The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - The Miracle Doctor: EVERYONE should start Fasting right now! (NEW SCIENCE) Dr. Mindy Pelz

Episode Date: June 15, 2023

In this new episode Steven sits down with the nutrition and functional medicine expert Dr Mindy Pelz. Dr Pelz is a fasting, keto and detox expert, she is a leader in alternative health and a pioneer in the fasting movement. She has worked with a wide range of high-profile clients from Olympic athletes, to Academy Award-winning actors, and Silicon Valley CEOs. Her books, 'The Reset Factor', 'The Menopause Reset’ and most recently ‘Fast Like a Girl’ are bestsellers, she is also the host of two podcasts, ‘The Women United’, and ‘The Resetter’. In this conversation Dr Pelz and Steven discuss topics, such as: The power of fasting The most common myths about food and eating How sugar is at the root of most health problems The perfect diets for men and women You can purchase Dr Pelz’s newest book ‘Fast Like a Girl’, here: https://amzn.to/3NgXOD7 Follow Dr Pelz: Instagram: https://bit.ly/461aBB0 YouTube: https://bit.ly/3qHdIht Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo

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 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. Feminist women out there are not going to like this. Women are perishing in this modern world more than men. Well, that's terrifying. If we want to exist on this planet, we're going to have to. Dr. Mindy Peltz. Renowned functional health expert. Best-selling author. And keynote speaker.

One of the leading voices in educating us about our bodies. Spending two decades helping millions worldwide. You got pretty famous from talking about this certain subject matter, which is fasting. What do I need to know? Research shows it's going to make me stronger. More lean, 1300% increase in testosterone in men. Oh, wow. We see inflammation go down, growth hormone go up.

It's the hormone that keeps you young and helps you burn fat. You know where it dropped the most amount of weight? Belly. Yep. It literally takes cells that are turning into cancer and it gets rid of those. and helps you burn fat. You know where it dropped the most amount of weight? Belly. Yep. Literally takes cells that are turning into cancer and it gets rid of those. You are tapping into a healing state

that you never knew was there. I'm sold. Where do I start? So the first place to start is menstruation or the big M is considered a taboo topic. I'm gonna say something which is really embarrassing here. I know nothing about menstrual cycles. I'm in a relationship.

What advice have you got for me? Well, the first is, do you know her cycle? Moving on. Tell me about your childhood. Let me give you gold. First two days, give her some space. If you have any conflict you want to resolve with her, do it between day two and day 12.

Her libido is going to be the highest between day 10 and day 15. And then here's the gold. You're going to have to report back to me how this works. Around day 17, this is where you got to go. Once in a while on this podcast, I have a conversation that I desperately wish I'd had sooner. This is one of those conversations. I'd heard about fasting, but I had no idea, no idea at all of its potentially life-changing impact. Weight loss, your sex life, a woman's menstrual cycle, how to heal from illness and injury, the incredible power of fasting. I'm incredibly happy that you chose to listen to this particular conversation because

if you're like me and you've never really taken the time to understand fasting and you don't understand the six types of fasting then maybe this is the conversation you've always needed to hear because it certainly was for me you are really really going to enjoy this one take my word for it Mindy, if you took the full body of work that you've produced over the last, let's say, 10 years and the work that you're going to produce over the next 10 years, and you had to summarize the mission that you're on and why it matters, how would you do that? Wow, that's a great question. I'm trying to empower people to believe in themselves again. And I want to do that through everything that in our lifestyle that taps into our body's own ability to heal itself. We've gotten so far off course. We don't even realize that we're giving so much of our health power away, our happiness power away. And all we've got to do is come back home to ourselves and learn that every single

thing inside of us, every cell, every neuron, everything is working for us, not against us. And we have to stop villainizing our body. We got to figure out how to believe in ourselves again. We're the ones that are going to save ourselves. And we've just lost our way. What have we fallen into the trap of believing? Well, in the health world, we've totally fallen into the trap that if I take this pill, if I do this diet, if I do this exercise, then that will cure me.

Nobody cures you. You cure yourself. And so you have to start to look at the human body as this self-healing organism that's always figuring out how to keep you alive, how to keep you at your best. And if you're not feeling at your best, then the only thing to look at is that there's an interference. There's a physical, emotional, spiritual, chemical interference that is pulling you away from

this power that's inside of you so that you can start to heal. Once you pull those away, you see yourself in a whole new light. I mean, this is what fasting did for millions of people. You just see yourself so differently in what you're capable of doing. Where have we gone wrong in terms of our attitude towards what it is to be a human? Because, you know, I often think much of the health advice that is thrown at us these days has this underlying belief that like in some way we're broken. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my. I so agree with you. It's the messaging is like you did something wrong. You have a genetic profile that you're doomed to have a disastrous outcome. And everything is exogenously blamed at us. And I really think that that comes

from not only our health care system, and I'm not trying to bash the health care system, but we have lost our way. And it comes from, for women specifically, it comes from the messaging we get from, you know, social media and magazines, like everything is outside in. We got to go inside out now and start asking what we want on a physical, spiritual, emotional level so that we can create the life we want and stop looking outside for the answers. We got to go within. I love that. Inside, inside out I love that inside, inside out, inside out, inside out living. You got pretty famous from talking about this certain subject matter, which is fasting. Now I want to talk about fasting, because I've heard about it. And I'm sure

here I represent a lot of my audience right now. I've heard the term fasting. I've had loads of people in recent times over the last, I'd say two years, get really excited about it and say that it's a good thing. But that's really the extent of my knowledge on the subject. So let's just start right there. I mean, you wrote a book called Fast Like a Girl. You've got so much content out on the internet about fasting for both men and women. This book was written in 2022. Why? Why are you so focused on fasting? Why do I need to care about it? What's it going to do for me? It's the quickest antidote to what we just said. If we've got all this physical, emotional, chemical stress coming at us, we've got taste buds, we've got to change. We've got behaviors we have to change. There's a lot there. But I can show you how to compress your eating window into a 10-hour eating window, leaving

14 hours for fasting, something as simple as 14 hours. And I can show you how you can start to heal yourself without money, without time. You are literally tapping into a healing state that you never knew was there. And I think part of why we've had so many people pour onto YouTube and so many women gravitate to the book is that it's so, once you learn how to fast, you start to see your body in this whole new way. It can absolutely heal itself. So for me, fasting became this incredible tool that everybody could do. And we just had to learn how to do it. The women that I'm watching that are just dropping, I mean, men and women, hundreds of pounds and medications they're getting off of and mental health that's

coming back just because I taught them how to compress their eating window and leave a longer time for rest so their body can repair. That is all each individual is doing that. I didn't do that. I'm the type of person that very much needs like stats to believe things. I'm one of those people. And once I've got the stats or some kind of like scientific evidence, then I'm all in. Beautiful. What do I need to know? From a scientific standpoint, what research has been done on fasting? Okay, so let's let's go through the basic principle of fasting. And I think this will help everybody is that you

have two metabolisms. So you burn energy when you eat, and you burn energy when you don't eat. But there are two different mechanisms. So when you eat, like let's use myself as an example. I had eggs and some avocado for like around 11 o'clock today. So that's going to bring my blood sugar up. Now as my blood sugar starts to drop, what's going to happen is my body is going to switch over into this other energy system. And I call this the fat burning energy system. I call this one the sugar burner energy system. When it switches over into this fat burning energy system, it starts to make a byproduct called a ketone. And that ketone will go up into the brain and

it starts to repair your brain. And what most people don't realize is your brain needs 50% ketones, 50% glucose. So you're giving a fuel source to your brain that it desperately needs, which is why people when they fast are like their mental clarity goes up, their cognition improves, their brain fog goes away because you're literally giving a fuel source to your brain that it may never had have been given before it takes about eight somewhere between eight hours to metabolically switch over into this fat burning place ah okay so if i'm doing a podcast and i want to be sharp yes i shouldn't eat eight hours before yes ah fuck Oh, fuck. Did you come back in seven hours? Seven hours? Yeah, sure. I should have given you the memo before we got here. Yeah. So I think of it like a hybrid car. You know, you switch over into this fat burning place. So at eight hours, you start to make the switch. By about 12 hours, your body's now starting to make a good dose of ketones.

The brain is excited. So you're getting that mental clarity. Ketones turn off the hunger hormone. So you also, when you switch over, there's going to be a point in which you're not hungry. And that all happens at about 12 hours. But you're also, if you stay there a little longer, if you stay there and you go 14 hours, 15 hours. So check this out.

Research shows at 15 hours, we see growth hormone go up. Okay, growth hormone is the hormone that keeps you young and helps you burn fat. We also see in men, 1300% increase in testosterone just from somewhere between a 13 to 15 hour fast. 13% increase in natural testosterone stores. And we can explain why that happens in a moment. And then we start to see inflammation go down. So all of a sudden, if you have people who have like joints that are hurting, they start doing 15 hours of fasting every day. And they're like, God, you know, my joints just don't have that same stiffness in them anymore. But if you stay in that fasted window, you keep going 17 hours, your brilliant body turns within and it goes, wait a second, no foods coming in.

We better get stronger. So it literally takes the bad cells, the cells that are slowing you down, the cells that are turning into cancer, and it gets rid of those. They're called senescent cells. And it literally recycles them out of your system. And it goes into the cells that are still usable, and it makes them stronger. It fixes the intercellular parts. We call that autophagy. And that actually was the, if you want stats, the Nobel Prize in 2015 by a japanese scientist dr osumi he won the nobel prize in medicine and physiology for this term called autophagy and that's when you go without food yourself your cells will heal themselves that was back in 2015 so i want to go

into all of that i want to start with with why? Why does fasting help so much? And really like what I'm getting at there is if the effects of this are so profound in so many ways, then where did we go wrong? Because from what I have been told, breakfast, lunch, dinner, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and then maybe dessert you know, dessert. Yeah. And then, you know, yeah, that's the narrative that I was brought up on. Yeah. Well, breakfast is the most important meal a day. I've done a lot of research on that phrase. Do you know where it came from? No. It was actually, and I don't mean to diss any companies out there, but it was a tagline that they came up with for cornflakes for Kellogg's cornflakes back in the 1970s.

They needed a tagline that made people eat cornflakes in the morning. And so they came up with cornflakes. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. And that has continued until this day. I can't find any research and many other fasting experts, many other blood sugar experts

will tell you the same thing. There's just no research showing that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. So that became a myth that we need to bust. Second myth we've been taught is you can speed your metabolism up the more you eat. Six meals a day. Remember that one? Okay. Also a myth. There is no evidence that the more you eat, the faster your metabolism will be. If you want a faster metabolism, you need to know how to metabolically switch. You need to know how to go from sugar burner to fat burner. And that's where you start to lose weight. So that's the other myth that I feel like we have to break apart. And then we have this, you know, I can tell you as a mother, and this is, you know, not for anybody to have mommy guilt,

but what we do as parents is we have certain statements we make to our kids, like, you know, dinner's being served, the kitchen's closing in an hour. You need to eat lunch. You need to eat breakfast. Like we are programmed when to eat by a clock, not by our own internal sense. So kids are raised to eat according to a clock, not according to when they want to eat. We don't say, am I hungry right now? That's so true. We all wait until 1 p.m. to have lunch. And the morning we wake up, we feel like we have to have breakfast or we're doing something wrong. Yep. And then dinner time, you know, any time between, I know, 6 and 8, we have to sit down and eat again or we're doing something wrong.

