Know Thyself - E128 - Dr. Mindy Pelz: Harness Your Body's Intelligence: The Miracle Of Fasting, Hormones & Women's Cycles

Episode Date: December 24, 2024

Dr. Mindy Pelz explores the profound mental, physical, and spiritual benefits of fasting. She discusses how fasting can unlock the miracle within us, providing transformative effects on our health and well-being. Dr. Pelz delves into the incredible processes that occur within your body while fasting, unpacking ideal fasting durations, eating windows, and re-feeding. Dr. Pelz also addresses the emotional and spiritual dimensions of fasting, examining our relationship with food, the purification process during fasting, and strategies for healing from eating disorders.Moreover, she highlights the healing potential of extended fasting (7+ days) and emphasizes the importance of following a proper re-feeding protocol. She also reveals her Insights into hormonal differences between men and women as we age and the power of the post-menopausal woman.  André's Book Recommendations: https://www.knowthyself.one/books___________0:00 Intro 1:59 How Mindy Discovered the Power of Fasting6:30 Modern Living Ruins Our Health 12:21 How Your Body Heals While Fasting16:51 Ideal Fasting Protocol (3-5 Days)19:15 Shrinking Your Eating Window (Daily Protocol)20:40 Avoid These Foods at All Costs23:27 What’s Going on Inside Your Body When You Fast25:48 Our Emotional Relationship to Food & Eating Disorders29:26 Spiritual & Mental Purification During Fasting38:28 Minerals to Take to Support a Fast41:33 Healing Chronic Disease Through Long Fasts (7+ days)44:21 Re-Feeding Protocol: (Don’t Skip This Step!)48:10 Dopamine & Sugar Addictions51:06 The Danger of Artificial Sweeteners53:59 Insulin Resistance54:46 Menopause & The Intelligence of the Body57:36 The Power of the Post-Menopausal Woman1:07:44 People Pleasing & Taking Your Power Back1:14:12 Advice for Women Going Through This1:17:31 A Closer Look at Hormones1:21:41 Difference Between Men & Women’s Cycles1:24:49 Fasting as a Woman: Timing it With Your Cycle1:26:31 Getting Your Period Back1:29:46 The Rise of Infertility1:33:30 What We're Missing in the Modern World1:38:51 Muscle Mass’ Impact on Longevity1:41:09 Anti-Aging is Misleading Us1:43:38 Your Body Knows: Our Inherent Intelligence1:47:56 Gaining a Greater Understanding of the Body1:51:32 Finding Health and Fulfillment in Life1:58:42 Conclusion___________Dr. Mindy Pelz is a world-renowned women’s health expert on a mission to empower women to Believe in their Bodies! Her high-profile clients include entertainer LeAnn Rimes, former race car driver Danica Patrick and popular influencer Jesse Itzler. She is a bestselling author of Fast Like a Girl (top-selling release of 2023 from Hay House Publishing) and The Menopause Reset.  Her podcast, “The Resetter Podcast,” is ranked within Apple’s top 20 category of leading U.S. science podcasts, and routinely features top guests including LeAnn Rimes, Danica Patrick, Lisa Bilyeu, Miesha Tate, Cynthia Thurlow, Sheri Salata, Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, Max Lugavere, and many others. Her Youtube channel has garnered over 60 million lifetime views.  She holds a BS degree from the University of Kansas and a Doctor of Chiropractic degree. ___________Know ThyselfInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/Website: https://www.knowthyself.oneClips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ4wglCWTJeWQC0exBalgKgListen to all episodes on Audio: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4FSiemtvZrWesGtO2MqTZ4?si=d389c8dee8fa4026Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/know-thyself/id1633725927André DuqumInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/

You're turning out a whole healing system in your body when you fast, that you can't access when you're constantly eating. We have hit the most toxic time in human history, a horrible food system, a profitable health care system that wants to keep you on medication. You have to back away from something or you are going to find yourself down a path of chronic disease. Atofugee is a state that our cells go into where they heal themselves. The most potent way is actually fast. This process can work for everybody. There are hacks you can do to make the process easier. And two things I found.

One, you don't need anything but your own belief in what your body is capable of doing. And people are finally getting results when they never got results before. How many times are we frustrated with ourselves and we think we are not enough? Yet, when you actually know the body, you realize we are like little walking miracles.

Hey everyone, welcome back to know thyself. Our guest today is a best selling author, keynote speaker, functional health podcaster, nutritionist, an expert, and pioneer leader, healer. She wears many hats. But she's been really for decades now supporting people reclaim their health with amazing insight. And the conversation today is going to be filled with nuggets and insights around reclaiming our health and the miracle that is in front of our eyes, that's free, that we can all start in this moment, that has profound, a on our mind, body, and spirit. Dr. Mindy Pellis, thanks for being here. Oh, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure getting to connect with you beforehand. Yeah. Yeah, this conversation, we have not focused on fasting, both from the mind, body, spirit perspective on this podcast.

Yeah, and so when you feel into like your mission here on Earth, because you spent so many years really supporting people with amazing advice and guiding them, what is at the heart and core of what you feel like all you're doing is really about? Yeah. I think where I've landed now, right, because we sort of evolve and change over time, but where I'm firmly landed now is really helping people understand how their body works, how it self-heels, the miracle that is within us in each cellular level. And then I've taken that mostly to the female body.

I think that women in this day and age are incredibly disconnected from their bodies. We have been manipulating ourselves to look a certain way, to weigh a certain thing, to pacify a patriarchal culture that wants us to behave a certain way. And so I started to see that there was this incredible disconnect for women because they didn't understand how their bodies work. So when I started looking at all the self-healing strategies that I was giving people, I realized that women are really desperately needing. more information than ever, than men in general, but they're needing free healing tools so that they can take back their own power. It's really about taking back their power. And that's kind of where I've landed now, is that in educating women on how their bodies work and what they can do to keep it healthy. So there's many different aspects in which you could have done that, right? There's many different

ways to empower people to reclaim their health. What drove you to fasting being such a predominant aspect area of supporting people? Yeah, well, so it goes back actually to a patient. And I had this beautiful patient. Her name was Lanny. And she showed up at my office at 40. And she brought her daughter. She wanted her daughter had asthma. And she wanted me to help with nutrition and detox to help her daughter. But when I went into my waiting room to invite her daughter back to the consult room, there was Lanny, completely bald. She had just gone to her. through chemotherapy. She had just been diagnosed with breast cancer, metastatic, and here she was asking for help for her daughter, which is a classic, you know, mom always taking care of the

children first. And once I got to know her and her daughter, I ended up being a part of Lanny's healing journey, and they gave her three months to live, the medical establishment, and we turned it into 10 years. And we did that by... really changing her lifestyle. And about a year before she died, she asked me what I thought of fasting because I felt like we were sort of linked arms and we were on this healing journey together. And I said, I really don't know anything about fasting. Let me look into it. And so because of her desire to heal herself, I ended up down science study after science study trying to understand what was emerging from fasting in the fasting world. And what was interesting,

at that time was that there was a beautiful scientist in Japan. His name is Dr. Yoshinori Osumi, and he won the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology for a term called autophagy. And autophagy is the state that our cells go into where they heal themselves, where they detox themselves. There's a lot of ways to stimulate autophagy, but the best way, the most potent way, is actually fasting. And so, So once I was like, wait, the body detoxes itself when you take food out of the equation? What? Like, I didn't know that at that moment. And so I just, from there, was like, what else can the body do when you take food out of the equation?

What else is the body capable of? And it just has become a 10-year obsession now. I still am excited about it. And how the body actually performs miracles when we just remove food. It's so deep. There's so many ways to get. go. But what I love about it is that it gives you the power back in a health care system that is taking your power away, that is telling you you need to take this pill to heal yourself.

What I love about fasting is you can say to somebody, you're just going to not eat for X amount of days and just watch what your body does. It's so cool. And then the stories that have emerged from that has really just made fasting my obsession. I love that. so much. I often think about how modern living is directly at odds with ancestral behavior. And you speak beautifully about the feast famine cycle that we have historically always been a part of, you know, and has been a natural part of a healthy, you know, ecosystem in our body. So how do you see that modern living is directly at odds? We live in a time of indulgence like none other, and that has a lot of health implications. So I call it an evolutionary mismatch.

We are now in the modern world at an evolutionary mismatch. We are going against our own design. And a great way to express this is I wrote this in Fast Like a Girl. There is something called the Thrifty Gene Hypothesis. And the idea was that back in the primal days that if you didn't have this gene that allowed you to go long periods of time without food, you died because food wasn't readily available. So all the people in the gene pool that didn't have that gene no longer exist because they never came, they weren't able to come out of those, that paleolithic time, they needed to have this specific gene.

Now, fast forward to this moment, we have the opposite happening. They believe that we all have this gene, that we're all able to go long periods without time. And if we're not doing that, if we're not condensing our eating window, leaving longer periods for fasting that we're now going again. our genetic blueprint and that the people that are building chronic disease, the people that are dying earlier than they should are the ones that haven't gotten this message. And they're the ones that are going against their genetic profile now. So we're just at this mismatch because of the way genes flourished throughout the time, the years. Now, you mix that with a horrible food

system. You mix that with a profitable health care system that wants to keep you on medication. you mix that with a tremendous amount of stress. You have to back away from something in the modern world, or you are going to find yourself down a path of chronic disease. We have hit the most toxic time in human history, and we have to bring these primal ideas back so we can be back in alignment with our evolutionary design. Because most people are familiar with the concept of fasting,

but they don't really know the deep implications it has on purifying our body, autophagy, a lot of these aspects that we'll go into systemic stem cells, so many things that are so exciting that we have like this power that is literally a lack of behavior away. Like there's something that we have to do less things to achieve greater health, which is really exciting, you know, and I love, and it's probably why your voice in the space has been such a big success because it's so empowering and accessible. Yeah. And we're speaking to how it's directly at odds to having.

easy access to all these junk foods and just the amount of foods. I think there's a lot of conflicting advice out there of like what to eat. But when you eat and how often you eat are just as important. So if you could speak to that aspect of a healthy makeup. Yeah. So I think it goes back to the women in my practice. I call them the mama bears. I had a group of women that were in their late 30s, early 40s, and they were struggling with their health. And I kept trying to change their food and trying to get them to get over sugar addictions and eating, rushing out, like grabbing some food and rushing out on the go. And so when I was studying fasting for this patient, Lanny, and just, like, really learning what fasting was capable of, I sort of changed the conversation with these mama bears.

And I was like, okay, how about we don't, you just eat whatever you want, but I'm going to ask that you eat it in an eight-hour eating window and that you're going to leave this long. a longer period of time for fasting, and I'm going to teach you how to fast so that we can see what your body's capable if we just take food out of the equation. And two things I found. One, it was easier to do that than to get them to change their food. It was just so, it was so much more simple. And two, there was something that happened to their body.

