Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - Big Wellness, Quick Fixes & How to Stop Being Sold to in Midlife

Episode Date: December 22, 2025

Big Wellness is booming and middle-aged women are the target. In this solo episode of The Resetter Podcast, I break down why the wellness industry has exploded, why women in midlife are especially vulnerable to being sold quick fixes, and how to stop outsourcing your health to supplements, influencers, and viral advice. After reading a New York Times article titled "Big Wellness Loves Middle-Aged Women," I wanted to give you a framework for thinking critically about what you're being sold, whether it's a supplement, a biohack, or even a medication. This episode is not about telling you what to buy or what to believe. It's about teaching you how to think for yourself, how to prioritize lifestyle first, how to evaluate quality and integrity, why supplements should be cycled, and why no product is ever going to replace the fundamentals. At the end of the day, your lifestyle saves you, not a 90-second reel. To view full show notes, resources mentioned, discount codes, transcripts, and more, visit https://drmindypelz.com/ep319/ Check out our community membership at https://resetacademy.drmindypelz.com Please note our medical disclaimer.

Hey, Dr. Mindy here, and on this episode of the Resetter podcast, I am bringing you what we call a solo episode. This is me ranting about a particular topic that I think will be helpful for you in navigating your health journey. And according to our stats, you all like the solo episodes that I do. And what I like about doing them is I can really niche down into a topic. And I can give you more detail. and it's not a 90-second rail. It can be a 30- or 40-minute episode, which I really start to unpack a concept

that will help you navigate your health the most. So let us know, write us a review if you like the solo episodes. And pass it out to your friends. The more solo episodes that gain traction, that's a signal to us that this is what you want. So with that in mind, today, I'm bringing you something that really hit me

just this morning. and it was a New York Times opinion article. And the title of the article was why big wellness loves middle-aged women. And this is a huge pet peeve for me on many levels because there's everybody and their brother wants to sell middle-aged women a tool to stop her suffering. And so on this episode of the Resetter podcast,

I really want to help you understand if you're scrolling Instagram or you're watching a video on YouTube like mine, I want you to help you help understand if a product is being promoted. How do you decide if that product is right for you? Ultimately, I'm here to try to help you navigate your own health journey. And there are a lot of products. There are a lot of health influencers. There's a lot of corporations that just want to say, sell you things to sell you shit basically and i want to make sure that you choose the right wellness tool

for you so let's break this down first i want to start with what is big wellness and how does that compare to traditional health care so big wellness as we know it right now is basically the industry that is promoting everything from supplements to lifestyle tools. And I would even say that some of the conversations around hormone replacement has fallen into big wellness. Whereas our traditional health care system is more backed by big pharma. So big wellness can be everything from every single biohacking tool you've ever seen

to all the supplement companies that are out there. whereas traditional health care is really largely backed by Big Pharma. So when I look at that word, that phrase, big wellness, my brain says it is all the things that contribute to your wellness that sit outside of a traditional health care system. Now, I want to talk about when we look at the traditional health care system that we have all been living in, there are two types of challenges and conditions that they see or that fit into that category. One is acute care and the other is chronic care. And I've interviewed a ton of doctors here on my podcast.

And ironically, we just got some information about the Resetter podcast that the demographic, those of you that listen to my podcast are in health care and probably a lot of you are in more. of the big wellness area. And one of the things that I've learned from just talking to so many doctors is that I think we all could agree that in a traditional health care system, that they are rocking acute care. ICU units, crisis moments. If I always say that like if I'm in a car accident, take me directly to the ICU.

