way to personalize fasting that it still works for women. Now, a little bit more about Dr. Mindy. She has empowered hundreds of thousands of people all around the world, primarily using social media and her books, to harness their body's own healing abilities through fasting, diet variation, detoxification of harmful chemicals from the body, stress management, and lifestyle changes. She's worked with many high-profile clients, including entertainers, Leanne Rimes, former race car driver Danica Patrick, and actress Kat Graham,

who's the co-host of their joint podcast called Women United. She's also worked with popular influencer Jesse Itzler, Olympic athletes, Academy Award-winning actors, Silicon Valley CEOs, and countless patients looking to supercharge their body's healing powers. In addition to her new book on fasting, Dr. Mindy is also the best-selling. author of three books including the menopause reset, the reset factor, the reset kitchen, and her members-only Facebook group, The Resetters Collaborative, includes over 50,000 active members who regularly participate in her monthly fasting programs. Dr. Mindy also has a podcast called The Resetters Podcast, and I'm excited for you to check it out.

After today's episode, Dr. Mindy is truly an advocate and a champion for the role of fasting in our health regimen, not just because she's heard from testimonials from all around the world, from men and women, but because she's also seeing the changes that it's made in her life firsthand. I'm excited to share Dr. Mindy's knowledge with you. If you've ever been confused about how to best incorporate fasting and personalize it for you, if you're a woman, today's conversation is absolutely for you. Dr. Mindy, welcome to the podcast. A pleasure to have you here. Fast like a girl. It's out. So tell us, if somebody wants to be. wanted to fast like a girl, what are the top misconceptions that they have to get around to

ultimately get to the place where they're effectively using fasting as a tool to help accelerate all sorts of goals that they have in their life? Oh my gosh, that's such a loaded question. I love it. So here's what I want women to know is fasting works for you. All different lengths fast will absolutely work for you. You just have to time them to your hormones. And this is where we really do. differ from men. So if you look at like a woman's, let's just take a woman's menstrual cycle and we can talk about postmenopausal because that comes up a lot. But at the front half of a woman's menstrual cycle, she does amazing with fasting. The back half, not so great with fasting. That's when we need to

avoid fasting. Now there's a lot of nuance in all of that, but to really go deep into the question that you asked, which is what do women need to know? Why do we need to fast like girl? is because we have to vary the way we approach fasting. We can't just click into 16 hours every single day. We can't click into one meal a day, became very popular in the fasting movement. We can't just do the same thing over and over again every day of the month because our hormones are constantly changing. Let's pull on some of those threads that are there.

So what's the challenge with some of those approaches that are there? For example, one meal a day. They got very popular that's out there, specifically for women. And obviously there's these different stages that women are at depending on what age they are and whether they're menopausal or whether they're in their prime fertility years. So what's the challenge with an approach like that as one fasting tool that people are using? Yeah, a lot of people are doing one meal a day. It's like once you find that groove, you're like, oh, this is so easy and convenient. And then you just want to keep doing it over and over again.

So let me kind of back up for a moment and sort of give the big picture of why fasting works. is what we're doing is we're mimicking what we did primally back in the cave days. And so back in those days, we would walk out of the cave and there wouldn't be men and women. We'd walk out and there wouldn't be any food. So we would have to go hunt for food. And in that ability of the human body to go hunt for food, we switched over into another fuel source, which is called the fat burner system or the ketogenic energy system. And we used ketones to go find food.

And then when they hunted for food, they brought it back and then they feasted for days. So the human body in general, both men and women, are meant to have feast famine cycling. We need to go into periods of less food and then you can go into periods where you're feasting what I say on the right foods. That is how our metabolism really shines best. Now, the challenge, so if you do one meal a day over and over again, you're not in accordance with that feast famine cycling. You were not meant to eat all day. You were not meant to fast all day. You were meant to dip in and out of different styles of eating and different styles of fasting.

Now, for women, this is even more important because when you look at, let's just say, let's pull on the thread of estrogen and progesterone. Estrogen and progesterone are two of the major sex hormones that drive women. And they need vastly different approaches. So estrogen does amazing with fasting. Progesterone, you will completely tank your progesterone with fasting. So if a woman is doing one meal a day over and over and over again, eventually she's going to lose progesterone. And if you lose progestrone, you're going to be more anxious. You're going to have trouble sleeping. Your hair's going to fall out. You're going to have trouble calming your body and your mind. And this is literally what we saw on my YouTube channel. is that everybody started doing, after the obesity code came out, everybody started doing one meal a day. They got so excited about the weight loss benefits of fasting. They started doing one meal a day. And then they all came to my YouTube channel where I was teaching variation.

And I started seeing that the women had very consistent, consistently similar results and problems. And it was exactly what I just said. Hair falling out. some of them were gaining weight back, trouble sleeping, highly anxious. And it was all the women because progesterone cannot handle one meal a day. It also seems that if somebody's continuously doing one meal a day, especially as they enter into their later years, it might be more difficult for them to get the appropriate amount of protein they need in their body to maintain muscle mass and avoid things like sarcopenia. Is it also a challenge that says to? It's a huge challenge.

and then let's put it in the context of women. So we have to remember that protein is the most important macronutrient. You know, in the whole low-carb movement, we got excited about and villainized carbs, although I believe nature's carbs are healing. I don't think we need to totally put the enemy badge on carbs. But with protein, we are not eating enough protein as humans, but as women, we need more protein than ever. And especially after 40, when we start to go through those menopausal years, we need protein. So if we're doing one meal a day, you need at least, you know, 30 grams of protein per meal

to trigger amino acid receptor sites in your muscles, to grow your muscles stronger. But on a daily basis, I really do believe one gram of protein for one pound of body weight you want to be is a good measurement. But how are you going to accomplish that with one meal a day? There was a popular book on the topic of one meal a day that was written by James Cameron's wife. And I think they're very vocal about their advocacy is really from a place of they truly believe that plant-based is the best for the world. And they are also seeing that one meal a day. I went to a talk of hers in Santa Monica just as like a supportive thing, you know, just seeing what's out there in the world and always being open-minded.

And it also seemed that the idea of preaching one meal a day was another way to get people to cut down specifically maybe animal protein. That was being, you know, it was kind of the vehicle to kind of get people to that place. Yeah. And just was interesting. I just was, you know, paying attention to that. Obviously, people can eat whatever they want to eat or not eat whatever they want to eat. But let's zoom out of one meal a day.

Yeah. And let's go back to the idea of fasting. So you said something that a few other women, you guys are in a. small but powerful minority. And I'm proud to say that my podcast has been one of those that was early on really giving voice to a lot of the great women in this space. But the idea that women cannot fast like men. Talk a little bit more about that. And why do certain things work for men that may not necessarily work for women? Yeah. It's such a good question. And I think what all of us are trying to do is bring to light the conversation in the health world that men, when you

look at your hormones, you work off of a 24-hour system. You get testosterone every 15, 20 minutes. You're getting a pulse of testosterone. It'll come back in another 20 minutes. And testosterone is pretty much the primary hormone that drives you. Now, it doesn't mean that you're not affected. Estrogen is still a part of something you need to keep in the mix and make sure you're not doing endocrine disruptors and all of that. But you really have one hormone that is going to convert into other hormones and is driving you. Women, we have three hormones. We have estrogen, progestrone, and testosterone. You have it coming in in a 24-hour period. We have these three hormones coming in in a 30-day, 28-30-day period. So when we look at the characteristics of these hormones,

testosterone for both men and women does amazing with fasting. Now, we don't have a ton of studies for women on fasting and testosterone, I wish we did. We have, on men, we see 24-hour fast. You can upregulate testosterone by like 2,000 percent. Men do so well with fasting because it has such an energizing experience to testosterone, and you can really upregulate testosterone. But women, we only get testosterone during ovulation. We don't get testosterone much the rest of our cycle. We get estrogen in the front half, and then we get progesterone primarily in the back half. And progestrone and estrogen have to be treated differently. So estrogen is very forgiving. You can do a lot of cardio, you can go, you can do long fast, you can do low carb, like anything

that's going to bring glucose down, bring insulin down, estrogen's going to shine. If you have PCOS, this is one thing I write about in the book, you're really going to benefit from doing longer fast, going into those low carb moments. It's going to help you balance out estrogen and testosterone. But in the back half of our cycle, when we get progestron, we're, progesterone's completely the opposite. So what happens with progestrone is if cortisol goes high, progesterone gets shy. Like she's, she's out. Like, you want to run a marathon. It's day 21 of your cycle. It's not the best time to do it because as cortisol is up, you're going to see progesterone go low.

