Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Functional Health Expert Dr. Mindy Pelz on How Fasting Heals Hormones, Burns Belly Fat & Increases Sex Drive

Episode Date: November 18, 2025

A single shift in your morning routine could change your energy, your mood, and even how you age!! And…your sex drive will improve too! Are you struggling with menopausal weight gain, endless food cravings, or feeling like your body just isn’t working the way it used to? You’re not alone. In this groundbreaking episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, Dr. Mindy Pelz — leading expert in women’s health, hormone science, and fasting, and author of Age Like a Girl — exposes the truth about why women age differently, what’s really behind weight gain during menopause, and how to train your fat-burning metabolism to finally work with you, not against you. She reveals why everyone should care about women and how they age (it affects more than just women’s health!), the real causes of menopausal weight gain and how it differs from regular weight gain (and yes, it’s fixable!), how to train your metabolic system to burn fat efficiently (even after 40!), the mental health and chronic disease benefits of fasting, (especially for women in menopause), and the dangers of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement (what they’re getting wrong about your health!). Dr. Mindy Pelz also breaks down: - Fasting 101: When to fast, for how long, & how to break your fast safely - The truth about detoxing: Common toxin buildups & how to activate your natural detox pathways - Proven solutions to reverse menopausal weight gain naturally - The surprising reason older men also gain weight - How much protein & fiber you really need - Why fasting is not starving, and how to do it safely for your body type - The shocking origins of the “breakfast is the most important meal of the day” myth - Who should and shouldn’t fast, and why it isn't isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach - How processed foods are destroying your hormones (and why they’re even worse for women) - The real reason men lose weight faster than women, and how to level the playing field - Why we’re living in the most toxic time in human history, and what you can do to protect yourself - How fasting can ease menopause symptoms like hot flashes & brain fog - Why endometriosis diagnoses are rising - 3 things everyone should add to their diet right now for longevity & energy - The powerful role women are designed for after menopause (your brain actually rewires itself during this time!) - The real truth about hormone replacement therapy (HRT): Who should consider it, its risks, and why it only works with key lifestyle changes - How to finally beat food cravings once and for all, without feeling deprived - Why most people are getting aging completely wrong...and how to truly age like a girl! Whether you’re in your 30s, 40s, 50s, or beyond, this is the information that can literally change how you age, think, and feel. TUNE IN to MBB now and learn how to reset your body, balance your hormones, and reclaim your energy, naturally! Try Notion, now with Notion Agent, at https://notion.com/break That’s all lower-case letters — notion.com/break — to try your new AI teammate, Notion Agent, today. And when you use our link, you’re supporting our show! https://notion.com/break Dr. Mindy Pelz’ latest book, Age Like a Girl, is available for pre-order: https://www.discover.hayhouse.com/agelikeagirl/ Subscribe on Substack for Ad-Free Episodes & Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The top killers all have roots back to poor metabolic health. Only 17% of Americans are metabolically healthy. Talk to us about fasting. Is 12 hours enough? Every day you have a fasting window and then you have an eating window. Let's just make it simple. When you fast, especially if you go 17 hours, you stimulate something called autophagy. We start to see all these chronic diseases go away.

Dementias are all of these chronic diseases go away. off the table. Many cancers are autoimmune challenges, infertility, cardiovascular disease, it's like magic. Dr. Mindy Pels is an expert in hormones and metabolic health. She's taught over 100,000 people how to retrain their metabolism and detox from the chemicals, preservatives, and toxins were exposed to every day.

We live in the most toxic time in human history. There's air pollution, it's laden in our beauty products, it's in our food, it's on your new clothes. The worst toxin that we are exposed to is glyphosate. Recently, under the new administration, all of the laws and the regulations around glyphosate have been reversed.

I feel like this is gaslighting on a global scale. When you fast, you spark the intelligence inside the cell, and it will actually push out bacteria, viruses, pesticides. For someone who is at the beginning, tell us some of the amazing changes that you've seen to help motivate people to get started, to believe that it's possible. People don't need motivation. They need momentum. Are there certain people who shouldn't fast? Yeah, so... Hi, I'm I'm B. Alec. I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. Today we're going to be talking about something that I've had a tremendous amount of skepticism about,

something that I've had very, very deep conversations with Jonathan, with Dr. with a lot of people. I have never heard the things that we're going to talk about, spoken about the way they are spoken about today. What would it be like to take some of the most detrimental and threatening diseases pretty much off the table with one simple implementation of a metabolic switch? Did we evolve to do? what I assumed we're supposed to do, which is wake up with a plan for the menu for the day and move through the day consuming glucose and using glucose and sleeping on a pile of glucose. Is this how we were designed? I'm sure you can imagine the answer is no. We were actually

designed to have a very elaborate interplay between glucose metabolism and ketone synthesis. And these two things combine to improve your heart health, your mental health, your longevity, and even your transition through some of the most challenging shifts that you will experience in your life, namely menopause. But we're going to be talking to Dr. Mindy Pells. And Dr. Mindy is an expert in all things health, hormone science, and metabolism. You may know about Dr. Pels from fast like a girl, the menopause reset, eat like a girl, and most recently age like a girl. But the bulk of our conversation is going to be about metabolism, taking control of your health, and spreading the message that there is something

you can do to shift so many aspects of your health. And it does not cost a lot of money. you don't have to buy any gadgets, and it's something you can start implementing literally today. This is so much more than menopause. We're talking about something that impacts every single individual, and it can contribute to all kinds of diseases that we previously didn't fully understand. The core of our susceptibility is how our metabolism functions, and what Dr. Mindy explains to us is how to improve our metabolism,

how to retrain it when it's gone off the rails, and how we can detox from all the chemicals, food additives, preservatives, environmental toxins that each one of us is exposed to every single day. We're also going to be talking about what does it mean to make America healthy again? What does it mean to prioritize the kind of foods, the kind of systems, and the kind of mindset that we all deserve in a nonpartisan kind of way? It's a fascinating conversation and one that literally, as Jonathan said, impacts all of us. In addition, we hope that you'll follow us on Substack because there's a conversation today that is going to continue on Substack that we hope you're subscribed for. Just before we get to this episode, I just really want to ask you a tremendous favor.

