Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - The 5 Weight-Loss Lies Keeping Women Stuck

Episode Date: August 5, 2026

For decades, women have been taught to lose weight by eating less, doing more cardio, and watching the number on the scale.But losing weight is not always the same as becoming healthier.In this solo episode, Dr. Mindy breaks down a recent meta-analysis showing that adults between 60 and 75 years old were able to lose body fat, gain lean muscle, improve blood pressure, and build functional strength through resistance training.She also challenges five of the most persistent weight-loss myths women have been taught, including the idea that cardio is the best way to burn fat, hunger is a willpower problem, and the scale is the most important measure of progress.You’ll learn how protein, resistance training, sleep, blood-sugar tracking, and progressive challenge can help you improve body composition without sacrificing your muscle or metabolic health.Weight loss is not a character test. It is a strategy, and most women were simply given the wrong one.Resources MentionedContinuous Glucose MonitorKetone MonitorFast Like a GirlFor more resources related to today’s episode, visit the podcast episode page: drmindypelz.com/ep358Connect 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.

I want to invite you to something that I am crazy excited about. This October 3rd and 4th, I'll be joining an incredible group of speakers at Empower Your Life, a live event at the Alex Theater in Glendale, California. We'll spend two days exploring health, personal growth, mindset, and practical tools to help you create meaningful change in your life. I'll be there alongside speakers. like Susie Orman, Jim Quick, Jamie Kernlema, Brendan Bouchard, Nancy Levin, and many more. It's going to be an amazing weekend filled with learning, connection, and inspiration.

I'd love to see you there. I'd also love to give you a big hug, and you can grab your VIP or general admission ticket by visiting hayhouse.com forward slash Dr. Mindy. That's hayhouse.com forward slash Dr. Mindy. I can't wait to see you. Hey, Dr. Mindy here, and welcome to the Live Like a Girl podcast, where I bring you icons, disruptors, educators, scientists, and doctors that show you what can be possible when you love and celebrate the female body you are blessed to live in. Let's dive in. For decades, we have been teaching women all the wrong strategies for losing weight.

We have been teaching women how to get smaller, not healthier. This is the major reason why we lose weight and then we gain it back. And then we lose weight and then we gain it back. But I have a new study that flips that style of weight loss on its head and shows us a very different way to lose weight and become healthy. at the same time. It's a 24 meta-analysis from scientific reports that pulled 15 randomized trials that included 575 adults. So large sample size, but check this out. The average age or the age range of these adults was between 60 and 75 years old. Wait to hear the results they got because they found

with the right kind of training. I'm going to show you exactly what that looks like, that these 60 to 75 year olds reduced body fat by over 5 kilograms and added 1.4 kilograms of lean muscle at the same time. But that's not the only thing it happened. With this specific type of training, they saw that it lowered their blood pressure

and it improved their functional strength strength. Functional strength is key for longevity. So where most people are chasing weight loss, I want to teach you here how to chase health and you're going to lose weight in the same path. So in this episode, we're going to walk through five of the biggest weight loss lies that women have been told. I want to break all of them down so you come out of this video with a different knowledge of how to fall in love with your body again. And I'm going to show you, I'm going to break this study down and show you exactly what works

and how do you burn more fat and build muscle at the same time. Sound like a plan? Let's dive in. First thing I want you to know that this study says very boldly is you can lose weight and you can gain muscle at the same time. This is a flip on the weight loss drugs. There's a lot of spiz out there about these weight loss drugs because instantly you fit in your clothes

differently and you see a change on the scale. But that does not mean you're healthier. And one of the things that they're concerned about with the weight loss drugs is that people are losing muscle. And when they get off the weight loss drugs, all of a sudden they realize that all the fat comes back, but the muscle doesn't. What this meta-analysis shows us is you can lose fat and gain muscle at the same time. In this study specifically, they looked at 15 different trials. So it's a meta-analysis. So they're looking at many different studies together. And what they saw is that on average, there was a loss of 5.3 kilograms of body fat. That's about 12 pounds. But at the same time, there was a gain of 1.4 kilograms of muscle.