Yep. Like if you just unwind that. Yeah, where did that come from? Right? Usually from your parents. And it came from a schedule. What did my ancestors do before my parents existed and the schedules existed? I can tell you exactly what they did.

What did they do? They came out of the cave. I'm going to go back to our primal friends. Go back to our cave friends. They came out of a cave. They didn't have a refrigerator. They didn't of a cave. They didn't have a refrigerator. They didn't have a pantry. They didn't have DoorDash. They had to go find food. Did they have Uber Eats?

They didn't have Uber Eats. Delivery? Yeah, I'm pretty sure they didn't have Uber Eats. But what they did is they came out of the cave and they went to go hunt food. Sometimes they could make a kill really easily and bring it home and they would feast. Sometimes the kill wasn't as easy and they had to go far to find an animal to kill. Exercise. Exercise. But what did they do when they had to go super far and they couldn't get food? They switched over into this ketogenic energy system.

And that ketogenic energy system supercharged them. Because every cell in the human body is the number one priority of our cells is survival. So we were built to make sure we could stay alive in the absence of food. So their ketones kicked in. And when ketones kicked in, they became mentally very focused so they could go find food. They were able to stay calm. Ketones will affect a neurotransmitter called GABA and cause GABA to come on. So you feel calm, you're focused. Ketones will power up your muscles so that all of a sudden you have this incredible muscular energy, all because they were meant to go find food so they can bring it home. Okay, so the body, which is

orientated towards survival, when you hadn't eaten, it invests a lot of its sort of resources in your brain to increase the chances that you'll catch something to eat. So that's why when I fast, or when I haven't eaten, I'm very focused. I'm very articulate. That's right. Seems I perform at my best. Bingo. That's it. Makes sense. And then what what did they do when they got a kill they came home and they feasted they didn't necessarily ration it out they ate and then they divvied it up again amongst the tribe and then they went out again until when the food was gone maybe a couple days maybe they'd feast for a couple days when the food was gone they go out again it's called feast famine cycling it is how humans were meant to be to live. The challenge we have is we have access to food all the time

that we are, you know, feasting has taken on a really negative connotation because we're feasting on the wrong foods. But if we could go back and just be like our primal friends and we could learn how to go in and out of this feast famine famine, cycling, using fasting as a tool for performance, for healing and using food in the proper way and eating the right food so that our brains will work well. And, you know, there's a whole hormonal pack or a sense of food that can help support hormones. If we're really conscious about the quality of the food that we eat, we're now mimicking what our primal ancestors were doing. Does that also imply that we should exercise fasted? Because I was thinking, if I'm thinking about my ancestors, they would have been doing the most physical activity when they hadn't eaten yet.

That's right. Yeah. They would have been doing the most physical activity right before they ate. Yeah. So really interesting point. And you and I were talking about this in the beginning, is that when you exercise in a fasted state, you're going to get rid of the glucose that's been stored in your muscles. So as that glucose comes out, because your body needs it to go, you know, you don't work 100% off of ketones and 100% off of glucose. You're needing both of them at different moments of your day.

So when you're exercising in a fasted state, you're getting ketones, and your muscles are releasing stored sugar, which is great for anybody who wants to lose weight because now you can lean out those muscles. Now let's go back to what our primal ancestors did. When they came home, they ate meat. They ate protein. And they stimulated something called mTOR.

mTOR is when you actually create muscle growth. And what we now know is it takes about 30 grams of protein to trigger these amino acid receptor sites in the muscles to cause them to grow stronger. So for you, if you work out in a fasted state, you're going to release all those stores. You're going to have those ketones for performance, but then you want to follow that up with protein so you can build your muscles strong. And that is a hack that has worked incredibly well for so many people. Okay. Historically, people have thought that fasting is a one size kind of fits all technique. And there's one kind of fasting, which is you just, I don't know, you might just not eat for a prolonged period of time. But in your book and throughout your work, you describe these six

different types of fasting. Yeah. What are the six types of fasting? And tell me what the difference is in outcome and benefit? Yeah, it's a great question. So again, fasting is when we switch over. So now we're in the fat burning place. At about 13 to 15 hours, we start making ketones. This is intermittent fasting. That's pretty much what most people, when they say they're intermittent fasting, that's what they're doing. Okay, they take 12 to 16 hours.

Yeah, they're making ketones, testosterone's going up, inflammation's coming down, hunger might be going away. They're kind of having this, they might be, a lot of people lose weight with that. It's kind of the most common fast. Does it matter from the window? Does it matter what time I start and what time I end? You get to choose.

You choose what that window should be. So I could eat at 3 a.m.? You could. There's a whole nother level we can talk about why you don't want to eat in the dark what's ideal an ideal window um i really like it depends on the on the time of the year but in the summer i really like somewhere if you're going to do an eight hour eating window like 11 to 7 in the summer and then in the winter because it's darker earlier you would do more like a like a 10 to 5 kind of eating window it's not so hard

to do 11 to 7 right not hard at all not hard at all that's not that's not fasting that's that's just a slight having a slightly later breakfast and a slightly earlier dinner yeah but it's it's like being intentional right yeah exactly because you don't want to you gotta you gotta keep blood sugar low otherwise the minute blood sugar goes up you're gonna switch over right so you can't put it you know if you walk past the kitchen and put a grape in your mouth yeah yeah exactly yeah yeah which is you've pulled yourself out yes yes so that's the first type of the six fasting um styles the second is i'm going to try and say this word or ought of oji agi autophagy it's one way of saying it people say either call it um autophagy or autophagy

people say it different you can tell me i said it wrong i've kind of landed on autophagy i feel like autophagy is the best way to say it. Autophagy fasting. What's that? So autophagy fasting is about 17 hours in without food, your cells will turn within and they'll start to heal themselves. And that was what Dr. Osumi's big discovery was, is that the cells clean themselves up. So what's interesting on this one, and this is something I really want to get out to the world, is that when you stimulate autophagy what you're doing is you're turning on the intelligence inside the cell and that intelligence is looking around and it's going hey there's a virus there's a bacteria get them out so let's push these infections out of the cell that mitochondria it's not working well we need

to repair it that endoplasmic reticulum inside here it's it's lagging We need to repair it. That endoplasmic reticulum inside here, it's lagging. We need to fix it. So it literally goes in and fixes everything inside the cell just at 17 hours. But one of the greatest studies that I've seen in fasting was done during COVID. And it showed that if a virus comes into a cell that's in a state of autophagy, it can't replicate. Viruses have to live off of your energy system. So when viruses go into a cell that's laden with glucose, they have a party in there. They love that. They munch on that and then they go out and they start replicating. If you were in a fasted state when a virus comes in, it can't replicate. There's nothing inside that cell for that virus to take over and

it dies. Why does that happen? What's the reason for the, that sort of the CEO within my cells looking around and saying, right, let's clean all this stuff up. Well, because once you've stimulated autophagy, there is one goal for that cell and that is survival. So everything in there is on high alert okay everything is going to be in your survival interest so a virus is not in your survival interest so it pushes it out so it's kind of like an emergency signal because there's not been food for a while so it's kind of like the last the last attempt to do everything the body can to help you make it through this period of hunger.

That's right. That's right. You've put yourself in this state of extreme healing. And it's all based off of this idea that your body wants to stay alive. Okay, so that's, are you writing your book that that's good for balancing sex hormones and preventing colds? So yeah, with with autophagy, it's great for preventing colds. What here's what's interesting about autophagy for sex hormones is that the major part of your brain for both men and women that control hormonal, all hormonal control is your hypothalamus and pituitary. not have a blood-brain barrier. So it's very vulnerable to toxins. So whenever we have massive toxic exposure, that part of the brain starts to malfunction. We see this with polycystic ovarian syndrome, most common hormonal imbalance for women. Well, a lot of that is this imbalance of testosterone and estrogen, and there's a huge toxic piece that has destroyed or interfered with the part of the brain that controls hormones.

So when we look at autophagy, there are certain parts of our system that are more easily influenced by autophagy than others. Well, it turns out the hypothalamus and the pituitary are easily influenced by autophagy and can repair themselves when they're in easily influenced by autophagy and can repair themselves when they're in the state of autophagy. The other interesting cellular makeup that is highly influenced by autophagy are the cells around the testes and the cells around the ovaries. Those are the cells that are putting out sex hormones. And if that whole system is malfunctioning, when you go into a state of autophagy, those cells will respond and become better cells and be better at producing

these hormones because of you dipping in and out of the state of autophagy. That really got me thinking because I've been looking at a lot of companies from an investment standpoint at the moment that are trying to solve for this macro decline in male testosterone you know i had a few guests come on this podcast and tell me that male testosterone has been declining year over year and then kind of paired with that we're becoming more and more sexless our libidos seem to be in decline i've got a lot of close friends of mine that are taking certain hormonal supplements to try and get their libidos back up. And for the first time ever

on a show called Dragon's Den that I'm on in the UK, we had someone come into the den for an investment that was producing a supplement to try and get our sex drives back. It feels like a big macro conversation that we're not having.

And looking at your work and the work around, you've done about fasting and what you said there, it seems like there could potentially be a link between the two, the ways we're living our life and what we're eating and our decline in testosterone and our libidos. There's a beautiful book. I don't know if you've read it called Countdown. And it's about the sperm counts going down in across the world. And I actually brought her onto my podcast, the woman who wrote the book.

And she said that there's one chemical that's reducing sperm counts more than any, and it's phthalates. And phthalates are in fragrances. They're in our colognes, they're in our perfumes, they're in our laundry detergents, they're in our air fresheners. They also are now infiltrated into our water. So they've infiltrated into they're now being sprayed on our foods. Animals that are drinking the water have phthalates in them. So it's the number one toxin that's destroying testosterone levels. And it's a brilliant book that she wrote. You talk about in the Reset Factory, your first book from 2016, chapter 10, you said something which I hadn't quite um appreciated you said that even the things we put on our skin are absorbed into our

body um and then they go directly into our bloodstream and into our kidneys i didn't think when i read that it got me thinking because there's so many things that i sort of unconsciously just spray on my body right every day and i never look at what's in them because I just think it's on the outside and it will wash off. But now you're saying that. Yeah. Your skin is a breathable organ. So it's going to push toxins out and it's going to take toxins in. So think about if you've ever like eaten something that didn't react well with you, you might get a rash. That's your brilliant body trying to push that toxin out. But the same thing happens when you put something on your skin. It actually goes into your body. So a good general rule is if you aren't willing to eat it, don't put it on your

skin. And beyond that, if we even look at the microbiome, you have bacteria on your skin that protect you. And bacteria is are actually talking to the bacteria in our gut there's actually a connection between the two bacteria so if you start putting things on your skin that destroy that microbiome you're actually going to ultimately have an adverse effect on the microbiome in your gut so what you put on your skin is massively important and then the smell we know the hippocamp, which is the seat of Alzheimer's and dementia, is also where the olfactory nerve innervates.

