Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - Trying Everything to Lose Weight? These 5 Things Matter More Than You Think

Episode Date: September 9, 2026

You’re exercising more, fasting more, changing what you eat, and trying everything you know to support your weight, and yet the scale still doesn’t seem to move.In this solo episode, Dr. Mindy breaks down five foundational habits she wants you to look at before assuming your body simply isn’t responding. She explores how fibre-rich foods can support satiety and your gut microbiome, why walking after meals can benefit blood sugar, how meal timing interacts with your circadian rhythm, and why sleep and consistency deserve a much bigger place in the weight-loss conversation.She also explores GLP-1, food noise, nervous system state, and what research tells us about maintaining weight loss after stopping GLP-1 medications.The takeaway is refreshingly practical: instead of chasing another complicated strategy, start by looking at the everyday rhythms you can actually repeat.Resources MentionedFREE Nervous System QuestionnaireTime & Light: Missing Pieces of a Healthy Lifestyle with Dr. Satchin PandaThe Cancer Conversation Women Aren't Having Yet with Dr. Leigh Erin ConnealyReset AcademyEat Like a GirlAge Like a GirlFor more resources related to today’s episode, visit the podcast episode page: drmindypelz.com/ep368Connect 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. I know you're trying your best to lose weight. The food noise is going up. You're running more. You're exercising more. You're fasting more. You're changing your food. You're counting your calories. And nothing is working. I got you. I know you. I was you. I want to show you five free ways that you can change that. And first, those of you are like, I think I'm just going to go the weight loss drugs. I want to tell you about a study that will blow your mind. There is a study in BMG, British Medical Journal, put out in 2026 that looked at 9,341 adults. And they found that the weight that you lose with these weight loss drugs comes back almost four times faster when you

stop the medication than after diet and exercise. This weight loss drug is smoke and mirrors. And it does not change you physiologically. I wanna show you these five ways that you can actually get the same result and change long term physiology. Most the people who go on these weight loss drugs within a year and a half to two years are right back at their starting weight.

Plus, they've lost. lost a significant amount of muscle. So let's dive in to how do you do this free? Because you deserve to live in a body you love. You have been putting in the work. I know, I know you. I read your comments. So I want you to understand five tricks that will really make a difference in your weight loss efforts. Now, before I dive into those five tricks, some of you are in what I call a red nervous system state, meaning that your nervous system is so maxed that your body's holding on is like, I'm not going to let go away because your body thinks it's under a serious threat because of all the chronic stress you've had. So in order to help you have come up with a nervous

system questionnaire, it's free. And you take the questionnaire and it'll tell you what nervous system state you're in. I'm going to be talking about that nervous system state throughout this whole video. So if you want to take that quiz, just go down into the notes or you can put NSQ in your comments and my team will send you that link. But this is probably more important

than these five things is to know your nervous system state because it affects your weight loss capabilities and these five things will feel a lot easier if we can get you into a balanced nervous system. Here we go. What has actually happened that caused so many people to need to go on these drugs.

Your intestinal tract has a specific cell called an L cell. And that L cell, when you eat certain types of food, actually starts to break that food down into what we call short-chain fatty acids, your bacteria and your gut will break that down. Those short-chain fatty acids go and they initiate and stimulate these L cells to produce GLP1 hormone.

One of the reasons we are in the obesity crisis that we're in right now is because ultra-processed foods have destroyed our microbiome. And it's destroyed the production, the ability of these L cells to be able to make GLP1 hormone. When you go on the drugs, what happens is you're bringing the hormone back in, but you haven't changed the internal environment of your microbiome. This is why the weight comes back four times faster, and within a year to two years you have all the weight back

because you didn't change anything physiologically. So you can stimulate these L cells with the right foods every time you eat. The medication is a synthetic copy of what your own cells can. do, your body isn't broken, it's that the factory needs to be fixed and these five things will start to fix this factory. Now, one last thing I want to say is that the new drugs coming out down the line are not as promising, even though the big pharma will teach you that. They're actually showing that the new drugs, the rebound is even faster than the old ones. The newest GLPs, according to the BMJ article that I quoted in the beginning,

