Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - How To Eat To Balance Hormones, Boost Energy & Burn Fat with Dr Mindy Pelz #474

Episode Date: September 10, 2024

For many years, today’s guest, has been helping tens of thousands of women all around the world live healthier lives by helping them understand the key differences male and female bodies. Dr Mindy Pelz is a renowned holistic health expert, a pioneer on the subject of women’s health and the author of several books, including the international bestseller ‘Fast Like a Girl’ and her brand new one, ‘Eat Like a Girl: 100+ Delicious Recipes to Balance Hormones, Boost Energy, and Burn Fat’. This is Mindy’s third appearance on my podcast and our initial conversation back in 2022 was one of the most listened-to podcast episodes in the entire UK that year and I think that speaks to just how important her empowering message really is. In this conversation, Mindy explains the importance of women understanding their unique hormonal cycles and offers profound insights on how they can live in harmony with their hormones, and find balance in our hectic modern world. Mindy talks about how we can harness the power of food to support our body’s natural rhythms and how as a society, we can bring a more positive attitude to the challenges of peri-menopause and menopause. We also explore Mindy’s foundational five health principles.   Always passionate in her approach, Mindy embodies the importance of staying curious, adaptable and proactive and, in this episode, she highlights the importance of healthcare professionals truly listening to women's experiences but emphasises that it's ultimately us who are responsible for our own wellbeing.   While this episode primarily focuses on female health, the content within it is crucial listening for everyone. Yes, Mindy wants to provide women with powerful knowledge about their bodies but, for men, Mindy’s work provides a deeper understanding of the unique challenges that women face and helps them better support the women in their lives.   This really is a powerful conversation and Mindy’s empowering attitude reminds all of us that it's never too late to better understand our bodies and take action to improve the quality of our lives.    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. Thanks to our sponsors: https://thriva.co https://airbnb.co.uk/host Save 30% off your first subscription order & receive a free six pack of Ketone-IQ with KETONE.com/LIVEMORE https://boncharge.com/livemore Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/474  DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

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. Hey guys, how you doing? Hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee,

and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More. For many years, today's guest has been helping tens of thousands of women all around the world live healthier lives by helping them understand the key differences between male and female bodies. Dr. Mindy Pelz is a renowned holistic health expert, a pioneer on the subject of women's health, and the author of several books, including the international bestseller, Fast Like a Girl, and her brand new one, Eat Like a Girl,

100 plus delicious recipes to balance hormones, boost energy, and burn fat. Now, this is the third time that Mindy is appearing on my podcast and our initial conversation back in 2022 was one of the most listened to podcast episodes in the entire UK that year. And I think that speaks to just how important her empowering message really is. In our conversation, Mindy explains the importance of women understanding their unique hormonal cycles and offers profound insights on how they

can live in harmony with their hormones and find balance in our hectic modern world. She talks about how we can harness the power of food to support our body's natural rhythms, how as a society we can bring a more positive attitude to the challenges of perimenopause and menopause, and we also explore Mindy's foundational five health principles. Always passionate in her approach, Mindy embodies the importance of staying curious, adaptable and proactive. embodies the importance of staying curious, adaptable, and proactive. And in this episode, she highlights the importance of healthcare professionals truly listening to women's experiences, but emphasizes that it's ultimately us who are responsible for our own well-being. While this episode primarily focuses on female health, the content within it is crucial listening for everyone.

Yes, Mindy wants to provide women with powerful knowledge about their bodies. But for men, Mindy's work provides a deeper understanding of the unique challenges that women face and helps them better support the women in their lives. the women in their lives. This really is a powerful conversation and Mindy's empowering attitude reminds all of us that it's never too late to better understand our bodies and take action to improve the quality of our lives. I think the first two conversations we've had transformed the lives of so many women and many men, which we can talk about for sure.

For today's conversation, I wanted to ask you if men and women need to think about their diet differently, and if so, why? So the first part of that answer is a thousand percent. Women, as we talked about in the last two conversations, women's bodies, for lack of a better word, are just a lot more sophisticated because if you think about it, we house a baby. You know, we have that capability of housing a baby. So our inner workings are just more complicated. of housing a baby. So our inner workings are just more complicated. So there are different food demands that we need compared to men. Yeah. It's interesting. When you came on my show for the first time a few years back now, the response to that conversation was quite profound. One of the key things that we went through in that episode was this idea that

if you wish to use fasting in your life, then if you're a woman, you have to think about it differently compared to if you're a man. And once we've heard you explain it, and of course, you wrote a whole book on it in Fast Like a Girl, it's actually one of the most intuitive and obvious things once it's been spelt out to you. But until then, I kind of feel we're blind to it. Is it the same thing with food, would you say? Yeah, I think it's the same thing. And I think we're at the beginning of that conversation, too. What are the differences?

I think it's the same thing. And I think we're at the beginning of that conversation too. What are the differences? So if you go back and you look at where Fast Like a Girl was even born out of, is we just kept having for somebody else to write the fasting book and they didn't. And so I'm like, well, I need to explain what I'm seeing in my clinic. I need to explain what I'm seeing on YouTube, that there is this subtle difference. I don't think we've had that conversation in enough depth yet until now. I feel like with food, we've got to start taking this approach that men and women need to eat different. Men and women need to exercise different. Men and women have different needs around rest and recovery. The list goes on and on and on. And we just are just babies in starting that conversation. Yeah. That first conversation we had has transformed the lives of so many people. Yes. Listeners who would feed back. That was one of the most listened to podcasts in the entire UK that year. Okay. It really struck a chord with people.

The principles you outlined in that conversation have helped women in my own life, friends, family members. Just this idea that you need or the body needs different things at different stages of the cycle. Again, like I've already mentioned, it's so obvious once you hear about it but until you have heard about it you don't even know that that's a thing yep you know my my favorite thing to do when I'm speaking from stage is ask the women how many women in the audience are crave more carbs crave more chocolate crave more sugar the week before their periods. Literally every single woman in the room raises her hand. So does that mean that every single woman is undisciplined? Does that mean that every single woman is doing something wrong the week before her period?

Or is there something hormonally showing up that's causing every single woman to have this craving? These are the questions I dove into. And when I started to look at the personalities of like estrogen and progesterone and testosterone in a woman's body, I started to see that these three hormones had very different requirements when it comes to almost every aspect of our life. I feel that you talking about this topic for the women you've helped,

from what I can tell, you've given them a language to think about their bodies and their cycle. You've almost given them permission to tune in to what they already know. Yeah. Like you just mentioned that about craving carbs or chocolate in the lead up to your periods. Yeah. Now, without your message, I would imagine that many women would feel guilty about that and feel, man, I'm trying to avoid chocolate. I'm trying to go on a low carb diet. I can't do it. I'm really, really craving it. There's something wrong with me.

That's right. Has that been your experience as well? Yeah. I'm so happy you're bringing this to the surface because when you look at lifestyle choices, when we look at the typical differences between men and women, if a new health habit doesn't work for a man, he tends to have an idea that, well, that's not for me. And he just moves on to the next thing. Women in general don't do that. When we try a new health habit and it doesn't work, whether it's one that our husband is on or one that the ladies at ladies night told us that we should do. When we try something new

in the health world and we fail at it, we turn on ourselves. And we all of a sudden start going, I must have done something wrong. I must have, I can't see, I can't diet. See, I can't exercise. See, I can't do all these things. And we turn on ourselves. And that is exactly what I am trying to stop for women is helping them understand you live in a feminine body that needs to be treated on all levels very differently. So let's roll up our sleeves and get to know this feminine body so that you can stop saying such horrific things to yourself. If I cracked open most women's brains, you'd find some real negative talk in there. So let's start to help you understand why your body's giving you

the signals that it's giving you so you can work with it. Why do you think it is that women, or I should say women these days, respond in that manner? Yeah, you want the honest? I want your honest opinion, yeah. Okay, well, so in the new book, I wrote something that I saw after looking at millions of women. So we have 74 million total lifetime views on my YouTube. I have a team of people that literally reads every question. I ask, like you know from YouTube, I ask questions of people watching my videos. We get answers. We collect that. Here's what I'm seeing. Women are massively dysregulated in this patriarchal production world where we're keeping up, we're working as hard as men, which I'm not saying we don't do, I'm not going there,

but I'm saying that we have been fighting for the position that we stand right now, We have been fighting for the position that we stand right now, especially in America, to be able to sit at corporate tables, to lead countries, to be able to birth a child and then go back to work. All of these things that we have been demanding that we have the right to do and do have the right to do, but we never stopped and asked, how does that work for our feminine body? Is there certain areas where we need to rest and recover more? And women are dysregulated. Their nervous systems are dysregulated.

