Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - 3 Reasons Walking Is Queen & How To Do It Correctly with Dr. Mindy

Episode Date: December 23, 2024

Ready to boost your health with a simple walk? Discover how 20 minutes a day can improve metabolism, reduce stress, and support weight loss. Perfect for women embracing life's next chapter. This episode highlights the benefits of regular walking, focusing on hormonal balance and long-term weight loss. Citing studies from the *Journal of Nutrition* and the *American Journal of Health Promotion*, Dr. Mindy notes that consistent walking leads to sustainable weight loss and overall health improvement. It also introduces 'rucking'—walking with a weighted vest—as a way to enhance these benefits.  To view full show notes, more information on our guests, resources mentioned in the episode, discount codes, transcripts, and more, visit https://drmindypelz.com/ep267 Check out our fasting membership at resetacademy.drmindypelz.com. Please note our medical disclaimer.

On this episode of the Resetter podcast, I am so excited to talk with you all about literally my new favorite exercise. And this is coming from an ex-athlet. So I want to dive into three reasons why you should bring walking into your life, especially if you're looking to lose weight. And it's one of those exercises that I really think. we don't give enough credit to. And I will tell you, again, as an ex-athlet,

my background is I was a competitive tennis player. And if you had told my 20-year-old self that my 55-year-old self would be singing the praises of walking, I'm pretty sure my 20-year-old self would have rolled her eyes and laughed and said, I've become a wimp. But as you'll learn in this video,

or if you're listening to this on the Resetter podcast, what you're going to learn is why walking is a major, I mean major fat loss tool. And we can all do it. And then what's really cool is I'm doing something new. We're at the end of this episode, I'm answering five very common questions that we are getting sent into us. And one of them may be yours. So stay tuned all the way through while I answer these five questions.

And if you have a question, send it into us. Find me on YouTube and leave a comment, leave a question, and we'll make sure that I answer it on future episodes. So here you go. Hope it helps. Welcome to the Resetter podcast. This podcast is all about empowering you to believe in yourself again. If you have a passion for learning, if you're looking to be in control of your health and take your power back, this is the

podcast for you. So first, I want to give you a big picture on this. So the first thing to remember is what chemical reaction is happening in our bodies when we walk. And as I go through the three major reasons why you want to incorporate walking, I will bring in the research for those of you that are the research hounds out there. But I want to start with this conceptual idea. So when we go walking, there are two things that are happening. The first is what we call bilateral stimulation. So you're doing right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot. That bilateral stimulation is calming to the brain.

So much so that walking alone will bring cortisol levels down. Now those of you who have read my books and have watched some of my videos or been listening to my podcast for years, you know a principle called the hormonal hierarchy. And the hormonal hierarchy says that at the bottom of the hormone chain is our sex hormones. And I'd probably put thyroid hormone too. So it's estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone, and our thyroid hormones. And above that, the things that will influence those hormones the most are insulin. So if you're insulin resistant, you're going to have an imbalance in those hormones.

But then above insulin is cortisol. So those of you that have been trying to lose weight and you're getting nowhere, it literally could be too much cortisol in your system. So you're dieting right, you're exercising right, you're doing all the right things. But stress is so high that cortisol, your body's just saturated with cortisol, which makes you more insulin resistant. And then above cortisol is oxytocin. So when it comes to walking, because you're moving forward and you have this bilateral stimulation, you are literally sending a signal to your brain, telling your brain to turn off the cortisol spikin. Turn off the faucet of cortisol.

We are moving away from the stress. So let's put this in context. Let's say you're having a day at work and all of a sudden something hits you. and you're like super stressed out. And something goes wrong at work. And so the best thing you can do is to get up out of your chair and go for a walk. If you can't, if you're in a building and you can't get outside, then just walk around the floor.

