The Fastest Way To Lose Belly Fat (THIS Is The Best Kept Weight Loss Secret) | Dr. Mindy Pelz

what causes your body to gain weight your body if it could talk to you was like you just had a lot of extra stuff you've been giving me and I didn't know where to put it so I started in your belly and I'm putting it there to save your life women's health expert podcast host Dr Mindy pelts what is the worst mistake someone can make while fasting that will make them gain weight doing the same fast the same way every single day this is the part that I want to scream from the rooftop we're thrilled

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biggest names in health and science world-renowned relationship therapist and your favorite manifestation expert is back to drop new findings hit subscribe to not miss any of these episodes if you think of someone who would love this episode send it to them to make their day the number one Health and Wellness podcast J shett J shett the one the only J sh hey everyone welcome back to on purpose the place you come to to become a happier healthier and more healed today's guest is going to help us do just that From the Inside Out Dr Mindy

pels is a women's health expert podcast host and bestselling author of fast like a girl the menopause reset and her new book eat like a girl with a mission to empower women by helping them understand their bodies Dr pels and has become a leading voice in the fields of hormones fasting and Healthy Living Dr Mindy's work provides invaluable guidance for women navigating the complexities of hormones metabolic health and nutrition please welcome to on purpose Dr Mindy pels Mindy it's great to see you and uh thank you for being here oh I'm excited I'm super happy

to be here and have this conversation with you I just want to point out how amazing you are because you're actually here on your birthday which shows how much you value and deeply believe in the work you're doing to be spending your birthday with us so I feel even more lucky and grateful to be with you yeah you know I'm sure it's like your work you know it is it's just oozes out of me so it's not like I had to sacrifice to be here on my birthday it was more of a joy to be

here so thank you for having me on my birthday I love it well let's get right into it I wanted to start off with a big question when when we knew you were coming on the show we asked our audience for things that they would love to learn from you things they'd love to know about you and one of the biggest ones that came up is what what is the worst mistake someone can make while fasting that will make them gain weight ooh this this was the biggest question okay this is really great because there's

not a on sentence answer so the biggest mistake for starters is doing the same fast the same way every single day over and over and over again wow we were meant to vary men and women were meant to vary our fasts and here's the way you look at it is that the human body will adapt to what we call a hormetic stress a little tiny stressor that puts it into a forc adaptation so you go without food all of a sudden you're like your body's like wait a second no food's coming in we're going to

need to go find that food that we stored years ago and so it will go to the fat storage and burn that fat if you do that same style of fasting maybe it's one meal a day over and over and over again the body gets really smart and it's like wait no Foods coming in I only get a little bit of food every single day I'm going to slow my metabolism down so the biggest mistake that people make is that they've got to vary their fast vary the length you don't fast every day it's what

we call Feast famine cycling and it's how the human body was designed to be I was not expecting that answer EXC because I feel I feel like everything we're ever told is like here's the hours here's what it is do it five days in a row maybe you can take a couple of days off a week or a month or whatever it may be how do you know then how to structure it to give yourself some sort of system to follow so that you're not just I guess completely out of sync as well yeah so

first I want to say is if it makes logical sense if you go back and you think about the hunter gatherers like they came out of the cave and sometimes they had a meal left over from a kill they made the night before sometimes they had a lot of food and then sometimes they had no food so our body is used to that Feast famine cycling because that's how we were primally designed so I want to point that out second thing the way that I see this is that every day you have a fasting window

and you have an eating window and your eating window you get to vary and it should vary for most people based off your lifestyle so let's use the example of the soccer mom um because that was sort of a big part of my practice was all these I call them the mama bears and what we found is that they want the most important meal for them was dinner with the family so they needed to skip breakfast and start their eating window somewhere around 12 1:00 so that they could finish that eating window at 7 8:00

so Monday through Friday they would make their eating window in the afternoon evening but then on the weekends like a lot of families want to have brunch on Sunday or maybe they'll go to the farmers market or or maybe they'll go out to breakfast on Saturday morning so then they would move their eating window up in earlier in the day so I think you should base it off your lifestyle and then of course base it off of women should base it off their cycle which is what fast like a girl was about yeah so I'm

someone who loves systems and routines so I end up eating I'm a three meals per day kind of person I have to eat three meals a day my body reacts in whether it's cramps or fatigue or whatever if I don't so if I try and Miss breakfast or have a late breakfast I'm feeling that yeah um if I'm skipping a meal in the middle of the day I'm I'm feeling that like my body wants it so I generally end up eating three meals a day pretty much at the same time every day is that bad

am I doing that wrong well I mean it I always say it depends on your intention so what's your intention for your health my intention right now is to gain strength and muscle as I've been training and tryy enough protein is someone who follows a plant-based diet and then you are doing when you're working out in the morning yes in the morning yeah so for you because you're trying to up muscle you're going to want to make sure that you eat before your workout and you're going to want to make sure you eat after your

workout I'm not doing the before yeah yeah so then what will end up H so you go in fueled you're breaking that muscle down while you're working out and then you're refueling afterwards that would be like the perfect way to stack protein but then where does the fasting window fit in so the fasting window would probably be more towards the end of the day and one of the things that I just try to make this simple for everybody is the best thing you can do is always eat in the light the minute we start eating

in the dark like at the end of the day we've got melatonin coming into our body and melatonin causes us to be more insulin resistant so if you are working out at 9 in the morning I'd want you to have a meal maybe a small little protein shake at 8 you do your workout then you follow it up with a recovery mail yeah I would do yeah I would just enough to kind of fuel you yeah you wouldn't need a huge amount and then 5 six o'clock at night depending on the time of year you

shut it down and then now if you're done eating at 6 you would go you know 6 to 6 all the way till 8 that's a 14-hour fast every day and that's pretty good yeah so that's pretty much what I do fasting was I stop eating at like 6:30 we always have an early dinner yeah but I guess yeah that means no no none of those late night snacks that if I end up being out till late if I have to got to stop those late night snacks that's the challenge eating the light yeah so

