The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Moment 147: Stop These Habits That Are Destroying Your Body!: Mindy Pelz

Episode Date: February 2, 2024

In this moment, nutrition and functional health expert , Mindy Pelz discusses how we often treat our body as if it was an enemy working against us and our interests. Mindy discusses how evolution has actually shaped the human body so that it is constantly looking to increase your chances of survival. However, in the modern world we are getting in the way of our body’s natural defence mechanism, and taking actions that are against our own and our body’s interests, this can include injecting ourselves with weight loss drugs and using toxic deodorants, causing larger health problems later in life. Mindy says that in general we seem to be in a ‘evolutionary mismatch’ with our bodies and need to regain trust in them. Listen to the full episode here - https://g2ul0.app.link/hXIqoyQGOGb Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Mindy: https://drmindypelz.com/ https://www.instagram.com/dr.mindypelz/?hl=en

Quick one, just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio.

And thirdly to Amazon Music who, when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. What do you mean by opening up our detox pathways? Yeah. So if you look at our lymph system, the lymph is like, you know, people know lymph nodes because when you get sick, you can feel them. Mumps.

Yeah. So the lymph is always carrying toxins out of organs. So the liver has a lymph pathway. The gut has lymph nodes in there that are going to pull all the toxins that are in there and move them out of you. So we need to keep these lymph pathways open. So the gut, the gut's a great one. You should be having a bowel movement every single day.

If you're not having a bowel movement every single day, then what the body's trying to get rid of is staying inside of you and it gets congested. A thing we teach women about the armpit and actually would work for men too, is that you should have a pit, not a puff. If it's a puff, like look in the mirror and if your armpit is a puff, then that's stagnant lymph. It means that you're not pulling the toxins for women that are coming out of her breasts are not getting out. Toxins that are coming out from the head down into the thoracic area is not getting out because it's congested. So if your underarm is puffy and not like a pit, then you might be storing some of those toxins. That's right.

They're not moving. They're not mobilizing. Why aren't they? Am I blocking my pathways? Yeah, the pathway is blocked so with what well there's the question yeah with i feel like people are going to leave this podcast to be so depressed because there's so many pieces of this but uh deodorant deodorant clogs that up and so it doesn't mobilize all of the toxins out this was a big thing with breast cancer is a lot

of women using toxic deodorants they weren't getting the toxins out of the breast and it was clogging in the armpit because of the toxins from the deodorant that explains why we sweat in that area right because it's a pathway why do we even have hair in that area i don't know you tell me it's a detox it's for detoxing it's to help get those toxins out oh so the molecules go down the hair yeah yeah and what do women do shave it off that's right so you're saying i i i shave i i'm i just because i don't i can't walk it's just not in my in my nature but i you know what i do is i have a loofah in my shower and i just loofah under my arms whenever I shower to open up those pathways.

What's a loofah? It's like a little organic sponge. Ah, okay, that scrubs it. Yeah, scrubs it. We also have pubic hair. We also have pubic hair. We are getting toxins out from the ovaries. The ovaries are the major area for, and testes.

This is where hormones are being produced. And so as they're coming out they are supposed to influence our everything biologically we need them to influence but then they're also supposed to get out of our system and so the hair ends up becoming like this way that we can mobilize the toxins out of us i never what i never knew or asked why i grow hair under my arms and in the pubic region. No one ever told me about that. No one ever, I never questioned it. I thought it was slightly inconvenient.

Yes, well, it is for sure. But the body doesn't do anything to inconvenience you. It does it to increase your chances of survival because I'm the byproduct of millions of years of survival of the fittest and evolution that has made me pruned a sculpted to survive it's funny because we spend so much of our time and this goes back to the conversation around sugar we spend and just weight loss and all these things we live in a world where we think that our body is against us right it's fighting us it's it's making me go for the sugar drawer. It's stopping me losing weight. It's growing all these pubes. Right. Inconvenient. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then we fight it. We shave it off and we, you know, do all these crazy things to fight against our body. But our body

is very much, it's actually, it's actually for us. And many of the things we're choosing to do are against us. We are against ourselves, not not our bodies our bodies cannot put a foot wrong you got it i mean you got it it's this is what i'm trying to bring back is this this respect for what the body's trying to do that's what we're missing we we it's all inconvenient and it's everything from like, even like weight gain. Why is your body gaining weight? Because it's so brilliant that it decided not to put that fat around your organs. It put it around your belly. And now you're looking in the mirror and you're villainizing it.

But your body was trying to save your life in that moment. Like everything the body is always doing for you, not against you. But we continually discredit what it's trying to do and manipulate it, which is why the best thing I can think of is that we're just in an evolutionary mismatch. We're just at the modern world does not line up with the human body's design. I was walking through New York City and I saw a poster and it is for weight loss injections. Yeah.