Like, we should be training our bodies that every time a big influx of cortisol hits us, we go walk. Cortisol is the one hormone that is built to make you move. It goes back to the primal days. When there was a stressor, usually it was because an animal was chasing us. So we always say it's the tiger chasing us. So if the tiger is chasing you, the worst thing you can do for stress is sit there. Because the body's like, wait a second, we're under siege here and you're not moving. So let me make more cortisol.

all. So this is why we don't mix longer fast with longer exercise, with stressful periods, because stress upon stress upon stress makes us insulin resistant. So walking is the absolute fastest way to tell your brain, I hear you. It just got stressful. I'm moving away from the stressor. So I can, I'll share with you that, I've shared this with my reset academy, that during the pandemic, I still have my clinic open. I loved my patients. I loved my staff. And the minute I got word that we might have to shut down, it was incredibly stressful. Now, as many of us learned over, over that first couple, you know, the first couple months is that essential health care was allowed to be open. So I went from this place of being really stressed to being like, okay, my clinic can be

open, but it's going to operate in a very different way. We literally, the whole building I was in got shut down. It was locked. So I had to hire a new person to sit in my clinic and just go down and let patients in from the front door. They would have to text us when they got there. I would hire, the new person I hired had to go down and let the person in. And then we had to rearrange our whole office so that nobody was in contact. We had to rearrange our whole schedule. It was a big deal. And at the same time, as a business owner, I was like, I need to make sure my staff gets paid. I had a stat one of my staff members was a single mom. I had some staff had been working with me for a very long time. Like their payroll was a lot more of a concern for me than anything else. So I was under a tremendous amount of stress. And as many of you experienced during the pandemic, it was like stress we didn't know what to do with. We didn't know how long it was going to be. We didn't know where this, this new plot twist of life, like where this was going to. going to go. So I didn't know how to soothe myself. So one day amongst all the stressful moments,

I started walking. I started realizing the minute my brain spun out of control, I would go for a walk. And one walk literally turned in to about five walks a day. And they weren't long. They were like 10 minutes, five minutes, 20 minutes, hour. I just walked until my brain calmed down and then I would go back in. And do you know what happened in that time period is that I was in the best shape of my life? Well, everybody was gaining weight during the pandemic. I wasn't because I was walking so much. So walking is an incredible way to bring those cortisol levels down and like let your body sink into a rhythm that feels comfortable.

So when we look at these three reasons, we have to understand that. that walking is incredible for the first piece of research I'm going to bring to your attention, which is when you have a normal regime of walking, and we'll talk about walking protocols here in a moment, research shows that you have sustainable long-term weight loss. So a lot of people go on crash diets, they do like an intense fast or they do a six-day-a-week workout where they're like absolutely double down on their workout, but really successful weight loss comes from the small little habits we do over and over and over again, and walking is one of them. It's such a powerful tool that actually the Journal of Nutrition found that walking just for

20 minutes a day for 12 weeks caused people to lose a half a pound every week versus people who didn't walk. We also have some really cool studies that many of you have heard, like the American Journal of Health Promotion and the American Heart Association came out many years ago, that they found that if you did 10,000 steps a day. Remember when 10,000 steps a day was a thing? Where did that go? Like, it was a trend, and then we stopped talking about it. But this study that was published in the American Journal of Health Promotion found that 10,000 steps a day for six months on average when the participants walked 4,000 steps or one mile a day, so they didn't even do the 10,000, so that they still lost a half a pound a week, and they kept it off. So imagine if they had done

the 10,000, not 4,000, that they would, what would have happened for weight loss. And the reason is because you are lowering cortisol. So it's not just because you're moving. It's not just the action and the calorie output of this experience. It's because you're lowering cortisol levels and you're making yourself more insulin sensitive. In fact, there are some people that believe that if you walked 20 minutes a day for the next year, you'd lose around 25 pounds based off those statistics that I just read to you.