eating the light and then what a lot of people do because of that night snacking what a lot of people decide is you know what I'd rather delay my breakfast so that I can eat a little bit later because I maybe sit down with a bowl of popcorn and watch a movie at night and so they'll they'll make their first meal noon but this is the whole point of what I'm trying to teach is all of this is customizable so you but you should customize it to your intention and your goals and your lifestyle and

and if you can do it that way it's a health habit that becomes effortless over time as opposed to what we typically do which is I'm going to get healthy I'm going to get fit I'm G I just discipline myself into this new body I want right and then after a while we lose the discipline and we Boomerang back into our old habits yeah well you've already given me something I'm going to start having that by to eat before my workouts now I think that would make a huge difference for me for sure no I

love that the second thing that everyone asked about which was the big one which is what is the fastest most effective way for people to lose their belly fat everybody wants to know about belly fat everyone everyone's obsessed with belly everybody is obsessed with belly fat Okay I want to start with this understanding what causes your body to gain weight and that's a better question to ask yourself than how do I get this weight off because you need to know the mechanism here's what the body does is whenever there is excess excess glucose excess hormones

excess toxins the body is so welld designed that it knows I can't put all these e this excess around your heart and lungs I probably shouldn't put this around your liver I'm not going to go over here and put it around your spleen I'm going to store it somewhere that will keep you alive so it stores it first around your belly no way so it this is the thing that I'm like trying to free women from is then you look in the mirror and you're like wait a second I'm I hate that belly fat and

you shame yourself you guilt your way into the next diet when your body if it could talk to you was like okay listen you just had a lot of extra stuff you've been giving me and I didn't know where to put it so I started in your belly then I put it in your booty then I put it around your face and the back of your arms and for women sometimes it goes in the chest and I'm putting it there to save your life so I think the first step to losing menopausal belly fat is

a is getting in alignment with the body and and thank the body for what it's doing because it's trying to save you great ANS yeah so now we at that understanding we go okay well belly in general can we know cortisol so we are a cortisol saturated world right now and so we got to do something to help with cortisol well there are there are things to help with cortisol other than you know uh becoming a monk there are other things you can do other than sitting somewhere and just meditating like easy things a stressful

event H hits you the worst thing you can do is sit get up and move cortisol was meant to make you move it's it's that hormone that gives you up get up and go because you're running from a tiger so if you're sitting at your desk boss walks in is like hey I need this by the end of the day and you're like there's no way I can get it and you're all upset the worst thing you can do is stay seated go move your body so constantly walking will help bring that cortisol down getting

out in nature more bringing cortisol down hanging out with positive people so that you're not in an environment where negative people are throwing cortisol bombs at you all day long where your thinking starts to become one that's intrinsic that you're starting to like think everything is a threat and you're not safe and cortisol is high that all relates to belly fat this is why I'm like going into the detail on this because people want the Quick Fix but I with the belly fat the first thing I want people to ask themselves is what is the

stress level of my life and how can I bring that stress level down and how can I start to work with cortisol walking being the biggest one hanging out in nature and then getting your body in the right environments then you can look at toxins so we started this conversation before we recorded about toxicity we live in the most toxic time in human history women are putting over 200 toxic carcinogenic chemicals on their skin every single day the brilliant body is like I don't know what to do with all this so I'm going to put

it around your belly and your chest and again then we look in the mirror and we're mad at ourselves cuz we weren't weren't disciplined enough so go and look at your toxic load what toxic chemicals are constantly coming into your body start looking into different detoxes because we got to bring your toxic load down I really believe if you want to be healthy you don't need motivation you need momentum I can't overcome my sugar addiction no you should rephrase that and you should say I've trained my body to crave sugar and you're double Downing on

dieting and you're double Downing on uh working out and you don't even realize that it's actually this chemical load that has completely reprogrammed your body what are the most common places that people are putting toxins into their body well the skin is is a big one um food is horrible I put a whole thing in and eat like a girl and I was so depressed after I wrote it all about obesogens so obesogens are chemicals that are in our food so uh BPA Plastics are what our food are wrapped around th that's an obesogen um

pesticides are an obesogen i the there's a long list in the book like artificial colorings and flavorings BHT BHA all of these synthetic ingredients what they do and this is the part that I'm like want to scream from the rooftops is what they do is they literally those chemicals go into stem cells and they reprogram those stem cells to to actually make fat cells and one of the places we're seeing this is in the UK right now because kids have low have lots of stem cells and as we get older we have less and so

what we're seeing is that the stem cells that we're supposed to make bone are now making fat and so kids are BEC their height is smaller and shorter than ever before and they're bigger and bigger than ever before so these chemicals are totally crazy changing our fat distribution and the belly fat is one of them so what you put on your body and what you're putting in your mouth start there yeah that's it's so terrifying it's terrifying it's terrifying because it feels like everything you turn over these days every pack is labeled with a million

different things and if you're not conscious and aware and checking pretty much everything you pick up is going to have one of those things in it that's right and and the thing you can do is eat food without a label like go to your farmers's Market get you know healthy fruits and vegetables if you eat meat you know know who your butcher is and like know where that meat came from make sure it wasn't packed with chemicals like I think we used to think it was like woo woo and people who ate organic were hippies

and I would say at this particular moment in in history you should know an ingredient label you should know those chemicals that are going into your food because they are reprogramming your body and one of the things they're reprogramming our stem cells to make these these o you know fat cells and you're double Downing on dieting and you're double Downing on uh working out and you don't even realize that it's actually this chemical load that has completely reprogrammed your body and so they're conscious of it oh yeah oh well so the chemicals are are are

there for two reasons in food one is shelf life so you know much easier for these food companies to make sure that their food if it sits on a shelf is going to last a very long time the second one is that they are hijacking your taste buds so that you're addicted to it let me give you an example years ago in the LA Times this was like 15 years ago this three spread page spread comes out in the LA Times like huge about what L it was lays specifically potato chips what they were doing

what the the company was looking at was what kind of chemicals can we spray on the potato chip so that it hits all the dopamine receptor sites in the brain but we got to keep that that that chip light enough that when it hits the the stomach it doesn't stim trigger a reaction in the brain to kill hunger so it needs to be light it has to be salty it has to hit the have a little bit of sweetness in it so it can hit those dopamine sites but we can't let the person fill up

on it so think about that how many people open a bag of potato chips and eat it does just that it does that you can't just eat one you're like the whole bag's gone and then the next thing you know you're like I I need more food and that is what all this Western processed food is doing is it's hijacking our taste buds so now we don't even have control over our taste buds it's so hard when you know that you're being manipulated and programmed and it's been hardwired since such a young age that the

