Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - The Link Between Hormones and Mental Health Part I

Episode Date: August 1, 2022

For full show notes, resources mentioned, and transcripts, go to: www.drmindypelz.com/ep132/ To enroll in Dr. Mindy's Fasting membership, go to: resetacademy.drmindypelz.com This episode is about the key themes emerging on how our hormones and neurotransmitters play a crucial role in our mental health.  Please see our medical disclaimer. https://drmindypelz.com/medical-disclaimer/

oxytocin is the hormonal hero of the day for both men and women, but especially women. And we can get oxytocin in so many ways. Resetters, Dr. Mindy here, and I am on a mission to teach you just how powerful your body was built to be. This podcast is about giving you the power back and helping you believe in yourself again. Let's jump in. Okay, Resetters, have I got a treat for you? So this is my first ever solo podcast that I have done on the Resetter podcast. And the reason I wanted to pause almost mid-season here, we're a little over halfway through the year and through the third season of the Resetter podcast, is because I have been having some incredible

conversations here on the podcast about hormones and how they relate to relationships, how they relate to mental health. And you mix that with what I'm seeing in our reset academy, the hundreds of thousands of comments that have been left on all my social media platforms. And what I'm clinically seeing, and there are some really general key themes that are emerging on how our hormones, our neurotransmitters, and really play into how our mental health. is going to play out. And I feel like we're at a point, especially as we come out of the pandemic, where there's a lot of discussion on mental health.

And once again, when we talk about mental health, we put every human in this big container of either you're depressed, you're anxious, you have ADD. And we never say how women should be approaching our mental health. and how mental health for women is affected by hormones, specifically menopausal women, or how women need to be eating differently, fasting differently, taking different supplements, engaging in different activities throughout not only our menstrual cycle, but if you're a postmenopausal woman, there's a lot of important information you need to know about how the decline of hormones is playing out for you mentally.

So whenever I see that there is a conversation where women are being left out, I want to come in and enlighten you all, but really, more importantly, start a bigger vision for us when it comes to mental health and understand where our hormones are affecting us in this process of our moods, our sleep, our relationships. This is what I want to discuss today. So that's why I come to you for a solo episode so that we can really dive into really starting to understand mental health and hormones.

So here we go. For my first ever, if you like my solo episode, please make sure that you leave me a review and tell me what you thought. I'm going to make it really simple for you to understand. So let's start here. In the new book, Fast Like a Girl, which will come out in December, I go through three key hormonal principles that you absolutely need to know. And I'm going to give you an overview of them right now. So the three key principles are what I call the hormonal hierarchy. The second key principle is

what happens to your hormones on a monthly basis. This is really important principle for those of you who still have a cycle or if you're a perimenopausal woman. And then the third key principle is what happens to your hormones on a lifetime basis. The biggest absence of knowledge we have in hormonal health right now is this understanding that hormones are coming in and they're moving out. And it's not like you have estrogen fully on board all. month long. It's not like you have estrogen fully working for you your whole life.

Estrogen is going to come in and come out. Same thing with progesterone, same thing with testosterone. The reason that this is important is because this is the natural way they're meant to flow. They're not meant to be there all day long. Whereas when we look at hormones like insulin and cortisol, those hormones we can call on them. They come in when we need them in like a crisis for cortisol. Cortisol will come in when we, when our stressors on and then cortisol should go away. Insulin will come in when glucose goes up. But our sex hormones have a natural rhythm and a natural pattern that they will follow on a monthly basis and they'll follow on a yearly basis. Now men, I've been out speaking a lot recently on different conferences, seminars are back on track, which is amazing,

so exciting. And I get a lot of men that ask me, why are you not talking about andropause? Why are you not talking about fasting when it comes to male hormones? And here's what I really want to emphasize. I am not trying to leave men out of the conversation. Your hormones are just a whole lot more simple. You have testosterone coming in every 15 minutes, and testosterone is the major sex hormone that drives you. Women, we only get testosterone if we're cycling for a five-day period out of every month. So the benefits of testosterone, we've got to utilize those benefits when they come in, and we're going to talk about that here on this podcast. So, and you don't men, you have estrogen.

You definitely have estrogen. But here's what's really interesting. It doesn't affect your brain. You actually need testosterone to go up into your brain and it will convert into estrogen once it's in your brain. Women, we need estrogen to be made in our bodies. if you are a cycling woman, then estrogen is being made from your ovaries, your adrenals, and your peripheral tissue.