we are so grateful to be here with you and to share some of the cutting edge research that is happening in health, in well-being, in the intersection of science and spirituality, and the one thing that you can do, which is absolutely free to help support the show and help us and the entire team here continue to bring you these episodes

is make sure that you are subscribed. Anywhere you're listening or watching this episode, please click the subscribe button. We are absolutely. tremendously grateful if you do so, and let's get on to the episode. Let us welcome Dr. Mindy Pels to The Breakdown. Break it down. Yeah, thank you.

We're very excited to talk to you. The women among us are very excited. I mean, I think, I think actually this is a good place to start. Why should everyone care about women and how they age? Hmm. That is such a good question because our hormones affect our moods. They affect our behaviors. And as a woman ages, her hormones dramatically shift.

In fact, she has a massive neurochemical shift, which is a real initiator of a rewirement of her brain. So she's changing. She's upgrading. She's deciding what she doesn't like. She's deciding what she does like. things are changing and that affects every single person in her life. So it's like, think of it like a teenager. When your teenager all of a sudden starts to turn away from you, especially a teenage girl,

we all kind of go, oh, it's the teenage year, she'll come back around. But we don't really give the same grace to women as we age. And there is a massive rewirement that's going on in a female brain. And if you're not clued in, you might take it personal. You might think you're losing her. You might push away from her. But there is a massive rewirement that if you hang in there and you understand what's going on, you can actually help assist her and grow even closer to her. There's so many different components to what we still don't understand, right, about this entire process. And, you know, I'm just thinking in my lifetime of how different the conversation is. What has it taken for us to have this kind of revolution in the way that we even approach these

conversations? Because I think so many of us thought, like, oh, my mom just doesn't like my dad. That's why she acts like that, right? Or she's just crazy. Or that's just how women are. You know, how much of that can we modify and what has shifted, really? really in our generation for us to be able to have these conversations. Yeah. So the beautiful thing is it's our generation that is actually changing the conversation. So for starters, that's how powerful we are. We are literally all of us stepping into this menopause conversation and everybody's asking

questions. Everybody's experimenting with new lifestyles and HRT and all the things. But the best way I can answer your question really revolves around this book. we went into contract on this book three years ago. And I had to change the focus of the book three times in three years. Because what happened was three years ago, nobody was talking about menopause. I had written a book called The Menopause Reset that my patients had asked me to write to like, how do I work with my lifestyle?

There was nobody out there really putting up-to-date information out. And in just three years, we have like gone. from nobody talking about it, I call it a cultural hush, to everybody talking about it. And it's really more of a cultural chaos now where at least the conversation has been cracked open. But I like what you said before this, which is we still don't know enough to be able to assist women. In many cases, it's the most surface-level things about menopause that women get the loudest about and are allowed to get the loudest about. And one of those things is mood, right? And another thing is sleep. And then a third thing is what is happening to my body, especially around the belly. Right? Yeah. Like,

there's a very special belly that you get, apparently, when your hormones start shifting. Can you explain a little bit what is the specific weight gain that is different from other kinds of weight gain that we start seeing at this phase of life? And most importantly, how, do you get rid of it? Yeah. Well, the first thing that makes it different is that 99.9% of the women going through menopause will have not changed what they eat, will not have changed how they exercise, will not have changed very, or they've changed very little about their lifestyle, and they're gaining weight left and right. Like, that alone tells you that our hormones have an effect on our metabolic system. So estrogen,

which is one of the biggest hormones that drives us, kept us insulin sensitive. So estrogen had an impact on your glucose and insulin system. And when she went down in the 40s, when her natural levels started to go down, you didn't get the memo, but you actually became more insulin resistant. And what I see in our community is this drives women crazy

because what they do is they double down on more working out, they double down on more dieting, trying to go back to their old strategy, but they never got the memo that it was the loss of estrogen that dramatically shifted the whole metabolic system. So that's like if I could go to every 40-year-old and like poke them on the shoulder and be like, hey, hey, I just want to tell you what's coming down the road, they could actually get ahead of it and go into that perimenopause, menopausal experience and like actually start to improve their metabolic system and then they won't get that menopausal belly weight gain and happy to talk about how you do that but it starts with awareness i'll be honest this is something that even in all the conversations i've had with many many

doctors with midwives with obes right with functional doctors so you're telling me if i keep doing the same things if i'm exercising the way i'm exercising and i'm eating the way i'm eating and if all of a sudden my body starts doing things that do not look like what it looked like before, that means there's something going on that I can't see that is actually imp-see, like, I don't think most people think this way. Yeah, that's bingo. That is exactly right. Right. We figure like, oh, I'm eating too much fat,

or like, I need to mix up my workout, or I need to work out three times as much. And then you become this, like, you know, crazy person working out all day. When the fact is what it sounds like you're saying is that there are some simple things that are on a nutritional level. They're on a hormonal level that might prevent us from basically fighting with our body when it's just doing what it's doing because estrogen is decreasing. And all we think about is like, why does my belly look like this? Yeah. Well, and this is the thing about women in general is that we go, oh my gosh, why is my belly getting bigger? And then we think it's our fault.