So when we smell something toxic and breathe something toxic in, it goes straight into the hippocampus and starts to create degeneration in those neurons that ultimately can lead to dementia and Alzheimer's. Toxicity is a huge human problem. Toxicity. When you say the word toxicity, how are you defining that? You're saying like toxic chemicals that we introduced into our lives on our skin, consume, inhale, have around us. Bingo. And that are in our foods, etcingo what are what are some of the the most toxic chemicals or foods or products that we consume without thinking that you think we need to stop consuming on a day-to-day basis oh here's the most the easiest one is plastics bpa plastic

they say that it's that there's it's not a matter of if you have plastic in your body it's a matter of how much so let's use it in in context of something that people are really motivated by which is weight loss what's bpa plastics it's it's a it's a chemical within plastic that's within our water bottles it's on in our tupperware um they actually are putting they're saying that they're now in the microfibers of our clothes and that's being washed out. It gets really depressing when you start talking about toxins. It gets washed out into our oceans.

But for the sake of simplicity, it's bottles mostly that you see, but we've got plastic containers, we've got plastic plates, we've got plastic everything. And that has BPA in it. And that is a toxin that destroys human health. And the biggest and most interesting thing that BPA plastics do is there was a study around something called a Noguti mouse. And they took this mouse that had a gene for obesity. And they were twins. They fed them the same food. They gave them the same amount of exercise, but one of the mice got introduced BPA plastic. And the one that got the BPA plastic all of a sudden started to gain weight and the hair color started to change. And that was the only difference between these two mice with the same genetic profile. And so then when they

detoxed the BPA plastic out, the mouse lost weight. So that was the beginning of us understanding a term called obesogens. And obesogens are toxins that actually make us insulin resistant, actually cause us to hold on to more weight. And that's just one category of toxins. Well, that's terrifying. It is terrifying to be completely, you know, from the center of my heart. This is it's this is why we have to educate ourselves. This is why we have to wake up. We have to understand that we are living in the most toxic time in human history. And it doesn't, it's not just mental stress. It's not just social media. It's a barrage of all of that that is pulling us off course. And I can tell you that I have sat with some of the most brilliant doctors who are generally so

concerned on the direction of humanity and where we're going because of the abundance of these toxins. As you said that, I could see a sadness in your face. Where does that come from? I think it's really easy when you hear a podcast like this and what I'm saying to reject what I'm saying because it's too overwhelming to understand what the evolutionary mismatch we're in right now. So many people are suffering, whether it's physical or mentally, and they don't realize that it's everything from the food to their shampoos to the plastic water bottles. It's so vast. And yet nobody's doing anything about it. And that's where my heart hurts. It's like, people are suffering that don't need to be suffering. And if they understood that the

modern world we're living in has taken us so off course with our health. And we've got to start to one by one figure out how to bring it back on course. And, you know, yesterday I sat with Dr. Dale Bredesen on my and interviewed him on my podcast. He wrote a book called The End of Alzheimer's. And he laid out seven things that we need to do to stop Alzheimer's. And he strongly feels that Alzheimer's is optional. You don't have to, you don't have to get that. And those seven things are so intense. Like it's everything from detoxing to metabolically switching to prioritizing sleep to human connection to understanding, you know, what the best exercise is for you. And it's easy for humans to look at those seven things and go, I'm out. I can't do all that. But we if we want to exist on this planet, we're going to have to do

that. That's the new level of health we're in right now. And I love being the cheerleader. I want to be the one that's like, come on, we can do it. But I also need people to understand that where we're living as humans right now is a very, very dangerous place. And it's just in the existence of moving in and out of grocery stores and restaurants and, you know, and the drugstore. Everything has a toxic insult on us. And it's overwhelming. It's overwhelming. Drastic action, because we've, we're so drastically far away from where we're supposed to be, where our ancestors were. We've built up this society that's full of plastics and toxins and alcohol and drugs and sugar everywhere and i can't move

in bloody new york city which is where we are now without someone offering me you know every block is almost every block is really bad food horrible but food that tempts the certain part of my brain that maybe is looking to help me stay alive and to survive whether it's pizza or sweets or whatever it might be yeah um so it's it is difficult and i have a great deal of empathy for anyone that's struggling yeah with it too me too it's it's it's it's it's we've hit a point where the door out of poor health is multifaceted it's not just one. And if you're healthy and you're just like, you know, someone like you just wants to get in better shape, then the path is a little bit easier. But what do we do for the person that gets the cancer diagnosis? What do we do for the

woman who's suicidal and going through her menopause years. Like, where are we helping her? How are we getting to them? And each time they walk into their doctor's office, they're typically getting a pill and not being taught how to live a life that works with their body in this modern world. That's where we have to get to. You told me about the first two styles of fasting. The first one was intermittent fasting,

which is 12 to 16 hours, which is good for weight loss, brain fog, that kind of thing. The second is autography. Autophagy. What did I say? Autography, but I like it. I said autophagy. It works for me. We can play that back.

I definitely said autophagy. And if I didn't, we'll fix it with AI. Autophagy fasting, which is 17 to 72 hours good for balancing sex hormones and preventing illness yeah yeah number three we haven't spoken about gut reset fast yeah what's that yeah so that's based off a study that came out at mit that showed 24 hours without food and your intestinal stem cells inside your gut actually start to reboot themselves. Now, a stem cell is a cell that can go to anywhere in the body and repair itself. But at 24 hours, you get a plethora of them in your gut.

And in the gut, we've got a damaged microbiome from everything that we've just been talking about. So what I discovered in this 24-hour fast is I could take women that had been on birth control pill for years, people that had been on multiple rounds of antibiotics, people who had been eating horrible food, and I could actually put them through a 24-hour fast once a week, once every couple of weeks. And these stem cells would come in there, and they would start to repair.

And so now if I teach that person how to eat right, their food is actually starting to build a better microbiome in the gut. So that 24-hour fast became this go-to in my clinic where I could take all these gut challenges and I could start to unwind them just because I knew the body had this capability of making these intestinal stem cells. And it was crazy. Like we got people off supplements. We got people that weren't making serotonin, which affects moods, comes from the gut, all of a sudden started to become happier. People who hadn't had bowel movements in like three days, all of a sudden we started to put in this gut reset. And it was like a miracle. It was incredible. Number four, fat burner fast.

So the fat burner fast is probably my favorite for those people who want to lose weight. The research was done that 36 hours without food, followed by 12 hours of eating, and then another 30, they actually did it over a 30-day period, but we've been using it in our community, just dosing it in. That at 36 hours, what happens is that's enough time where the blood sugars come down, where all of a sudden the body, it's so smart. It goes, okay, blood sugar is not common. We've been in this fasted state. We've triggered autophagy. We've brought inflammation down.

We've made you ketones. We're trying to go find food. But this extra weight, it's not serving you. Because remember, you got to go find food. So it drops weight. And it's the most beautiful way to get a person to unstick any kind of weight loss resistance. But most importantly, you know where it dropped the most amount of weight from? Where does everybody want to lose weight? Belly. Yep. So it is the, I probably should have called it the fat burning, belly fat burning. Yeah, the belly fat. Yeah, that would have banged. Yeah. But yeah, and so that's what they showed is that actually a 36 hour fast started to unstick weight loss

and it was started with weight around the belly compelling number five the dopamine reset fast yeah so number five um i found some research showing that when people go without food for 48 hours the whole dopamine system will be rebooted so what's important to know about the dopamine system is it is our molecule of happiness. It is the thing that it's actually a motivation molecule. It's a neurotransmitter that allows thoughts, happy thoughts, to go across from neuron to neuron. What happens, and I'm sure you've talked about this on your podcast, that we're so dopamine saturated right now. Specifically, people who are overeaters,

they actually are finding the study I quote in the book is that they found that people who had food addiction, people who had extra weight, like obese situations, they were not getting as much happiness out of their food because their dopamine receptor sites were saturated. So they had to eat more food to get more happiness. And, you know, food is a state changer. It does make us happy. So what they found is if they put them into a 48-hour fast, that they actually rebooted the whole dopamine system and new dopamine receptor sites appeared.

So that when they brought food back in to the equation, they actually got more enjoyment out of food with less food. This kind of got me thinking about a conversation I was having yesterday with some of my team here. We were talking about how it almost feels like sometimes if I've eaten sugar, I can go into a bit of a sugar cycle. And what I mean by that is I'll have some sugar and then like a couple of hours later, I'll have another craving for sugar. And then a couple of hours later, I'll have another craving for sugar and then a couple of hours later i'll have another craving for sugar but then at other times specifically for example when i did keto i was i did the keto diet for about eight months uh eight weeks bloody eight

months i wish um eight weeks and throughout that period i didn't have any cravings for sugar yep i would we had some chocolate come into the studio and i walked over to the chocolate i smelled it yep and i didn't want any of it. It had gone. But then when I'm in what I call the sugar cycle, I'm eating sugar maybe once or twice a day and I'm getting the craving for it, which I just can't seem to resist. Well, dopamine is the molecule of more.

It's not the molecule of enough. So what it does is when you get sugar, you get this dopamine rush and the brain goes, love that. Give me more of that. And so it's endless. You will never be fully satisfied.

It constantly wants you to come back for more and more and more. So when you start to go off the ketogenic energy system, you're getting the same euphoria. You probably felt the same high, the same mental clarity, but you've totally taken this molecule more out of the picture. In fact, dopamine will actually, you know, you get those receptor sites that will be repaired, but you're not getting a big dopamine buzz when you're in a ketogenic state. You're getting ketones. I was mulling it with my team how long I had to stay away from sugar to kind of get out of that vicious give me more cycle. Yeah. My experience has been it's about three days.

Three days. That's what I thought. Yeah. I think I said four or five, but it's just from experience as well. If I haven't had sugar for three or four days, I mean like a chocolate, but something significant in terms of sugar. Then after three or four days, the craving for it seems to vanish. Yeah. Yeah. It's not it's not

if you think about that it's not hard if you're trying to overcome a sugar addiction yeah like just bear it for three days and then that dopamine stops barking at you and then if you attack fasting onto it now you're getting ketones and so you're not needing that as much ketones kill hunger and they make you so mentally mentally clear they give you this euphoric feeling so you don't have that urge to go for the for the sugar and the ketones come from fasting yeah which is when your body switches metabolic state yeah the last and final fasting style immune reset fast yeah so immune reset was built off of Dr. Valter Longo's work. And he did a study on people who had cancer and were going through chemotherapy. And one of the challenges we know

about chemotherapy is that it wipes out the whole immune system. And so he wanted to see, well, what if I put somebody in a fasted state as they went through chemotherapy? Would there be a difference? And what he found is after three days of fasting, the white blood cells in our system actually reboot themselves. So what they do is all old white blood cells are sloughed away and new white blood cells emerge. So people were able to come out of that chemotherapy experience and have a stronger immune system as opposed to what we were seeing was that it was wiping the immune system out. So that launched the whole three-day water fast sort of craze. At least here in America, we're seeing a lot of people that are just

going after three-day water fast to prime their immune system. But you also, also at three days, get stem cells, full systemic stem cells. So all of a sudden, your body's got surging with stem cells going to all parts of the body repairing it. The great example I always use on this one was I had an Achilles tendon injury and nothing was helping it. So I threw a five-day water fast at it. On the fourth day, I felt this buzz in my Achilles tendon. I was like, Oh, wonder what that is. And it stayed all the way through. I went five full days.