I don't want to go to my natural doctor and get a supplement. I want to go and get triage in an ICU. And the ICUs are doing a phenomenal job at crisis care. That system has mastered crisis care and is saving lives. Yet what they have completely failed at, and the majority of doctors would agree, is at chronic conditions like obesity and diabetes. And a lot of the things I talk about here,

Things that chronic health conditions for the most part have a lifestyle piece to it. And in the traditional health care system, they are not trained in lifestyle unless they go outside of their education. I'll give you an example. I had two years ago, I had a really interesting discussion with Dr. Mary Claire Haver, who is on the Resetter podcast. You can go listen to the episode. And her book, The New Menopause, had just come out. and she's a traditional OBGYN. And I brought her on to my podcast to talk about her new book.

And one of the questions I asked her and a whole part of the conversation we landed on was lifestyle. And I asked her, did you get lifestyle training in your medical degree? And she said, no, I had to go get it outside of my traditional medical education. So when we look at these chronic conditions, the problem we have is this health care system that we have relied on has continued to fail us with chronic health problems. And because of that, big wellness has grown bigger and bigger and bigger. But my beef with the big wellness community is that when you have a chronic condition, when you are suffering, you want an out. like chronic obesity, you want, give me the supplement that's going to kill my appetite and is going to make me burn fat with sleep, yes, please sell me the sleep supplement that I can

take so that I can finally get a good night's sleep. So over here in Big Wellness, it has become so product driven because so many people are dealing with multiple symptoms. And when you have a chronic condition. You've got fatigue and you've got brain fog and you've got you've got memory problems. I don't care if you have diabetes or Alzheimer's or cancer or cardiovascular challenges. There with a chronic disease comes multiple symptoms that will not go away, which is why big wellness keeps getting bigger and bigger. So when we look at these two industries, I want to take them out and I want us to think of traditional health care as being our crisis care, and I want to think of big wellness as trying to help us with chronic conditions,

and I would say there's also a preventative piece to this. Now, what also caught me about this article is it says why big wellness loves middle-aged women. And I'm going to just tell you that the reason they love us is because, We have money and we have problems. And we are looking for a quick fix out of those problems. So we are a big target. And this is what they say in this article in this op-ed piece is they say that exactly that. That there are so many symptoms that women have in their middle years, in our middle-aged years,

and they keep piling one on top of the other. So, you know, let's just use menopause as an example. With menopause, it's like you don't just, most women don't just have one symptom. You've got hot flashes and insomnia and memory problems and mood disturbances and weight gain. So you are a target for big wellness, which is why everything I do from my books to my videos to my podcast, you'll hear me. And now, if you haven't heard me say this before, you're going to hear me now. You'll hear me say, I'm presenting you with information. Now, your job is to make the right decision for you.

I'm not trying to get you to think like me. I'm trying to give you a formula and a thought process and critical thinking on how to navigate your wellness so that you make individual choices that are right for you. So with that in mind, let's start to break down what it is that how do you navigate a very seductive Instagram ad that is going to sell you a supplement that will help you lose weight. How do you know? Because some of those supplements could be good. Some of them are off. I just bought a supplement off Instagram and I'll tell you why. But I want to give you a formula. And so I have come up

with seven different things you should know about big wellness and how to navigate the information that comes out of big wellness. So now before I do that, don't worry, I'm getting there. Before I do that, I want to remind you that when it comes to health influencers and a health influencer is a podcaster, it is somebody has a big profile on social media that's delivering health. It can, be an author, you know, that I fall into the category of all three of those. And I found a statistic in this article that was so fascinating to me. It said that the majority of Americans now seek health information from social media. So this is, this is terrifying to me. And I'm one of those people who is delivering you health information on social media. So this is why I wanted to come

and give you a formula that you can use so you can navigate this information. First, let's start with this idea. Before you get on a medication that your favorite podcaster is promoting, before you buy a supplement that is going to solve all your problems, I want you to ask yourself this question first. have I given everything I can to this symptom or this condition have I given it every lifestyle tool that I know am I using my lifestyle to fix this problem this is why I fell in love with fasting because I was like whoa wait we could teach the world how to heal their bodies without spending

