Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - The Metabolism Reset: How to Go From Sugar Burner to Fat Burner in 14 Days

Episode Date: June 24, 2026

Right now, millions of women are stuck in a cycle of constant hunger, food noise, energy crashes, stubborn weight gain, and frustration. Most have been told they need more willpower, but the truth is often much simpler.Your metabolism may be stuck in sugar-burning mode.In this episode, I break down one of the most important concepts I’ve taught over the last decade: the metabolic switch. You'll learn the difference between your body's sugar-burning and fat-burning systems, why blood sugar crashes drive cravings, and the five simple steps I use to help women become more metabolically flexible.If you've struggled with fasting, weight loss, or constant cravings, this conversation will help you understand why and show you where to start.In this episode, you'll learn:• The difference between sugar-burning and fat-burning metabolism• Why blood sugar crashes create cravings and food noise• How meal order affects your metabolic health• The role of protein, fiber, and healthy fats in blood sugar regulation• Why walking after meals is one of the most powerful metabolic tools• How to gently extend fasting windows without stressing your body• The symptoms that show your metabolic switch is improvingResources Mentioned:• Fast Like a Girl: drmindypelz.com/books• Eat Like a Girl: drmindypelz.com/books• Burn Fat Like a Girl Reset: https://bit.ly/4kKkqJR• Nervous System Reset Guide: https://bit.ly/4exCeGVFor more resources related to today’s episode, visit the podcast episode page: drmindypelz.com/ep346Connect 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.

Right now, more than two in five American adults have pre-diabetes, and eight in ten of them literally have no idea. Let that sink in for a moment. Almost half of us are quietly losing the ability to handle sugar. And we have been told the answer is just to have more willpower. And I think we've been quite possibly lied to about sugar cravings. We've been told that if we're constantly craving sweets, chips, snacks, it's because we lack discipline. But what if your cravings aren't a character flaw? What if they are a metabolic signal from your body? Here's why this matters is that most women today are trapped in a cycle where they're constantly feeding their body's glucose.

breakfast, snacks, lunch, snacks, dinner, dessert. The body never gets a chance to access stored fat, so it becomes completely dependent on sugar for fuel. The result? Cravings, energy crashes, food noise, weight gain, brain fog, frustration. But here's the really good news, is you can change your metabolism and you can change it quickly. And in today's video, I'm going to show you how to flip what we are calling the metabolic switch

so that you reduce cravings, you stabilize blood sugar, and you train your body to become a fat burner again. Because once your metabolism works with you instead of against you, everything gets easier. Sound like a plan? Okay, let's dive in. Metabolic switch. This is one of the most important concepts for weight loss for sure, but for mastering your metabolic health. You don't have one metabolism, you have two. So metabolism is just a fancy word for how your body makes energy.

So you make energy when you eat something, and you make energy when you go an extended period of time. That's around 12 hours not eating. And so what your goal is to get that hemoglobin A1C down, to start to lose weight, is you want to learn how to play with both of these metabolisms. This was a key thing I taught you all in Fast Like a Girl. It was a big reason why so many people got incredible results with that book is because we weren't really aware prior to books like Fast Like a Girl coming out that we had two metabolisms. But what's important is how you handle the sugar burner metabolism

is going to affect how quickly you get over into, your fat burning metabolism. So I would always tell people when they wanted me to coach them through fasting, I would always say we are going to start with food. Food, once we master food and we stabilize your sugar burner metabolism, we can easily start to switch you over into this fat burning metabolism that fasting starts to get. So this is a key point for those of you who have tried fasting and you struggle to go an extended period of time, or you found that you weren't able to stay in a fat burning state very long,

let's start to work on cleaning up your sugar burner system. Because if you don't clean this up, if we're over here in ultra-processed food land, if we're over here in carb land, sometimes if we're over here trying to get to those, macros of protein, you may be spiking glucose so high that you will never get over into a fat burning state. And when you stay over here in the sugar burner state, this is where the cravings show up. So the goal is to stabilize your blood sugar in your sugar burner state so that you can get over to fat burner as quickly as possible. Now, glucose monitors.

I think you all know that there feels like a lot of people are wearing them. If you have not worn a glucose monitor, I highly recommend that you wear one. I'll put a link to the one I wear and love. There's lots of good ones out there, but the levels is the one that I use. And what's interesting about these glucose monitors is that you can get real-time data of your sugar burner system. When you eat a food, you can see the spike and you can see the decline. I remember having a patient many years ago who was borderline anorexic was moody all the time. When she didn't eat, she was moody. When she ate, she was moody.