I think it's my fault if your belly gets bigger. Oh. Yeah. Codependency. That's right. Oh, yeah. I mean, this is the thing we saw in our online world for years, where as I was teaching women how to fast, which we can definitely, we need to go into that because that's one of the ways that you can avoid this menopuzzle belly gain. But we think it's our fault.

And if I could say it in the most simple way, when estrogen starts to decline, your body and brain do not use glucose the same way it used to use glucose. And glucose comes from the food you eat. The more sugar, the more refined flowers, the more carbs in there, the more glucose you eat, the quicker that menopausal belly weight is going to gain, you're going to gain it. So you might have gotten away with that at 35, but you're not getting away with it at 45 because this major hormone disappeared. MyNBialx breakdown is supported by Superpower. We all know the feeling of leaving a doctor's office and kind of feeling like we didn't get anything out of the experience that was useful.

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She's a lovely lady. but what came up in blood work was like, hmm, you look pre-diabetic. And I'm thinking, what's going on? Like, what am I, like, I wasn't at a weight that you would think that, like, you know, and now I'm realizing it's likely because we were on this train of my body's like,

you don't need to process insulin the way you used to. Now we're going to say you're pre-diabetic. So most women are then, and then what we're told is like, oh well it's because of your age and we're just going to put you on a what do they put you on a statin? Like what do they they like make you go on a medication? I mean they'll put you on a weight loss drug this day and age. They can definitely put you on a statin.

They put you on hormone replacement. They'll put you on anything they can put you on to try to get you to lose weight without teaching you why you're gaining weight, which is so important because this is the thing that drives me crazy is that we then outsource our power. We're like, okay, well, I must be weak. The doctor's strong, the medication's strong. And we don't, if we understand what's going on through this process, it's not that hard to avoid the menopausal belly weight, and it's not that hard to lose it. I promise you, we have literally seen hundreds of thousands of women go through this process. And once they know and they have a strategy, it works. But unfortunately, you started this off and said something about how little we

know. And it's true. Even your doctor, your trusted doctor, was most likely not trained in menopausal belly weight. How much overlap is it to men who are also gaining belly weight at a certain age? What's the similarity in terms of their metabolic breakdown and how they're processing glucose? Well, so this brings up the question of what's the difference between testosterone and a man and the sex hormones in a man and sex hormones in a woman. So in a man, testosterone is made in the testes and goes up into the brain and converts to estrogen in the brain. Based off of all of the research that we have seen on, and we do, we stay in the lane of women

mostly, but from the research we've seen, men typically don't, well, they're not meant to lose testosterone as they age. And testosterone isn't necessarily your weight loss hormone. It'll affect your muscles and things like that. So you don't have this huge hormonal shift like we do. Yet, when you talk about the man boobs and the man belly, the dad belly, what do we call that, the dad body, dad bond.

A lot of that is endocrine disruptors. These are estrogen mimicers in the body. and the male body doesn't know what to do with, neither it is the female body, but especially the male body doesn't know what to do with synthetic estrogen. So when the body doesn't know what to do with something, it stores it as fat.

So when a man has a big belly or, again, the man boobs that show up, that is an estrogen mimicor that's coming from ultra-processed foods, coming from men, men have plenty of beauty products that they're lathering on themselves, lotions and shampoos. It can come from heavy metals in the soils.

I mean, we live in the most toxic time in human history. So when I see a man like that, I think toxicity. You clean up his diet and he'll drop that weight immediately. Let's talk about fasting. How do you get women? Talk to us about the process of getting women. How do you get women skinnier? How do you make them not look like they do?

Tell the women how to fast so they don't have the belly. Amazing. Amazing. Okay, so here's how this goes. I'm not suggesting they'd be skinnier. I'm just suggesting that they use insulin better so that they can all be healthy. Exactly. So, okay, here's how this goes. We have two metabolic systems, one that gets activated when we eat, and we already talked about this is called glucose. I call it the sugar burner system. So basically your body goes, oh, there's an increase in food. We're going to use that for fuel. right now. We also have a second metabolic system. And this is the biggest one. This is what I brought forward and fast like a girl. I was like, we have this whole other metabolic system sitting here that if you don't use it, you're not training your body how to burn fat. And it is called the fat burning metabolic system. And you activate that system by going at least 12 hours without food. Your body needs. You need to

needs to signal that glucose is going down, down, down, down, down, and somewhere around 12 hours, it will go right over into a fat-burning mode because your body is so intelligent. What it will say is we haven't had a lot of food coming in, but we stored some food. And we stored that food around the belly, the back of the arms, the face, the chest. I'm going to go get that glucose that I stored, and I'm going to burn it right now because I don't see any glucose coming in. And when you burn that, you make something called a ketone, which is a whole other fuel for the brain. Sorry, this is going to sound ridiculous. I understand it's not healthy to make an entire box of mac and cheese at 10.30 at night. Yeah, good, good choice.

You know, it took me about 45 years to get there. But what I'm saying is I understand the notion of, don't go to sleep on a full belly, right? Okay. Then I was able to push it. And also I have, you know, fascinating eating, disordered eating challenges. So for me, I was like, what do you mean? I can't eat at 10 p.m. So then I moved it to nine and then I moved it to eight. And now I get it. I can plan my life around an early dinner.

Excellent. So that my body has some time to metabolize. You take a walk after dinner, all the things. So then I'm kind of fasting, right, from let's say, I don't know, call it 8 p.m. just for good measure. So I go to sleep at 8 p.m. Hopefully I sleep. If I sleep eight hours, right?