those studies. Think about that. Think about that. 20 minutes a day. Are you willing to do something 20 minutes a day for a year to lose 25 pounds? So this is what I mean when you look at the at the neurochemical reaction that happens when you walk, when you look at the ritual and doing it on a regular basis. Like, this is what happens. So second reason why you want to walk is that it prevents. It prevents. Metabolic slowdown. So a lot of people are believing that when we start to age, that our metabolism slows down. Now, I hope you all that have been following me know that I'm a big believer that really we need to work with metabolic switching and the two parts of our metabolism to prevent that slowdown. So knowing what to eat and when to eat and building a fasting lifestyle,

really important for that metabolic slowdown. Because it's not like it's the body, the, the, your body doesn't become inefficient with its metabolism as you age. It's just that you become less glucose sensitive as you age. And so you have extra glucose that gets stored in your fat. Now, what's interesting about this study I'm going to tell you is that they have noticed in research that when people start to lose weight, that they start moving less. And it's not just walking that they move less. They're actually moving less in their day to May movements. And specifically, and when they call the non-exercise activity thermogenesis, it's called neat. Now, thermogenesis is just another fancy term for your metabolism.

So as you are moving, as you're sitting throughout your day, like fidgeting, moving around in different positions, those of you that toss and turn at night while you sleep, you're actually helping your metabolism in these small little movement. So like right now, I like to talk with my hands. So I just thinking about this, I'm like, oh, I'm getting. some metabolic, I'm giving my metabolism some help because I'm moving around talking with my hands. Or like I know when I speak from stage, I don't just stand in one position I pace. Or if you ever see me, you know, if you can see what my feet are doing as I'm doing a podcast, I actually tap my feet

like I'm walking right left, right left. I do those fidgeting positions. If you listened to the podcast that I did with Katie Bowman about the movement diet, she points this out that we We have become so obsessed with exercise and we forget that it is our movements throughout the day that can keep us in shape. But here's what's interesting is that the American Journal of Regulatory Integrative and Comparative Physiology, this is a 2011 study. They found that as people start to drop weight, they naturally move a lot less throughout the day. Now, I think there has to be some kind of evolutionary point to this.

I think that the body is always bringing itself into homeostasis. So is it possible that as your metabolic health starts to improve, that the little behaviors your body does to speed up its metabolism, that it doesn't find those necessary anymore, these little neat movements that we're fidgeting and moving with our hands, maybe as we are improving metabolism, we become more sedentary and we're not doing these behaviors that we're speeding up, naturally speeding up our metabolism. So how many of you have said to me, God, I've heard this all the time where people say, I was doing really great with fasting and then I got stuck.

My new response based off of this research is going to be, are you walking, are you fidgeting, are you moving? These movements matter. So if you're stuck, it might not be that you've got to hire a trainer and start to get fit. It might not be that you've got to do anything extra special, then move your body and bring back these neat exercises, these neat movements like fidgeting, shifting positions while sleeping, walking, even spontaneous muscle contraction. Like as I'm reading this, I find myself wanting to contract my thigh muscle, all of that matters for weight loss and metabolism. Pretty cool, right? Like, this doesn't have to be, the weight loss doesn't have to be like a major event. It has to be a lot of great minor events put together to create a major impact on your body's

ability to drop fat. Now, there was a hallmark study done in 1988 in the Journal of Metabolism. Now, it's a long time ago, but it's really worth pointing out that people who lose weight burn 18 to 25% less energy daily due to a decrease in these neat exercises. So it's like the body's way of balancing itself. So if you are on this path of weight loss and you don't want to get stuck, come back to something as simple as walking, come back to something as simple as simple as as fidgeting. I'm a huge fidgeter, so I'm a big fan of this. Or just moving like Katie Bowman, you know, express, like just start moving around. Like she was, she gave some incredible insight.

Like that was one of the my favorite podcasts that I did this year on the Resetter podcast. Because, you know, we think again that we've got to do these big things to stay fit. And what she showed is something as we age as simple as like chopping your vegetables or whisking food. Like something as simple as that can actually improve your overall anti-age, I call it like a pro-aging toolbox. It can help with pro-aging. It can help with the decline that happens with aging. So again, we don't want to take this out, walking out of the equation.