And so the very first thing I did was put a glucose monitor on her. And I told her just to eat everything that she normally eats. I told her even go to the store and eat all the things she wants to eat. And we started mapping her glucose, looking at the trends of her glucose monitor, to the food she would eat. And all of a sudden it became an intrinsic feeling for her to make the right choices. She can see when she mastered the principles I'm going to teach you with the sugar burner system. She could watch the result on the monitor.

It's very satisfying if you have, if you have the resources to buy one. So now there was a study of more than a thousand people wearing these glucose monitors. And it showed that it was not the glucose spike that drove hunger. So it wasn't I ate a donut and all of a sudden my glucose spiked really high and that drove more hunger. It was actually the dip two to three hours later. So if you do have a glucose monitor, what you want to look at, is how quickly does your blood sugar come down within two hours because as high as it goes is as low as it will go and the biggest dippers according to the study got hungrier

sooner so if your blood sugar on that monitor dipped down then you are going to be hungry and according to the study for over 24 hours from one dip so here's the place that I really want you to start to wrap your head around is that when we go to look at metabolic health, when we go to try to lose weight, the goal of weight loss is never to get smaller. I know it might be your goal because you want to look in the mirror, but if you want long-term results,

if you want to keep weight off, then the goal needs to be we want to get this metabolic switch to start to be more effective. And the first thing you do is you start to look at the foods you're eating and notice if they are spiking your blood sugar and causing these crashes. Now, if you don't have access to a blood sugar reader or it's outside of your financial resources, pay attention to your symptoms. A good meal, when you put a good meal together, you won't have, you won't feel like you have an energy crash within two of a hours. You won't feel like you're hungry two hours later. So I oftentimes with patients, I would have them just do a food journal, make a meal, and then look at your moods, look at how quickly you

became hungry, and it will tell you if that meal is actually effective or helpful for you. There are several principles to this sugar burner system that I want you to keep in mind. So the first is the higher the spike, like we talked about, the more you're going to get a crash. And it's going to increase cravings and it's going to make it harder for you to switch over. So we want to eat foods that are going to stabilize your blood sugar, which means we want to bring fiber into every meal. I've done a ton of videos on fiber. So just make sure you're bringing fiber into every single meal. Okay. Second, protein is a big, it's super, it's a it's really in right now. It's quite the fat. And I think protein has a lot of benefits,

but one of the things that is really helpful for is making you feel full. So if you can do fiber and protein first, now we're going to feel full and we're going to stabilize that blood sugar. The third part of that meal that would be really helpful is drizzle some olive oil on it, put some fat on it, so it will stabilize your blood sugar. If you put a meal together like I just told you and we get off the refined flowers, we get off the refined sugars, what you're going to start to see is that you will switch over into a fasted state quicker. There are six different length fast that I mapped out with science in Fast Like a Girl and the first fasting ledge is about 12 hours without food. Now as I go into fasting, the second, the fat burner system here,

just want to point out that some of you may be saying, wait, isn't fasting just starving yourself? No, it's not. You are actually accessing a primal metabolism that most people don't get into because they're eating all the time and they're on this wild blood sugar loop. And so it is a primal design in your body that when glucose stays low for 12 hours, your liver gets a signal to start making something called a ketone. And ketones go up into your brain and they cut off hunger. And ketones preserve muscle, which is why fasting doesn't break down muscle as much as most people think. And ketones start to fire up your brain and give you better brain clarity.

So I really want you to stick to the protocols where you're looking at the sugar burner metabolism, But what I also want you to see is that if you master that, the quicker you get over into the fat burning metabolism, the more weight loss result you will get. Now, a lot of people will ask me, can I really get a change within 14 days? And the answer is absolutely. We take hundreds of women through something called burn fat like a girl experience where we actually, for 14 days, do different fast, different styles. of eating to help improve this metabolic switch. If you ever want to join us, just put Burn Fat, and Girl in the comments. My team will send you a link. For the sake of this video, what I want you to know is that when we take 14 days and we show these women how to get this

metabolic switch working for them, the average weight loss is 5.8 pounds within two weeks. That's pretty remarkable. Now that's an appropriate amount of weight loss, which is really important because with these medications and the weight loss drugs, a lot of people are losing weight too fast. And what's stored in fat? We've got hormones stored there.