Their guts are off because microbial system because they've been put on birth control and they've been given antidepressants, which I can go down all the science on that and what that's doing to a woman's gut. Women aren't sleeping. Women's hormones are all off. Their emotional systems are off. We are massively dysregulated. And one of my goals with this new book is let's get women back into regulation with her body. That has to be a top top priority. Yeah. Some people will say, I imagine that what you just said could be interpreted as being disempowering for women. Now I know you don't, you're not meaning it like that. I know it's the exact opposite. Thank you. But people will say that,

don't they? Have you come across that? Yeah. Here's what you need to know about me. I was raised by an incredibly powerful woman that taught me that you have a voice, you're a woman, speak out. I am also the primary breadwinner of my family. I am the one for the last 25 years who's been bringing an income into the family, working while my husband was at home when my kids were little. So, and my daughter, she was an incredibly powerful feminist woman. I'm standing here saying we are strong and we are capable,

and we come with some extra bells and whistles in our body that require that we rest a little more. And if we do that, you will get the best of us. And when we don't do that, we see autoimmune conditions go up. We see thyroid problems. We see menopause symptoms. We see depression and anxiety and all cancers. All these conditions are going through the roof because we're not having the conversation you and I are having right now. I appreciate you sharing that. It reminds me of something that Gabor Mat Mate said to me when he was on the show and he writes about this in the myth of normal he calls women society's shock absorbers oh that's good and he says that in the context of trying to explain why it is that women's rates of autoimmune disease are so much higher than men's.

And there's many factors there. But one of the factors is to do with this chronic stress load and what is being asked and demanded of many women in the modern world. Yeah. That's right. In the modern world. Yeah. If you look at a more traditional household, you know, even women that are working,

if both men and women are working, if you're in a heterosexual relationship, when they come back to the home, now this is changing, but when our kids were little, the woman was the one that was on the job. She had to come back and work the second job. Whereas the men typically didn't have that as much of a responsibility. Now,

that's changing. Again, I think your point, I really want to get across that I'm not here for disempowerment. I'm here to help women understand themselves. And what's happening right now is women are trying to do everything like men, everything. And they're not realizing that we, hormones are so susceptible to the environment that we put ourselves in. So if we put ourselves over and over and over again in a stressful environment, then our sex hormones shut down and we lose our cycle. If you put us in a toxic food environment, our sex hormones change and we get things like PCOS. If you have an unresolved trauma from childhood and you go through menopause and all your hormones shift, all of a sudden now you have an incredibly irritable woman. The number one symptom of

menopause right now is irritability. It's not hot flashes, it's irritability. So all I'm saying is, can we all crack open this conversation and look at this together, men and women, figuring out how to support a woman's body in the modern world we're living in right now? Yeah, this point about empowerment versus disempowerment, I think it's really, really important. I've never got anything from you except the idea that you want to help empower women and empower men actually by men understanding women and their bodies better, which I think is also not said enough about your work. I think many men find it incredibly helpful for a variety of different reasons. I don't know if this analogy works or not, but let's say you

had a Ferrari, like a top-end sports car, compared to a car that is designed for, you know, I don't know, a Land Rover for rugged terrain and long distances, let's say. You wouldn't put the Land Rover on a racetrack and be surprised that it's not cornering as well as the Ferrari. You got it. And you wouldn't put the Ferrari out on an uneven landscape and judge the Ferrari for not performing there. You'd understand that they have different structure, different functions, and a different ability to thrive. So the point I'm trying to make is, if we say that men and women are fundamentally different, I think what all your work points to is simply not saying that women are not capable. You're saying women are very, very capable, but let's treat women

like women to get the best out of the woman's body. You got it. Stop trying to be something else. You got it. You got it. And in the stop trying to be something else, you free yourself from many women will free themselves from the negative self-talk that happens in their minds. So there's, there's many reasons why I'm trying to get women to come back and believe in their bodies again. One of them is so we can end the health situation that's in the world that's going on with women. We talked about autoimmunity and things like that.

But the mental health piece, the self-talk we have, when we're out of rhythm with our body and we're trying to muscle our way into better health, it does not work for the female body. We are way more sophisticated than that. So I'm trying to give women the power back, like you said. The other thing I want to say on this, this is really interesting. As you were saying, you're trying to help men. Do you know who, when I first started really understanding this, you know what man I went to first? And it wasn't my husband. I went to my 22-year-old son.

And I said, I'm learning some really interesting things about how the female body works. And because I thought, here is a young man that is going to come across many women in his life. And I want to make sure that he's armed with the right information to understand how a woman's body works. So I think we have to bring all of us in the conversation. I went and spoke in Norway last year at a biohacking conference, the most beautiful humans. Do you know when I got done, the more men came up to me than women, and they said to me, thank you very much. I understand my wife better. Thank you very much. I'm going to go teach this to my son. The men that are grabbing this are rallying around the women in their lives, and they're helping the women support an understanding of this precious

body you get to live in, and how do you take care of it. It is the most beautiful unfolding that I've seen. Yeah, super, super powerful. You mentioned hormones a few times. And I know your new book is about food, you know, eat like a girl. Yeah. this idea that the food we eat impacts or even influences our hormones i still do not believe is common knowledge so perhaps you could explain mindy how is it that the foods we choose to consume you you know, how do they actually influence our hormones? And therefore, from that, we can start talking about, well, what are the foods that women

should be focusing on to help balance their hormones? Yeah. So in the new book, I've got a chart called the key 24. And this is something I spent the last several months really deep in understanding. There are 24 vitamins, minerals, and amino acids that women need to be able to make their hormones. I just saw an article this morning, 230% increase in thyroid problems when women are on long-term birth control. I was like, what?

Okay, I dove deeper into it. They're believing because of the depletion of minerals, specifically selenium. So women who've been on birth control go into menopause, 50% of women going into menopause are going to have some kind of thyroid problem. So when our hormones don't have the fuel to be able to make their appearance for production, they go into depletion. And when they go into depletion, typically where our medical system goes to is like, oh, we got to medicate this, we got to medicate that, which puts them into further depletion instead of going to, hey, here are 24 key nutrients that you need to be able to make hormones every single day. Now let's roll up our sleeves. Let's look at the food groups that encompass these 24.

And let's create a lifestyle that has you eating these foods on a regular basis so you can get them into your system so you can make a proper amount of hormones. It seems like a really logical thing that all doctors should be doing with their patients. And it seems very simple to me. So the key 24 is one of them. The second part of the discussion, and I'm not sure you and I had this last time, but when we talk hormones, all we're talking about is the production of hormones. But a hormone has to go through production. It has to be broken down, so it's called metabolized, and then it has to be detoxed. Our food can help us do all three of

those things. What breaks a hormone down in the gut is your microbiome. I know you know this. And that microbiome has to be fed polyphenol, probiotic, prebiotic foods. What detoxes your hormones is your liver. So liver loves bitter foods. So let's feed the liver some bitter foods so it can have the juice, the nutrients it needs to cycle hormones out of your body. So these three principles become the guiding light for women. We've got to start to look at how do I produce more hormones? How do I break down hormones? How do I break down hormones? How do I detox hormones? And can I do that all with food? Okay. So in the book, there are these two, well, they're related, but two different food philosophies. Okay. One of them

is these three food rules of eating that is going to help your hormones. And I think that speaks to what you just said. It's about making the hormone, breaking it down, and then detoxifying it out of the body. Yes. Always out of the body. Yeah, yeah. Through your stools, through sweat, through breathing. There's all kinds of ways you detox. Okay, so let's just stick to this philosophy then.

I just love to help people understand what are these foods that we need to focus on, like foods we need to avoid and foods we need to bring in. 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 if we go back to this difference between women and men's bodies, I do feel like, and to Gabor Mate's point, like male bodies are a little more forgiving. Female bodies are not as forgiving. And the large reason behind that is because a male body is thinking about its number one priority is survival. A female body has two priorities,

survival and reproduction, just so we're clear. When we look at these foundational five, one of the things, and I'd be curious your opinion on this. One of the things I'm very concerned about in the health world right now is we have overcomplicated food, right? Yeah.

So we've gone from toxic food out there that is way complicated. You can't even pick up an ingredient label and be able to decipher the ingredients. So let's go into what the lay person, the average person's dealing with. I don't know what's in those ingredients. I even in the book trying to help people understand we have a whole page just on ingredients and reading them and what to look for. That is complicated enough. Then you go to social media and you've got one expert saying protein, another expert saying, no, plant-based only. You don't want to eat animal meat. And then you've got another expert saying, oh, you've got to go and start counting carbohydrate load. It is confusing everybody. And then all the experts are disagreeing and pointing fingers at each other. It's horrible. I completely agree. I think this has been going

on for years. I think it's getting worse. And I think people are more confused than ever. But I would have to say that your foundational five, they're pretty sensible. Thank you. Not only, 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 sometimes we get sidetracked on things that don't matter. And I think personally why I like food principles is particularly because of what you just said, 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. Yes. Thank you. So there's two thoughts I have on that. This episode is sponsored by Thriver, the app that helps you listen to your blood and get personalized guidance on how to optimize your health and fitness.

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And I personally like to check it every three to six months to make sure it's staying in its optimal range. The Thriver app is what I use to help me do this and it offers many different options. You can do general non-specific blood testing or get more focused on things like hormonal health, heart health, sports performance and nutrient levels. For listeners of my show, Thriver are offering an exclusive offer of 20% off your first Thriver cycle when you enter the promo code LIVEMORE at checkout. Just visit Thriver.co to get started today. That's T-H-R-I-V-A dot C-O. Thriver, listen to your blood.