Like, they literally would come into my office, like a week after I taught them how to fast, and it was like a fat coat had been taken on. of their body. And so I realized at that moment that there was this rest that was required. This, like, it's hard to get over addiction. It's hard to change your behaviors. A lot of people eat for emotional reasons. But if I allowed them to eat whatever they wanted within a certain time period and then taught them different windows of fasting length, that then it became effortless. And I think that's why fasting honestly has stayed in the zeitgeist is because people, it gets easier with time. There's no diet or exercise or health plan that gets easier with

time. It's like the more you do it, the more you're clicking into the body's ability to heal itself. And then it doesn't cost any money. And you know, you don't, I always like, you don't need a guru. You don't need, you don't need like a supplement. You don't need anything but your own belief in what your body is capable of doing. So this whole empowerment thing comes out of these fasting experiences and people are finally getting results when they never got results before. I'm looking forward to diving into all the health nuance and also the cycle, emotional, spiritual benefits of all this because like you said, these baby steps that build on top of each other, like even just shrinking the eating window, they feel the benefits of that.

They have more power, willpower, to be able to then stack and make another healthy decision. Their confidence in themselves is also growing, right? Yes. And so I would love for you to actually break down the same. six types of fasting because they all have different implications for our health and maybe we could run through those so people can have a context for the different options and benefits. So the first thing I always start with on that conversation is we have two metabolisms. Like this is the first like mind-blowing thing.

Like we've been over here trying to manipulate one metabolism. And this came from all these women that poured into my office and they're like, my metabolism is slowed down. And I'm like, well, what is that? How do you know your metabolism slowed down? But you literally, we have two metabolisms, one that gets turned on when we eat, and we call that the sugar burner system, and one that gets turned on when we don't eat, and we call that the fat burning system.

In order to metabolically switch over the fat burning system, you need at least 12 hours without food. So what that means is 12 hours where your blood sugar is either stable or it's dropping, because when it drops, your intelligent body is like, oh, I don't sense any nutrients. I don't sense any blood sugar. It's like we're a hybrid car. Like, okay, I got to go over to the other fuel source. I'm going to start burning energy from the fat and the places that I've stored it years ago. So it starts burning fat to make something called a ketone, and that happens at 12 hours.

So usually you're safely in this healing space. at 12 hours. The longer you stay there, the more the body turns on these switches, and it's all based off primal design, because at 13 to 15 hours, all of a sudden, your growth hormone goes up. Well, the reason growth hormone goes up is because it slows down the aging process. It accelerates the fat-burning process, so you can make more and more ketones. Your inflammation goes down because the body's like, we've got to go find food. We can't deal with inflammation, we can't have you aging. We need to go find food. Then you all of a sudden go to 17 hours of fasting and this termotophagy kicks in. And the intelligent body is like, wait a second, we haven't had nutrients,

we haven't had glucose. We need to take care of any cellular part that's not good. We need to repair it. And so the intelligence inside the cell starts to take these worn out cellular parts and it either discards them or it repairs them. So at 17 hours you go into this, massive repair phase. You also, at 17 hours, the intelligence inside the cell will say, you know what, this is a cancer cell. This isn't a zombie aging cell. There's something not great with this cell. The cell's packed with heavy metals or toxins. And so it actually kills the cell, and that's called apoptosis, where it will get rid of the weaker cells because everything in the body needs to be stronger so you can go find food. At 24 hours, your gut, you'll hold

whole microbiome and your gut resets and you get a flush of stem cells into your gut and bad bacteria gets left off and bacteria gets spread out all in preparation for food. Your body's like, okay, when food comes in, we got to get some nutrients. We got to be able to grab what we can and make ourselves nourished again. At 36 hours, the body's like, okay, it's been 36 hours. Where else have I stored food. So usually it goes to places around the way, the belly circumference, it goes into the liver, the visceral fat, the fat that kills you. It goes in because it's really trying to make you more efficient. At 48 hours, it resets your whole dopamine system because it's like, you got to go, I got to motivate this person to go find food. So it improves the whole dopamine system so that

you're motivated to go find food. And then at 72 hours, it's like, let's reset the food. the immune system. We have to reboot the whole immune system. We have to flush the system with stem cells so that this individual, in order to survive, becomes the most physiologically best individual, so it goes to find food. And all of that happens in like three days. So you get to choose what do you want? Do you want to just bring some inflammation down? You want to reset your gut? You want to detox your cells. You want to reboot the dopamine system, which is why I always say, say there's six different flavors to fasting, you just decide which one you're going to do. Let's say I'm a human who wants to become the optimal version of myself.

How often am I doing a three-day fast versus like what's my daily eating window? Like what's the most ideal? Obviously, we can't account for individuality within everybody who's a man and a woman and different health things. But just a, you know, generally healthy lad, what would be the best kind of fasting times? So three-day water fasts, I think, are best done twice a year. We do them as a group in January and September. Point of going longer, like five.

Yeah, so that's a great question because at three days you get systemic stem cells. So stem cells will go and repair everything in your body. So, but that starts at 72 hours. So the example I always use is I had an Achilles tendon injury that I could not heal. I couldn't figure out what to do. And I was really concerned because I love to run and work out. It's like, I don't know what to do. And I was like, well, let me throw a fast at it.

three days, I started to feel the pain go away. And as the stem cells were pouring in, I'm like, okay, what if I could spend two days bathed in stem cells from my own internal body? What would happen? And sure enough, by the fifth day, the pain was gone and never has returned. So there is a benefit to go going longer. You just have to decide, like, you know, if you just want optimal health, three days is probably fine. Five days is going to be a little more stem cells. You have to to measure your blood sugar and make sure you're being safe and things like that. But the longer you go, the more healing happens and the more, you know, this, I don't want to call it anti-aging because it's a little more nuanced than that. It's like you're getting, discarding what is causing

you to age quickly and you're discarding things that are building disease. So the longer you stay in those fasting windows, the more that happens and the body just cleans itself up. Amazing. Which is really cool, right? Yeah, sign me up. Yeah, right. And you don't have to pay it. anything for it. Like I went and got systemic, because I have a friend who has a functional health clinic in Florida, and I was like, okay, he did IV stem cells for $2,500. That was fun, but it was very similar to fasting. You can save all that money just by fasting. So three-day to five-day, maybe a little bit longer depending on how, you know, invested you are in your health and where you're at a couple times here. Yeah. What about the smaller, like daily fasting windows?

and such. Yeah, so daily, I think everybody should be doing about a 15-hour fast. And that would look like, what, ending your last meal at 8 p.m., starting at, what, like 11? 11 the next day. Okay. Yeah, I mean, it's not that hard when you start to do the math on it. Yeah, that's not bad at all for most people. Yeah. And if you don't want, if you like eating breakfast, then finish eating at like, you know, five, like push your dinner up a little bit. And then you can't eat anything. You can't gnaw at 10 at night. Like, you have to, and you can't drink. And you can't drink. anything, you can drink water, but you don't want that blood sugar to go up. So, but yeah, it's pretty much pushing your breakfast back and pushing your dinner up. And instead of getting up and thinking,

oh, I'm just going to eat, or the old philosophy was that if I eat, it'll speed up my metabolism. We have no evidence that that happens. What you're saying is that I have a fasting window every day, and then I have an eating window. So the way my brain thinks about this is like, I get up, I'll have a cup of coffee, and then I kind of look at my schedule and I go, okay, when I'm opening up my eating window. So like today, I could just based off my schedule, I was up at four because I'm writing my next book, and I got up and I had all this inspiration, but I didn't open up my eating window until noon. But then once it's open, I'll eat. And then I'll close it down tonight, probably about eight. So it'll be an eight-hour eating

window. While we're in that eating window, what can we be doing that is most effective to moderate glucose and like pulling from those energy sources, if you'd like to elaborate on that, that really empowers the fast to be better too and just health energy levels? Yeah, it's a great question. Yeah, I think the first thing we have to start doing is we have to get off the processed foods. And hopefully your audience kind of is aware of that. But in those processed foods are a lot of toxic oils. So the oils are the, if there was one food change you, I would encourage people to make is get off the canola oils, the cotton seed oils, corn oils, soybean, partially hydrogenated oils, like the man-made oils are horrific. So get off those and get into your olive oil and your avocado oil. Some of your

seed oils like walnut and sesame seed can be really good. So switch your oils out because now around every cell is a bilipid membrane. So when we eat bad oils, it congests that biolipid membrane. And now you create inflammation around that cell. So when you go to fast, your cell's going to repair that and it's going to push all of those toxic oils out. But that might not feel so good for you. So if you could clean those oils up before you go into the fast, that's so much easier. So that's step number one. Step number two is to really focus on where you get your carbohydrates from. So I always say get your carbs from nature, not from man. So if it was made in a lab, it's probably not good. If it came from the earth like fruits and vegetables and sweet potatoes

and anything that comes from the earth and is a carbohydrate is going to have some form of health for us. The earth didn't provide us anything that was unhealthy. And then as opposed to your breads, your cakes, your cookies, your pastas, those are more refined. That makes fasting harder. And then, of course, toxins, you know, toxins are in everything. So organic, I hope your people know this, but pesticides are a major endocrine disruptor. They are carcinogenic. The fact that they're allowed, our food is allowed to be sprayed with it is a crime.

So getting off of those chemicals, and get out of like the prepackaged foods has sort of all three of the bad things. And then the last thing I'll say is that a lot of fiber, because anything fibery feeds your microbiome. And there is going to be this microbiome shift that happens when you fast. So if you can feed those with a lot of fibery foods, then you've set yourself up for a really good time fasting. What's actually happening at the biological level? Let's say I'm doing a 15 or 17 hour fast for a lot of years I actually just did one meal a day and that was nice I found a little bit hard to hit my like calories that I needed yeah so now my window is like I usually stop eating around

two or three and my first meal is like 11 so I like to do a pretty big window yeah I feel amazing my sleep like quality increased immensely like by tracking all this amazing uh increase immensely why is that the case for sleep the testosterone boost the autophagy what's really happening that makes this feels so good when we follow that. Yeah, I mean, you're turning on a whole healing system in your body when you fast. So you're experiencing, you have an whole new relationship with your body that you were never able to get. It's like what we talked about before, like when you go into a silent retreat for 10 days. You are able to hear thoughts that you can't hear when you're in your day-to-day life. So you're able to discover healing mechanisms in your body that you can't, you can't. You can't.

access when you're constantly eating. So there is this sort of neurochemical magic that is happening. But the thing that excites me on it and what should excite us all is that these are, you know, like if you think about it, we've come so far with technology, but the human bodies stayed the same. I mean, we've had a few batted adaptations, but for the most part, we are literally living in the very same body that our primal friends lived in. But we live in a lot of technology. We have a lot of access to food. We're completely saturated with dopamine. So when you step out of that and you go, okay, body, you do what you need to do. You discover parts of yourself that you didn't realize that were even existed. My favorite thing is to see the look of pride on people's

face when they go two days, three days without food. They're like, I actually feel good. So, yeah, there's hormonal changes. There are cellular changes. There's inflammatory changes. There's brain changes. Like, there's so much on a physiological level that your body's capable of if you just stop eating food. I've experienced so many revelations about ties to food, the link between emotions and cravings and food. And when people fast, there can be like a little bit of that purging of not just the physiological hunger, but like the emotional familiarity of getting your knees met in a certain way. How have you seen that shift with people as they started to fast?

Yeah. So the first, when I first started rolling out fasting in my clinic, I had in my head a couple of groups of people that I didn't think it would be good for. And the emotional eaters and the women that had specifically had a like eating disorders. Eating disorders, yeah. And I was like, I don't know if I should introduce this to them. But I had a couple that were really good and willing to kind of play along with me. So what we did is we just started pushing their breakfast back like by a half hour.

