Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - I Stopped Fasting for a Year - Here's What It Taught Me (& Other Habits I'm Giving Up)

Episode Date: June 10, 2026

After 30 years in health, Dr. Mindy is calling time on the rules.This solo episode is one of the most personal things she's shared on this podcast. It covers two big ideas: the science and story behind why she stopped fasting for most of the past year and the five health habits she's deliberately walking away from in 2026.First, flex fasting. When cortisol is high from grief, trauma, illness, perimenopause, or chronic stress rigidly pushing through long fasting windows doesn't support the body. It depletes it. Dr. Mindy shares what happened when she lost a close friend and found herself in an acute stress state, what the research says about prolonged fasting and the HPA axis, and how she developed a new approach she's calling flex fasting: a more intuitive, body-led way to use fasting as a tool without turning it into a rule.Then the five things she's giving up: counting (macros, biometrics, followers, all of it), the gym, other people's urgency, productivity over health, and information overconsumption. Each one is a direct response to what the wellness industry has quietly done to us — turned health into a full-time job with a performance review.RESOURCES MENTIONED:Fast Like a Girl: https://www.drmindypelz.com/booksAge Like a Girl: https://www.drmindypelz.com/booksSubstack Article "I Stopped Fasting for a Year": https://substack.com/@drmindypelz/Carb Manager App carbmanager.com, available on iOS, Android, and webThe Movement Diet: Redefining Fitness at Every Age with Katy BowmanStudy: Prolonged Fasting, HPA Axis & Cortisol - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12736288/Study: Estrogen & Cortisol Regulation - https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/102/12/4457/4587523Midlife Women Fasting Trial - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65678-zStudy: Self-Selected Fasting Windows - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03375-yBEAM Minerals, use code MINDY for 20% off: https://www.beamminerals.com/?oid=4&affid=648LMNT, get a free sample pack with your order: https://bit.ly/drinklmntpelzTo view full show notes, resources mentioned, transcripts, and more, visit👉 https://drmindypelz.com/ep343 Connect with Dr. Mindy:Join Reset AcademyWatch the episodes on YouTubeFollow Dr. Mindy on InstagramSubscribe to Dr. Mindy’s newsletterDisclaimer: This podcast is intended for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional before making changes to your diet, fasting routine, or lifestyle.

Can I be honest with you for just a second? So many of the women who have come to me have literally already tried everything. They've done the diets, they've worked themselves out to death, they've done the programs, they've diligently followed the advice of their doctors, and yet they are still exhausted. They are still hormonally lost. They are still wondering why nothing seems to work for them. And here's what I've learned after two and a half decades of working with women. It's not a willpower problem.

I promise you, it's an education problem. Your body has a very specific set of needs. And most health advice out there was never designed with those needs in mind. And so this is exactly why I built my Reset Academy. It's my monthly membership community where I teach you how to use fasting, food, and lifestyle to genuinely work with your female biology. Every month you get new trainings, live Q&A's with my team and I, and a community of incredible women who are all in it with you.

They're doing the work, they're seeing the results, and the best part is they're cheering each other on. If you're ready to stop guessing and start actually understanding your body and finally getting results, come join us. us over there. All you have to do is head over to resetacademy.doctrmindypels.com. And I would love to see you inside the community and help you accomplish your health goals and fall in love with your body again. So that's resetacademy.com.com. I stopped fasting for almost a year and I want to tell you exactly why. Now first, understand

I didn't stop fasting because I didn't believe in it. That is absolutely not true. I sit here every week giving you video after video looking at the science. I watched the results people get with it. But last year, I made a personal decision based off of my cortisol levels if fasting was right for me or not and what fasting lights were right or what eating lights were right. And I went into a whole self,

discovery and I had to let go of the rigidity of fasting. And in that, I learned a tremendous amount about myself and I learned a new way to describe fasting, which is what I'm now calling flex fasting. And I want to teach that to you today. So first, I want to go into this mixture between cortisol coming from stress and cortisol coming from habits like fasting. You also, by the way, get cortisol from exercise. So let's start there and then I'm gonna walk you through

exactly what flex fasting is and how it might help you in your fasting efforts, because there's so many variables within flex fasting. So here we go. First, let's look at cortisol. So there's some really interesting research that I wanna bring to your attention. One of them is, was,