that's about three pounds of muscle. Second challenge that we start to, that we, this study helped us unpack is that we can see dramatic improvement with upper and lower body strength with a specific type of exercise. And it's called resistance training. So resistance training is like bands that you do where you, you pull in one direction and then you're ultimately resisting it in a different direction. And it will work a full muscle range of motion. This would be like your TRX. This would be a pushup. This would be a squat. These are not hard exercises to do. And what they found in these 60 to 75 year olds is just by

teaching them a routine of resistance training that they really gained some significant significant strength. The upper limb strength showed a size increase of 2.09. Hold on, that number means something here, and lower limb strength increased by 2.03. In research terms, anything above a 0.8 is considered a large effect, and these were more than double that threshold. So these are people in their 60s that are losing weight and building muscle by just doing resistance training. I'm going to show you how to do it here in a moment. The third thing that they found was that they saw an increase in an improvement in blood pressure and in endurance. On the top of body composition and strength changes, the group that did

resistance training saw a systolic blood pressure drop by nearly 10 points. and a diastolic pressure drop that was about four points. So we got fat loss, we got muscle gain, and we got blood pressure improvement. Now, they also looked at their endurance and how much their actual walking. They measured this in a six-minute mile. And what they found was that their six-minute walking distance, a standard measurement of cardiovascular endurance improved by 94 meters. So their endurance improved as well.

Now, what's interesting is when they looked at all of these different trials, they found that intensity matters when you work out, but not like you think it matters. So the meta-analysis found that, yes, high-intensity circuit training was best for changing body composition, losing weight, and gaining muscle. High intensity is like doing a jumping jack as fast as you can or doing a push up as fast as you can or doing squats as fast as you can so that your heart rate gets up. But when it came to actual blood pressure, a measurement of health, it was actually the moderate to low intensity training that made the big difference. So that means that there's no one right intensity for if your measurement of success with your workouts is health.

You don't have to push it every single time. You can push it a couple of days a week. And then other days you do moderate exercise intensity so that you can improve something as crucial as your blood pressure. So if you are somebody who's trying to lose weight, here are a list of things that I don't want you to do. I don't want you to just eat less. When we go into eating less to lose weight, that's the old way of looking at weight loss. What ends up happening is that we lower something called our set point. And our set point says if I eat this many calories and I exercise this amount, then all of a sudden I'm going to lose weight at a set point of, let's say, a thousand calories. So if I eat 1,500 calories and I exercise for 5,000, and burn off 500 calories, then my set point

is 1,000 calories, meaning every day I need to eat 1,000 calories or burn off a certain amount of calories and stay at that 1,000 calorie mark to be able to keep the weight off. This is why the yo-yo dieting has happened for so many women that are calorie counting, is because they lower their set point. So stop just eating less. That's not going to get you a healthy fat loss muscle building response. Second myth that I really want to look at is cardio is king for fat loss. It is not the case.

The meta-analysis that I just quoted, it didn't even use a cardio program. It used resistant circuit training. and those participants lost nearly 12 pounds of fat while building muscle, and they didn't do a stitch of cardio. So that old idea of like workout, workout on the treadmill is not going to be the healthy weight loss that you are looking for. Trick number three that we have taught women is that your hunger is a willpower problem. Your hunger is not a willpower problem. When we start to have more food noise, as we're now calling it, there are many factors to it. And one of the biggest factors is when you eat protein. Research is now showing if you eat protein earlier in the day,

what ends up happening is that it sends a signal of fullness to the brain. And it keeps you, well, it keeps that satiety under control throughout the day. It kills the hunger hormone. So if you have been struggling with hunger and the food noise, consider having protein earlier in the day, especially if you add it with some fiber, you add it with some fat. That combination is magic for killing the hunger signals that your brain may be giving you. The fourth myth that we have been taught is that the scale tells us if our weight loss efforts are working or not. That is a bunch of bullshit. The scale lies to you every single day. We've got to start looking at more measurements, different places that we can measure our weight loss success. My favorite place is to look at

your blood work, specifically look at hemoglobin A1C. Hemoglobin A1c is a measurement of your glucose and insulin system over the course of 90 days. Your scale is just a measurement. A1C is just a measurement of that warning. And who knows? Maybe your body was holding on to something that morning, but if we look at it over 90 days, we actually might find that all your efforts are doing a lot better. I also am a fan of keto mojo, the actual blood sugar and ketone reader. So those of you who have wanting to see your blood sugar in real time, get a continuous glucose monitor on you. We like levels. I'll put links down in the notes for you. Or get a little ketone and glucose meter. We like Ketomojo. When I was coaching patients in my practice, that was the first thing I did is I asked them to take the scale away and I went straight to blood sugar because I wanted them to see those improvements in blood sugar and they could see it quickly. So the scale has been a bit of a liar to you. Okay, so here are the five. steps that I want you to do that maps to this study so you get the same result that these 60-year-olds got.