have roughly a two pound a month payback, let's call it that. And the starting weight usually kicks in earlier around 18 months. The second thing I want you to know from the study is that it wasn't just weight that came back. Blood pressure came back, cholesterol came back, blood sugar challenges came back to pre-treatment levels. So the mistakes that people make, when they go to lose weight is they think,

oh, I'm gonna start eating all day and that will speed up my metabolism. Doesn't work, that doesn't work. Oh, I'm gonna start counting calories. Stop counting calories. It is not working long term for you. I've done a lot of videos on those. I'll leave them down in the notes

so you can look at them if you wanna dive into these more. The six meal a day thing. Remember when we used to think, oh, we need six meals a day? That is not acceptable when it comes to weight loss. There is no evidence on that. And many people are going straight to the medication without a single change in their body. Now, I did a really fun interview with a longevity and cancer specialist, Dr. Lee Aaron Caneli. You can find that here.

I'll put that down in the notes, where she talked about how, she uses the weight loss drugs. And she says if somebody's really overweight, she'll say, okay, I'm going to put you on this for 90 days so that you can get a head start, but you're going to need to do some lifestyle changes because I'm going to take you off in 90 days. And many of these lifestyle changes occur in these five things.

Here we go. First thing, you want to feed your GLP1 factory. Every time you eat, I want you to think I am eating to stop the food noise. I am eating to drop the weight. I am eating so I can finally live in a body that I love. And the foods that will produce GLP1 hormone the best are packed with fiber. These are things like beans.

Legumes are incredible. If you want some great recipes with legumes, I wrote a whole cookbook called Eat Like a Girl, and I had a plant. based chef that came in and put incredible recipes in here and many of them are bean-based. I am a huge bean fan. It's incredible for not just health, but also for satiety, for killing that hunger. So let's bring beans back into your diet. They're packed with fiber. Avocados. Avocados are packed with fat and fiber and can help tremendously repair the

the GLP1 factory. Any kind of vegetable, like a red pepper, a carrot, a watermelon rash, radish, salad also will be really great for stimulating the GLP1 factory. So when we go to drop weight, if we want to mimic what the drug is doing, we've got to stimulate the GLP1 factory by eating specific foods. I have done a ton of videos on very specific foods that goes into detail, I'll leave them here in the notes for you. But fiber feeds the GLP1 factory.

Many of you love cillium husks. So there's a lot of videos that have been done here on YouTube on cillium husks or cillium fiber. And it's really interesting. There's a lot of evidence that cillium fiber before a meal was linked to a reduced body weight, a reduced BMI, and reduction in waist circumference versus people who didn't have or they had a placebo before their meals. So another trick, you could try a cillium fiber, put it in some water and drink it before you eat. And then see, do you eat as much?

You might also try a trick if you have a food that you can't get over that craving. try eating or drinking silium fiber beforehand and see if you want as much of that food. What cillium does is it slows gastric emptying. Makes you feel full longer. So when you go to eat that meal, you're not as hungry. Okay, step number two is you're going to move with purpose. I can tell you I was an ex-athlet. In college, I played on a tennis scholar.

I love moving my body and I love working out hard. And I have looked at walking as like this ridiculous thing. Why would we walk? But as I've gotten older and I've done so many videos here on YouTube about the power of walking, I started to realize that walking is the most effective exercise that you will ever do. And two reasons, two things that accomplish. pushes. One is that right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot brings cortisol levels down. Cortisol, if your body gets too much cortisol and it doesn't know what to do with it,

it will store it in the belly. The second thing, when I say move with purpose, is I want you to think about after your biggest meal going for a 30 to 60 minute walk, if that's in your wheel, house if that works for you, if it's light out and you can do it. But the timing of that that walk is more important than the duration. So let me go back and repeat myself because it's after you eat. After dinner is the best time. Most people have the biggest meal at dinner, which is not great for weight loss. But whatever your biggest meal is, go for a 30 to 60 minute walk. If that's too long, just go walk, just get 20 minutes in if you can. Maybe even walk in the morning, walk at night.