This episode is brought to you by Airbnb. Now, I've been using Airbnbs for many years now for pleasure and for work. And last year, when I was in London for a few days of work, instead of staying in a hotel, I stayed in a wonderful Airbnb, which was centrally located

and had a really nice kitchen so I could start off each day with my own foods just the way I like it. I've also just booked an Airbnb for a work trip to Oxford in which I plan on recording a few episodes of this podcast. Now over the summer one of my best friends from university told me that he has been hosting his own place on Airbnb when he and his family are away. And he said that the extra money has been fantastic and helped over the years, both with the cost of their holiday and the cost of their new family car, which got me thinking when we're next away as a family and our house sits empty, perhaps we could Airbnb our own place and make some extra money to go towards

our holiday. And if you have a trip coming up, you could potentially do the same. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.co.uk forward slash host. One is when you know, when you look at a science study, it always tells you how many people were in this study. And it refers to it as N equals 3,000, N equals 100, whatever the amount of the study. When we refer to studies, we say N. Well, there's a principle called N of one, and they use it actually in psychology. And the principle is if I involve the patient in their own healing process, they actually get better quicker. So in Eat Like a Girl, I have a whole section on be your own N of one. It's time to be your N of one. Now you take that idea,

and the other concept I've been really trying to get women to understand is if I gave you a toolbox, you were going to build something in your backyard, and I gave you a toolbox, and it was going to take you the whole weekend to build this thing. Maybe it's a play structure for your kids. You wouldn't look at the toolbox and go, okay, well, I have a hammer, and I have a screwdriver. Well, the hammer's better than the screwdriver and you wouldn't pit them against each other. You would go, well, I know that there's a time to use the hammer

and I know there's time to use the screwdriver. My job now becomes, let me figure out when to use what tool. So, but to your point, we go to social media and I believe health influencers are actually perpetuating much of this problem, is that we go up and we're like, it's this way. This is the only way. And then another health influencer gets up and says, you're wrong. It's this way. Okay, when we do that, what we're going to do is we're going to send everybody back into the arms of the Western Standard Diet.

And we know that that is killing people. 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. Yeah, I love it. That's always been the approach I've taken with all of my communications with the public, also individually one-on-one with patients. With patients, it's slightly different because you've got a lot more history and knowledge. You

might have blood tests, you might have symptoms. But when trying to communicate with the general public, I've always focused on food principles as opposed to this is the perfect diet. Thank you. A, because I've seen different diets work for different people. Yes. Right. So therefore, it is impossible for me to say that this is the perfect diet for you. Yes. Because I don't know that. Right. The other thing I think we forget often is this idea that the right diet for you is going to depend on a number of things. It's going to depend perhaps on your age. I know in Eat Like a Girl,

you talk about women. It's going to be potentially different when you're in puberty, premenopausal, postmenopausal. Your body is different, so it might thrive on different foods. So I think that's really, really important. Also, it depends how sick you are. If you are doing generally okay and want to make a few little changes to improve things, you may just get away with just a few changes. If you've got florid autoimmune disease symptoms that are causing you a lot of heartache and pain every day, you know what? You may be motivated to go to some quite extreme changes. And if those extreme changes work, it doesn't kind of matter what anyone else says. You're going to be like, hey, I'm out of joint pain. I like eating this way. Do you know what I mean?

And I had said this in a previous podcast, but I feel too much of the commentary around diet is done from a theoretical standpoint. Whereas like me, like you, like other people who have seen tens of thousands of people over years, you kind of realize, you know, people often need a different approach. You know, the other day I was in the supermarket and I was staring looking at the olive oils and a woman came up to me and recognized me from reading my book and my videos. And she wanted to share with me that she had just done the carnivore diet and she was doing carnivore with fruit. And she's like, I've been on it for two weeks and my SIBO

symptoms have gone away. I've, my energy's up. My moods are up. I've never felt better. Now, two days before that, I was on my socials where there was one social media influencer making fun of another social media influencer who was proselytizing this idea behind the carnivore diet. That is what I'm talking about is this woman needed that. And I asked her, I was like, how long are you staying on it? And she's like, oh, just a couple of weeks. I'm like, that's beautiful. Like it's a healing diet. You should try it.

And I think this is great. So she found a tool. She found a screwdriver. She found a Phillips head screwdriver. Is she going to pull out the Phillips head screwdriver every single day? No. But now she knows when I'm not feeling well, this is the diet I can

turn to to heal myself. Now, when my body's feeling better, I'll put the Phillips head screwdriver down and maybe I'm going to pick up the pliers because now I might need a set of pliers to be able to build my health in a different direction. I mean, a few things to comment on there. First of all, for anyone who doesn't know what SIBO is, we're talking about small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, S-I-B-O. And as you know, as we both know, you know, pretty unpleasant symptoms. Often you can get bloating, you know, within 20 minutes or so of eating straight away, it just bloats out. And, you know, these kinds of diets can be very helpful for that at least in the short term yeah so that was the first thing this idea of people and other professional colleagues of ours calling

other people out i don't think it helps the public no it encourages you to take sides agreed and it's simply not helpful the truth is the carnivore diet can help people with autoimmune symptoms. Now, does it mean it's the best thing for the rest of their life? I don't know the answer to that question. Yes, right. Right. And I don't think we know that yet. We don't. But when you have been in pain and discomfort and the medications have not worked and you've struggled to sleep and your life has been just awful and you find something that gives you relief, you're going to go all in. Agreed. And you're going to go, well, this is amazing. I don't care what the science says. I don't care what this influencer is saying. This makes me feel better. Now, it may be at that point you need to work with someone

and over time figure out a way to introduce more things in. I definitely think that is possible. So yeah, I think that's a really key point and it's really interesting. And I think we also get into a trap where we then go and let's say, look at long living populations. I love looking at these long living populations and seeing how they're living, what they're eating, what is their sleep like, what is their stress? I love looking at that. But again, that doesn't mean that that is the right approach or diet for this particular individual at this moment in their life. Well said. You know, so those are kind of my views on diet. And I think some of the ways we get a bit waylaid.

Which is why can't we just look at them all as tools? There's all of them. So in Eat Like a Girl, when we went to go gather chefs to put, there's over a hundred recipes in there. 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 when I looked at how am I going to create these amazing recipes that are

going to help people's hormones, I needed to think about the plant-based people and I needed to think about the omnivore people. So I wanted to bring everybody into the conversation. Now, my plant-based chef, she is like the master chef for the Four Seasons Resorts. Her recipes are off the chart. They're amazing. She wouldn't touch meat with a 10-foot, 100-foot pole. Like she is so pro plant and I love that about her. My chef that did the omnivore recipes,

he is so dedicated to meat. He had a very famous restaurant in Las Vegas. And he studied from women in the mountains of Spain on how to cook meat. Both passionate, both useful. I wanted to bring them both into the conversation. And this is what you do this with your podcast. Let's bring everybody into the conversation and let the listener go, hey, when I pull out that tool, that works for me there. And then I put it down and I pull out this tool and that works for me there.

I think we will free people from being either frustrated and confused or from people just going, you know, I feel like I'm failing it at all, which is what I hear a lot of women say. It's 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? You are being your own end of one now. 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. Just go back to what we said earlier, Mindy, about this idea that men and women need a different approach for fasting and perhaps need a different approach for their food choices.

I was just remembering a conversation I had just a few weeks ago with Jonathan Haidt, you know, world famous psychologist. He's just written a new book called The Anxious Generation. It's all about the impacts of smartphones and in particular social media on mental health in children and adolescents it's a brilliant book it just came to me as we were talking there this idea that Jonathan wrote about is that this tech and the way adolescents are interacting with the tech, it has a different effect on boys to girls, right? Because of the way girls are psychologically wired,

as a general principle, you know, he explained to me why social media in particular was really, really toxic for girls because of how, you know, how girls interact and what their psychological drives are compared to boys. And he said that, yes, there were impacts of the technology on boys, but it seems to be different than from girls. Right. So this general overarching principle in all of your work and what we've been discussing so far, this idea that men and women might need a different approach. Once you start broadening that out beyond even like

food choices and fasting, you can start to see everywhere. It's like a pair of glasses you put on. And then all of a sudden, it's like your hormonal glasses. And all of a sudden, and this is what I saw with the women that read the book. It was like, all of a sudden, it's like your hormonal glasses. And all of a sudden, and this is what I saw with the women that read the book. It was like, all of a sudden, they're like, wait a second. Okay, so I tried the fasting thing. That worked. I got my cycle back. I'm feeling better.

What else do I need to cycle to my, what other lifestyle do I need to cycle to my hormones? It like cracked open a conversation. So I think that's so profound that we're even seeing it in social media. And I think that's also a reflection of what I see in the millions of women that reach out to us is that we tend to internalize much of this dysregulated world we're in. We internalize it and think we're a problem.