And then I'd let them do that every day for a week. And then we would push it back another half hour the following week. And what I learned in watching them slowly compress this eating window is that they started to see two things. one, food is a state changer. So if you're eating to suppress emotions or you're eating because you're depressed, when you don't have food as a resource, now you're going to be forced to go find other things that will help you with that dopamine shift. And these women found that. They found music. They found friendship. They found dance. They found go hiking in nature because they were forced to go find it. Whereas if they didn't have that experience, they would just would go to their

pantry and put some food in their face. So it kind of forces you to expand your dopamine hits. But the second part was, I mean, everybody has, people who have eating disorders have it all for like different reasons. But there is a little bit of like a control issue, some women. And I know it happens to both men and women, but eating disorders are more prevalent with women. There is also like a punishment issue. And all of a sudden, what they started to see these women with eating disorders was that actually fasting was a gift. It wasn't punishment. They started to have this new relationship to their body.

And we just had to go slow. There had to be a lot of conversation around it. But what I have witnessed, now I want to say, you're probably going to get people who are going to be like, this is that are like real like body positivity people. and people who have severe eating disorders. My go-to line always is do it with the practitioner who is guiding you through that. But my experience, time and time again, is that fasting can absolutely help that emotional eating.

Fasting can absolutely change an eating disorder when it's guided correctly. Because you are literally entering into a new relationship with your body, one that you can't, You're not going to bring shame. You're not going to bring control. You're not going to bring guilt. You're going to bring curiosity.

And you're going to go, and you're going to bring trust. And you're going to say to your body, you got this. Let's see what you can do. And when you take a woman with, or anybody with an eating disorder like that, they just completely blow their own mind. And it is so fun to witness. It's so important. I just love how you're exploring the body holistically as it is.

because we can hyper focus on one aspect. But like our mind, body, spirit, these are all intertwined into one being, right? And so fasting has been a spiritual religious practice for millennia, you know, from the Aesnes, which is an ancient Jewish sect, they would fast for 40 days out of the year. Jesus, 40 days and 40 nights before his ministry.

The purification that happens. It's almost like similar to a silent retreat, where you're not talking for 10 days. And it's the yogic principle called Pratihara. It's one of the eight limbs, which means withdrawal of the senses. So in the absence of something, in the withdrawal from something, you gain a new relationship to it. A more pure, clean relationship. And when we go without food, it's like if there was like an AC unit or like the fridge was like making noise over here, it's kind of in the background, but we're not aware that it's

making this noise that's like causing dysregulation in a nervous system. But the moment it stops, We're like, whoa, I didn't realize how noisy I was internally. And I feel like fasting does that. It makes that realization really prevalent. You feel so much more clear energetically. It's like you're sharp intellectually. Like that ketone source, right, comes online. I feel like you're just like your peer, you're present.

Yeah. Your senses. You can smell everything. Yeah. Yeah. Like turning up the dial of being a human and alive in your liveliness. And so you've explored this, you know, on some podcast. but I would just love to hear your own personal experience with fasting as it's helped you purify your mind,

your body, your spirit, and what else becomes available outside of the physiological benefits, which are amazing. Right. But there's this psycho-emotional, spiritual component that really helps cultivate and, yeah. Yeah. So my personal experience with the longer fast, what you're talking about, I really do believe happen more in the three-day, five-day water fast because you need a little, you got to get past, the voice that's going, what are you doing? Why are you doing this? You're going to die.

Like all the, like, you will really truly see your relationship to food. So if you feel like you have a dysfunctional relationship to food, you use food, you have an abusive relationship, you use it to calm your soul. When you start to fast, you understand why. You will see moments in your day where you're like, oh, I can't eat. Okay, and the brain is telling you, like, are you safe? I don't know if you're safe right now. You listen to that podcast and then you just bought that woman's book and the next thing you know you started fasting, do you really know what you're doing? Like those kind of comments come up. Or like, don't you remember you tried this before and you failed? Don't you remember a friend fasted? Like the limiting beliefs are like, here you go.

Here's what you need to know about what's holding you back from being a healthy human when it comes to food, nutrition, and your relationship to it. And food is a relationship. And you get to decide, is it a healthy one or is an abusive one? So that's usually day one. Day one is you see all that going on. Day two, then all of a sudden, who you are as an individual reveals itself. So all of a sudden you're like, am I strong enough to do this? I said I was going to go three days. I got a whole other 24 hours. I don't know. I've failed at this and I failed at that. And I don't know. like, do I really want, maybe my health is okay. Am I, why am I really?

Like, the amount of mind chatter that reveals itself for you on day two about who you are and what you think of yourself will blow you away. And then something happens at the night of day two, where all of a sudden you're turning the corner and you're like, I just have to get through tomorrow. And what most people find is they wake up on day three. And they're like, that's so hard. quiet in here. I don't, like, there's, like, I can make it to the end of the day. And then, like, there's no chatter. Like, the chatter just stops. And all of a sudden, there's just space.

And most people on day three, that's where downloads come and things can come in. Because the first two days were about revealing what's holding you back. And by time you get to the third day, there's so much space that there can be an influx of universal energy. And, you know, and by the time you get to the third day, there's so much space that there can be an influx of universal energy, insight, like, and it's like the mind just calms. And on a physiological level, why that works is that as you go down the fasting lane into these multiple days, you start making ketones. And ketones will stimulate a neurotransmitter called GABA.

So if you're three days in and your ketone level is like at three point of, you have so much GABA in you that you're just calm. And the activity in your brain slows down. And there just is this portal opening where all of a sudden you can hear things. And I've done it with five-day fasts where I've done it around setting goals for myself. But the most profound one that I had experience that I had for myself was I have a 24-year-old daughter and when she was in college, I was really concerned about her. Got in with the wrong crowd.

It was around the pandemic. There was just a lot of things that I was like, I think I need to go and actually pick her up from her apartment and her area and bring her home. Like, she's not hanging around the right people, and I couldn't get to her. I couldn't find that emotional connection I had with her. And I was really concerned. So I was like, okay, I'm going to throw a fast at it.

And I, of course, went into the first two days. The mind chatter all came up. Third day, things started calming. On the fourth day, I was meditating, and I heard this thought in my head, she's going to be okay. She's going to be okay. Just let her be. She's working herself through something. Don't step in. Don't manipulate it. Let her come to her own conclusions. And then I closed down the fast on the fifth day. And on the sixth day, she called and asked if she could come home. home. And I was like, whoa, how did that happen? And it was really one of the most spiritual, like, cosmic. And that's what I wanted her to come home. And so we could kind of reset her and get her back on track. But I also wanted to come in and manipulate the situation. So using a tool like fasting to just find that answer was a godsend. And then when she called, I was like, thank you, universe. Appreciate that for giving me the certainty through that. fast, but you can't hear it when you're eating. What you can hear when you don't eat is just incredible. It's incredible. I agree full heartedly. Anytime I go, I have a kind of big

life decision or I feel like I'm entering a new chapter. I always just take time away. I fast. I like go inwards. And it's like you're you're settling all that noise on the radio and your antenna gets stronger for like what you're here for and what's available and possible for you to receive. I've said it like many times. I feel like, sometimes we're always in this top-down brain process of saying what I want from life, what I want from life. And then fasting, getting clear, clearing that signal, you get to see what life maybe wants of you.

And in so many instances, like we're kind of imposing ourselves on the life circumstance, right, with I guess our agenda. And in that receptive state, you release the energy and it's funny how quick it shifts, right? Yeah. And it's like the downloads can be profound because the other thing that happens is you don't need as much sleep. So the downloads can come in the middle of the night. Like I've, in the middle of a five-day fast, I've woken up at two in the morning. I'm like, oh, that's the answer to that problem. And so it's taking, like you said, the static out. And I think what's surprising to even people

who are healthy and they eat really, like, healthy foods is that the minute you put food into your body, there's a whole energy system that has to go to work and the stomach has to work and the liver has to detoxify, and all that energy that goes towards digesting food is a distraction for the brain. But when you take it away, it's like clearing the static. You said it really well.

Yeah. Makes sense and why not just so many health experts, but also spiritual leaders for millennia, again, have fasted. And Plato, Socrates, Apocritus, like so many of these amazing voices, ancient and also present-day, Dr. Mindy Pells, and the people that are, you know, here sharing the benefits on the physiological level as well, help us just understand how important and how good it can feel to be alive.

And I think for anybody that's listening right now that maybe either hasn't fasted or it's been a while and now they're feeling inclined, perhaps towards the new year when this episode releases, they're like, okay, maybe we want to do a new fast, which I know you like to advise generally three-day fast. It's a good time in January and September after the holidays and after summer. You get to kind of help your system cleanse out. Yeah. When people decide to go for it, what have you learned about the minerals, electrolytes, hydrogen water, even? I've heard you speak to that can really support you following through on it.

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of ways you can enter into a three-day water fest. So personally, I love the January one. And again, we're going to do a big one. It's free. People can join us. I don't know when this is coming out. Which people can find, like, on your website or something? Yeah, they can find it on our website.

And then you do it with other people. Like, we had 100,000 people worldwide. last year, do it all together. And it was just, we partnered with our publisher, my publisher, and then we just created this huge container. And that's important because when you're doing it with other people, you can kind of lean into them and you can energetically feel them and it feels good. So we did it and we'll always do it in the beginning of January.

The new year, you know, so many, I don't have to go into all the reasons why you're going to fail at your New Year's resolutions. And, you know, there's tons of stuff. statistics that people gain two to five pounds every Christmas, that they never lose. I mean, there's all those kind of things. But I think those longer fasts are just the ultimate reset. So understanding that this process can work for everybody, and I think that's what I would want people to know, you don't have to have some superhuman strength. I promise you, I have seen millions of people fast, and everybody can find a path.

towards clicking into what we're talking about and making fasting easier. Now, in that, when you go into the fasted state, and I'm curious if this happens to you when you go and sit in silence for 10 days, there can be a detox. There's a detox of thoughts. There's a, you know, to your thing about minerals, there can be, like people can start getting rashes because the body, not all the time, but the body pushes out what no longer serves it. So it pushes out toxins. It's, It pushes out pathogens like viruses and bacteria. A big thing that I noticed when we started doing these longer fast was started to see how mineral depleted everybody was.

People were getting heart palpitations and their hair was falling out. That's not common because we've identified that most people are eating from conventional farms. They don't have the same mineral content in the soils. So most people are walking around mineral depleted, which is why we recommend you do some minerals, through the whole process. Hydrogen water is really interesting because it feeds the microbiome. So there are hacks you can do to make the process easier. But you're doing it to shed the old. That's why you're doing it. You're doing it to let go of what no longer serves you. And just like

anything you do to let go of what no longer serves you, there can be some bumps and there can be some assists that are helpful, which is why I like the electrolyte. And I like the electrolyte. And I like that the community because we all do it together and everybody has a different experience with it. So picking up on the prolonged fasts, what are, what's the efficacy for people that struggle with chronic disease? What have you seen with like 20, 30 day fast even or 10 day fast, you know, what have you seen? Because you just mentioned after three day fast, a lot of people feel the purging. Like finally we're giving our system the space to like get rid of stuff that it doesn't need to, right? Yeah. Apoptosis, all these things.