Habit that we have of grabbing that bag of chips or the chocolate bar or whatever else it may be yeah it feels like that is US yeah almost like oh but that's who I am I just I just love that type of food or that's what I'm used to and we're trying to go against this deep long-term conditioning it feels like yes and so breaking that habit is a lot harder than it seems yeah and and again I'm always looking at things through the slant of women's health because what I think women do is that

when they don't know this information is that they start to think they can't lose weight because there's something wrong with them and they have no idea that the chemicals they've been eating in their diet food that was low fat and they bought because they wanted the the lower sugar version actually had a chemical in it that reprogramed stem cells to make fat cells and and hijack their taste buds so that they're addicted to these Foods over and over again but but the woman doesn't know that she's like oh God I can never lose weight it

must be my my fault she goes into the doctor's office the doctor's like your BMI is really high and so now all of a sudden he's you know the doctor is like you got to lose weight she doesn't know what to do so she's like doubling down on on eating less she's doubling down on exercise she's doubling down on shaming herself and she didn't realize that it was actually the food industry that changed her whole body and she needs to unhook from that food system in order to get the result she wants a lot of

people when they're in that position something they do is people count calories do they matter so this question comes up all the time so I'm so happy that you asked it um because based off of research yes calories matter but based off of human behavior calories don't matter so so this is why in eat like a girl I have a statement that blood sugar matters calories don't and the reason that I say that is that every single woman I sat with in my clinic and every all the feedback we're getting on our socials from women

who are fasting is that they don't know how many calories they eat in a day and they don't know how many calories is their output in a day so nobody can actually succeed at calories in calories out but I can take a a CGM and I can put it on the back of a woman's arm and I could say just eat and then she can see real time what that blood sugar spikes how many does she have over and over and over again and from that visual she can start to make better choices about her

health that affects her her blood sugar better and so that she can start to keep her blood sugar low I'll give you an example I had a patient a couple years ago that was plant based and um not wanting to change plant-based I was in honor of her choice but when we put a CGM on her she had about 10 spikes of these really high spikes of glucose every single day and I asked her I was like how do you like what do your moods follow these spikes and she's like yeah I'm like up I'm

down I'm hungry and then I'm not hungry like I feel like I'm on a roller coaster all day long so what I did is we worked with okay how about if we add a little bit of fat how about if we add a little bit of fiber what if we take some of these things like oat milk and let's sort of switch oat milk or or maybe if you love your oat milk let's make sure it's really clean oat milk and let's add a little MCT oil in your coffee and we started to change how

a meal was put together and she went down to about four spikes a day she didn't and she didn't change really anything she ate she changed the way that she put a meal together and then the blood sugar changed and then her moods changed and then then her weight changed because we because I taught her blood sugar that doesn't happen with calories how many spikes a day is okay I don't know if there's an average Spike amount but let's let's say that when you get a glucose Spike the most important thing is that it comes

down to its pre glucose amount pre-meal amount within 90 minutes so textbook is two hours but I like to say if we can do like an hour and a half where you have a blood sugar Spike and within an hour a half your blood sugar's right back where it was before you ate that meal that you're pretty insulin sensitive if it's taking more than two hours for your body to be able to integrate that glucose now we may have a little bit metabolically resistant insulin resistant body so it's your recovery from the meal that matters

more than anything El interesting oh right okay so 90 minutes is what we should be aing for that's my personal standard CL like what most doctors will say is two hours but I I like it to be a little quicker than that got it so that's what we should be measuring that's what we should be looking at and then the other thing is one of the greatest studies done on fasting is 168 and such and Panda was the leader of that and that study and what he found is that if you ate all your food

in an eight- hour eating window leaving 16 hours for rest and Recovery that you basically became metabolically IMU immune from the harsh metabolic consequences of a processed diet so what that meant was I can take all the bad food and I can put in an eight hour eating window and if I get give my body 16 hours to rest then the metabolic system rebooted itself and was able to continue forward without seeing insulin go up and hemoglobin A1c go up and inflammatory markers like CRP go up so when I look at the spikes I want

to see the recovery of the spike and then I want to see that part of the day there's you're just not eating anything that there's no spikes right does that make sense yeah that makes a lot of sense that makes a lot of sense one of the things that I found fascinating that you talk about in eat like a girl is you talk about eating for your microbes not your taste buds and I find this to be the constant kind of challenge that people in my life have when I'm talking about healthy eating or healthy

habits when it comes to food we generally eat for our taste buds or eat for our emotions yes talk to me before we talk about eating for your microbes talk to me about how our patterns of our taste buds have changed over time yeah because I feel again we're not aware of the root of where this started yeah and this is a the reason I put that as a real foundational rule is again I'm trying to free women and help women have a better relationship with food and there's so many women that just find out

like let's use carbohydrates or sugar or alcohol they'll say I just crave it I can't I can't UNC crave it I just it's like the Tubba ice cream just calls me well if you actually look there can be microbes and there can be fungus that lives in your gut that is doing the calling so those are the ones that are sending a signal to the brain feed me so we have trillions of bacteria in our gut and they all want to stay alive and so they send signal to the brain and they tell the brain

feed me this don't feed me that so that it can stay alive and then on top of that we add this dopamine response we're getting from the chemical food we we are actually not really in control of our food choices when you look through that lens so let's go to your friends your friends who are like I I have no willpower or I don't know how to get over my sugar addiction well the first thing is make sure you're eating chemical free get back to Nature's food cuz nature didn't create food that made you addicted

so get off those processed foods and then let's look at feeding your microbes let's give your microbes more food like what I found in my clinic is people were eating the same Foods over and over and over again like the same 20 foods and now when I opened it up their whole food window and said hey how about instead of iceberg lettuce every night what if we try a spring mix with a little parsley and maybe some dandelion greens so we can support your liver like all of a sudden we just opened up the foods