It's a really, I don't know, it'd be interesting to have that discussion with him, like what part of the brain does that for women? I believe it's a cultural issue that women have just been really working so hard to keep up with this patriarchal pace and to keep up with men that they haven't had the opportunity to say, hey, this is going on in my brain. Hey, I might need a rest. There's nowhere in the culture for us to do that. Yeah. 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. So what is it that you can do by just knowing that blood sugar is a guiding target for you. 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, 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. No. They can self-assess. And I think it speaks to, you know, this wider societal problem at the

moment with respect to food, which is we're so far removed from how we're meant to eat, how our bodies are meant to eat, that 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. Right. And stabilizing blood sugar, like eating in a way to stabilize your blood sugar, So stabilizing blood sugar, like eating in a way to stabilize your blood sugar, it's 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.

Like I never feel as good. Like, you know, I will put a CGM on, I don't know, it changes, but I don't't wear one regularly but I'll probably put one on at this stage maybe twice a year right just just a cgm being a continuous glucose monitor they last about two weeks for me when I've got that on even when I don't as well but you know I can I can learn which are the foods and which is the style of eating that keeps my blood sugar the most stable, whether I have it on or not. When I'm eating like that 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. Yes. Do you know what I mean? If your blood sugar is plummeting because you had a sugary cereal at 7 a.m. 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 in those sporting events. You travel with them. And I got to know this one woman really well. And she would always ask me when we were sitting at these sporting events, she would always ask me, like, what do you eat and 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. 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 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, you start to see that food is actually a tool to give you the life that you want. It's not, it can take away from the life you want, or it can give you the life you you want. It's not, 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.

Okay, so blood sugar stable, keep your blood sugar stable is an important principle. Any sort of quick tips for people on how they can do that? I know it's all outlined in the book, but some top line things people can think about. Well, you can read your symptoms. That's the first thing. Are you energized after a meal or not? That's a really first combo. But when you look at a meal, you know what? I still love this diet concept was the zone diet. Do you remember Barry Sears and the zone diet? I've heard of it, but I can't say I know that much about it.

Okay. So one of the things to know about me is that I've been fascinated with nutrition since I was 16 years old. So I have read like a bazillion nutrition books. So the Zone Diet came into my life when I was like 19. And I actually had chronic fatigue at the time. And I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. chronic fatigue at the time. And I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. And I had a doctor who was showing me how to eat different so that I could get my body to heal itself. And one of the things he introduced me to was the zone diet. And Barry Sears made this so easy. He said,

when you look at a plate, look and say, okay, is there protein? Is there fat? And is there a carbohydrate? Now, he didn't even talk about vegetables and what type of carbs. But he said, what you want to make sure is that the protein is like a fistful. So you look at your fist, and then you put it over your chicken breast, and you go, okay, is it the same size as my fist? Is that how much protein I have there? Then with the carbohydrate, let's say it's rice or it's a potato, is it similar size to the protein on the plate? And then, so same fist concept, and then the fat would be a half a handful. And if you look at every single meal

you put together with that lens, protein, carbohydrate, fat, they all need to be there. That for blood sugar, that is incredibly important. Now, I would take it one step further and say, now let's look at the carbohydrate you're eating. Because if it's, and we'll get into this in a moment, if it's a vegetable, if it has fiber in it, it's going to help your blood sugar even more. So just putting a plate together, how do we make this really simple for people? Yeah. So the vegetable, let's say it was broccoli, for example, that's got fiber in it. So it's carbs with fiber. So it's going to keep your blood sugar stable as opposed to white rice, which doesn't have the fiber and therefore

potentially is going to spike your blood sugar. Yeah. I was just at the restaurant you recommend near the train station and they had a salmon dish I knew was coming here so I want to keep my energy up, but it was on rice. So I just asked him, I was like, can you give me a side salad instead of the rice? And he's like, of course, very easy to change. It's interesting. I didn't know you had chronic fatigue when you were 19.

And of course that was, you know, many years ago now, but you wouldn't know it from seeing you. And honestly, the energy radiating from you from the minute you walked into my house is one of high energy. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, you know, I don't, it's funny because it was so long ago. I don't tell the story a lot, but it's, it's very applicable to these principles and to this new book and actually the doctor that really helped me see food. I actually

acknowledge him in the acknowledgements because it was so profound. I had a high levels of Epstein Barr virus. I was 19 years old. I was a competitive scholarship tennis player. I was holding a scholarship spot at the University of Kansas. We were in the middle of our tennis season, and I went home for Christmas for a quick break, a week break, and I literally couldn't pull myself out of bed. I was sleeping all day long. At first, my mom was like, oh, well, it must be that you're just tired from school. But this went on for about five days. So she took me to, and it was just like somebody had drugged me. It felt like a drug. She took me to the premier chronic

fatigue specialist. I grew up in Los Angeles. We go to this guy, we sit down, across a mahogany desk. He's got a white coat on. He must have been in like his 60s, 50s or 60s. He listens to us. He had done a bunch of scans on my brain. He had seen that my brain was inflamed. And he looked at me and he said, yep, you have chronic fatigue syndrome. And my mom said, oh, okay, great. What do we do? And he pulls out a list of medications. And next to the medications are hash marks of how many times the medications have worked. And he said, well, we don't really know what to do for chronic fatigue syndrome. Here are the medications we know that of what we could be doing, but we don't know which one's going to fit for you. So we're going to try one. And then if it doesn't work, six months later, we'll try another one. If it doesn't work,

we'll try another one. And my mom says, she's got to go back to school. She's a scholarship athlete. She's holding a scholarship spot. We have a coach. We got to finish school. And he really pompously looked at her and said, well, does she look like she can go back to school? And my amazing mom from that moment looked at me and she said, we are not listening to him. And she picked me up from there and drove me in LA. This is a really far drive. Drove me from Redondo Beach all in traffic to her homeopathic doctor in Santa Monica. She went in unannounced, walked in and said, Dr. Luke needs to help my daughter. She needs to get back to school. And they were like, he's packed. And she said, we will wait all day

until he is ready. At the end of the day, we waited in the waiting room. At the end of the day, he brought us in and he looked me in the eye and he said, well, tell me what you're eating. And of course, what was it? Beer, pizza. What did college students do? It was like I was eating horribly. And he said, I'm going to put you on what he called the candida diet. And he gave me a list of foods. It was meat and vegetables. I went on meat and vegetables with a few like berries, a few fruits. And within two weeks, I was literally back on a plane, back to school. Within three weeks, I was back on the tennis court, all from eating a very specific way.

I never turned back at that point. I was like, oh, my 19-year-old brain was like, if I want to perform and enjoy life in a certain way, then I eat in a certain way. And I just, those neurons connected on that at that time of my life. That word performance is interesting, isn't it? You're a tennis player, right? So you wanted to perform. But as I often say, we all want performance. We all want high performance in our lives. I, in this moment, want to be a podcast host who's performing well, I, in this moment, want to be a podcast host who's performing well, right? That's right, yeah.

I want to be a high-performing dad, a high-performing husband, a high-performing friend. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? That word performance doesn't just relate to competitive athletes. Yeah. And it's interesting to me, if I think about what you're doing at the moment with your career, and what you've been, what you've been doing for many years, but over the last years, helping people on a mass scale publicly, you, you learned a very powerful lesson, didn't you? Back then. A lesson that you can't

really be taught by reading. It's a lesson you have to experience for yourself, which is if you change the way you eat, you may feel completely different. Yeah. Yeah. And to your point about performance, because you could be somebody who's like, well, I don't really care about performing, but do you care about being an amazing mother or an amazing sister or amazing wife? Or do you care about just being able to stay present with whatever task you're doing? Maybe it's gardening outside or a hobby that you love. All of that requires health. And at the foundation of health is food.

Yeah. Now, before we move on to the second principle i just want to make something super clear um you were diagnosed with a condition you change your diet i felt better there will be many people who are listening who have been diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome and have tried to change their diet and not had all the improvements. Right. And so I just want to acknowledge that. Yes. And say that there are ways to heal for sure. But diet, I think, is an important component for everyone to try.

But sometimes it's not enough in and of itself. Agreed. And I just want to make that clear. I don't want anyone going away thinking, well, it worked for Mindy, but I'm doing something wrong. Going back to what you're saying, right? I for Mindy, but I'm doing something wrong. Going back to what you're saying, right? I've changed my diet and I'm still struggling. There are many inputs into the body that can result with chronic fatigue. And often you have to deal with more than one.