We have toxins stored there. And so there's a lot of release of these toxins and hormones into your system that can cause stagnation in the liver and can make it harder for your metabolic. switch over time because when we go over to fat burning, that's when the liver has to kick in and start to burn fat to make a ketone. So two weeks is absolutely an incredible amount of time to start to prime your metabolic switch. Now, the first lever, like I said, before I go into the steps is you are going to eat meals with your carbs last. It is the carbs that mess us up.

But carbs aren't evil. I just want to point that out. That carbs actually can be signaling molecules that tell your nervous system to calm down when you eat them in small amounts. They can be really helpful. When you lean more towards nature's carbs, which are things like sweet potatoes and fruits and vegetables,

even rice can be nature's carbs. And when you eat those carbs, It can help you make serotonin and it can help to feed different bacteria. In another video I was talking about how fiber-rich bread can actually increase a bacteria called acrimancia that will help speed up your metabolism. The goal here is not to fear the carbs. The goal is to eat them last and to make sure that you are leaning into nature's carbs. We are not when the minute we get on the refined flowers and the refined sugars, you've messed the whole metabolic switch up.

Can I tell you something I wish someone had told me years ago? If you've ever tried to fast or follow any health program and it didn't work the way you expected, I need you to know that it's not a discipline problem and it's not a willpower problem. It is an information problem. Most fasting research was done on men. Most dietary advice was designed for men. And then it got handed to women as if our bodies work the same way. And they don't.

You operate on a 28-day hormonal cycle. And the foods you eat, the length of your fast, even your workouts, all of it needs to be timed where you are in that cycle to actually get results. That's exactly why I wrote Fast Like a Girl to teach you. It's a step-by-step guide to using fasting in a way that's actually built for your feminine body. This book has been out in the world for several years now, and it just hit the New York Times bestseller list. That tells me something. People are still reading it.

They are still getting incredible results. And I want to point out, this isn't just for women that are in their menstruating years. There is plenty in there for pari men, a point. and post-menopausal women, because even then, we have a new hormonal balance we need to time our fast too. If you're finally ready to understand your body at a new level, you can find fast like a girl wherever books are sold or at Dr. Mindy Pells.com slash books. Okay.

With that in mind, here are your five steps that if I was coaching you and I was sitting here and teaching you how to start to get this metabolic switch primed again, here's what I would say. Step number one, I just said it. You're going to eat your meal, your carb meals last. Carbs go at the end. They're meant for dessert. Put them at the end.

So even if it's a sweet potato, even if it's a piece of bread, you're going to do fiber, protein, fat, eat that first, and then you're going to have your carbs last. I even have had several patients that will leave their carbs. at the end of the day. That's absolutely okay to do. Okay, step number two, and this one is controversial, and I've done videos on it, but we're gonna just unpack it right here.

Front load protein at breakfast. Okay, some of you might be saying, wait, wait, I thought we were skipping breakfast. So here on my channel, I have introduced a concept called flex fasting. And flex fasting means you decide you're eating when you're eating, and you decide your fasting window. And so if you like breakfast, go ahead and have breakfast,

but I want it to be a protein-rich breakfast. That needs to not, this is not a time for a glass of orange juice and some oatmeal. This is where we are going to double down on the eggs. We can get some grass-fed sausages, and we want a protein-rich breakfast. I've even made a breakfast. a breakfast salad before where I'll put all the salad makings and put fried eggs on top make them a little

runny let them drip into the salad it's amazing now you want to aim for that breakfast to have 30 grams of protein the first meal matters whatever day it is whether you're eating breakfast or you're eating lunch the first meal matters so let's nail that 30 grams right there in the first meal The other part that we know about eating protein is that we want to make sure that protein comes from leucine-rich sources. So leucine is an amino acid that you can find in lots of different meat and a lot of different beans. I wrote about them all in my cookbook, eat like a girl. I have lists of leucine-rich proteins. Why leucine is so important in combination with 30 grams is it.

It opens up a sensor within the muscle that will allow all the other protein amino acids that you eat for the rest of the day to get into the muscle and start to grow the muscle bigger. You truly are a chemistry experiment. So that first meal becomes really, really important. And if you're somebody who has a 10 a. Craying for carbohydrates, start your day with 30 grams of leucine-rich, proteins. And I want to say a lot of you might be going, well, if I eat breakfast, then how am I going to fast? You would stop eating earlier in the night. So earlier in the afternoon. So maybe you stop at four o'clock, five o'clock in the afternoon, which is actually a really, if you want to lose, accelerate your weight loss, don't eat dinner. That's actually better than skipping breakfast. So now you have a protein rich breakfast that you can lean into. Step number three, you are going to walk 10 to 15 minutes after your highest carb meal.