a dime. I got so excited about that idea. I was like, I got to tell everybody that there's these six different length fasts that are going to heal you and you don't need a doctor and you don't need a supplement and you don't need a fancy treatment plan. And over a million of you stepped in to fast like a girl, bought the book, applied it and reported back that you change some things like when you eat and all of a sudden you had a whole cascade of benefits to your body. So we always have to ask ourselves before you buy a supplement, before you buy the latest biohack, have you given it everything you can possibly do to affect your lifestyle? In my new book, Age Like a Girl, I have a whole middle section on easy, free, easy, easy lifestyle tricks you can do to help moods and memories

and sleep and injuries that we all get in these middle years. So we have to start the conversation at Lifestyle. And I don't know why we lost Lifestyle. The only thing I can think is that because we've been so reliant on traditional healthcare that's not educated in lifestyle that we have a lot of doctors that don't know how to give advice on lifestyle. So maybe that's it, but try to solve it with Lifestyle. first. Okay, second, when you're going to buy a supplement or a red light or something that you

just have to have to be able to help your symptoms, I want you to think about two things, quality and integrity. I can tell you in the supplement industry, the majority of supplements come from China. And a majority of those supplements that are made in China are coming from as little as three to four manufacturers. I know this because I tried to create my own supplement line about 10 years ago. And when I asked these four companies if they can send me a toxic report of have they vetted the quality of their ingredients and have they done a toxic?

report, all four of them told me they could not supply me with that answer. And at the time in my clinic, we were doing so much heavy metal detox. And lead is one of the most common things to find in supplements. And all I could think was how disingenuous would I be to support a supplement that had lead in and then to give that product to a patient or even a follower online, knowing what lead can do to the brain and to the body. And so I stopped pursuing doing my own supplement line. So we need to know quality.

And here's how you can find out the quality of a supplement. You email the company and you do what I did with the four corporations that help us create supplements that many of these health influencers are selling. I just emailed them and I said, hey, you know, can you tell me if you're, you've tested for toxicity and can I see those reports? I even go as far as to say, are they organic food-based supplements? That would be another phrasing, which leads to this integrity piece. If they cannot give you a direct answer, I question the integrity of that company. I can tell you that the majority of the supplement companies we've worked with have food-based supplements. And that's why we love them. And now the majority of the ones that I'm working with

are actually testing the soils in which their herbs and their nutrients are grown. They're coming from a regenerative farm, which is why when you use the supplements that I endorse, and we'll talk about endorsements here in a moment, they are food-based high quality. I've already vetted them for toxicity. So, and if I find one that I, I have endorsed before and all of a sudden I find out that they've changed the ingredients, which has happened a few times. I will pull my endorsement of those people. The quality of supplements is that important to me.

Now, what about some of the other things that were sold like sleep masks? I bought that off Instagram and weighted blankets and red lights and all the things the biohacking world brings you. Well, I just put out a really beautiful podcast with Dr. Josh Axe. I really recommend you all go listen to it. And we talked about how so many of the biohacks that you are buying equipment for, you can actually get what they're selling you for free. And let me explain myself. Let's use red light as an example.

Okay. So we get red light every morning and every night. So if you don't have the money to buy a red light machine or a red light bulb, which is really not that expensive, but the red light apparatuses are a little more expensive, then just wake up early and let your eyes see sunrise and go for a walk at night and let your eyes see the sunset. You don't need hundreds of dollars of red light equipment to be able to access the benefits of red light. Okay, what about something,

like minerals. And I have, by the way, a lot of mineral companies that I love. And I'll talk about them. And some of them, like being minerals, is very unique minerals. They're folic and humic acid minerals. I can't get those very many places. They have to come from the earth. So that's a unique situation. But what I've discovered recently is that actually, did you know that the ocean has the same mineral content as our blood. And so when you dip in the ocean, you're actually bathing in minerals that is equivalent to the same makeup