a study out of Nutrients Journal, which is a very prestigious journal. It was published last year in 2025. And it basically says that prolonged. Prolonged is the key word. Prolonged fasting activates the HPA access, pushing cortisol up and keeping it there. Prolonged. Okay, then we also have a 2020 study by endocrinology that said estrogen, this is another key one because I'm a menopausal woman, estrogen is woven into how you regulate cortisol, melatonin, and sleep. So midlife women who are under stress, we're already working with a system that is renegotiating the baseline for cortisol. So for me, personally, and I know a lot of you have this. This is why I'm sharing my story because I see your comments and I know a lot of you go

through this. I went through a period where I lost a very good friend. He died at 52 years old. He was like a brother to me. It was a very hard loss for me. Two months later, I was living in the area in L.A. that was burned. I was there that morning, those of you who have read age like a girl, I write that whole story. So I had two major life stressors that put me into an acute PTSD setting. Now, when cortisol goes that high for a 56-year-old woman, so this is for those of you who are menopausal, any version of menopause, peri, menopausal transition, post-menopausal, if you have two major life events, one major life event, and your cortisol is through the roof from those two events, I don't care if it's fasting, I don't care of it's exercise,

I don't care if it's calorie counting. Any horse's, Or medic stressor, which is a stressor that is going to provide cortisol to the body, a good stressor, is not good in those moments. Because like I just said, estrogen, according to this endocrinology study, estrogen regulates cortisol. And when you lose estrogen, there is a new baseline of that regulation, which many of you are probably already noticing this, where you just can't handle stress the same way. So it's really important when we go through those periods of time that we categorize stress.

So very similar to how I mentioned to you all, there's good fat and bad fat. There's harmful carbohydrates and there's nature's carbohydrates, but we call them all fat. We call them all carbohydrates. We do the same thing with stress. And one of the benefits of fasting is it taps into a good stress that makes your body stronger. when you have your system has been flooded with cortisol because of unusual circumstances like a loss of a friend or your neighborhood burning those are unusual moments and I know many of you have been under unusual moments and in those unusual moments that is not the time for a hormetic stressor so what I did over the last year taught me a lot because I started to use the clues of my body to tell me if I should even fast that day or not. Let's talk about some of those clues because you all may may have this and this is a part of the flex fasting formula that I'm going to teach you.

The first is anytime your heart is racing and and running and you could feel like it's pounding out of your chest. Anytime you go from seated to standing and you get dizzy, that is a body that is in a fight or flight response that is stuck in fight or flight. If you remember from many of my videos, we have three nervous systems. One relaxes us. One gives us the energy to handle a stressor. And one is what we call the freeze nervous system, which is the nervous system that we start to disson. associate with. When we are in fight or flight where we feel that heart racing, where we get and we stand up and we are dizzy, that is a sign that you don't want a hormetic stressor. You don't want

to add more stress. When the third nervous system, this freeze nervous system, where all of a sudden you find yourself wanting to numb yourself with food, alcohol, or drugs, or maybe Netflix series or you want to just numb yourself out. You want to hide. You want to not deal with life. That is a frozen nervous system that cannot adapt anymore and a hormetic stress or like fasting is not okay. So what I did is every single morning I checked in with my body. And I want to encourage you all to do this. And I was red, where's my heart at? Where's my breathing pattern at? Do I feel like I just want to back away from the world? Am I using things like social media and, you know, binge watching Netflix series?

I was at that time binge watching White Lotus. And am I finding that I want to withdraw? And if the answer was yes to any of those things, I ate breakfast. I ate that day. I did not fast. I used the signals that my body was giving me to take. tell me what nervous system state it was in to decide if a good stressor was going to be appropriate for me. Now, I also want to tell you I didn't do heavy workouts.

That's also a good stressor. I also stopped all my supplementation. I didn't want anything from the outside coming in, and I didn't want to put myself in any kind of situation where I would amplify the cortisol. So this is really at the heart of what flex fasting is. And since we're living in a very unusual time and I see your comments and I see how many of you are doubling down on fasting because you're stressed because you're gaining weight and you want to double down on that and make that tool work for you. It may not be the right tool when you're in a crisis situation with a fight or flight nervous system or a frozen nervous system that's stuck. So this is what we know about more of a flexible approach to fasting.

So first, I saw two studies that really hit home with me. The first one was a 2025 trial in midlife women, yay, thank you for studying us, that found a flexible eating window, especially when combined with exercise. We'll talk about different exercise in here in a moment, led to significant fat loss. With adherence to fasting, the adherence rates was 83 to 87%. There was a second study that it was done in 2025. So these are both very current studies. And it was a trial that said people, when they let people pick their own fasting and eating window, instead of assigning them one, they did just as well as if they had a restrictive,

you need to eat breakfast or you need to skip dinner. when they allowed people to make their own choice on what their fasting and eating windows were, they got as good of a result as if I stood here and said, hey, everybody, you need to skip breakfast. I don't say that. You choose what's right for you. And this was a study in the Journal of Nature Medicine, 2025, that then this was a quote from the study, letting your body have a say didn't cost the people in the trial a single thing. So who is flex fasting for? This is a new term I'm bringing out to you all here on YouTube.