What about those prolonged fast for healing? I've seen some miraculous things. If you're going to go 20 days, 30 days, you need somebody to guide you. So one of the things that we recommend is you get a blood sugar reader so that you can see where, like, you know, like when you first learned a bowl, you put up the little bumper rails so that the ball doesn't go in the alley. I feel like with fasting is the same thing. We got to put up some bumper rails so that you know you're going into a dangerous place. And measuring your blood sugar and ketone level is part of that. So what I recommend is you can either get a little cheap kind of handheld one,

or you can actually put a continuous glucose monitor on, which is even more amazing to see what happens to your body. But you don't want your blood sugar to dip more than, like, the number that I always tell people is if you get in the 50s, you're going to want to watch yourself and make sure it doesn't go below 50 because you could be going into a dangerous place. So those are the kind of things that become imperative if you're going to go 20 and 30 days. They can be optional with a three day, but not a 20 and third day. The other thing is that you probably should have a guide of some kind that's at least

watching you and with you because fasting can get, it can get addictive and it can get where those ketones make you buzz and you feel so good. And a lot of emotional release can happen, a lot of physical release. I met a guy who didn't know how to solve his health, chronic health problems. He was grossly overweight. And he was on a 250-day fast when I met him. Of just water? Yeah.

Just water? Yeah. And he was so overweight that his body had plenty to eat. Wow. But literally, like, his skin was hanging off of him. he smelled horrific because the body was purging. But he had some crazy stories about like moles that were falling off of him. He felt incredible.

But here is a classic example where I'm like, okay, dude, it's time to stop the fast now. Yeah, after about a year in. Yeah. Like he didn't know the exit ramp because he was seeing so much evidence of change. I didn't even know that was possible. I guess if you have enough fat. If you have enough, he was grossly overweight. Okay, wow.

Yeah, so he had a lot to survive on. Wow. So then the reintroduction, what's the advised refeating process? Even for a few days or even like a one day fast, I feel like it's so easy to fall into like overeating. I feel like our stomachs have shranked a little bit and sometimes we can overeat. I know after a one day fast in the past, I have eaten a little bit too much that felt comfortable for me.

And it's like kind of slinking back the benefits of what we just did. So, yeah, what is the best way and how we can kind of ease back into food? Yeah, so that was like the whole, like a big reason why we wrote Eat Like a Girl was to like help specifically women like get back into food. That first meal matters. That first meal is really important whether it's a short fast or long fast. So I'll explain two different ways. To me, a short fast is anything under 24 hours.

That first meal in, you want to think about refeating your microbiome. That should be the most important. So there should be something fibery, some. some vegetables, a salad, something that's going to feed the good bacteria. Adding in nuts and seeds can be really good because they're prebiotic. Hemp seeds are amazing. I sprinkle hemp seeds on a salad all the time as my first meal in. And then you've been in a state of autophagy, which is a breaking down.

So you want to go into more of a state of what we call mTOR, which is a building up. And that happens with protein. So legumes, if you're plant-based, animal meats is great, and then I'm a huge fan of like olive oil of drizzling it with fat. So you just want a really good nourishing meal if it's under 24 hours. If it's over 24 hours, then there's like a four-step process that I recommend. The first is you do some kind of broth. I like bone broth if you eat meat because it has glycine in it, and glycine is an amino acid that actually heals the gut and repairs that inner lining. So bone broth is great, otherwise do a vegetable broth.

And eat like a girl. We came up with a one of my chefs did a whole mushroom functional mushroom broth that would be great for plant-based people. Then if you do okay with that, and what that means is you should be energized by the broth. If you get sleepy by the broth, like that you need to ease yourself back in a little bit more, like have a little more broth until your body gets used to it. But after broth, then you want to think about anything fermented. fermented. Fermented coconut yogurt, fermented even raw kefir, sourcrow, kimchi. You can put it with like an avocado or you could drizzle it on a salad, but you want to add in those good bacteria.

Then we start to look at can you handle raw vegetables? So a lot of people, you know, the oxalates and lectins thing, like a lot of people don't do well with plant toxins. So do a little bit of raw vegetables and see how you react. And if you do well from there, then you're ready. to go into meat. So you have to systematically, for three-day water fast, it's imperative that you slowly put yourself back into food. And then the other part of going back into food after you have been fasting that long is you'll see which foods work for you and which foods don't. The first three-day water fast I did, I thought eggs seemed like a good thing to do. I was like, it'll be soft. Like, it should be good.

Like, I fell asleep. I did a little bowl of eggs, and I'm like, oh, my God, I feel like someone just tranquilized me. Now, it's possible my system just doesn't do well with eggs, but it changed the way I looked at that food. So you would have done maybe some bone or vegetable broth first, a little bit of maybe fiber first, slow into that, and then maybe some more protein. Exactly. Okay. That's when I started playing with it, that's when I came up with this four-step process because I was like, there has to be an easing back into it. a little bit more of like a macro perspective on health.

Like we live in one of the most metabolically poor nations on the planet. And sugar is obviously a massive contributor to that. So when you think about sugar and glucose, how have we gone so wrong? Of course, we could look at it from the food industrial complex perspective. But also physiologically on an individual level, what sugar does to us and how you think about it. Yeah. Well, sugar amps up the dopamine system. So you're just, we got our little phones that amp it up.

We can order, even when we order DoorDash and our food comes to our front door, we get a little dopamine hit. We are so dopamine saturated. So sugar is just keeping us in that dopamine saturation. Now, the thing about dopamine that we really, I love to point out, is dopamine is the molecule of more. It's not the molecule of enough. So the more dopamine-rich things we do, the less we ever feel satisfied. because that neurotransmitter is constantly saying, go do more, go do more. So if you want to get off sugar, if you feel like you have a sugar addiction,

a really key thing to remember is that it's keeping you chained to a life that you're never satisfied with. Because if dopamine runs you, you'd never get that satisfaction that's a neurotransmitter like serotonin can give you. So the way that neurotransmitter system is supposed to work is dopamine comes in and then you stop the dopamine activity and then serotonin follows and says, this has been great. We're doing wonderful. Like if you achieve a good goal, one of the best things you can do is be like, oh my God, dopamine got me here. But serotonin is going to tell me that I can rest now and I can just enjoy this moment. so we have to get away from all these dopamine stimulating activities. But the food industry knows this.

So they have sprayed chemicals on food. They have upped the sugar content of food so that you never feel like you got enough so that you keep buying more. Like potato chips, they literally spray a chemical on it, that you eat it and you never feel full and you just want to keep eating. If you've ever had a bag of potato chips, that wasn't sprayed with chemicals and had the right oils. You literally can't eat the whole bag because you get full,

whereas a very light, fluffy, chemical-laden potato chip, you never get full. So in this modern world, I think dopamine is really important that we watch because it's so sneaky, because you feel good, you're chasing it, but you don't ever get it. It's like you get a little bit of it, and then you want more, and then more, and then more. And that is the quickest way to live a life of suffering. There's a whole other host of problems that like the sugar-free stuff causes, though, right? So why is that the case?

Because a lot of people think, well, okay, I'll just go for the sugar-free alternative that has Aspartame and all these, you know, artificial sweeteners. Yeah. Why is that bad? Well, so Spartame is a great one to break down because everybody goes to their diet soda and their diet drinks thinking they're going to lose weight. I haven't met a person yet that was like, yeah, you know what? I just went on diet everything and I lost a ton of weight because what that chemical does is it's an obesity. And an obesity actually hijacks your stem cells and reprograms your stem cells and tells your stem cells, instead of making something like bone, I want you to make fat. This is what's going on with our children right now, is that we have flooded our food system with these obesogens.

And they are reprogramming these stem cells that are supposed to make healthy. tissue and they're telling those stem cells to make fat. So NutraSuite, all of those, you know, not to call them out, but all of those companies, but I am calling them out, all those companies that use these synthetic sugars, what they're doing is they're literally reprogramming all of your stem cells and telling your body, make more fat, make more fat, make more fat. What about like stevia, monk fruit? Like, are these all? No, those don't do it. Okay. It's just the obisogens. Yeah, it's just, yeah. The things they make you obese.

But here's the thing. Stevia and Monk Fruit, even though it's made in a lab, it comes from a plant. Like, aspartame doesn't come from a plant. It comes from a lab. It was chemically designed. And then the other thing I want to say on most of the diet foods is that they make you more hungry. So they actually go up into the brain centers and they keep you actually agitating the hunger centers so that you actually are more hungry. Where does insulin resistance come into all this?

Yeah, so insulin resistance is the cell is now unable to take insulin that your body is producing, and insulin's job is to take the glucose from the food you ate and grab it and put it into the cell. And when you're insulin resistant, what happens or what went on in the cell is it got like a traffic jam in there, and now insulin can't put glucose into the cell. So it has to store it in somewhere else. So where it stores it typically is fat. And this is really interesting because we go and we look in the mirror and we see ourselves as overweight, the people who are insulin resistant. And we're like, God, I didn't do, I couldn't stick to the diet. I'm doing something wrong. It must be my genetics. Like something's wrong with me. But what your brilliant

body actually did is it was like, I didn't have a place to store insulin and glucose. So I had an option. I could put it in your brain. I could put it around your heart and lungs. I could put it in your liver. But that would kill you. So I decided to put it around your belly. I started to put it on your booty. I put it up on the back of your arms. I put it in your breasts. And now you're looking in the mirror and you're mad at me. I'm over here trying to save your life. So insulin resistance is the state in which the body no longer can efficiently use glucose. And so it has to store it somewhere. So your pancreas is still making insulin, but insulin cannot do its job of escorting glucose into the cell. So it all goes to storage. It's so fascinating to just see how without fail

intelligent our body is, you know, like when people focus on belly fat, for example, like, why is that the case, you know? And so what are some of the ways in which you see our intelligent body protecting us, like you just mentioned, which we think, like we hate to see in a lot of ways. Oh my God, there's so many ways because this is the thing I geek out on all the time. I'm like, I'm always fascinated by why is the body doing that? What is it doing? I mean, well, there's a fever is a great example. A fever and mucus. When you have a cold, your body's like, hey, there's a foreign invader. Let's start raising the temperature to burn the fever out. And let's create some mucus so we can stick to these bacteria virus that have

come into the system. So the best thing you can, can do is cover yourself up, rest, and let the body do its job. But that's not what we do. We get an anhystamine to kill the mucus. We get some kind of pain reliever or eczedron to bring the fever down. But you just killed this amazing mechanism inside your body that is trying to actually support you and help you. Pain is another one. I'm shocked at how much chronic pain is going on in the world right now, a lot of people are stuck in these pain cycles, whether they're joint pain or just fibromyalgia. And pain is the body's way of saying, hey, inflammation has gotten so big here that we need to make you slow down. But we don't do it. We take medication and we

push through. My new theory, and the new book is going to be on, is I think this is why so many women are suffering with menopause is because we didn't learn our evolutionary design. And the evolutionary design of menopause is actually one where you are taking an energy system inside your body that was going towards reproduction, and it's now changing that energy system, and it's going to put it towards better fitness, and this is all scientifically proven, better fitness, better cognition, and better ability to connect and socialize with others. The whole purpose of menopause is a transformation into the happiest, most intelligent version of you possible. But because you didn't stop to slow down in order to honor that transition, you are like pushing through.

You're not resting. You're eating the wrong foods. You're not prioritizing sleep. You're doing all the things that work against your body. And so you're irritable. You're gaining weight. You have hot flashes. You can't remember anything.

because you have not worked and adapted to the hormonal system that's transitioning in you into this incredible version of you. And I really believe we've missed the mark on what the body is always doing the right thing at the right time. I want to get your perspective on this in regards to menopause because you spoke to it as this transformation and initiation. Yeah. And I looked into this recently and I'm just curious. I don't know how strongly, like strong the validity of it is, but there's about three species that have menopause, right?