they were eating and the microbes changed and if you mix that with fasting the greatest study that I love one of the greatest that was done on fasting was the Every Other Day Diet and what a a researcher did is she took a group of people that were metabolically challenged had food addiction and had cardiovascular challenges and said you can eat anything you want one day and then the next day you don't eat and the next day eat whatever you want next day don't eat and what she found was that and you they had to

do it over a course of a year by the end of the year everybody's metabolic markers improved everybody lost weight which is what she thought would happen but what surprised her was that everybody's choice of food what they were craving changed so when I look at those people's Str struggling with like I can't get over my Cravings we've got to change your microbiome and we've got to put you in some fasted States so we can have you can start to have a different experience with these cravings and and it's it's a combination of those things

how do we detox the bacteria that's calling out for the sugar or calling out for the fats or carbs or whatever it is how do we how do we detox those because starve them out really that's the only way yeah you start starving them out wow um and that's why I mean I I've spent a lot of time really asking myself like why did Fast like a girl connect with people what was it that was in there I mean we have across all the audio and the ebook and the hard copy over 800,000 versions of

fast like a girl was purchased and I think congratulations yeah thank you I think what happened is that people finally were able to take a break from food and they saw the result and they started to starve out the microbes and they started to go after all these places that the body stored excess and they started to see a result and I really believe if you want to be healthy you don't need motivation you need momentum and once you have momentum the motivation comes so one of the things that we do when you're looking at

these microbes that are controlling your taste buds is let's just start tack on some you know fasting Windows every day where you just give the microbes a break and they will start to die off and and the longer you fast the more they die off and your food choices will change which is what happened in that study I've experienced that personally I always talk about how my wife trained me off of sugar because when I met her I was addicted for sure I was that friend yeah and and it's I can empathize with it because

I know how strong it was for me because I gr up eating four chocolate products a day and now I'll have one dessert a weeking and it's taken me or like one refined sugar product a week and uh and then I'll only eat natural sugars like fruits and things for the rest of the week and I think it's it's been such a journey for me but you're so right that it had to be starved had to be substituted and then eventually I eventually I started realizing how many other things were impacting my desire for sugar

I it was a lack of workout it was poor sleep it was uh a lack of the right vitamins and supplements which means my body had low energy so it turned to what I thought gave me energy and so you started realizing how interconnected all those things were exactly rather than it actually being about my addiction to Sugar that's right yeah that's right when like when people are like I like I've had so many over the years people like I could never fast and I'm always like oh actually sit with me for a hot moment

because there hasn't been a person that I haven't been able to train to fast you just trained your body to eat and you could look at the same thing with the food you're eating when you're like I can't I can't overcome my sugar addiction no you should rephrase that and you should say I've trained my body to crave sugar I would like to train it to crave something different and you and that's your what you did is you found a what we would call a multi-therapeutic approach a lot of different things came into play so

that you could literally train your body to crave something different the worst thing you could do is have pasta with red sauce and no protein can we start looking at food as hormonal medicine food isn't just pleasure food isn't just you know energy food is actually feeding these hormones before you go to the weight loss drug ask yourself have I dialed in my lifestyle there's another thing that you brought up which you talk about protein being the hero macro ingredient yeah and right now I feel like like the hot everywhere it's having its moment for

sure I wanted to ask you about you know no one seems to be getting the amount of protein that everyone says you should be getting so how much protein should we be getting and how do we actually get there well to me the protein is very much like when we were counting carbs or when we were counting calories like they're fun to do in a in a moment and then nobody sustains it over time so I I'm in alignment with everybody what everybody's saying which is one gram of protein for every pound of body weight

like I think that's a good measurement for you to look at I I've heard some people even say you need you know two grams of protein for every pound of body weight if you're trying to to to grow muscle so I think in theory that's great and then we have things like make sure you have 30 grams of protein per meal so that you can open up amino acid receptor sites to to grow muscle I think that's all great now let's talk let's talk to the woman in the Midwest let's talk to this single mom

in the midwest that's working two jobs and she's like I'm just trying to stay AF float and now you want me to count how many grams of protein I eat every day so that I can be optimally healthy this is why I put in there what I want her to know is just know protein is the hero macronutrient has amino acids in it and amino acids are going to make you hormones and neurotransmitters so at every single meal I want you to look at the protein Source first and how do you get as much protein

in that meal and then build the carbohydrates around it and build the the vegetables and everything around it don't skimp on the protein every meal has to have a protein that is a more doable like language and for a woman who is or and man who is like so busy because again I don't know if people are successfully counting this day in and day out unless they're really making a priority yeah I don't my appetite wouldn't even allow me to eat that much protein like I I struggle with two things one is I don't think

I can eat that much protein I've tried and second of all it's heavy on my gut it's hard on my gut like that much protein just my but my gut can't process it so how do how do you work out those two things um this actually came up in another interview and I and I explained that this February of this year I decided to try the protein Theory and I was working out with a trainer I was lifting heavy weights I'm 50 550 55 as of today um I was 54 at the time I'm postmenopausal

and I was like okay let me experiment with this protein thing in January I was still with the trainer I was still tacking on My fasting window and I was really doing what I could talk about in the book where I would have keto days and I would have hormone feasting days but I wasn't as focused on protein in January I lost weight and I built muscle in February I'm thing I just upped my protein to one gram per pound of body weight by the end of February I had put on more fat than if