And then estrogen will go up into the brain and will affect neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin. We're going to talk about that in a moment. So women, we have direct estrogen production is going to go up and affect mental health. For the menopausal woman, for the postmenopausal woman, As estrogen declines, it takes close to 10 years for your brain to recalibrate to the loss of estrogen. This is a really, really important point because to my women over 40, if you're feeling

depressed and anxious, then we need to talk about how do we support this transition of losing estrogen, naturally losing estrogen during these menopausal years. Whereas men, if you're needing more estrogen for your brain, you actually need to work on just including and focusing on testosterone. Testosterone will go up into the brain and will then be converted into estrogen. So I say all that when it comes to mental health to say men, you have one hormone, sex hormone that's going to drive your mental health. And women, we have three.

So and men, you can keep your testosterone production high all your whole life. You, andropause, yes, it's a thing. And yes, I'll bring an expert on and we'll talk about it at some point. But women, we know every single woman is going to lose key hormones after 40 and that is going to have an impact on her mental health. So when I look at these three key principles that I want to bring to you today, I want you to understand that the hormonal hierarchy works for both sexes, but it really has a powerful influence on women. And women's hormones are just more complicated because of the monthly changes and because

of our lifetime changes. So I start with that. If men and women are listening to this podcast together, I know I have a lot of, A lot of you have told us that you listen to this podcast with your partner. And so if your partner is a male, then, you know, listen up. I was at a talk recently at a local clinic, a beautiful bio-wellness spa in Lake Oswego, Oregon. And I was giving a lecture on fasting and hormones. Most of the room was women and there were a few men.

And a couple of the men were like, well, do I need to stay for the talk? They had been there to support their wives. And my response is absolutely you need to stay for the talk. Because men, when you can understand what I'm going to say about a woman's mental health and hormones, you can support her better. You can understand her better, whether you have a wife, whether you have a daughter, whether your best friend is a woman. this is a conversation I feel like we need to be having around hormones to better help women understand

herself, but also men, you were going to learn so much. I had, after this talk, by the way, I had many of the men in the group come up to me and say, thank you so much. I have a better understanding of how to work with the female relationships in my life. That's how important hormone, knowledge is, hormone literacy is for all of our mental health. So with that in mind, I'm going to dive into these three key concepts. And then I want to go into the characteristics of the sex hormones.

How do estrogen, progesterone and testosterone play out on your moods and your sleep? So I'm going to go through that. Then I'm going to go through the intersection of sex hormones with neurotransmitter production so you can understand how this plays out with dopamine and serotonin and gaba. These are really important concepts. And then I'm going to finish this up with tools that hopefully you'll find helpful to not just balance your hormones, but to be able to balance your neurotransmitters so that ultimately for a woman to be mentally happy, for a woman to be mentally stable, we really need her

to have great hormonal production and great neurotransmitter production. So I want to dive into some tools that I'm seeing work really well clinically so that, as always, I hope you guys understand that one of my missions in life is not just to give you information, but to give you information you can apply right away. So here we go. We're going to dive right it. Hormonal hierarchy. This one is simple.

your sex hormones progestrone, estrogen, and testosterone are always going to be influenced by insulin. This is why whether you have PCOS, infertility, or menopause symptoms, your first go-to is insulin. Now, let's stop there for a moment because you're going to hear a really cool podcast coming out on my channel. it's probably already out when this one comes out. If not, stay tuned with Dr. Baws. And Dr. Baws is an internist who is on a mission to help people understand a key measurement of insulin, which is hemoglobin A1C. And when we look at hemoglobin A1C, it is a measurement of what is happening with your

insulin levels, your glucose levels over a 90-day period. So it gives us an average. It helps us see an average of what might be going on with your glucose and your insulin system. Now, remember that insulin is that hormone that escorts glucose into the cell. And if you guys follow me on Instagram, hopefully you heard the conversation I had with Stephen Gundry that was really key talking about that. our mitochondria and our brain need 50% glucose, 50% ketones. Now, this is really important because those of us that love the ketogenic diet, we get so infatuated with ketones. We forget that we still need some glucose. So when I look at the combination of my conversation with Dr. Baas, my conversation with Stephen Gundry, I start to dial in this idea that measuring,

what our glucose and insulin is doing on a regular continuous basis is so important. Because if insulin is mismanaged, then those sex hormones are not going to be able to shine. Now, let me stop for one moment here. I recently had a beautiful conversation with a woman who thanked me for really highlighting how important our sex hormones are. Our sex hormones, women are our superpower. And you're going to, as I go through what they do for our moods, you will hopefully walk away from this podcast and understand that estrogen,

progester and testosterone is a superpower for you. It's not something to be villainized. But if you were turning into a superhero and I was giving you a cape and putting on a superhero girl mask on your face and saying, go fly, girl, like you've got these hormones really there to help you mentally shine, to bring you so much happiness into your life. What I would want you to know is to activate the cape, to activate the mask. You've got to have insulin in check. You cannot balance your sex hormones without insulin being in check.