So any stressor, like a fast is a stressor. Exercise can be a stressor is going to raise cortisol and now progestone goes away. Second thing on why women need to fast differently is that we actually are more insulin resistant the week before our periods. And that's to progesterone's advantage. progesterone needs glucose to be higher. So I can't tell you how many women that I've put CGMs on, continuous glucose monitors, and just by teaching them how to fast like a girl, we still are seeing that glucose is going up the week before her period because that's what progesterone needs.

And to take a quick little pause, I mean, we've done so many episodes on this topic, but you never know who's listening. Just give us the quick breakdown on insulin resistant versus insulin sensitive. It's something that kind of confuses a lot of people, but it's always nice to get a rehash from someone. Okay. So insulin resistance means that your cells cannot use insulin to your advantage. So insulin is the hormone that will actually store push glucose into our cells so they can be used. So if you're insulin resistant, that can't happen. And then what the body does is it has to store glucose and insulin somewhere else. So it stores it in fat, and it stores it in the liver. And it'll store it in your eyes. It'll store it in all the places that the mitochondrial.

are hanging out. It'll just pack all that glucose stored in your brain. So that's insulin resistance. Insulin sensitive means that when insulin shows up, you can actually use insulin to your advantage and push glucose into the cell so the mitochondria can use it for energy. Yeah. And people often think of it as being something that only individuals that are overweight or obese are dealing with, but there's plenty of people that are in that skinny fat category. You know, I come from an Indian and South Asian background, a huge percentage of that population, men and women, now that we're sort of in North America and Europe and eating the sort of standard diets that are there, a huge percentage of those people, even if their BMI doesn't put them in a category of being

overweight or obese, they still have insulin resistance and it's a major driver of a lot of things that they're suffering with. Yeah. It's such a good point because when the pandemic hit, there was a lot of talk about metabolic syndrome being the core of a poor immune system. And then when metabolic syndrome became a very, a very popular topic during that time, there was a study that came out. I'm pretty sure you've heard of it, that only 12% of Americans are metabolically fit. So then the question became, well, what does metabolic fitness mean? And it's everything from your blood pressure to your cholesterol,

to your fasting glucose, to your circumference of your waist, to your liver enzymes. Like there's a variety of things that need to be in balance without medication for you to be metabolically fit. And it's really, the fact is we've got everybody's walking around insulin resistant, but if you are just judging insulin resistance off a weight, you're missing the whole discussion. So connecting this back to the topic that started it, you were saying that women, in their fertility years, right, in their prime fertility years, a week before their period, are naturally more have challenges with sort of processing and using insulin.

Yeah. Right. They're more insulin resistant in that period of time. Right. Yeah. And so what kind of impact does that have when it comes to how they're thinking about navigating the different stages of their cycle, specifically like that week before their period. Yeah. Well, the reason I laugh is because ask any woman, what does she want to do the week before

her period? She wants to sit on the couch with a box of pizza and a tub of ice cream, do nothing, and eat carbs. And usually there's some chocolate involved in that, like craving chocolate, which is interesting too, because if you look at what we naturally are inclined to do, which is slow down, eat more carbs, and crave things like chocolate, well, let's look at what the demands of progesterone are. Progestrone needs you to raise glucose, so that's why you crave carbs, and you need magnesium to make progesterone, which is a large part of why a lot of women crave chocolate. And you can't have cortisol high, so what progesterone does is try to get you to slow down and have less energy so that you can actually be in a place where you can be in a place where you

You have all the right mixture of cortisol, insulin, glucose, everything's got its flow so that progesterone can make her appearance. And yet we villainize that. We pushed through that last week. We haven't been taught what the importance of that last week of our cycle is, but yet there are very clear demands that progesterone has. And I believe this is a large reason why we have such a hormonal mess for women is because we haven't been taught when we can lean into more of more of the challenging health habits and when to

actually pause. So that would be, for example, a time where we want to maybe ease up for women, not we, but for women that have their period and their cycle and everything, they might want to be easing up on things that were be positive stressors at other times during their cycle, but now it might be too much on the body. That's right. That's right. And this is a big part of my message and what I put in the book is we're brilliantly designed.

Like how many times have we complained about the fact, I don't feel like doing anything? I just want to eat carbs. I don't feel like going out. I don't feel like working out. And it's like since we haven't been taught the design of our bodies, what ends up happening is we've just been bitching and moaning about PMS. But progesterone's been there the whole time saying, hey, here's the environment I need you to live in. And so this is part of what I'm trying to break free for women is if you don't feel like working out and it's day 21 of your cycle, there's a reason for that.

If you're craving more carbs, how about you go instead of to the box of pizza and we start to bring in some sweet potatoes and look at nature's carbs? So we've got to first help women identify that's normal. And then we start to change the conversation of how do you make it healthy for progesterone. How about women at other life stages? Perimenopause, menopause. I'm sure a huge percentage of the audience that follows you and follows me as well or find themselves in that category. How should they be thinking about fasting?

Yeah. So to me there's three phases for women. There's the fertility years. There's the perimenopause and there's the postmenopause. So with the perimenopausal years, this is one that is really delicate and I really encourage women. You're going to have to find your own unique rhythm with it. But let's sort of set the picture for those women. At 40, what ends up happening is your ovaries are going into retirement.

And that doesn't mean you can't have a baby at 43 or 45. But in general, the ovaries are like, okay, like I've done a job here for a very long time. now I'm going to go into retirement and slowly back out. But I'm going to do two things as I go through that process. One, it's going to take me about 10 or 15 years to go into this retirement phase. So I think one of the biggest misconceptions of perimenopause is that we think it's like a switch that goes on and off. That's not the case. It's about a 10-year journey of these decline of hormones. Second thing is because the body's so well designed, what it does is it has to hand over the job of making sex hormones to a different organ. And what it does is it hands it over to the

adrenal glands. Now, let's talk about a 45-year-old woman, a 43-year-old woman who's got teenage kids, is balancing work and family is, like, maxed out. And now her adrenals have been in high mode, like a high-performance mode, and now has to take over the job of making sex hormones. Okay, now those adrenals are very loaded. So I say, I see. set that all up to say we have to think about the adrenals for the perimenopausal woman as we move through different fast. Because if you throw a three-day water fast at a perimenopausal woman, at the wrong time of her cycle, you could put her into a really difficult hormonal state. So what I recommend for perimenopausal women is you really want to get to know the characteristics

of your hormones. You want to start tracking your cycle. I'm 53 now. at 43, I started tracking my cycle for the first time. You want to know what day you're on, and then you want to know what hormone is coming in. And when you know those two things, which I teach you that in the book, now you know, okay, it's day 10 of my cycle, estrogen's coming in. Estrogen likes keto. Estrogen likes fasting. Estrogen likes my extreme exercise. Great. Let's use that tool. Now, when you get into the back half of your cycle, it's day 22, okay, now I need to look at progestrone and really nourish progesterone. At 40 as you go into this perimenopausal state, progesterone's just going down, down, down.