of the mineral content in your blood. So if you're near an ocean, are you getting in the ocean instead of buying a whole bunch of minerals? Okay, what about things like grounding mats and grounding sheets? Well, the human body works really well, at a certain frequency and that frequency is around 7.8 your nervous system calms down when you are

receiving the frequency from your environment of about 7.8 hertz well guess what else has the frequency of around 7.8 it's called schumann's resonance and it's the ground it's outside it's your backyard Instead of spending money on grounding sheets and grounding pads, could you just take your shoes off every day and go stand out in your backyard? Okay, let's use another example that a lot of you have heard me rant about. Let's go to traditional healthcare. Traditional health care wants everybody on Ozempic. When I first saw Ozempic, I was like, I asked so many people.

I was like, what are you noticing on it? And they're like, I don't, I'm not hungry. So I'm losing weight because I'm not hungry. And I kept saying, yeah, that's what we see with a fasting lifestyle. Your hunger starts to go away in a fasting lifestyle. I can teach people how to fast. Their hunger goes away and they lose weight. It's the same exact thing we're seeing with OZempic.

Why do we need to spend money on something that we can access through a lifestyle hack? So I want to make sure that we're always bringing this back to necessity. Did you try everything with your lifestyle? And I want to make sure that when you're engaging with companies, that you're getting quality and you're getting integrity. And when it comes to some of these things like red light and weighted sheets and cold mattress pads and all of that, email the company any question you want and see how they respond.

how you're going to create a relationship to see if they have integrity. Okay, third step. So the first thing I want you to think about is lifestyle. The second step I want you to think about is quality of the product you're buying mixed with the integrity of the company. The third thing I want you to think about, and this really pertains to supplements, is are you cycling these supplements? Are you cycling these biohacks?

So we have to remember that the human body is always trying to get itself into homeostasis. So let's use temperature as an example. You walk outside and it's cold and your body starts to shiver and all it wants to do is go back to a comfortable temperature. And so it's shivering and it's making you uncomfortable so you go put a jacket on so that you give it what it needs so it can go back. so it can go back to homeostasis. So when we take a supplement, that supplement should do the same thing. It should supplement a healthy lifestyle

and help you get back into balance. And once you are back into balance, then you shouldn't need the supplement anymore. I'll tell you an example of where we're seeing this in big wellness right now with peptides. I am incredibly intrigued by peptides. I think it's fascinating, and I have seen some incredible results with peptides. And the interesting thing, if you don't know what a peptide is, it's an amino acid sequence

that starts the process, a cellular biological process in your body. And with poor diet and stress and menopause and living life, we've been. lose our amino acid load. Therefore, we don't have enough amino acids to make this sequence of amino acids that is needed to make a peptide so that the peptide can go in and activate a biological response. The most famous peptide is called BPC 157. It's gotten the most attention. And what's interesting about BPC 157 is it started off as a gut healer, and there's still some great supplements. That's the one I bought off Instagram. There was a BPC 157 and I wanted to test it on myself and see what I thought. And I would never even tell you the name because I haven't vetted it yet,

but I just wanted to test it and see. I bought one bottle. I didn't go the three bottles that they tried to upsell me. I bought one because I wanted to know if it was going to work for me. And so what BPC17 will do is it can repair your gut, but it's also known to speed up healing. Here's the challenge with BPC17. I could give it to one person with a gut problem and they're like it's a miracle, but they may have a deficiency in that amino acid sequence. So they might need that. Whereas I give another person the same thing and they're like, I don't notice the difference.

On the episode with Dr. Josh Axe, we've talked, he and I did a podcast swap, so I'll be coming out on his podcast. We talked a lot about peptides and what we thought of them, and he asked me what some of my favorites were. And one of my favorites right now is a product called cerebellicin. And cerebralicin is so fascinating to me because it stimulates BDNF in your brain. Well, when I first started taking cerebralicin, wow, I felt like my brain was on fire. And now when I take it, I don't notice it as much. So is it possible that it just helped me get back to homeostasis? So I got myself back into balance.