And about the fifth and sixth day, so sixth day I was entering food back in, all the pain completely went away and it never came back. I tried everything. I tried everything. And that was the only thing that repaired it it does make again evolutionary sense that if our body senses we're injured because we're not eating or you know some other signal that we are on a course to not survive to put it nicely it does make sense that it might set about to repair whatever needs to be repaired you're getting it you know because like if i was a wounded human back in on the savannas of i don't know africa or wherever we came from um and i'm laid there and i'm not

eating my body should probably go okay steve might need something fixed so he can get back to hunting. So you're getting it. So survival, that is the number one priority of the body. So when you go without food, you amplify every resource it has to keep you alive. And if repairing my Achilles means I can now go hunt for food, it's going to do that. It's going to make me stronger. And in the book, I stumbled, when I was writing the book, I stumbled upon a really cool hypothesis that's called the thrifty gene hypothesis. And it said that, it's a theory, obviously, it's a hypothesis. It's a theory that the people, the humans that evolved out of the primal days had a very specific genotype. And this genotype allowed us to metabolically flex and be stronger in a fasted state because

we had to survive. And the people that didn't make it from that time period didn't have that gene. But think about this for this moment. So they think we all have this gene inside of us right now, this thrifty gene, where we can go long periods without food and we can survive. So what happens when we're eating all day? What happens when we're ignoring and we're not actually activating that genetic profile? So what they are now believing is that diabetes, metabolic syndrome, all of that is largely happening because we are going against the genetic profile that we are now seeing in humans.

We're like on the opposite end of this spectrum. We're overloading our bodies. Yeah. Which is meaning that the survival gene you referenced there is not being activated to help us. That's right. That's right. Interesting about what about coffee you know if i'm gonna fast for i know people are so addicted to coffee so i feel like i have to ask a question as their representative if i'm gonna fast do any of these six fasts that you just mentioned does coffee break that fast

yeah it does break it no well it depends okay so this is this i'm just yes or no um i can't give you a yes or no on it i'm gonna give you most likely okay no let me give you most likely it's okay okay most likely it's okay yes there's not a high degree of uncertainty and conviction there no let me let me explain myself okay so when you drink a cup of coffee, it shouldn't spike your blood sugar. It shouldn't? Should not. It doesn't. So if it does, it shouldn't.

So if you have black coffee and your blood sugar doesn't spike and you're trying to metabolically switch over into your fasting window, you're good. You're golden. Drink that black coffee. Okay. Okay, now I'm going to add some sugar to it. Okay, now you've pulled yourself out of a fasted state. drink that black coffee. Okay. Okay. Now I'm going to add some sugar to it. Okay. Now,

now you're not switched. Now you've pulled, you've pulled yourself out of a fasted state. Okay. So no sugar, just a plain coffee with no milk or sugar in it. Is most likely going to keep you in a fasted state. Most likely. Well, I've seen a few occasions where it didn't. Okay. This is why we have people test their blood sugar like it it's unique to you so you can test your blood sugar have the cup of coffee half an hour later check

your blood sugar again those numbers should be equal okay so for most people coffee should be fine when they're fasting yes but there's a couple of anomalies who their blood sugar does spike yes um which means that they're not going to switch over to the fasted state. Yes. Yes, exactly. And, you know, coffee made creamers, those can be a little more problematic. But some people put full fat cream in there with no sugar. Some people put MCT oil in there, you know, the buttered coffee became very, very very common and that was because of the fasting movement so the reason they did that was because when you put a fat in your coffee you stabilize your blood sugar and so you were able to stay in the fasted state and switch over i had glucose goddess on the podcast who um jesse she talks a lot about glucose spikes it was the

first time my eyes were really open to the consequence of living a life where your glucose levels are spiking and crashing and spiking and crashing and i've invested in this company called zoe where they give you a glucose monitor which i attached my own for 14 days as part of the initial test and then they give me this big sort of nutrition plan and profile and um that was the first time i got to see you know i was in america at the time i was in la for a couple of months and I in LA I mean I pulled up at a gas station and I was it's funny I was walking through this gas station and everything in there was sugar it's because because now I was looking right now I had my eyes open because I'm wearing this bloody monitor yeah so I'm about to see the impact within minutes that it has on my body and

I was just looking around thinking oh my god the only thing that i can see in this whole store that i can eat without spiking my glucose is water that is so is it a monitor where you can see it you can scan it yeah yeah so so they've got game changer yeah so they've got two one of them you scan the new one they've got it's automatic yeah by bluetooth so it just keeps constantly updating on your phone i honestly think we could dramatically change the health of the world if everybody put one of those on. Amen. Amen. Because then what you would do is you would just go because, you know, this is like coffee. Like you should it should be so simple for me just to say, yes, drink your coffee. You're fine. But your microbiome in your gut is going to determine what

it does with whatever hits that. So it's going to determine your blood sugar levels, your microbiome in your gut is going to determine what it does with whatever hits that. So it's going to determine your blood sugar levels. Your microbiome, my microbiome, completely different. So food no longer is a one size fits all. There's an individual approach. So you have to know what your blood sugar is doing. You know, like when I eat, believe it or not, when I eat a grass fed steak, my blood sugar goes down. It's amazing.

Wow. So whereas other people eat a steak and their blood sugar goes super high. And so then again, you go to a thread of this conversation, which is how do we help humanity? Yeah. And humanity wants the one size fits all. I can't give you that. Yeah. You have to learn your own you gotta learn you and something like that teaches you you but you're gonna have to become very curious about you like you are and what's really fun to me when you put one of those things on I it's my favorite thing to do with patients is I say just eat normal just eat everything yeah yeah and then and then every day I have them send me their readings and we just talk it through. I just did this with a beautiful patient that I've been

working with who has a long history of eating disorders. And she was counting calories and really wanted the control of being able to keep her weight where she was, where it needed to be. And I said, okay, you can count calories if you want, but I just want you to stick this monitor on and let's just eat and let's see what you're doing. And she was vegan. And this isn't a this isn't an anti-vegan conversation, but her spikes were up and down and up and down like there was like eight of them a day. And her moods followed those spikes, too. And so then we started to go, OK, well, let's add a protein here. Could we add fat here? Could we add some more fiber here? And she got to watch for herself. And within four weeks,

she was free of any food control. And she was off teaching everybody else. It was so beautiful to watch. That calorie counting point though. There's a, there's a big school of thought that in order to lose weight and be healthy all you've got to do is count those calories yeah you know there's something called a set point have you heard about the set point which is the amount of calories that i need to consume in order to hit my that's right so we all have a set point if you're going to go down the calorie path you have you have to understand you have a set point and the set point is there's a how much calories coming in and how much calories going out. What's the delta of that? And that will keep you at whatever weight you want to be. So let's use an example. You eat fifteen hundred calories a day.

You exercise five hundred. You have a delta of a thousand. So if you want to keep your weight where it's at, you always have to do a thousand calories every single day. Yeah. Okay. Well, what happens on the days you decide not to work out? So now you have 500 extra calories that your body's not used to. And so what does it do with those calories? Stores it.

So then you all of a sudden start noticing you're gaining weight and you don't really understand why. So you're like, well, let me count. I need to restrict calories. Yeah. So then you start eating maybe, I i have 500 less yeah and then you bring the set point down well that's your new that's your new set point you're gonna have to stay at that set point now if you don't ever want to gain another pound you see the game oh okay so

my set point is moving the crafty it moves because as you restrict and you if as food restriction goes down and energy output goes up your set point goes down and now you're like i feel great but you can't leave from that set point you're going to always have to make sure that that set point is a thousand calories or 800 calories so i was told i mean this is the school of thought that i have to have for me as a male that has my weight 2000 calories a day. And then if I'm under 2000 calories a day, then I'll lose weight. That's what I was told. Yeah.

So you go now you go to 1500 calories. You drop weight. Yeah. To lose the weight. Yep. You go back up to 2000. And for most people, they start to gain weight again. Because my my set point has moved.

So now it's 1500. Yeah. To maintain my weight. Yeah. Which is why if you think about it, have we ever seen a calorie restriction diet work long term? No. Right. I haven't. Long term being the key word there. Yeah. It's short term. It works great. But this is why I'm such a fan of metabolic switching. How about we watch blood sugar? We put a monitor like you're talking. Let's put a monitor on so that you keep your blood sugar spikes minimal. It's like what I did with this woman. I was like, can we have two spikes in a day, not eight?

And we just keep your blood sugar at a low level so that when you're not eating, you can switch over and now you can burn fat in the fat burning energy system. So metabolic switching is where you're keeping your blood sugar at a stable place. It's not got all these spikes all over the place so that when it starts to go down, the body is going to want to switch over and it can start to burn fat in the, in and use that other energy system. What do you think our relationship should be with sugar? Well, you know, there's only 12% of Americans that are metabolically healthy. That means that they have the right blood pressure, the right cholesterol,

that their hemoglobin A1c, their insulin, all those metabolic markers are in balance. Only 12% of Americans have that right. That is a huge problem. And that is largely because we're addicted to sugar. So what's the consequence of poor metabolic health? Obesity, cancer, heart disease, mental health challenges. I mean, you name it. Every chronic disease on the planet at the root has a metabolic thread. Now, I hate to bring back a really traumatic concept topic, but during COVID, when we looked at the people that fell prey to COVID, this is no disrespect, they were metabolically unhealthy. And the people that had less COVID symptoms were the ones that were more metabolically healthy in general. So, and largely because the virus could really replicate if you had a lot of

glucose in your system. So the consequence is huge. And the healthcare consequence, the amount of money we pay trying to help everybody put their health back together because they're metabolically unhealthy. If we just started with metabolic health, we would change everything. And metabolic health, people think of metabolic health often as being, you know, I'm in good superficial shape, i'd like to think um but that's not metabolic health you could be i'm guessing you can be metabolically unhealthy but also have abs oh oh yeah you could this woman i was telling you about with all the spikes she was she's actually a model and an actress that is beautiful.

