Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - Menopause: How To Burn Fat, Sleep Better & Live In Harmony With Your Hormones with Dr Mindy Pelz #392

Episode Date: October 10, 2023

CAUTION: This podcast discusses fasting, and its advice may not be suitable for anyone with an eating disorder. If you have an existing health condition or are taking medication, always consult your healthcare practitioner before going for prolonged periods without eating. I first spoke to today’s guest on Episode 342 - and that episode has become one of the most downloaded episodes of the year - it has transformed the lives of many women - and men and I think this conversation will do the same. Dr Mindy Pelz is a nutrition expert, a pioneer on the subject of women’s health & hormones, and the author of Fast Like A Girl and The Menopause Reset: Get Rid of Your Symptoms and Feel Like Your Younger Self Again. Mindy’s aim is to empower women by explaining the biological changes that take place each month and throughout a woman’s life. She believes that, armed with that knowledge, they can improve their health, happiness and relationships. But this conversation is just as relevant for men. We discuss whether weight gain is inevitable as we age. Is it our fate – and particularly a woman’s fate – to gain weight once she hits 40? It can be, she tells me, but only if women don’t know how to harness their hormones to prevent it. She explains how declining oestrogen levels can make women insulin resistant which may be one the reasons why the diet and lifestyle that worked for them in their 20s and 30s, no longer does once they hit 40. At the same time, declining levels of progesterone, the calming hormone, can result in lower-quality sleep, more perceived stress and increased levels of the stress hormone cortisol - which, in and of itself, will contribute to an increase in belly fat. It makes so much sense when Mindy explains it, but unfortunately, this information is still not widely known. We cover so many different topics, including: How to adjust when and what you eat during different phases of your cycle. The importance of gut health when thinking about hormonal health. Why women often handle stress in a different way to men. The impact that hormonal changes can have on brain function. The practical steps we can take to improve our sleep. The importance of lifestyle changes irrespective of whether a woman chooses to have HRT or not. The best times in a woman’s cycle to resolve conflict and deal with relationship issues. This episode is jam-packed with insightful information and practical take-homes. I hope you enjoy listening. Thanks to our sponsors: https://naturalmat.co.uk/livemore https://boncharge.com/livemore https://drinkag1.com/livemore Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/392 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.

Women, depending on how long you live, will spend 40% of their life in menopause. 40% of their life will be without these hormones. Why aren't we studying this? Why aren't we creating a culture that can talk about this? Why aren't we helping women understand this? And that's the thing that I'm trying to bring to the world is like, if we just could talk about it, we could all come up with some solutions. But instead, what's happening is the 45-year-old woman is trying harder at weight loss. the world is like, if we just could talk about it, we could all come up with some solutions.

But instead what's happening is the 45 year old woman is trying harder at weight loss. She's working out harder. She's dieting more, trying to get this result that she got at 35, but she's not looking at it through a hormonal lens. And the minute you flip the whole discussion on its head, the minute you start to look at it through a hormonal lens. And now that woman can start to get some serious weight loss results when she comes at it from hormones, not from grit and discipline. 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. and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More. I first spoke to today's guest back in March of this year on episode 342, and that episode has become one of the most downloaded and shared episodes of the year. It has transformed the lives

of many women and men, I might add. And I think today's episode is going to do the same. Dr. Mindy Peltz is a nutrition expert, a pioneer on the subjects of women's health and hormones, and the author of Fast Like a Girl and the Menopause Reset, Get Rid of Your Symptoms and Feel Like Your Younger Self Again. Now, her aim is to empower women by explaining the biological changes that take place every month and throughout a woman's life. She believes that armed with that knowledge, women can improve their health, happiness and relationships. Now I want to emphasize that this conversation is just as relevant for men. Yes, we do cover a lot of information about women's health, but it's just as important that men understand this crucial information. Men and women are

constantly interacting, so the more we can understand each other, the more empathy and compassion we can have. We start off discussing whether weight gain is inevitable as we age. Is it our fate, and particularly a woman's fate, to gain weight once she hits 40? Well, it can be, she tells me, but only if women don't know how to harness their hormones to prevent it. She explains how declining estrogen levels can make women insulin resistant, which may be one of the reasons why the diet and lifestyle that worked for them in their 20s and 30s no longer does once they hit 40. At the same time, declining levels of progesterone, the calming hormone, can result in lower quality sleep, more perceived stress and increased levels of the stress hormone cortisol,

which in and of itself will contribute to an increase in belly fat. It makes so much sense when Mindy explains it, but unfortunately this information is still not widely known, and that was one of the main reasons I invited Mindy back onto my show. She is a wealth of information and a fantastic communicator. Now we cover so many different topics today, including how to adjust when and what you eat during different phases of your cycle, the importance of gut health when thinking about hormonal health, why women often handle stress in a different way to men, the impact that hormonal changes can have on brain function, the practical steps we can take to

improve our sleep, the importance of lifestyle changes irrespective of whether a woman chooses to have HRT or not, and the best time in a woman's cycle to resolve conflict. This honestly is an episode jam-packed with insightful information and practical take-homes. As I have already said, it is just as important for men as it is for women. I thoroughly enjoyed chatting to Mindy for the second time on my show. I hope you enjoy listening. Mindy, welcome to the show. Oh, I'm so excited to be here. I feel like I'm in a second home. It's very,

very warm in here and you, of course, have such a beautiful spirit. So thank you for having me. Not at all. The first conversation we had together has proved so impactful for so many people, my audience so connected with you and your message. And so I'm really excited about conversation number two. I want to go into some different areas. I think there's a common narrative in society that as we get older, we're going to put on weight. And I think many women will say once they get into their 40s that I'm doing the same things that I did before, but now I'm putting on weight and specifically I'm putting on belly

fat. So first question for you is, is weight gain inevitable as we get older? Oh, that's such a deep question because on one hand, I want to say it is inevitable if you don't know the formula for making sure that you don't gain belly fat and weight. There's a formula, and especially for women. So if you're just living the traditional life and you've been doing the calorie in, calorie out routine, and you think it's about exercising more, eating less, yes, you will gain weight as you age. But what I'm asking people to do is to look at this through the hormonal lens. And with women, what we see is that as estrogen goes down, you become more insulin resistant. So estrogen starts going down in our early 40s.

And all of a sudden, the diet you did at 35 doesn't work for you at 43 or 44. So you have to start to make a change. And if you do, then weight gain is not going to be in your carts. But if you're not willing to look at a lifestyle shift through those perimenopausal menopausal years, yeah, then you're going to gain weight because your whole hormonal profile changes. You mentioned two hormones there that people may not be familiar with, or they may not fully understand them, estrogen, but also you mentioned a term called insulin resistance. Could you just explain, first of all, what insulin resistance is, and then I guess expand on what estrogen is.

Yeah. So insulin is the hormone that drives glucose into the cells. So I think of it as like an escort. It's like you eat a meal, you get a bunch of glucose, and then your brilliant body will make insulin. And then the insulin will come along to the glucose and say, hey, okay, let's get you in the cell so that we can put you to use. When we're insulin resistant, that system doesn't work. And so there's two, the basic principle of that is that the opening for glucose to go into the cell via the escort of insulin is clogged.

So you can't get either glucose or insulin into the cell. So what ends up happening is your body has to store it somewhere. So it stores it as fat. And that's insulin resistance in the most basic sense that I can really picture it in my mind, is that it's a chemical reaction that is not working properly. And so when it doesn't work properly, your body will store insulin, the hormone, glucose, the molecule as fat. Yeah. Well, let's come to estrogen in just a minute

because I think what you just said there about insulin resistance is really interesting. So I spoke to Dr. William Lee a few months ago on this podcast and he was sharing with me some research he came across. Now, to be clear, I don't know if this was research in men or in women. I know a lot of research is biased because it's done in men. And for many years now, I think we've finally getting this understanding that we just can't extrapolate that research to women. But one thing he told me is that between the ages of 20

and 60, our metabolism is rock solid. He said it doesn't change. Whereas we think our metabolism slows down. And he said the research shows, certainly the research he was sharing with me, is that actually, no, our metabolism is the same. But because of our lifestyles and how busy modern life is we put on fat we put on visceral fat and that visceral fat is what slows our metabolism down not the other way around so I found that really empowering to say okay it's not an inevitability that we're gonna put on weight as we get older But how does that fit in perhaps with what you just said, which is, you know, because men don't go through that huge hormonal change like women do in their 40s, right? You're saying that as estrogen starts to go down, women naturally become more insulin

resistant. So do you think that fits alongside with what Dr. William Lee said? Yeah, I would love to see the study because I bet it wasn't done on women, with what Dr. William Lee said? Yeah, I would love to see the study because I bet it wasn't done on women and it probably wasn't done on menopausal women or perimenopausal women. So this is the part of the conversation I want to start to pull out

is we need to study women by ourselves and we need to study women going through perimenopause and menopause. So I'm not discrediting anything that he's saying. I'm asking the world, can we just start to study women in isolation so we know more specifically? So that's what my response to the study would be. Now, the way my brain thinks this through, so we have three forms of estrogen. Estradiol is the major, most powerful form of estrogen that has been coming into a woman's body since the first day of puberty. That is the version of estrogen that leaves

starting around 40. And if you look at the human body, there are receptor sites for estradiol on every major organ, cardiovascular system, within our gut, on our brain, in our kidneys. So you are losing a major hormone that has been activating all these processes in your body, including metabolic ones. You're losing that hormone, which is making you not process blood, the glucose as efficiently. And that's what we need to study because I can put you in a room of hundreds of thousands of women that will all raise their hand and tell you at 40, I just couldn't lose weight anymore. And it's because you lost this powerful form of estrogen and she was helping every system in your body. And now she's gone and every system's starting to have issues now.

Yeah. You know, it's interesting as I reflect on that, I think what you're saying could fit completely alongside what Dr. Lee is saying, actually, because he was simply saying that metabolism is the same, right? So let's just assume that's correct for a minute. So let's say a woman's metabolism is the same as they're going into their 40s. It could be that their estrogen is going down, they're becoming resistant to one of the most important hormones in our body, insulin, which is going to drive weight gain if we're still doing

the same things. The things that women could do in their 30s when, let's say, they're more insulin sensitive, as they go into their 40s and they become more insulin resistant, that could be driving the weight gain as opposed to metabolism changing. So I actually think it could fit alongside what Dr. Lee is saying. For sure. I mean, this is where we got to get everybody in one room and have a big discussion. Or you listen to a podcast like this and share it out and open up the discussion because we don't have the research yet. So we've got to have discussions like this, and we've got to let women express themselves and share like, yeah, it's tough going through perimenopause and menopause. All the tricks aren't working anymore.

But we don't have a society that allows women to say that. So everything is sort of done at ladies' night and at the gym and on walks, and everybody's sharing stories there. So why can't we bring this to the research forefront? And then the other thing I want to bring up, which is another nuance here, is that we lose progesterone starting at 35. Now, progesterone calms us. So when we get into our 40s, now all of a sudden we don't have this hormone that was stimulating things like GABA, which is a neurotransmitter that calms us. We react to stress much more acutely. And that reaction to stress creates a cortisol surge.

And cortisol, when you have too much of it, is going right to your belly. So we have a double whammy. We have estradiol going down, making you more insulin resistant. And we have progesterone going down, destroying your ability to handle stress, making cortisol go up. And there you go. Now you've got menopausal belly weight because cortisol is up and you're insulin resistant.