I had been doing none of that and I was like this isn't working for me this is too much protein for my body and I and I went back to just protein with every meal Mindy stopped trying to get it to a certain amount that was my experience now other people will say oh I've built so much muscle with it amazing but I talk about this in the book that we have to go back to n of one n of one means you can hear us talk about protein and now your job is to figure

out if it works for you didn't work so it was hard for you it sounds like was hard for it's been hard right now I've been trying to I've been practicing with it for like three months maybe yeah experimenting so it it was hard for me whereas other people are like this works perfectly for me which is great so I just think protein with every meal we have to prioritize protein and then you've got to find what pattern of the amount is going to be best for you mhm yeah the point is to remember it's

the hero ingredient that's right and and that and and then build around it that's right and and don't worry if you're not getting 30 grams per meal or 40 grams or even depending on your body we 50 60 grams per meal it's a lot do you remember the Zone diet I do yes yeah yeah okay so the the berry SARS this was back in when like when I was in university so this was back in the '90s he was the first one to say when you put a meal together and he used pasta as an

example he was like the worst thing you could do is have pasta with red sauce and no protein because that is all glucose and you'll get this incredible glucose Spike but actually if you put a meatball in there and you drizzle some olive oil on it now the co the metabolic cost to you will be much less and you will lose weight and his whole thing was like stay in the Z you got to stay in the zone so the protein conversation to me I feel like needs to evolve to protein at every meal and

let's make sure we're putting it there with fat and some nature some of Nature's carbs and some Fiber and how you put that meal together has a bigger is going to have a bigger effect on you than just the protein amount yeah that's very helpful yeah that's very helpful and and I hope everyone who's listening and watching kind of you know eases up on it or or finds a way that it works for you I think that's yeah that's the point when does you know I think we've been talking a lot about belly fat and

fat in general when does fat make you fat that's a great question okay so toxic fat makes you fat what is a toxic fat so our canola oils are cotton seed corn oils soybean oils partially hydrogenated oils vegetable oils uh highly processed sunflower and safflower oils those are the biggies those are toxins so let's go back to what what what is fat fat is a storage place for things your body doesn't know what to do with those oils your body doesn't know what to do with so it's putting it around your belly it's putting it

in fat so stop giving it to your body because when you give it to your body the the body's so smart it's like I'm just going to go store it over here if I come over and I do now avocado oil olive oil olive oil is like the hero oil um even some MCT oil or even some of the the nut oils like um walnut oil or seed some some seed oils like sesame seed oil your body knows what to do with that it knows how to integrate that it doesn't cause cellular inflammation and so

it'll kill hunger it's going to help nourish your brain it's going to stabilize your blood sugar it's you need these oils to make hormones so totally different beasts one makes you fat and and the other one actually will make you healthy and can actually help you lose weight because it kills hunger when we're also talking about our fat intake is there a time of day that's better for us to be eating fat versus others or is it something that needs to be spread out across the day I think of fat as like a blood sugar

break so let's use today as an example it's like what 3:00 in the afternoon and so I had my first meal I I worked out in the morning on an empty stomach it was just where I decided to go today I had some collagen powder in my coffee and a little bit of raw cream and then I went out and worked out and then I had my first meal around 11 o' and one of the things that I made sure I did is get a lot of protein and a lot of fat because I knew

I wasn't going to eat again until tonight and I was coming here for this podcast so I didn't want my blood sugar to spike at one or two and then show up in your chair and have fog and and be unable to focus and my energy low so I made sure I had extra fat on my breakfast and extra protein so that my my glucose stayed very steady so I like fat when you are not trying to you're really trying to minimize a glucose Spike so performance is what I just explained or um I don't

want to be hungry in two more hours I should use some fat or I don't want to Crave that chocolate at 10 o'clock at night so I should have some more fat with my dinner because all of that stabilizes blood sugar and then those cravings and those brain fog and that lack of energy doesn't show up that's that's really helpful because I think again it comes to if we have the time and energy to be that mindful with what we can plan yeah but especially when it comes to big events big moments big meetings big

high performance moments in our life it seems like that's that's something good to be mindful at those times oh yeah yeah this is why I love olive oil just start drizzling it on on your meal and you will be shocked at how it kills hunger and you'll be shocked at how you're not hungry for hours afterwards and your brain power is completely online and focused it's it's the easiest thing to add yeah me and my wife were joking about how often what happens is you end up eating smaller meals but then you end up eating

junk afterwards yeah right and that happens so often because we're like oh no I want to be mindful of my portion size or whatever it is and then at 10 p.m. you want a dessert but the idea of sprinkling something simple as olive oil onto your meals yeah to help curb a craving later on and then you know olive oils are high in polyphenols and polyphenols feed the good microbes so when you're drizzling olive oil on your meal you're stabilizing blood sugar and you're feeding the good microbes so those good microbes are going to keep

giving you signals to to Crave good food so it it really is multifactorial um but let's go back just so we don't confuse people let's go back to the calorie in calorie out because some people are like wait a second if I put too much olive oil on top of my food that's a lot of calories but I'm back at does the calorie in calorie out is it working for you I'm more interested in you feeding your body through the lens of metabolic health so that blood sugar can be stable I'm interested in food being

a performance enhancer for you and I care a lot about your microbes because not only do they control your Cravings but they control your immune system your neurotransmitters like they are the thing that is driving your health if you actually look into it so olive oil you drizzled it on your meal and like magic happened in your body in in eat like a girl your new book you talk about how need to eat to make hormones especially for women walk me through the importance of that because I don't think I'd ever heard that before yeah

so this came kind of out of my frustration with women feeling like if I have low hormones then I just need to take an exogenous form of hormone and put it into my body and what I wanted women I'm not saying that's wrong I'm just wanted to say can we have a conversation first before you start to feel like the challenge with your female body as you don't have enough hormones can we look at your food behaviors and ask ourselves are you getting enough nutrients in to be able to actually make hormones so I look

at it like if you were making bread you have to have a certain amount of ingredients you've got to have flour you've probably have to have yeast you have to have some baking soda like there are certain ingredients that need to go into bread in order for it to rise and for it to be able to be breed same thing with hormones and what I did in the book is I spent a lot of time researching well what are those nutrients that we need and I came up with what I call the key24 you need

these 24 nutrients every single day to be able to even make a hormone and when you look at those 24 ingredients like nine of them are amino acids which takes us back to protein and you got protein where you're getting amino acids from and one of the major one is omega-3 fatty acids which takes us back to olive oil so if I'm a woman who is like let's just talk about I'm sure this is going to come up because it keeps coming up let's talk about the weight loss drugs let's say I'm taking a shot

that kills my Hunger so I'm not eating very much and I'm losing weight but if I'm not getting food in with enough nutrients into my body I don't have enough of these vitamins and minerals and fatty acids and amino acids to make hormones so down the road something's going to give from my lack of uh intention around a diverse meal so that's why I put it in there was like can we start looking at food as hormonal medicine food isn't just pleasure food isn't just you know energy food is actually feeding these hormones but you've