I could keep sleeping, because if I go to bed at 10, I get up at 6, right? So I want to keep not eating, is the idea. So skip the most important meal of the day, which is what the 1980s taught me. Or just delay it, or delay it. Or delay it. Now, tell me how this is different.

then I'm telling my body it's starving and it now has to use other resources. Okay. So first, you said something really powerful there that the 1980s taught you breakfast was the most important meal a day. Do you know where that came from? Probably some food lobby that wanted me to drink milk. Bingo. It came from Kellogg's. Kellogg's when they put out corn flakes, this was actually in the 1970s, they needed a jingle. and so they said breakfast is the most important meal in the day. Yes. And it has stuck.

And we are all living by it. And it's not serving you. So let's re-pattern that. The first thing, I think that if you can, a really good rule is to always eat in the light. And I'm going to explain this in a moment. Right? Okay. Hang with me.

Can I hold up a flashlight? 1030? Well, you can try that too. But when you are eating in the dark, your melatonin is being produced in the body. How can I hide my shame if the lights are on, Mindy? Well, you can keep your lights on, but yeah, that's a whole other story. We can keep chatting about the blue light at night with a whole other pattern. Put your blue blockers on.

So once it gets dark, this is the time that also evolutionarily, I should not be thinking about eating. Yeah, because when it gets dark, your body makes melatonin. Once you make melatonin, everything in your whole body starts to get into a more parasympathetic state because you're preparing for sleep. So this was actually a phrase that Sachin Panda, who is one of the top premier circadian rhythm experts in the world said to me, he's like, think of it like this. When melatonin kicks in and you, You get sleepy, so does your pancreas. And your pancreas is not pumping out insulin at 9, 10 o'clock at night if it's dark out. It's preparing for sleep. So the meal that you eat at 10 o'clock is going to be more detrimental and cause you to gain more weight than the meal, that same meal, if you eat it at three or four or even five in the light. So this is also why, like in many European countries, they eat a heavier meal. at lunch. Then they take a little snooze, a chelax. They go back to work for a few hours,

and then they have a sometimes a later meal, but it's not the same kind of heaviness. It's, Jonathan, it's like when our kids are like, let's eat Thai food in the middle of the day. And we're like, nope, I will never wake up if I eat Thai food for lunch. I'll just sleep through the day. Interesting. Yeah. So during the day, you don't have that melatonin issue. Plus, if you eat something, let's go back to what food is. If you were eating something, it's supposed to be fuel. So if you eat something to your point that you said earlier and then you fall asleep, like, you're not using it. So the body's like, oh, I don't know what to do with this. I'll just go and store it as fat. Whereas if you eat it and you go walk, then the body's like, oh, okay,

let me use the glucose of the food you just gave me. And that's how you train your metabolism, right? Another thing that we thought was only something that athletes get to know about. That's right. That's right. And I mean, this has been the blessing of the menopausal conversation opening up is that so many women are like, I don't know what I did, but I put on 30 pounds, 40 pounds. And so it's because the rules change. The game changed. At 40, the metabolic game changed. And if you don't understand what your body needs now, then it's just going to keep storing all that extra as fat. So talk to us about the fasting.

Is 12 hours enough? Is it that the benefits kick in at 12 hours and you need to go further than that? What is the ideal for someone to start to see real change? Yeah. So think of it like this. Every day you have a fasting window and then you have an eating window. And so when you, the longer you stay, let's go here, The longer you stay in your fasting window, the more healing happens.

And there are six different levels of healing that happen from starting at 12 hours, going all the way to 72 hours. So you decide how much healing do you want. So at 12 to 12, 13 hours, you've now metabolically switched over. Your body's burning fat. It's making ketones. If you hang out there, 17 hours now all of a sudden you're going to hit something called atopathy where your body will start to detox itself. At 24 hours, you'll start to repair your intestinal stem cells kick in and you can actually do some serious gut repair.

36 hours is the key number, by the way, that the body starts to go after the belly fat. Lady, I'm hungry. So your brain is hungry, though. and your body knows what to do. So your brain may be hungry, but your body's like, okay, your brain can be chattering at you and saying, I'm hungry, I'm hungry, I'm hungry, I'm hungry.

But your body in the meantime is going after that belly fat. It's going after the stored glucose. I think the first question anyone hears when they hear about a 24-hour or 36-hour fast is how do I do this safely and not give in to some of the feelings of dizziness, nausea or your brain saying, hey, hey, you're hungry. How do you separate that so that you can actually do it safely and achieve the end results?

So the first thing to know is this metabolic switch. When you switch over into fat burning, the first time you do it, if you haven't gone more than eight, nine, ten hours, which most people haven't, without eating, then it's going to feel, it's going to feel yucky. It's not going to feel good. It's like if you haven't run a marathon, you don't just put on a pair of tennis shoes and go run 20 miles. Like you got to train for it. You have to slowly work into it.

So with my patients, I used to say, we're just going to push breakfast back a half hour. And then I'd say, how did that feel? If they're like, it was horrible, I say, just stay there. Stay there and tell me when it's not horrible anymore. So maybe a couple days go by. They're like, okay, it's feeling better now. Okay, now I want to push it back an hour. Can you push it back an hour?

Again, the body goes to a place where it's like, oh, it doesn't feel good. But if you hang there because your body knows what it's doing, you'll start to even out, just like your body knows what to do if you're going to train for a marathon. It knows what to do. Can you drink water? You can drink water? Tea with caffeine. You can drink coffee, but let's talk about the coffee because you can't put coffee made in it

and you can't put sugar in it. Black coffee. And some people do okay with. cream, like a good high-quality cream, but yeah. You start to push back your meals and then you're starting to get maybe 12 hours. Maybe you start to experiment with 1314. What's the phase to start to get to that 24 or 36 hour mark and how often does one go and do that to get the benefits without depleting muscle stores or doing damage to the body?