You're never getting progesterone back to what it was in your 20s. So that back half, you really got to go more into nurture. So it becomes this sort of dance you do with your hormones, but you first have to get to know your cycle and then you need to get to know the personality of these hormones and what they need from you so that you can really maximize that. You were sharing that there's a lot of variation during this time and it's important that you kind of play with it for a woman that finds herself in this stage, this transition stage of 10 to 15 years where the ovaries are going in retirement before menopause. What are some examples, if any, that you could think of from your own life where

you kind of thought something was a good idea, but then you found through testing it out something else worked better for you. Anything come to mind? Oh, well, fasting was, this is how I've discovered everything that I teach in fast like a girl was at 43, I mean at 40, I went into 40 wanting to be in the best shape of my life. I did all the right things and I was working out and I was eating all day long and I was, everything clinically was clean in my, in my lifestyle. By 43, I had the worst perimenopausal symptoms ever. And can you just explain what they were? Yeah. So trouble. sleeping, hot flashes at night, really irritable. My kids, you know, at that point were teenagers and it was like anything they did just kind of really set me off, almost became intolerant

to stress. A lot of injuries, like I'm an athlete and a lot of like knee and hip stuff just wouldn't go away and it just kept showing up and lingering injuries. It just, and anxiety, I'd never had anxiety before where like I'd just be sitting. on the couch and like I just would feel anxious. And I, and I could, my brain was like, what is going on? There's nothing I'm doing. I'm just sitting on my couch. There's, how could I be anxious? And that was the, that was the first time I'd ever experienced anxiety before. So, so that was kind of what I had. And then I discovered fasting. And so what I did is I loved how, oh, weight gain was another thing. That's really common in your 40s. Like all your old tricks are not

working anymore. Everything you did in your 30s and 20s to keep your body in great shape, not working anymore. What was an example of something that you were doing, right, for weight management in particular? Obviously, you've always had a little bit of like a wellness focus. So maybe some of the stuff that people are doing, you're not going to be doing. But was there anything that was an old trick in your book that stopped working for? Oh, exercise. Exercise. So just exercise alone as a vehicle to sort of maintain weight. That in itself was not moving the needle forward. Wouldn't. And so I just started running more. I'm a runner. I'm a runner. I loved to run.

And I would just throw more at it. And the more I threw at it, the harder, the less my body responded positively. It actually started responding more negatively. So then I found fasting. And I threw, I started throwing fasts at it and longer fasts. And the shorter fast started to move some of the needle for me. I started to see that there was like some weight that was dropping. And then when I started doing it, I threw some three-day water fast at it.

and I started to see massive weight loss drop. But what I didn't know then was how to vary it to my cycle. I was doing it at the wrong time of my cycle, which is how I came upon all of this. So let's talk about that personalization piece because you're known for really providing sort of a bunch of options for people for a fasting journey that can help them towards that goal. And we'll kind of cover a few of those. And we'll come back to maybe, I don't know if there's any additional distinctions you want share for like women that are in the menopausal years because we talked about the transition years.

Yeah. Yeah, let's talk about the because they, I always get asked these questions, all the postmenopausal women and I always say, I'm not leaving you out. It's just different. So you don't have a cycle to time to anymore. So, but you still have three sex hormones to consider. And these three sex hormones are still declining every year of your life. That's how they're naturally supposed to do, what they're naturally supposed to do. So, um, you, um, you, In the book, I put a 30-day reset in there where a post-menopausal woman can go through different length fast, different food styles, and we can talk about that in a moment, and kind of just learn to have a rhythm with going into low keto, coming out into what I call hormone

feasting foods, which is a lot of root vegetables and some really healthy carbs, and then going into shorter fast and then coming out. It's that ebb and flow that a post-menopausal woman still needs to think about. Whereas, you know, if you look at a 60-year-old man who just wants to raise testosterone, he doesn't have as much of that ebb and flow to think about. So you still have these hormones to think about, you just don't have a cycle to time it too. Got it.

Does that make sense? Totally. So what I did is created one for postmenopausal women in the book. Great. So let's jump into some of these fasting. As a base entry point, you know, fasting is one of those things I'm always, it's kind of like There's a lot of buzzwords that are out there in different categories of, you know, of different industries.

For example, you know, there's like, people talk a lot about gratitude and the benefits of gratitude, right? And in the health world, it's like fasting has been, you know, all the rage. But when you actually look at it and you talk to people, like very few people are actually regularly practicing fasting as a part of their regimen. Anybody can kind of like quickly get excited about something and they drop off. Right. So as much as it feels like we've been talking a lot about fasting, still, I don't really know how many, that many people are incorporating it.

It's still the minority of individuals if it's a regular part. It's just been my experience when you talk to people. It's like, oh, I know it's a good idea, but I'm not necessarily doing it. Right. That's what I mean by it. Right. If you go to the general public, we live in the wellness world. Right, I know, right.

So there's going to be a higher percentage of people in that in your comments and your YouTube comments and my podcast comments. But most people you walk down the street, oh, yeah, I've heard a fasting. I heard it's a good thing. But I'm not necessarily doing it. Right. So as an on ramp, do you have an entry place where you start people before, we get into the different variations that are out there of how to begin to tap into the benefits

of fasting. Yeah, it's a great question. So I hope everybody that's listening that is like, I think it's a good idea, but I haven't started, we'll start after this conversation because here's the entry point is you have to start looking at your 24 hours that you're given every single day as there is a window in which you eat and there is a window in which you fast. So I do like the concept that it's time-restricted eating because you're taking, you're eating and you're putting it in one short window. So when we talk about one meal a day, that's what we're saying is you're just in that window. And when you're eating, you're raising blood sugar. So that, and then when you're not eating, you're bringing blood sugar down, which is letting you switch into another

fuel source. So what I first start doing with people is I say, just push your breakfast back an hour or push your dinner up an hour one day and start to take all the food you're eating and compress it into a shorter time period. And if you naturally do that, you push breakfast back an hour. It may be a little difficult in the beginning. That's okay. It's actually good if it's difficult. It's like going to the gym. Do you want to go to the gym and make it easy all the time? you want to actually push yourself to a little bit of an edge so the body can adapt. That's the same thing we're doing as we start to push breakfast back an hour, is you want to hit that hormetic stressor moment where the body is like,

okay, this is stressful, and then all of a sudden it starts to kick in and turn on the ketogenic energy system for healing. Then you can push it back another hour and another hour until you're right at that intermittent fasting level, which is about 15 hours. I love to chat about this a little bit. I know you've talked about this on your podcast. I've heard a few of the episodes, and I've seen some clips on social media. This idea of breakfast, and of course there's the larger concept that we've always been told

that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and that's sort of being in the zeitgeist for many years. Yeah. And then there was this whole movement of people incorporating fasting and people doing fasting the same way. And often for a lot of people that meant skipping breakfast because it's just easier way to do things, especially in a society like America, North America, European countries, Western countries, where dinner is a very social kind of component.

I grew up in a tradition where fasting, which was a regular part of my parents' life and upbringing for spiritual and religious reasons, often when they fasted, it would be they'd skip dinner. That was the sort of approach they had. And that was kind of just what had been passed down for years. And I've also noticed for my wife and my sisters, again, just a little end of three situation that's there, is that they're not hungry right away first thing in the morning. But when they get that morning sunlight, that sort of helps them suppress some of that melatonin that's there that's lingering in the body. They build an appetite and at least eating something in the morning, they feel better.