And really it was because these two hormones were exiting. Yeah. I mean, no wonder so many women find it tough at that age. That's right. And you called it a double whammy. We could even call that a triple whammy and go, yes, estrogen's going down, making you more insulin resistant. Progesterone's going down, meaning you don't have that calming effect anymore. But then many women are living in a culture, a societal construct in many ways that actually has not really paid attention to women's needs

and how they change throughout a 28 day cycle. Of course, it's not always just 28 days, but doesn't really pay attention to a woman's needs through their cycle, but maybe also doesn't pay attention or as much attention as it should to their needs throughout their lifetime. Yeah. You know, I read a statistic the other day that women, depending on how long you live, will spend 40% of their life in menopause. 40% of their life will be without these hormones. Why aren't we studying this? Why aren't we creating a culture that can talk about this? Why aren't we helping women understand this? And that's the thing that I'm trying to bring to the world is like, if we just could talk about it, we could all come up with some solutions. But

instead what's happening is the 45-year-old woman is trying harder at weight loss. She's working out harder. She's dieting more, trying to get this result that she got at 35, but she's not looking at it through a hormonal lens. And the minute you flip the whole discussion on its head, the minute you start to look at it through a hormonal lens, and now that woman can start to get some serious weight loss results when she comes at it from hormones, not from grit and discipline. So we're saying it's not inevitable. It's just harder for women as they go into their 40s, unless they start making some changes. You've also mentioned the relationship there between stress, increased stress, increased levels of

stress hormone cortisol, and belly fat. Now, one big source of stress for all of us, men and women alike, is a lack of sleep. So what's the relationship between a lack of sleep and belly fat? Yeah. So this is where it gets really dark. So hang with us as we go through this, because whenever I really explain what's going on for a woman who's over 40, it's a bit depressing going on for a woman who's over 40, it's a bit depressing because she can't sleep. She's struggling to sleep. Because progesterone was the hormone that helped her sleep. So when progesterone goes away, now she's waking up in the middle of the night. She can't fall asleep. So I think we do a disservice when we go out publicly and we're like, hey, weight loss and sleep. You got to sleep so that you can lose weight. Again and we're like, hey, weight loss and sleep, you got to sleep

so that you can lose weight. Again, we're leaving the perimenopause and menopausal woman out of the conversation. She's trying. She's tossing and turning, trying to sleep. But she can't because she lost progesterone. And progesterone was that hormone that helped her get into that restful sleep. So again, we have to come up with another set of hacks, another set of tools for her that are going to be different than a younger woman or even a man. But yeah, I mean, you burn fat when you sleep. Your brain detoxifies when you sleep. You reorganize information when you sleep. All your organ systems will repair. Your liver dumps blood sugar when you sleep. There's so much magic to sleep.

We just got to help that woman fall asleep. Okay, so first of all, we don't want women who used to be able to sleep well and now are struggling to sleep. We don't want them to feel bad. And I think what you've just said is really quite empowering because it's like, no, no, no. Yes, you used to sleep well in your 20s and 30s, but there may be a hormonal reason why you're not to sleep well in your 20s and 30s, but there may be

a hormonal reason why you're not sleeping as well in your 40s. But what are they meant to do? I mean, you say we need some different hacks. What are some of your top tips then for women to get better sleep? It's a great question. So I think we have to reset ourselves to the circadian rhythm. So I'm a real big fan of women getting up close to the sunrise. So you're seeing that red light, even just if you could get outside if it's a sunny day and just sort of get that red hue. What it will do is it will turn melatonin off, which is the hormone that helps us sleep. And it starts your circadian rhythm. It will bring you back into a more insulin sensitive place. And then about an hour after you

get up, you're going to get some cortisol because your eyes registered light, that red morning light. And so once cortisol kicks in about an hour later, go move your body. So you got to get up and walk, you got to get up and work out so that you can use that cortisol, not store that cortisol. Then the second thing I think that women have to do is just, I mean, these are little simple things that you can build into your lifestyle. You got to go out in the sun midday without sunglasses on and let the receptors in your eyes see the daytime. So we got to be able to see that it's midday. And then at night when the sunset happens, can you even sit in a chair and look out using light to really help train that circadian rhythm? Now, the other thing

I would say is for the perimenopausal and menopausal woman, timing at dinner is really, really important. If you're eating dinner in the dark, when melatonin goes up, you're going to be more insulin resistant. And if you go to bed, when you are in that, as your body is digesting food, you are not going to sleep as well. I mean, I can tell you, I've looked at it on my Oura ring over and over again. Like the minute I go to bed, eat a late dinner and sleep, I don't get the same. So we've got to go back to simple things

that women might not be doing. And the book, The Menopause Reset, we reissued that with a sleep chapter. Oh, wow. And I just put all my sleep hacks in there. So that for perimenopause and menopausal women, there's a lot like, you know, keeping the room

cold. That's really important because as estrogen goes down, it signals to turn up the heat in your brain. Weighted blankets become really helpful for perimenopause and menopausal women. Like there's a whole sleep strategy. What's the evolutionary case for a weighted blanket? Yeah. I think I had a really interesting discussion with a woman who's a sleep expert. And we came up with this thought. Now, I have no proof, but we are so primally driven. What happened in the cave person day? We used cow hide or animal hide on top of us to sleep.

And we slept on a cold ground. We didn't have mattresses. So our body is primed for when it gets cold, all of a sudden we get into more of a parasympathetic state. When you have a heavy blanket on you, again, same thing, going more into parasympathetic. Now, if you go back to what progesterone did, progesterone helped you access that calming part of your nervous system. So now she's gone or going away. So when you get in bed, we got to do everything we can to activate that parasympathetic system. And that's where a cold mattress, a dark room, a weighted blanket, all of those things now start to prime your parasympathetic nervous system. Yeah. I mean, I've also seen so many patients do well

with weighted blankets. So many kids do really well. And it's really interesting to hear that potential evolutionary perspective. It sort of makes sense, doesn't it? Why would it not be the case? The other thing I'm hearing as you're talking, Mindy, is this idea that, let's be honest, the modern world is tough. Modern world is tough for many of us, particularly for women, who I think often are bearing the brunt of all kinds of pressures, work pressures. Still, potentially, there's a pressure to look after everyone at home, elderly parents, whatever it might be. And it sounds as though what you're saying, or one way of interpreting it, is that,

you know what? You can get away with it in your 20s and 30s, right? You can get away with it and your hormones are probably helping you in some way. But those changes or those lifestyle behaviors that you're not paying attention to that you're currently getting away with as you go into the perimenopausal years, you're probably not going to get away with them anymore. That's exactly it. That is exactly it. The term I heard, and I didn't come up with this term but i loved it is that women are at an evolutionary mismatch and it in in this modern world with the physical emotional chemical stressors that we have you can get away with it 20 and 30 perhaps although we could you know pcos is like on the rise and that's a another you know mismatch with our modern world. Well, just explain what PCOS is.

It's polycystic ovarian syndrome and it's insulin resistance mixed with toxicity that causes testosterone to go too high for these women. So we could look at every hormonal challenge, infertility. All of these are because the modern world is really affecting us hormonally in a negative way. And this is why, again, conversations like this are so important because what's happening is women are suffering and then they start to turn on themselves. They think it's their problem. They did something wrong and they don't realize that they're in this modern world that is throwing their hormones off. And I personally think the perimenopausal woman and even postmenopausal, but peri especially, is really getting at the toughest. that came from our first conversation together, which my audience absolutely loved, Mindy,

was just this very simple idea that once you know it, it makes complete sense. But until you know it, it feels like the world and society is blind to it, is that women run on these monthly cycles. We kind of all know that, but you broke it down so beautifully to say, well, men run on these 24-hour cycles, women run on these monthly cycles. And just that awareness that actually at different times of the month, women should perhaps be fasting differently, exercising differently, eating differently. I think for many, that was so, so eye-opening. I think for many, that was so, so eye-opening. Yeah, it's such a primal biological process that's going on in us every month.

And I think we have to start to look at many of the challenges that are happening to women of all ages as not working with those hormones. And the more I study this, the more I'm like, wow, the female body is just brilliant. But man, that same diet, that same exercise, that same workload, that same push on through that so many women are doing is destroying us hormonally because we don't understand ourselves. So we have to look, go back. And I remember you and I talking about like cholesterol and like how cholesterol goes up in the front half of the cycle. And then it goes down in the back half of the cycle. Okay. Well, why aren't we looking at blood work differently?

You know, diet, our diet and our exercise can be different in the front half of the cycle. In the back half of the cycle, it needs to change. It's once you grab it, it's not that hard to do. That's the key. It's interesting. The sleep hacks you recommended, a lot of them are to do with the light, our appropriate exposure to light. Now, first thing I want to say about light is I feel that although there's growing awareness about light, I still think we undervalue it because we're used to doing things or putting things on our mouth or getting on an exercise bike or something where we feel, oh yeah, this is a health promoting activity. Whereas I still think going

outside and allowing the sun to come into your eyes at different parts of the day, which is helping us set our circadian rhythm and our circadian biology, I still don't think people value it enough. And we're having this conversation in September in the Northwest of England, okay? And we've had a lovely weekend, but it is now raining outside. And you said that you want people to see the light first thing in the morning. You don't want them to eat in the evening when it's dark. And I guess at this time of year, it's still okay to be eating at 6pm, right? It's probably getting dark at 7.30 or 8, something like that.

What do you recommend for your patients, let's say in the height of winter? Yeah. Like here where I live, in November, it will be dark at 4pm. So not eating in the dark then becomes quite challenging for people, doesn't it? Yeah. So there's a lot of different ways you can sort of look at that. For starters, if you have the financial resources, you get yourself like a red light and you just put like a red light, just have it shine on your face when you get up in a red light and you just put like a red light, just have it shine on your face when you get up in the morning. I have a morning ritual that I do

where I get up and I meditate and I just turn my red light on and that simulates the sunrise. And then the same thing at night, you can do the same thing regardless of the time, put that red light on and then you have to be careful to not be on the computer and the phone and things like that. So we can use that as a tool. I actually love those full spectrum lights. They're very inexpensive and you can put them on and have them at your desk in the middle of the day. They're really easy to use and now your eyes are seeing that it's more full spectrum. And so you would bring in these tools in the winter. Second thing, I think it's really important when we talk about weight loss that we think about melatonin and insulin and how those two connect. Because ideally, if you want to stay a good weight or you want to lose weight, you should be eating when it's light out.

Okay. To your point, well, what happens when it gets dark? Well, what if you put in the winter time your heaviest meal in the middle of the day? And then at four, you're just eating a lighter meal. So flip it. If lunch was light and dinner was heavy in the summer, let's flip it in the winter. And then then, and then even better, what if you take after your biggest meal, what if you go for a walk or you do a bunch of air squats and drive that glucose somewhere other than to your fat stores? So they're, again, small little hacks that you're just going to need to adapt to. little hacks that you're just going to need to adapt to. What you're talking about is rhythm and different seasons to life. And I was thinking about this this morning, Mindy,

was trying to think about where am I going to go with Mindy today in our conversation? Because it was such a thorough conversation first time around about the female cycle and what happens at all these various phases of the cycle. And we'll definitely touch on that shortly because I think for people who haven't heard that, a little overview and a recap would be helpful. But I was thinking, and I'm very conscious of this because the season is now changing. We have this idea that we have to live the same way 12 months a year, get up at the same time, go to bed at the same time, eat the same foods, which is kind of ridiculous because the weather, the climate, everything is

different. We never would have done that in the past. It would have always been different depending on season, depending on weather. And you're kind of saying the same thing. That's the macro piece. But the micro piece is that women are going through these seasonal fluctuations every month. So we need to be, or women need to be thinking about, am I in the week before my period where, you know, last time you shared, women should maybe be having more carbs at that time, really quieting their workloads, almost kind of like a hibernation type period, isn't it? Yeah, it's recovery. Just taking a quick break to give a shout out to AG1, one of the sponsors of today's show. Now, if you're looking for something at this time of year to kickstart your health, I'd highly recommend that you consider

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This is the thing that I think is the hardest thing for women, especially those of us that want to achieve everything we possibly want. We want to have a career. We want to have a family. We want to do it all, but we are not honoring rest. Because of progesterone, because of the amount of progesterone that flows through a woman's body, progesterone demands that you rest because the minute cortisol comes up, she's out. Progesterone's gone. You cannot make enough. You will not make enough progesterone. And one thing I want to say on that, the biggest thing that has blown me away with Fast Like a Girl going out into the world is how many 20 and 30-year-olds do not have a cycle. And that's because

of this progesterone piece. Well, I wanted to talk about that specific problem actually. So throughout my years as a doctor, I would say it has increased throughout my career, the amount of women in their twenties and thirties who are complaining of no periods? Of course, there can be a whole variety of different reasons for that. But in your view, what's going on there? I think the first is that we are under too much stress consistently. So now let's break down what stress means. Because if we just want to make this simple, it's we need more rest and recovery the week before our period. Okay. So now a woman listening to this is like, okay, well, maybe I'll sit on the couch a little more.

But she decides to pick up her phone and she decides to go to Instagram. And she sees a bunch of other people doing things and it triggers a cortisol response in her head. She gets maybe, you know maybe FOMO or something. And now she's sitting on the couch and she is completely stressed out, not aware of it, which is also tanking progesterone. So I feel like what needs to happen that week before is let's just slow down your workouts. You can ramp them up starting day one again or day two, but let's just maybe more yoga, maybe more walking. Like let's just take a little more ease.