Okay. Third thing that we know about walking is that it helps, it has a lot of other health benefits. So we already talked about the fact that it calms cortisol. Well, when you call them cortisol, guess what else you get? The Journal of Alzheimer's Research and Therapy found you get better memory, you get a decreased risk of cognitive decline, especially, especially, especially in postmenopausal women. And it's all built around this neuroplastic change that happens when cortisol is out of your system. We also know that walking, this was a 2021 meta-analysis, showed that walking 20 minutes a day again, significantly reduced blood pressure and lowered the risk of hypertension.

We have seen studies that show it decreases your heart disease risk. We know it stabilizes your blood sugar and that it's been really recommended to people with type 2 diabetes. and all it takes is 20 minutes a day. We are not talking about large amounts. Now, I will tell you if you have a competitive athletic brain like mine, one of the things that I've noticed as I've moved into my post-menopausal years is that the harder I work out, the more I get injured. And I don't want to be injured.

I watched my mom have two hip replacements. I don't want that. So I love to run. That has always been my, I call it my drug of choice. But as I've moved into my postmenopausal years, in order to prevent any destruction to my joints, I have stopped running. And when I first started doing this, I felt really hypercritical of myself. I was like, well, look at you.

Like, isn't that fascinating? You're like walking now. And then I realized, do you know what? I'm going to call it my forward movement exercise because it's moving forward that calms the brain that brings cortisol down that makes me more insulin sensitive that will balance my hormones and balance my, balance my sex hormones and balance my thyroid hormones. Now, if I do this forward movement in nature, I get the added benefit of nature bringing this down, bringing cortisol down. So I started going to friends and I'm like, hey, instead of us meeting, you know,

know, at ladies' night out, instead of us meeting for a cup of coffee, can we go walk together? Because then I was like, oh, my God, this is brilliant, because I'm walking in nature with a friend, lowering cortisol, and I'm increasing oxytocin because I'm now in connection with somebody. If you understand the neurochemical upside of something as simple as walking, you will never look at it as a silly tool again, and you will see that is one of the most perfect exercises for us as we age. Now, something I've been training, I'm going to add, add this to the list of things to talk about on walking is that I've been really talking to my reset academy about weighted vests and how important these weighted vests are. Because when you put a weighted, it's called rucking. And when you put

a weighted vest on you, that extra weight lowers cortisol too. This is why the weighted blanket works. That weighted part on your body calms you down. So now you're with a friend. friend with a vest on, your nervous system is calming, cortisol is coming down, you're getting more insulin sensitive, your hormones are balancing, and you're massively inflexing oxytocin into your body and into your friend's body because you're doing it in community. When you start to unpack this, you start to see real clearly how incredible walking is and how we can trick out walking. We can do walking from lots of angles. An interesting study I just found on rucking with these weighted on from, it was a study that was done on postmenopausal women that they're even showing

that that added weight forces the muscles, the bones to be stronger and you put calcium and keeps calcium and phosphorus within the bones. So again, I hope you see that this is the greatest gift you can give yourself. And I really want you to be in love with the aging process. I want you to be in love with the losing weight process. The losing weight does not need to be torture. It can be fun. And the fasting lifestyle gives you a quick access there. And the walking with a vest on, weighted vest, with a friend,

now we've amplified the fun and you're getting an incredible result. So there are my three major steps on why you want to walk. What I do want to do now is switch gears and go into listeners' questions. So this is something new that I'm doing on both my podcast and my YouTube channel. I'm answering your question. So I have a team of people that are scouring socials for your questions. So depending on where you are listening to this or consuming this information right now, if you have a question for me, leave it in there so that my team grabs it and I answer it in this format.

So here's the first question. It's a blood sugar question. What is normal and why is it high while fasting? Okay. I'm going to give you American numbers. I apologize for the, we will leave in the notes of wherever you're watching this, the conversion. But a normal fasted glucose, which is blood sugar, is somewhere between 70 to 90 nanograms per decilator. So you want to wake up in the morning between 70 and 90.