And we had to go back in and really work with getting her metabolically healthy. So yeah, we call it skinny fat. You look skinny on the outside, but you're dealing with excess sugar on the inside that is putting fat around your liver, putting fat in other areas. I think a lot of people can relate to that skinny fat concept. Yeah. So it's a major, major issue. And we can look at different things like hemoglobin A1c. It's a marker in the blood. Everybody gets it tested every year when they go to their doctor. It should be under five. If it's not under five, what's happening is all that extra sugar is going

around your red blood cells and your red blood cells carry oxygen to your body. So they're gummed up with sugar so they can't deliver oxygen to the brain, to your eyes, to your muscle. So you're not getting oxygenated because of the sugar just gumming up these red blood cells. In chapter one of your book, you talk about this metabolic health crisis in great detail you share some stats which i pulled out which i i thought were terrifying it's page page four of your book you say according to the cdc 41 percent of women and 21 and older are obese 45 have high blood pressure out of two one out of two will develop cancer in their lifetimes. One out

of five will develop Alzheimer's. One out of nine will get type two diabetes. One out of eight will develop a thyroid problem. And 80% of all autoimmune conditions occur in women. Why is that, that last one, 80% of all autoimmune conditions occur in women? Yeah, so autoimmunity is a really interesting one. And if you look at what an autoimmune condition is, it's the body attacking itself. And so when we look at where toxins go, we're back at the toxins. Hashimoto's, why is the body attacking the thyroid? There's something there that needs

to get out. So it's usually a toxic issue. So the body's attacking the thyroid. When we look at RA and joints, there's toxins in their bodies attacking that. So it's happening more to women, largely because, well, this could go dark real fast, but largely because we have so many influences that are affecting our hormones. So the best way I can explain this is something I call the hormonal hierarchy, where our sex hormones are going to be completely thrown off by insulin. So when you get insulin resistant, your sex hormones are off. And insulin is going to be so impacted

by cortisol. So when you're stressed all the time, you're going to be insulin resistant. And when you're insulin resistant, you're going to have trouble balancing estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone. But at the top of the hierarchy is oxytocin. And oxytocin is that we're getting oxytocin right now just from connecting with each other. And it'll calm, start to calm cortisol down. And then when it calms cortisol down, you can be more insulin sensitive. And when you can be more insulin sensitive, now your sex hormones can balance better. So we need that hierarchy as women to be in balance in order for our bodies to be in balance.

But what do we have women doing right now? We have poor diet, lots of stress, and our sex hormones are way off. Sugar. And sugar. You're going after the sugar. Yeah. So women are perishing within this modern world more than men. So we've got to help a woman bring back more insulin sensitivity. We've got to get her doing better stress management. And when we do that, now the immune system can regulate. Now the immune system can calm down and stop being so hyperactive, attacking all the toxins that are in the body. So it's very complex. Does that imply that women and men have a different relationship with stress? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

We're not I. OK, so I'm going to I'm going to be as bold as to say this. And I know all my my feminist women out there are not going to like this. And I was raised by a strong woman. I am a strong woman. I've raised another strong woman. And I have to tell you that we are not meant to handle the stress loads as well as men. And that's largely because of two hormones. So estrogen makes us very outward, makes us very much an extrovert. And we can handle a lot of stress when estrogen is present in our body. But progesterone,

she can't handle stress at all. So progesterone will start to diminish as cortisol goes up. I always say when cortisol goes high, progesterone becomes shy. So now, I mean, the number of women since Fast Like a Girl came out that I have heard from, the 20 and 30-year-olds, that have no cycle. None. That is because they're insulin resistant, they're more stressed, progesterone's not making her appearance, so there's no shed of the uterine lining. That is absolutely a stress issue. And not having a period for a woman is a major problem because that's how we detox. That's how we get these hormones out of us. So if you're not having a cycle, you're not getting rid of estrogen. You're not getting rid of so many toxins and it's just staying inside of you. That's a major problem.

Controversial idea, but it rings true for a lot of people yeah and i know this because i've had women very close to me in my life talk to me about this exact thing and um specifically not having their menstrual cycle and then focusing on the stresses in their life and then comes back their menstrual cycle coming back um people very very close to me in fact that i've i've struggled with because of this exact challenge yeah it is a controversial idea though isn't it it's a it's slightly problematic um as an idea is there any scientific basis for that idea well we know based off science that when cortisol goes up, progesterone goes down.

Cortisol is the stressful moment. Yeah. So when you're under stress, cortisol goes up. And so if you're, let's say it's the week before your period, that's when you're supposed to have the most amount of progesterone. If it doesn't matter if you're trying to run a marathon, doesn't matter if you have a work deadline, doesn't matter if you're skimping on sleep, as long as cortisol is going up, progesterone is not going to make her appearance. And if she doesn't make her appearance, then the uterine lining won't shut.

That's been proven over and over. Every hormone expert would agree, multiple studies. But women don't realize that. So if there's ever a time to mind your stress, it's the week before your period, which is why you don't fast the week before your period, because that's a bit of a stressor. It's why you shouldn't train for a big Spartan race or a crossfitting event or run a marathon. You should be doing more yoga and recovery the week before your period. This is why we should prioritize sleep the week before our periods, because we don't want cortisol up. So in an interesting world,

this is sort of the vision I have for women right now, is what if there is this moment where the week before our period, we have the capability of maybe not working as hard. Like Spain, they're giving a three-day menstrual leave to women. No questions asked. Before the period? Well, it's no questions asked. They anticipated it that women would use it the first three days of her period, but a woman can use it anytime. I say use it the three days before your cycle is supposed to come. Interesting. Have you shared this idea before publicly uh i've on several podcasts i've talked about it i had a great interview with kate northrup um on my podcast and she's an entrepreneur and she actually maps her whole business cycle around her menstrual cycle and so we had a beautiful

conversation about this and she said that she doesn't do as many Zoom calls. She tells her team that she's going to get off work a little bit earlier on those days. She slows everything down. Her workload goes dramatically down. And she said what ended up happening is that when her period started, her productivity went up. So see, when estrogen comes in on starting day one, day two of our menstrual cycles, estrogen makes us really mentally clear, makes us very verbal. Estrogen is an incredible hormone for productivity. But if you aren't minding that back half of your cycle and you're not slowing down then, then you're coming into your period and you're having, you hear so many

women who are like i'm cramping i'm bleeding a lot it's really painful that's because you didn't mind the back half of your cycle and what's the sort of evolutionary basis for all of this why is the body doing this why is the body um not going to give us our periods i mean listen i don't have a period but um well i have a version of it right I'm sure men have some kind of... Yeah, you guys work off a 24-hour cycle. Okay. So every 15 minutes you get testosterone. Okay.

You know we joke about that, right? What do you say? You joke behind our backs? Kind of. What do you say? The joke is, like, if you don't like what your husband's saying, just ask him in 15 minutes. He might say something different.

Oh, that's what you've been saying. Just letting you in on what might be going on behind the scenes. Okay. So what is the evolutionary basis for why that is true? So think about, yeah, let's go back to our primal days. So, you know, testosterone is meant to have you go out and hunt. It's a very motivating. You get it every 15 minutes.

So, you know, God, this sounds, as I'm saying it, sounds so sexist. But when we look at the body, this is actually how we're built. So your body was driven to go hunt and go find and go achieve. That's the number one hormone that it works off of. For the women, we are meant to be more outgoing before ovulation. Okay, why is that? We need to connect. We need to start to feel that mental clarity. You know, estrogen makes your hair really like full and your skin really glow, and it starts to make us more beautiful, all leading up to ovulation. Once ovulation hits, now we have estrogen at our peak. We have a little bit of

testosterone and we have a little bit of progesterone. Okay, well, why is that? Because now our libido's up. We're motivated to reproduce. We're looking beautiful because we have so much estrogen going through our body. We're verbal. We can connect. And we have progesterone to keep us calm. So we're supposed to reproduce when ovulation hits. And then the back half, technically, we would have a fertilized egg and we would be winding

down. And if we didn't get a fertilized egg, then we're supposed to relax so we can go back and do the extroverted piece of ourselves in the front half of our cycle. So it's all based off of reproduction. So I need some advice then, because I'm in a relationship and I want to understand. I guess this goes both ways. I want my girlfriend to understand how hormones are influencing my behavior. And I want to know how hormones are influencing her behavior yeah what advice have you got for me well the first is do you know her cycle moving on we're going to talk about sugar again no no this is too good so sugar it's really bad isn't it who's to blame seriously. Tell me about your childhood.

Get to know her cycle. I'm going to give you gold right now. I should know, shouldn't I? Let me give you gold. Okay. So day one of her cycle, day one to day 10, she's building estrogen. First couple of days of her cycle, just let her be. She's transitioning out of the back half of her cycle. She might be having some heavier bleeding. She's moving into that extroverted place.

So the first two days, give her some space. Now, day three, estrogen starting to build. So you're going to notice she's more verbal. She's going to be more present. She might feel more outgoing. She's going to feel like she wants to connect with you. That's going to go all the way through ovulation, like in the middle of ovulation, which is about day 12, day 13, where all of a sudden estrogen's at its peak. If you have any conflict you want to resolve with her, do it between like day two and day 12 of her cycle. She's going to be so ready to handle any conflict with you. Between, let me write that down. Day two and day 12. Day two, like literally. That's where I pick my battles.

I had a dad come to me and tell me that he was struggling to understand his teenage daughter. And I said, well, do you know her cycle? And he's like, no, I don't. I said, well, you would never ever bring a conflict to her on day 18 or 19 of her cycle bring it to her on day 10 and now she's going to talk to you I'm going to say something which is really embarrassing here I know nothing about menstrual cycles at no point in my life did

anybody teach me about menstrual cycles the only insight I have in my life to what a menstrual cycle is is overhearing my sister when I was younger talking about it yeah and when I say overhearing I mean maybe a sentence and then maybe my girlfriend once in a while she'll say oh I'm coming into my cycle or whatever she'll say I'm on my period that's for most men that's in fact the extent of the education we have about the female reproductive um menstrual menstrual cycles. Yep. So talk to me like I'm an idiot about the menstrual cycle. Yeah.

How long is it? Oh, I love this. And do you know that most women don't know? Oh, really? So, I mean, most women are ignorant to their own cycles. So it's 28 days, anywhere from 28 days to 32. Every woman has a different length. Okay. And what day does the period come on?

Day one. So day one is the first day she bleeds. Okay. Then how long that lasts for what? Seven days? Everyone's different. Anywhere from three to seven days. Okay. So day, you said day between day two and 12 is when to pick my battles? Yeah. So day two, you're going to start to see her be emerge a little more gregarious. She may be a little more outgoing so i mean as she get closer to day 12 you want to go party with her you want to take her out make her feel good like that's the time to wine and dine her okay cool we'll put all the dates then and all the fights and then after day 12 what am i doing then after date well okay so day 12 is right when she's ovulating so

you're gonna have to choose your battle there but ovulation occurs for most women between day 10 and day 15 there's a small little five-day window there that's if this is when i once i figured this out i was like why don't why don't men know this um that's when she's gonna be her libido is gonna be the highest okay so we're having sex yes so if you want to have sex with her i'm just writing this down yes have sex with her around that time around that time if she's willing she yeah she's going to be more motivated because she has testosterone she's going to feel more like it okay then after she finishes ovulating after day 15 yeah so then there's going to be a crash of hormones you might see a change in her personality she might feel a little low so go stay in a hotel but you could ask you know like

if she's having a bummer day like a low day ask her do you know what day your cycle are you on be really nice be really nice and then here's the gold here's gold this is so good you're gonna have to report back to me how this works okay uh when around day 17 or 18 progesterone's coming in this is where you got to give her foot rubs you gotta be extra special and cater her like like she's the queen that she deserves to be. Okay. So all my compliments. That's where I pull out the notepad.