If you don't feel like working out, don't work out. So just be a little more mindful that you need recovery. Then let's up our carbs because we need glucose to be higher, but nature's carbs. So fruits and vegetables, maybe some potatoes, not cakes and pastas and pizza and things like that, but up nature's carbs. Let's prioritize sleep. So maybe we'll go to bed a little bit earlier that week before. And let's look at stress. Maybe you have to say no to a social event.

Maybe you have to come home a little bit earlier. Maybe you have to get off social media a little bit more that week, but you've got to protect the amount of stress that's coming in during that week. And if women did that, I think we would start to see the 20 and 30-year-olds get their cycles back. So you think maybe because of the chronic stress in society that I think we're all aware of, and particularly let's say in that age group, 20s and 30s, if you're not honoring your body's cycle, probably because you don't know about it and no one's ever taught you about it, right? Then actually you may not create the conditions that then allow your body to break down the womb lining and have a period.

That's right. Which is really very, very empowering. And I'm always thinking about, okay, there's so much detail in your book about the various things that you can do throughout your cycle, right? We're definitely going to cover them. But I really feel what you just gave there

was a powerful, powerful take home for people, which is if you do nothing else, but just in that one week before your period, you rest, you recover. You don't go on long runs. You're doing yoga. You're going off social media. I think this is really powerful because also it means if you're in a job where it's not really changing your workloads compared to your cycle, which is probably most people's jobs, you probably can't change that. You're like, well, my job is my job. I need to do it. It pays for childcare. It pays for my lifestyle. I have no option there. Even if you just plot out in your diary, assuming you've got a regular cycle, that's, oh, this is the week before my period. This is the week before my period. If that's all you do and you just make an intentional effort to go quieter

then, like that's going to have a huge difference. That could be all you need to do. Like that is so brilliantly said because you just need to recover that in that week. So maybe it's you just cut your workload, you know, by a third and you're just like two thirds of your effort. I've talked to a couple of female entrepreneurs that will tell me that they just don't, instead of doing like six Zoom calls that day, they'll do four. So they'll, or that during that week,

they'll cut that down. I've heard some women say, instead of like being all frazzled as they, and walking the kids quickly to school, they just prepare for a little more time so they can walk a little slower to school. Like if we just look at that week as recovery and we're not doing that because we're not having conversations like this. It's about empowerment this. It's about flipping the switch in our heads instead of going, how tricky is this? How frustrating is it that all these hormonal changes are happening? And again, look, I'm aware that I'm a man saying this, so I'm just trying to put it to you. I really don't want to speak for women on female issues. You're doing a phenomenal job.

I don't know about that. But the point is, is that I had a monk on the show called Tubton, lovely guy who was burning out in his life in his early 20s in New York. He was an actor, he was partying, and he burnt out severely. And initially he went to become a monk in Scotland as an escape. And then after a year or so of doing that, he realised, actually, I really like this way of life. And so instead of running away from his life, which is what got him to the monastery, he then intentionally chose, no, this is how I want to spend the rest of my life. And what was really interesting is that he said, and we discussed on the show, that when he tells people that, they always want to know, oh, you know, what have you given up? You know, you can't do this anymore. You can't do that anymore. You can't do this. But no one's really asking him what he's gaining. And I kind of see a similarity here. Instead of women potentially

seeing how frustrating it is, you can almost flip this and it can be empowering to know, wait a minute, I'm in tune with my body here, right? In this week, it's not that I'm a failure, that I can't do those six Zoom meetings. I'm actually taking control. I'll go, no, you know, I'm honoring my body by only doing three or four. And there was something in your book, which I underlined again, which I found really, really powerful. I definitely want to talk later on about the foods that support our hormones, but there was something in the book. Oh, here it was. You put this, the beauty of being a woman is that there is nothing simple about your

body. And I really paused when I read that because I thought, Mindy's completely reframing the way many people, many women, I think, view the frustration of their hormones not playing ball in their 30s and 40s. You're kind of saying throughout the book that, hold on, that's your superpower. Women's hormones are their superpower. The reason you don't like them is because you've not learned how to harness them. So well said. That is so well said. So one thing that I've been thinking a lot about lately is the fact that the number one driver for the human body is to stay alive, right? I think we talked about this last time, is that we were always, our body's

always thinking survival, survival, survival, which is why stress shuts down so many important mechanisms in the body because the body is like trying to run from a tiger. But for a woman's body, we have survival and we have a number two priority, and that's reproduction. So whether we're aware of it or not, we have these hormones that are coming in so that we can continue the species on, so that we can procreate.

And I'm not saying that every, this is not like every woman needs to have a child. I'm saying that your body was built to have a child, whether you have one or not. And those hormones have to be minded and nobody has taught you how to take care of them. So when we look at survival, this one's really interesting to me. The reason many times people can't lose weight is because they're so stressed out. And well, if you're stressed out, the body doesn't care about losing weight. The body wants to get away from the tiger.

Okay, same thing. If you are so stressed out, your body's like, we're not making a baby right now. We're running from a tiger. And every single hormonal system now goes off. And that's what we have to take back as women is we have to say, okay, I was programmed for survival. I was programmed for reproduction. How do I work with that? And that's a really simplistic, but very clear way of thinking about things, isn't it? Yeah. And you guys don't have to think about that as much. Your hormones don't demand that. Because we're

carrying the baby. So there's a lot more plumbing that has to go with growing and carrying a baby. Yeah. I mean, I can't tell you the amount of times in my career I've had a female, let's say in their 30s, who is struggling to get pregnant. And again, of course, there can be many different causes off that. But I would see so often if you could help that woman slow down. I remember one case, really driven, highly successful woman in her early thirties, who would go to the gym every morning at 5am before work and she'd be crushing it at work. And I remember saying, hey, listen, I think your body is constantly wired and you're in a chronic stress state, a chronic go, go, go state. And I just don't feel that your body is in a position where it actually wants to just go, yeah, I can release an egg now. You know,

you can get pregnant. And I said, would you be interested in not going to the gym? Could I persuade you to, as a trial, not go to the gym for four weeks? She said, do you think it'll make a difference? I said, look, I honestly don't know, but all your tests are clear. And this is the sense I'm getting from you. And literally a few weeks later from stopping going to the gym she got pregnant yeah and again that's an n equals one right it's not a scientific study but i have seen that so many times so many times so one as once i started to really understand hormones i was like there there are are so many lifestyle tools that we need to map to our hormones, exercise being one of them. So I got to know

Tony Horton. Do you know Tony Horton? I don't think I do. P90X. He did a whole online. So he was like a fitness guru. So I got to know him and I asked him, I was like, have you ever mapped out, like, why does, why do women have a weekly workout schedule? We should have a monthly workout schedule. And he's like, oh, tell me more. So I broke it down each part of the cycle. Like I have a really strong theory that when testosterone comes in during ovulation, women should be lifting heavy weights because you have all that testosterone there to build muscle. So we mapped out a whole program and we actually put it out. It just was released.

It's called PowerSync 60. Oh, my God. And it has a woman's calendar for her monthly calendar. So that shows where you can do harder workouts in the beginning, more weightlifting in the middle, and at the end, there's more recovery. And I hope this starts a trend. Let's just talk about exercise and in the context of the woman's cycle. So first of all, if someone is struggling, they don't know where they are in their cycle because they're not having a period, what do you say to those women, first of all?

It's the hardest one. It's so hard. And I think we talked about this last time. Really, the best map is the moon cycle. And the logic behind that is that if we didn't have all this blue light, most women would be cycling together. But we have so much blue light that's affecting our back at the light thing, right? Throwing off our hormones that we're all cycling different. But if you looked at the moon, many experts believe that the new moon would be the first day of our period and the full moon would be during ovulation.

And so, in fact, really interesting story. I was on the island of Kauai recently and we had a yoga instructor that was working with my friend and I and she also was a surfer. And she said, do you know that all the women on the North Shore, she's like all the, she owned a yoga studio. She's like, all the women I know here on the North Shore cycle together. And I'm like, why do you cycle together? And she's like, I think it's because we're outside so much. They were surfers. It's a very outdoor island. And my theory on that is they are actually seeing more of the moon and maybe even being in the water, the tides changing. But why would you see a group of women? Now, this is a story. We don't have science on this. But why would you see a group of women cycling together that are all outdoors in this island together? We are connected to nature. So to your point, we would use the moon if we didn't have a cycle to be able to try that.

It is so interesting. Do we know, for example, with other people who are outside a lot, let's say hunter-gatherer tribes, do we know if the women there cycle together? We read about things like red tents where the women go and they rest during their period. That's right.

And the rest of the tribe are doing all the work. They're allowed to just nourish themselves, I guess, for four or five days. That, I would love to know that. And that will be somewhere along my research. I want to go look at other cultures and see what are they doing and how are they managing this? What are the infertility rates? I think that's the first place to start is look at the infertility rates by different countries.

And then maybe we could dial down and see, okay, why does this country not have such high infertility rates? And then we could dial down and see, okay, what is she doing with her lifestyle? That's what's needed right now. You also hear of women saying that when they're sharing a flat with other women, they start to have their menstrual cycle at the same time. You know,

I've heard that many, many times. Is that something that's come up for you? Yeah, definitely. And oh, in my office was for sure, you know, we were tons of women in an office together. Always, we would just all sync up with, you know, and every new woman that would come in, a new employee, we'd be like, ah, well, this, here's when our cycle is, yours is probably going to be the same soon. So yeah, and that's through smell, believe it or not, it's through pheromones that we actually can smell the changes, which is also crazy, right? Like, how do we smell the changes in each other? It's so subtle and it changes our hormones. If smell of another woman in her cycle can change your hormones, imagine what, you know, the toxic beauty product you're using or the amount of stress you're doing is doing to your hormones.

This is why we have to bring hormone literacy back to women. It's so nuanced. And it's about getting back in touch with our bodies. We're talking about women here, but for men as well, like I feel that we've lost touch with ourselves. We're constantly looking to external experts for advice and expertise on our own bodies. And I say to people, look, listen to what people say, listen to what I'm saying or what Mindy's saying, but then kind of listen to yourself. Go, is that applicable to me? Does that work for me? Do I agree with that for me in my life?

Agreed. And I do feel that your whole work, which on the surface is about empowering women about their hormones, it's actually much bigger than that. It's about empowering women to know themselves better, to trust themselves better, and to lean into that. Yeah, thank you. That's exactly, you know, so interesting because, you know, people often say, oh, you're the fasting expert,

and it's fine. You call me whatever you want to call me. But in my heart, if you were to crawl in my heart and ask me what I really am trying to do is I'm trying to give women their power back. And fasting was the first step and teaching women how to fast and eat according to their cycle. But now we need to continue the discussion into what are all the intricacies of our hormones? What do I need to learn how to do? So let's talk about exercise then. I think we all know that exercise is important. So let's say on a typical, which is not even that typical anymore, 28-day cycle, just maybe give us a recap again of those three phases. And then if you could explain what kinds of exercise you think are most beneficial

at each stage. Yeah. This is also a really good nugget for people to take. So real quickly, day one is the day you start your period. So many women don't even know what day one is. So day one is when you actually need to use feminine care products. So spotting is not day one. And a lot of women have spotting and we can chat about that. But day one is when you start your period. So from day one to day 10, you're going to start to build estrogen. And the characteristics of estrogen are vast. I mean, she is going to give you great mental clarity. Ask any menopausal woman who's lost estrogen. She typically makes your hair really full and your skin very moist.

She gives you great ability to access both sides of your brain. So you can access both the right and the left side of your brain. So you're very, not only creative, but you're very articulate. This makes us, many of us, verbal processors. And she's building, building, building from day one to day 10. She peaks during ovulation. So at day 11 to day 15, we now have estrogen at her glory. And then, boop, you get a little blip of testosterone.

And testosterone comes in. And testosterone is going to be motivation and drive. It's going to be your libido. Testosterone doesn't typically have a food, like I can't tell you I would eat these foods for testosterone. But when we get to exercise, you'll see that I really want women to use testosterone to build muscle because that's crazy important. But we always think of testosterone as libido, but it's not really libido. It's also your motivation and drive to get something accomplished. And then we get a little bit of progesterone that calms us. So in the book, I called that the manifestation phase. That's day 11 to 15. So day one to 10, you call-

The power phase. The power phase. Day 11 to 15, the manifestation phase. So during that phase, the woman is ovulating, releasing the egg. Yeah. I also read a study yesterday. Check this out. This is how brilliant we are. You get right before a release of an egg, you get a surge of oxytocin.