And now my lifestyle is facilitating a healthy brain and a healthy body. So this is why we cycle. You should be on something for a short period of time and then get off of it. I always say if you're taking a supplement and after 90 days, you're not recognizing any difference or a biohack, like an oxygen chamber, if you went that far into an expense or, you know, a red light. If you are doing it regularly and you don't notice a difference in yourself after 90 days, there is a good chance. That is not working for you anymore. And we've got to just keep cycling this. Another really interesting supplement that a lot of people are excited about and I keep getting interviewed or I keep

this keeps coming up in a lot of my interviews is acrimancia acrimancia is a very specific microbe that helps make glp1 hormone and there's an incredible company that i love called pendulum that has nailed acromansia and they have a lot of products that you could lean into to buy that will help support this bacterial strain in your gut that makes GLP1 hormone. If I was going to take that supplement, I would take it for 90 days while I was eating fermented food. I was fasting and breaking my fast with bone broth, so I got the glycine, and then I would supplement with that supplement for 90 days and then I would get off.

This is how you save money with it. So please know that you're not meant to be on these products. over and over and over again. Okay, so that's number three is we're going to cycle them. And my fourth step for you, as you think this through, is after 90 days, you want to think I need to pause them. Even if they're working well for you, I used to do with patients, put them on supplements for 90 days,

and then we would go a month without it, and I'd see if they were stable. And if they felt fine, we never went back to the supplement. If they all of a sudden slipped backwards, we went back on the supplement after a 30-day rest. So you could use the same formula for yourself. Okay. So now you have decided, okay, I'm going to try this thing.

I'm going to cycle it. I'm going to give it the 90-day test. I've worked with my lifestyle to make sure that I'm supporting the changes I need to overcome a chronic condition or a chronic symptom. and I'm going to overcome this moment with lifestyle and this particular thing I bought. You now have a formula for that, okay? And let me know any questions you have on this. You can ask them anywhere. You can put them in this video, which would probably be the best place to ask it.

And then my team will bring it to me. And I'll do a Q&A I do every week on YouTube. So if you're watching this episode on YouTube and you have a comment or a question about anything I just said, please put it in the comments on this video and I will have my team gather those and then I will answer them live on my Dr. Mindy's lives that I do every week. Okay. So just so we can go from there. Okay. Now, you've got a formula to help yourself.

Let's talk about a few other things you need to know about the people promoting your products. So I'm going to pull pack the veil and I'm going to tell you what happens. to me. Dr. Mindy Pels, who has over 3 million followers across all of her social media, we get offers all the time. I get money thrown at me all the time to wrap a product, and I do not do it. There are two ways that health influencers get paid to promote a product. The first one is a company will literally flat out give tens to over a hundred thousand dollars to an influencer depending on their platform to stand up and say hey what do you i love this supplement i think you should take it

when an influencer is doing a real giving you a promo like that there is money being given to them behind that i had i was out surfing today and I had one of my friends out surfing tell me that she was listening to a very popular male doctor who has a science podcast and he has ads for a very specific supplement in there. And she's like, is he being paid? And I'm like, yes, in the ads, you are paid in the ads. You're often, there also is a trend in podcasting that you would pay the podcaster a large amount of money to bring them on and to have a conversation with the developer of a product.

So that happens. And I have seen recently, and I'm a big fan of this, on social media, people putting hashtag ad. And I have massive respect for those podcasters that are doing that, those health influencers that are doing that so that you know they are delivering a message to you that they've been paid to deliver. The same thing, by the way, happens in traditional health care where Big Pharma pays influencers. We now, I'm going to go back to the majority of Americans are getting their health information from social media. So both the supplement companies and Big Pharma have gone into the business of paying health influencers to tell you what to take. So I'm a big fan of this hashtag ad. and I will tell you, you can kind of understand what camp a podcaster is in by their ads.