Where I can just drink a black coffee like I have here and kind of like go for a period of the time. My wife will literally tell me, she's like, I cannot focus. I cannot pay attention. I don't feel like I have the energy. Any thoughts about any of that? Yeah, I got a lot of thoughts on that. So the first thing I would say is I'm an advocate for finding your fasting lifestyle that's unique to you. So in the book, I have a whole chapter on what is a fasting lifestyle. And one of the key things is, what are you trying to do with your fasting? So in that scenario, with the women in your life, I would say if you're hungrier in the morning, but not as hungry at the end of the day, then let's take your eating window and put it at starting at maybe you open up the eating

window at nine and you close it at five. And then you fast, you're fasting the rest of the time. Which is very socially, it's tough to do for a lot of people, which is why I appreciate the way you've shared it, which is that you have to find your fasting lifestyle. That's right. But I genuinely see a performance difference. Again, this is my little corner of the world and just paying attention to a lot of, you know, the people in my life and I'm lucky to be surrounded by amazing, you know, women. But it's great to get your take on that. So everybody has to figure it out for themselves.

Yeah. Yeah, you have to figure it out for yourself. And here's the thing is that what I hear a lot from people who are not fasting is they will say, like, that kind of thing. I'm hungry in the morning. I couldn't really go that long without. fasting or without eating. And fasting is your natural state. Your body, the human body, whether you're a man or a woman, want thrives when you go without food. We have all these

healing mechanisms that kick in, that you can't get supplements to kick in. You can't get drugs to kick in these mechanisms. So we want to understand what our personal bodies want with this fasting window. And if you're hungry all the time in the morning, but not hungry in the afternoon, or a lot of people do circadian fasting where when it's light out, they eat and when it's dark, they don't. I think all of that is great. But if you are going consistently every single day, seven hours is the longest you go, eight hours is the longest you go without food, you've completely missed a whole set of healing tools that your body has. It's interesting you mentioned that I also notice for my wife in particular, again, my sisters,

they can actually power through, but then it kind of hits them that they don't feel that great if they don't eat a little bit. We're not talking about like a big breakfast and we're definitely not talking about Kellogg's and some of the other stuff that you've talked about in your podcast, but even a little bit of chicken sausage, some bok choy, some greens, just a little something in the morning, primarily fat, protein, fiber, that is just a little bit of that kick to get the brain, especially because all three of them are like more executive types and they're in meetings and they're using a lot of cognitive power. And they're not that moms aren't. They're probably using

even more cognitive power that are out there. But yeah, I think it just goes back to everybody sort of figuring out what is their unique window and what can they keep up with in their life. That's right. Because if you can't keep up with it, then you can't tap into the benefits. Yeah, I'll share a story of a beautiful interaction that I had with a man this summer who came to me and he was 300 pounds. And he said, I need your help. And he's like, if I don't change my food behavior, I'm going to die. And I have two kids and a wife. What can fasting do for me?

And when I dove into his food addiction, it was all the worst things. It was the standard American diet. It was like 12 sodas a day. And he had been on every diet. And so I knew, I couldn't just say, well, gosh, get rid of your soda. That's an easy answer. I asked him to take all the food he was eating and start to compress it into a shorter eating window. So we did exactly what I taught you.

I had him just back breakfast back an hour. And we did that every single day where we just slowly took all of this horrible food and put it into about, it was about an eight to 10 hour eating window. First month, he didn't change anything. He lost 13 pounds first month. Still drinking all the soda, still eating all the hamburgers. Next month, I just kept him at that around, he was doing around 15, 16 hours of fasting. I asked him, could he just have soda outside his home? Don't bring soda inside his home.

So we just worked on the soda thread. Second month, 10 more pounds. Third month, still let him eat whatever he wanted, just soda outside the home. he had to add in protein. Still kept him at that same eating window. We didn't even vary the fast. Just add in more protein. He lost another 20 pounds. So you're looking at in three months, this man was able to lose over 40 pounds just by compressing the eating window and changing a few habits. That, to me, is the power of what the body does when you just give it a rest, give it a chance to click into this ketogenic system and to heal you.

And for women, and back to the women in your life, I actually would suspect that if I sat down with them or they read the book and we taught them like, hey, here's the part of your cycle where it's really good to eat more breakfast. And here's part of your cycle. You may notice you're not as hungry for breakfast. And how do you have that natural rhythm with it that they would start to find that fasting they would actually crave it at different times of their month? Yeah. And sorry, the one thing I didn't add in there, which goes right along with your point, is that they would start. they actually probably are following that process because they all eat dinner at much earlier time.

Right. We're talking about like five, six o'clock. Right. You know. It's beautiful. So they're just, it's just that their preferences instead of skipping, skipping breakfast, they prefer to just eat earlier dinner or like not like constricted that way. Right.

Which goes just back to the natural variation you're talking about. Right. So how we got on this whole topic is that we were talking about an on ramp to begin. Yes. The journey of fasting. And one clarification slash question I'd love to ask, you've mentioned before that most people, and at the end of the day, you know, you want to hear people for why they're coming to you because it really is a sign of that they're struggling and you want to support people, but give them the right

tools that help them with both their immediate goals, but also support their long-term health. So you've shared that most people come to you because they're looking for weight loss. If somebody isn't necessarily looking for weight loss, is this on-ramp of fasting still a good approach for them, the idea of time-restricted eating. Yeah, I think everybody should get used to what it feels like to be in ketosis. Let's go back to a really key principle, which is we have two ways we make energy. We make one from when we eat food and our blood sugar rises, and we make energy when the blood sugar dips for an extended period of time, we switch over into the fat burning system, into the ketogenic energy system. And we use ketones to fuel our brain.

Our brain requires 50% of the fuel needs of the brain are ketones. The other 50% is glucose. So if we've never dipped into the ketogenic system and given the brain ketones, then we're missing a whole fuel that the brain needs to function and perform at its best, which is why you see people who once they come to fasting for weight loss, they lose weight, they're like blown away at how powerful their brain is working, how much cognition they have, how much their memory kicks back in. That's a huge reason to keep fasting. We also, you know, in my practice, I used to throw supplement after supplement at gut issues. People had been on antibiotics for years.

And then I've discovered, gosh, if I just put them regularly in and out of a 24-hour fast, that intestinal stem cells would kick in and the body would heal itself. just by giving it a break from food, it would go, okay, now let me give you some nutrients that will heal. So I think that's the big part of fasting. I love that it's a trend for weight loss. Great. But because it's what the body is designed to do, there's all these other healing mechanisms that will kick in for you. So now that we know that that's a great way to get started and more details inside the book.