When you eat, you will see your blood sugar spike. That spike should come down within 90 minutes of eating. It should come down to its pre-glucose number. So if it's coming down to the pre-meal number, then you are, and you're waking up consistently between 70 and 90, we're in good shape. We are in a very good fasted blood, you know, blood sugar health. The other number I prophylatize all the time is hemoglobin A1C.

And how important you look at hemoglobin A1C that your doctor does and that it's five. Now, with that intact, let's talk about what we see when we fast. When you fast, your blood sugar should come down. if your blood sugar is not coming down, then it could be a couple of things. It could be your metabolic switch is a little rusty. It could be that you have a lot of stored glucose, that your body is dumping, which is really good. And or it can be that you're under stress. Like I've had continuous glucose monitors on and I've watched like, you know, my blood sugar spike from a stressful reaction. So if it's high while you're fasting, it's probably either coming from a cortisol spike

because there's a bunch of stress in your life and that added stress of the fast has increased it so much that the body is pulling, pushing glucose out into the system, or the body is actually naturally doing it to get rid of stored sugar. An interesting fact that I haven't taught in a while is that as glucose becomes mismanaged in your body, the first, place that your brilliant body will put it is in around, you know, in the cells. You'll try to drive it into the cells so that it can be used for energy. The second place is then if once the cells are flooded, it will put it into the liver. The liver is a storage place for extra glucose. The next place it will put it is in muscles because it knows that you need glucose in muscles

so that you can run from a tiger when you're under stress. This is why walking releases that glucose stored in those muscles. And then the last place it puts it is in fat. So it's like, you know, these places become like the pantry closet for extra glucose. So when you go into fasting, what your brilliant body does is it starts to release all these stored sugar, all the stored sugar. So again, tying into why you would go walk during a fast, if it's high and you want to bring it down and you're fasting, go for a walk. Okay. Then number two, why does my glucose go very low? during an extended fast. So a lot of people, you know, I've been learning and just teaching so many people fasting, I've learned that a lot of you are fasting too much. A lot of you are exercising,

fasting too much. And so if your body's been going at it for too long, sometimes it just, it'll keep that blood sugar too low. So it could be too much of a good thing. The other thing that we've seen in my community is that sometimes the mitochondria can be sick. And just like a sick mitochondria causes high blood sugar, it can also cause, or, you know, can cause, yeah, high blood sugar. It could also cause low blood sugar as well. So make sure you're not fasting too much. Make sure you're not exercising too much. Make sure you're not stressing too much. If that's not even an issue for the person that asks this question, then what I would say is make sure that you are going into shorter fast because it's going low, so we don't want it to go too low. So just don't go

into maybe these longer fast right now is too much stress on the body. So let's be mindful of what the body wants. And in my book, too low is in the 50s. When you get it down into the 50s and it's going there pretty consistently, you need to think about. You need to break the fast. Think about the length of the fast, super important. Okay, then number three, why does exercise spike my glucose? So it's the same thing I mentioned before, where all of a sudden you've got this situation where you're running, you're exercising, you're running from a tiger. And so what the body is doing is it is trying to release all that stored sugar into your system so that you can run. That's all it's doing is that and protein spiking your glucose. So that's interesting. That will change the more

metabolically healthy you get. When I put on my first CGM years ago, I started to notice that protein really spiked my blood sugar. And then I tell you now, when I am eating protein, I have a CGM on, it lowers my blood sugar. So you become more efficient the longer you do metabolic flexibility at taking the influx of protein, the glucose influx of protein, and your cells get more used to using it. Okay. Question number four is if I can't get my glucose under 100 in the morning, what should I do? So this is really a question of how do you get your glucose down? So a couple of things. One, there is something I haven't talked about recently that is worth talking about in this video. And it's called the dawn.