Go listen to the Ben Bickman podcast that I did this year. Amazing information about insulin. Go listen to Dr. Baz's talk about hemoglobin A1C. So many of the discussions I've had here have been helping us understand insulin. For those of you that are taking HART, that those of you that are maybe doing bioidenticals, even if you're doing thyroid, I mean, we talk about sex hormones, but I would even put thyroid hormones down in the same category, that when you go on these medications, they are only going to be as effective as how insulin sensitive you are.

If you put somebody, a woman, on HRT or bioidenticals, and she has a hemoglobin A1C of six or seven, And she is averaging glucose levels of around 150 on a continuous basis. Those hormone replacement strategies are not going to work. So the same thing with thyroid. I've done some episodes here. A great one that we get a lot of feedback from is the one that I did with Dr. Rebecca Warren, where we talked about how to look at thyroid from a different perspective. So our endocrine system in order to make these hormones needs insulin sensitivity,

specifically the sex hormones. So the hormonal hierarchy reminds us that even though we're on a medication, we still have to become insulin sensitive. Now, the hormone above insulin that really drives and affects insulin and glucose is cortisol. all. Now, this is really important because I can tell you from what I've seen in just our community. And I want to thank so many of you for leaving your story on my YouTube channel or telling us the impact that fasting is made on our reviews on our podcast. I mean, I have a team of people that read these reviews. We gather the information because you guys, the more stories you leave, the bigger sample size we have.

And one of the things I see chronically is that as you're applying fasting and keto strategies to your life, if cortisol is high, you're not going to be able to get as good a result out of the ketogenic diet and out of fasting as you are desiring. So just like we go to take HRT, we go to take bioidenticals to help with balancing our sex hormones, and therefore we need insulin to be balanced. If you're trying to balance insulin, you need cortisol to be balanced. You cannot lose weight. You cannot reverse insulin resistance if you keep putting cortisol up at high levels.

Now, this is a real catch-22 for women, and especially I want to give a shout out to my menopausal women because we are trying to get our mental health on track so that we can bring cortisol down. But if you're, let's just use menopause, for example, if you're going through menopause, your hormones or your sex hormones are declining, affecting your moods, then it's harder to keep a good attitude. So it's, you're going to react to stress a little more exaggerated, a little more with a little more, there's going to be a stronger reaction.

And I can tell you as a 52 year old woman, I saw this a lot. it was one of the real things that got me diving into wanting to understand this was the fact that I was reacting to stress very quickly. And I realized that a lot of that was because of the loss of sex hormones. Well, that's sort of a, you know, that's sort of a bum situation for us because as we lose the hormones, we react to stress more intensely, which makes cortisol go up. cortisol goes up, makes us more insulin resistant, more insulin resistant. So we have the less sex hormones we have.

So there is a vicious cycle to these hormones if we're not clued into this hormonal hierarchy. And I'm going to give you solutions. So don't worry, the solutions are coming. At the top of the hormonal hierarchy, I just want to point out is oxytocin. And this has been my rally cry to you all right now. oxytocin is the hormonal hero of the day for both men and women but especially women. And we can get oxytocin in so many ways. We can get oxytocin by just sharing a compliment with somebody.

At this fasting and hormones discussion I was at, it's called Evergreen Factor, is an incredible bio-wellness spa. Those of you in Oregon, got to go check them out. at this lecture, I was talking to this group about hormones. I was saying that it just, we don't give human connection enough credit. And it is time for us to understand that the door in to hormonal health happens in something as simple as connecting with another human. Our hormonal health starts in kindness.

It starts with giving a compliment to somebody, listening to somebody who's in need, giving somebody a hug. Over the last couple of years, we've been isolated. We've been here in America. We've been fighting about politics and vaccines and all the things. And we have been in this high cortisol state. And as we come out of this pandemic, it is time for us to put down these agendas that we have, this desire to be right and overturn somebody's opinion. And we need to say are the most important hormone as we move out of the pandemic is oxytocin. And we are going to get that

through connection and kindness with other humans. End of story. So I want to start this conversation of mental health and hormones by really helping you understand that when you tap into oxytocin, now you can manage stress better. And when you tap into oxytocin and bring cortisol down, now your chances of overturning insulin resistance become greater. And when you make yourself more insulin sensitive, now you can get access to these sex hormones. That's how important this hierarchy is. and this is why I want you to focus in on oxytocin.