got to get a good variety of food in order to do that is there any indication to Women's Health at age 20 30 4050 where different hormones in different foods are more of a priority in the different decades yeah well in the younger years I mean again what we're talking about is gold and um fast like a girl introduced something I called the fasting cycle which is where the front half of your cycle you're going to keep your glucose low and then the back half of your cycle you want to bring your glucose up so

and I showed that through the lens of fasting in this book I'm really and eat like a girl I really want PE women to see front half of your cycle you're really catering to estrogen and estrogen likes glucose to be low so the keto diet the low carb diets that you were on they'll work in that front half of the cycle um just again keep diversifying your food choices whereas the back half of your cycle progesterone showing up and progesterone actually wants you to keep glucose higher this is why every single woman craves carbohydrates or

chocolate or something sugary the week before her period because her body is so intelligent it's like I need you to bring up glucose so I can make progesterone so that the uterine lining can shed and you can have a cycle so for those women 20 and 30 this is the message they need to know front half of the cycle lower carb back half of the cycle higher carb that's as simple as I can make it there's more detailed in the book now let's go into Perry menopause and menopause estrogen goes is going away and when

estrogen goes away that woman becomes more insulin resistant so I can't tell you how many women will tell me I haven't I haven't done anything I'm 43 years old I haven't done anything different and I am gaining weight that's because you're losing estradi and EST dial kept you insulin sensitive and so now you have to find other ways to keep yourself insulin sensitive and fasting is one of the best ways that I know to keep yourself insulin sensitive and then you're probably going to need again as you move through per menopause you're going to need

a little lower carbohydrate diet mixed with splashes of a higher carbohydrate diet so this is why in the book I'm like here's your I call it ketobiotic is when we want to go lower carb but keep enough fiber in there and then hormone feasting is when we want to go higher carb so we can cater to Progesterone it sounds confusing no no not at all yeah but it's think of it like gas pedal break like you know there's a rhythm to a female body so you're just going to understand the rhythm of your hormones so

you can match the foods and the fast according to that what are our greatest misunderstandings of the female body and and in what decades are we so yeah confused about or uneducated about that you'd like to point out oh thank you for asking me that the female body is highly complex it is highly rhythmic so it's constantly having uh ups and downs to it if you look at our hormones there is we are meant to have moments of where we're in complete joy and then there are moments we're crying and there are moments that we

we're rushing to the gym and we're so excited to go work out and then there's other M moments that we can't get off the couch and that's all because you live in a female body that is driven by different hormones so the first thing I want women to know is you your hor your hormonal system makes you highly complex and a male's body isn't that complex this is the way I've been saying it and I always say like you know no offense to men but like you guys are like a a ukulele and we're like

a violin like it's just we are a very our body is a very sophisticated instrument and because of our sex hormones we are we require more rest and Recovery we we we don't do as well with toxicity um when we become insulin resistant we start to become infertile and we start to get things like PCOS polycystic ovarian syndrome and our menopause symptoms will be off the chart like crazy so that doesn't happen so much to men so we're just a more sophisticated body we're living in what are some of the things you would encourage people

to be mindful of at different stages to spot those signs early and to respond because it seems like we we don't really talk about the difference that clearly and we expect the same things in the same eras or Decades of Life yeah yeah I mean I think the thing that have to look at is that lifestyle impacts both men and women but for women really we've got to dial in a lifestyle for women um that like go to Lifestyle first before you go to the anti-depressant before you go to the hormone replacement before you go

to the weight loss drug ask yourself have I dialed in my lifestyle and what that means is there needs to be a rhythm of where I'm maybe working out a lot and then I'm recovering I'm maybe going low car Barb and then I'm I'm I'm feasting on healthy foods so we need to have a rhythmic lifestyle and that's that's like new conversation that's just coming up in in the last couple of years whereas men don't have to worry about that as much you guys are a lot more resilient you have one hormone to think about

which is testosterone you have you operate off a 24hour cycle we operate off operate off a 28 day cycle so we're just a lot more complicated but that's why lifestyle is so important for women and this is like this is like my rally cry like oh my gosh when we look at autoimmune problems when we look at the menopause symptoms like please can we have a conversation about lifestyle as being the first line of treatment for women before we start medicating the the out of us no I love the rally cry and and I think

it's so important I I'm so glad that you're you're sharing it so passionately here because I I couldn't agree with do more I've I've heard so many women recently when I've been at events or listening to panels or I've been hearing so many women talk about per menopause menopause and and and what I found so fascinating when I was listening was that I was obviously I was like okay I knew I had no clue right but a lot of the women in the audience were like oh my gosh we didn't know either what we were

going through and so I think there's such a need for it because there seems to be either misinformation or to be honest no information that's right and so we're just turning towards Pharmaceuticals right so on that conversation when I first started teaching this cycling of fasting and food on my YouTube channel nobody talked about menopause and then I started getting people pouring in and asking me like well what how do I do this for per menopause and menopause at that time I was like mid-40s and so I just shared hey here's what I'm doing I

actually put it in a book it's called the menopause reset I was like here are the lifestyle changes that I've made and they' worked really well for me during per menopause okay fast forward to today we've gone from a cultural hush around menopause where we're like oh she's a little irritable let's not let's not like poke the bear and get her all upset because she might be menopausal but we don't want to say that to our face to cultural chaos where women are like finally like the conversation of menopause is emerging and and that part

is amazing like there's been a lot of authors there's been a lot of influencers there's a lot of people that are cracking that conversation open which is so good but what we have turned the conversation to now is you are suffering in the per menopausal experience and so you need to think about hormone replacement therapy I'm not opposed to that but every woman who goes on hormone replacement therapy has a different path to it and that's because alongside hormone replacement whether it's HRT direct or bioidenticals needs to be a lifestyle change and the diet you

had at 35 doesn't work for you at 45 and the stress load you were able to do or handle at 35 you're going to need some breaks and some new tools at 45 so there's a lifestyle that I'm just still trying to bring in like hello the answers isn't isn't in the patch the answer is not in the pill those are o those are good support systems but let's make Lifestyle the change that happens once you go into those per menopausal years what would you say the top three lifestyle changes that changed everything for you

or were positive for you yeah so in the menopause reset I wrote five um I started fasting that was a big one I started varying my foods which is what I teach and eat like a girl I went low carb high carb I started feeding my microbes so how do I support because the microbes break down estrogen so I wanted to be able to ex increase the diversity of my microbes so they could break down estrogen the the last estrogen I was getting um I did a massive detox I detoxed my whole house um I

started detoxing myself throughout my whole 40s detox became my my obsession and then the last one is something called the rushing woman syndrome which was actually coined by a woman uh Dr Libby Weaver who showed biologically why women that are constantly in a state of stress end up having hormonal problems so I started saying no to more things um I'm a competitive athlete I was a competitive tennis player in my early 20s and I started learning how to do more yoga I started learning how to walk more I started getting out of that mentality of