There's orcas. Yep. Elephants, they have like a social menopause, but I think it's a certain pilot whale. Pilot whales, yeah. And it's interesting because those are three species, including us, that rely on their intellect and information passed on for survival. Yeah. And in the process of because the woman have the incredible superpower of bearing life that we men don't have, right? And so why would at a certain stage of life that turn off?

Why would that go offline? And there's this perspective that in the transformation and the initiation, it's extending their lifespan because birth is a kind of risky thing, you know, in the perspective of evolution and survival. So by extending the lifespan of the female, they become kind of the information bearers, the wisdom elders, and in many ways. And I know you're so passionate about how we have just completely, like culturally misunderstood menopause and the woman's process and all of that. And so what do you think? What are your thoughts on that? Yeah.

I love that you've researched this. You're looking at the same stuff I'm looking at. Okay, cool. So it's called the grandmother hypothesis. And the idea was if you go back into the primal days, what happened was around cave life, you had the men that would go out and hunt. you had the woman who was bearing children, delivering children, caring for an infant. And then you had the older children that were not strong enough to go hunt.

They might be toddlers or they just didn't have the ability to go out and make a big kill because the hunters that were going off were off for days and they were going for large animals. And so somebody had to take care of cave life. So it was the grandmother, the post-menopausal woman, that took care of cancer. cave life, and she did that by taking this renewed energy source because she wasn't reproducing, and she would go and hunt for tubers. And she would pull tubers out of the ground and bring them back because the hunters were off for days. And she would bring it back to nourish the family and make sure that the mom-bearing children had nourishment so that she could stay alive so she could continue to

perpetuate the species so that the species that we would live as species. If the grandmother didn't transform into this new version of herself. We literally, you and I would not be sitting here right now because the hunters were gone for days, and when they came back with a kill, they only came back with a kill 3% of the time. So it was the grandmother that was able to keep subsustinence together for those around the whole cave life.

And in order to do that, there had to be a transformation of, her in these non-reproductive time. So she became this elder leader that kept everybody alive. Now, the orca whales, they exhibit this. They actually, there's really interesting research there that the orca whales spend 30% of their life post-reproductive. We spend 42.5% of our life post-reproductive. That is not a mistake. It's not like, oh, whoops. Like, we're just going to let you live for 42% of your life without a reproductive cycle. You are needed. You are important. You are, there was a transformation that put you into a leadership position to keep the species

alive. But we don't do that now. We toss our menopausal women aside. We have women that are trying to freeze their faces so they don't look old because, God forbid, if I'm old in this culture and I look like I'm old, then I become invisible. And so what I'm trying to do, and this is I'm passionate about this because this is my next book, is I'm trying to show that actually we need to be talking about menopause as an evolutionary redesign where we are actually coming into a leadership position. And if you look at like the stuff like Lisa Moscone has done a ton of brain research on women going through that process, what she finds is that the neurons in our brain that actually are like the people-pleasing neurons that are like, I want to make sure you're happy, which so many

women have, those prune away. And the neurons that come in that are like, I'm going to take care of myself, I'm going to stand up for what I believe in, because I'm a leader. I was meant to be a leader. I'm supposed to be a leader. So when you talk to a post-menopausal woman, she'll tell you what she thinks. Like, she's not holding back because her brain reorganized itself for this new leadership position. But we don't honor it like that. And I really want to change that. I think, you know, the most common time for a woman to commit suicide is between 45 and 55. And I think in this, I call it the brain remodel project. As the brain is remodeling itself, she doesn't understand herself. And so, and we have a culture that's like, you have a wrinkle, you're old, you're not

helpful anymore, and our culture doesn't lift up our wise elders. So if we really change that, and you know, Desmond Tutu said, if you want to heal a world, let the women lead. And I would add, if you want to heal the world, let the postmenopausal women lead. Because they have the energy resources, they have the brain that's changed itself to be able to heal communities of people, because that's how we were designed. That's a whole purpose of menopause. So this is so powerful. I can just feel the power and impact. You're already doing it.

I know you say this is your intention with your next book. But just by speaking it, how passionate you are right now, I know this is impacting so many people. I've seen a lot of that journey as well with my mom and women in my life. And yeah, it's just such a shame that we have this cultural misunderstanding and view something that's actually a feature as a bug. Yeah. You know?

And it's that transition from the maiden to the mother to the crone. where the wisdom is really held. Do you know what the crown stands for? I don't know. It translates to mean crown. Oh, wow. Yeah, that makes sense. But we have it, like, as an old lady.

Right. With, like, you know, like a witchy old lady is the crown. Like, she's like, come after you. Like a character, a Disney character. But actually, Clarissa Estes Pincola, who wrote Women Who Run with the Wolves, and it is an incredible American author. and a philosopher as well.

She is like the crone is the crown. That is where our post-menopausal women need to sit. Is that with this, like, we should be putting crowns on us and being like, you have wisdom. Your brain can actually, like the amygdala for post-menopausal women, instead of looking for fight or flight, the amygdala turns towards empathy. So the brain changes that are happening, mixed with the evolutionary design, mixed with the energy

redistribution, makes the post-menopausal woman, in my opinion, the wisest of all humans. And we have to stop tossing her aside. Yeah, us men don't have it. Interesting how there's not a grandfather hypothesis. There's not a grandfather hypothesis. And actually, you know, you're meant to keep... Of course. You serve our own function. Yeah, and you're meant to, like, keep impregnating. Like, you know, men can stay fertile for years and years and years. So there is a, there is a difference between men and women as far as our functionality as we get older.

Like, your reproductive system doesn't stop. Ours does. So if you go back and you think about the evolutionary design of that, why would whoever made us, whatever energy, whatever your belief system is that made us, why would this, energy create something different for menopausal women. And I am, the more I study this, the more I'm clear, it's because we were met to be cultural leaders. But we live in a culture that glamorizes beauty and glamorizes, like, you know, youth. I'm not an anti-aging fan. I'm actually a pro-aging fan because I think anti-aging says, I don't want to go there. Pro-aging says, I'm curious about who I'm going to be there. One of my other really interesting things that I've been thinking about is there is a feminist philosopher. Her name is Carol Gilligan. And in the 80s, she studied the differences between the way boys and girls asked for what they wanted. And an example would be

that if you went to an 11-year-old boy and girl and you said, what do you want to eat, they would both tell you exactly what they want to eat. Now, fast forward to them both going through puberty. You come back two years later, you ask them the same question. The boy says, I want a hamburger, and the girl says, I don't know, what are you going to eat? When our hormones come in, our brains as females start working from right to left, and we become relational creatures. And everything we are doing is adapting to the relationship of another human, adapting to the relationship of a patriarchal society. we are constantly making sure everybody is okay. When we go into menopause, those hormones go away.

I strongly believe we hear our own voice again. And all of a sudden, all the ways we've betrayed ourselves, it's actually a return home to ourselves if we allow it to be that. And there is the cultural kind of programming and viewing of especially more heavily women that their value is based and derived out of the value they bring to others. And you're speaking to this like sovereignty and reclaiming, especially postmenopausal, where it's, your value does shift in relation to others. But it's also, in our curious to hear your perspective on value irrespective of doing anything for society or others, but it's inherent, you know, as who you are. Well, I think we have to value ourselves first.

I think that's the problem is that, you know, for women, we've gotten our value from whatever we've, you look beautiful. you were so helpful. Carol Gilligan actually says that in the 1980s, the messaging for women was you should be selfless. And so we only got our value from externals, validation. So for women, I think one of the challenges we have is that in order to create value and to be visible again, we need to actually love ourselves first.

And we need to need to get to know ourselves. first and have a relationship with ourself first, which is why, like, know that. Which is why we're in know thyself land. We arrived. We are. I'm speaking your language. But it's everything you're teaching. But, but, and I know it's important for both men and women, but I, it breaks my heart how many women arrive into their 50s.

with no understanding of who they are without adapting to everybody else's needs. And that is what I'm going to change with this next book. That's what I'm writing about right now. I'm excited. I'm so pumped for you. Yeah. Have you been on your own journey with that? Yeah.

Can you tell? Would I never guess, Mindy. Yeah. I mean, let's see, in full transparency, see, I, you know, as a doctor, I had a very, very busy clinic. Everything, I would spend my whole day catering to my patients, and then I'd come home and spend my whole night being a mom. There was never, I never thought about what I wanted.

I thought about what everything else needed to be. And then the pandemic hit, and I had this little YouTube channel that was growing very quickly, and it took off during the pandemic. And all of a sudden, and you know from doing YouTube, all of a sudden I was like, wait a second, like there's a whole online world here that I can take what I'm teaching in my clinic and I can help more people. So again, always about the other person. And I actually ended up closing my clinic and writing books and doing videos. And as I was going through that process, I was getting more and more depressed.

and I was becoming more and more frustrated about, like, oh my God, if on paper, everything in my life looks amazing. I got an incredible book deal. My Fast Like a Girl has sold over 800,000 copies in two years. Like, there was so much goodness out there, but I wasn't happy. And I think something happens with social media, too. I was super nervous that the likes and the follows. I didn't want to become addicted to that. I didn't want to be, you know, I had a lot of people wanted me on their podcast.

And it was like, I don't want to get attached to that. And so I had to go within, and for the last two years, I've been doing a lot of therapy, a lot of plant medicine, and a lot of journey inward and discovering that I never gave oxygen to my own voice. And the catalyst was actually a friend of mine. This is what a good friend does. said to me one day, you know what's really interesting about you, Mindy? You're so worried about disappointing everybody else, but you have no problem disappointing yourself. And so who you're seeing right now is somebody who is taking the journey back to herself and learning to say, no, I don't want to do that for you. That doesn't, isn't work for me. And I need, I'm spending a lot

more time by myself, getting to know myself. I'm really trying to ask myself, what do you, like if I'm in a group of people instead of going, well, what does everybody else want? How do I make this really good for everybody else? I'm asking myself first, what do I want? And I'm just trying to reprogram myself so that I put myself at the center. And it's harder said than done, because you're going to disappoint a lot of people than I have. But not myself. So I, I, I am this next book. I am this next book. I am coming in, I'm two years post-menopausal, and I'm coming into the best version of myself because it's the most authentic version, the version that never got oxygen before, and I'm now giving her oxygen.

Aw, I love this. This is so powerful, so potent. I just, and it just feels like it's just so widespread, how so many women struggle with this. Like, it's across the board, like, unanimously. I had somebody, the summer, like, I took the summer off and I just kind of let it, like, slow down so I could get this to understand myself. And somebody said to me, well, what do you, you know, what are you going to do with your days? And I was like, I can't tell you because I've never asked what I want to do. Yeah.

And so it took time. It's like fasting. It took time away from the busy schedule. to like wake up in the morning and go, okay, if nobody else was in my life today, what am I going to do? If I didn't have any Zoom calls or things to do, what am I going to do? And the first, actually the first week of asking myself that, I cried every day because there was no answer. Nothing came to me. Because I'd never, at 55 years old, I had never asked myself every single day, what are you doing today, Mindy?