Flex fasting is for people who are going through crises in their lives or maybe with their health. They still want to use fasting as a tool. They just want to use it in a more flexible. or a subtle way. And here are some of those people that I want to point out. Obviously, grief, that was a big one for me, like when you're deeply grieving the loss of something. So somebody going through a lot of grief,

sometimes this can be grieving your health because you got like a cancer diagnosis or something of that stature. So anytime that grief is around or loss is around, this is a time to embody flex fasting, which I'm going to explain to you what that looks like here in a moment. Recovering from an illness.

If you are either recovering from a surgery or you're recovering from maybe a horrible diagnosis or any kind of injury, that might be a time you want to be more flexible with your fasting. Postpartum, a lot of hormones crashing down. I always say keep your fast short. if you're nursing, but if you're going through emotional up and down from postpartum,

flex fasting is your go-to. If you're not sleeping, if you're not sleeping, if you're going through long periods of not sleeping and you're waking up at two and three in the morning and your heart is racing or your brain is getting OCD and thinking about problem after problem after problem, you're going to want to do flex fasting. And then the one that is really important that we, I talk about so much here is perimenopause. And even menopause, postmenopause, but especially perimenopause. That's a very turbulent time.

One day you're up, one day you're down, your cortisol levels are recalibrating as estrogen goes away. If you wake up one morning and you don't feel like fasting, don't fast. You heard it from me. find a new rhythm in this flex fasting routine that I'm talking about. So what's interesting I want to point out to women is that especially menstruating women, the whole premise around fast like a girl, the whole reason I wrote this book was because people were fasting too much and that was damaging women more than men. That was the whole premise of this book.

So I am not here to tell you all to keep fasting over and over and over again. I'm very excited to present the flex fasting to you. But what's interesting is I did find a study that cortisol shifts throughout your cycle. So one fixed fasting window for women was never going to work. And that was based off research done in 2023 in the European Review of Medical pharmacology. I'll leave all the links here. So what how do you flex fast? And here are your five flex fasting principles. And then what I would love to hear from you is I'd love to hear how this works for you. Because for me, I found an intuitive way to some days eat breakfast, some days not.

Some days have dinner early, some days not. I love the new state that I'm in. I'm playing with the tools, but I'm not rigid about it. Fasting is a tool. It is not a rule. And you decide your own. Let's talk about cod liver oil for a second. And I know what you're thinking. Cod liver oil? Really? Dr. Mindy, that sounds like something my grandmother took. But hang with me here for a moment because this is one of those old school remedies that modern science keeps proving right. Cod liver oil is one of nature's most concentrated sources of omega-3 fatty acids. Also, it's high in vitamin A and vitamin D, all in a form your body can actually recognize and use. This is such a powerful combination that is profoundly anti-inflammatory.

It's protective to your brain. It supports your hormones. And it does something I care really deeply about which is it starts to repair and nourish your gut lining at a deep cellular level. This is something I personally take every single day, and one of the things that I have noticed the most is what it's done for my skin. I recommend it to women who are navigating hormonal shifts, dealing with chronic inflammation, or simply trusting to protect their long-term health. So Standard Process is the company I deeply align with and trust. It's a Whole Food-Based, Clean company, and it has held the standard of quality for decades, and I expect only the best from Standard Process.

They are definitely one of the top new supplement companies in the world. So if you want to try it, check it out. You can learn more and get some for yourself at Dr. Mindy Pells. dot standard process.com. That's Dr. Mindy Pels. dot standard process.com. Enjoy. Here are the five steps.

Okay, first, I don't care what level you're at. If you've made it this far into the video, my sense is that you have an intuitive hunch that maybe you've been fasting too long. So what I'd like to do are too often, or maybe you've been too rigid, What I'd like to do is bring you back to a basic fast and just do 12 hours consistently. This is where I landed.

I'm doing about 13 hours pretty consistently now. Some days I intuitively want to pop up to 16 or 17. But for the most part, I'm doing about 13 and I'm feeling equally as great as two years ago when I was doing a lot of 24-hour fasts. So that's number one, start at 12 hours and stop trying to earn your fast. Stop trying to push through so that you get some badge that nobody's giving you. So let's make sure that we all go back to the basics. Now, if you haven't fasted before and you're concerned because of the stress level, I want to encourage you to start at 12 hours.