Before I leave this discussion, I want to just point out that there are a lot of ways to get oxytocin, and they're all free. So one of the major tenets of every piece of information that I put out there is that I always want to give you free information that you can put into action. oxytocin is available to you every single day. And you can get it by complimenting somebody. You can get it by just texting somebody and saying, I was thinking of you today. I just wanted to tell you how much of an impact you've made.

I'm so grateful for you. So gratitude will raise oxytocin, being in complimenting somebody, hugging somebody, touch. So if you're alone and you don't have somebody who's touching you or hugging you, go get a massage. To my massage therapist and chiropractors out there, I want to say you're doing so much more than just muscle work right now and skeletal work. I want to let you know that you're raising people's oxytocin and it is such so necessary. If you have a loved one, hold their hand. Holding hands increases oxytocin. Petting your dog increases oxytocin.

getting out into nature around other people increases oxytocin. We also know that things like, of course, this one gets a lot of press, sex, masturbation, those kind of things raise oxytocin. So we've got to look at every source of oxytocin we can possibly find. I have been out speaking at different conferences recently, and I love when women come up to me or anybody comes up to me. They're like, I want to give you a hug, give you some oxytocin. It's amazing. It fills me up. And in a hug, you're exchanging oxytocin. In a compliment, you don't even have to be in somebody's location. In a compliment, when you give somebody a compliment, you get oxytocin for giving it and they get oxytocin for getting it.

So this is where I see the world needing to move to as we move to kindness. As we move to connection, we move to oxytocin. Now, the one thing I want you to know about oxytocin is that it has a very short half-life. What this means is that it's going to come in and out within seconds into your system, anywhere from 30 seconds to a minute, depending on how long you choose to hug. So you're going to have to do a lot of these strategies. You might have to get a lot of doses of oxytocin throughout the day to keep cortisol, insulin, and sex hormones in checks, especially if you're living a high-stress life. So don't underestimate the hormonal power of a hug.

Don't underestimate the hormonal power of kindness. And the more stress you have, the more kindness you need to give and receive. It's that simple. Now, as I move on to the other two concepts that really make a powerful difference for women. And then I really want to dive into neurotransmitters and help you understand this. We have to look at if you're a cycling woman, you have hormones coming in and out in somewhere between a 28 and 34 day cycle. The first thing I want you to understand is there's a large chance you and your bestie cycle much different.

So I say that because as I go to explain the different concept. behind lifestyle and hormones, what I want you to understand is your hormonal path is unique to you. So don't compare yourself to other women. Don't compare yourself to a man. You have a unique path because your hormones might be on a 20-day-8 cycle, whereas another woman's hormones are on a 34-day cycle. In writing fast like a girl, I have to tell you this was the hardest part of writing that book, is that I'm giving you very broad ideas of hormones, and I'm saying these different days of where hormones come in and out, but yours might be different. So as I go through the woman's menstrual cycle, explaining the hormones that are coming in, explaining how they relate to your moods and

explaining neurotransmitters, just know that this is a unique path for you. The second key hormonal concept is this lifetime concept. And I really want to speak to my menopausal women right now. And to me, a menopausal woman is anybody over 40. And if you have an active cycle and you're 45, I think that you probably may feel a little bit like how I did in my mid and early 40s, which is I'm too young to be going through menopause. like menopause was something that older women go through, something my mother went through. And it took me a long time to realize that at 40, my hormones decided to back out. And yours are doing the same thing.

So when we look at the lifetime, and I want to emphasize this because we also have a lot of you listening that are teachers, your mothers, your grandparents, and you have an impact on teenage girls, teenage women. And this is really important that once you understand these lifetime hormones, once you understand a 30-day menstrual cycle where those hormones come in, I'm going to ask that you go and teach the younger generation because hormonal illiteracy is at an all-time high. I mean, even those of us in our 50s and 60s are trying to figure this out. But once we start this conversation, this teenage group is really growing up in the most toxic time in human history. They have more physical stress, more emotional stress, more chemical stress. So we need to help them. This is women. We need to collaborate with other women. And when I walk you through what happens hormonally to us from puberty through

post menopause, I think you will see that there's a lot of similarities hormonally between a 50-year-old woman and a 15-year-old teenage girl. And so as we learn them, we need to turn down, look down and help that generation so that we can all thrive with our hormones in specifically mental health. So here's how it looks. The day you start your period, the most important thing I want teenage girls to know is that it takes about five-ish years for the rhythm of the brain and the ovaries to start. get to know each other. So if you're a 35-year-old woman listening to this podcast, what I want you to understand is what you did those first five years of that communication starting between your brain

and your ovaries can be influencing your hormonal production today. Because in that time period, the hypothalamus and the pituitary and the ovaries were learning how to communicate. And when you're 15, let's say you're 13 starting your period, it's like that path from the brain to the ovaries would be like walking through grass that has never been walked through before. There is no path. But after about five years of your, the hormones coming in, that path is well defined.