Okay, let's come back over to our switch. We have a sugar burner system and we go and we eat a bowl of pasta. So all of a sudden we're like, oh, God, I wasn't supposed to eat so much pasta. I didn't put protein with it. I didn't put fat with it. I didn't give it a fiber. Like, ugh, I guess I'm completely messed myself up. now that's not true if you eat a high-carb meal and you don't know what to do don't

beat yourself up go for a walk because when we have all of that sugar in our system from the food we ate if we go and walk our body will actually use it it will actually use the glucose and if you don't use glucose you will store glucose and you will store glucose and you store it as fat, oftentimes as belly fat. So it's you're you're never out of a metabolic tool when you eat a bad meal because you can always start to look at walking after a meal to use all of that glucose. It's interesting because I found a really cool study that said your muscles will pull glucose out of your blood without needing insulin to escort it. So fascinating for those of you that are insulin resistant, where that glucose insulin system is no longer working as well for you, but you're trying to build muscle.

Well, one way you can do that is by a 10 to 15 minute walk after your highest carb meal because now your brilliant muscles are pulling glucose out and putting them right in to the muscle so that you can use it for the walk. When you're walking, let's get you moving your arms as well. Okay, step number four for this metabolic switch in 14 days. How do we get this thing primed up? You're gently going to stretch your eating windows. So what does that look like? When I get up in the morning, I go, okay, when am I breaking my fast? Now we already know that breaking your fast with protein is a key component to this metabolic switch.

So I have that in my mind. I know the time that I'm actually going to break my fast. And it depends, it varies based off of my workout schedule. In fact, I did a video for you all that showed that you get a better metabolic result and you will actually start stick to fasting and eating windows if you choose your eating window. You choose your fasting window. And for me, I change that every single day based off of my workout and based off my work schedule.

So if you have been doing 14 hours of fasting, what is really important to get this switch really primed is you want to start to go to 16 hours. And then maybe a couple of weeks, you want to go to 18 hours. Not every day, but once or twice a week so we can start to stretch out that fasting window. so you're signaling to your body, hey, go over to the fat burning system and start to burn fat. The way I used to always teach it in my clinic was that you would push your breakfast back an hour

and see how you do. And when that gets at first for most women, that became very difficult. And then I would ask them after an hour to go ahead and push it back another hour. And so we started to compress their eating window so that they could gently move themselves into this flex fasting state and get their metabolic system primed. Okay, number five, track one thing for two weeks.

This is really important because what happens with fasting and cleaning up your sugar burner system is all of a sudden things start to feel effortless, like you didn't even do anything to get this result. And so you'll start to lose sight that all of this looking at what's going to affect your sugar burner system, fasting so you can access the fat burner system. Once the switch becomes easy to hit and to switch back and forth, what ends up happening is that it gets easier and you forget that you trained yourself to get there. So let's use a measurement. you can use a glucose monitor, definitely one of my favorite, but you could also use symptoms. And here is some of the symptoms I would expect you to see improve as your metabolic switch gets more refined. You shouldn't be hungry as much. The food noise will go away. You won't have

energy crashes. You will notice better mental clarity and you will notice that you are dropping weight while preserving muscle. These are all signs that that metabolic switch is starting to improve. The other thing you'll see is on your hemoglobin A1C, the next time you go into your doctor's office, you'll see that number go down. I've been here on YouTube for over a decade. We have had millions of comments and over and over and over again. We see hemoglobin A1C numbers go down. In fact, if you are one of them, you've seen that number go down, put it in the comments because that is the success of metabolic health. That is more of a success of metabolic health than your, even your scale.

The scale lies to you all the time. When we look at the scale, we have all kinds of associations with the different numbers. I want you to get a monitor or I want you to start to look at your results. So 14 days, it's simple. We're going to clean up this system. We're going to go a little longer with fat, with our fat burner system and learn how to fast. And we're going to go in and out of these two systems so that we can prime that metabolic switch. If you want to have an experience with me on how to do that, just burn fat like a girl in the comments.

And you can come join me and my community where we do this together for 14 days. And then you will see that, yes, you can. lose weight, you can prime that switch within 14 days. And those of you that have been around for a while, put in the comments what you've noticed when you followed these rules that I just laid out. As always, don't give up on yourself and I hope that helps. If you like this video, you're definitely going to want to check out the next one.