Whenever I was coaching people, I would tell them like, that's your first ledge. Just get comfortable there. So don't optimize, this over-optimization that the whole biohacking world is obsessed with is getting out of control. Don't push through 12 hours is the win. Okay? 12 hours is good. And some days you may just do no fasting. Action step number two.

run a once a week body check before you set your window. What does that look like? And I mentioned a few of them. So I'm going to give you some lists of symptoms. So let's start with trouble falling asleep and waking up at two in the morning, three in the morning with your heart racing and your mind running in circles. If your sleep is that disrupted, then let's lean more into flex fasting. If your heart, if you can feel your heart really heavy,

like there's sort of like it's gonna pound out of your chest, then it's a time to do more flex fasting. If you are stand up and you get dizzy, that's a sign your adrenals are maxed. So it's actually a clinical sign that many doctors use called raglins. And when you go from seated to standing, if you get dizzy, it's a sign your adrenals didn't adapt

to the change in position because your adrenals have play a part in blood pressure. So clinically, doctors use this to test adrenals. So you can use it yourself. And if it's not working, then if you're getting dizzy, your adrenals are maxed. Your reaction to stress. If a stressor hits you and you can't pause, you just turn around and lash out, that's a good chance that your cortisol levels are already really. high. So take inventory and I've shared with this with you all before when you sit

with yourself get to know your body and ask it it might just be one morning and you just close your eyes and you're like okay do I want to fast today how does that feel and start bringing your body into the inquiry start bringing your body into the whole decision not just your mind okay so you're not following a calendar you're not following a protocol you are collecting data on yourself and making a decision on that data remember n of one that i've been teaching here you're going to be your own and of one number three you're going to match your fasting window to your season not the goal we are not we are not pushing through so if you have high stress right now keep it at 12 hours

If you feel rested and grounded, then great. You can go over 15 hours. You can go into the six different tools that I taught, fasting lengths that I talk about in here, which is great. I love that. And it's okay for some days to be 15 hours and for it to feel effortless. And some days it's 12 hours and you're famished and your heart is racing and you're dizzy. And that's okay. You can mix it up however you want it.

The important thing is that you let your body give you clues. And the more you let it give you clues, the better off you'll be. Number four, protect your fasts by making sure you don't deplete yourself anymore. So minerals, when you go into a fast, bring your mineral load up. I've already mentioned multiple times. I have two mineral companies that I love for fasting, LMNT is one, B minerals is the other. I will leave links in here for you to access that with discounts. But the most important thing is that sometimes bringing those minerals up and when you're under so much stress

because all that cortisol requires minerals to make cortisol, so it's going to deplete minerals. and then you go into a fast that already depletes minerals, that's a problem. So let's make sure that when you are fasting, if you're going to flex fast, even though stress is high, you're keeping your fasting lengths short and you're bringing in your mineral supplements to make sure your body has enough resources to make it through the fast. Second thing I want to say on this as far as protecting your fasts is when you break your fast, you break it with protein. I've taught you a lot of different ways to break your fast.

But what's really important is when you're under a lot of stress, is you need protein because protein has amino acids and your brain needs amino acids, your muscles need amino acids. So when you're done with the fast, refuel with amino acids. The general statement is 30 grams of protein at that break fast meal.

and you want at least 2.5 grams of that 30 grams to come from leucine-rich protein. This is how we, you know, have you ever seen like when people are under so much stress, their muscle starts to break down? That's because their adrenals are pulling nutrients from their muscles to be able to keep that cortisol level high. So we want to make sure that doesn't happen to you if you're going to do a shorter fast during flex fasting, we want to make sure that you are actually bringing your protein load up, your mineral load up, so the reserves don't go so low that you lose muscle.

Okay, and then number five, and this is my favorite, is drop the all-or-nothing scorecard. I feel like I should have started this video with this, but what this means is we have a tendency to be like, oh, well, I'm stressed I shouldn't fast. Then I'm just going to go eat. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying let's be flexible about it. So I did shorter fasts last year because they were intuitive for me. It was like, oh, I just would, like I started to notice after a couple of months

after I was coming out of an acute PTSD situation. I started to notice like, you know what, I actually feel more hungry in the morning. and I'm going to eat and then I would count back and I was naturally at 12 hours. So this doesn't mean you're so stressed that you can't even fast anymore. It means that you're going to give yourself permission to fast a low amount, 12 hours. You're going to give yourself permission to not fast some days. You're going to make a decision on what meal and eating window you're going to and fasting window based off of that day. Because when you're under stress, every day can look different.