The more you walk, the more you absolutely will start to balance your own blood sugar and your own cortisol level. Those of you who take my NSQ and you show up in a red state, we got to walk. We got to get you walking because walking is going to bring cortisol down. It's going to allow your body to free itself from, holding on to weight. So move with a purpose. There was an interesting study done in the frontiers of endocrinology. This is a 23 study that showed that movement is a glucose signal. That aerobic exercise, which in the study, they claimed was walking, lowered hemoglobin A1C

and the average blood sugar numbers, like fasting numbers you wake up in the morning. Now, if you followed me at all, you know that I have been prophylatizing how important hemoglobin A1C is. Go look at your blood work right now. That should be close to five. If you want to have, once you get yourself to a five,

your menopause symptoms will go away for my women that are deep into menopause, it's a longevity marker, diseases go away. If I could get everybody on the planet focused on just getting hemoglobin A1C to five, we would end the obesity crisis that we're in. So let's use movement to get us closer to that and specifically movement after you eat. Okay, I have something I've got to say that I really, really think a lot of women need to hear. If you've ever followed a health program and it didn't work, check this out. This is not your fault. I promise you, let me explain. Most fitness programs,

most fasting protocols, most dietary advice, it was researched on men. It was designed for men and then handed to women with a shrug and I here you go, hope this works for you. But here's the thing. You operate on a 28-day hormonal cycle. The foods you eat, the length of your fast, even the intensity of your workouts, all of it needs to be timed to where you are in that cycle to actually get a result. This is the science I teach inside my reset academy. This is the science that I have researched for over a decade. And inside my academy, every month, I walk you through it in a very practical and actionable and way. And it's actually built for your body, for a feminine body.

So it's going to work. I promise you, I see it over and over again. This is a moment to get back into relationship with this beautiful body that you are so blessed to live in. So if you're ready to finally understand this incredible body of yours and work with it instead of constantly fighting against it, come find me over in the Reset Academy. That's Reset Academy. dot Dr. Mindy Pells.com.

I'll see you there. Step number three is I want you to close the kitchen earlier. So I had a really interesting interview when I was out promoting my book, Eat Like a Girl, on Jay Shetty's podcast. And he asked me at the end of the podcast, what was the most important weight loss technique that I have ever heard of? And it was funny because this just came out of my mouth and I thought, yeah, that's pretty accurate. It was only eat in the light. Now, why is that important? That's important

because when it's dark out, whether it's at night or in the morning, you have more melatonin in your system. And when it becomes light out, that signals to the body to suppress melatonin. Melatonin and insulin work inversely. So when melatonin is high, insulin, starts to become sluggish. I interviewed on my podcast, Dr. Sachin Panda, who is a circadian rhythm expert, and it was fascinating what he's, I love the way he phrased this. He said when melatonin kicks in, not only do you get sleepy, but your pancreas gets sleepy. So when I look at this step number three, I want you to start to close the kitchen earlier. We're talking about five powerful techniques you can use to lose weight. So one of them has to be to stop eating right before you go to bed,

to stop eating in the dark. Let's get you eating in the light. I understand in the winter that's a little bit harder, but it's one of the most powerful tools I know for losing weight. So and it takes time. Over time, you will start to get used to an earlier and earlier dinner time. Now what the science says is that if you combine a time restricted eating, which is fasting with exercise, so we just talked about movement, so now we're going in talking about fasting, you combine those two. It improved BMI and it improved blood pressure.

So I tell you this to say that stacking these five together is your most powerful solution for finally getting your weight unstuck. Step number four is protect your sleep. Your sleep is when you burn fat. Most people think, oh, I burn fat when I work out. No, you work out to create this neurochemical change in your body so that at night you can actually go into a repair phase and your body can actually burn fat with sleep.