First is I want you to lead every meal with protein. Protein helps you build muscle. Protein breaks down into amino acids. And those amino acids start to fuel your muscle and make them stronger. Muscle is where glucose is stored. If you don't have a lot of, you don't have a a lot of muscle, especially as you age, your body will store that glucose in fat. So every single meal, I want you to start looking at how you can lead that meal with protein. And I want you to eat your protein earlier in the day so that you get the signal of fullness. Breakfast is the most carb and sugar-rich meal of the day. When I brought Fast Like a Girl out into the world, I honestly think a large reason that people lost weight is because they skipped the sugary breakfast.

How do you eat breakfast if you're leading with protein? This can be your eggs. Four to five eggs has around 25 to 30 grams of protein. This could be sausages if you eat meat. This could be cottage cheese. This could be Greek yogurt. These are packed with protein, but have them earlier in the day. so that we kill the hunger hormone and you're feeding your muscles at the same time.

Okay, step two. What they did is they did resistance training. So two to three times a week. So this is a big one and it comes directly from the meta-analysis. So what is resistance training? It's a push-up. It's a lunge. It's a squat.

Anything that uses your body weight where you're, You have to like a push-up, you have to go down in a push-up and then you go back up. Both down and up is difficult because you're having to push your body weight against gravity. Two to three times a week of resistance training. You might find bands where, again, you're just doing some stretching in one direction and then releasing it. You don't want to let it go like that. You want to control it as you start to release it. into a second position. I personally, one of my favorite workouts, I have no attachment to these people,

is TRX, where you can actually start to use the TRX to, again, push your body weight down, push your body weight up. It's complete resistance training. I want you doing resistance training two to three times a week. And you want to do it for 20 to 30 minutes. So, mimicking the study, they did it for 20 to 30 minutes. Now, if you're still not convinced, there was a 22 review in obesity reviews, looked at over 100 different studies on resistance training, in people who were overweight and obese, so there was 4,000 participants. And across all these studies, resistance training consistently reduced body fat, an increased lean body mass. So you don't have to have a gym membership. You don't have to pick up

the heaviest weight possible like we had been trained for a while. Two to three times a week, you are doing these body weight exercises. It could be squats. It could be lunges. It could be push-ups. Two to three times a week. Step number three, I did a whole bunch of videos on this and I will link them here. Sleep is where you burn fat. So you think you burn fat in these resistance training exercises. You think you burn fat when you're fasting. You think you burn fat when you're eating a meal. And yes, there are minor fat burning moments in those, but you actually burn more fat when you sleep. And when you get a good night's sleep, it dramatically changes those hunger hormones. So, research found that after a sleepless night, leptin, which is a big hunger hormone, it's the hormone that

tells your brain it's full, dropped significantly, and ghrelin, the hormone that makes you hungry went up. And this was measured in a lab in blood work. And unfortunately, the results were more pronounced in women. So think about this. We have this really interesting time where we're seeing so many people go to the weight loss drugs and they're saying my food noise is going up. I've had food noise. I would ask those people, if you're one of them, what are your sleeping habits like? Because it may be that you're just not getting a good night's sleep. And so therefore, you are seeing this drop in leptin and a raise in grelin and that's making you more hungry. So how do you get a good night sleep? I'll give you like my easiest.