I've got to push my body and so I just started looking at how I could recover a little bit more and those were the five I changed and it was like gold it's so refreshing to hear that they're all interconnected as well with eat like a girl and and fast like a girl and it seems that it seems that what we need to do is simple but it's so hard yeah because of our wiring because of society's expectations because of our maybe our own pressure on ourselves yeah what what gave you the permission to just

say you know what I'm I'm I'm G to unsubscribe from all of this and I'm going to find a way what was that for you because I feel people are really looking for that breakthrough and you said it's not motivation it's momentum but it's almost like how do you give that stone or that rock a push down the hill so that it gains momentum the best door in is fasting this is why I started with fast like a girl like that is the quick if you want an a totally different experience with your body learn

how to create an eating window and a fasting window and it's interesting because my practice was built by what I call the mama bears they were like these women who would bring their families to me and who would come in to learn about detox and hormones and food education and lifestyle my clinic was built off was like a lifestyle clinic teaching people how to live a lifestyle to build health and it was the mama bears that I got to experiment on you know I put that in like you know a loving way I got to

to take these principles that I was studying and using on myself and try it on them mhm and I remember what with weight loss one of the things that blew me away is once I started teaching women how to fast maybe two weeks would go by and I didn't see them and they'd walk into my clinic and it looked like a fat coat had been taken off of them in two weeks and I was like oh my God like fasting got you that in two weeks so I think this is why I'm a I'm like

the Evangelist for fasting is there anyone who should never fast or shouldn't fast great question um I always say uh if you're pregnant or nursing it's a no that's not your tool so um and I write about that in both books uh if you have a eating disorder you need to be working with somebody who who can work alongside you um because there's little tricks that you can do to to line yourself up for that um certain cancers don't do well with fasting and certain cancers do incredibly well with fasting so so going to a

specialist that knows that outside of that everybody else fasts can fast the one you I just want to point out the person I didn't didn't point out who couldn't fast is the diabetic this is the one that shocks everybody is the type one and type two diabetic when done right and done with Doctor supervision actually does really well with fasting interesting yeah wow yeah that is surprising right you wouldn't expect that no there's a trend right now of women eating meatballs in order to lose weight what's your take on that have you come is that

all they're eating well at least a big a big part of it yeah yeah well I mean they're just trying to to dose up protein so what I would say is if you're going to dose up protein make sure it's a clean protein so what would you define as a yeah like hormone free antibiotic not pumped with antibiotics not pumped with hormones um grass-fed if you're going beef and you really want grass-fed because it has higher omega-3 so it needs to be a clean source of protein I'm also a real fan for women specifically of

fiber because fiber feeds those microbes that break hormones down so if you're only going meat you're missing out on the vegetables we need more fiber but from a metabolic standpoint from a blood sugar standpoint meatballs if you didn't have a lot of fillers and stuff in them could be really good yeah are they losing weight yeah that's what I said BS yeah meat bows sorry not B it's my accent it's my accent yeah yeah meat balls yeah my accent meat balls okay meat bows bows yeah b b sorry it's my accent no no you say

it better than oh my God so um what what kind of meat is it a Variety Meat in there I believe so I mean so basically just bowls that people are having that just like are ground beef essentially like good grass-fed ground but it's like the main thing that they're eating like lunch and dinner and breakfast are they eating any fiber at all or they're just eating that I think it's like very minimal like carb okay okay this is interesting and let's dive into the mechanics on this so protein stabilizes your blood sugar so if

I'm only eating a meat Bowl all day long then what ends up happening is I'm really not those blood sugar spikes we talked about I'm not getting very many many of them so that's good if you don't have a lot of blood sugar you're not asking your body to make a ton of insulin so from a from a metabolic standpoint that is really fascinating from a gut microbiome standpoint and this this is really controversial and I still stay by this to this day is the carnivore diet the carnivore diet kind of had its moment and

then people were like this is crazy and it went away well what we saw in my community and in my clinic and in the research that I dove into is that when all you do is eat meat you actually can stimulate a a immune cell in your gut called your tea regulatory cells and your t- regulatory cells make sure that your immune system isn't too low and your immune system isn't too high so in my clinic I would do something called carnivore fasting which would be like like a therapeutic process for a patient who had

an autoimmune condition for like two to three weeks they would just eat eat meat and they would fast about 17 hours every day and the rest of the time all they did is eat meat and what I was trying to do is calm the immune system down and help them drop weight because they're Spike they weren't spiking the their glucose it worked it absolutely worked but especially for things like sibo small intestinal bacteria overgrowth like it was phenomenal and so you got the benefit of fasting and you got the benefit of meat it's just not

something you sustain right I would do it two to three weeks to balance the immune system with my autoimmune patients and then we would go back into fiber because we need that fiber to be able to break those hormones down so it became a therapeutic tool interesting thank you so much yeah it's it's I love what you do by actually explaining what is going on behind the scenes because to me that's the part which a makes it click and then it's not just to hack yeah it's like oh I actually understand how my body is

working and why it's doing what it's doing and therefore now when I'm having that feeling or that experience or that craving yeah I can actually talk myself through it right if that makes sense yeah I mean so here's the this is like like another big pet peeve and rally cry for me is that you should learn how to do Health from your health professionals whether it's your doctor your fitness trainer your the the your favorite Health influencer but if we go into this place where we're like eat this don't eat that but we don't know