Have you seen this? No, but Ozempic is a drug that's really popular right now. There's a couple of drugs right now. My friends were talking about it and we were like, there's a diabetes drug, I think. And the headlines have been that so many people are taking this yeah diabetes drug to lose weight that people with diabetes are struggling um there's another one called semaglutide yep yep this is this is people injecting things in their body to help them lose weight yeah and the poster

which my friend had sent me and i'd seen it earlier and then he'd sent me the poster as well in our group chat says one shot a week lose weight and it has a little url someone thankfully had actually ripped the url off this billboard um what's your take on all this stuff yeah the the the new medications that are out there right now are creating a weight loss uh possibility when we look at the scale and when we look at how people feel when they put on their clothes. But it's at the expense of muscle. They're actually losing more muscle

than they are losing fat. So yes, you feel thinner, but it's not because you lost fat, you lost muscle. Muscle is the organ of longevity. If you lose muscle as you age, you are going to be in a bad situation. I mean, we need muscle to get out of a chair. You need muscle to perform daily life functions. The other thing people don't realize about muscle is in muscle are insulin receptors.

So if you lose muscle, you don't have as many insulin receptors, which means you're now putting yourself in a more insulin resistant state, which means you have to stay on the medication forever to be able to stay at the weight you want because you don't have the same insulin sensitivity. So again, it's like the calorie in calorie out short term result. It's not it's risky. It's risky. And then every medication has a side effect. But I'm more concerned about the person who thinks they solved their weight loss issue and all they've done is made it worse down the road. I've sat here with many a health expert and a fitness expert and nutritional experts,

and they all agree with what you just said about muscle. They all said to me, because I asked a question to, I think it was Tim Spector about, might have been Giles Yeo, asked a question about, does our metabolism fall off a cliff as we age, which is quite a popular thing. And a few of them said the same thing to me. At a certain point, further down the line, metabolism does change. But really, the thing that changed is muscle mass. And that means that we stop moving as much, which means that we stop moving as much which means that we gain weight faster so he said the number one thing that you need to do as you age is keep doing resistance training keep your muscle yeah and because i was asking him a

question about my father i said i went down this really steep cliff in bali a couple of weekends before and as i was going down those stairs i was thinking my dad couldn't do this anymore and at the bottom of those stairs was our activity for the day we were going white water rafting and as i was walking down those stairs i was thinking i want to be my dad's age and be able to go down these stairs so i can do stuff with my kids um and getting into a place where i'm immobile at you know in my by 60 that is a choice that is an unavoidable that is a for most of us that is a choice and it's one that we can avoid if we keep muscle and we keep therefore we'll keep fat. And what you said there from what I garnered from it is I will actually if I take those chemicals and if I inject them into my body, I'll lose my muscle mass.

And if I lose my muscle mass, I will be I will have a higher chance of weight gain and obesity when I'm older. And and your functionality. Yeah. So the great, the perfect example that I always stuck in my head is my dad had a knee surgery and he's 86 years old. And I remember trying to help him get around a chair that he was sitting in and he was starting to lose his upper body strength and he literally couldn't push himself up and out of the chair to be able to move into a comfortable position. And I thought, oh my gosh, that's where muscle is so important at 86 years old, is just being able to get up and out of a chair after recovering from a surgery. But if you think about the functionality of a human as we age,

if you want to be able to not do as many activities like you're talking about just make sure you don't have as much muscle like the minute muscle goes away your functionality goes away but more importantly the minute muscle goes away you're more insulin resistant so you're going to gain weight more down the long haul a lot of other people would say you know the way to lose weight is just to do lots of cardio run a lot yeah good idea no no so here's another interesting thing and i'm going to give it through a woman's perspective because we're good let's go back to women over 40 so cortisol goes up with extra cardio uh calorie set point because you know you're more calorie output so remember that's also happening and you're changing your set point so i need more calories my calorie set point goes up

and my cortisol levels go up yeah okay okay so what ends up happening is that you actually now are tanking all your other hormones so let's follow the trail of progesterone. Cortisol goes up because you're doing so much cardio. So progesterone goes down because cortisol goes up, progesterone goes down. Well, progesterone keeps estrogen in check. So now estrogen can go up. And if you have too much estrogen, eventually what's going to happen is it's going to be stored as fat. So that extra hormone will. So long term, that's not a great plan. For women? For women.

For men? Well, so then the second piece applies to both men and women, is if you're doing a lot of cardio, most likely you're breaking down muscle to be able to perform that cardio. And a great example is look at a marathon runner versus a tennis player, you know, or a soccer player. Like even though soccer players are doing a lot of cardio, it's a lot of start, stop, start, stop. But a marathon runner who's done so much cardio is breaking muscle down to be able to do that

amount of cardio. So it's okay to do just not at the expense of muscle. And for women, you can't do it at the expense of progesterone so it won't help me to lose weight doing cardio no you know what's going to help you to lose weight is more weight lifting build more muscle so you have more insulin receptor sites fast more so you can get rid of all of the glucose that gets stored in muscles break your fast with protein. And yeah, I mean, that's what we saw, we see all the time in both my clinic and my online world is those three things will get you in the shape that you want.

It might not, remember, as you build muscle, you're not gonna lose, the number on the scale might be that much different. It might not move, but your whole shape is gonna change. You're gonna look different. You know, it might not move, but your whole shape is going to change. You're going to look different. So is any level of cardio good for weight loss? Would you recommend that just for the broader health benefits?

You know, I think cardio is more of a mental health improvement. You know, you get all those endorphins. It's so good for your mental health. I love to go running. It's my favorite thing. But I do it for my mental health, not to lose weight.