And of course, you have a YouTube channel. We have a link to it in the side of the show notes. You have a ton of content on this or anybody that wants to drill down. You do these really fun fasting Q&As. I watched a couple. And you kind of like really go into the weeds. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

And you make them funny and fun. Thank you. So we have a link to that at the bottom for people that want to go deeper. But now let's get into some of these more different type of fast that you've set up based on the experience of putting, you know, thousands of people through this and them going through. it, whether it's your Facebook group that you have, your YouTube channel, people are just trying stuff and seeing what works. So walk us through a couple of those to get started. Yeah. So the way I like to explain it is that if once you start to think about your food in this eating window, then now you can think about, okay, if I compress my eating for longer periods

of time going longer times of fasting, or for shorter periods of fasting, what switches are going to get turned on? And that's the way I like to look at it. It's like they're like healing. switches that get turned on. So what, and there's six of them that I have found have worked the best. And they're based off of research and then they're based off of what I saw on my YouTube channel. And I mean, literally millions of comments and millions of people worldwide that we have seen move through these six. And here are the six. The first is what we've been talking about. It's just intermittent fasting. It's 12 to 16 hours. You're going to start to switch over into the fat burning system. You're going to get some key.

ketones, you're going to get some growth hormone, you're going to get some testosterone. It's a great place to live. Once you extend that to 17 hours, autophagy kicks in. And autophagy is like a dimmer switch. It starts to turn on at 17 hours. But what's so brilliant about autophagy is that the intelligence inside the cell is like, okay, no food's coming, nutrients aren't coming, so I better become more efficient. So all the cells that are no longer working well, it'll get rid of those.

They're called senescent cells. If it can repair the cell, repair mitochondria, repair endoplasmic reticulum, can get the membrane of the cell more porous. It'll do that. The autophagy will cure the dysfunctional cell and make it better again. You get to 24 hours. Now we're getting the gut repairing. 36 hours, what we're seeing is that that's long enough for those stubborn weight.

loss situations, the body will go and find all the fat that it stored years ago around your waist, your hips, your liver, it'll go and burn that. 48 hours, which actually right now we're in the process as a community of doing a 48-hour fast. I was reading a bunch of comments this morning that we start to see clinically and research-wise dopamine, the whole dopamine system will be reset and new dopamine receptor sites will start to be formed. So when you bring food back in after that, you'll start to enjoy food more.

You'll also notice other things in your life you'll enjoy more because it resets the dopamine system. And then 72 hours is what Walter Longo taught us about rebooting your whole immune system. So old white blood cells will be tossed away and new white blood cells will be formed. You get full body intestinal stem cells that will happen. You know, people are paying tens of thousands of dollars for stem cells right now. you throw a three-day water fast at it, and now you're getting this massive systemic surge of stem cells. So we have to start to look at fasting as a healing tool. It's not a fad diet.

It is a healing tool that you can choose to step into, depending on which one of those tools I just mentioned, do you want to pull out? In these groups that are going through this, and right now you mentioned there's one, the 48-hour group? Yeah, we're doing the 48-hour one. Is it women of all of those stages of life that you had mentioned. And do they have to navigate it differently depending on that stage? So we'd love to and if they do, if you could walk us through that. Yeah. I mean, so our resetter collaborative on Facebook is actually our whole audience is both men and women. So when we do these group fast, it's both men and women. So the women know because they've been following my teachings that you wouldn't throw a 48 hour fast at your,

if you're at day 20 or longer of your cycle. And then ovulation is another interesting time. I don't recommend a longer fast. So between day 10 and day 15 of their cycle, they would not do a 48 hour fast. So they know that. And they would just bow out and say, okay, I'm not going to do it. I'll wait for the next one. I'll wait for the next one.

That's typically what we find. Now, again, going back to women, because the book is fast like a girl, is what is the cadence, something like the time restricted eating and closing that window, that's obviously becomes a lifestyle of yours. Yep. Yep. Fasting also becomes a lifestyle, but the question becomes when people hear about, wow, I can reset my gut, I can create new stem cells.

The tendency for human beings is naturally to kind of overdo it a little bit. Of course. So what's the cadence of something like a 48 hour, a 48 hour fast? Like, should we thinking, how often should we be thinking about incorporating it? Not we, sorry, but specifically women. Women, yeah. So again, you have to ask yourself, what's the tool you're looking for? So in general, what I recommend, and I'll kind of go through the longer fast, I think the three-day water fast, twice a year is a great time to just get rid of senescent cells that are aging you quickly or cells that are going to go rogue and become, you know, tumors, get rid of those. Yeah, so just to be clear, like, so everybody hears and we go on record, we're not talking about doing this every month.

No. This is something that is used as a targeted tool. That's right. To support the body and longevity. And it sounds like you're also pulling together a lot of the research from individuals like you mentioned, Dr. Walter Longo, who's been this podcast before. Awesome. So, okay, great. So twice a year.

Twice a year. January, September, fantastic times to go into. January and September. Yeah. I choose those because we typically go off and overindulge in the holidays and we overindulge in the summer. So depending on what hemisphere you're living in. That's typically the way I choose those two. But twice here, you're good with that.

I mean, there would be no other reason to do that other than if you had a chronic, serious disease and you would want to be coached, you know, through when to keep doing consecutive long fasts. The 48-hour fast, once a quarter, if you have a mental health challenge, if you are depressed and anxious and you're looking for a variety of tools to help you and boost your moods, Then do 48-hour fast once a quarter. You'll be totally great. 36-hour fast, that's really there for the person who's just so frustrated and cannot lose weight.

So if you're really struggling with weight loss, throw once a month, throw a 36-hour fast at it and see how it unsticks your weight. Then the 24 hours and below, I have people vary those in a weekly, you know, depending on where they are in their cycle. but one 24-hour fast a week can be really miraculous. Those are the one meal a day people. Do it once a week. Don't do it every day. And then most people are doing either a combination of something between 12 hours and 17 hours on a regular basis, except the week before their cycle. So now that we've talked about that, let's chat a little bit about this is a perfect opportunity to talk about some of the do's and don'ts with when you get above 24 hours.

Yeah. Right? Yeah. Generally speaking, everybody knows that 20s. 24 hours for most people, you know, again, all those disclaimers and everything like that that people talk about there to make sure nobody sues me or you. But people know that it's generally regarded as safe, right? And anybody can do it. And you don't really have to think too much about those components. And again, people are still having water during this time, right?

Yes. What else might they be having that could help a 24 hour fast? And then let's go look at the longer fast and see if there's any tips and do's and don'ts around fasting. Yeah. So this is what's really interesting and I think not talked about enough in the fasting world is that there are a lot of things you can have in that fasting window outside of like, I want to talk about the fasted snack because that's something that I've used really strategically with people who are learning to go into these longer fast. So we can talk about that and then we can talk about what you drink. So let me start with the drink because the cup of coffee is the thing I get asked the most about, which is, can I have my coffee in my fasting window?

And I would say of the millions of people we've watched fast, for most people, coffee is going to work in your fasting window, black coffee. So now, in the book and on my YouTube channel, I've really emphasized you should do a blood sugar test to make sure that it does work for you. And we can talk about that in a moment. But with coffee, if it's black, it's going to be fine in your fasting window. if you add MCT oil, even better because it'll start to move you over into this fasted, this fat-burning ketogenic system quicker.

Once you start adding cream, you're going to have to really do the blood sugar test and see if cream works for you. And this is the blood sugar test. You take a blood sugar reading. If you have a CGM great, you can get like a handheld, like a keto mojo or something like that. get your blood sugar baseline, have your cream and coffee, and then a half an hour later, take another blood sugar reading, and are those two readings similar? If that second reading is five points or higher difference than the first reading, it pulled you out of a fasted state.

So you're going to want to play with maybe pull the cream out and see if what happens if you just do black coffee. Sometimes doesn't that, because most people have their black coffee first thing in the morning and your cortisol is going up so your blood sugar like i notice for me when i'm wearing a cgm sometimes there's that just natural variation of my blood sugar going up in the morning which coincides with people having their coffee yeah so should they wait a little while to have that just to make sure that that doesn't interfere yeah if you want to be as pure with the testing i think it's a great idea is like no you know when your cortisol goes up know your you know your coffee habits all that so you might if you had a cgm you might understand what that natural really you know that natural really

them is first and with that spike of glucose and then add the coffee in the next day and see what it does. And have you seen enough situations where cream does sort of move people's blood sugar up significantly? Yeah. And you know, this is a whole other rabbit hole of information, but what controls our blood sugar is our microbiome. So it's all the questions I've been asked, I mean, this is the most common one. and I can't say that women should do it this way, men should do it this way, because your microbiome and my microbiome are completely different.