What do you want to do? It was always what was required of me to do. It's fascinating to get to 55 and realize that. I just want to give you a big hug. And also my mom, too, I just feel like her so much the same timeframe as you also going through this and discovering, you know. And what do you wish people going through this

or that one day will go through this transition of like entering kind of that dark period where it's like you're unsure. There's this familiarity with always just living your life for other people's needs and not really discovering your own or prioritizing your own self-love. What would you say are the most important things

that you wish you two years ago would have had? They're baby steps. Like, first you have to ask yourself, like, what do I want? And then you also have to catch yourself adapting. Like, I'm, like, just full transparency. You know, I've been married to the same man since I was 21. So he is getting a different version of me now

than the 21-year-old that he married. and the mother of his children. And so I've had to have some hard conversations with him about, I need space, because I can't even hear my own voice. So I'm going to need to take a couple of days by myself. That was like I needed to remove myself from environments where I was a professional adapter. So that was the first thing. The second thing is I had to hang around other people that actually supported their own personal journey. and that other women that had been through, this is the wise elder. So a lot of my friends that were

10 years ahead of me, I was like, tell me how you handled this situation. I mean, I can't tell you how many conversations with women that are in their 60s that I say, I just, I can't do it anymore. I can't please everybody anymore. I can't betray myself anymore. And then I say, am I crazy? And then I have women reflect back to me. So I've created a really cool group of women that will reflect back to me, like, nope, I went through that. Nope, you're not crazy. The Okinawa women that we put up on a pedestal all the time as being their longevity they live forever, one of the things they do is they create a moai. And a moai is where they gather women together. And in their case, it's women who have lost their husbands, but they share resources. So one woman might have a home, so they go live there.

Another woman maybe has a meal, so they go there. Another woman has a meal. Another woman has a wisdom, so they go there. But they come together and create a support system. I think that's what women need to do when we go into those post-menopausal years. When we start coming back to our true authentic self, we need to surround ourselves by other women who are like cheering us on, that are supporting us, that have been through that process. And then you have to do, there's a little bit of a dark night of the soul and honoring that that's okay, that you are letting go of the worth you got from pleasing everybody else. And you're stepping in to pleasing yourself. And that can be an addiction that's really hard to overcome. But again, support helps. And just like you're detoxing when

you fast, you are detoxing from the people pleasing. So knowing when it gets, oh, God, the boundaries get so hard to set, I'm going to upset these people. I'm going to say something that's going to really upset everybody. But it's the right thing for me to do. You have to be willing to do that over and over again until all you want to do is please yourself. It's really beautiful. Yeah, it's amazing. What do we not understand about hormones and estrogen and progesterone in this whole process and transition that both men and women need to know?

Well, hormones have personalities. Have you seen Inside Out? Yeah, yes. So the Inside Out too was amazing because it was all about what happens to the brain when the hormones come in. They need to now do one for menopausal women. Yeah. Follow her through AIDS, yeah.

Yeah, exactly. So hormones have personalities, so I give them pronouns because I'm like, here's the way I look at it. If estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone went to a party. And they're in the room, they walk in, estrogen, she would be the life of the party. She would be like, because estrogen, when she comes in, she stimulates dopamine and serotonin and glutamate and all, acetycholine, all these wonderful neurotransmitters that make you want to go, what I want to connect to you, I want to have fun, that's estrogen. Testosterone is going to be the motivator. We think of testosterone as libido, but especially for women, testosterone is your motivation. So estrogen would be

dancing on the tables. Testosterone would be going to the head of the party and would be like, this is going to go all night long, right? Like testosterone want to make sure that there was plenty of time for the party to happen. And progesterone would be in the corner saying, when can we go home? I don't want to talk to anybody. So those three exist in one female body. So at 35, progesterone starts to decline. And she takes with her GABA. And GABA kept us calm. So irritability is the first thing to show up. Then estrogen goes on a wild ride in our 40s where one moment you're like, I love everybody. The next moment, you're like, you're looking at me wrong. Like we, go from, we have these really wicked extremes.

Just look at all the memes out there on pari menopause. It's because estrogen's up one day and then she's down and then she's up and then she's down. But then eventually those two hormones and then testosterone usually follows both of them and starts to tank. All of a sudden we're not motivated. We definitely don't want to have sex. We don't really feel like even getting out of bed. So there can be sort of a collapse that happens.

that journey is really intense for a woman. It's really intense. If you have a woman in your life going through that, support her, honor her, know that it's okay if she shows up one way one day and on the next day if she shows up differently. It is how those hormones programmed us, and as they go away, there's this total behavior shift. But when you get on the other side, now everything stabilizes. And that's where everything we've been talking about smooths out and you end up with this wise elder. But before that, the exit out of reproduction to post-reproduction is a tumultuous one. And the more love and support and acceptance that we can have, if we go back to this idea that I'm talking about how women have had to package themselves to be palatable to a patriarchal

society that had a lot of expectations, what that means for a woman is that all parts of us is not welcome. And as we start to go on this wild ride with our hormones, we are actually starting to pull back parts that we recognize. They're like, oh, I like this part of me that's certain, and I like this part of me that's flirty, and I like this part of me that is more outgoing, and we start to pull our parts back so that, again, we can stand in this wise elder place. So the best thing you can do is just support us through the process. And then with cycling women, know when estrogen's coming in, know when progesterone's coming in, because you're going to have somebody who at one point is like so gregarious and wants to connect to you.

And then the week before her period, she's like, you need to back away. Because that's how hormones work in a woman's body. I was certainly not brought up with the understanding of a woman's cycle and how more complex it is than the men's hormonal system. And what do you wish, I guess, because I want to go on the differences of both we haven't covered from men and women for fasting. Yeah.

But then also in understanding the cycle, obviously how fasting plays into that, but then also as your understanding of the time of the month and how you're going to be, you know, as better for certain behaviors to, you know, happen at certain times in the month. What should we most know for men and women? Well, so the first thing,

If you're in a heterosexual relationship and you're a man with a woman, you should know her cycle. Because you'll get to know her. So the front half of her cycle, she's more outgoing. The back half of her cycle, she's more inner. So you'll start to see the rhythm of that. I think that's really important. Same thing for women to understand themselves that like there is, like, some women are like, why do I cry one month and then the next month I want to, you know, punch somebody or the next

day I want to punch somebody, it's because you're a hormonal being. So for men, your your testosterone comes in every 15 minutes. And it does that over a 24-hour period. Testosterone goes up into the brain and converts to estrogen. You have one hormone to think about. Calling me simple? Yeah. You are very simple. I will even go a little bit, like I'll just tell you what I've been saying on stage lately. Do you know Peter Crone? Oh, he's a dear friend of mine. Yeah, he lives up here too. Yeah. So I was speaking at Gaia a couple of weeks ago, and he spoke after me. And so I used this analogy, and I guess he came in and cleaned it up and made something.

I haven't heard of his response yet, but you can bring him on to talk about what I'm going to say. He's been on a couple times. Okay. So I think a woman's body is like a sophisticated violin. You got to finally tune it. You need to know how to play the different strings. If it isn't tuned or played, it starts to get out of tune. there's a lot to go on with it.

There's a lot of notes it can play, and it has a level of sophistication. I think a man's body is like a kazoo. A kazoo. I used to say a ukulele. I have now downgraded it to a kazoo. And I say that because there's one note. There's just one note to play.

And that's why you guys are definitely more simple. But we are not like that. This is why we have more autoimmune problems than you. This is why usually fertility issues often are more a woman's issue than a male issue. This is why we go to, women have more depression because we have a more sophisticated body that we're living in. I don't know if that helps. Yeah, I know. I think some people might hear that and take it to be a value judgment of who they are as a human being versus the complexity of the physiological system, you know, which is an important

distinction. Yeah, thank you. That's why I always say I take this with love. It's your interpretation. I'm taking it from a body physiology standpoint. Yeah, I mean, a woman's body is definitely way more complex. Yes, exactly. There's a lot going on. Exactly. Okay, amazing. And then so fasting, what is the most important for fasting for a woman and when in her cycle?

Yeah, so front half of the cycle, when estrogen comes in, no problem. You can fast all the time. The most important, if we just keep it simple, the most important thing to know is the week before your period, no fasting. So when cortisol goes high, progesterone's out. She's shy. She's like, I'm out. So you can't bring too much cortisol to the party when progesterone needs to come in. And progesterone comes in the week before our period.

So this goes for fasting. This goes for hard workouts. This goes for skimping on sleep. The week before our periods is meant to be recovery so that progesterone can come in and shed that uterine lining. So don't fast that week. Yeah, she wants to leave the party. She wants to go to party. She wants to sit on the couch.

The other thing I always say is progesterone, wants you go home and sit on the couch, and she wants you to watch Netflix series all day long, and then she wants you to eat carbs. And every single woman will go, yeah, I want to eat carbs the week before my period. And I'm not saying go eat a box of pizza and a tub of ice cream, but what progesterone, our bodies are so intelligent, what progesterone is, chill out because I don't like when cortisol is around. She's a bit of a bully to me. And I need you to eat more so you have more glucose because I need to take that glucose so I can actually grow bigger so that the uterine lining can shed. So if we're dieting, if we're exercising hard,

if we're stressing out too much, if we're over-scheduled that week before, we start losing our periods, we start, we're irritable. PMS is just us working against our own biology. For women that lose their periods, which is, I feel like a really common thing, why is that such a big issue? Because of many things, but the biggest is that is your detox. you are shedding out every month what no longer serves you. And I'm going to tell you what the science says, and I'll talk about a little bit about what I think on an emotional level. So the science says that they have found four chemicals in a woman's blood, period, blood.

They have found pesticides, they have found plastics, they have found forever chemicals, and they have found phallates. These are chemicals in our system. Stuff we don't want in our system. That we don't want, that are cancer-causing, that disrupt our phallates. hormones. And when you shed and bleed every month, you're getting, it's a detox. You're getting rid of those hormones, or those toxins, which is beautiful. But if we go to Bruce Lipton's theory, Bruce Lipton said that our thoughts and our beliefs are on the outer part of ourselves.

So I have a belief system that when a woman sheds, she's also has the opportunity to shed what thoughts that no longer serve her. And she has an opportunity to redo herself every single month and shed away the old and rebuild the new. It's a real, and then that maps to the moon. And if you actually start looking at that, you start seeing how magical we are because we are shedding this what no longer serves us and we're stepping into a new version of ourselves every single month. So if you don't have a period, you're missing that whole opportunity. and toxins are staying in your body. What have you seen actually moves the needle to getting it back?

That's a great question. What I was going to say to you is, does it make you want to have a period? Being connected to the moon sounds pretty lit. But no, I'm still going to turn down that offer. Because, you know, it looks pretty rough for a lot. Yeah, it is a little rough. So the most surprising thing that I saw from, Fast like a girl is how many 20 and 30-year-olds don't have cycles.

And I think it's coming from manipulation of our cycle through birth control. I think it's coming from this desire to stay thin. And so we're not eating enough calories. You need at least 1,000 calories to make your thyroid work properly. And I think it's coming from stress. And a young woman could be sitting on her couch looking at Instagram and feeling stressed because she doesn't look or act like everybody else. So those three things are causing women to their periods to go away is it's the modern day. We're back at the modern day.