But what you need to know is she's probably going to be like, if you're like, oh, you look so beautiful today. She might at that time be like, no, I feel horrible. I'm bloated. I don't feel beautiful. And I should disagree. I should say, no, you don't. disagree I should say no no you don't you look amazing okay cool and you do that till she bleeds and you can take amazing care of her in the back the week before her period and you will get kudos like you you can't even imagine and then start it

all over again and then start it all over again yeah I mean just once you understand our patterns and then it also helps you understand that we're going to be more outgoing in the front half of our cycle. We're going to be more introverted in the back half. What about men? You guys, every 15 minutes, you're pretty black and white. Really? Yeah, you're pretty straightforward. So if she was asking you the same question about me, would you say anything to her about my hormone cycles at all?

What would you say? It really depends on the issue at hand so if it's a a mismatch of libido then the best time to have sex with a woman is during ovulation okay because she has the most amount of testosterone day 10 to 15 of her cycle yeah it would be really handy wouldn't it just to have a little menstrual cycle chart on the wall at home i I know that sounds a bit strange, but just so I know what's going on inside her body. The first time I discovered this, I started using an app called the Clue app.

Yeah. And it shows you in a circle. It kind of shows a little cloud and then it shows you where PMS clicks in. And it actually has a button that you can share it with people in your life. And I thought, not only does my husband need this, but my staff needs this. They need to understand where I'm going. And what if

all the women on my team actually shared it with each other and we could see where each other was at in the menstrual cycle? We would understand why a woman's moods can be so up and down. It's really, you know, because of these three hormones, our moods are much more volatile than yours. You guys are pretty steady, Eddie. We're, I mean, this is general, you know, this is, I hate to be sexist in this conversation, but this is hormones and the way they work. It's actually really helpful to know this because without this insight, it's very easy to fall into the trap of just assuming your partner is moody or that they are, they have like mood swings or that they're,

you know, people say things like they're too emotional or they're whatever it might be. But with this, I actually think it creates a ton of empathy. Yeah. That's certainly the reaction that I get from hearing that there's a there's significant hormone fluctuations in my partner and they happen at certain periods it actually now would change my behavior the way that I receive certain times where I come home or I'm I notice that my my partner's just different

yep and it's almost it catches me off guard sometimes I've actually we've spoken a lot about this and we're very open we're very much the same person in terms of our willingness to talk about everything um and very difficult things as well yeah and there will be times where um i come home or we go through a patch where just a week you know things are making her upset which wouldn't normally make her upset just tiny things that I'm doing. And I go, what? That's it. Like, yeah, you know, so see if you can track that to a certain part of her cycle. I'm getting so like the week before our period, we're pretty, we're irritable. And every time I say that men go, well, you said it, I didn't say it. Well, but that's because progesterone, we, you know, we're meant to be more inner. We're meant to sit on the couch. We're also meant, believe it or not, glucose goes higher the week

before our period. So we crave carbs. There's a reason we crave carbs because we need to bring glucose up to be able to make progesterone. So we crave carbs. We're irritable. We don't want a lot of cortisol. So generally, we're a little bit slower. We don't want to, you know, we don't have the desire to push through stress and push through exercise. And so we're going to be, we're a little, we're different that week where, so if you come up and you just put your hand on our shoulder and you're like, I love you. You're amazing. I'm here if you need anything, that's all you got to do. But if you're trying to resolve a big conflict or you're trying to come at us in too aggressive a way, we will shut down the week before our periods. So interesting. Whereas if you have something you want to resolve with us,

make sure estrogen's there because estrogen makes us great, great verbal. Our verbal skills are incredible when estrogen's around. Ask any menopausausal woman she'll tell you what it's like when she loses estrogen and i have to say this is because you know women have this incredible power to create life that us men don't have it's like women are superheroes for being able to carry a baby for significant amounts of time and then give birth to this baby it's just the most magical thing that i can think of in existence and women have that superpower and with that comes this cycle yeah so it's a wonderful thing it's beautiful and in in the book i called it the manifestation phase ovulation because when all of those hormones come in we we can manifest anything we want. But it's not just a

baby. This is a great time. Ovulation is an amazing time to start a new business project. Interesting. It's a great time. Like as an author, like I'm going to write during those five days because my creativity is going to be at its peak. So we're highly creative. If you want to like, you know, talk about something about life and how to create something with us do it during ovulation your husband is behind that wall here in my home and does is he aware of your menstrual cycle he is until i started to lose it i'm 53 so i'm starting to go um yeah, we talk like this all the time. And the way I like to take ownership over my hormonal moods. So I will say to him,

after a long day of work, I will say, hey, it's been a testosterone-driven day for me. I don't feel like I have a lot of estrogen right now. I can't handle a lot of stress. I'm going to need to just take some time to myself. We literally talk like that. We, um, losing the menstrual cycle. We, the first time I started as a young man that hasn't been exposed to that at any point in my sort of, you know, in the education system or other, um, the first time i started to understand what menopause was and pre-menopause and perimenopause all these things was from guests that have come here and it's such a big it was such a big light bulb moment for me because i have

women in my life that are going through that phase of life and i feel like they are so misunderstood in so many ways thank you and i love hearing about it now um because it's going to help me relate to those women in a better way and have and understand how i can be a partner with them through that phase of life like you know certain members of my family that are going through that phase of life what do what do we need to know as men but also as women about menopause perimenopause and all those things yeah thank you thank you for asking i think that we're the most misunderstood um age group of women and with the 45 to 55 year old in that decade is the most common time for

women to commit suicide really yeah this is why my next book I'm writing right now is on the mental health of menopausal women because we're struggling. And so the first thing you have to know is that after 40, our sex hormones start to decline. So estrogen goes up and down. So one day you're going to experience, if you live with a 43-year-old woman,

you're going to experience she's great. Next day you're going to be like, who are you? That's because her estrogen is on a roller coaster ride. So that's the first thing to know. Second thing is that progesterone is plummeting after 40. They actually say now at 35, progesterone is starting to go down. So as progesterone goes down, we are less stress resilient. So little things are going to irritate

us like they've never irritated us before. And you might be the recipient of that. So if you find we're very triggerable, it's because we're losing progesterone. So we just need to have more breaks. We need more nurturing, like I explained in the menstrual cycle. We need to have more love brought our way because we just can't handle stress the same way. And then as ultimately estrogen finally goes into a place where she's non-existent once a woman doesn't have her cycle, we can't hold on to information the same way we used to be able to. We forget things. And it's really frustrating to us. And so when people around us, like I went through this with my team, when I was trying to get my menopausal hormones in check, they would say, well, you already told us that. Yes, you reminded us of that.

And I started finding I was repeating myself. And then I realized, oh, I'm at a new level of low of estrogen. And then I worked, you know, getting, working with some bioidenticals, working with some lifestyle to bring my estrogen up. But from 40 to about 55, that is about a 10 to 15 year period where the woman's brain has to recalibrate to these loss of hormones. And so our moods are all over the place during that time. So understanding where we're at, having more compassion for us, not taking us on, and just helping us understand ourselves, which is largely what I'm trying to do through my books,

will be so helpful. But we don't even understand our own selves. Menopausal moods are treacherous. It's an extreme sport. It literally is an extreme sport. It's brutal. What about after 45? She said 40 to 45. Yeah. So once we actually go a whole year without a period, we actually do better. So the brain is used to the less hormones. So when we get on the other side, postmenopausal, we actually are great. Women that once they go to that side of the hormonal process tend to actually be, you know, we have so much wisdom, I'd like to think. We actually tend to be the opposite of everything I just said. We tend to be more stress. We can

handle stress better. We tend to be more gregarious. Our libido goes back up. As our brain starts to recalibrate, we become a better version of ourselves. And that's that first phase, that 40 to 45 phase. What's that phase called? Is that the... That's perimenopause. Perimenopause. And then menopause is beyond 45. Yeah. The average age for menopause right now is about 52, although a lot of women are going in around 45, sometimes earlier. Okay. But I think that if there was one thing I could help the world understand is that we're trying to understand ourselves during that time,

so be patient with us because we may react much different than you've ever seen us react before. So we have to get to know ourselves from a new lens. That's the post-menopausal years you're going to have a beautiful wise wonderful woman on the other side of that it's just that transition into perimenopause is really a treacherous one it's so interesting it's so i find it staggering that no one told me this at any point in my life agreed um because irrespective of whether you are a woman or not and you're going to go through that you're going to um your relationships with women are going to be integral to your life unavoidably your mother your grandmother your partner so having the insight gives me the empathy you know and that's what that's why i'm so fortunate from having this conversation it was gabby logan who came on this podcast davina mall, who wrote a book about menopause in the end, and you that have really helped to open my eyes about that.

And it's interesting. I don't know what it is. I think growing up, like, men just don't want to talk about periods and menstrual cycles and all of these kinds of things. They're almost taboo in a weird way. I call it, in the new book I'm writing, I'm calling it the cultural hush. Yeah. I think we have a cultural hush around the menstrual cycle, around menopause.

I can't tell you the number of men since Fast Like a Girl that has come out that read that book and they go to the chapter on women and hormones. And then they come and find me and say, I finally understand my wife. Yeah. I finally understand my daughter. Why aren't we talking about that? And then how many women we don't, we don't talk about like the fact that I'm, I'm suffering because I don't have as much estrogen. It would, we don't have a culture or a society that allows us to talk like that. And that's what I think is shifting right now. So many menopause books are coming out. Big people, you know, Oprah's

starting to do a whole thing on menopause. Like the conversation's opening up, but it's going to take bravery from women to step up. I mean, I'm a very, very capable woman who has a beautiful family and a great business. It's really hard for me to say, I can't do one more Zoom call. My brain can't do it. That feels like failure. And then we have the other side of this, which is we have the men that are like, why are you being a bitch today? It's like, because I don't have the hormone to stop me from being a bitch today. So those kind of conversations are not happening. But if we did it with more empathy, if we could express our like hey i just need i need a break right now it's just a lot on my hormones give me 30 minutes give me an hour i can

come back and be a better version i just need to take care of myself now someone's going to be listening to this and they're going to think it's not a problem you can just go get the hormones you can just go get some hrt it's called hrt right, yeah. You can go get some HRT, throw that at the problem, then you'll have your hormones back. Yeah. So this is the big thing is that just because you take a hormone doesn't mean your cells are going to use it. So if you take it, let's use thyroid. It's a perfect example because so many women specifically take thyroid medication and they don't see any change in their thyroid symptoms. It's called an exogenous hormone. You bring it into your body.