One of the biggest things I saw in clinical practice is that people who didn't sleep, there's nothing I could do to help them lose weight because at night they were not in a rested state during their fat burning time. So when you look at like all these habits together, it's not hard. They're pretty easy, but we've got to start to do them consistently and sleep is such an important one. Now, I know for some of you are like, great, that's great, but I can't sleep. So I've done several videos on sleep and of all the books I've written, I feel like age like a girl has the best sleep chapter in it,

especially for women over 40. So if you're struggling to sleep, please go watch some of those videos. I'll put them down here in the notes and get the book so you can start to learn because there's like 20 different hacks for sleep. And I don't know which one you're doing, but I want to make sure that we're getting you to sleep, keeping you asleep, and that you are getting that fat-burning component of sleep that will get you the result that you want. Step number five.

And this is probably my favorite one and the most important one, which is we're going to take the other four. We're going to take eating more fiber. We're going to take moving with purpose. We're going to take protecting your sleep. We're going to take closing the kitchen at night. We're going to take those four and we're going to stack them together every single day and we're going to do them consistently.

Consistency is where you get the benefit. When people take the medications, they don't just take it one week and not the following week. They do it consistently. I want you to treat these five. things like their medication like you paid a thousand dollars a month for them and that you're going to do them consistently when you start to treat these hacks not as isolated hacks but as a rhythm that you can start to build you'll start to see over time that your food noise goes down that your waist size goes down that you are all of a sudden your clothes are fitting a lot

looser. It is not a one, these are not a one week experience. This is a larger experience that if you do consistently, you will get the result. I know some of you are like, okay, well, what is consistent? I'm going to tell you that what I always told my patients whenever we made a lifestyle change, I said, it's give me 90 days. Can you do these five things for 90 days? It's really four things with the fifth one being consistency. Can you do these four things, more fiber? So moving after you eat, go for a walk after you eat, making sure that you are doing the best to sleep

and you're closing the kitchen. Just do those every day for 90 days. And then I want you to come back to this video and report back what you notice. So let me put in the comments if you're going to do this for 90 days So you can be accountable to me. I see your names down there.

I see your comments. So let me know if you're going to join in. Now, I'll tell you, I have a membership group, and there's incredible results over there. So if you need more assistance, you can come over there. But one of my members, Laura, was really struggling with her ketone readings. So how many of you have been following me? And you're like, I'm just not getting the ketone readings that I want.

I can't get into ketosis. And one of the things she started to do was apply techniques that I've taught on autophagy. We taught her how to detox. We started doing things consistently, not difficult things. And all of a sudden she was able to get her ketone numbers up. So I say this because consistency is such an important part of getting a long-term result with your health. And if you obviously, if you need help, you can come join us over there. Here are three things.

I want you to do immediately. One is tonight the next meal you eat, I want you to build it around beans and lentils and vegetables. We're going to fiber you up. So I want a ton of fiber on the next meal. Number two, after your biggest meal, I want you to go for at least a 10-minute walk. Let's start with something light like a 10-minute walk.

Let's just do that after your next meal, especially your big one. And then action number three is I want you. you to decide when you're going to close the kitchen. What is that time going to be? Is it eight o'clock? Is it six o'clock? Put in the comments, so you're accountable to me.

Put in the comments what that time is that you're going to start to close the kitchen. If you are invested in your metabolic health and you want to drop weight, I promise you, it's not your genetics. It's not that you're undisciplined. You just didn't get the stress. strategy. And all over my channel here are videos after videos on how you can strategize weight loss.

The next video that I would encourage you to look at are three metabolic markers, especially if you're a woman. Every woman under 40 must track. I have that in my notes below so you can dive into more videos. Most importantly, don't give up on yourself. You've got this. I am cheering you on. This is science that works. We see it work over and over again. So don't shame yourself. Don't beat yourself up. You just, it's just got to learn the art of proper metabolic health. And the world is not teaching us that, which is why I've dedicated my YouTube channel to that. As always, I hope that helps. If you like this video, you're going to want to check out the next one.