effect. So some of you will consistently wake up in the morning and you will see that your blood sugar is high. And it's high because your body is pushing out all the stored sugar at night because it needed glucose in the system to be able to nourish your brain. So a lot of people have the dawn effect will tell me like, I went to bed and my glucose was like 120 and I woke up and my glucose was still 120 or it was 130. During the night, you may have dumped some glucose into the system. So in that case, then what we want to do is a real simple hack. It's called the honey hacked. You're going to take a little bit of raw honey and you're just going to put just a teaspoon, put it in your mouth so that at night your blood sugar

doesn't dip too low forcing your body to release stored sugar. So try that and see if the morning number changes. If the morning number changes, then yes. you had the dawn effect. That was exactly what that is. If the morning number doesn't change, then the next thing would be that you just need to go into some longer fasts. Because the longer fast will help you wring out all the stored sugar. So try a 36, 48, or 72 hour fast, and then go back to some of the shorter fast and see if your morning glucose changes. Then the third thing is it might be the dinner you're eating. Make sure it's not a high carbohydrate dinner. Because if it's high carbohydrate dinner, you've got all that glucose in your body.

And what can end up happening is it could end up just swimming around in your bloodstream and it didn't have enough time to be able to get it down into under that 100. So there you go. That's my thoughts on the morning glucose. Okay, number five is how should I be exercising as it relates to each phase in fast like a girl? Okay, here is the fast like a girl. exercise fasting cycle. We could call it the exercise cycle. Day one of your period is the day you start to bleed. Like full on blood, you need feminine care products. From day one to day 10 is what I call the power phase one. And your body during that time wants to be insulin sensitive. You're building estrogen. This is a great time to push your workouts. Now, many women tell me I can't, I don't

want to push my workout the first couple of days I bleed. I get that. I understand that. So maybe day two, you start to push your workouts. So a harder intensity, more what we call zone three and zone four exercise. You want to be out of breath. You want to be pushing your cardiovascular system those first 10 days. Now, you can do other things. You can still weight lift. You can still pliometrics are great in power phase one. Hit training, great in power phase one. Once you get into the manifestation phase, which is day 11 to day 15, what you're doing there is you've got estrogen at her peak, you've got the most amount of testosterone you'll ever have and you have a little bit of progester. So when estrogen's at her peak, your ligaments

are going to be very flexible and easy to tear, especially ligaments that are attached to bone. So during ovulation, which is, you know, like your leg muscles, your shoulder muscles, during ovulation, it is really important that you don't do quick movements. So high estrogen means high injury capabilities. So let's avoid the hit training. Let's avoid the pliometrics. But you have all that testosterone during this ovulation manifestation phase. So, why don't you lift heavy weights? Less reps. I did an incredible interview with Dr. Stacey Sims on exercise and women. It's on my resetter podcast. You can go listen to that. And we go through all different types of exercise. And she's a big fan of low reps, heavy weights for females,

especially perimenopause and menopausal women. So then she does she believes less than eight reps. So in the max weight you can do to build muscle. So that's manifestation phase. Then you come out of manifestation phase. And you can go walking during that time, but I would walk and I would lift heavy weights. Then you come out of manifestation phase and you have a five-day window where you can actually ramp that up and you could go back to hit training. You go back to pliometrics. You can run a marathon from day 16 to day 19. You have lower hormones. Really push your workouts. And then starting day 20, you need to think about recovery. So 20 until you bleed is your recovery phase. This is where we go into yoga. This is where we go into Pilates. This is where we go

into walking and hiking. You can still lift weights. You just don't make, you're not pushing yourself because whenever cortisol goes high, progesterone is shy. And you're trying to make progesterone that week before your cycle. So, and then. then once you bleed, it starts all over again. So I'm a big believer that workouts for women who have menstrual cycles should be done in a monthly format. So there you go. Okay, let me know if you love this new format where I am answering questions. It's been fun for me. And if you have questions, please leave it in wherever you're consuming this video, leave me a question and I will make sure I answer it. You might even put a little note. I'm going to give you a little trick. You might

even put a note that says, please answer this on your pod, we call them solo episodes. What I'm doing right now is a solo episode. So just put on there, please, please answer my question in your solo episode. It'll get a lot of extra special attention. So, okay, as always, I hope that helps. Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we'd love to know about it, so please leave us a review, share it with your friends, and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.