I don't think they had that problem in the primal basis. So all the things that manage stress, bring us back into right relationship. That's right. Fasting, I'm sure, is a powerful tool to maybe navigate getting back into that place. Yeah. So what I did in fast like a girl is I mapped out something called the fasting cycle, which is basically when you should fast. and when you shouldn't fast, and how to time that to your period. And what we've seen, because we've now used these principles

with as many, with a ton of women, is that we've seen that it actually brings women's cycles back. Because we're rhythmic. So it puts you in a rhythm that works for your feminine body. Resetting you to get back and flow. That's right. Yeah. That's right.

Why is fertility also plummeting so much? I mean, it makes sense that if you're, especially for, women that are not having their periods and they're not flushing out all these toxins and phallates and all these things. That just sounds like it would just lead to a system that's not fertile. Yeah.

I think infertility is largely a toxic issue on both sides. So for women, it's exactly what we just talked about. We have the, and the other thing I would just, the other thing I want to point out for a woman's body on fertility is that a woman's body needs to feel safe. If a woman's body doesn't feel safe, her whole. reproductive system shuts down. So some younger female bodies don't feel safe because they are turning on themselves, saying bad things about themselves. And the body's like, wait a second, we're running from a tiger now. Right, which is an intelligent system once again, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Shutting it down. Yeah. Exactly. Or maybe she doesn't feel safe because she's in a relationship she doesn't feel safe. Or she doesn't feel safe. Maybe because she's in a country that doesn't allow women to feel safe. She's in situations. I mean the patriarchal world. And by patriarch, I don't mean men. I mean power over. And we live in a power over society. And for a lot of women, that's destructive to our reproductive system. For men, what's really interesting with infertility, and this came out years ago when I interviewed this woman on my podcast, that when a boy is growing in the womb, if he is exposed to phallates, which is in, and forever chemicals, both of those, which is in our water system and is in a lot of our meats and is in our soils,

that if they, if a boy growing in the womb is exposed to that, that actually in the first trimester, the area, this gets really technical, but I'm going somewhere with this, the area between the penis and the anus, the hypospadias, actually is smaller, forms smaller, and the penis gets tucked in. It was actually, Joe Rogan brought this woman on. Her name is Shauna Swan, who did this research. And he... I think I saw that, yeah.

Taint size and penis size are both decreasing, yeah. He talked about how penis size, which was going down, which caught everybody's attention, but it was going down because of exposure to these chemicals. But what Shauna wanted to bring to the world was sperm count is going down because of these chemicals. So if we look at infertility rates, we have women that don't, their bodies don't feel safe, they're not eating enough calories, they're not, they're under a tremendous amount of stress, they have toxic exposure, and we have men that are putting clones

on themselves that are in air fresheners. That's where all those phallates live, is if you don't want exposure to that, don't get all the scented fragrances going on. And you can put those two people together in a relationship and try to see if they can have a baby. Unlikely. Yeah. Like the odds are not that great. So it's not like, I mean, it's not like there's one thing I can, I mean, this is why, can you see like the picture when I start to like map this together?

I'm like, oh my God, what are we doing as humans to ourselves? And then that couple goes off and spends $30,000 to like try to get a baby. Like, we need to go back to our primal cave friends and see what they did. and there are so many things they did right that we're not doing now. What are the most powerful things that they were doing right that were not doing outside of the fasting? Outside of things that we've covered, what do you feel like for something? Okay, light. They got up with the sunrise, and they got exposed to sunrise and sunset, so they got that red light for melatonin production.

They got midday light for, we have sensors in our eyes, actually serotonin receptor sites in our eyes. that register full-spectrum light. And so they got that full-spectrum light that created a serotonin reaction that also helped with their sleep-wake cycle. So they did that. They were forced to connect. I just actually looked this up.

I've been looking up all the evolutionary designs that worked for us. But they prioritized connection, which helped with safety, and helped with problem-solving. We are completely, we think we're connected. We're so disconnected right now. Our light has been completely manipulated and hijacked by blue light.

Nobody's going out. We're eating all day. And we're not getting enough plants. They got tons of plants because they had to live off the tubers that the grandmother brought. They slept on the ground, which was probably cold and hard. And their blanket was probably a cow hide or some kind of animal hide that was heavy, which is why now we have cooling mattresses. and we have weighted blankets and we have red light.

They probably did the cold plunge. Like everything in the biohacking world right now is a technological manifestation of what our primal friends did. It's really fascinating when you break it down. Why should we not eat in the dark? That's a big one that you've spoken to, right? Yeah. So when it's dark out, our melatonin is the highest.

And when melatonin is high, we are more insulin resistant. So melatonin coming in shuts the cells off from receiving insulin. So the meal you eat at 8 o'clock when it's dark out will completely have a different insulin reaction in your body compared to if you eat that meal at 5 o'clock. So you want to make sure that you're eating in the light because that way you're working with your melatonin system. In the morning when we get up and we see the red hues of the sunrise, that tells melatonin to shut off. It tells the cells to become insulin sensitive again, and it tells cortisol to come in. Cortisol is the hormone that is meant to make us move.

So in the morning, we're supposed to delay the food by like an hour. We need to exercise in the morning with cortisol because cortisol is meant to make us move. And then we should be eating through the day, and when it's dark out, shutting down eating at night. Do you mean eating literally in sunlight or like most ideally, or is it just? it's where it's bright and maybe you're inside but you can see light. Yeah, I mean, you don't have to be like eating, like, you could probably have a meal in this room. As long as, as long as you saw light and your brain registered that it's day. Yeah.

So you're just using your eye sensors to tell your brain what part of the day it is. And once you've done that in the morning and the evening and the middle of the day, you've now put yourself in this circadian rhythm. And so then you're able to work with that. And you can eat wherever you want to eat. But what do most of us do? We get up, we stay inside. We have our cup of coffee.

We don't get outside first thing in the morning. We're sedentary all day. Inside synthetic blue light. We don't see the sunset. Maybe we leave at the end of the day. We never saw the sunset. I mean, it's really interesting when you see how disconnected from our natural rhythms we are. I was on a flight just last week.

And I don't know if you've experienced this, but now they're having everybody put the shade down. And I was flying from L.A. to Miami. I left L.A. at noon. And the whole flight, everybody had the shade down and the lights were off. Oh, you had to see the whole flight? The whole flight.

Why? It's like temperature or something? I have no idea. Yeah, that's weird. But all I could think, and then I got to Miami and it was dark. And I thought, holy shit, my body doesn't know what happened today. Yeah, it's so confusing for our system. It makes sense, too, why just eating late at night is just another reason and example of why it's deleterious for our system.

Not only eating close to bedtime and going to sleep, but then also like we're just not digesting it to the same capacity in melatonin's presence. So it's melatonin. Like, you know, people always ask me like, give me some simple tools. And I'm like, well, if you want to lose weight, the best thing. to do is just eat in the light. Easier done in the summer, harder done in the winter. But then don't eat before you go to bed. If you're having trouble sleeping, don't eat and then go to bed because when you eat, your body's like, okay, well, I have to digest this. It doesn't, it's not going to put you into a restful sleep. So I don't think our ancestors did that. So again, if you always go back and ask,

like, how did our ancestors live? You usually find yourself on the right path of health. Thoughts on muscle. I know you've spoken to the organ of longevity that is muscle and the importance of keeping it through life. Yeah. So muscle does a couple of things. It's functional for us. So the example I often use is my dad had a knee, my 88 year old dad had a knee replacement a couple of years ago. And in his recovery, it was interesting how weak his arms had gotten. And we couldn't even get him out of the chair, like, because he couldn't lift himself out of the chair. So always think about how you want to be at. 90 or 100, and muscle is really important. Second thing, muscle houses insulin receptor sites. So if you want to stay metabolically healthy, the more muscle you have, the more insulin receptor sites you have that are going to be able to put glucose in and you're going to store less fat. So build more muscle. Now, if we go back to what we talked about with the menopausal women, you're actually meant to be more fit in your later years.

This is a mind-blowing idea. If we go back to the grandmother hypothesis, what was she doing? She had to pull tubers out of the ground, so it took a lot of hand strength. And one of the things they look at is they look at that one of the predictors of how you age is how strong your hands are. Yeah, your grip strength. Yeah. So we got to keep our, and you can do that by lifting weights, doing pull-ups, hanging from a bar. So we want to make sure that we are getting more fit as we age if we want quality of life to be better.

If you want to lose weight, you need more muscle because you need more insulin receptor sites. It makes sense when you break it down, right? Yeah. It makes sense and common sense is not so common these days. I know, I know. But like you just always go back to like, how is the body designed? Right, yeah. Like I wish.

Because you were just born into this modern society. I wasn't born into how our primal ancestors live, right? But it makes sense that we still have the same technology. Like our technology being our body, right? Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think we have gotten so complicated that we have lost our way as to how the natural body is supposed to be. And I mean, we even have lost our way like in what aging is supposed to look like.

Like we don't even know what aging looks like anymore because we manipulated that. Yeah, anti-aging. is a funny statement. It's almost like anti-oxygen in a sense where it's an inevitability, right? You know, but of course you can slow the speed of aging, right? But it's the discernment of if it's coming from love or fear, you know, and the scarcity mindset.

I really think it's coming from fear. I think it's, we are a youth-obsessed society for both men and women. But I think it comes from, I don't want to be irrelevant. I don't want to be rejected. and we live in a society that really applauds beauty and really applauds youth. So we have to start to put value on other things in order to get that changed. Yeah.

Similarly, for men, I feel like it's success, right? Like, societally, women are more valued for beauty. For men, it's more like their success. And it's just important to diversify our value portfolio in a sense, you know? Yeah, right. So think about that. As you're saying that, I'm like, you know what? Because in that we go back to the primal days, the man was off hunting.

And when he brought back food, this is something I've recently heard a long story about, that when he brought back food, the first thing he did is he took the kill to the other men. And the other men applauded him. And then the next thing he did is he fed it to the woman, the pregnant woman to make sure she had food, to make sure the kids had food. And what was left over was what the grandmother needed. Food-wise, she was the lowest on the food chain. But there was this, I mean, men were keeping the tribe a bit alive with this big kill.

So, yeah, translate that into today's world. And success is hardwired into your evolutionary biology a lot more than perhaps women. Success is hardwired into our biology. It's just going back to our natural roots, right? Leverage how we evolved to thrive as a human being. That's right. So many important reminders on how to do so in this conversation. And it's an inviting perspective when it's coming from the energy of like, hey, your system is intelligent.

It's doing its best to keep you survived and healthy. And that's why all these different things are happening, which you think are your body going against you. That's right. Right. That's not. No. And that's like, I hope people get that for me. this conversation is like how many times are we frustrated with ourselves, we guilt and shame ourselves,

and we think we are not enough. I think all humans at the core wound is I'm not enough. And yet when you actually know the body to the level that you and I've been discussing, you realize, oh my God, my body does all of that. We are like little walking miracles. even if you look at, like, how, you know, you've probably heard, like, there's millions of sperm that come running to an egg. Okay, the egg, actually, do you know, the egg determines the sperm. Yeah, the egg chooses and lets it in. How fascinating.

And she does that by sending a chemical message and reading all the sperm that come running at her. And then she decides, you're the best one for, to create a new human. that's how wise the egg is. Yeah. There's a little crone in there somewhere. There's some there's, yeah. Well, then the egg, you know, they say that the egg was actually a woman's eggs was created when she was in the womb of her mother.