The body, as estradiol peaks and an egg is about to be released, you get a surge. A woman will get a surge of oxytocin. Okay, why would the body do that? Because oxytocin makes us want to connect. So now, all of a sudden, I have oxytocin is going to make me want to connect with my partner, which is going to help, again, reproduce the species. Again, coming back to your previous point, there are two main goals for a woman or the body, biologically, I should say, survival and reproduction. So understanding how to harness that is really, really important. And so when you look at this manifestation phase, some CEO out there is going to hear this, somebody in a corporation.

I feel like you could take all the ovulating women, put them in a room and let them create because we are wickedly powerful. That's why I called it manifestation. We are locked and loaded with these hormones. So if you want to start a new project, if you want to paint, if you want to create something in your life, if you want to even start a workout plan, do it during ovulation because you have so many hormones. That's not the time for rest and recovery. That's the time to pull out women's empowerment card and do everything you want to do because you're so

hormonally locked and loaded at that moment. Yeah. Okay. So you've gone power phase, manifestation phase, days 11 to 15. Then you go back to the power phase for a few days, don't you? Yeah. Because you get a crash after ovulation, you get this crash of hormones. So I called it another power phase and I gave them all names because nobody can remember follicular and luteal. And so it was like, let's make, let's have a game out of this. Let's have some fun with this. I love that you do that because I think you're a really fantastic communicator and you really want to empower women and using these terms, I think for many, I think connects and

lands better than these kind of dry follicular luteal phases that scientists have used for many years. Yeah. Yeah. So power, when you think power, power is what you can power up on all your health habits. So you can do, you know, work out hard. You can fast hard. You can stay up late. Like those, you can power up and you're going to be fine. You also have power. So you can actually, hormones are a little bit lower. In the first power phase, you're going to be fine. You also have power. So you can actually, hormones are a little bit lower. In the first power phase, you're building estrogen that really helps with the mind, what you are able to do with your mind. But there's a lot more you can accomplish in those phases. Manifestation, okay, now we want to create. Now we want to bring some new project.

We want to solve some problem. I think you and I talked about this, that I really am encouraging people, if you have conflict to resolve with a woman, do it during the manifestation phase. She is locked and loaded with all of these hormones. She has all these hormones. She wants to sit down. She can verbally process with you. She's got progesterone, so she's going to be a little calmer. And she's got testosterone, so she's motivated to talk to you. Don't do it the week before her period.

We can go into that in a moment. But if we understood hormones, we would even understand better ways to communicate with us. Yeah. Well, we're definitely going to get to that. So I think that's super, super interesting. Sorry, I get so excited about

if everybody understood this. Yeah. So I think that's super, super interesting. I get so excited about if everybody understood this. Yeah. And I think you're right. I was thinking about our first conversation for weeks and months afterwards, because I think the implications of what you're teaching are so profound. Thank you. And the final phase, what would you call that again? Yeah. So power phase, the second power phase goes like day 16 to about day 18, 19. And then the final one is nurture. The nurture phase starting around day 20, you've got to nurture yourself. And this is really important because I was going to originally call it the

chill out phase, but you can chill out on your couch and still have stress. I want you to think of this time as you need to nurture you. Actively nurture yourself. So go get a massage. Like I said, how do you cut cortisol down? What activities can you do during that week to nurture yourself? If you do that, you're going to find your PMS symptoms won't be as high, and the day you start bleeding won't be as bad. But because we're not nurturing ourself during that week, during that, and for some people it's a week, some people it's three days, but during that time, and you're plowing right through that with all your stress,

this is throwing all hormones off. There's a really interesting point there for me, Mindy. A lot of us, a lot of women, I think, and I'm basing this upon clinical experience and what women would come in and say, they would often feel that hormonal problems or hormonal symptoms around their period are inevitable. Yes. And it sounds like from what you're saying is that in a lot of cases, the symptoms are a consequence of the mismatch between our lifestyle and our biology.

Yeah. So if that woman, for whatever reason, is not able to nourish herself for that week before her period, she's more likely to have uncomfortable symptoms because she's working against her body. That's right. And although that doesn't necessarily change it for someone, someone may feel that their life is tough and that they don't have time to nourish themselves. And they're looking after children and they've got a jobish themselves. And they're looking after children and they've got a job to hold down and they're looking after their parents, right? And I have so much sympathy for that. I think even that knowledge that they weren't able to honor their

biology for that week, that's why, or one of the reasons why their symptoms are so bad, I think that makes people feel less bad. They go, oh, I get it. And then by knowing that, and then a woman, if they're able to then experiment month to month and go, oh, that's interesting. Last month I was super crazy busy at work and I had social dues two days before my period and I really struggled with my PMS symptoms, can maybe then compare and contrast with another month where they're more intentional or they've got the ability to make changes in their life and go, oh, wow, when I chill that week, when I actually nourish myself, I feel a lot better. That's kind of self-knowledge. That's empowerment, isn't it? Yeah, it's total empowerment. And this is the big

thank you for the way you said it is so perfect. This is the challenge that I think women are scared. We're scared to get up and say, I can't do that. It's the week before my period. We don't have a culture right now that allows us to say that. Well, in culture, it's almost looked down upon. There are sort of jokes made. Oh, you know, I can't do that because it's, you know, not going to have a conversation with you now because, you know, you're coming up to your period. And those jokes, I don't think help because actually you're saying, no, there's real biology at play here. Yeah, right. So if we looked at the week before a period as a nurture time, you could say, let's say to your spouse, you can be like, hey, it's the week before my period.

I'm just going to take it a little easier. I'm going to nurture myself. Now, in an amazing relationship, your spouse would come in and figure out how to help nurture you and make it a little bit calmer for you. When we don't nurture ourselves that week before our period, what ends up happening is now we're going against biology. Now we're irritable. Now we're angry. So when women say, oh, the week before my period, I'm craving carbs. I don't feel like working out.

I can't sleep. Everything everybody around me is doing is making me mad. That is a moment to take a step back and go, wait a second, I'm working against my biology in this moment. There's so many implications of this. Right? You know, there's a wider point here, which is, forget companies for a minute. Let's talk about in a relationship with a couple, let's say a husband and a wife, a lot of the time, I don't think there's a strong communication about the stage that a woman is at in her cycle.

I'm not blaming anyone for this. I'm just saying, I think that is the case in many relationships. And so it begs a wider question, which is, is it appropriate? Like for many years, we may have thought, or men may have thought that's a woman's business. You know, I have no business asking my partner where they are in their cycle, but I guess you might make the case that no, this should be common knowledge for everyone because then everyone's empowered and everyone understands each other better? Yeah.

I mean, how do you think about that? That's exactly right. Like, I think if we could have a gentle conversation, let's play this out in two ways. The gentle conversation would be, it's the week before my period. I'm just going to be a little more because we get a little more introverted.

We get a little more intuitive. We go within. So if we could say to our spouse, hey, you know what? I'm just going to nurture myself. So, you know, just know that I'm in this week before my cycle. And the spouse was to say, you know, what can I do to support you? You don't have, this doesn't mean you're like giving her foot rubs every night, but if you can just say, how can I do to support you? This doesn't mean you're giving her foot rubs every night, but if you can just say, how can I support you in nurturing yourself? That would be huge, as opposed to what women are doing right now, is they're doing the same stressful life that week before, and now everything their spouse is doing is getting venom coming at them. So we could help relationships if we start to understand each

other's cycle. But instead, we're bitching about it. We're complaining about it. We have to flip this upside down. And that's why it's important, I think, as I highlighted in our first conversation, but equally in this conversation, that this information is not just for women, it's for men as well. And could you imagine a scenario whereby, you know, many of us have Google calendars for our work and our life, right? You know, this is what my work responsibilities are, this is when the kids need taking care or whatever it might be. Could you imagine a scenario where in some relationships, let's say in the man's calendar, in a heterosexual relationship, that they actually put down, oh, you know, my partner this week is when she's in her

nurture phase. So just knowing that as a partner could potentially allow you to be thinking, I might need to just go a bit easier with my work commitments there because I need to be supporting my other half then. I maybe can offer to make more meals then if I wasn't making them at an earlier part. I don't know, there's quite, I guess of all, I have a slight discomfort even saying this because I sort of also know how controversial it starts to get when we're talking about the differences between men and women. It's so true. It's so like, yeah. Triggered people often feel and how some women will say it's none of my partner's business where I am on my cycle. You know, whereas I kind of feel, actually, if we knew this more, there'd just be so much more harmony.

Yeah, exactly. So as you were talking, I was thinking, gosh, you know, even just if a spouse knew that week before and just was a little kinder with their talk to you, just like, just took a gentler approach to a woman, that relationship would be so much stronger. The relationship would win. And because that's not happening, that there's more PMS symptoms, there's more irritability. So that would be the first thing I would say. The second thing, and I really want to point out this idea about, God, it's really hard to make this kind of conversation in a world where we've got women that are leaders of countries and are doing incredible things. This sounds almost like anti-feminism. Yeah. But I'm not saying that.

I was raised by a feminist. I am a feminist. I raised a feminist. I am women empowerment all the way. And the new version of women empowerment is that we take a moment that week before to just honor the fact that our body needs to recover so we can come back out on day one and we can go at it again. Yeah, I love that. And I sort of feel we need almost a phase two now. So phase one, let's say, very simplistically, 50 years ago, let's talk about the UK or America. I live here in the UK, you live in America. Women didn't have as much opportunity as they do today. And I'm not saying it's even perfect today, but it's improving. That's a good thing, right? That's clearly a good thing. But did we, along the way in this, let's call it phase one, did we forget that we have biological differences?

That's right. And so it's like, it's not about going back. It's about going, no, no. How do we move forward? We move forward by going, yeah, women should have the same opportunities as men have always had. But let's also be mindful that actually we're on these monthly cycles, whereas men aren't. So we need to work within that. And then I imagine that understanding these cycles, you mentioned some of these CEOs you've had as your patients before, who instead of doing six Zoom calls, they'd reduce it to three or four the week before their periods. Well, I imagine just like if you meditate for 20 minutes each morning,

you get that time back later in the day, even though you think you can't afford the 20 minutes. It kind of feels that this is the same thing. If you take that time in the week before your period, if you can, you're going to have more energy and be more productive in your power phases and your manifestation phases. So actually, you're still overall going to be winning. You got it. That's it. Yeah. And that's it still overall going to be winning. You got it. That's it. Yeah. And that's, that's it. It's, we got to take a bigger picture. We got to zoom out a little bit from this. So, um, a couple of things on that. If, if you're in an environment, if you're listening to this and you're like, well, this sounds really great, but my spouse isn't going to care.

My company's not going to care. I don't, you know, I don't know how I'm going to nurture myself. Well, if work is really hard that week, then you got to say no to social events. You might need to do more yoga. You might need to get out in nature a little more. Where in that crazy day of yours can you nurture yourself? Maybe you're going to go for a walk in the middle of the day. I'm not talking, it doesn't have to be huge if your life is that chaotic. The expense of this is what I'm really trying to get across because even women like me, like I was the primary, I am the primary breadwinner of my family. When my kids were little, I was in my practice working 10 hour days, like just going at it and going at it and grinding. And the minute I got

into my perimenopausal years, everything fell apart. And then I started to understand this, and then I started to realize, oh, wow, I got to do things a little different. And there was a profound book I read that I highly recommend everybody read called The Rushing Woman Syndrome. And The Rushing Woman Syndrome was written by a woman named Dr. Libby Weaver. And she explained through a biochemistry lens why women need to rest more. And when I read that book, I wept because she spoke my language. She showed me the science. And I thought, and this was around 45, I thought, I got to do this different. Perimenopause is so hard. I'm not sleeping because I am not honoring the nurture part of me that

needs to happen. And the expense of not nurturing, I had a friend the other day, as I was telling this theory to, really powerful woman said to me, come on, Mindy, you of all people can push through anything. You're telling me that women need to rest more? And my response was, yeah, but the expense of that was some pretty wicked perimenopausal symptoms. The expense of that was lack of sleep. And for some women, the expense of that is autoimmune problems and Alzheimer's and dementia. Sometimes it's divorce. Sometimes there's an expense that we're not highlighting. And so I hope this opens a conversation up so we can all learn together.