So let's start with this concept. What you're trying to recreate is what our primal ancestors did. So they didn't have predictability. Sometimes they would get a big kill and they'd eat a ton and then they would go a week without food. So this is why these six different lengths fasts became really powerful for my community because you get to choose how long you're going to go. My experience has shown that once you can safely go and comfortably go 15 hours, it's not that hard to go 17. That's not so bad because 15, if you stop eating, sorry, I'm going to do math again.

If you stop eating at 7, right, that's 5 hours till midnight. And then 10 a.m., that's 15. There you go. Bingo. It's not that hard. I mean, if I could stay in bed until then, that's even easier. But if I got to wake up at, you know, 5.30 to get ready to take my kid to school, that's a long morning. But I could fill it up with so many healthy things. So, right.

So a lot of people use their coffee as like, you know, a crutch, especially in the beginning. So you have your cup of coffee and you can put a little bit of raw cream. Raw cream would be best. Or you put some cream in it that's like heavy, heavy fat cream. because fat stops the movement of your blood sugar. So it makes it and it satiates you. So it actually can help you not feel as hungry. There's a lot of people that put a little bit of MCT oil in their coffee.

And MCT oil actually helps you go into this ketogenic state a little bit deeper. It helps you make ketones and helps you turn off the hunger hormone. So the coffee can become the crutch in the beginning. What does MCT stand for? Medium chain triglyceride oil. It's a piece of coconut oil. It's a small segment of coconut oil. So we're talking about how the body uses insulin, how the body burns fat.

Can you talk about some of the mental health and psychological benefits of starting to do these fasts? Yeah. So there's a couple of things that happen. You have to remember that your brain has two major fuel sources. One is glucose and the other is ketones. You only make ketones by burning fat, and some people like to make ketones by keeping their, you know, carbohydrate low. That's not a recommendation that I like really low.

I don't really recommend that. I recommend you get ketones through fasting. So the brain needs 50% glucose, 50% ketones. So if I never go eight hours without food, then I'm only giving my brain glucose. I'm never giving it ketones. So it's missing half of its fuel source. Now, if I'm over 40, what we know based off research is that my brain isn't as sensitive to glucose. This is why we call it Alzheimer's type 3 diabetes, because the brain doesn't know how to use glucose when estrogen starts to go down. So what you need to learn,

how to do is figure out how to get a ketone. And if you can make these ketones by 15 hours every day, if you want to go longer, go longer, and you give you juice your brain up with ketones so that you give it its other preferred feel source. So that's like, that's like so huge for people to understand because nobody ever taught us. It was always eat so your brain feels better. Eat so you have energy. But if you actually understand what a ketone is and how powerful it is and how easy it is to get and that it's free, you will start to see and you burn fat. So you're burning fat and you're powering up your brain. Like who doesn't want that? And how do people feel when they start burning ketones? Does it impact depression, anxiety, or other mood disorders? Yeah. So ketones will,

when they start to show up, they stimulate a whole host of neurotransper. And so, you know, The biggest neurotransmitter that it will stimulate is GABA. And GABA is the neurotransmitter that calms us. So most people think, now it might seem like in the beginning when you're going without food, you might feel a little like, oh, I'm going to go a little nutso. But if you start to train pretty quickly, you'll see that you hit that 15 hour mark, you don't have hunger, and you actually strangely feel calm and clear and focused. So the first thing it does is it brings that GABA system up to be able to relax the brain.

Second thing that it does is when ketones go up, it stimulates dopamine, it stimulates serotonin, it will stimulate oxytocin, it creates a whole neurochemical reaction in your body that delivers these powerful molecules to your brain that keep you happy, keep you focused, keep you connected to people, that all comes from a ketone. Obviously, what I'm about to ask is so variable, depending on the individual, but is there an average at which you've seen in your community that people start to acclimatize and feel okay getting to that place of that 15 hours? Yeah, so the best way that we recommend you do this process is very much like what I just

said, where you just start pushing your breakfast back and you hit a point. night where you're like, I won't eat after eight. I won't eat after seven. So this means no alcohol. This means like you're not, you're not the little piece of chocolate. Like you don't want your glucose to go up. So let's say like you stop at eight and then you start to slowly push your breakfast back. So like I said, you go a half hour and then you push it until you're maybe at an hour or two hours. Once you get to 15 hours fasted. What happens is your body is now acclimized. Like it's now, okay, I get what's going on. When we do this, skip this breakfast thing every morning, you want me to go in and make a ketone. So most fasters will start to notice somewhere around 15 hours, they're just comfortable. They don't, it's like,

this is easy. Once they get past that initial training period, they're like, this is easy. What happens next, and we've seen this over and over and over again, is people start, this is going to blow your mind, people start forgetting about food because they're not hungry. And so all of a sudden, they're going 17 hours. I've had people that were like, I'm just eating dinner now. I'm a one meal a day person. So after that initial, like, two-week period of pushing your breakfast back, if you stick with it, it gets easier and easier.

And then it becomes an eight and then you, you choose. Like, I used to do this with my patients all the time. I would give them what I call a 5-1-1, where five days a week, they would do a comfortable fast. Whatever was comfortable for them, 15, 16, 17 hours. One day a week, I would have them stretch their fast to something that was a little uncomfortable.

