Habits and Hustle - Episode 356: The Fasting Reset: How Taking Breaks from Eating Can Reboot Your Health with Dr. Mindy Pelz.

Episode Date: June 21, 2024

Have you ever wondered if there's a simple, effective way to boost your well-being, increase energy levels, and promote sustainable weight loss? The answer may lie in the age-old practice of fasting. In my Fitness Friday episode, I dive deep into the science behind fasting and explore how different fasting durations can provide a wide array of health benefits. Expert Dr. Mindy Pelz shares a fascinating insight: fasting for just 17 hours can trigger a process called autophagy, where your cells start to clean out toxins and repair themselves. From busting common fasting myths to providing practical strategies for incorporating fasting into your lifestyle, this podcast is a must-listen for anyone interested in optimizing their health. Dr. Mindy Pelz is the Founder of Reset Academy, Best Selling Author, and Fasting Enthusiast. What we discuss:  Intermittent fasting and its initial effects on weight loss  Changes in energy levels and body composition after starting intermittent fasting  The role of diet vs. exercise in weight loss  Calorie restriction vs. fasting and the role of insulin in weight gain Comparing Weight Watchers to fasting and the importance of accountability and community  The benefits of different fasting durations (13-15 hours, 17 hours)  The benefits of longer fasting durations (24 hours, 48 hours, 72 hours)  Addressing the myth of fasting putting the body into starvation mode  Tips for easing into intermittent fasting  The role of mitochondria in health and the benefits of becoming fat-adapted through fasting  Thank you to our sponsor: Therasage: Head over to therasage.com and use code Be Bold for 15% off To learn more about Dr. Mindy Pelz:  Website - https://drmindypelz.com/  Find more from Jen: Website: https://www.jennifercohen.com/ Instagram: @therealjencohen Books: https://www.jennifercohen.com/books Speaking: https://www.jennifercohen.com/speaking-engagements Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it! Hey friends, you're listening to Fitness Friday on the Habits and Hustle podcast where myself and my friends share quick and very actionable advice for you becoming your healthiest self. So stay tuned and let me know how you leveled up. Before we dive into today's episode, I first want to thank our sponsor, Therisage. Their Tri-Lite panel has become my favorite biohacking thing for healing my body.

It's a portable red light panel that I simply cannot live without. I literally bring it with me everywhere I go and I personally use their red light therapy to help reduce inflammations in places in my body where honestly I have pain. You can use it on a sore back, stomach cramps, shoulder, ankle. Red light therapyy is my go-to. Plus, it also has amazing anti-aging benefits, including reducing signs of fine lines and wrinkles on your face, which I also use it for. I personally use Therisage Trilight

everywhere and all the time. It's small, it's affordable, it's portable, and it's really effective. Head over to Therasage.com right now and use code BEBOLD for 15% off. This code will work site-wide. Again, head over to Therasage.com and use code BEBOLD for 15% off any of their products. You started this whole thing about five years ago or so. Yeah.

So you were really doing it because at the beginning, you were kind of doing like you said, all these little tips and tricks that you've always done. And that five pounds, it was really more for like, for weight loss than for anything at the time, right? Started as that. Yeah, yeah. Started as that. And it works. So you basically started the fat. What was the first kind of fast that you started with? The first thing I did was intermittent fasting, which is 13 to 15 hours without food. So you skip breakfast. Right. And did that by itself let you lose the five pounds?

Pretty much. Yeah. I mean, what it did is as I started intermittent fast, at first, by the way, I was very dubious. I was like, okay, I'll try this one day. And then I realized, oh wait, this you're supposed to do every day. And I was like, no way. Like I had a whole breakfast plan. I was a smoothie girl in the morning. Like I had a whole health plan around my breakfast. So it took me probably a couple of months to embrace that I was gonna do this, not just once.

I was gonna do it every day. So once I did, the first thing that changed for me that I was going to do this not just once. I was going to do it, you know, every day. So once I did, the first thing that changed for me is that I stopped crashing at three o'clock in the afternoon. So my energy shifted. And then I would say the second thing was I noticed I started to like when you become a fat burner, the way that you lose weight is totally different. You lose it like in the places that you wanna lose it, like in your belly, like around your back and your booty. I think that was the first thing I noticed,

like my pants were fitting looser, I was going down a belt buckle, but I wasn't really seeing it on the scale. I just felt like there was something shifting my shape. And then from there, I started to do less exercise I just felt like I like there was something shifting my shape. Right. And then from there, I started to do less exercise because I was getting injured at knee and hip and all kinds of problems from so much running. And then I noticed, wait a second, if I don't exercise as much, I actually like I'm still

losing weight. I'm still feeling good. Like what was that about? And then that's kind of launched me into a whole, like what else could I do with fasting? Right, right, right. I mean, this is interesting because, you know, a couple of things that I think about with that is,

