Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | 5 Food Rules To Balance Hormones, Boost Energy & Transform Your Health | Dr Mindy Pelz #544

Episode Date: April 3, 2025

CAUTION: This podcast discusses fasting, and its advice may not be suitable for anyone with an eating disorder. If you have an existing health condition or are taking medication, always consult your healthcare practitioner before going for prolonged periods without eating. “If you change the way you eat, you may feel completely different” - Dr Mindy Pelz Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests. Today's clip is from episode 474 of the podcast with nutrition expert and best-selling author of ‘Fast Like a Girl’ and ‘Eat Like a Girl: 100+ Delicious Recipes to Balance Hormones, Boost Energy, and Burn Fat.’, Dr Mindy Pelz.  In this clip, Mindy shares how food can be a powerful tool to support your health and wellbeing, and we explore her ‘foundational five’ health principles, which include actionable strategies that anyone can implement. Thanks to our sponsor https://www.drinkag1.com/livemore Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/474 DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

Today's Bite Size episode is sponsored by AG1, one of the most nutrient dense whole food supplements that I've come across. And I myself have been drinking it regularly for over five years. It contains vitamins, minerals, probiotics, prebiotics, digestive enzymes, and so much more and can help with energy, focus, gut health, digestion, and support a healthy immune system. For the month of April only, AG1 are offering a free morning person hat, bottle of vitamin D, and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription.

Just go to www.drinkag1.com forward slash live more to unlock this exclusive offer and get started on your journey to better health today. Welcome to Feel Better, Live More, Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 474 of the podcast with nutrition expert and bestselling author of Fast Like A Girl and Eats Like A Girl, Dr. Mindy Peltz. In this clip, Mindy shares how food can be a powerful tool to support your health and wellbeing. Where we explore her wonderful foundational five health principles. Now please note the advice in this episode may not be suitable if you are suffering with

or recovering from an eating disorder. Also, if you have an existing health condition or are taking medication, always consult your healthcare practitioner before going for prolonged periods without eating. Food is actually a tool to give you the life that you want. It can take away from the life you want, or it can give you the life you want.

It is one of the greatest tools we have access to. We just haven't been taught about it. Yeah. So I just love to help people understand what are these foods that we need to focus on, like foods we need to avoid, foods we need to bring in. Right. So, the first that I call it the foundational five.

So, in the new book, we talk about there are five guiding principles that every woman needs to follow. I would say men probably need to follow these too, but I do feel like female bodies are not as forgiving. And the large reason behind that is because a male body is number one priority is survival. A female body has two priorities, survival and reproduction, just so we're clear. One of the things I'm very concerned about

in the health world right now is we have overcomplicated food, right? Yeah. So when I put these five principles together, I literally thought if I was sitting with somebody who knew nothing about nutrition, was a part of the whole cultural zeitgeist of eating foods to lose weight, diet foods, and not reading ingredients, what would I say to them? And these were the five I would say. Yeah, I love it. Well, let's go through these foundational five then, the people, you know, start where I say to them? And these were the five I would say. Yeah, I love it. Well, let's go through these foundational five then for people, you know,

start where you want to start. Okay. Well, number one, I hope you see why I put number one on there. So number one, for those of you who are not seeing it is blood sugar matters, calories don't. Now, I thought about that sentence a long time, because a lot of people are like, calories still matter. Okay, yes, if we lived in a perfect world where everybody could scan their calorie output and their calorie input every day and figure out exactly how many calories they needed to eat every day, then the calorie would matter.

But we don't do that. We don't have, nobody knows how many calories they can even chart it. Nobody's gonna keep that chart forever to even figure that out. It is not an attainable health target. Blood sugar is. And with blood sugar, one of the things that we can do

is we can get a CGM, we can get like a little Keto Mojo blood sugar reader or something like that. But we got to find ways to help women that have no money. And what you can do is ask yourself, how do I feel after I eat? Am I energized? Am I focused? Do I want to take a nap? Am I hungry again? If within two hours after a meal, your energy drops, your brain fog kicks in, you're hungry again, you didn't nail the blood sugar rule. You didn't get that blood sugar combo right. And that's what I unpack in the book is what does that look like with food? So you should be energized after

a meal. Yeah, I love that. That's a very simple way that doesn't require people to spend any money. They can self assess. And I think it speaks to this wider societal problem at the moment with respect to food, which is we're so far removed from how we're meant to eat, how our bodies are meant to eat. But many people think it's normal to feel hungry every two hours. Right. Yes. Or sleepy in the afternoon. Yeah. They think it's completely normal. And I get it's the norm for them. It doesn't mean