So those are the five. You're going to hear me talk a lot more about this. I just want to say before rumors run rampant all over the internet, I am not saying that fasting isn't effective. I am saying that if cortisol levels are so high because you lost a friend and your neighborhood burned and you can barely function as a human on your day to day, then it's time to rethink your fasting behaviors. And we all have our different version of that.

And this flex fasting, you'll hear me talk a lot more about it in coming videos because the most important thing is that you use fasting inappropriately so it supports your body doesn't deplete it. Okay, let me ask you a personal question. And this one is a really important one, which is when was the last time you had your vitamin D checked? And I'm saying this because in all my years of working with women, low vitamin D is one of the most consistent findings I see and one of the most consistently missed. And vitamin D matters for so many aspects of your health. We're talking about a deficiency. that can show up as hormonal imbalance, mood struggles, poor sleep, immune issues, even stubborn weight that won't budge no matter what you do. But here's the part that most people don't know. Taking an isolated D3 supplement isn't enough.

This isn't like just running down to the local store and grabbing some D3. Your body actually needs D3 to be combined with very specific co-factors to actually absorb and utilize vital. D the way nature intended it. And most supplements on the market don't include these cofactors. That's why I personally love Cataplex D from standard process. It's a whole food supplement. It's vitamin D complex, not just an isolated nutrient. There's an incredible difference between checking a box and actually moving the needle on your health, and this one really moves the needle. In fact, in my clinic, We used to test vitamin D and we could see with a product like Cataplex D, we could see on lab work

the vitamin D levels and people go up. So you can learn more and you can get yourself some vitamin D. You can test out Cataplex D at Dr. Mindy Pells.com. Enjoy. I have morphed into a new mindset and I realize that for, over 30 years. For over 30 years, I've been in the health trenches with people. And the rules of health that I have put forward, do this, don't do that. This is the length fast you want to do. This is the length fast you shouldn't do. All the half-toes, I am an unwinding. And I really feel

like the rules of health that are being poured out on platforms, like I'm giving this to you right now, are actually blocking our health. And so what I want to do in this video is I want to talk about the five things that I am not doing in my personal life for 2026. And I'm hoping that these five things will free you from any guilt or shame or have-toes that you have changed yourself to

that is spiking your cortisol. And yes, you're going to find some things in here are contradictions to what I have taught you for over 30 years. I know some of my patients still follow me on all of my socials. But in this day and age where we are right now in 2026, I strongly feel that we need a new approach to health. And so this is to deliver to you the new approach that I am taking. So are you ready?

Here I go. Let's dive in. So I started watching over the last couple of years so many health influencers creating more and more have-toes specifically for menopausal women. So much so that I know you all saw this. I have really seen that people making fun of like, oh, I'm 45 now. I need to eat 30 grams of protein with every single meal. I need to be drinking creatine three times a day. I need to go outside and get sunlight.

I need to not drink alcohol. I shouldn't be drinking caffeine. I need to make a dose on magnesium. I need to get to the right OB so that I can find the right HRT path. Like, enough, enough. This has gone way too far. I'm calling this the great unlearning for me.

I actually, the other day, said to myself, I think I'm in rewirement. I'm rewiring the way I look at my life, the way I look at my health, and so that it can start to flow with ease and joy, and I can be with the experience of a healthy lifestyle, not trying to manipulate my body with a healthy lifestyle. So here are the five things that I am not doing anymore in 2026. Okay. You ready for number one? I am done counting. Now for years, I told you, stop counting calories.

Now, my younger version did that, but what I did is I said, count macros. All over Fast Like a Girl are macros. And do you know how many questions I've answered in three years after over a million, is we're at like a million five of those books have gone out into the world, so many people start to live their life by, oh, I got 60 grams. Is that going to, am I going to gain weight?

Is that going to kick me out of ketosis? Oh, wait, I only got 75 grams of protein. Are my muscles going to fatigue? Like, we have to stop the counting. And for me, what I've decided to move into and to transition to is more of intuition. And it's really interesting because I watched people over the years. I would always put on a continuous glucose monitor on all the patients that I worked with. Before we had those, we had the pinprick.

And it was really exciting to be able to see what your blood was doing in relationship to your food and your stress and your workouts. And we became so obsessed with counting blood sugar in my clinic. We had literally a little strips of for ketones and blood sugar and meters. When you checked in, you could actually count and see what your blood sugar and ketone levels were like. That's how obsessed with counting I was. And then I started to see a pattern for myself. And I started to see a pattern for my patients. And that is that people knew when they went into ketosis.