The body registers that it's there. The gut and the liver have to still break that hormone down into a usable form. So if your gut is off or your liver is overloaded, you're not gonna break that hormone down. Once that hormone's broken down, the cell has to be able to receive it. If that cell is inflamed with a lot of toxic oils and endocrine disruptors, there's no way to get the hormone into the cell.

So there are three very pivotal pieces. There has to be production of the hormone, there has to be breaking down of the hormone, and there has to be production of the hormone. There has to be breaking down of the hormone and there has to be receiving of the hormone. So when you take HRT, you're only handling one of those things. You still, and lifestyle, this is why I'm such a, so passionate about lifestyle. Lifestyle can handle the other two. They can take care of the gut and the liver. They can open up the cell so it can receive HRT. I wrote a book called The Menopause Reset, and it'll come out and we're reissuing it in June. And one of the things in there is I mapped out five lifestyle changes that women should do after 40. And in that book, I lived that. I did that

through my whole 40s. I didn't start doing bioidenticals till like 52. But I had my lifestyle dialed in first. And now bioidenticals are working well. People are sat there going, five lifestyle changes? They want to know what they are. They're gonna buy the book as well, aren't we? We're gonna buy the book and we're gonna find out right now. Yes. Okay. Well, what do you think the first one is? Fasting. Yes. There you go. The first one's fasting. So it actually fast like a girl came after the menopause reset because all the women asked me, well, what if I have a site? You know, what if I'm in my thirties? What if I'm in my twenties? How should I fast? So that's, you know, that was sort of the birth of that book.

So fasting. Second one is you have to learn to cycle your food. So ketogenic diet works really well at certain times. Cycle your food. Cycle your food styles. What does that mean? So in the front half, if you have a menstrual cycle, in the front half when estrogen is coming in, go keto. Keep carbs low.

Keep glucose low. You're great. Back half of your cycle, when progesterone is coming in, go keto. Keep carbs low, keep glucose low, you're great. Back half of your cycle, when progesterone's coming in, raise glucose. So don't go keto. But do nature's carbs. Do more fruits. Do more squashes, potatoes. That's going to help with building progesterone. So the perimenopausal woman has to learn that there's times to bring carbs down and there's times to bring carbs up. And that's what I explain in that. I called it keto variations in that book. So that's step two. Step three, microbiome. You got to pay attention to your microbiome. Too many women have been on birth control for decades. They go screaming into their perimenopausal years and their microbiomes

and is completely off. We have a whole set of bacteria in our gut called the astrobalone, which is the bacteria that break estrogen down. So you need to be eating more leafy green vegetables, more nuts and seeds, olives, chocolate even is great for the microbiome. So I list all those foods out in there. And then number... And that's for stage two of the three steps to act these hormone replacement therapies actually working which is being able to metabolize the hormone break it down yes you got it okay yeah step four got it you're gonna be a hormone expert after this well you know not just a pretty face yeah so then the fourth one is to watch your toxic load so we talked about that and then step five is

my favorite um and it's stop being a rushing woman. Yeah, I know, as I tell you from a rushing lifestyle. We need more as we go through perimenopause, we need more downtime. You got to schedule more downtime. You need to let that nervous system come down. You can't go through your perimenopausal years and thrive if you are go, go, go all the time. It will catch up with you. And so you've got to bring in more mindfulness, more meditation, more yoga, more vacations, more no's. That's got to be a part of your repertoire. You might have gotten away with it at 35, but you won't get away with it at 45. I was thinking then as you're speaking i was thinking about how i kind of

summarize all of these points into how we should be living our lives as men and women because obviously we've got dragged into a consumerist workaholic sugar overloaded toxin ridden life because of because we've been unconscious yeah you know, so that's the way that corporations and media narrative and social media algorithms have taken us. So I was thinking if we could just pause for a second and we could rewrite the blueprint of what it is to be a human and how to live, let's try and rewrite that. So how would I work as a man and a woman?

What would be the differences how many days a week what if you if you were in charge now rewriting that which you might be one day i'd like to be you'd like to be okay so you're taking on the responsibility so how would men and women work and and you mean from a business yeah like a professional standpoint okay well let's start with a man yeah so well both men and women, we have two nervous systems, one that speeds us up, one that relaxes, that slows us down. So you could be in a speed-up mode most of the time. I would say you just need to make sure.

I mean, it really actually, I just thought about this right now. The patriarchal work week works really well for men. Monday through Friday, work your fanny off. Saturday, Sunday, take it off. Now you're moving in and out of your parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system, and you're giving both of them a break. You are not meant to be working 24-7, seven days a week. You're not meant to be working all the time and never taking a break. What would you make the work hours for a man? Well, I'm a big fan of working

in the daylight and resting. We're supposed to rest when it's dark. Okay. So winter you would work less, summer you would work more. Okay. We do the opposite, right? We take more vacation in the summer. Women? So women, we would design our whole work week around our menstrual cycle. So we could go full tilt all the way till day 19, day 20. And then we would, we would take a week off and we would bow out. So instead of doing it in a weekly amount, like you guys would be doing, we'd be doing it in a monthly amount. And how long would you bow out for? Well, ideally it depends on each woman's going to be a little different. But I would say anywhere from, I want to say seven days if it worked for a schedule until you bleed.

So day 20 till, you know, if you're if day 21 till day 28, you would do it for a week bowing out might also look like i just am not going to take on the the high load that i normally do the rest of the month maybe i'll cut it in half maybe work from home or yeah maybe i work from home maybe i can't do my workload and my extreme exercise and go socialize with my friends during that week. I just need to start to slow everything down. So that's what I want to say about bowing out is that it's just you're putting yourself first and you're slowing everything down. Now eating. Men and women eating. Yeah. So men, I think as far as food, I agree with just keeping blood sugar stable is great. I think you guys really work well off of a meat-based and animal diet. I don't think you have more testosterone, which means you have more muscle. The way that we build muscle and keep muscle strong is through amino

acids, and you get that in meat. So for men, I feel like that primal diet, the paleo diet, was meat and vegetables and fruit is amazing. I think that's perfect. I don't think refined flours and sugars that we are exposed to, I think that in an overabundance, they'll hurt men too. And we're seeing that with metabolic syndrome. Women, we do well with meats. I think we need less of it because we have less testosterone. So we may need less of it, although it is important. Protein is important, especially as we age. So I don't want to lose sight on that. But we also need to bring glucose up. So we need more fruits. We're going to need more squashes. We're going to need more potatoes. And that's, you know, all built around your menstrual cycle.

And eating times i'm i'm not a fan of eating when it's dark out because when melatonin goes up insulin you become more insulin resistant so i'm a fan of which means what it means you so your your body won't process the glucose from that meal as efficiently when it's dark out it won't take it away and store it yeah where it needs to be stored as energy exactly it'll store it as fat or something uh yeah it's going to store it as fat if it can't if insulin can't drive it into the cell for inner energy it'll store it as fat so the meal you eat at 9 30 is going to be stored more as fat than if you have that same meal at 5 30 i know so 90s aren't doing themselves any favors. No.

So we go back to our primal friends, right? Like, let's go back and use that if people get lost in these theories. So they didn't have electricity. They sat around the fire. So most likely they ate during light hours. And then the women, what did the women do? If we go back and look at cultures around our period, we were actually that's the whole red tent ideas. We were sequestered off into another part of the of the tribe. We didn't have to do as many chores. We went more into an introverted place. If you go back and you study what we did in those days, it was very much along those lines. And we're just not doing that now. What about supplements? What supplements would you have men and women consuming? days, it was very much along those lines. And we're just not doing that now. What about supplements? What supplements would you have men and women consuming?

Well, for women, the most important supplement she could ever take is magnesium. Magnesium makes every single hormone in your body. For men, I would say the most important supplement. I mean mean there's a lot of them but for hormones is zinc because zinc makes testosterone outside of that for both men and women the other supplement and the other measurement that we all need to be looking at our vitamin d levels yeah i've learned this from guests on this podcast i've started taking vitamin d supplements. If your vitamin D is under 30, you are in a critically depressed immune state. So you got to get it definitely over 30. For hormonal health, we need to see it more up in about 60, 70 to have your hormones be working at their best. So this goes back to like the HRT thing. If we're taking HRT, but our vitamin D d is 20 that hrt isn't going to be as effective

as compared to the woman who has an hrt of like 55 or 60 or a vitamin d of 55 or 60 that hrt will work better interesting and vitamin d comes from sunlight doesn't it sunlight and uh sardines sardines it's the food sources are really bad this is why everybody's low in it the food sources are it's sardines it's like really fatty fishes and sunlight and we spend most of our time indoors that's right we can't get it from this kind of light no no no and you have to be outside with your your skin exposed at the high point of the day of the sun, like 12, 1 o'clock to get the most vitamin D. And if you're in a city where there's more air pollution, study has shown that you're not going to the rays that come in that turn that will hit your skin and turn it into vitamin D or less because air pollution blocks it. Which is why so many people are low in vitamin D,

which is why taking vitamin D is a smart thing. Is that why people are doing these like infrared saunas and stuff now? Does that produce vitamin D or is that something else? It's more detox. It's pushing infrared sauna. What it does is it simulates a fever. So it burns things out from the inside of the cell out, which is why it's a really good detoxer. There's a few things you said when I was watching some of your YouTube videos that I wrote down that I found really compelling. One of them was you said about the importance of opening up our detox pathways, and you just mentioned detoxing there.

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 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'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 it 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 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 uh into the thoracic area is not getting out because it's congested so if your underarm is puffy and not like a pit yeah then you might be storing some of those toxins that's right and 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 gonna leave this podcast to be so depressed because 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 at whenever i shower to open up those pathways it's like 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 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 want 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. It's fighting us. 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 do all these crazyes. 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 our bodies. Our bodies cannot put a foot wrong. You got it. I mean, 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 like 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. Something really pissed me off this weekend. I was walking through New York City and I saw a poster and it is for inject weight loss injections yeah have you seen this no but ozempic is a is a drug that's really popular right now there's a couple of drugs right now there's there's one of my friends were talking about it 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 yeah yeah 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. 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 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 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, long term consequence. It's not it's risky. It's risky. And then, you know, every medication has a 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 changes is muscle mass. And that 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. 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 whitewater 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 what 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've 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 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 goes 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 cortisol goes up because you're 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 uh well so then the second piece applies to both men and women Astrohormone. Well, 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 muscles 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 going to lose the the number on the scale might be that much different you know it might 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. Another thing that I saw online, which was very curious that you said, is you were talking about how to undo the oxidative damage from eating too much sugar. Yeah. What do you mean by that? So think about the cell as an ecosystem. And so inside the cell, there has to be a balance of all the right components. So when glucose goes up, which happens when you eat too much sugar, that balance goes off. And one of the byproducts of that is that your body puts off these free radicals. It creates more oxidative damage within the cell.