So maybe it was 19, 20. Like, when you push your body just a little bit, it'll adapt really well. This is like why we all work out. So we push our body to make it to adapt. And then one day a week, you don't fast. You actually don't, you just eat. So a lot of people used to do it on Sunday.

Sunday was they'd go have brunch. They have, you know, big breakfast with their family. Sunday was like their free pass day. Monday was the day that they would go longer fasting. And then the rest of the day, they just did a comfortable fast. 99.9% of my patients and the people that I were following me or are following me online. That's it.

That's it. It's that simple. It's super easy. If I'm fasting this much, how am I supposed to get my 180 grams of protein that everyone else says I need in order to work out and build muscle? Am I working out fasted like this? Do I have the energy to be pushing myself to get my zone two cardio for 40 minutes plus weightlifting and training?

I've heard a lot of controversy, or not controversy, but difference of opinion between fasting to get the benefits of the regeneration and the adding muscle mass, making sure you're getting enough protein. How do I reconcile those two ways of thinking? So this is where it gets really personal. And this is a podcast where like people want, like, just tell me what to do. but each person that has a little different strategy. So I'm going to try to give some general guidelines. But we live in a world where we're looking for absolutes with health, and there's no absolutes.

There's only your way. So you experiment with this. Some people do really well in a fasted state going into a workout. Now, most of these people are not bodybuilders. They're not endurance athletes. They are people that just don't want to eat breakfast in the morning. They'll have their cup of coffee. They feel better going into their workout in a fasted state.

I am not one of those people. Yeah, we'll talk about that in a moment because if you start fasting, you may become one of those people. The biggest challenge, believe it or not, that I've had teaching the world how to fast is getting people to stop fasting because they feel so good. Do those people not like food? Yeah, and they just keep going and keep going, and then eventually their muscle, they start to break their muscle down. Mindy, when I wake up in the morning, I think, what can I eat today?

And how many times can I make that happen? And the joy of being alive is that you get to eat all day. Like, you take little breaks, you know, and in my family, like, food meant you were alive. Like you, like having a chubby baby was literally like God saying you're going to make it. So like I just come from like, what's for breakfast? And then like, what's for lunch and what snack can I have? So are there some people for whom this is something that they're very motivated to do and they're very fitness oriented? And then the rest of us just like keep eating?

Or do you believe this is something that could benefit everyone if we just allow ourselves to have an open mind about the benefits. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm being really frank with you. I'm not discrediting your upbringing or what you've been trained. We appreciate that. Yeah, I was trained to be in a, when I had a bad day to eat. My mom was like, oh, you had a bad day, sit down. I made you something. So I just learned after a while that I felt so much better in a fasted state that actually most the high performance things that I did needed to be done in a fasted state. So it's like a tool. Think of it like a tool. You get to decide if you're going to pull it out or not. Who are the people who maybe are not genetically or biochemically cut out for fasting?

Because obviously I want to set eating disorders aside, meaning for a lot of people who are anorexic, this is like, I can do it, right? Like, I'm a good restrictor. I will just restrict and I won't eat and like, I feel it. I just like smoke cigarettes and, you know, drink coffee, just saying some people do that. But I'm wondering, so Jonathan, who I think is a fantastic person, if his blood sugar dips, he becomes a different person. And I think that someone who likes to eat, you know, even he needs like a little snack, like every two hours, like, you know, a little bit like a beloved toddler. My feeling is maybe that's the kind of person who is not made for fasting, Like, are there certain people who shouldn't fast?

Like people who are hypoglycemic, they're not able to fast this way, correct? Okay, here we go. You ready? Here we go. There's something called the thrifty gene hypothesis. The thrifty gene hypothesis goes back to the hunter and gatherer days. And it says that back in those days, we didn't have DoorDash. We didn't have the convenience of food.

We couldn't just sit on our couch and punch a bunch of, bunch of numbers on our phone and food appeared when we wanted it. We had to go hunt for food. So because food was scarce, our body actually went into this other metabolic system. Glucose went down. It switched over to ketones. Ketones powered us up and off we went to go find food. The thrifty gene hypothesis says that the people that evolved, out of those primal hunter-gatherer days, all had a very specific genetic profile. And it's called the thrifty gene. Like it can go long periods without food.

And the belief is that in this modern world right now, if you are a human, if you were born, that you have this genetic profile. And I'm going to just say something else. And I mean this with so much love for people, Jonathan doesn't have the thrifty gene. They can't cut it. Yeah, if you're going against your genetic profile, then you're going to start to have things like hypoglycemia. You're going to have weight gain. You're going to have diabetes.

You're going to have chronic disease. So hypoglycemia is a trained behavior. You ate a certain amount of food, a certain type of food. You trained your system so that every hour food was coming. so it never had to go over here. So that makes perfect sense, Jonathan, that you would be like, oh my God, I'm going to kill somebody because you never trained your body to do what it's meant to do.

I'm going to say something that reaffirms what you're talking about. It used to be that when I would wake up in the morning, like I needed something like within minutes. And I actually trained my body very intensely to push that, to push that, to push that. Now, by no means I'm a 15, 17 hour type of guy, but it went from like eight hours to now maybe 10 or 12. And it's, I have seen that it changes. I don't want to brag, but you know who's a good faster? This one.