People knew when their blood sugar was too high or too low. Once they counted for a while, they could stop the counting. So some of you that are brand new, the continuous glucose monitor is still a very valuable tool, but I look at it as metabolic training wheels. Those tools are great. Even counting your macros on an app like carb manager that I taught you in Fast Like a Girl are great as training wheels.

But for many of us, now is the time to take the training wheels off and go into an intuitive state. So for me, what I started to notice was when I looked at my continuous glucose monitor and I looked at my blood sugar reader that somewhere around 9 or 10 o'clock in the morning, I wasn't in ketosis and I was starting to feel a little hypoglycemic. and I would then check in an hour later, I became so obsessed with checking it. And I finally realized that there is a click that happens when you go into ketosis. And that click is one of those scenarios where you can feel the ketones come in

because your mental clarity goes up and your hunger goes away. And I know many of you know what I'm talking about. So I started to feel this click and what I would tell myself is ketones are coming, ketones are coming, put the darn reader down. And so one of the things that I could discover is I could feel when I went into ketosis.

And I knew and it was like a beautiful relationship with me and my body. So some of us need to stop counting macros and stop counting blood sugar and ketones and go into the intuitive experience. I've taught many times, in the past about how why I stopped the scale because every time I get up in the morning and I got on that scale if that number wasn't what I liked it set a bad tone for the whole day I wanted

to go into an intuitive experience with myself like what weight do I want to be what weight is comfortable do I need to let a number on the scale tell me what I am so I dropped the scale One of the other things I dropped was all the biometric readers like the aura ring and woup band. This is not to say those aren't great companies. But after I wore it for a while, I realized I don't want a darn ring to tell me if I had a good night's sleep or not. I want my own intuitive sense to know if I was well rested or not.

Whenever we count, we start to compare. and we start to judge. I'll tell you again, since this is a very personal podcast and video, another thing I'm not counting anymore are subscribers and followers and how many posts I do. I want to go into an intuitive experience with delivering information. So a lot of you have heard that I'm now over on Substack, having conversations with people so that we can all experience information.

and maybe the only five people will be over there having conversations with me, and that is okay. I have found counting has led me to comparison, which has led me to suffer. So I am giving up counting in 2026 of all kinds. And this is an incredibly, I want to point out, this is an incredibly hard thing for an ex-competitive athlete to do. I spent my whole life counting because that's how I knew if I was winning the game or not. But not in 26. The counting is done. Number two, I am breaking up with the gym.

So when I started seeing all the incredible benefits of strength training, my motivation was at a little bit of low. I was working a lot and so I thought I got to hire a trainer because that's the only way I need an accountability bunny. And so I started going into the gym and lifting weights. And I did this for about two years. And I'll tell you that I noticed some minor muscle growth. I didn't, it wasn't like all of a sudden I was going to be walking around in a bikini showing off my muscles. I felt a little bit stronger, but I hated going to the gym.

I am a nature person that needs to be out in the open. Now, I know some of you love going to the gym, but what I decided to do, was to go more into sync with where do I want to go? What do I want to do to enjoy my workout? The younger version of me was like, what do I need to do to look good? I think the menopausal conversation has so many women going, you got to lift weights, or you're going to become osteoproduct and your brain, your cognitive abilities are going to go down.

And what I want us all to get to is a place of functional, fitness. What can you do functionally with your fitness to make you succeed in your everyday activities? I'll tell you an interesting example. I remember when my dad was in his early 80s, he had to have knee replacement surgery. And as I was helping him with the recovery process, I noticed that he couldn't use his hands to get out of the chair, like he had trouble pushing down. on the chair to get up. And I told him, I said, hey, dad, when you recover from this knee surgery, we need to get your triceps stronger.

So you can get up off the floor. You can get in and out of a chair. I wrote in age like a girl. I didn't want to put a bunch of have-toes on fitness in this book. So I started to look at what kind of activities do we need as we age? One of those activities is squatting. We need to be able to squat and get back up and down. so I spend a lot of time just squatting throughout the day to loosen my hips up.