But women need more recovery. Bottom line, how are we going to go about that? What drives you? Yeah, I think it's the way that women are thinking right now. It's the turning on ourselves. That is a big thing that I see in all of my platforms. I saw it in all and throughout all my clinic years was that when a woman is ill, she doesn't think that it's the problem with the food system. She doesn't think that it's her work environment. She thinks she did something wrong. She thinks she's not disciplined enough. She thinks that she, you know, didn't find the right diet or the right exercise. And she

turns on herself and the talk becomes negative. And that becomes a disempowering moment. And what I'm trying to do is highlight this hormone literacy so women can understand. And now this is the first time we've talked about this that I know of in human history. So we're at the beginning of this discussion. Now let's all talk about it so women can be healthy again. I think the funny thing is, Mindy, is that a lot of women will probably know some of this, or they would have known some of this, whereby, oh, in the week before my period, I'm tired. I crave carbs. But somehow I feel it's kind of almost a societal thing where it's almost drilled out of you where it's like, yeah, but you just got to crack on. Monday to Friday, it's nine till

five or nine till six every day, four weeks a month. It doesn't matter what stage you're in. So you almost, I imagine, forget about this innate wisdom that you may have had an inkling about at some point in your life. Do you know what I mean? I kind of feel it's probably not news to a lot of women that, yeah, in that week before my period, I do feel tired. I do want to rest more. It's probably not news, but you giving it a language, talking about the biology, the hormonal changes, I think makes women feel better about trusting themselves. Yeah. Yeah. Because when women aren't getting a result with their body, they do one of two things. They try harder or they don't try at all. And so they all of a sudden now they're like, well, I, I, you know, I'm overweight because my family's overweight.

It's just the way it's always going to be. Okay. Well, long-term consequences, you know, of obesity is early death and all kinds of chronic diseases. And when the woman who tries harder because she's not getting the result, she didn't understand her hormones. Now what happens to her is she's pushing on through, pushing on through. And what's the consequence of too much stress is chronic disease and early death. So like where in the healthcare equation are we talking about women's hormones? And in the menopausal world, we're just talking about like HRT, bioidenticals, great conversations, but where is lifestyle in this conversation? And that is what I want to bring to the surface. And then I hope everybody that listens to this podcast takes it to ladies night and shares instead of us bitching at each other. And I'll let you know what happens at ladies night. I've been there. A group of women will sit down and be like oh my husband's irritating me works is is impossible i can't lose weight i'm not sleeping we sit and bitch and i could go through each one of those complaints and i could give you the hormonal imbalance that caused that

what if women got together at ladies night and they were like oh man work has been really hard i'm in my nurture phase and so it's just been really difficult and I need to find ways to just give myself more self-care. What are you all doing? That would be a more constructive conversation. That's the world that I see. Or you walk into your doctor's office and instead of saying you need to lose weight,

the doctor is like, okay, tell me what part of your cycle you're at. How can I assist you in this? Or a woman says she's depressed. She's given a prescription. Like what we need to bring hormonal lifestyle into this. Yeah. I mean, you know, as a medical doctor, apart from if a woman is coming in with an obviously hormonal problem, coming in with an obviously hormonal problem, I don't think we're trained to ask the woman about their cycle. If they're struggling to lose weight, we don't talk about their cycle. If it's a blood test, we don't say which part of the cycle should we do that blood test in. So for all our advances, we're pretty behind on this. Because it's interesting, your message

is really landing with people all over the world, whether it's on my show or other shows you've been on. People love what you have to say, because I think there's been this big hole in society all over the world where, certainly in Western culture, I would say, but I think beyond that as well, actually, where we're just not aware of these basics. Yeah. You know what the biggest compliment that women give me, either on a podcast or if I see them out in public is they say, thank you. You see me. You see me. And that's what we want to do is we want women to feel heard, and that's what we want to do is we want women to feel heard, to feel seen. So all I'm saying is what a woman intuitively knows, but because of a patriarchal society,

and to me, the patriarchal society is power. It's not men. It's the power of the system, whether it's our healthcare system or our corporate world is not seeing her. And so she's having to take all these little hunches that she has. I want more carbs before my period, but I'm undisciplined if I do that. I want to rest a little bit more before my period, but oh no, I was told the trainer I would show up at the gym

because I need to look well. Like each one of these times we are pushing through these hormonal moments, we are separating ourselves and we're making ourselves not only sicker, but our brain starts to change and we start to think it's our problem. Let's go back to exercise. You've outlined the different phases of the cycle. So let's start with the first power phase, days one to 10. In your experience, in your view, what kinds of exercises should women be doing in those 10 days? Before we get back to this week's episode, I just wanted to let you know that I am doing my very first national UK theatre tour. I am planning a really special evening where I share how you can

break free from the habits that are holding you back and make meaningful changes in your life that truly last. It is called the Thrive Tour. Be the architect of your health and happiness. So many people tell me that health feels really complicated, but it really doesn't need to be. In my live event, I'm going to simplify health and together we're going to learn the skill of happiness, the secrets to optimal health, how to break free from the habits that are holding you back in your life, and I'm going to teach you how to make changes that actually last. Sound good? All you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash tour.

And I can't wait to see you there. This episode is also brought to you by the Three Question Journal, the journal that I designed and created in partnership with Intelligent Change. Now journaling is something that I've been recommending to my patients for years. It can help improve sleep, lead to better decision making, and reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. It's also been shown to decrease emotional stress, make it easier to turn new behaviours into long-term habits and improve our relationships. There are of course many different ways to journal and as with most things it's important that you find the method that works best for you. One method that you may want to consider is the one

that I outline in the three question journal. In it you will find a really simple and structured way of answering the three most impactful questions I believe that we can all ask ourselves every morning and every evening. Answering these questions will take you less than five minutes, but the practice of answering them regularly will be transformative. Since the journal was published in January,

I have received hundreds of messages from people telling me how much it has helped them and how much more in control of their lives they now feel. Now, if you already have a journal or you don't actually want to buy a journal, that is completely fine. I go through in detail all of the questions within the three question journal completely free on episode 413 of this podcast. But if you are keen to check it out, all you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash journal or click on the link in your podcast app. So one thing we haven't talked about is day one and day two. It's kind of a unique time.

You actually have more access to both sides of your brain those first two days because you're coming from this surge of progesterone, and then now all of a sudden it's crashed down and estrogen is going to build. So the first two days, I always say, listen to your own intuitive. A lot of women will say, ah, day one, my period starts. I don't want to work out. Okay. So if that's the case, give those first two days a pause moment. But by day three, estrogen is now going to build. So when it comes to working out, estrogen loves when you do your cardio, loves when you push your HIIT trainings. You can lift weights throughout the whole cycle, but really, estrogen would be the time to push yourself to the max, whatever that max is for you.

So can we very simplistically say the first half of the cycle is more about pushing? Yes. And the second half of the cycle is more about resting. That's right. That's right. And how would you split up though, day one to 10, and then 11 to 15? Like, is there something you would recommend people concentrate more on in days 11 to 15? I know you said that testosterone is higher, maybe you're going to put on more muscle mass. So you can do resistance training, as you say, strength training throughout the cycle, but are you sort of saying prioritize it more in the first half and particularly just before ovulation? Yeah. So those first 10 days, if you want to run

a marathon or you want more cardiovascular help, there's some really interesting research I saw recently that estradiol, again, the form of estrogen that releases an egg, estradiol also stimulates BDNF in the brain. And so that's a brain fertilizer. It helps with neuronal growth, with neuroplasticities, making those neurons able to hold on to information more. Well, really strenuous exercise can also stimulate BDNF. So if we can use when estradiol comes in, also use exercise pushing yourself, whatever it looks like, high intensity. I mean, there's so many different forms of exercise out there,

but more of a cardiovascular where you're out of breath. Now you're getting BDNF and you've got estradiol. You're wickedly, now we've stacked this. Day nine, you're a superstar because of using exercise to your advantage. And it may be if you have a personal trainer that A, your personal trainer, a personal trainer that, A, your personal trainer, especially if they're a man, probably needs to be aware of this and be thinking about that during their programming for you. But it could be that you're only doing these hard workouts for the first two weeks of your cycle. And then afterwards, you don't have to feel bad. You can just start to relax a bit more and lean more into, let's say, yoga. Now, I know yoga can be intense in some forms, but a more relaxing form. And then to make it really practical, Mindy,

I was thinking that something that I know a lot of women who listen to this show like to do is parkrun. So that's a 5K run or walk in your local town or village every Saturday morning that's done in community. It's a really special event. I'm a huge fan. I know many listeners are big fans. But I'm just trying to think, how does a woman in their 30s, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s take this advice and then use it through the lens of parkrun? And I'm thinking, well, maybe the first two parkruns that are in your first two weeks, you know, you can go and try and run it pretty quick and maybe go for a PB, a personal best. But maybe if you're in the final week of your period and the Saturday for park run comes along,

either you give it a complete miss and you don't feel bad about it. You go, yeah, I'm just going to miss it because I'm going to nourish. Or if you do it, you could walk it or do it at like half speed, do it really, really softly. So you can still engage in these things that are part of, let's say a seven day routine, which is how much of life operates at the moment, but you can adapt the intensity perhaps by knowing about your cycle. That's right. That's perfect. You took the same exercise and you adapted it to the menstrual cycle. So you're not missing out on that connection with humans, which oxytocin is the most powerful hormone we have. So if you're walking or running with friends, that's amazing. So you just are going to need to taper it down in the intensity

the week before your period. It could be that simple. So I like day one through day 10 of just, this is what I mean. This is not saying we are weak. This is saying we are actually ridiculously strong. We're even stronger when we honor our menstrual cycle. So day one through day 10, go after it with your workouts. Really, really push yourself. I encourage you to do that. And if you're lifting weights, maybe if you're doing reps that are like 10 reps in one set, maybe you do 15. Like really,

really push it. In the middle phase, in that manifestation phase, day 11 through day 15, this is another key one because you have testosterone. It is almost the only time of the cycle. You'll get a little bit throughout the rest of the cycle, but it comes in huge in the middle during ovulation. Okay, well, testosterone can help you build muscle. Okay, well, if I build muscle, I also create more insulin receptor sites. So I actually make myself more glucose

or insulin sensitive by building muscle. So how many women have you heard say, I, and especially menopausal women, I can't build muscle. I just am struggling, struggling to build muscle. Well, let's build it during that ovulation manifestation window. So my vision says you would maybe one day you would do biceps and triceps. The next day you would do legs and glutes. The next day you might go and do, you can still do a cardiovascular workout

because you've got a lot of estrogen there. The next day, then all of a sudden you do chest and back, but let's live really heavy weights and try to build muscle during that window. So you're getting more bang for your buck. That's it. Basically. It's like, instead of strength training and getting frustrated the week before your periods, it's like, no, be targeted, plot it out in your diary. Go, okay, in those five days, I want to get to the gym twice or three times and really lift heavy weights. Even if that means I don't lift weights in the final week, I'm going to get so much benefit from doing it there. That's right. And you can lift weights in the final week if you want.

I would just encourage you to make them pretty easy on you. So you can still do the same activity. If you have a rhythm where you go to the gym three days a week and you enjoy it, you're not saying stop it. You have to just sit at home and have an Epsom salt bath for that final week, right? Which as great as it may sound, may not be practical. It's more about just modifying what you're doing, modifying the intensity. That's right. That's right. So let's go back to Tony's workouts. When we created PowerSync 60, we created, I think he has about 11 workouts. And when he showed me the workouts, I was like, okay, these are really good here. These are good here. These are good here. But there's 11 of them,

so they have to repeat. So what we did when we actually filmed it is he has a stop option. And so halfway through is we were like, Hey, if it's the week before your cycle or you got to go, go ahead and stop. And, and, and it gave women or it's giving women the option to just not work out as hard during that week, but it's the same workout. What if the woman has been through the menopause? Okay. So they're no longer having these 28 day or these monthly cycles. They're through that. What happens in their body at that point? Are they still on some form of cycle and how does that change the exercise recommendations? Yeah. So the way we look at the menopausal journey, let me just sort of point this out because this also is confusing.

So there's the menstruating woman. There's the perimenopausal woman. Now, research is, you know, it's not even research. It's experts are saying that perimenopause starts around 35, which is so young. I don't think it's, I think there's an environmental piece there, but that's what they're seeing. So from about 35 to 50, you're going to have moments where estrogen's high, estrogen's low, and progesterone is declining, and your cycle might be all over the place. So that's the hardest phase. And we can chat about this in a moment.