I would say people with a good, diverse, healthy microbiome typically get away with cream and their coffee, and it can actually cause their blood sugar to go down. And so then it actually helps them in the fasted state. You know, Dave Asprey is a huge fan, obviously, of buttered coffee in the fasted state. He strongly feels that it allows you to go into these longer fast. I've even had discussions with him where he feels like you could do it in a three-day water fast. I would say it probably works really well for his microbiome. We just need to get to know our own bio-individuality, and we have to get out of these absolutes. So that's why I like the blood sugar test.

Totally. I'm one of those individuals. that liquid sources, concentrated sources of higher saturated fat, creates, again, probably because my gut microbiome creates a little bit of like an endotoxemia reaction, that a high concentration of that in, like, I'm okay with butter being used to cook food and things like that. But if I have it in liquid form, I notice immediately from my history of having acne as a teenager being on things like acutane, antibiotics, other stuff. There you go.

I notice immediately the redness in my skin. I notice immediately like I'll get little pimples and stuff like that. So again, just another reason that people have to personalize what they do. MCT I'm a little bit better with, but also it's interesting. I'd love to get, you know, maybe we can chat about this afterwards. We'll have you on round two. Have you heard of the clearly scam? It's like a, it's a new type of test that's sort of.

of measuring both hard and soft plaque tissue. Yeah, I have. Like, I heard about it. I feel like I heard about it like six months ago. Yeah. It's sort of been making the waves a little bit. And Dr. Gabriel Lyon, a friend of mine, was the first person who kind of put it on my radar.

And I'm getting mine done next week. Beautiful. Because also, you know, I have a natural history of high LDL, even with all the tweaks and other components that I've brought in. But again, we know that there's like a whole nuance thing when it comes to LDL and, of course, cholesterol and other stuff. but this feels like another test to add. I'm not affiliated with them in any capacity.

But another reason why I'm temporarily just minimizing like concentrated liquid sources of saturated fat while I get clear on sort of my own personal situation when it comes to cardiovascular disease and family history and stuff. And this is, I think when it comes to health and nutrition, we really get into danger when we look for absolutes because we are all, because of the microbiome, we are so, diverse and your microbiome and your exposure to what you're what stimulates your microbiome is going to be completely different than mine. That being said, there are things that you've seen that generally work for most people. That's right. That's right. And so going back to your list,

you were talking about the do's and don'ts of fasting, one of those things that generally works for most people. And we've seen that it's kind of been talked about by a lot of other individuals that are also fasting experts like yourself, is that black coffee is okay, right? In general, black coffee is Okay. In general, black coffee's okay. What else are on the list of do's and don'ts when it comes to some of these longer fasts that we're... Okay, so other things you can do drinks-wise and that I really wanted to address this fasted snack and then we can go into some of the don'ts. You can do mineral water. You can do, I'm a huge fan of electrolytes. That's really, really works well to keep, make that fasting window just a little bit easier. We noticed really that that was like a turnkey thing for people going into those. longer, a little bit of, you know, to me a longer fast, I guess 24 hours will feel like a lot to some people. So if you do your coffee, you do some electrolyte packs, you might notice you can go a little further. The fasted snack was actually something I found in the research when I was putting

together a video for my YouTube channel a couple years ago. And here's what the research showed, is that if you had pure fat and it didn't raise your blood sugar, that, and you wanted to fast longer, you could still get the same metabolic advantages that people who fasted, let's say, 24 hours, if you fasted 17 and you're like ready to die, but then you had a full fat bomb, like a half of an avocado, some nut butter. I've used even bone broth, something that's really rich in fat, but didn't elevate your blood sugar, that it would kill hunger and you'd be able to go fast a little bit long. longer and you'd still get the benefits of somebody who didn't eat, didn't eat at all.

So in the case of, you know, like a lot of the commercial bone broths that are available out there that are still like good quality. Yeah. Looking at, I started a new like strength training program. So I have to like measure everything that I do and, you know, calculate it in. So bone broth is often a good go-to tool for me because in particular for the program that I'm on right now, which is a short period of time. I don't have fat phobia or anything like that, but I'm on a lower fat diet.

just for a period of time while I get into kind of ideal body composition and then we're sort of building up from there just kind of following the program but one thing I noticed about like bone broth is that it's high in protein and a lot of it's like low in fat so do you have to do a particular type like like my bone broth that I have kettle and fire it's like 20 grams of protein and there's like really like hardly any fat inside of there yeah so is it and even like an avocado would have things like fiber and have a little bit of this. So when you say a fat bomb, how strongly do we have to stick to that to make sure that it doesn't interrupt our fast? Yeah. Yeah. So on the bone broth topic, by the way, you're right. I mean, you need it as fat, rich as possible. If you could make your own,

that would be the best and really have it's that, it's that just top layer. Yeah, that top layer, that like juicy layer that you really want because that will kill the hunger. Here's the challenge. Fat bombs are really hard to find and hard to make, where they're just pure fat, no protein. I'll tell you the thing that I have found the most, and I have no affiliation with these people, but they are my go-to or keto cups. Have you tried keto cups? I think I have. They're like these little almost look like Reese's pieces.

Yeah. Yeah. Peanut butter cups. Like when I've got a long day ahead of me and I know that I need ketones to keep my brain solid, And I know hunger may kick in at some point. I'll just grab a couple keto cups and pop one or two in my mouth. Kills hunger doesn't take me out of a fasted state. I still get all the benefits of those ketones and I can go longer without having to stop

to eat a meal. Great. So that's where like a tool like that could be a useful component. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Great. So we had the fasted snack.

Yeah. Anything else that you want to talk about before we get into the don'ts of things that are supportive? Yeah. No. I mean, the other thing that I would say, and this is something that's actually not talked about enough with fasting is that when you're in a fasting window, really start to understand your body and start to listen to your body. So I've had a lot, and this kind of will tie into the don'ts. I've had a lot of people who have had eating disorders or they're orthorexic,

and they want to do too many of the healthy things until it starts to become a dangerous thing for them. What I like women in general, because I think this is, really plagues us deeply, is that I'd like you to listen to your mind as you go in that fasting window. What is it telling you? Where do you use food to soothe and you're not using it to actually nourish? You're using it to soothe whatever your mind is, maybe you're depressed, maybe you're frustrated and so you need a dopamine hit and food is your dopamine hit. So outside of the drinks, outside the fasted snack, there is an opportunity in the fasting window to get to know yourself that I do not feel you can get without when you're in the fed state.

You have to have those thoughts come up. And then if you're listening, you'll know, like, is that thought serving me? Is that how I want my relationship to food to be? And so that would be the only other thing I would say in the fasting window. Please just really get to know yourself because, you know, for women, your brain's going to be talking to you. Your brain's going to be talking to you. your body's going to tell you what it needs. And so let's start to turn within and on or that. So that would be the only thing. The don'ts. Okay. So here's some of the hard, hard don'ts. And if I could shout this from the rooftop I would. Eating disorders. If you have a known eating disorder, you do not, and I say this in the book, I've said this on my YouTube channel, you don't just go,

oh, here's another great tool for me to lose weight. Let me go into more. restriction without bringing your therapist, your doctor, people on your health team into this fasting experience. I have seen it work for women with eating disorders. I've seen it change people's relationship to food dramatically. But if that is your past, you need your healing team around you to support you. Here's the challenge. Too many doctors, too many health care practitioners don't understand fasting.