We do dry fasts, like for the Jewish, like, yeah. So throughout the Jewish. That's the hardest of hardest. So I'm not doing it to like be a hero in traditional Jewish. practice. We have minor fasts, which are sun up to sundown, and those are dry, and then twice a year we have a 25-hour dry fast. Now, mind you, we're not going to work. We're not like working out. We are sitting in prayer and meditation using very few calories, but I will say, and I have a 17-year-old who, you know, is on the early end of his learning to fast for these

holidays. And I said, you're going to get really grumpy and mad around noon. And once you ride through that, you're going to start, like, soaring. And by the time, you know, on Yom Kippur, by the time you're singing the final prayers, it's like you have this third wind and you feel kind of trippy. Like, it feels kind of, you feel ecstatic. And so we do it throughout the year as part of a religious practice, which I think is really fun because there's all this, like, spiritual stuff and like it's very out there. It's like poetry and it's chanting and it's all these like body movements. It's very interesting. But yeah, that that's something that I've never had a problem. And some people like get migraints and I'm like, no, we're going to rock it out.

If I do a short fast, if I mean, I often wake up a lot at night. If I wake up at like four or five in the morning, I will eat a banana and drink a glass of water and go back to sleep. And then I fast the rest of the day once I get up and I'm fine. So I believe I have the thrifty gene. Well, the belief is that we all have it, but, you know, again, it's a hypothesis. So let's make sure we just point that out. Right. So yeah. Yeah, I mean, so you said something that's really important. You're told your son that there's a point at time you're going to kill somebody. When you first start to learn to fast, there is a point at time where you're like, oh, God, God, no way.

Like, this is too much. But if you hang in there, that little window is about an hour, maybe two hours, because you're metabolically switching, and now your body gave you ketones. And one of the first things that ketones will do is go up to the brain and turn off hunger. It's like I just, I've watched hundreds of thousands of people go through this process. And the pattern is always the same. and there is always this difficult moment, and if they hang in there, it gets easier,

and then it gets so easy, like I said, that we're like having to have discussions about you need to eat. This isn't, fasting isn't about, oh, I found this cool tool, I'm just going to fast all the time. Now you need to think about eating. There's a huge protein craze now. Everybody's like protein, protein, and all the rules were wrong, and you need to be eating so much proteins coming out of your ears.

What is happening in the one or two meal, that I'm having. Like how much protein and how much food can I pack in? I mean, like, if you're only eating one meal a day, what's happening at that meal? I don't want to know. Well, so remember, one meal a day

would never be every day. So I just want to say that for the first point. Okay, second, when we talk about one gram of protein for every pound of body weight, this is a target, not an obsession. And I really am, I have seen people do one gram of protein for every pound of body weight and gain weight. This is a recommendation based off of many different science studies, but you now have to go and try it on yourself and see if that works. It's called n of one.

Now, most people will, in my community, will end up having two meals and several snacks. within what we call their eating window. So one of the most famous studies ever done on fasting is what they call 16-8. 16 hours of fasting, eight-hour window of eating. So depending on what you're shooting for, if you're shooting for 150 grams of protein, that is not that hard to get in in eight hours. If you're snacking, if you're doing two meals, it's how we, choose our protein? Are you choosing high quality protein? For me, when I go to make a meal,

I start with the protein first. What is the protein I want to cook? What is it I want to eat? And then I build the meal around the protein. So I agree protein is really, really important. But in an eight hour window, try it. It's not that hard to get one gram of protein for every pound of body weight you want to be, by the way. It's your ideal body weight. 20 grams an hour. Think of it like that. A couple beef sticks, like you get some hard boiled eggs, make a protein shake. Some people will put protein in their coffee in the morning. Just take a scoop of protein powder and put it in your coffee in the morning. So there's, I mean, it's, you can get really creative. And, you know, people who haven't fasted before, it seems like mind blowing.

but once you start to fast and you feel how good you feel, you know, it's not that hard. It's just intentional. And we haven't trained ourselves to be intentional. We go off our taste buds. What does my taste buds want me to eat? As opposed to, hey, I need to make sure I get protein first. Can you explain a little bit about the mechanism about how fasting starts to repair the body

to overcome some of the chronic diseases that people face? Yeah, so when your body goes into what we call a hormetic stressor, I'm surely some, you've had guests talk about this. It's basically just a tad bit of stress, it gets stronger. So when we're looking at chronic diseases, I would say probably the number one commonality of all chronic disease is a messed up metabolic system. So if you have a high hemoglobin A1C up in the sixes or in the late fives, you are setting yourself up for chronic disease. This is a very well-known fact.

When I start, let's just use the 5-1-1 as an example. Five days a week, I'm going 15 hours. One day a week, I'm going, maybe I'm going all the way to dinner. I'm going 22 hours. Every time you are in those fasted states, you are telling your body, go for, find the food you stored years ago and clean this metabolic mess up. And it starts to clean the system up and hemoglobin A1C comes down. I feel like I could probably spend the whole rest of my career just teaching people how to bring their hemoglobin A1C down because if they do that,

then we start to see all these chronic diseases go away. What goes away if you lower hemoglobin A1C? Okay, well, so Alzheimer's is off. Dementia's off the table. Many cancers are off the table. Autoimmune challenges off the table. Infertility, off the table. Cardiovascular disease, highly connected to a poor metabolic system off the table. Fatty liver disease. Over 30% of Americans are going to have fatty liver disease by the time we hit in the next like 10 years. So every single, single chronic disease has a metabolic root back to poor metabolic health. Immune system during the pandemic, there was all these articles that came out that said 17% of Americans are metabolically healthy, only 17%. We can see that as metabolic syndrome, metabolic disease, poor metabolic health has gone up, so has chronic disease. Now, I'm sure there's some obscure ones, but all the major ones, the top killers, all have roots back to poor metabolic health.

And just not doing something is the way to fix it. It's the most, it is. It is. I mean, think about it. How many more fancy diets can we come up with? Come on now. Like, this is why I'm a little cynical about the counting of protein. Like one of my favorite memes I've seen all year is I'm sorry I can't go to work today. I need to count my protein. Like come on now. Like let's just put protein at every meal. Let's just make it simple.