it's normal. And eating in a way to stabilize your blood sugar, it's the norm for them, it doesn't mean it's normal. Right. And eating in a way to stabilize your blood sugar is arguably one of the most important things you can do for your short-term health, your long-term health, and for how good you feel. Yeah. I will put a CGM on at this stage, maybe twice a year. A CGM being a continuous glucose monitor, they last about two weeks. I can learn which of the foods and which is the style of eating that keeps my blood sugar

the most stable, whether I have it on or not. When I'm eating like that, consistently, I feel great. I sleep well, my focus is great, I don't feel hungry much. I find it easy to resist temptation. And that's, I think the other thing which people forget Mindy is if you eat in a way that stabilizes your blood sugar, you're having to resist temptation less. Do you know what I mean? If your blood sugar is plummeting because you had a sugary cereal at 7am and at 9.30 or 10, you're feeling jittery and hungry, your blood sugar probably is dropping and you do need to have that bagel.

You're going to struggle, but that isn't the issue. The issue is what you had two to three hours beforehand. That's right. I had a really interesting situation. I'm sure you have this with your kids, when your kids are in different sporting events, you end up hanging around the parents that are on the sidelines.

I got to know this one woman really well. She would always ask me questions around nutrition. And every time I would tell her what I ate or what I did, she'd be like, I couldn't do that. I can't do that. I can't do that. After about a year of this, she said to me one day, she looked at me and she said, okay, I've watched you almost every weekend, three days a week, you know, after school, our kids

are here. And I've finally come to one conclusion about your nutritional theories. And I'm like, oh, okay, tell me what that is. She goes, you are not deprived. I said, I'm not. I'm not deprived at all. I eat amazing food. I feel so good after I eat. I sleep so well.

Like food is medicine for me. And I am not depriving myself at all. And I'm not over there eating like granola bars all day. And like food can be incredibly satisfying if we look at it from these five angles that we're going through. Okay. So keep your blood sugar stable as an important principle. I would have to say that your foundational five, they're pretty sensible. Thank you.

What I mean by that is you'd struggle, I think, to find people these days disagreeing with those principles. And I love principles because I think there is too much confusion out there. I think we have to get to the point where we can listen to experts, but then tune into our own expertise. We have to be able to go, okay, that expert said that, that other expert said that, I like them both, I trust them both, let me figure out what works for me. Yeah.

And one of the things I know from my community is that I have a lot of plant-based people and I have a lot of omnivore people. And this is what you do this with your podcast. Let's bring everybody into the conversation and let the listener go, hey, when I pull out that tool, that works for me there. And then I put it down and I pull out this tool and that works for me there. I think we will free people

from being either frustrated and confused or from people just going, I feel like I'm failing it at all, which is what I hear a lot of women say. It's like, I'm just failing at feel like I'm failing at all, which is what I hear a lot of women say, is like, I'm just failing at it. I'm failing at health. Well, you're failing at the culture's idea of what health should look like for you.

How about we start asking you what your intuitive sense is around your body? And now we have, just in that question, now we have taken a woman and we've put her at the beginning of a health path. And that is what I know you and I are trying to do. Okay. Eat nature's food.

That's number two, right? Yes. Okay, so this was another interesting one that I saw is that everybody started instead of counting calories, we got obsessed with counting carbs. And it got to the point where even the food industry has gotten so sneaky, they started to see that, oh, keto is popular, let me go ahead and create keto foods

or let me create gluten-free foods that everybody's gonna wanna eat because they're like, oh, it says that has these buzzwords on it. And so I started to tell my community like, okay, here's, let's just make it easy for you. The carb that is going to be the healthiest one is the one that came out of the earth. If it came out of the earth, there is a good chance it has fiber in it, which will help with rule number one, which is support your blood sugar.

So it's getting really difficult to teach people how to read an ingredient label now. The food industry is really crafty at how they put headlines on things. So I needed to find a new way to explain this. And we got like so many messages of like, Oh, today I ate 60 grams net carbs. Is that gonna mean I'm gonna gain weight? And I thought, oh God, this is not, we need to free women. I don't want women counting carbs instead of calories. So let's just all of a sudden look at a carb as, is it nature's or is it manmade? If it is nature's, it's probably a great tool for me.

If it's manmade, not a great tool. So the more we alter nature's food, the further away we take its nutritional value. So if you keep going back to what was the original source that nature provided this, and how close can I get to that? We're gonna be able to be in a place where we avoid chemicals and we stabilize blood sugar.