I think of this phase as this is where you got to get to know the personalities of your hormones so you know how to adapt your workout schedule to it. And we can talk about that in a moment. Okay, my menopausal women, postmenopausal. Exercise becomes not just a physical experience for you, but it is a mental experience. not just a physical experience for you, but it is a mental experience. When we go into menopause, we lose estradiol, we lose progesterone. Those two hormones were stimulating, I've calculated to date, I keep looking for more, but they stimulated around seven to eight other neurochemicals. stimulated around seven to eight other neurochemicals. So estradiol stimulated dopamine,

serotonin, acetylcholine, BDNF, oxytocin. She goes into all of those receptor sites. Progesterone goes into the receptor site of GABA. So what happens to the menopausal woman is that she is now depressed. She doesn't know why. She can't think straight. She has ADD brain. She can't hold on to information. She doesn't feel connected to people because she's lost oxytocin. And so when you look at it through a neurochemical lens and all those changes for that menopausal woman, in the research that I'm doing right now, one of the biggest cures for all those changes is exercise. So I think for the post-menopausal woman, exercise becomes a whole different ballgame. I'm not telling you to exercise for your weight loss, although it will help. I'm asking you to exercise for your brain health.

Now, with that in mind, we still have the same rules apply. You don't have a cycle. So you can either choose a 30-day plan like we're talking. You could just simulate that with the moon. That's what we did in PowerSync 60 for the postmenopausal women. They just follow a 30-day calendar. And why would that help them if they're no longer having a cycle? Well, because you're minding all the hormones. So you're going through a period where you're helping estrogen. You're going through a period where you're helping testosterone. You're going through a period where you're helping... So it's not necessarily about matching what you were doing before. It's more about being intentional about your workouts and when you're doing things and make sure over a month you're

covering all your bases. That's it. That's it. You're covering all your bases is really well said. So that's option one. That's option one. I will say for postmenopausal women, you could do a weekly calendar. So a weekly calendar would look like you have certain days where you're pushing it. Let's say three days a week you push it. You have maybe two days where you decide to lift really heavy weights. And then you have one day or two days where you would do more rest and recovery, maybe yoga.

So you would vary it within a week. And you might do it based off what your intention is. If you want to build more muscle, then lift more heavy weights. If you want to try to help with BDNF and your brain capacity, you want to push your workouts a little harder. So it just becomes a little different dance. Yeah. I love that. Super, super helpful for people to think about what they're going to do at different stages of their cycle. Also really helpful for people to think about what they're going to do at different stages of their cycle also really helpful for women who've gone through the menopause as well we've touched a little bit on relationships and how we can communicate with each other depending on where

a woman is in her cycle now we're going to this topic tentatively with caution. You said, I think earlier that the best time to resolve any conflict with a female partner would be between days 10 to 15. Yeah. I think because we're hormonally have all of our hormones there to be present, to connect, like we are our best selves. This is the thing that I think we don't emphasize enough is when these hormones come in, we can be our best selves. And all three of them are coming in during that time. So whereas the week before our period, remember, we need cortisol to go down. So if you're coming at us with a conflict, you might get the worst version of us.

Okay. So let's say you want to be an attentive husband to your wife. Okay. Let's make it really specific. I'm not talking about anyone in particular here, just theoretical. Just anybody in the room, maybe. how can one be an attentive husband to a female partner over a 28-day cycle? Let's talk about your phases. Is there something that we can be doing days one to 10? 10 to 15, 15 to 20, 20 to 30, break it down for me. Yeah. And it's funny because I want everybody to take this, I want you to try it, and then let's all have a cultural discussion about it because nobody's written a book on this yet. I'm thinking about it. Yeah, you should be.

Yeah. So, but here's what I would say is that when estrogen comes in those first 10 days, remember, estrogen makes us great at multitasking and it makes us great as verbal processors. So, if you want to chat with us, if you want to like, you know, we're resilient to stress. So there's really nothing that a partner can do during those 10 days other than, yeah, you can bring conflict to us. There's not really, you don't really need to do much. Okay. Yeah. It's kind of a whatever goes, goes during that time.

Okay. Ovulation. We already talked about it. If you really want to deepen your relationship, if you have some deep conflict, do it during day 11 to day 15. That would be the time to really say, hey, there's some things that are going on in our relationship that I feel like we can improve upon. You're going to get the best of her. point out for a lot of women, their libido is a little higher during that time. So, you know, this is a thing if we, and I'm definitely not a sex expert, but what I would say is when we look at the menstrual cycle, a woman's desire to have sex can possibly change with her hormonal profile. And that makes sense, doesn't it? It makes so much sense.

If the goal of sex is to have a baby, well, it kind of makes sense that there would be a particular time. It also reminds me of something you said earlier on in this conversation, Mindy, where as estrogen is going up, I think you were saying that a woman's skin looks better, the hair becomes fuller. And I think we forget sometimes that we're animals, right? And actually things happen at certain times. So, you know, would you say that one would find their female partner more attractive between days 10 to 15? Oh yeah. Oh, that is scientifically proven because, and we're biologically designed to be more attractive so that we can attract a mate. That's exactly right. And the other thing I would say during that time is we want to connect more.

So if you're with a woman that doesn't like to, maybe, you know, there's a woman out there that's like, wait, I'm not, I don't like to verbally process. You might find a softer version of her during ovulation. You might find a version of her that really wants to connect with you. So there's an intimacy that can happen because she was made to be intimate so she could procreate. And then after ovulation, how can one be an attentive husband? Yeah. So after ovulation, you're fine for five days, just be you. There's nothing much to do for like four or five days, but starting day 20 of her cycle is when you got to nurture her and you got to give her space. And you might, it might be as simple as like,

how can I support you today? What kind of needs do you have? Is there anything I can take off your plate? Yeah. Like if my, you know, you know, I'm post-menopausal now, but if my husband had said that to me, especially in those perimenopausal years, man, that would have been an attractor factor for sure. And I would have felt very, very supportive or supported during that process. Yeah. I think there's a really important point here, which is by understanding this, not only can, let's say me as a husband support my wife, this, not only can, let's say, me as a husband support my wife, for a man or the partner of a female to really know this, it means then that you're not taking things personally as well. Oh, that's right. So let's say your partner doesn't want to talk, just wants to be by themselves a bit or just sit down, or, you know, maybe it's a bit more distant,

then understanding the female physiology and biology at that point, I think can really be transformative relationships because you're not then taking it personally. It's more like, oh, yeah, that's, I get it. That's what's going on at the moment. It's not about me. That's right. I saw a really interesting statistic that 70% of divorces that happen over 40 are initiated by women. Okay. Why is that? Now I'm not trying to keep everybody married. I'm not trying to get everybody pregnant. I'm just asking people to think of their hormones. Well, as she loses these hormones, there are so many brain changes that are happening. these hormones, there are so many brain changes that are happening. And because she doesn't understand herself, she thinks it's your problem. She thinks it's her teenage kids' problems.

She thinks it's her aging parents' problem. She thinks it's work's problem. She doesn't go, oh, okay, wait, I've got some neurochemical changes going on in my brain that I need to make sure that my lifestyle supports. And she doesn't, since that conversation isn't open, she turns on everybody else. Now, this is not for women that are like, well, that makes it sound like it's my problem. It's not. The problem is that we're not having this kind of conversation. Yeah. And you don't understand yourself. For years, I had so many women that came into my clinic and they said, whatever you do,

please help me stay out of my doctor's office. And I was like, why? Because they don't understand me. And when they don't understand me, all they do is give me an antidepressant. And I feel so lost in what I'm supposed to do to help my own brain health, help my own body health. And we start dishing out supplements and prescriptions when there's a lifestyle that women are working against. What's your take on HRT?

Yeah, it's a tangled one. So here's what i want to say on hrt and i and i i think there are many ways there's an n of one you have to figure out yeah so and i can tell you i've tried i've tried everything i've tried everything i've experimented with everything hrt made me almost want to kill everybody around me and then i switched to bioidenticals, which made me cry a lot. And so I had to like figure out my bioidentical path. So nobody, nobody has the clear answer. I saw a post on Instagram the other day that said women are going to social media to figure out the dosage of their HRT. Okay. Our healthcare system can do a lot better than that. And whether you choose HRT,

whether you choose bioidentical, bioidentical is no judgment, but it's not a free pass from lifestyle. And I think women are putting these patches on and they're like, okay, this is gonna be a lot better. Everything's gonna be good. And they're still not living in accordance with their hormones. So the study that everybody's revisiting on HRT, there's so much to look at that.

We don't know what the lifestyle was of all those women. We don't know where their detox pathways open that they could get rid of the estrogen. Was their cortisol high? What was their diet like? they could get rid of the estrogen? Was their cortisol high? What was their diet like? So we can't just, this is the problem with science is we throw one thing out there and the whole culture shifts because of it. But whether you do BHRT or HRT, there's a lifestyle you gotta match to that. And there's going to be your version of those prescriptions that are going to work. Yeah. It's such an important point because I think sometimes the narrative is,

well, hold on a minute, this is my hormones, what's the lifestyle got to do with it? So I know I need hormones. And again, this N equals one idea, I think it's something we all really need to embrace, not just for female hormones, beyond that. Like no scientific study tells you exactly what you need for you. Absolutely. And to many doctors, that would be quite a controversial statement, but it's just common sense. All these studies can ever do is just show us patterns and give us maybe a starting point. But just because it works for your mates at the end of the road doesn't mean that same approach is going to work for you because we've all got different bodies, different microbiomes,

different trauma histories, right? All these things, this whole myriad of different factors that play into who we are. And I really support what you just said there, which is very much, let's help people with their lifestyle. Let's empower them. Understanding that life is tough and some people are going to find it harder than others. Understand that some people will benefit from a form of HRT, but I don't think everyone necessarily will. And even if you do, it's still good to pay attention to your lifestyle, right? Yeah. So the book I wrote, The Menopause Reset, was five lifestyle changes that every woman needs to make after 40. Whether you do HRT or bioidenticals, you got to still make these five lifestyle changes. And if you match that with the right dosage of those things, that might be

magic for you. That might be incredible. But to the women that are like, well, my friend is thriving on HRT and I'm not, or I'm gaining weight on HRT, like, don't turn on yourself again. You just have to find your path. And this is where it's so hard because we want a one size fits all even for HRT. Yeah. What are these five things that people should do? Yeah, that's a good, it's a good question. You set it up. I was like, I'm not a woman. I want to know what are the five things that everyone over 40 should do? Yeah. So hopefully by now you can see I'm a little hormonal obsessed. Like I just see, I've been studying it, analyzing it, trying to figure it out. So these five are what I could

tell right now. And then I'm actually writing a book. My current book is on the brain changes that are happening to women over 40 because of the loss of estradiol and progesterone. And I've come up with so far about 20 things she can do to support a better brain health. So that's to come. Okay, the five. You gotta fast. You've gotta vary your fast.

As your estrogen goes down, you become more insulin resistant. We already talked about that. So bring fasting in. It's gonna help with your menopausal weight gain if that's happening. You got to vary your foods. You know, sometimes you're going to need to go into more of a keto style. And I feel like keto is getting a bad rap, which is fine. I'm not a keto fanatic. I like to

think of carbs as bad carbs and good carbs, just like we've gone bad fat and good fat. So we need to bring the good carbs in. That's nature's carbs. That's potatoes and the fruits and the vegetables. And we need to get rid of the refined flours and sugars. And women are going to have to bring up their glucose sometimes and bring it down. So there needs back to your rhythm. There needs to be a rhythm. And it's in that week before their cycle where you're wanting them to bring in more of these carbs from nature. That's right. Yeah, exactly. And then if they're post-menopausal, you could just take one week where you eat more carbs and you could do the other time where you're more low carb. So have a cycle. Yes. Don't keep it

the same all the time. Have some sort of variety. Okay. Which is interesting because everything in nature cycles. It's true. And when we look at the moon, back to the moon for a second, what is it? It's about 30 days, very much like a woman's cycle. That's not coincidence. So we've just in this modern world just like pulled ourselves away from nature. But there's a cycle for everything.

Then the third one is your microbiome. So what a lot of women don't know is that there are literally a set of bacteria in your gut that break estrogen down. So let's tie in the HRT conversation here. What I've seen, I experienced this myself, I've heard other women experience this, is whether they do HRT or bioidenticals, if the microbiome that breaks down estrogen is off, or if the liver is overloaded, which also breaks estrogen down, the brilliant body, if it can't break estrogen down, will store it as fat. And so all of a sudden you start seeing the fat on the arms, the fat around the belly, because that microbiome is so depleted. So we want to bring in more of what I call the polyphenol,

probiotic, prebiotic foods, more sauerkrauts, more diversity of vegetables, those kinds of things matter. Throughout the cycle? Always. Always. Yeah. And if you have, if you're perimenopausal, the most important is that manifestation phase. Yeah. On our first conversation, I think you covered that where you said between days 11 to 15. Yeah.