So as you put your hormonal picture together, I want. you to realize that those first five years of your, when you started your period, impacted your whole hormonal health. So if you went on to birth control during that time, one of the challenges that we have is that you went on to, let's just use the birth control pill as an example, you got on to something that was manipulating your, what would have been your natural rhythm of hormones. So when you go through menopause, your menopause symptoms may be more difficult because if you got on the birth control pill at 15 and you didn't get off of it till 45 or 40 or 35,

that's decades of manipulation of this natural rhythm. It doesn't mean it's too late and that you can't come back. to your natural rhythm, but it means that you just are going to need to apply more principles because that natural rhythm never got a chance to get up and go. This is another reason I'm so concerned about this younger generation. So that's what happens when in the first five years. Our 20s and our 30s are our fertility years. These are the years that we should be having a normal cycle. I'll go through what that normal cycle looks like in a moment. And then around 40, what I want you to understand is that's the moment the ovaries say, you know what,

I've been doing a lot of work here for about 30 years, a little bit, you know, maybe 25, 30 years. And it's time for me to retire. It's time for me to back out. And when the ovaries make a decision to stop making sex hormones, there's less eggs in the ovaries, there's less need for these sex hormones, but you still need. lead estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone for mental health. So the intelligent body of yours decides to hand over that job to somebody, another organ in the body, and it hands it over to two

places. It hands it over to your adrenals. So stress over 40 will tank hormonal health, which means we need more resources for helping with stress. And I'm going to go back to how I started this, which is oxytocin, is so massively important. So after 40, more hugs, more human connection, more community, these things become more important to you because you got to get cortisol down. One of the things that I did while I was going through my 40s is I kept kind of walking around and thinking, this is just cruel. Like, who created this body of ours to go through this process, as many of us are sending

our children off into college. We're becoming empty nesters. And some of us are going through menopause as our teenage daughters are going through puberty. So we have these incredible stressors showing up in our life, but we're not hormonally equipped for it. So more oxytocin and more downtime and more mindfulness tools for a woman over 40 becomes really important. And then remember, it takes that 10-year spot for your brain to recalibrate to the loss of estrogen.

This is why I'm so adamant about fasting for women over 40 because what can happen at that moment when we start to make ketones is ketones will go up and they will nourish the brain. They will help the neurons in the brain. They will help with neurotransmitter production. They will help with estrogen. Remember that in general, our good estrogen will shine when we're in more of a ketogenic ketosis state. So this is why I'm such a fan of every woman over 40 making sure that she understands how to fast and how to make ketones. So that becomes a more important over 40 as we start to see these hormones decline. We bring cortisol down and we make ourselves insulin sensitive and we start to repair neurons. That needs to be the rally cry for women over 40. Now, I just want to point out that women over 40, I did write you a book. It's called

The Menopause Reset. I made it a quick easy book for you to read or listen to. So that is available on Amazon. You can go go find that. Fast like a girl is. really meant the new book to help you understand how to time food and fasting to your hormonal cycle from the time you start your period till years after, you know, until the day you die, it's really meant for women of all ages. My post-menopausal women, I want you to understand that if you're still having hot flashes, if you're still having anxiety, if you're still having depression, that it's not too late. You can go back and apply the principles I taught in the menopause reset, you can go back and I'm not going to go into those five principles,

but they're there. So go back and rework those five principles and get your lifestyle on track. And then you're going to find that it's much easier to get rid of some of those lingering menopause symptoms. So that's the trajectory of hormones and what we're looking at. Before I move on to neurotransmitters, I want to point out that I'm going to continue to create a rally cry that we need to all be hugging women over 40. Men that are listening, I really want you to understand that it is an extreme sport as we lose

these hormones. Be patient with us and know that it just takes this reacalibration mixed with some incredible tools that I'm going to share with you here in a moment. Women over 40, I want to say to you get to know yourself as much as you can. hormonally so that you can not only take better care of yourself, but you can teach those around you how to take care of you. And this is the level of conversation that I really want to have. 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.