So I have a really interesting concept that would apply to both men and women. And have you ever gone bowling with your kids where you put up the bumper rails? Yeah. Okay. You do that so that the ball doesn't go into the alley. So I think we should do that with food. It is a crime at this particular moment,

what's going on in our food system. And if you don't have a personal value system, if you don't implement rules for yourself, you are putting yourself on a collision course with chronic disease, men and women, end of story. That is the moment we're living in. Yeah, maybe it's an uncomfortable truth, but it's a truth nonetheless. Certainly the way I see life is that in the modern food environment,

if you don't have some sort of framework that you apply around foods, I think most people are going to struggle because the food is going to encourage you to eat more. You're going to crave more unhealthy foods. You have food available all the time everywhere you go. On an evolutionary level, we've never had this before. Never. We are living in the worst food time ever. Yeah.

It's not necessarily your fault or the fact that you are weak, that you can't resist. Humans, if you take our hunter gatherer ancestors and pop them in this environment, they'll also get sick. Yes. It's not as if they have more discipline than us. It's just they're in a food landscape where they're not having to make all these choices. So I think we all need to figure out certain rules that work for us. And I think that's why so many different diets can work for people because that diet or the name of that style of eating, low carb, low fat,

whole food, plant-based, whatever it might be, it gives people a framework and a structure which means that they cut other foods out. And I know people don't like to talk about restriction, but I just don't really see how you do navigate this modern food environment without a degree of restriction. Yeah, no. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, that's why I go back to nature's carbs, not man-made carbs or human-made carbs. If you looked at every food you went in contact with and you said,

okay, how close to this, if we're going back to that original conversation, how close is this to nature's food? If it appears very close, you're probably going to that original conversation, how close is this to nature's food? If it appears very close, you're probably gonna get it right. But if all of a sudden you're looking at, especially the box stuff that's in the center aisles at the grocery store, you're going in there, and it has a list of 20 plus ingredients,

there is a good chance that one of those ingredients has not been fully vetted for your health. It's been vetted as a preservative, it's been vetted as a taste enhancer, but it has not been vetted for your health. Now here's where it gets crazy, and this is why I'm so irate about this, and this was a huge motivator for writing Eat Like a Girl, was that when we look at so many of the chronic diseases and we look at these horrible toxic foods, they are ones that many people are eating every single day and they are known carcinogens.

They are known to change your direction with obesity. The food industry has infiltrated with so many chemicals that if you're just constantly going into this toxic food, you are setting yourself up for chronic disease. But you have to understand that the modern world is taking you off track. Exactly. And that's what I don't think people are getting yet. Yeah.

Point number three of the foundational five, eats for your microbes. You know, do you know why I'm saying that? I don't know. Hit me. Okay. This I love too. So whenever we go to choose a food, what do we easily do? We say, what am I in the mood for? Every time you say what I'm in the mood for, you're asking your taste buds. But what controls your taste buds? Your gut bugs. Your gut bugs. So your gut bugs are telling you what kind of food to eat.

So the bad gut bugs are gonna tell you to eat the sugars. The bad gut bugs are gonna make you crave the processed foods. So when you actually ask yourself, what do I need to eat right now to feed my microbes? You flip that whole scenario on its head and as you start to feed your microbes with things like fiber and seeds and nuts, I put lists after lists in the book of polyphenol, probiotic, prebiotic foods, what happens is your taste buds now change.

And the greatest study ever done on fasting was the every other day diet. This was years ago. And the every other day diet took people who ate toxic Western food and basically said, you eat those every other day. So eat whatever you want. If you're going through fast food, eat whatever you want, but on the days off, you're not gonna eat. And what they found, and they had to do this over a course of a year,

what they found at the end of the year was that not only did everybody's metabolic markers improve, but what surprised them is their taste buds and what they craved was massively different a year later. And that's because in the fasted state, especially when you go a full day without food, you are killing off those old bugs and you're creating an environment where new bacteria can grow and those new bacteria give you new signals to your mouth and make you crave new things that are healthier so that they can stay alive.

Yeah. This is where the idea of listening to your body gets a little challenging, doesn't it? Because if we want people to tune into themselves and listen to what their bodies are telling them, but sometimes we can get waylaid by that, right? So if you have an unhealthy balance of bugs in your guts. You may well be craving foods because of that gut dysbiosis. Candida is a great example of that. Candida is a fungus that lives in your gut and it makes you crave sugar, alcohol, carbohydrates. This is what I had when I had chronic fatigue syndrome. I had massive candida.

So it kept telling me to eat these toxic carbs over and over again. So the diet that this doctor put me on was one that was absent of all those foods. Now let's talk about what happened the first couple of days I went on that. That fungus just screamed at me, I want more carbs, more sugar.