Yeah. It's the toolbox again. The hammer worked for me. The hammer may not be what you need right now. You might need the screwdriver. So, you know, I've coached plenty of people in my career who have had stellar diets and had a whole list of symptoms that we had to go. But we always start with diet because we got to start there and then we can build upon it from there. And also, I think one of the reasons diet

is a great starting point is this idea that you don't know which of your symptoms are related to food until you radically transform your diet. You just don't know. For years, I realized that when a patient would come in with these kind of chronic symptoms, I would always go to diet first because I didn't know what was related to food until we changed it. And more often than not, things got significantly better. Not complete remission a lot of the time, but things got significantly better. Then you go, okay, this is what's left when you're having a mostly whole food diet. Okay, now let's try and figure out what's going on. Keep going with your whole food diets

because that's helped you with all these things, but let's figure out what else is going on. Think about how many people go on supplements when they have a toxic diet. Like fix the diet first before you spend money on supplements. Like fix the diet first before you try to, and I don't want to say,

like before you try to do something too extreme. I was going to say hire a trainer. I think exercise and diet really go hand in hand. But fix the diet first and see what's left over. Yeah. That's it. The only flip side to that is, and I completely agree,

is sometimes I've seen patients in the past who are in such dark places and are feeling so bad that they're struggling to make lifestyle change. And sometimes I've found that putting them on the correct supplement for them can help them feel better in the short term, which then allows them to make the lifestyle change.

But I also agree with you, a food first approach always. But I think that's just a little caveat that I've certainly found. Agreed. But again, let's go back to what a supplement is. A supplement is an in addition to a diet. And then when you get up and going,

get off the supplement and use your diet. Keep that foundation going. Yeah. Okay. Eat nature's food. That's number two, right? This episode is sponsored by Ketone IQ. Now, I've been following the research around exogenous ketones for many years. Exogenous ketones, basically ketones that we consume as opposed to ones that our bodies make, enable us to experience many of their benefits without necessarily needing to go on a ketogenic diet. There's mounting research on their ability to

improve athletic performance and focus, but also growing evidence on the powerful effects of ketones in early cognitive decline. Now, Ketone IQ is a clean shot of high-performance energy with no sugar and no caffeine. I myself have been taking it for the last few months and have been really impressed not only with its taste, but also how it impacts me when I go for a run. I've also started to take one bottle about 30 minutes or so before every podcast recording. And I've also started an elderly relative with early cognitive decline on it with really promising results.

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instead of counting calories, we got obsessed with counting carbs. And it got to the point where even the food industry has gotten so sneaky, they started to see that, oh, keto is popular. Let me go ahead and create keto foods or let me create gluten-free foods that everybody's going to want to eat because they're like, oh, it says it has these buzzwords on it. And so I started to tell my community like, okay, 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 going to mean I'm going to 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 man-made? If it is nature's, it's probably a great tool for me. If it's man-made, not a a great tool what about something like rice cakes right you could

go down some really uh you know well well the only reason i ask that is not to be difficult yeah no i know i love it rice is a natural food yeah but white rice has the outer coating taken off yeah right so it's now white rice right but it is from nature. And rice cakes are incredibly popular snack food. Yeah. And a lot of people feel that, well, this is one ingredient. It's not a UPF, an ultra processed food with nine different ingredients that I don't recognize. What is your take on rice cakes? Well, I got to tell you a funny rice cake story first. Yeah, please do.

It's funny that you would use the rice cake. I don't know why that came into my head, actually. Well, I know. So this is really funny. So a couple of things to know about Eat Like a Girl. I dedicated the book to my mom because she taught me food from a very young age. And she taught us, my sister and I, how to read ingredient labels.

So we had a little game we played when we went into the grocery store. And it was like, if sugar was in the first four ingredients, we were not allowed to have it because she wanted us to know that the ingredients that were put in a certain order depending upon the food. So the breads all had sugar in them. So instead of bread back in the 70s,

instead of having bread, I got rice cakes. Okay. And she would put them with that, you know, the healthy peanut butter with the oils. We couldn't find any jam that had no sugar or artificial ingredients. So I got honey with banana in two rice cakes wrapped in wax paper sandwich bags because it was better for the environment. And that is what I got every single day. So literally you're unpacking the rice cake and I'm like, I don't know if I have anything good for you on the rice cake because it's a trauma of mine. But you bring up a valid point, which is rice comes from nature. So the more we alter nature's food, the further away we take its nutritional value. Yeah. I think, you know, I totally agree. And look, I think rice cakes are a better choice

than many ultra processed choices. Having said that, if you have got some degree of metabolic dysfunction, you know, which is a lot of us these days, you know, rice cakes for many of us are going to give you a big blood glucose spike unless you put it with something with healthy natural fats like avocado or nut butters or something like that, which is going to help blunt it. That's right. Yeah, you agree with that? Yeah, oh, absolutely.

In fact, let's go back to the meal I had before I came here. It came with white rice and I asked them to skip it. Now, if I had really thought a little deeper, I could have asked, do you have wild rice? Because wild rice is less altered. White rice is more altered from its original form. I could have asked for do you have wild rice? Because wild rice is less altered. White rice is more altered from its original form. I could have asked for quinoa. Quinoa has more protein in it. 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 going to be able to be in a place where we avoid chemicals and we stabilize blood sugar. Okay. Point number three of the foundational five, eats for your microbes. Do you know why I'm saying that? I don't know. Hit me. Okay. This I'd love too. So whenever we go to choose a food, what do we usually do? We say, what am I in the mood for? And we go off our taste buds. What am I in the mood for?

I look at a menu, I go shopping. 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 going to tell you to eat the sugars. The bad gut bugs are going to make you crave the processed foods. So when you actually ask yourself, what do I need to eat right now to feed my microbes? You flip that whole scenario on its head. And as you start to feed your microbes with things like fiber and seeds and nuts, I put lists after lists in the book of polyphenol, probiotic, prebiotic foods, what happens is your taste buds now change. And the greatest study ever done on fasting was the Every Other Day Diet. This was years ago. And the every other day diet said,

took people who ate toxic Western food and basically said, you eat those every other day. So eat whatever you want. If you're going through fast food, eat whatever you want, but on the days off, you're not 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 now we're back at fasting, but 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 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 gut dysbiosis if you have um you know an unhealthy balance of bugs in your guts it's a potentially over simplistic way of describing gut dysbiosis but i think in essence that that gets the idea across. 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, and 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 more, more, more. 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. 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 tune into your body's cravings and desires at that point. Yes. 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. So therefore, going back to the original question, the differences between men and 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. but women can't. Well, let's go back to the gut bugs. Okay. 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.

Yeah. So estrogen, 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 need good amounts of fiber

to help nourish their 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. So I guess, for example, a lot of men will say that they thrive on one meal a day or two meals a day, right? And I'm not saying women can't, but you often see these reports where people say, yeah, that doesn't suit women as much as it does men. So I guess what I'm trying to get at, are there some broad differences that you've seen between men and women? Yeah. Well, here's what I'm going to say with men and the gut microbes. That's supporting your immune system. That's making neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine. So I'm not saying that men have to keep their gut bugs out of the picture.

I'm saying there's more of a job for these microbes in a female body than in a male body. And I guess also speaking to other themes that we've covered before, women, of course, have a cycle. They have a monthly cycle, whereas men, I think in our first conversation, you said they have a 24-hour cycle rather than a monthly one. That's right. So therefore, we don't have these changes throughout the month, which might require different dietary strategies throughout that month. That's a pretty core difference, isn't it? And then there's another difference that I've been really down a rabbit hole trying to understand, and that is things like birth control. The birth control pill is really toxic to the gut microbes. And in the research that I've

done, I did for Eat Like a Girl, and I continue because this one is really fascinating me, is what is the birth control pill doing when a woman is on it for decades? What is it doing to her body? And we know right now that is doing two major adverse consequences. One, it depletes her of nutrients. So there's like seven different nutrients. We've got, you know, the magnesium, the zinc, vitamin C, vitamin E, we've got all the B vitamins. Like it depletes a woman when she's on birth control pill. I don't know why we don't share with women that they got to bring in some kind of, that would be a time for a supplement

where you bring in a great multivitamin to support that depletion. But the second thing that it does is it changes the microbiome. And I just, right before coming to you, I just read a study where one of the things that the birth control pill does is it upregulates a very specific microbe, a bad bug in the body that actually blocks the production of flavonoids, which are antioxidants in a woman's gut.

Wow. Okay. So now let's just assume, I don't know how many people you've talked to, but I can tell you in my clinic, like decades, women were on birth control. I can tell you what we see with our online community, decades, these women were on birth control and never did they think of the depletion that birth control did to them that they need to now add back in so they can just maintain an average level of health. Men don't have to think about that. Yeah. It's a lot easier being a man, isn't it? Yep. But I would tell you as somebody who lives in

a female body that once you learn how to work in harmony, it's like, we're, it's, yeah, it's, it's a blessing to live in a female body. Yeah. I mean, and look, I think the, the key theme is that let's help men and women work and live in harmony with the way their bodies want to work and operate, you know, know, in general, right? Yes. Okay. Yeah. It's fascinating to reflect on all these things though. Yeah.

You know, another one that's really interesting. I don't know if you brought Lisa Moscone on your... I've had Lisa on twice in the past, but not since a new book came out. So her new book's really interesting, The Menopause Brain. And I brought her on my podcast. And one of the big questions I wanted to ask was what's

going on with the female brain after 40? And there's a very long explanation of that. But one of the things she said is that when women get into the postmenopausal years, that brain is less receptive to glucose and is more tuned in to ketones. So then, you know, she's a researcher. So then I said to her, so does that mean that post-menopausal women should be going after ketones more? Should we be fasting so we can get ketones so that we can have better brain clarity?