And let's start tacking these fasting windows on and you will find that your metabolic health will be effortless. And I'm not I'm not Pollyanna-ish. I have probably led more people through fast than any other human on the planet. I've been doing this for over 10 years. And it's like magic. And I know it's hard because we losing weight, getting the metabolic system right, we feel like it's complicated. It's not complicated.

Eat real quality food and start tacking these fasting windows on and watch what happens. It's, it's, I almost want you all to try it and let me come back in like two months. And you tell me what you find because, I cannot be convinced otherwise because I've just watched so many people benefit from it. I mean, this is a synchronistic moment for me personally. I was at the doctor this morning. I'm in what I consider fairly good health, but the heaviest I've been in my personal life with a couple of biomarkers that are out of range

that were surprising to me that are sort of in the pre-state where they're like, well, we can't do anything for you right now, but come back when it's a real problem, which I'm like is a huge red flag for me. And I had tried fasting before, but was never really serious about it. Right? Like I'd known about it.

I'd heard about it, but I'd never really done it consistently enough. And this could be the moment where... We don't speak to each other until three o'clock every day for the rest of our life. Give him like three days. I give you three days.

Don't talk to him for three days. Three days. I'm going to get on my cycle. What did I say when you said you're the quote heaviest you've been? What did I say? You said I was still skinny, but... No, what I said, I did say you're still skinny. I said, here's what it's like to be a man.

I said, work out three times in the next week and you're going to lose 15 pounds. And you're going to be exactly where you want to be. Yeah. Because of the estrogen conversion happens in your brain, for men, they lose weight so fast. Like, this is just a no-brainer to me to a man that wants to a little. lose 20, 30 pounds. Like, you'll lose it in like a month doing this strategy. The 10 pounds we're talking about in my life right now, I will be working on them until I die. And people will be like, at my funeral, like, oh, she lost eight of those 10. Couldn't get rid of the last two.

You know what? This is an interesting part of the fat loss conversation. What's more important, the number on the scale, the size of your clothes, or your blood work? Blood work. Blood work. Blood work hands down. I mean, speak for yourself. We become a weight-obsessed society. There is one number. It is hemoglobin A1C. Get it close to five,

and who cares what size you are unless you care about it? I don't know. For me, as a, you know, a public-facing person, these are, you know, different kinds of considerations. And we've talked about this before,

and we've talked about it especially in the framing for menopause. Like, a lot of people do just want to be skinny. even over being healthy, you know, like in terms of like when we're told, like lift the weights. Yeah, your shoulders are going to get broader. A lot of women are like, no thanks. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. How do we break a fast safely if you're in that 15-hour window? Are there things to eat or can you just jump right back into what you would normally have been eating? So I find that there are three things you want to focus on. Let's go with your protein because I hear you're. trying to increase protein. Think of it like you're a true sponge at that moment. You haven't eaten for 15 hours. Your intestinal microbial intestinal cells are like, hey, let's get me, get me some

food. Put the most important thing into your body first, and that is protein. So I love making sure that people break their fast with protein. The second thing is a lot of people, maybe you've been on a lot of antibiotics over your life. And antibiotics, what they do is they destroy all the microbes in your in your gut. 80 to 90 percent of your microbes will be destroyed. So add in some fermented something. Sourcrow, kefir, what are some of the? Kim cheese is a big one that people that's great for immunity. And you can add it in maybe with like a perfect meal, a breakfast meal would be a grass-fed, burger patty with a side of sauerkraut. Because now you have your protein and now you're feeding your microbes what it needs to be healthier. The third thing, if you're a hunger, if you're hungry

is an issue. I don't want you to boomerang, which can happen where you're like, I made it to 15. Oh my God. Now I'm going to boomerang or I'm just going to eat whatever I want. We don't want that. we want so a lot of people who are worried about that we make sure that they add fat in so i would have them have like a big like a cob salad like lots of fiber put a lot of olive oil on there put some protein in there maybe some cheese if you do okay with cheese so that you're getting the protein you're getting the fat maybe you can put some sourcrow i actually love putting sourcrow in my in my in my salads. And so you're getting all of it.

But the first meal is the most important meal, for sure. We used to always break the Yom Kifur fast with deli. Would just meat, deli meat? Yeah, I mean, like, when I was a kid, and it's funny because they would always say, like, oh, break the fast with dairy.

Like, that was a thing because, like, easier on your stomach. Nope, just corn beef, lean. We would always have soup. Chicken soup. Interesting. So chicken soup is phenomenal. I mean, there's some incredible benefits of chicken soup for not only lung health, but just chicken in general has so many great nutrients for cartilage, for skin.

So chicken soup's great. A lot of times I will have people break a fast if they have a really messed up gut with bone broth and like a really dense bone broth. And then that also, it's fatty, it's got protein. it's a good way to ease into food, and then they find that they're not as hungry. We're going to hit pause here on our conversation with Dr. Mindy. There is so much more to tackle.

We're going to speak specifically about what it means to make America healthy again. What are people getting wrong about their approach to aging? How can fasting treat symptoms of menopause? Also, what are the changes you can make to cut back on cravings, eliminate the detrimental effects of processed food and the top things you should be avoiding and adding to your diet to help you balance your metabolic system efficiently. We are also going to cover one of the most important topics we have potentially covered in all of our health episodes, which is what is hormone replacement therapy missing?

What is the conversation about hormone replacement therapy not talking? talking about. We can't wait for you to hear part two of our conversation with Dr. Mindy from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.