Another big functional fitness measurement is grip strength. Longevity and grip strength have gone hand in hand forever. And so I want to focus on better grip strength on my resetter podcast. I brought you a great guest. It was one of my favorite podcasts. It was Katie Bowman that talked about creating a movement diet. And one of the things she educated us all on was how important, like cooking is, like whisking, strengthens your muscles, chopping strengthens your hand muscles so that you have good grip

strength for when you're 70, 80, and 90 years old. One thing I do is hang from a hanging bar that I have here at my house, one to two minutes a day. I try to time myself to see, you know, how long I can stay on there, but I'm looking for what. ways to strengthen my grip strength because I know I'm going to need that down the road. I also know if I go out into nature and I exercise, I bring cortisol down. I know that if I'm out in the water surfing, which has become my new passion, that I'm getting a good surge of dopamine and my eyes are seeing turning light into serotonin. So I started to look at my fitness through the lens of what do I enjoy doing

And how can I have a neurochemical experience with my fitness that makes me want to keep coming back to it? Surfing is a great example. I'm getting great upper body strength and ab strength from surfing. And I want to keep doing it. All the paddling, all the extension, the whole backside of surfing is a lot of extension. My back of my neck, my lower back, my upper back are all getting tremendously strong, which is so important for posture as I age, and I'm enjoying the activity while I'm getting the result.

So I'm sorry, Jim. I know we have some gym hounds over there, out there, but I'm broken up with the gym, and I'm using things I enjoy to increase my fitness level. Okay, number three. Oh, I love this one. I'm not in anybody else's hurry anymore. So let me explain what that means.

I, many of you, if you've read Age Like a Girl, you know that I was in the neighborhood where the L.A. Fires were. And I was in the middle of writing Age Like a Girl. So I came to Santa Cruz, California, found an Airbnb to sit down and rest and recover and finish the book. And if any of you know Santa Cruz, this should be named the town of Bombinburne. bumper stickers because everybody has a bumper sticker, if not 20, on the back of their cars. And I pull into yoga class, that's the only gym I haven't broken up with. I love my yoga class. And I pull into yoga class and I pull right next to a car that has a bumper sticker on it that says,

I am not in your hurry. And I was like, oh my God, I have lived my life by other people's hurry. so much. Hurry can be other people's deadline. You gotta have it done by this time. Other people's agenda for you, whether it's travel, whether it's social, whether it's work.

Think about the phone. Oh my God, I've thought about this so much. Like if I'm having a conversation with somebody and I get a text, who's the priority? In my book, the person I am talking to is the priority. Does that mean I need to go and immediately answer the person who has texted? I can tell you right now sitting on my phone are about five texts. And if you're one of them, you now know why.

I have about five texts that I have not responded to. I will respond to it. But one day I looked down and I was like, shoot, I got so many emails. I have so many texts, so many slacks that I got to answer all these people. I'm not doing other people's timelines anymore. I am doing everything on my timeline. And so this even goes with chasing the next shiny new object, trying to get the fastest weight loss result.

The chronic urgency kept my nervous system in fight or flight. And those of you that are trying to lose weight, it halts you from weight loss. And so I am moving into radical presence. and I am going into what's here now philosophy. And if those of you that are friends of mine are trying to get a hold of me and you're wondering why, it's because I am staying in a present time moment and I am not living by anyone else's time agenda anymore. And I will tell you that that has been the number one thing that I have found on a day to day that has calmed my nervous system.

I even have caught myself in traffic and feeling like, oh, I'm in traffic. I got to get home. I got to get home. And then I think, why do I not have to get home? I'm not in a hurry. I literally rewired my brain to start saying, I'm not in a hurry anymore. I'm not in a hurry over and over again. I'm not overworking.

I'm not in a hurry. That is not who Mindy is anymore. Okay. The fourth thing that I am giving up is prioritizing productivity over my health. So what my schedule looks like now is my workouts, the things that bring me joy, are all put in my calendar first, and then work is backfilled in around that. And I'm going to share a really potent story that I think a lot of you will recognize. I spent a large part of my 40s prioritizing my work over relationships. I have prioritized work over workouts.

I have prioritized work over healthy eating. I'm here teaching you how to healthy eat. but then tomorrow if I have five Zoom calls and I don't get to healthy eat, I become a hypocrite. That's the way I become incongruent. So at 56 years old, I have put work above everything else. It has challenged some of my relationships. It has challenged my sleep. It has challenged, you know, the healthy body I want to live in.

and I have decided I am not prioritizing work anymore. And I know a lot of you don't have that luxury, and some of you do have that luxury, but for me, work was an addiction. It was an addiction to productivity, because I felt so good when I could produce a big day, and I could watch how it had an impact in the culture. But it caused parts of my life to fall apart.