This is what I'm hoping this book is going to teach. change is like let's help them understand fasting so they can work with you, especially the way a woman should fast. So that's number one. Second tool, second time, pregnancy. This is not your tool in pregnancy. You need more calories. You need more nourishment. You can focus on quality of food. You can focus on your microbiome. But if you start to go into these longer fasts, like 17 hours, there's a bit of a detox effect. You're going to stimulate something called apoptosis. And apoptosis is where dysfunctional cells die and they get shed. But where are they going to go?

They go into your bloodstream. They're going to go those toxins, that dysfunction goes into your child. This is not your time to fast. Same thing with nursing. That would be the other third time that I would say. You don't want to go longer than 15 hours. You do not want to stimulate autophagy. because if you stimulate autophagy or which can lead to this apoptosis and their cellular death,

where's that discard going? It's going into your breast milk and now you're going to, you're feeding your child. So those to me are like really three times. We have to really stop. Two of them are absolute nose. The nursing is 15 hours or less. Don't go more than 15 because you don't want to stimulate this atophagy effect. Now, outside of that, other ones,

that need consideration. Diabetes. Type 1 and type 2, I've seen amazing results. I've seen type 1 diabetics really transform how much insulin that they are required to take by learning how to dip in and out of different length fast. But again, you need a doctor. You need a coach. You need somebody with you guiding you through that process. And then the last one where I don't think you need a coach, but I just want to emphasize this one. are people with thyroid problems because it comes up a lot. The thyroid does not do well with calorie restriction. So it does do well with fasting,

dipping in and out of fasting and eating. So what I've noticed with my women that I've coached through this process that have thyroid problems is once you open up that eating window, you have to eat. It's not a time to, and if you're not hungry, I'm sorry, you got to eat. We got to bring calories up. So for people with thyroid, the one meal a day is probably not going to work well for you.

Maybe if you do it once a month, maybe if you dip into it as a healing moment, but then you've got to make sure in those eating windows you are eating enough. And when you say thyroid, you're talking about everything from Hashimoto's to like just basic hyper, hypothyroid. Yeah, any thyroid issue. And again, I'm not saying don't fast because you're not. I'm saying, and this is my whole premise behind the style of fasting that I'm recommending, is it's like you're going to dip in and use a longer fast and then you're going to come out and you're going to eat really good nourishing food. And then maybe sometimes you pull out a tool and you go into a longer fast depending on what that, if you need that tool.

And then you're going to come back to your food base and you're going to make sure that you're eating good quality food. So I look at it like a Swiss Army knife. You know, sometimes I pull out the knife. Sometimes I pull out the tweezers. Sometimes I pull out the corkscrew to open up some wine. You know, what tool are you using? I feel like fasting has gotten so lumped into the diet culture, and that's not what it is. It is a healing tool that you can learn how to use to heal yourself that doesn't require

supplements, can get you off medications, can give you results like you've never seen before, but it's learning how to use these tools in a very ebb and flow way that we've got to learn how to embrace for ourselves, our own n of one. And it's been around forever in every major tradition around the world. Every major. So it's been stress tested quite rigorously. Yeah. Yeah.

Breaking a fast. How do we navigate that component? Yeah. So there's a whole chapter in the book on this because this is outside the coffee. This is the second most important or popular question that I get asked. And here's the deal. is that anything, let's start with what breaks a fast, and then I want to go to how do you break a fast? Anything that raises your blood sugar over this five points that I talked about is going to pull you

out of a fasted state. So let's start there. We already talked about how you can measure it and all of that. Now, when you go into food, this is so important. And I think this is where fasting has gotten a bad rap, especially with the microbiome. You have to remember that you just went into this healing phase and you're now entering back into food and so you can amplify that healing phase if you so choose. And I recommend you to you look at three different types of foods that you want to break your fast

with. If you are trying to build muscle, I highly recommend breaking your fast with protein. And I especially, Gabrielle Lyon is a huge advocate of this and really admire her work. 30 grams of protein at that first meal so you can trigger an amino acid receptor that will make that muscle stronger so you can trigger mTOR which is the opposite of autophagy and really start to create some growth women especially we need to focus on muscle i a thousand percent feel that muscle is our organ of longevity the more muscle we have the more insulin receptors we have the more we can stop, you know, the breakdown of muscle that happens when our adrenal fatigue, very common

to see that. So we need to preserve muscle. So that's number one. Second thing would be those of you that have been on antibiotics for years, those of you that have been on birth control for so long, and you know your guts in bad shape, then I really encourage you what happens the longer you fast is the old bacteria are dying off. and you've created this beautiful new environment for the good bacteria to grow. So it's like tilling your garden and now your body's saying, okay, give me some plants to grow

so I can grow the good that you want. Well, if you come in with polyphenol-rich foods, when you come in with probiotic rich, prebiotic foods at that first meal, you are feeding those good bacteria and you're allowing them to grow. And you can take both of those principles and put them together by eating a big salad with plenty of protein on it. And these principles don't have to be individual. You just pull them out according to what you want.

The third principle, and then I'll kind of talk about how this looks in application, is if you are thinking, gosh, it's 2 o'clock, I want to eat, I'm going to have my meal, but I won't be getting dinner for another four hours, then throw some fat in there. Fat will stop that desire to go back into food and overeat. I saw this a lot in my community where people were like, I'm doing well in my fasting window, but then once I open up, my eating window, I can't control myself. And so once I started to add in fat and told them, eat some healthy fat in that first meal, that binge eating completely stopped.

So it's really this three-tool system. Add in the protein if you're trying to build muscle and you're trying to stimulate mTOR. If you need to repair your gut, you really want to feed those good microbes. Be sure, I call them the three peas. Add in the polyphenol, probiotic, prebiotic foods. And if you're really worried about that eating window and eating too much now, make sure you're adding some fat. And you can combine them all in one meal. Great.

I love that. And even more details inside of the book that people can pick up. We actually did something really cool with this book. I know your answer to this. You launched an app. Is that right? Well, I did launch an app too, but we could talk about that. What did you do with this book?

But thank you for noticing that. I hired a chef. Oh, yes. I was looking at the recipes when you had me the book, Chicken Nuggets. Yeah. Recipe for chicken nuggets inside of it. That's right. So we have, some of them are tried and true recipes.

My husband and I love to cook. This is one of our passions that we do together. And so some of them are our tried and true recipes. but then I really wanted some good recipes around what to break a fast with because it was such a common. So the question. So there's a whole category of break your fast recipes. Is there another, you shared this testimonial, this gentleman that you met this summer who was 300 pounds and you kind of really helped him turn his life around through following sort of a stage process. In putting this book together, in thinking about all the people that have written in to you, is there another testimonial that comes to mind of somebody who,

really felt like they either hit rock bottom or were so confused that they didn't know how to move forward. And a testimony that comes to mind that, you know, stepping into your methodology helped them really reset, so to speak, and now get true access to their health and step into their goals. Is there anything that comes to mind? Well, I'll tell you two of my favorite. But I always say, go to my YouTube channel and read the comments. Like, it still blows me away. How? people I do not know are losing so much weight and getting off so many medications with the support of their doctor. Like, it blows me away how, what an incredible tool that is.

But there's two very clear ones that always stick out to me that involve women. The first was actually a woman on my team who was really frustrated because she couldn't get pregnant. And so two years of trying to get pregnant and nothing. She went to her OB. Her OB said your BMI is too high. Okay, well, the BMI in general is thrown in women's face a lot. And there's a whole, you know, in add inaccuracy with the BMI.