Is it then you want to detoxify the hormones or just after ovulation? Afterwards, yeah. After ovulation. But you can start. I mean, you're never going to, but yeah, a lot of women post ovulation are bloated. It's because the estrogen is not getting out of you.

Let's get it out of you. So more cruciferous vegetables, bitter foods. These are the things that are going to really help them. That's right. But breast tenderness, the weight gain we feel like as we move into that nurture phase, all of that is just estrogens trying to get out of you. Let's help her. You can even do, we've taught

women to do like castor oil packs around their abdomen to help, castor oil can help open up everything and make sure that you get rid of all those hormones. But yeah, and if you don't get rid of them, you store them. And if you store them over time, that's a cancer situation. So that's really important. So microbiome, and a lot of women have been on multiple rounds of antibiotics. A lot of women have been on birth control for decades, all of which is destroying the microbiome. If there was a time to not drink alcohol, I don't know if you and I talked about that. I would say it's around ovulation going into after ovulation because your liver is going

to break all those hormones down. So basically at that time, going into ovulation and just beyond it, you don't want to be putting additional strain on your liver because you need your liver working for you really well, specifically at that time. That's right. Okay. Yeah. So, and then, okay, so that was microbiome. The next one is toxicity. So this one gets really depressing because we live in such a toxic world.

We do. And there's two parts of the brain, three parts really, that aren't protected by a blood-brain barrier. And that's your hypothalamus, pituitary gland, and pineal gland. So those are the hormonal control. So when we're lathering our body with toxic lotions, the perfumes that we have, the air fresheners, I mean, they're everywhere. And they go right up into the hypothalamus and the pituitary and they throw off all your hormones. So for the woman over 40, again, you might've gotten away with a toxic perfume at 30, but at 45, it could throw your hormones off.

perfume at 30, but at 45, it could throw your hormones off. And I think this is not that commonly known. I think people, when they think about health, I think many of us are thinking about the foods. They may even think about organic foods versus non-organic foods and all this kind of stuff. Think about pesticides. We think about sleep. We think about exercise. I don't think enough people are thinking about and talking about what are the products I'm using on my body? What's the soap I've got at home? What's the shower gel? What's the shampoo? And the more you delve into this, that's really good reason to go to more natural, less toxic products. Yeah. On know, on the toxicity issue, you know, if you don't believe what we're saying, go research it yourself. I'll give you an example. I don't want to go deep into EMFs, but there has been a lot of thought about what our cell phones are

doing, our electromagnetic frequencies. Well, I don't know if you saw this week that one of the cell phones, France, is actually now banned. Yeah, iPhone 12, I saw that. Yeah. So, you know, we can sit here and say these toxins don't affect us. And you can look at you and I having this conversation is like, we're crazy. But what I'm finding is that everything I said 10, 20 years ago is now actually being proven when it comes to toxicity. Yeah, toxicity comes in many forms. And also, some people are really, really sensitive. Yeah. I think the best way to think of this in our brain is if your health is working for you right now, amazing. Exactly. Keep doing what you're doing. We're not trying to persuade you to do something different. But

if your health is not working for you, the best thing you can do is go back to our primal friends and say, what did they do? And how can I mimic that? And when we look at, they weren't lathering themselves with toxic beauty products. They didn't have these artificial ingredients in food. They didn't have EMFs. So when you look at the toxic load, you have to then ask yourself, what can I pull off? So like natural beauty product, it's becoming much easier. There's a great app, Skin Deep, or another funny app that I love is called Think Dirty. And you just scan all of your products. I taught my daughter this when she was 13. This was 10 years ago. I'm like, just whenever you buy a product, scan it and it'll tell you if it's toxic or not. And so we have ways to kind of navigate this very

complex moment. But what I don't want people to do is listen to this and go, oh my God, how do I stay healthy? It's like, okay, let's just go back to our primal friends. Let's just think about all the things they did and let's try to mimic as much as that as we can. There's a lot of natural wisdom that we've lost, isn't there? Yeah. We can maybe look at this like a bell curve. So if on one end were the simplicity of our ancient healing strategies and the way that we took care of our health when we didn't have all this modern technology. As the modern world has been ramping up, we've hit this peak now where we are in this modern physical, emotional, chemical mess. If we don't stop and try to go back to some of these ancient healing strategies, that peak may just

continue up. But if we just are willing to bring a few in, like fasting and some things that are very simple, trying to live life more with our hormones, maybe now we can start to come back down to the bottom half or the back half of this bell curve. You mentioned one of the things that you would like to see all women over 40 do is fast. And in our first conversation, we went into detail about different lengths of fasts and at what point in your cycle you should do these varying lengths. So for people who haven't heard that, I'd really encourage you to go back and listen or watch that first episode. The question I want to ask you in this conversation, Mindy, is do you think fasting is for everyone and in particular,

every woman? Because it's very controversial for some women. They will say fasting is not for me. Fasting is dangerous. And I'm really interested, what's your perspective on that yeah it's so interesting because people get really fired up yeah when I say fasting is for everyone they're like well you know I'm out that doesn't make sense okay well what do you think of sleep sleep sleep is for everyone but not everybody can sleep sleep is a healing state you put yourself. Sleep is a healing state you put yourself in. Fasting is a healing state you put yourself in, but not everybody thrives in a fasted window. And that's what I'm trying to help is all these little tricks that we can do to thrive in a fasting window. So let's just be really clear what you mean there. So not everyone thrives in a fasting window

at the moment because of their current state of health. That's it. Right? So you believe if we were all, let's say, in optimal health, that we could all thrive whilst fasting. That's right. That's right. So because it's an energy system that is in your body. So even if we can look at something like the brain, 50% of the brain fuel source is a ketone. So how else are you going to get ketones if you're not fasting? And define a fast. So fasting is when your blood sugar comes down enough over a significant period of time,

and usually that time is somewhere between 8 to 12 hours without food going in your mouth. Your blood sugar will come down and it triggers a response for your body to switch over to the fat-burning ketogenic energy system and to use a different fuel source. So can we say that if you're fasting for 12 hours and every 24 hours, which some people say is not a fast, some people say that's what we were all doing 50 years ago, which is probably true. But essentially that's like having your breakfast at 8am, finishing at 8pm and then not eating anything until the following day's breakfast. That's right.

So, you know, that is very gentle. That qualifies as fasting according to you. And what kind of benefits do you think we can get if we do one of these very simple, short fasts? Well, somewhere between like around 12 and 15 hours, we're seeing inflammation markers come down. That has been well-researched. We're seeing a lot of metabolic markers that start to bring themselves down. Like, you know, you can see like 16-8 was one of the most popular studies ever done. It was an article printed in Cell Metabolism. Yeah. That's 16-hour fasting, isn't it? Yeah. 16 hours fasting, eight-hour eating window, and they saw all the metabolic markers come down. Liver enzymes balanced out, blood pressure came down, cholesterol regulated.

I mean, you were what I call metabolically immune from the damage of a Western diet. So if you don't want to change your diet, just fast 16 hours as much as possible, and you're resetting that whole metabolic system. What about people who would say, hey, Mindy, listen, life is stressful enough and fasting is an additional stressor on the body. I don't think I was like, okay, how are we going to do this? And what I decided to do is take their eating window and slowly, slowly compress it. So I took whatever their natural state was. So let's say they're like seven hours without eating. And I was like, okay, can we just go seven and a half hours?

And I would try that. I'd have them do that for about a week. And if they're okay, then the next week I would be like, okay, can we do eight hours? And so I call it tiptoeing in. I just slowly tiptoed them into this fasting lifestyle. And every single time they got more energy, every single time those adrenals healed to the point that I didn't even need any supplements anymore to help support them. And when you say adrenal fatigue, are you essentially talking about people and women who have been under chronic stress for a sustained period of time? Yeah. Adrenal fatigue to me is a combination of the adrenal system, the HPA axis,

the hypothalamus pituitary adrenal axis is off. It's not working well. Because a lot of people don't like that term, do they? They get very frustrated with that term. But I think what you're talking about is this chronic unmanaged stress that over time causes some dysfunction in that HPA axis, your hormonal kind of master control center in your body, as it were. And you're saying that even in those cases, if you start small, you can bring up the fasting. Right. And to your cortisol question, exercise raises cortisol. So cortisol is not the enemy. We just don't know how to dance with cortisol yet. We haven't learned how to use cortisol. And if we look at like a little bit of cortisol is made to upregulate a lot of processes in

our body, it's when it's done too much that it's a problem. So with somebody who's really worried about a stressed out life, they don't want to fast and create more cortisol surge. Then what I would say is like, let's just have a more gentle approach, just like you would have a more gentle approach with your exercise. You wouldn't just, you don't want to go after it in a big way to raise cortisol up so high. Yeah. I love that. And I guess another way I'm thinking about this for people, Let's say a woman is listening to this and they're resistant to fasting. And let's say they're resistant more to 16 hour fasts, 20 hour fasts,

and they've heard or they follow someone on social media who said women shouldn't be fasting like that. Even if they simply took your advice about the cycle and the different phases and in the final week before their periods were more kind to themselves and allowed themselves to rest and nourish themselves more. And they exercise according to your recommendations at different parts of the cycle. Well, even that is going to make massive improvements, even if they don't go the next step and do some of these longer fasts that I know you're a fan of. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You hit the nail on the head. You know, we're going into a lot of nuance because, you know, there's people listening that are going to grab different things that will be helpful. But if you're overwhelmed,

exactly what you said, let's just start to look at this week before our cycle. And let's think of all the things we can do that we can mellow out on. And if we just did that, and then minded the rest of the cycle, I mean, there would be so many health issues that would be helped. We have a membership academy. It's called a Reset Academy. And we have thousands of women in there. And we do all kinds of different fasts together. Some of them, I would say the majority of them love what I call an autophagy fast, which is 17 hours because it's a bit of a detox. But about twice a year, we do a three-day water fast together. A lot of them don't want to do

that. And there's no judgment. I'm not like, hey, what do you mean you don't want to do it? It's a menu, those six fasts I put in Fast Like a Girl. It's just a menu, and you get to choose according to what you need. You've helped thousands of women around the world improve their health, Thousands of women around the world improve their health, some with the help of fasting, some without that. There's two groups of women I just want to make sure we've covered. One is night shift workers and the other is athletes or people that are really into sport and let's say endurance sports. So let's start with shift workers because a huge part of the population is shift workers. For, I don't know, let's say a female in their 40s who is starting to experience hormonal changes,

but they, let's say they're a nurse doing, you know, 8pm till 8am shift. How would you advise them to maybe take some of your principles and feed that into their life? Because of course, their lifestyle is already against their natural skating biology, right? But I think you can still help them. Yeah, I think we just have to break it down. I mean, for starters, my heart goes out to the shift worker because there's a real hormonal change shift that happens there. So let's say that 8am they go off to work. Sorry, 8 p.m. 8 p.m. That's right. So I'm considering that they would eat dinner before that.

Now there's two ways you can go about this. There's a part of me that if it was me, I would eat dinner at like 7.30 and then I wouldn't eat throughout my whole shift. And then I would come home in the morning and I would eat a light meal. So I'd probably have my biggest meal at 7.30 and have a light meal when I get home. And what sort of meal would you have at 7.30 PM before your shift? Oh, I'd have a lot of protein. I would have, because protein is going to give all the amino acids for your brain, for your energy. I would, I mean, if you eat meat, I would have like a grass-fed steak and some salad and maybe a sweet potato.

Okay. So you'd have that before you go to your shift, you would fast during your shift. And what does that mean for fluid and drinks? I'm a drink lover. So you could do mineral water with no sweetener. You could do regular water. You could do tea. You could do coffee. You could put like a mineral packet in there. Just make sure it doesn't spike your blood sugar. So no juices, soft drinks, tea or coffee with sugar to keep you up at night. No, no. So tea or coffee, fine, but you would say no sugar. Yeah, no sugar and no NutraSweet, like any of the synthetic artificial ingredients. And why would you not say someone, again, this is optimal, right? Why would you say to that nurse who may be knackered at 2am and is fancying a black coffee with a spoon of sugar in to help them get through the rest of

their shift? Why not the sugar? Because it's going to raise your blood sugar up. So, you know, it's a really interesting example of this is one of the more interesting fasting lifestyles I had to put together was an actress who had in the middle of the night, she was filming. You wrote about this in the book. I remember reading it this morning. Yeah. And so when she came to me, she's like, I'm exhausted. And so I gave her this exact protocol. I'm like, okay, we're going to eat before you go to bed. You're going to eat a big meal before you start filming and you're not going to eat during the night while you're filming.