you know, being in the health industry, right? I mean, people think it's working out, but the reality is it's about 80%, I think even more, I think it's even 90% of what you eat makes a difference, right? It's not exercise. Exercise helps you tone. It's good for all the other health benefits

like your mood, your stress, all the other stuff. But if you wanna lose actual fat, you need to be eating differently. So, right, so, but I think it's all psychological. People think if I just run faster, longer, harder, it will work and it's actually, it's all psychological. People think if I just run faster, longer, harder, it will work. And it's actually, it's myth. But that's the first thing I wanted to make a comment on. But the other thing I wanted to say is, isn't it... I mean, I still get stuck in this whole idea that it really is about calories, right? Because when you shorten the window when you eat,

right, you're limiting the amount of calories you're able to eat, right? So is it why do you have to start? Why do you have to fat like you don't mean like I feel like it's very confusing So, okay. So let me let me give you an analogy So actually it's not about the calories you are eating less calories because what you do is you're shortening your eating window We call it a fast window and an eating window. That's happening. What we have learned recently is that we hold on to weight because of hormonal issues. One of the big hormones that causes us to hold on to weight is insulin.

When we are eating, let's say we're eating, let's use Weight Watchers as an example, because I like to pick on them because sometimes I feel like people go in the pre-packaged food and it's full of chemicals. It can be full of sugar and you're eating that stuff, but you're not, so you're minimizing your calories, but you're not necessarily minimizing your insulin production. you're minimizing your calories, but you're not necessarily minimizing your insulin production. So if you don't minimize your insulin production, the body says, there's a lot of insulin here,

I'm gonna have to go store it somewhere. So I'm gonna go store it in fat, and it uses fat as a place of storage. So that you hear this with people who have fatty liver, you look at them, like men, this happens a lot where they look super skinny, but they're dying of a fatty liver because all their sugar is being stored

in fat around the liver. So for many people, that's what's happening with fat around their belly and other areas. So when you fast and you bring insulin down, what the body says is, okay, well, I don't have any insulin coming because food's not coming. So let me go find that insulin I stored years ago

and let me burn that up. And let me go find the sugar I stored years ago. Let me go burn the stuff that I stored a long time ago. And that's why it's such an incredible, why it's working so well. So I, it's funny that you mentioned Weight Watchers because I'm actually a big fan. I worked with Weight Watchers many years.

I'm a big fan of that. I just still like the chemicals. No, but no, but that's about packaged food. But what I liked about Weight, what I do still like about Weight Watchers, and I've seen so many people have success on it for many reasons. Number one, it's a point system where it's tracking.

So people don't know how much to eat, they don't know what portion control is, they don't know how and what to do. It gives you a guided system, which I thought not only me, it's had, from what I've seen, a lot of success over many, many years. Plus it has that built-in community when you have those meetings and the groups that you, right? And it keeps you, and it gives you that accountability because you've got to weigh in every week. So let's pick on Jenny Craig if we're gonna pick on anybody.

We can pick on another one, that's fine. Pick on that. But I understand. But I really want people to see, so. I know, I'm teasing you. But what I was going to say though, is I feel like it's like this is all very psychological, right? Because people think not eating breakfast, then what so like if you're saying you get good results with that intermittent fasting, which is the

eight hour, let's say the eight hour window where you're allowed to eat, right? Yep. Because that's what it is. That's like the basics, right? Then you can, of course, increase. Why not just stay there? Why are you then taking it to all these other types of values? Oh, great idea. Great idea. And let me just make one other comment. What I would encourage your listeners to do

is if they are doing Weight Watchers and they love it, just throw in some intermittent fasting and see if you get better results. Yeah, that's a good idea. It's a, because it can, you can take fasting and apply it to any diet. You can be paleo, keto, vegetarian, Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, you can do all that. At each hour you fast, something different is happening. So 13 to 15 hours, we get growth hormone spikes.

Growth hormone will slow the aging process down and will cause your body to start to burn fat. So we also have seen great studies with 13 to 15 hours brings inflammation down. There was a New England Journal of Medicine article that came out where they studied, they looked at over 1,500 peer-reviewed journals on intermittent fasting, people doing 13 to 15 hours. And they came out and said, all doctors should be using intermittent fasting as their first tool to help chronic disease.

So that 13 to 15 hours is crucial for your body just to go into more of a repair mode. But with weight loss, you're now at 13 hours getting growth hormone. And growth hormone stops producing in our body at 30. So this is why it's harder to lose weight as we get older, one of the reasons. So now you're accessing growth hormone. Then at 17 hours, something called autophagy happens. And autophagy is where the cells have this intelligence inside of them. They basically say, okay, no food's coming.