steps. Get off blue light two to three hours before you go to bed. Stop looking at your computer or your phone unless you have blue blockers on. Your room needs to be cold. There needs to be a drop in temperature when you get into bed. That could look like a warm shower and then the windows open so the room is cold and then you get into bed and it's a moment of some chill and that will actually help you make more melatonin. Eat your last meal two to three hours before you go to bed. If that's still not working, do some yoga. Sun salutations are shown to lower cortisol. So just get into your bedroom and do some gentle movement so you tell your body it's time to start to go to sleep. step number four on how do you get the result that this meta-analysis gave you gave us is i want you to start

to track what the scale can't so look at how your clothes are going to fit different so instead of looking in the mirror and just criticizing yourself because your belly isn't where it's at start to take note when you put your clothes on what's feeling looser because you might start noticing that your belly's not feeling looser, but maybe you're losing a little bit around your hips. So pay attention to where the fat is coming off from. That would be my first recommendation. The second is I'm a big fan of measuring glucose. So either get a daily glucose monitor like a continuous one or a keto mojo or make sure that when you're looking at your blood work, you're looking at hemoglobin A1C is your measurement to see if you're in insulin.

Scentive. Now, I want to point out that you can lose weight and have a very different metabolic outcome. So you can look at the scale and there could be a number going down, but metabolically, you're not improving, which is why I want you to look at lab work. That's why I want you to look at what your glucose is doing. There was a randomized trial in the journals of gerontology that followed 86 older adults with obesity for six months. And one group lost weight through diet alone, another lost weight through diet plus exercise. Both groups lost weight on the scale, but the group that added exercise saw a significantly greater improvement in insulin sensitivity and preserved more muscle mass. So those of you, I've been following me for a while on fasting,

I appreciate you. And let's make sure we add to our fasting, we add to our incredible eating, that we add some weight resistance training so we can get the results that studies like this are getting. Okay, number five, keep in mind if you're going to dive into this, and I'm going to show you how to put it all together in a 30-day period. But understand that if you're putting this all together, that there's going to be a point maybe a week, two weeks in, that it starts getting easier. When the resistance training gets easier, I want you to tack on more. I want you to do more. I've been doing a challenge. I started

with a challenge of 10 push-ups a day. That's a resistance training exercise. It got easy. So now I'm at 15 push-ups. It's starting to get easy. So now I'm going to need to go to 20 because I'm doing them every day. Once you have the basics in place, push your body a couple of days a week. Pushing your body with its fitness and its weight training and its resistance training forces your body to adapt. And one of the most exciting things we've learned in the last several years is that metabolism isn't, it's not a fixed state. You can build muscle at any age and your mitochondria, little powerhouses of the muscles of the cells, it can become healthier. Insulin sensitivity could improve. You are not doomed by your past. You are not doomed by your age.

You can make these changes, but we've got to have these moments where we push ourselves a little more. Okay, how do you put this together in a 30-day challenge? Here's what I'm going to do. Let's just checklist this. Checklist number one. You are going to to load you every meal with protein and fiber and more protein earlier in the day. Number two, you are going to do resistance training two to three times a week. Push-ups, you'd pick it. You don't have to have push-ups, bands, squats, just two to three times a week for 20 to 30 minutes. I don't even care if you got the band and you're watching TV and you're just doing it for 20 to 30 minutes. It doesn't have to be anything profound or

fancy. Number three, you're going to start prioritizing sleep. You want to protect that sleep and make sure that you're getting a good night's sleep. Turn off the blue light. Get off the alcohol. Get the temperature in the room down. Those kind of, those activities make a big difference when you go into sleep. Number four, we're not using the scale anymore. The scale is an outdated myth. We're going to start to look at hemoglobin A1C. We're going to start to notice how our clothes are fitting. We're going to look at our functionality of strength. We are not going to be obsessed by a weight loss number, because that is not where health lives. And the fifth thing, we're going to do all four of those for 30 days. And when it gets easy, what do we do? When it gets easy, we push ourselves to do a little more.

So I'm always going to be here to tell you all that weight loss, if you're struggling with it, it's not your fault. We have been taught wrong. But it is your responsibility to start to look at it differently. It's a strategy. Weight loss is a strategy, not a discipline. And the way we've been taught to lose weight has taught us that if we don't lose weight, we must be undisciplined. There's something wrong with us. I'm here to give you that strategy. And if this video resonated with you, send it out into the world. I am really trying to change the metabolic health of women.

And unfortunately, we have so many women going at it the wrong way, setting themselves up for failure. As always, I hope that helps. You are the miracle. Don't give up on yourself. and report back when you lose that weight, come back to this video and tell me how much weight you lost. I'm absolutely cheering you on.