If you're getting a lot of drug ads in the podcast, you're going to get more of a messaging that's going to be more focused on take drugs, that you're going to get a more traditional health care messaging, whereas supplements, you're going to get more of a message on supplements if you're getting a lot of supplement. ads in those podcasts. Now, on my platform, I just want to tell you that I don't take ads. So if you notice my ads are all like I'm telling you about my book or my courses, I don't take money for ads because you can't buy me because I work for you. I want to give you the information so you can make the proper decision for you. Now, there is something I need to say called affiliate sales. So a lot of influencers do this. If there are products that we feel are really beneficial to you, we'll bring them to you. And for me, you can find them on my website. And sometimes I'll share

them with you. I shared a couple of them here. So let's use bean minerals, one of my favorite mineral supplements. And if you can't get into the ocean, if you're not eating from regenerative farms and you want a good supplement, then that's a mineral supplement. That's a mineral supplement. That's That's one of my favorite. And if you buy it from my link, I get a percentage of that. Full transparency. Just like, do you know if you go and look at the bestselling books on the New York Times list, that you, there's a little button that says, click here, you can buy the book.

Because the New York Times will get a percentage of the sale of that book. The New York Times list, there is a promote. promoting, profiting peace to it. So this is throughout both traditional health care and for alternative health care, this affiliates, and it's pretty standard. So that's how you can navigate where the influencer is coming from. Okay. So last thing I'm going to say to you is that let's say you buy a supplement.

Let's say you're like, I don't care. They're making money off me, which is fine. making money is not bad. I just want to make sure they're giving you information that is accurate, not self-serving. So if you buy it, you've checked it out. Again, I just want to make sure that you understand that even red light, even oxygen chambers, even some of the crazy biohacks, that they are the most helpful when you are not at optimal health. When you have a symptom, when you have a crisis, when you are trying to help yourself out of a

whole, those tend to be the most helpful then. But if you stay at a level using your lifestyle of optimal health, which I hate the word optimal, but the best health for you, let's say that, most of this, these side products you don't need. Eat well, move well. Move well. sleep well fast get light make sure you're you've got positive relationships that is the root of wellness and so don't think a supplement cured you don't think an influencer is going to be the one that's going to save you the only person that's going to save you is you and keep educating yourself keep diving into long format long format education our podcasts they are YouTube videos. Stop looking at a 90 second reel and watching somebody who don't even know

lose weight who might have been AI generated and think that's going to happen to you. We've got to put all of the products we buy into a formula and a strategy. And that strategy is to get off of that as quickly as you as possible, just like if you're on Ozempic. The strategy needs to be get off of it as fast as you can. Just like hormone replacement. therapy. Is the strategy to stay on it our whole life? Well, I'm bringing you experts that are telling you opposing things so that you can learn to think this through for yourself. For me, I brought you Dr. Kelly Casperson onto my podcast to talk about testosterone. She is a huge fan of testosterone. I have found for me that I have to take very little amounts of testosterone or I get

very irritable. So we've got to use this information as as for curiosity. Be curious about what it might do for you. Don't keep spending, you know, your money over and over and over again, thinking one of these things coming from big wellness or even big pharma are going to save you. Your lifestyle saves you and its lifestyle is work. And once you get it dialed in, there's no supplement, no biohack, nothing big wellness can sell you that's going to benefit an amazing lifestyle.

You create that for yourself. So let me know if this was helpful. This was a rant I've been wanting to have for a while. So please leave comments and let me know what else you need. Let me know if it's helpful because this might have just been something I needed to do to take a burden off my back. Because as a health influencer, as a doctor, as somebody who is in clinical practice, for close to 30 years, I'm here to give you information to make the right decision for you.

I'm not here to convince you to buy a product. I'm not here to turn you into a mini-me. I'm here to present information that I know helped tens of thousands of patients that I worked with, and I see help women all the time. Now you become the owner of your own health and you make the right decision for you. I hope that helped. 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.