And she said, well, I can't tell you that because I haven't seen the research on that. But this theory that women don't use glucose, their brains don't use glucose as much in these postmenopausal years would leave open this discussion of, okay, maybe we get her some ketones so she can think properly. And I told her, I'm like, the women in my group, in my world, when I pull the postmenopausal women, they all say when they fast and they get ketones, their brain comes back online.

And she said to me, yeah, I hear that over and over again. I sent my researcher to go research that. They don't study that in post-menopausal women. So we don't have the research. It's all anecdotal. Like we just have to go off of what people say. But there's another example of how these principles are different for women. So we don't have the research. It's all anecdotal. Like we just have to go off of what people say. But there's another example of how these principles are different for women. Because blood sugar matters to a post-menopausal woman. Because I want her to be able to metabolically switch into fasting to get those ketones. If her blood sugar or hemoglobin A1c

is massively out of balance, her ability to switch over and get ketones is going to be very challenging. The 25-year-old woman who's trying to get pregnant or has PCOS, let's talk about that. Like, does she know that her sugar cravings are coming from the microbes from the birth control that she's been on? And now she wanders into her doctor's office. She's told she has PCOS. She's not going to be able to get pregnant.

But does she know that maybe there was a microbiome change that affected how that PCOS was presenting? This is why these principles on the surface look like they could go for both men and women. But when you go underneath, you're like, wait a second. Maybe they'd be a guiding light for a man, for a woman, they are an absolute. Like we've got to use these as,

that's why I call them foundational. They are a foundational part of a woman's health. Yeah. It's interesting that the postmenopausal brain may prefer to use ketones as opposed to glucose. There's growing research in the area of Alzheimer's in terms of how low carb and ketogenic diets can help improve cognition, particularly in the early stages. Dale Bredesen has published many papers on that. He does other things as well. But it's interesting to me,

I know I'm talking about men and women both here, but this idea that throughout our life, the kind of foods that we might want to eat in order for us to thrive might change. Yes. It's fascinating, isn't it? Yes. And if you think about what we do is we get hooked onto a food or hooked onto a drink and we do the same thing over and over and over and over again, both men and women. Yeah. And yet we don't ever stop to ask like, what is today? What does my body need? I can tell you, and we do it this with exercise. I can tell you at 54, I exercise a lot different than I did at 24

because my body changed. So my exercise changed. Well, why don't we do that with food? Are there any principles around exercise that you feel are worthwhile sharing with people in terms of how women might want to adapt and change as they get older? I'm a huge fan of what's going on

in the cultural conversation right now, which is menopausal women need to start building muscle as much as possible. I would absolutely agree that you want to fight for every bit of muscle that you can possibly get as you go through that menopausal experience. You say menopausal women. So is that women who are approaching menopause or is it

after they've been through menopause? Yeah, I would say at 40. At 40. At 40. If I could tell every 40-year-old, start building muscle now. It gets harder as you go through the menopausal journey. And the other thing about muscle that we know is it holds the insulin receptor site so it makes you more metabolically healthy. We also know you're gonna need it to get out of a chair when you're 80. And this is a thing, or 90,

this is something I do all the time for myself is every single day, I always think about my 90-year-old version of me. What do I need to do today exercise-wise, eating-wise, health-wise, so that I at 90 show up here? You better show up here at 90. I'll be here. Don't worry about that. And that we sit and have the same energized conversation. What do we have to do today so that at 90, we can be this vibrant? That is a question I ask myself every day. So as we're having this conversation,

it's a Tuesday. In just a few hours, the new episode of this podcast drops and it's with a lady called Gladys McCary. Ah, yes. I've already spoken to Gladys once. This is my second conversation with Gladys. She's now 103. Yeah. And I spoke to her a couple of weeks ago and it was just one of the most delightful conversations with, well, one of the most delightful conversations I've had on the show. And it was such a joy to talk to someone at the age of 103, who still has a lust for life, a vibrancy, a sense of humor, a cheekiness. It was really eye-opening. And it made me think, wow, yes, there's all kinds of factors that play in here. Gen'm sure does play a role in terms of how you age or certainly how long you live for right but there's so much with our lifestyle and it was just fascinating to think well that is possible

yeah what did she so what did she say about her lifestyle honestly what I took from her it's not that her lifestyle and her diet wasn't important she's always paid attention to that but if you made me pick one factor that I feel has influenced her ability to age that well it's her attitude yeah it's her attitude. It's her approach to life. The playfulness, the fun, the curiosity, looking for a learning opportunity in every moment of adversity. I honestly think that was the big thing that I took away from it. Yeah, that's amazing. Well, you know, there's a lot of studies that have shown that like, I've just brought on one of my favorite integrative doctors onto my podcast, and we talked,

we went through supplements. I wanted to go through the difference between capsules and IVs, and there's some new detox supplements out there that are really interesting. So we go, we're going down that path, and he brings up the idea that they have done studies on smokers, He brings up the idea that they have done studies on smokers. And they found that smokers that have very positive relationships in their life, have really good human connections, don't have the same lung cancer rates as smokers that are living with loneliness or smokers that are in environments that are highly emotionally toxic. Yeah.

It's incredible, isn't it? Yeah. Again, not to say that smoking is good for you, but it's more about the multifactorial nature of everything. That's right. And a positive mindset that you can choose to have. Yes. You know?

Right. Can make a massive, massive difference. Which is why, like when I look at these foundational five and when I looked at what happened with Fast Like a Girl, what I saw is when we just said, hey, avoid food for these certain periods of time and see what your body does, we saw the body heal. But then when we went back into the eating window, teaching people to eat, everybody got so confused. And I started to look at what the cultural conversation was around food.

And I'm like, oh my gosh, A, we have to stop arguing. And like B, there needs to be more love and compassion and care when we're talking about an amazing tool like what nature has provided us, this incredible healing. Fast Like a Girl has been a global sensation it's reaching people all over the world so many people are getting incredible benefits from it so i was going to ask you you know what was the case for writing eat like a girl and you just answered yeah it was the eat so remember like in fast like a girl what i introduced was this fasting window and eating window can you just recap yeah top line for people who haven't heard our first two conversations, which I hope if they haven't, they will go and revisit or visit, I should say, for the first time.

But just recap that, if you will. Yeah. So I introduced this concept of a metabolic switch, which was when you eat, you're operating from your sugar burner system. And when you go a certain period of time not eating, you switch over into your fat burning system. And that's what fasting's doing, is it's tapping into this fat burning or the ketogenic energy system. The byproduct of that is a ketone. So you now are getting both, your job is to switch from eating to fasting and eating to fasting and back and forth. And different stages of the cycle. That's right. So what do you call day one?

Day one's the day you have to start your period. Okay. And like you actually, let me go a little deeper on that because that was another shocker. Is that most women were like, well, if I spot, if I do this, no, it's when you have to actually use some feminine care product. Like there's no question you've started your period. So that's day one. That's day one. And again, top line, because we did cover this in depth in previous conversations, but you know, first half of the cycle, how do you encourage women to eat? Yeah, you want to go lower carb. That would be a time to do more of a keto. I call it ketobiotic. And then it's a time when you can go into longer fast. You want to become insulin sensitive during that time. So keep glucose down. Okay. So that's in the first half of the cycle. First 10 days. First 10 days.

And then? And then you move into ovulation. It's a funny little five day period where all your hormones are at their highest. So you don't really want to fast long. You would keep your fast maybe a little bit to like 15 hours. But in Eat Like a Girl, I talk about this is where we bring in these probiotic, prebiotic foods. Like what? So like fermented foods like sauerkrauts and kimchi and fermented yogurts, phenomenal during ovulation. And bitter foods like radicchio and dandelion greens and all kinds of leafy greens and nuts and seeds.

All of that is going to be incredible for the liver and the gut to help you break those hormones down. So that's in that five-day window. Move to more food as your medicine. Then you come out of that and there's a drop in hormones. So you're at like day 16 now. There's another little weird four or five day period where you can fast a little longer. So I called them power phases.

And then at day around day 20, this is when progesterone makes her moment. And that's when you don't want to fast. And I even talked about now let's bring glucose up. I call it hormone feasting foods. So in the new book, all the recipes are broken into that. Does this fit under ketobiotic or does this fit under hormone feasting? Oh, wow. That's going to be so helpful for people, isn't it? Just know at this stage, this is the kind of recipe you might want to utilize. That's right. There's a really interesting study done on fasted snacks. And so I went to my plant-based chef and I was like, can you come up with some fasted snacks? And she, so we came up with like four or five different snacks you can have in the fasted window.