So the first couple of days are hard as those gut bugs start to scream at you, but then they quieted down. And after a week, as little as a week, I started to actually crave the things that I knew supported my health. It's a little bit like you fake it till you make it. You have to ignore those until you get through it. And then you can chewed into your body's cravings and desires at that point. These principles so far all seem to be just as relevant for men as they are for women. And of course they are, right? Stable blood sugar, eat natural foods, eat for your microbes.

And the last two, which we're going to get to, protein is not just for men and fat doesn't make you fat. Okay. These foundational fibers, you call them, I think are just as relevant for men as they are for women. Broadly speaking, when it comes to diets, what are those core differences? What are the things that men can do and maybe thrive on, but women can't? Well, let's go back to the gut bugs. The gut bugs are breaking down estrogen. So men, we talked about this on the last one, they make testosterone and testosterone goes up into the brain and converts to estrogen. So estrogen is, its whole process is different

in a male body than a female body. You need to have good bacteria in your gut to metabolize estrogen. If you are 43 years old and you are going through perimenopause and you have a decimated gut microbiome, and you are trying to hold on to every little bit of estrogen that your body's giving you if you don't

Have these gut bugs that will help break down estrogen your symptoms are going to be worse that doesn't happen to men so women needs good amounts of fiber To help nourish that gut microbiome, which is going to help with the metabolism of hormones. That's right. But men also need good quality gut bugs for other things. Yeah. Maybe they'd be a guiding light for a man, for a woman. They are an absolute.

We've got to use these as, that's why I call them foundational. They are a foundational part of a woman's health. Yeah. Let's go back to the final two of your foundational five. Okay. Protein is not just for men. Yeah. Please explain.

Yeah. So, you know, it's interesting. I think protein is having its moment and it's beautiful. You know, I think for women, we haven't prioritized protein. In general, women, I mean, we have a lot more bodybuilders and a lot more fitness advocates, but in general, women don't think of protein as a crucial nutrient. So if I'm listening to somebody say, you need more protein so that you can have more muscles so that you can be more insulin sensitive, your brain as a woman may actually translate

that into, well, I don't, every time I build muscle, my clothes are tight. Every time I build muscle, the scale goes up and I'm addicted to the number on the scale. So all of a sudden you, you dismiss protein and amino acids come in the form of different forms of protein. What I'm saying is let's expand the conversation and say your hormones need those amino acids. Please make sure you're eating protein with every meal. So when we keep it in the conversation of men, we tend to keep it in the conversation of muscle. And I'm asking us to even go beyond that and put it in the context of your hormones want you to eat protein.

Do you think it's starting to change with women? The idea that protein is important. Yeah. I think it's a conversation that's gaining momentum for sure. One thing I haven't asked you yet, which I've been asked to ask you by someone who's a fan of yours is what should somebody eat when they're breaking a fast? Oh yeah. So in- I know you cover this. Yeah. In Eat Like a Girl. Yeah. We did. I did a whole chapter on this. So in- I know you cover this, but I think we must cover it. Yeah, in Eat Like a Girl, yeah, I did a whole chapter on this. So I'm going to make it really simple.

There are three things you need to think about. If you want to improve your microbiome, like we were talking about, you need to add in more fiber foods, fermented foods. I call them polyphenol, probiotic, and prebiotic foods, but they look like a lot of salads and a lot of salads and a lot of seeds and nuts. So I have lists in the book. Second thing, you want to eat to make sure that you keep your muscle in good shape.

That's protein. We talked about protein. And the third is you want to bring fat in. So fat curbs the appetite. It turns off the hunger hormone. It stabilizes the blood sugar. So when you put that meal together, ask yourself, like, is there enough fiber here? Is there enough of the polyphenol, probiotic, prebiotic foods?

Do I have some protein here and do I have some fat? So you put it with something with healthy natural fats like avocado or nut butters or something like that. In the book, I lay it all out. I have recipes, but that's a general guideline for the sake of this podcast is it should be intentional. The first meal matters. It is the most important meal of this whole conversation

is that first meal in. So what healing do you wanna keep going? And if you keep that in mind, I've gotta feed my microbes, I gotta put protein in here, I gotta put some fat, you can never go wrong. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. If you want more, why not go back and listen to the original full conversation with my guest? If you enjoyed this episode, I think you will really enjoy my bite-sized Friday email.

It's called the Friday Five, and each week I share things that I do not share on social media. It contains five short doses of positivity, articles or books that I'm reading, quotes that I'm thinking about, exciting research I've come across, and so much more.

I really think you're gonna love it. The goal is for it to be a small, powerful dose of feel good to get you ready for the weekend. You can sign up for it free of charge at drchatterjee.com forward slash Friday 5. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back next week with my long form conversational Wednesday and the latest episode of ByteScience next Friday.