So in 2026, my health is the top priority. This means I need to get out into the sunlight so that I can reset my circadian rhythm. I need to start moving slowly so I can reset my parasympathetic nervous system. I need to prioritize friendships that bring me joy so I can get more oxytocin to balance my hormones. I need to slow down and take time to have hour-long conversations with my aging parents because I don't know how much longer they're going to be here. I have flipped the priority of work and have made the holistic health lens in which I choose to live my life a priority.

And wow, and we're only to the end of January, it's a hard one to do, but I can tell you, it's incredibly rewarding. So while I might be saying no to late night events, I am saying yes to more morning time because my morning time fuels me between meditation and reading and sunlight. I'm working on resetting my circadian rhythm. I'm working on resetting my nervous system, but I am not putting productivity ahead of my health anymore. Number five, this one is also a challenge for me. I am not over consuming information anymore. I'm a highly curious human, and I'm fascinating

by the human body and brain. And I find the fact that we can get so much information at our fingertips, that's like a dopamine hit for me. So what that might look like for me is I go on a walk with my dog and I put a podcast on. And now all of a sudden I'm like hearing that podcast. Or I'm sitting at a stoplight and I reach down for my phone and I start to look at my social media. Or I have an hour between Zoom calls and I start to research down PubMed. I just am, it's the constant overstimulation, shoving information into our brain.

And why I'm giving that up is I started to notice that in the quiet moments, my brain's like, what else? What else? Give me something else. Tell me something else. This was happening to me in my sleep where all of a sudden I started to realize that my brain was not, didn't have enough stimulation. So if I woke up at two in the morning, it was like, hey, let me give you a problem to fix. And then I couldn't fall back to sleep. So I have chosen to slow down the amount of information that goes in my brain. I spend a lot of time looking at trees in the forest and looking at the ocean. I asked myself, how many rounds of boredom did I get that day? I am not over-consuming information.

Now, with that comes the way in which I am consuming information because I still love to learn, but I'm doing it through books. I'm doing it through long format. So, yes, podcasts are great, just not every single moment of the day. And I am going back to what I call old school learning. I actually live really close to a community college, and I've already been taking some classes there just for the fun of it. Get off my computer, get in front of somebody who can teach me how to do something. I'm going back to the way we used to bring information into our brains.

The amount of information that we are exposed to every single day is a large reason we are cognitively overloaded. And so what I have chosen, and you've heard me say this before here, is I want to go vertical and deep on a topic. We have become a horizontal learning environment in this culture. By that, I mean we know a lot of people know a lot on the surface, but they don't know the depth of a subject. Health is, this is one of the things that is driving me crazy in the health world, is that I see. see a 90 second reel, the person tells me I should eat breakfast, I shouldn't skip breakfast, and then I see another 90 second reel, and the person says skip breakfast and you'll lose 20 pounds. And you are bouncing from thing to thing to thing, trying to find the next piece of

information that's going to change your life. It's all done on a superficial level. I am choosing to go extremely deep into one subject that I'm interested in. So you're going to see that. actually in my content. For example, I just did a masterclass on creatine. And it was really fun to just look at creatine from as many angles as possible, and I'm bringing it to you here on my podcast. I'm bringing it to you on YouTube. And then if you want to talk to me about creatine, come over to my substack. I've started something called the health incubator over in substack, where you can have conversation with me and other people on a topic. But the problem with health right now is we have shiny object syndrome and we are staying on the surface.

Nobody knows how to critically think through health. The only way we can start to learn to critically think is if we go deep into a topic and we look at it from as many angles as possible and try to understand if it's right for us. So in order to best teach this, I'm getting off the addiction to more, more, more information. And I'm wanting to go subject by subject. And if you want to join me in that, please join me over my substack as we start to look at topic by topic and critically think this through. So there you go. My new health strategy in 2026, it's not about doing more. It's about removing the noise.

It's about training my brain for presence and patience and joy in the individual moment. It's about shutting down the FOMO brain that has a fear of missing out, or the achiever brain that wants to have consume more and do more. I am moving into radical presence and staying with even the discomfort that shows up in that moment. so that my brain can come out of this modern world and can start to be a more joyful, a more cognitively flexible human. And I think right now in a world

where we are all pointing fingers at each other and reacting left and right to each other's opinions, it's time for us to each go inward and learn how to critically think about information and how to be in the present moment and how to be in a place of compassion and love with the people that are in the room, the people that are in the room,

not the people that are one of your Facebook friends that are on social media. I'm coming back to falling in love with the way we used to do it. Back in the 70s, before the phones, before the internet, before we had all of the noise. I'm coming back to old school living. that I can find the happiest version of me.

So there you go. 2026, let me know what you respond to and what you're giving up this year. If you like this video, you're definitely going to want to check out the next one.