The more of that oxidative damage, the more it's going to destroy mitochondria and the nucleus and all the cellular parts. So what you're doing when you're fasting is you're reestablishing balance into the cell and you're allowing to your body to naturally undo the oxidative damage that happened from poor living. So it's like a reset. It's like a cellular reset. People say that there's been a school of thought that fasting breaks down muscle, that I'll lose muscle if I fast. True or false? So it appears to break down muscle. It depends on how long you're in a fast, but it will appear as if your muscle is shrinking because it's getting rid of the stored sugar. But when you now bring in a high protein meal and feed it amino acids, it will grow stronger. You'll see more definition

because it broke the sugar down, which you don't want in there. So it changes the shape of the muscle. Makes it more lean, I guess. It makes it more lean. But if you follow that up with good eating, you're going to make yourself stronger. Now, the person who decides to go into a fast breaks down muscle and doesn't follow up with good eating. Yeah, you're going to make yourself stronger. Now, the person who decides to go into a fast breaks down muscle and doesn't follow up with good eating. Yeah, you're going to end up with less muscle. But if you follow it up with a lot of protein and you build that mTOR back up, now you're actually able to build your muscle even stronger. There's two ways to build muscle. One is through weights, lifting weights, strength training, and the other is through food protein. So all fasting is doing is leaning it out. And does fasting have an impact on my sleep? It can in a couple of ways. Sleep, for starters, if your brain's inflamed,

you're not going to sleep. So fasting brings down inflammation. So that would be the first thing. The other thing is that a lot of people wake up, especially women, two, three in the morning, and they kind of get the jolt out of bed. And a lot of times that's because you've maybe had dinner at seven o'clock, glucose is going down. And so the body registers that glucose has gone down. And so it gives you a cortisol spike and all of a sudden you wake up at two or three in the morning. Is that why some people wake up at, I've got a friend of mine that's an elderly male. And he always tells me,

he goes, oh, I woke up at 3 a.m. last night. And he's constantly saying it. He's like, I woke up in the middle of the night again last night. And I've always wondered why. And when I'm with him, we do eat dinner particularly late. Yeah, yeah.

So he's probably getting, so he has all that glucose he goes he goes to sleep and now the glucose starts to go down and then there's going to be a point at which the body registers that it hits a new low and then it triggers it and and all of a sudden triggers cortisol and releases glucose from other body parts and the the body takes that as we're running from a tiger get up out of bed of bed, go. Ah, so it wakes you up. Yeah. And to avoid that, what would you do?

You'd recommend not eating so late. Yeah, not eating so late. But the more you fast, the more you stabilize that blood sugar. And you don't have those highs and lows as much. It's a way of bringing balance back to the whole blood sugar system. I have to say, you know, we talk a talk a lot about i mean we've talked extensively about fasting today and one of the concerns i have about talking about the subject matter is the implications it has for people with eating disorders yeah um because it's quite easy to

conflate messages if if if you're not able to fully understand the context of everything and i'm sure that's a topic you've thought about. I mean, I think you actually write about it in one of the later chapters in your book, in chapter 10. Yeah. It's a common, it's one that we thought a lot about when we wrote the book. So I want to say that first,

that when the book was put together, that was definitely something my agent, the publisher, everybody was really keen on how can we tread that lightly. And here's my stance on it. The first is that if you have a severe eating disorder, I'm going to recommend that if you want to learn to fast, you need to bring your therapist into it. You need to bring your doctor into it. You need another set of eyes to help you navigate that. So that would be the first thing that I would say. Second thing, I'm going to go back to this woman that I worked with who had severe eating disorders. And she's been very, very public about her eating disorders. And I didn't start

with fasting. I started with food with her. So we started by stabilizing her blood sugar first. And then once I saw that those spikes on her glucose monitor were in a place I wanted, were more steady, then I introduced fasting because she was seeing food as a real healing tool. And then I could put patch on fasting as an adjunct to it. And she's doing incredible, incredible. So there's just a different approach. But I really encourage that you work with your practitioner or your therapist. Where do I start? I'm sold. You sold me on fasting. I'm going to become a faster.

Where do I start, Mindy? So the first place to start is you want to think about compressing your food into one eating window so let me start by asking you what time do you typically finish eating dinner i told you this off camera i told you not to mention it sorry sorry okay on it on a good day on an ideal day so my my issue is um i'm gonna be honest because that's the point of this podcast um the issue i have is i wake up in the morning i then begin work and i'll get i'll eat my first meal this is quite shocking in fact i'll eat my first meal around i'm gonna say between 2 p.m and 4 p.m depending on how busy my schedule is sometimes there's been days i remember

one particular day it's actually when i found out that i do this i took someone with me for the day they were shadowing me for the day and it got to 7 p.m and they go we haven't eaten today oh wow and i didn't notice i had no idea that i hadn't eaten that day so i'm a very late eater but then the issue is i will go to the gym usually in the evening usually after work often between 9 p.m and 11 p.m and then when i get home from the gym oh no i go to sleep like a good boy no this is where you go wrong this is it yeah this is where it goes downhill then i'll eat then i'll eat something um pretty late at night and that could be midnight so you're so what i heard in that is your eating window is 2 to 12 2 to 12 yeah so that you're in yes you're in a 10 hour eating window yeah

so in in if you in the morning are you doing coffee yeah yeah i do now mainly because of this podcast but okay yeah but you're not eating anything else in the morning? No, not really. No, I don't eat breakfast. There's no days in my life where I eat breakfast, really. The earliest I might eat is midday. Okay. So if you choose to make two your time that you,

I call it opening up your eating window, you're going to start eating. So you would go two to 12. That's 10 hour eating window. It's not, and we'll work on your window here in a moment. That's leaving 14 hours of fasting. About 15 hours, you're going to start to get the testosterone increase. So I would say let's, can we make it a nine or an even an eight hour eating window, especially because you told me your goals and your fitness goals. I would think for you, an eight hour eating window would be great. So you have an option. You can either not eat when you get home from the gym. And now we're at. I'm just so hungry. Right. Or you could

push it back to three before or four, you said sometimes where you don't where you don't eat. What would be ideal? Well, for you definitely just don't want to eat when it's dark out. So ideal would be an eight-hour eating window finishing right now. It's summer, so finishing at nine. And then you would work back. Yeah, so you would do like one to nine. Or 12 to eight. Or 12 to eight, yeah.

Or 11 till seven. Right. It's not happen i'll do i'll do the uh the one till nine yeah that you said yeah because i go to the gym often quite late in the uk so that means i can eat after the gym and then here's here's a little hack is that and and i want to make sure that people don't lose sight what i just did with you is customize it to your lifestyle and i think that's really important you just take that eating window and you figure out what's the best where it fits for you. I do this with people who have families. They want to sit down and eat dinner. So don't skip dinner with your kids. Like sit and enjoy that. You sound like that from a fitness and work level, that's working for you. So let's keep it like that. Let's not move that around too much.

But for your fitness goals one day a week, I'd like to see you elongate your fast, push your fast. Like could you go 20 hours, 24 hours of fasting where you're just having one meal a day? Because what you're going to do is you're going to put your body into a little bit of a state of stress where all the things we've talked about are going to start to the healing is going to happen at a much quicker rate you're saying once in a while yes what i once a week for you once a week so once a week go like 24 hours without eating that's right or we call it one meal a day wow okay anything else i need to know to get started um I mean, coffee can be your friend. Putting MCT oil in it can help you get ketones a little bit quicker. So I don't know if you ever put oil in your coffee. I have MCT oil on my

counter at home because I did the keto diet. So just put it in your coffee. It'll switch you over and it'll get those ketones going a little quicker. There is something I wrote about in the book called a fasted snack. And the fasted snack is pure fat mom. They're hard to find. It's a fat mom. So it has no carbs, very little protein. It's all fat. So an example of one might be an avocado is pretty fat dense. It does have some carbs. But the one I love, it's something called a keto cup and it's MCT oil with cacao butter and some chocolate, just pure chocolate around wrapped around it. It looks like a little Reese's peanut butter cups. And I, you can do those in your fasting window and they'll keep, they, they won't switch you over cause they're pure fat. So fasted snacks are, it can be really

helpful. The research shows that you get all the benefits of fasting, but you're popping these little keto cups in your mouth all day long. What is the most important thing we haven't talked about in your view? You know, I think the most important thing is for people to realize that there's not the perfect path. There's just your path. So take everything we talked about and find the threads that resonate with you and put those into action.

And then maybe you come back and listen to the podcast again and you take another thread. But we have to stop trying to do our diet like everybody else around us. There's your diet. And that's really what I'm trying to get is that people build a lifestyle that's unique to them. N of one. Be your own N of one. It's really the most beautiful place to live. N of one.

Yeah. You know, they say in a study, they always say like the N is how many people were in the study. And so they'll say like n of 100 n of a thousand so n of one is one person was in the study be your own study be your own be your own study your own experiment yeah we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest asks a question for the next guest and the's actually not that profound or interesting, but it's, I feel like you're the type of person that will interpret a deeper meaning than this question maybe is alluding to, but really think about this. this okay how do you take care of you that's actually that's a great question um i could answer that question on a health level like

i i have a really strong health routine. I get up in the morning. I meditate. I have a hyperbaric oxygen chamber at home. I pop in my chamber. I read. Like the first two hours of my day are for me first before anybody else. So I have that part of me. But I want to give a deeper answer to that. I'm really getting to know myself and what my needs are, especially

as a 53-year-old woman who's moving through menopause, and really honoring that how I care for myself is more important than anything else. And what I mean by that is when I say no to things, not overscheduling myself, putting my needs before everybody else's. These are things I haven't done in my life. And right now I'm really working on caring for myself first so that I can pour love into the world after that. Love me first. Why is that important? I think for me, I have been in the healing profession for so long. I've been a mother, a wife, and I've done everything for everybody else. And I stand here at 53 saying, I'm going to start doing things for me now. And that feels like self-love. And that feels like where health is going to live for me. And I haven't spent much time doing that in my life.

So I'm learning to do it for the first time now. Mindy, Dr. Mindy Pelz, that is beautiful. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for your wisdom. You're a remarkable, remarkable engaging captivating storyteller author content creator and a wonderful practitioner everything you do you've helped so many people with your work and i'm so excited when they told me i'd be have the honor of having a conversation with you today this is one of those conversations that genuinely will change people's lives and

isn't that an amazing thing it's really cool yeah isn't that an amazing thing? It's really cool. Yeah. Isn't that an amazing thing that we can sit here and all the stuff you've shared will have a significant impact on one person's life, millions of people's lives, hundreds of thousands of people's lives, which will mean that they live a more fulfilled existence. They can kiss their and hug their kids for longer. And that is because of the work you do.

So on behalf of all of those people who may never get to meet you in person and thank you themselves, thank you. Oh, thank you. I just really appreciate the opportunity to be here for the thoughtful questions and really allowing me to express what I hope does exactly that. And I think the purpose of living a fulfilled life is touching humans you never actually meet. Amen.