I can see this. I better look within the cell and clean up what's in the cell and eat the toxins inside the bacteria that's inside the cell. The cell literally turns within itself and it starts to detoxify. So a lot of people doing 17-hour fasts, now what they're noticing is, okay, wait, you know, like that skin condition I had, that chronic joint pain I had, like things that were, that symptoms that were piling on top of each other, my body's strangely healing that now. Now if you go 24 hours, one of the things that happens that we've

seen off research is that your intestinal stuff, the mucosal mucosal lining in your in your intestinal tract will start to produce stem cells and will repair your whole intestinal tract and make it easier for bacteria to grow that are good. And some of those bacteria actually speed up your metabolism and help you burn fat. So each hour you're getting something more and more. I mean, I can continue on.

Like, you can even go like 48 hours and your dopamine receptor sites have all been reset. At 72 hours, you get stem cell production, so your whole immune system resets. If you have any chronic musculoskeletal injuries, those tend to heal. The longer you go, the more benefit you get. This is why I wanted to do on the right? Because a lot of people are doing fasting and talk about fasting, but you have all these groups of people that you put together

and you guys are doing these like five day fast together on a regular basis. Like, you know, I've been taught my whole life and this is why it's so difficult for me to wrap my head around it that like you put your body in starvation mode if you don't constantly feed it, right? Because that's how you rev up your metabolism. You eat breakfast first thing in the morning to

get your metabolism going. So this is such a different way of thinking and a totally different thought process that has shown such great results. So what happens to all that research that talks about putting your body in starvation when you don't eat? How do you go five days and not eat? Like, an apple? Aren't you going to die? I would love to come and walk you through that process. I can't even imagine.

I honestly, I can't even imagine. Even intermittent fasting of just having an eight-hour window to window to me is so difficult to even fathom. And I'm actually going to be trying it starting Monday. Because I'm so tired of everyone telling me that it's so great for me. I have to try it. I have to try it so I'm going to bite the bullet. But tell me about this. What happens if you have intermittent fasting? Yeah, you should definitely try intermittent fasting. That's that's usually the easiest door in. Actually, what I tell people to do is start with pushing your breakfast back an hour. Just just get used to that.

And then once you're comfortable there, push, push it back two hours and just slowly work yourself towards an intermittent fasting state. So you know, we have people so we have like over 200,000 people that we fast together once a month. We're actually in it right now. We're doing, we call it Fast Training Week. And the whole goal is to... You're fasting right now? Yeah. Yeah. So what day are you eating right now? Yeah, I haven't eaten since, well, I'm not doing, some of the people are doing five-day water. I'm just doing one meal a

day this week. So I'm just eating dinner. So it's what one o'clock right now. I haven't eaten anything yet. So, and I feel good. How long are you doing this one meal a day? This week we're doing it five days in a row. Okay. But a lot of people do this as their lifestyle.

And some people are just doing water fast right now. So they're just in our group. We always give people two options, and some people take the option of doing the five-day water fast. Here's what I'll tell you is that there are two ways to burn energy. One is from sugar, and one is from fat. You have to train yourself. They call it being metabolically flexible. And when you train yourself in this fasted lifestyle, this fasting lifestyle, the fasts get easier and easier. So I would never take somebody like you

and just throw you into a three or five day water, like you would be. I think you'd be swearing at me. Swearing would be an understatement. I don't think they'd be able to find you, you know, find your body. I mean, I get nervous if I can't like eat lunch on time, nevermind like, you know, not eating for like five days. I can't even imagine that, you know.

So here's to go back to the science again. And then I want to talk about how do you build yourself up to a five day water fast. The mitochondria of our cells are a powerhouse of our cell. And they used to think that all disease started in the nucleus. And now they're like, because of cancer, they're like, actually, disease starts in the mitochondria. And the mitochondria, you know your mitochondria are healthy when you can go without food. So when you're hungry all the time

and you can't go without food, your mitochondria are not sustainable on their own. They're needing that glucose to function. But once you turn yourself into a fat burner and you're making ketones instead of glucose, those ketones go into the mitochondria and they start to tell the mitochondria to create more energy. There's this weird moment where you'll go, I'm hungry, I don't feel good, I don't feel good. If you have a really healthy mitochondrial system, all of a sudden your mitochondria go,

okay, we're going to spit out more energy. You get this insane energy, insane mental clarity, the hunger turns off. It's weird. You have to experience it to know that you were designed for it. But sitting in your shoes, I was in your shoes, I totally get it. Like I was, I can tell you what I had for breakfast like almost every day and I would carry a bag of snacks around with me because I couldn't go without food. Right, right. So once I trained myself, now I can go without food, no problem. Right. So it's baby stepping it basically like everything else. You got to baby step it. So

let's go over this. So intermittent fasting, you say the benefits of intermittent are... And then I want to go from step to step, different types. Okay. So the benefits of intermittent are... And then I want to go from step to step, different types. Okay? So the benefits of intermittent are, in a few words or less, are... Go ahead, doctor. You get inflammation comes down. Inflammation? Yeah. And the biggest things are inflammation comes down and growth hormone starts to get secreted. And for some people, they may get a little bit of ketones.