What is a fasted snack? So the requirements of a fasted snack is you have to keep it under 200 calories. It's got to be mostly fat. So you're not spiking insulin. That's right. Well, you're not spiking glucose and therefore insulin. Yeah. And then you don't want to spike autophagy by eating more than 20 grams of protein. Okay. So is it that you encourage people to have fasted snacks or is it when people say, Mindy, listen, I'm generally okay with that fast that you recommended, but sometimes I just feel like something. Is it for that woman or is it more that you are

encouraging people to have these fasted snacks? No, it's the first. It's the first. So ideally, well, not ideally, but if you don't need anything, don't. Right. Yeah. But if you really feel like you need something, you can have one of these. That's right, that's right. My vision is that everyone, every woman, I mean, men and women, but women need to know how to do this to their hormones,

learns this metabolic switch. So one of the things we got was some people saying like, I can't fast, I can't go more than 10 hours, I can't go more than 12 hours. Or, you know, I just, I love food so much, it puts me in all these weird emotional states. So that's when I was, I had seen some studies and Valter Longo does this with his fast mimicking diet,

which is what could we eat that wouldn't disrupt the healing that goes on in a fasted state? And I found this incredible study that like unpacked a fasted state. And I found this incredible study that unpacked a fasted snack. And it said, the requirements I just told you, if you do that, you're still in the fasting window. And that seemed to help that emotional peace. It's interesting. You know, whenever I talk to Mindy, so much comes up in my head, because I think the implications of what you're saying are really quite profound.

comes up in my head because I think the implications of what you're saying are really quite profound. And what just came up now is this idea of cheat days. Now, I've never really subscribed to this, but I know many people would find the concept of a cheat day very helpful. Okay. And my understanding is that if you're eating well, you know, I don't know, Sunday to Friday, if you know that you can have a little blowout on the Saturday, some people find it easier to maintain a healthy diet the other six days. Not everyone. Everyone's very different with how they respond to these things. And what want to find interesting about your approach, Mindy, in Eat Like a Girl, but also in Fast Like a Girl, this idea that the first 10 days of the cycle, you can be a bit more low carb and maybe even keto,

but towards the end of the cycle, you're almost bringing back in lots of carbs and elevating glucose and not fasting as much. I thought there's quite an interesting synergy there. It's different, but it's almost saying to a woman, hey, listen, when you aren't craving those carbs and chocolate leading up to period, it's no problem. That's okay. And by not pushing that away and thinking I'm bad and I shouldn't be eating this, I should be able to resist it, by allowing that in and getting the benefits of that, I kind of thought psychologically, I wonder if it's easier than when day one hits, if you're following your principles and if they want to follow your principles and go, okay, I want to go low carb now and follow Mindy's

keto biotic diet, does it become psychologically easier as well because they've allowed themselves to, I'm not saying indulge, but if they're feeling the craving for the carbs and having it. Yes. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Well, here's what happens. It's not a cheat day,

but do you see the similarity I'm trying to draw there? I always say, as women, we can have our cake and eat it too. Let's just make sure it's a good quality cake. Let's make sure the ingredients are clean. But what every woman, once she starts to go and eat in this rhythm when she's fasting like a girl and eating like a girl the most common thing i hear is that they're not fighting against themselves

that week before their period and they're enjoying food like in the in the book oh my gosh we have some incredible desserts that i hope women just love and they eat them when on these hormone feasting days they're all great quality ingredients so ingredients. So you eat that on the right time. And then what happens is your period starts. And ironically, you're like, I'm not really hungry anymore. That happens so many times. I'm starving starting day 20. I give myself what it needs. Day one hits and I am ready to go keto again. I'm ready to fast again because I'm not hungry. I nourished my body where it needed nourishment. I feel men are missing out now. I flit, right? Because what I mean is that in some ways that's quite a nice message that in

different parts of the month, you can have different balances. Whereas I'm not saying you're saying this, but hypothetically, I guess as men then, is it better for us to be more rigid? Is it better for us to, you know, if we have 24 hour rhythms rather than monthly rhythms, I don't know, it's just fascinating, isn't it? So I have a really interesting concept in the book 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. We should put up some kind of value system. I call it a personal value system where we say,

on days that I don't want to count calories, hopefully you're never doing that, but I don't want to count blood sugar. I don't want to think about keto or all these other things. But I do have a value system around food. And my value system says, I'm not putting toxic chemicals into me. But if a incredible chocolate cake shows up made with really clean ingredients, I'm going to dive into that. To me, we all need some kind of food value system. Otherwise, the food industry has infiltrated with so many chemicals that if you're thinking the cheat day and you're just constantly going to this toxic food, you are setting yourself up for chronic disease. Yeah. I love the idea of a food value system. I think 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 you're going to struggle. 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. And therefore, you've got to understand that 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. Thank you.

Humans, if you take our hunter-gatherer ancestors and pop them in this environment, they'll also get sick. 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. Those foods are not allowed in. 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. Because 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 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. Now we're looking at this younger generation that is so obese and we don't know what's going on. I'll tell you what's going on. We are allowing too many chemicals into our foods. Stop eating chemicals.

End of story. And so it's gotten really bad and and i say this with love and compassion but we have i think fast like a girl works so well because it gave people a formula for stopping eating those foods yeah that's the other thing about fasting isn't it is that anything we can do as long as you're psychologically able to do it you know and you don't have long-standing issues with food and depriving yourself like we have covered before about eating disorders but in this world of frankly abundance everywhere for most people. Yes. You know, fasting is a form of self-imposed scarcity. Yes. Yes. Well said. And that is for many people, one of its, I think, key benefits.

It just stops you eating and stuffing your face. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. It gives your body a break. It gives you a break. From the modern world. Yeah. It's like when they say, I'm sure the guy with the anxiety generation, he probably talked about put the phone down. Yeah. We talk about, you know, like, like tech free days. We have to do the same thing with food now. Yeah. And food value systems is, is, it's really great. I've, I've just completed my sixth manuscript. And thank you. And the book's not out till the end of the year, but in one of the chapters, I talk about these rules for discomfort,

about how you need to introduce discomfort into your life intentionally. And think about creating rules so that this discomfort happens regularly. For example, you know, where I shop, the car park is two floors up from the supermarket. So I've had a rule for years that sometimes I'll walk there, but if I'm there in the car, I will never take the lift. I'll always get the stairs out and the stairs out. So I have a rule that I always take the stairs. Brilliant.

Unless there's some powerful reason not to, right? Maybe I'm at a hotel, I'm on the 20th floor and I've got the whole family's bags, right? Okay. I may not take the stairs there, but my default is that I take the stairs. And I know it sounds so simple, but it's just the stairs there, but my default is that I take the stairs. And I know it sounds so simple, but it's just a decision I make in my brain many years ago. So that's my own internal rule that I follow. Always take the stairs. Okay, great. Another one I suggest to people in that session is you could have a rule, for example, that I'm never going to eat after 7pm. Yes. Right. Yep. Or 8pm or 9pm, whatever works for you. Right. It's not about me imposing my rule on you. It's

about you saying, okay, if I apply this and I absorb it and I mentally make the decision to do this, it's not necessarily that there's anything inherently wrong with having a snack at 8 or 8.30, right? But it's more about you have a value system to use your language whereby you just don't do that. So you're cutting out. And dare I say it, for most of us, our poor food decisions probably come post 7pm, right? Or a lot of them. So if you can implement something like that, Yes. Right? Or a lot of them.

Yes. So if you can implement something like that, it's more a psychological tool, a trick for the modern world to help you stay on track. That's right. 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. I think your listeners, I think the people who read my book and applied it, that's part of what woke everybody up. But 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, like you spoke of, 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. Let's go back to the final two of your foundational five. Okay. Protein is not just

for men. Please explain. Yeah. So, you know, it's interesting. I think protein is having its moment and it's beautiful. And I think there's a lot of great authors that have like put this out into the world, which I love. And, you know, I think for women, we haven't prioritized protein. And because we haven't necessarily as a, 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. Now, if you look at these key 24 that I talked about that you need to be able to make hormones,

then a good amount of those, like close to half of them are amino acids. And amino acids come in the form of different forms of protein so if you are not looking to eat protein to bulk up i'm going to ask you to look to eat protein to make hormones and this is where it becomes really important for 65 year olds and 75 year olds who have got the most depleted hormonal situation of their life, is that we got to bring protein back in. Or what about the 20 or the 30-year-old that is maybe getting her body ready for pregnancy? How about we bring protein back into that? So when we keep it in the conversation of men, we tend to keep it in the conversation of muscle.

We don't 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.

But we still have it in the context of muscle. And I'm asking us just to expand that and see because a lot of women still are not craving that muscle. Yeah. It's interesting that. It's a good point that. Very good point to talk about protein as a necessary macronutrient for hormones. That's right. So if I'm listening to somebody say, you need more protein so that you can have more muscles so that you can be more insulin sensitive, your brain as a woman may actually translate that into, well, I don't, every time I build muscle, my clothes are tight. Every time I build muscle, the scale goes up and I'm addicted to the number on the scale. So all of a sudden you

dismiss protein. It is the hero macronutrient. 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. And what are some of your favorite sources of protein? Well, mine is an egg. Okay. Yeah. So for the choline in the brain, I mean, there's so many reasons to do eggs. Cottage cheese is another one. I eat dairy. I eat organic dairy.