And her mother's eggs were created in the womb of her mother. And then so the eggs are actually a way of lineage through all the women in your clan because each egg had been forming inside another woman's body. So who you are, the egg that created you, is actually a connection to your grandmother and your great-grandmother. So wild. So epic, how cool our bodies are. I know.

So you're saying all the men out there that are listening, we're the chosen ones, technically. Yeah, we chose you. You think you're trying to choose us. We chose you. That's so good. All right. Yeah, we're.

could flip it like that. You could have, yeah. You were, you were, you were so profound, we chose you. Just give something for a ego. Like, where's these stupid ukuleleys? That's right. No, we were chosen. We were the chosen one by this egg.

That's right. That's exactly right. Oh my God, I'm going to have to build that into the conversation now. No, I mean, I think, of course, like, this is not a conversation of, like, men are useless. Yeah, yeah, of course. It's more a conversation of, if, of knowing. myself because when we know ourselves, then we know how to communicate with each other. I had a really interesting story a couple years ago where a father came to me, and he was like,

I'm really struggling with my teenage daughter, and my wife and I just can't seem to get through to her. Is it her hormones? What do you recommend? And I said, well, when are you talking to her? And he said, what do you mean? I'm like, have you chosen the time you're actually trying to resolve a conflict with her. Did you choose that time? He's like, he's like, no, it's when she comes home from school and it's whatever I can find. And I said, you need to know where she is in her cycle. Because if you want to resolve a conflict with a woman, do it during ovulation. Because she has the most amount of estrogen so she can access the creative and logical sides of her brain. She has the most amount of testosterone, so she's motivated to solve the conflict with you. And she's a little

bit of progester. So she will be a lot calmer. So if you're having a continual problem with a woman and this guy was his daughter, map her cycle. And then at ovulation, you're going to get this really complete version of her that you're going to have a much better experience with. So many things that we just don't know that if we just knew would make our life so much better. That's right. That's right. So empowering across the board. Agreed. All those that you shared. Yeah.

Agreed. It's amazing. Having the understanding of the context, this whole conversation we had, yeah, is there anything that we've missed in regards to fasting, hormones that you think is really important that we add in here to kind of round anything out? No, we went all over the map. Yeah, we covered a lot. Yeah, we did really well. I mean, I think if you want to know thyself, you know your hormone pattern.

know where you, for women, know where you are on your hormone, hormonal scale. Men, you know, know that you're hormonally different than women. I know we, it's obvious. But if you're in a relationship with a woman, you care about women in your life, like, understand the ebbs and flows of her hormones. And then I think if we get that, that are, that primal desire of each sex, if we really take pieces that you and I talked about, what ends up, happening is it creates a bridge between us. It doesn't divide us. It actually unites us because we

honor our differences and we know each other's patterns. And I think that's what I'm really trying to get across is, you know, with fasting, it was really interesting when I pitched this book to all the publishers, a lot of publishers were like, we already have a fasting book. And my agent was like, yeah, but we don't have a book for women. And the patriarchal world was like, I don't understand. And what I found with Fast Like a Girl was that women not only now had a tool to be able to heal themselves, but they actually found themselves in the pages of that book because they started to understand ourselves.

So I think we've hit a point in which if we're going to go deeper as humans and we're going to take our differences and we're going to connect into a place of love, I think we need to really commit to being willing. to understand each other. And it starts with understanding the differences of hormones. It's so important. Well said, we just had Atlas Girl Alison Armstrong on the podcast. She was reflecting on how we often have this presumption that women just act as if men are just hairy, misbehaving women. And men often act that like women are just a more scattered, less productive version of themselves, you know? We just like kind of project that other people are.

like us, like our interiors are. Yeah. And understanding our differences, hormonally, psychologically, all these things just invite more empathy and understanding and less judgment. So it's important. It's a really good point. I really geeked out on this idea that a woman's brain works from right to left hemisphere. And a man's brain actually works from cerebellum to frontal lobes. So a man's information systems are going from back to front and from front to back. And women's are going from side to side. And what that means is that we are always, women are always in relationship. Men like rules. They, because of the way their brain works, it's give me the rules,

let me make the rules, let me break some rules. So there needs, they're a little more, you guys are a little more linear. Okay. Now, if you know that, like let's go back to, you know, my, my husband, like, I'm learning to say things like more, like, I need this from you. as opposed to, well, I'm feeling this way. He doesn't really know what to do with I'm feeling this way, but he knows what to do when I say, I need, this is how this works for me. And maybe you've experienced that in your own life.

Yeah. So that's where knowing the differences in our brains, we can now communicate at a different way. Yeah. We speak to others as though we would understand it instead of how they would understand it, right? That's right. Which requires nuance and understanding and communication

and asking. That's right. Yeah. Crazy concepts. Amazing. So I feel like when we zoom out, it's like look at our life as an individual and how we want to contribute and almost build this scaffolding, almost build this, you know, this our life that is viewed as a building. The health of our system is the very foundation in which if that's not right, nothing else matters, right? And you've worked with so many people dialing them in on this. And then you start to like find your groove. And like I feel like the healing communities can't, it can be an addiction in and of itself sometimes, you know?

Sure. Where it's like the purpose of life is to continue to just heal. And you just heal your whole life basically. Getting beyond, right, because there's always a degree of cleaning up toxicity. We can always improve and build more muscle. But once we discover and kind of cultivate a degree of health within our self and vitality, then our gaze kind of looks up and we're more able to be servants and support people and be in service to the world. And so I would just love for you to reflect on the journey of

that, how we can fall into the addiction of healing. And then, you know, as we kind of close up, it's like the purpose of our life and our gifts to share them kind of gets revealed once we have that clarity and vitality. Oh, yeah, it's so true. I mean, I think this is why I just keep preaching the message of health because if you have your health, everything else in your life will work better. I think the goal of health is to be adaptable. So, you know, like, so that plane ride I took, like, I've slept okay that night because I've dialed in my circadian rhythm on all other nights so I could step into some dark tube that filled with EMFs that took me across the country, and I was able to reset myself because of that. What we see in our fasting community are situations

where people go on vacation, they eat whatever they want, and they don't gain a pound. That's adaptability. You can be around somebody who sneezes and you don't necessarily go down with a cold. Like, how well are you adapting to the different environments you're putting yourself in? To me, that should be the goal of health. The goal of health, and you're right, like, where is there ever a moment where you're like, I've arrived? Like, I think the problem with health in general is that we made it a noun. It actually should be a verb. It's an action you take.

That's a continual process, right? Continual process. And then from that, yeah, I think we're all perfect. For me, I feel like ultimately humans are the happiest when we are in service of either each other or a mission or when we're outside of ourselves. I think the minute we start thinking too much about what's in it for me, where's my stuff, that's where the suffering begins. So I just can tell you what I told my kids is really to find careers that light you up and you're excited to go to every day, but that are giving back in a beautiful way.

Because when we are in the me, me, me, me culture of give me more, give me more, give me more, that's where we really start to find ourselves going into the darkness. And the light comes when, how can I help you, how can I serve you? That goes back to the. primal way of design, that we were designed, that we were designed to serve others and to help lift others up. And I really think that's where we miss the mark with happiness. And living in one of the most individualistic times in cultures where people are often celebrated and rewarded for kind of being the person who did it all in themselves. You know, the self-made person is such a, such a bullshit proposition. There's no self-made

anyone. Oh, my God. I see this. Okay, so you're going to love this because you're in this space. What happens when we go on podcasts like this together is, and when YouTubers get together, is there's a blending of audiences. It's like a Venn diagram and our overlap kind of meets there in the pod. So like we're like, like my audience is a mixture of Stephen Bartlett who brought me on Diary of the CEO and we got 10 million downloads on our first conversation. Well, I got a whole bunch of people came to listen to me from that. Recently, I was, was on Jay Shetty and a bunch of his audience found me and a bunch of my audience,

I'm sure found him. And I'm sure the same thing will happen with you and I. And so then we shouldn't sit on the mountaintop and be like, my followers, my people. They're really a meritage of all the people that have been following all, everybody else. And in that, I love it because it's collaboration. It's not individualistic.

Yeah. It's like building communities based off of shared values. That's it. You know, and the overlap of what your community values and what my community values come together and check out this podcast and almost a couple hours in now, hopefully they're viving with it and they're aligned with it and they find value in it. And then they share it with people and the community grows. And I just fully agree with we are really successful to the degree we're invested in

uplifting others and not just making it all about us, you know. and we can receive so much. We do receive so much in that giving. Like this idea of social influence is like, well, you only have social influence because you had a lot of eyeballs on you and you got a lot on a lot of different places that gave you that social influence. So, but it's not yours. It's like you don't own it.

So respect it and know that you got to a place because of a melding of a lot. lot of communities together. That I think we could take out, would take us out of that individualistic eye. So good. I love the way you break things down and just communicate. You're so effective at it. And I love how much passion you carry and what you're sharing about, you know, and it makes sense why it has resonated with millions of people. And I'm sure your next book is going to resonate with even more just because of how authentic this whole process has been for you. And how invested you are and seeing the well-being of others come to fruition. So just immense gratitude.

I'm so happy we met at that event the other day. And now we're here sitting down here out of this conversation. Agreed. And just build this interesting string of friendships that come together through this podcasting game. It's weird, but it's the best ever. It's like it's just like it's like camp. It's like all the communities, all people coming together and enjoying each other.

So agreed. And I agree. I mean, I think I love being in the presence of people that are trying to expand the way that we think about this life. Because, you know, if you stay stuck in the rhetoric that most people are stuck in, you will suffer. And it's going to take a large amount of us to step out of the matrix and to come into another place and have different conversations supporting each other in order to really change that suffering. So I totally agree. Amazing. Dr. Mindy.

Where can people find you any last words you have before we close out, just where people can find you, your books, what's upcoming? Yeah. You can go to my website. I mean, that's kind of the hub, but really, hopefully you heard YouTube is my passion project. So you can go there. Anywhere books are sold, I do recommend people go to the independent bookstores. Those are mom-and-pop places.

You can go to bookshop.org to get to the independent bookstores. so let's try to go to the individual over the corporate. But if you have to go to Amazon, it's on Amazon and all those places, and it's in every bookstore. But yeah, I'm pretty searchable. You can find me wherever you, whatever platform lights you up, I'm usually there. Amazing. I can't wait to see your journey to continue to unfold.

And for everybody that's been tuning in and it has these shared values in the community that's building here, it's quite a magical experience. And I'm sure you agree to, like, build this. like we sit here, we have this conversation. There's these cameras here that pick up and transmit it to millions of people or hundreds of thousands of people. And the ripple effect that comes off that is just untangible, but it is felt and it's so amazing and such a gift. And so it's not possible without everybody. Agreed.

It is really a little surreal, isn't it? Like I had a bunch of people come up to me in Miami this past weekend and tell me of how they change their health from reading my book. and watching YouTube. And I thought, how weird is it that I can sit in L.A. behind a computer and I can write books. And I can sit behind a camera and talk to a camera. And that goes out into the world. And that ignites somebody to change their own life. That is the miracle of where we're all sitting right now. I'm sure the same thing happens on your platform. Yeah. And I know we spoke to, obviously, how modern living is undermining our health in so many aspects, but it's, of course, enabling so much impact and widespread of information. So the middle path. And what a gift.

What a time to be alive. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. For everybody that's been tuning into this episode, let us know how this uniquely resonated and impacted you. And until next time, be well.