So if you've ever been told you were too much too overweight because the BMI, I really want to relieve you. Yeah, it's not the best tool. Yeah, that relieve you of that pressure. So she was frustrated. She said, you're never going to get pregnant. if you don't bring your BMI down is what her OB told her. So I put her on the 30-day reset that I wrote in the book. I taught her how to fast like a girl.

And I said, give it 90 days and then we'll look at where else in your hormones you might need some modifications. Within 30 days, she was pregnant. Wow. Two years and did Fast Like a Girl 30 Days was pregnant. Now, I then was like, well, that's cool. Let me test this. I've tested it on five women.

It's not a big study. all five pregnant within 30 days. So now it doesn't mean the whole world's going to get pregnant off of protocols like this. Everybody's reason for infertility is different, but that blew me away. Second thing that I loved was this was a woman in Australia who wrote to us and told us that she had a full hysterectomy at like early 40s. And they said within, you know, three months her sex hormones would be completely like similar to a post-menopausal woman. Three years later after the hysterectomy, she still had

sex hormones that were age consistent, consistent with a 43-year-old. They had only cut in about half. They hadn't gone into this post-manapausal state. And so she wasn't even on any type of synthetic hormone or hormone replacement therapy at all. The doctor didn't feel comfortable putting her on it because she was still making these hormones. Well, that's because she was fasting like a girl and she was using the principles to bring these hormones out in their glory and the adrenals and other tissues were still making sex hormones. So three years after the hysterectomy, she still didn't require hormone replacement. That one blew me away. That's incredible. People love hearing testimonials because it's a reminder that there's other people that have been in

very challenging situations. There's other people that didn't know what to do next. There's other people that were also feeling confused by all the different viewpoints and opinions that are out there. But something clicked for them. And they said, you know what, I'm going to give this a shot. That's right. And in giving it a shot and following a plan and having the support that's there by following

a plan like yours, they were able to see a possibility by completely sort of changing their approach, which was often based in either outdated information or, you know, or well-intentioned advice, but that isn't backed by the latest science and research or something else. Yeah. And that's the power of following a plan that you know has worked for other people and trying it on and personalizing it. Yeah. And I think that's the big thing I'm trying to bring to the fasting world for women is that when we go back and we look at the history of fasting, I really give people like Walter Longo and Jason Fung and Dave Asprey. I mean, they've been talking about fasting for a long time. And as it started to gain momentum, we started to hear more and more about

women shouldn't do it. Women shouldn't do it. I still run into women nowadays that are like, I'm not supposed to do it. I'm a woman. I even see it on sometimes on our Facebook pages. So what I really wanted to bring is we have to understand as women, there's so much we have to do differently. And fasting is one of those things. And don't. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Don't throw fasting out because one woman said it didn't work for her. One doctor said don't do it. Learn how to do it in accordance with your hormones.

Test it out. Try it out. Understand the little nuances that are required and then judge it for yourself. And I think it's too common, especially for women. And I'm calling myself out in this that we get in this sort of comparison model like this diet work for my friends. So now I'm going to go hop on that diet. And then it doesn't work. And we start to shame ourselves or we feel guilty that some, why couldn't it work for me? It must be something wrong with me. What I am here to tell you from seeing millions of women of all different backgrounds

is that fasting works for women. You just have to find your groove with it. And that's the tricky part. And that's what the whole book is about is helping you navigate that. The book is out there. Fast like a girl, a woman's guide to using the healing power of fasting to burn fat, boost energy, and balance hormones. Mindy, we've mentioned the YouTube channel. We've mentioned you have the podcast as well. You have the Facebook group. But it all can be found on your website.

And you're pretty active on social media as well. Do you want to send people to your social media? Yeah, you can go. I mean, each social has a little different thing. We have in the Resetter Collaborative on Facebook is a free fasting group. There's 60,000 people in there. are doing exactly what we've just been talking about, so you can join that. YouTube is like thousands.

I think I have over a thousand videos now. You can dive into what you need to know there. Instagram's actually where I am most of the time. I read the DMs. I am there looking at the comments. So we have a great, we take all those videos and we put them into reels so you guys can take this information and take it into small chunks. So, yeah, I'm kind of everywhere.

I have a podcast. I bring on interesting people. I'd love to bring you onto my podcast. I hate being interviewed. Oh, really? Yeah. I'd much rather do the interview. Oh, my God.

That's so funny. But I appreciate the offer. That's hysterical. I'd much rather have people like you on who I can spread the word about, but I really don't like to be interviewed. Yeah. I love talking to people. I love to get to know the heart of people. I've seen a few of your interviews.

Thank you. We've had some similar guests that have been on the show and I love the angle that you take with them. I'm like, wow, that was a great question. I didn't think about asking that or, you know, from a woman's perspective, oh, this is really unique. That's why it's so great. You know, we need a million more of you. We need a million more of all the health educators that are out there because people need to hear it from somebody that they resonate with. Right. Because that person with your life experiences and and your background

and being the mother of two kids, you're going to have a different perspective that's going to resonate with someone. And that's the click that they need to step into their change in their life. Yeah, and you know what's interesting with women, the one piece that I've been really trying, my rally cry to all women is that it doesn't matter your age, we need to all come together because like the post menopausal woman, there's so much wisdom in a 60 year old woman. If you have a 60 year old woman in your life, like sit down with her and listen to her talk. And then I've got so many 40 year old women in my life right now that are really starting to feel the changes in their hormones. And they're discovering that their whole life led up to these hormonal changes. Leanne Rimes is one of them. I just put out her podcast. I interviewed her on my podcast and I asked her, could we just go through your whole health history?

Let's go through your toxic load. Let's go through what happened to your neurotransmitters, winning a Grammy at 14, like what happened to your dopamine. And it's beautiful. When you hear her talk and you hear her whole journey, it's like you start to see where your journey matters, where you might. have had some physical emotional stress somewhere in your hormonal experience that is making the woman that you are today. So I just love talking and bringing out these conversations because we have

so much to learn from each other. Well, you do it well. And I want to acknowledge you for doing it and committing your life's work to this process, especially focusing on women for a long time. We're underrepresented. And there wasn't enough conversation about, okay, great. Let's stress test these ideas of what works, what doesn't. We went on one extreme. The original extreme was fasting is dangerous, right? There was a whole bunch of conversations around that, especially in like the early 2000s. Like, don't do fasting.

It's dangerous. To then, hey, here's all the latest research on fasting. Everybody should do it, which was the subtext that everybody should do it one way. Right. Kind of like what works for men in particular because that was just what was being studied at the time. Right. To then, hey, it's dangerous again.

for women, they shouldn't do it. And now we're finding, like, in a lot of areas of life, politics, this, that we're finding that happy medium, which is let's look at the nuanced approach and make sure we treat each idea independently so we can figure out what best works for the situation. So you're doing that with fasting and you're doing it for women. So I just want to acknowledge you and thank you for coming on the podcast. Oh, thank you, Drew. Thank you for having me. And, you know, I want to acknowledge you for opening this conversation up. I mean, you've had three of us now who are out there really talking about how to time different lifestyles to your hormones.

And it's like, I keep saying fast like a girl is like a coming out party for women. Like, I want to crack open this conversation that you just and I just had. I want all women to be having this on ladies' nights out. I want all doctors to be thinking about this. So thank you for giving me the opportunity to say this to such a wide audience. And as a man who loves women and have so many great women in your life, You know, these are the conversations we need to start having with each other. And it hasn't been had.

So thank you. Appreciate you. We're doing it. Yeah. Thank you again. Uh-huh.