So I know some people don't do well with dairy, but I love cottage cheese. And then I love a good steak. I'm a grass-fed steak kind of gal. Now, in this book with the plant-based track that Chef Leslie did, she and I spent hours on the phone talking about how could we create some vegan recipes and plant-based recipes that brought in the different protein of different plants. So in Eat Like a Girl, I have charts for those people that are plant-based that show the different levels of protein. Well, quinoa has a great amount of protein and broccoli

has a ton of protein. So if I'm a plant-based person, then I just need to make sure I know what those high protein sources are and I need to make sure I'm bringing those into every meal. Yeah, brilliant. Your approach has always been very inclusive to try and bring people in as you shared your own personal preference, but also recognizing that many people are choosing to be vegan. And of course, prioritizing protein is just as important. Let's talk about the grandmother hypothesis. I know it's something you're passionate about. I don't think we've covered it in our previous conversations. Yes.

Well, this is the one that Lisa brought me. And here's what I will tell you is that I've been trying to figure out what happens to the menopausal brain throughout 40. Why are we suffering? Why are so many women struggling with depression, anxiety, trouble sleeping, irritability, inability to handle stress? It's ginormous. Now, we have cracked open the conversation around menopause, and we're bringing in this idea, well, it's because women need HRT or women need bioidenticals. I'm all for that. If that's another personal path, if that works for you, great.

But what you should know is what's happening to your brain after 40 and here's what's happening. And this was, part of this is research I found and part of it is Lisa. So at 40, as estrogen, progesterone and testosterone go down,

those three hormones stimulated a set of neurotransmitters. They stimulated serotonin, dopamine, acetylcholine, glutamate, BDNF, oxytocin. It's profound how I call it their girl gang. They have a whole girl gang and that girl gang goes away. So you're not just losing three sex hormones, you're literally potentially losing eight or nine. And those were your neurochemical armor that helped you be able to handle stress. So the first thing is we need to understand that this neurochemical armor is coming down as you go through this process. So with that in mind, you can understand, well,

if serotonin goes with estrogen, then I may not be as happy as I am, as I used to be, which I hear from so many women. They're like, I don't know. I'm just not as happy. And if progesterone brings with her GABA, then that really explains when progesterone goes away, GABA goes away. So I'm a little bit cranky and irritable. You look at me wrong and you might get the worst of me. So this is what I've been trying to understand. I was like, well, there's got to be another tool. Lisa brought that tool to me and it's called the grandmother effect. And here's what it is. There are three different times in a woman's life in which there is a dramatic hormonal change that causes neurons, old neurons to be pruned and new parts of the brain to come online. It's puberty, postpartum and perimenopause.

Each one has a different brain it's trying to regrow. The perimenopausal brain, what happens is that you start to grow a brain that several things occur. One, the amygdala, the part of the brain that is your fight or flight, constantly seeing fear, all of a sudden has more empathy. That fear part of the brain turns off and you become more empathetic. The other part of the brain is that you go from this individual me, me, me, me, me, me to looking at a societal collective group. So you're looking at what does the culture need? What does society need?

And when that amygdala goes down and you're looking at what society means, all of a sudden, I don't care what you think of me. Your brain literally changes. And it's based off of this grandmother hypothesis that says that back in the hunter gatherer days, in order for the human species to survive, the men and probably the teenage men and women went out hunting. And who was left behind were the women that either had extremely young children or women that were pregnant, along with a whole bunch of toddlers and probably some five and six-year-olds. Who was taking care of those children?

It was the grandmother. The grandmother was around the cave, making sure that the cave stayed in a harmonious environment. She went and foraged for food, brought food back while they waited for the hunter and gatherers to come back with the big kill. So your brain actually changes during menopause so that you can be a better, more empathetic member of society. I said to Lisa, does that mean we're actually built for more cultural leadership? And she's like, I hadn't thought of it that mean we're actually built for more cultural leadership? And she's like, I hadn't thought of it that way.

That is exactly what I'm saying. So in a society we live in now where we toss women aside when they go through menopause and we're not teaching them, hey, your brain's not as sensitive to glucose. You might want to learn about a ketone. And we've got women slowing the aging process down. What women need to know is actually you are building a brain that is the most productive to this society. And we need to hear from you.

We need to lift you up. We need to take care of you. We don't need to push you aside because all of a sudden you have wrinkles on your face. Or maybe you have a menopausal belly. Or we look at you and say you're old and you're not useful to our culture. You are incredibly useful to the culture. And we need to bring that back for menopausal women. Yeah, it's wonderful to look at it like that, isn't it?

This came up recently when I spoke to, I don't know if you've heard of him or not, Professor Charan Ranganath. He is one of the world's leading experts in memory he's been studying memory for 30 years or so and we spoke on this podcast about all things related to memory and and and the purpose of memory and the idea that actually it's not only you know why we can't remember things that we want to remember it's this idea that most of what we experience each day we will forget yeah you totally reframed again most of

your things you don't remember yeah so it's why do we remember anything but it was really interesting but one thing we discussed was this idea of the post-menopausal woman and the idea that perhaps a woman's role changes her brain, which you've just been talking about, her memory, these things change for the good of the tribe and the culture. And he was sort of, I think he was hypothesizing rather than stating something as hard fact, this idea that perhaps the role of the post-menopausal woman is more about imparting wisdom to her kids, to her grandkids, to the people around it. It was really beautiful the way he described it. And it kind of fits what you're saying. Yeah.

Well, think about the Okinawa women. Like we always hold them up on a pedestal and we're like, they live the longest. But did we ever ask why? In that culture, the women gather together. They call it a moai, where the women start living with each other, especially if their husbands have died.

And in a moai, what they do is they share resources. So they share homes. They share finances. They share food. They come together collectively. And then everybody in the community knows that this group, this moai of elder women, are the ones you go to when you have a problem, the ones you turn to when you're needing to be lifted up.

They got it nailed in Okinawa. We don't have that nailed on this side of the world. And that speaks to one of the ideas why I so enjoy talking to Gladys McCary again. I don't think that we talk to our elders enough, particularly in Western cultures. You know, I should say in some Western cultures.

I know in other, like in Italy, for example, I believe it's very family orientated, cross generational, but certainly I think there's no question that in certain cultures, UK, US, we're probably not doing it as a society enough, but there's just such an incredible wisdom to learn if we do. Oh my gosh. Think about all the suffering that you've gone through and what you've learned from that. And then as you get older to be tossed aside

because you have a look that says you're old and not useful is so demeaning. That's why I wanted to break this down for women and like what is going on with our brains? Because some of the greatest women that I have learned from are ones that are 10, 20 years older than me. I want to sit with those women. I want to hear what they've learned. Because not only is their brain reorganized to be able to help me, but their years of wisdom, there's so much for me there. Yeah, man, so much more on that. Absolutely

fascinating. Mindy, I always love chatting to you. There's so many facts, but I love the way we just talk about society and culture and what these things all mean. 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. I know you cover this. Yeah, in Eat Like a Girl, I did a whole chapter on this. So I'm going to make it really simple. There are three things you need to think about.

If you want to improve your microbiome, like we were talking about, you need to add in more fibery foods, fermented foods. I call them polyphenol probiotic and prebiotic foods, but they look like a lot of salads and a lot of seeds and nuts. So I have lists in the book. Second thing, you want to eat to make sure that you keep your muscle in good shape. That's protein. We talked about protein. And the third is you want to bring fat in. So fat curbs the appetite. It turns off 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?

In the book, I lay it all out. I have recipes, but that's a general guideline for the sake of this podcast is it should be intentional. The first meal matters. It is the most important meal of this whole conversation is that first meal in.

So what healing do you want to keep going? And if you keep that in mind, I've got to feed my microbes. I got to put protein in here. I got to put protein in here. I got to put some fat. You can never go wrong. Yeah, fantastic. I'm sure Eat Like a Girl is going to be as successful as Fast Like a Girl and help so many women repair potentially their relationship with food, certainly empower them to eat in a way that works with their bodies and their hormones. Just to finish off, the world one piece of advice

about female health, what would it be? Yeah, that's such a good question. For starters, I want to say we have heard from so many men. There are so many loving men out there that want to support the women in their life. And I just, I love that. And I just, the thing I want to say to all men is listen to us, acknowledge that we're living in a different body than you're living in. Don't look at what you're doing with your health and assume that's going to work with our body. Have compassion for us when we're feeling emotional. Understand that our hormones are gonna make us up one moment

and they're gonna make us a little down the other. Like if you actually truly hear us, listen to us, understand us, you will get the best of us. And it's gonna take you learning how we're operating just as the opposite of that exists as well. Yeah, I love that, Mindy. Thank you for coming back on the show. Thank you for all the incredible work that you're doing. Thank you. Keep it up.

Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life. And also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember, when you teach someone, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information. Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday Five. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I'd be consuming, and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect. And I have to say, in a world

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