And like within days, her energy went through the roof. And we forget, don't we sometimes that digesting food, of course, food is important, but it takes energy. That's right. Right. Quite a lot of energy to digest our food. So sometimes when we fasted for a while or not eaten for a while, we can have pretty good cognition, you know, and loads of mental energy. So one thing that I did when I first understood fasting is I wanted to bring it to my patient base. And every January, I gathered hundreds of people

together and we would do what I call a reset, where we would do experiment with new health tools. And we would do it for the whole month of January. And I just discovered fasting. And I thought, oh my God, my patients are going to think I'm crazy. Like I've been talking about food and quality of food, and now I'm going to tell them no food. So I decided to go on a five-day water fast. And on the fifth day, I gave the presentation to them. And I explained all the science behind it. I told them what was going on. And then I said to them, and just so you know, it's Saturday today. I have not eaten since Sunday night. I'm like, do I look like I'm exhausted? And everybody came up to me afterwards. They were like, that was the best speech you ever gave. Like they could see it very clearly that I wasn't dying. So to the shift

worker, I would say, if you could follow that pattern, you're actually going to be, your performance at work will be better. You're not gaining weight. You're minding melatonin a bit. And then you are, then you can go back into this recovery place. I love that. Super helpful. For the athletes. So there's also this conversation online about female athletes and that fasting is not the right approach. They need food, they need energy. And I know there's a lot of nuance there, so I don't want to misrepresent anyone else's work. In Fast Like a Girl, I think there are a few case studies of athletes or female endurance athletes who you've helped. Oh, yeah.

Right. So what's your take on it? Yeah, I will completely refute that statement because I saw it in my clinic all the time. My clinic was a bunch of 45 to 55 year old, high tech, overachieving athletic people. And so when we started implementing fasting, I watched their times improve in such a huge way. So again, we can't make a blanket statement like fasting's not good for an athlete.

We have to go, okay, so I'll give you a classic of what I did with some of my 50-year-old athletes in my clinic. As I told them, like Monday through Thursday, I want you to eat, when you eat, you're gonna eat a lot of protein because protein builds muscle.

But I want you to experiment with a little bit of the longer fast. So maybe like one day you do a 15-hour fast, the next day you do a 15 hour fast. The next day you do a 24 hour fast. The next day you do like a 17 hour fast. Like let's just play with them. And then every time you go back into food, you need to make sure that that first meal has 30 grams of protein in it, because that's going to help build muscle strong. And you're going to work out in a fasted state. That was what we did. Then on Friday, you're not going to fast and you're going to protein load. And what the science shows,

it's called protein cycling, where every two hours you are going to do 20 to 30 grams of protein all day long. It is the best way to stimulate something called mTOR. mTOR builds muscle. So do that on Friday and knowing that Saturday was going to be the hardest workout. It was going to be competition day. It was going to be the workout that was the most demanding on your body. That day, you don't fast. That day, if you like carbs before you work out, you do carbs. And then on Sunday, you do another protein cycling day, no fasting. So three days a week, you're not fasting. Two of those days, you're powering up on protein. What I say, four days, you're fasting a little more, but still keeping protein in the mix. So that was what got performance through the roof. Yeah.

You're really talking about an individual approach, aren't you? So we're not leaving anyone with any doubts. What, in your experience, are the cases where we should be very cautious with fasting? I think eating disorders is one of them. Yep. Eating disorders, you need to involve your practitioner with you. And if you can't, then don't fast.

Yeah. Okay, second one is pregnancy. Pregnancy. Not your tool't, then don't fast. Okay, second one is pregnancy. Pregnancy. Not your tool. Don't even try it. And the third one is nursing. But if you're a nursing mom, don't go more than 15 hours because there'll be start to be a detox. And what about if someone is trying to conceive,

they're trying to get pregnant, what's your advice on fasting for that sort of person? So when I came up with the fasting cycle, I tested it in the book. I tested it on all kinds of women in my clinic. And I found that the women that had trouble getting pregnant actually started to get,

actually were getting pregnant for the first time. And here's why. The front half of your cycle, I had them do more fasting. So now they've cleaned up estrogen. They go into ovulation. And now I had them bring their fast down. I had them eat more vegetables

and more protein during that time. And then when they came out of ovulation, they didn't fast. They did more minding progesterone and they did more hormone feasting. I have the protocol in the book. It's an infertility protocol. That got women pregnant

like this so fast. Because you're using fasting for women in that age group to help work with their cycles. That's right. Almost to strengthen their cycles, I guess. That's a great way to look at it. So it's, yeah. So these, I guess the point I was trying to make is that, you know, I've been doing this podcast for almost six years now and it's just amazing how nuance is often lost online. And it's incredible how many people are so sure of themselves with their view without realizing that that may work for some people, but it doesn't work for everyone. And I think why it's so obvious to me is having been a clinician for so long, having seen tens of thousands of patients like you, I've just seen that different

things work for different people. You simply cannot say fasting is good or bad for who, in what context, at what age, how long. But what you can say on an evolutionary level is if we as humans weren't able to fast, we wouldn't be here now. That's right. Right. We can say that with certainty. We know that. Yeah. In fact, this is something new that I'm trying to figure out. In the book, I wrote about a thrifty gene hypothesis. And it says that the humans that evolved out of these caveman days had a specific genetic profile that allowed them to go long periods without food. And there's a belief that each one of us has that gene in us right now. So when we're eating all day long now, we're actually now going against our genetic profile. And they believe that that's one of the things that's contributing to diabetes. So now it's working on the other end. And the other thing, I really love what you're saying about social media because I think this is really important. Discussions like we're having right now

can heal. I encourage people, go back, listen to this again, take notes. There's so much in this that can heal people. But what we want is we want to be spoon-fed the answer. We want the quick thing. And we see a comment that somebody says, oh, that's not right. Or this is, and we forget that we're all individuals.

But when it comes to health, there are no absolutes. None. And if you're looking for the absolute, you will continue to be disappointed. Yes. Like we said earlier, you've got to use this conversation or any other conversation that you're listening to or any book that you're reading as a starting point. Take it and go, wow, that's interesting. If all you take from this conversation is, wow, I need to be doing different things at different parts of my cycle. Great. Start there and see how doing different things from month to month changes your experience, right? That's how you'll learn. Then come back to it again and go, oh, you know, it wasn't, oh, I didn't, you know, I was having too many carbs at that point or, it might be. Learn about yourself. Enjoy the process of learning about yourself. I do feel that we've got... I love the ability of

podcasts and social media to empower people. I love it. I've been using it for years myself to try and help people. But at the same time, I feel that one of the consequences is often that a dependence is created where it's like, yeah, but that expert told me to do that. And that expert says the opposite to that expert. And I say, okay, I get that's confusing. Try it out for yourself. See what works for you. It's such an important concept that needs to come to the surface right now. If the way we have done it is working, which I'm going to call the way we have done it is working, which I'm gonna call the way we have done it

is you have a set of symptoms, you're given a specific diagnosis, you're given a tool like a medication or a surgery. If that was working, why are we as culturally as a world sicker, more obese, more chronic disease than ever before? Like at some point we have to stop and say, gosh, this isn't working anymore. We need something different. But it's going to be up to us to each find our own path. So I use the word in my own head all the time.

Well, I'm curious about that. Yeah, let me try that. I'm kind of curious how that is. How will that work for me? I'm doing all this research right now for this new book, and I'm really coming back in love with all these concepts of exercise. And here I am like five days and kind of getting over jet lag. I wonder if I could apply some of these principles to help my brain feel a little bit clearer with jet lag. Sure enough, like 30 minutes later, I felt like a different person. So it's like, we have to be curious about how to use lifestyle to heal ourselves. Yeah. And that applies to fasting specifically, where I feel that in a world of abundance, fasting teaches us so much about ourselves. So true. You know, you learn, like when do you start, when do you feel like you need something? Yeah. Like it's that real hunger. Yeah. Or is it a bit of boredom? Oh yeah. Or emotional discomfort? Yeah. Right. I get it's

not for everyone at every stage in their life. I absolutely, yeah, stand by that. stage in their life. I absolutely, yeah, stand by that. But I do believe for people who do want to give it a go and try fasting, you will learn things about yourself that you probably didn't know. Yeah. You know what we're doing right now is we're actually putting together a Fast Like a Girl journal because I wanted to give prompts to questions for people as they fast to start to ask themselves. Fasting, I have watched change people's relationship to food like nothing I've ever seen. Because when you're in that fasted state, the monkey mind goes and it says, oh my God, I need food. Oh my God, I'm depressed. Oh my God, I'm going to pass out. Pay attention to that. Pay attention to what you're hearing because that might be a limiting belief that if you address could be the door

into a whole new version of you. Yeah. I love that. Mindy, I always enjoy talking to you. I feel I've got another whole podcast worth of questions now to talk to you. So we'll have to save that for a part three. To finish off then, we've covered a lot of different topics to the first conversation, which I'm really pleased about. Let's go back to that opening question right at the start, where we shared that weight gain is not necessarily inevitable as women get older, but you may need to start doing things differently once you get into your 40s. So let's keep that woman in mind at the end here. You've covered a lot in this conversation and the last conversation. For that woman who's, let's say, 42, who's struggling with her weight, what are some of the things you should do?

Yeah, I'm glad we're speaking to her because she's confused. So the first thing I would say is let's start taking all the food you're eating and let's try to put it in a finite period of time. So look at what you're eating right now. Do you eat at seven in the morning until eight o'clock at night? Can we start to get you to compress all your food into one window? And the easiest way to do that is just start pushing breakfast back. Just push it back a little bit.

Next day, push it back a little bit more and watch what happens to your energy and your mental focus specifically in the afternoon. And then you'll start to, the more, if you can get to that first fasting ledge of 15 hours for that 40-year-old woman, that is gold, except the week before your period. Okay. So let's just make that simple. Second, I would want her to really play with what does she feel like when she's low carb?

And what does she feel like when she's high carb? So low carb would be like meat and vegetables. Like how does your brain work? What do you notice about your body when you're in low carb? And what do you notice when you add carbs back in? And can you make sure that you're really prioritizing adding carbs back in? Sweet potatoes, tropical fruits, even beans, quinoa, wild rice, potatoes of all kinds, chocolate. Can we add these back in the week before your cycle? And let's just mind progesterone. The third one is, this goes along what I wrote in the menopause reset was like, What I wrote in the menopause reset was like, let's just start to diversify our foods. What I have found is that most people are eating the same hundred foods over and over and over again.

Can we open up your food menu so that you're getting at least 200 different foods in a month? So I learned this from Terry Walls, who wrote the Walls Protocol for autoimmune condition. But in order to feed all the microbes in your gut, we need more different foods. One thing I do, when I go to a restaurant, I try to find the thing on the menu I never have. And I try to eat that. Bison's on there, I'll have that. So diversify your foods. and I try to eat that. Bison's on there, I'll have that. So diversify your foods. The next thing is,

let's just look at your toxic environment. Can we just look at how, what beauty products, household cleaners, how can we minimize that? And then the fifth one was, where is more self-care? Where is more nurture? How do you say no more? Women have a challenge sometimes with saying no. How do we say no more? How do we sometimes with saying no how do we say no more how do we please people less how do we nurture ourselves more and they i love it um so much helpful information you you really are doing incredible work thank you

i've only read fast like a girl which i think is a fantastic read. You've got other books out there. Which is the first book you'd recommend people go to if they want to buy one of your books? Yeah. You've said you've re-released the menopause one. Where would you direct people first? Well, I look at all my books as a conversation I'm having with women. So Fast Like a Girl and The Menopause Reset

really are a good little duo. If you want a quick read and you're over 40, go to The Menopause Reset really are a good little duo. If you want a quick read and you're over 40, go to the Menopause Reset. But from that book, we learned so much, which is why I wrote Fast Like a Girl. So if you want to fast, Fast Like a Girl is your tool. Mindy, love it. Thank you for coming on the show. And I'm already looking forward to conversation number three. Thank you. to conversation number three. Thank you. 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

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