why we're never empowered you do doctor means to teach so what you know rally cried all the doctors out there are you teaching your patients or are you just prescribing your patient to your patients you have to teach to them how the body works and why if prescription's your path why prescriptions work why Food Works it because now you have an empowered human and big Pharma is not going to like us empowered and big food doesn't like us empowered but that's what we should create as empowered humans the only way we can do that is

by teaching people how their body works yeah for for people who talking about you know giving making people feel empowered for people who don't have access to expensive technology and want to know their muscle fat percentage body fat percentage Etc like how how do they get that information in a way that's affordable and accessible because it seems that so much of that data and that Insight you need to be empowered is expensive yeah so you know all the wearables are really exciting right now the cgms and all that the continuous glucose monitor really exciting but

they are expensive so in the book I put a list of of symptoms you would experience if you nailed your your meal if you got your meal right if your lifestyle was working for you this is are some of the symptoms and I'll I'll I'll share with you some of them after you eat a meal you should be energized you shouldn't be sleepy if you're sleepy we got to go back and look at the makeup of that meal after a meal you should have better brain Clarity you should feel uplifted it should it should be

like something that puts you into a per enhanced performance State you also it's not normal to be hungry every 2 to three hours so those things become really important the other piece is that you should be able to control your Cravings you should be able to be like hey I like I'll give use me as an example I used to have a sugar addiction too and um I had a moment where when in the height of my sugar addiction where if I looked at a piece of sugar I couldn't control myself I remember that yeah

yeah and it was like I know I'm not supposed to eat that but I'm going to eat it anyways once I started doing fasting and eating doing fasting and eating Windows like that craving went away so I now have a better relationship to food I don't feel like I'm eating food because I can't control myself so there are symptoms we can look at and all the biometric wearables they're great but I want to help the woman in in in the South you know that's working two jobs I um the story I tell a lot is

that in during the pandemic I had a high school principal in South Carolina reach out to me she was watching my YouTube channel and she said my high school teachers are about to come back to school and they're super scared about their immune system and and Co and so can you give us some ideas on how we can keep our immune system high well I come from a family of teachers and I was like oh yeah can I give back to the teachers and teach them this is really exciting so I pop on this call

with about a 100 teachers at this high school and I go into all you should take this supplement you should eat this oil and you should do all these things and I get to the end of of the presentation it was all done on zoom and this really Brave man raises his hand and he's like um I hear what you're saying but if I'm at the supermarket and I'm looking at nut Butters the the nut butter with the right oil in it is $8 more than the one with the wrong oil I don't I don't

have that $8 and then another woman raised her hand and said I'm up at 4 in the morning and I drive to to get my classroom set up at 5: I don't take a lunch break and by 3:34 I'm driving home exhausted and the only place I want to go is through the drive-thru at fast food okay we will never ever get our country healthy until we help those people because they're on a limited income and they are trying to be healthy but everything in front of them is leading them towards chronic disease this is

why fasting became my tool because everybody can afford it and everybody even the busiest person can do it and people it works for the majority of people and then they have that momentum so that's what you know the fast food lady ju okay so let's eat your fast food in a compressed eating window The Nut Butter guy it was like okay well maybe Nut Butter isn't your go-to like let's figure out how you can look at maybe some getting some oils from food that you're getting up in your omega-3 and other oils like we just

found lateral changes yeah how do you how do you train someone to not eat for a period of time because I think we've talked about fasting but actually it's really hard when someone has to do it how how do you how does someone train themselves to do that yeah so you start by pushing your breakfast back that's what I typically do you can push your dinner up if you want but most people I start with breakfast so I tell people push your breakfast back an hour most people will say well can I have my coffee

yes you can have your coffee but but not your creamer like if you're putting like some some kind of uh sugar creamer in there or you're putting oat milk or almond milk in there those tend to spike your blood sugar a little bit too high so cow's Dairy goat's Dairy does a little bit better so you just make sure or black have your coffee black push your your your breakfast back an hour is going to be uncomfortable that's the first thing it's like this that moment you're going to be like why did I listen to

jett's podcast for that crazy lady came on and told me to push my breakfast back an hour now all I want to do is yell and scream because I'm hry I'm hangry but if they say if they stay with that the next day and then the next day by the third or fourth day that hour is going to feel like nothing so when it starts to get easy now you're going to push it back another hour so now you're two hours back and then maybe a couple you go a couple days with that and then

you're going to push it back another hour and every everybody that I've done with this within two weeks they are effortlessly fasting somewhere between 13 to 15 hours you're just taking all that food and you're just compressing it into an eating window but you're gently moving your body into that place you're not I've had people just out of nowhere go on three-day water fast but it that's a lot more suffering involved you do that definitely yeah is there anyone who should eat as soon as they wake up there's a lot of theories on this um

like sain Panda who is the Premier you know researcher on circadian rhythm he came on my podcast and he likes that you wait an hour after you wake up if you're going to try to get into the proper circadian rhythm meaning your melatonin and your cortisol are are being secreted at the right moment so he would prefer that you would wait an hour Dr Stacy Sims who is an expert and one of the leading experts in exercise and menopause came on my pock podast and she strongly feels you need some kind of nutrients coming in

the minute you wake up the first half hour you wake up to trigger the hypothalamus to start hormonal production when I broke that down with her she's also plant-based when I broke that down with her she said I put collagen powder in my coffee every morning and a splash of vegan collagen po yeah vegan yeah so she probably uses a vegan vegan one or maybe a marine one I didn't ask her through the vegan lens if she did if she did fish um and then she does MCT oil and then she does a plant-based cream

and she puts she does like a loaded coffee and that on some mornings that's her how she triggers this hypothalamus so I tell you all that to say that here we have two leading experts one says wait a half hour the other one says you need some nutrients in very quickly I think everybody's got to be their own in of one yeah yeah definitely for you yeah it's it's hard to know and I think that's why so much of this is also being able to listen to our bodies and our minds cuz I think so

much of our food habits are driven by our minds not our bodies I we mentally crave something emotionally crave something whereas when you actually listen to your body kind of like what I was saying to you earlier that when I'm listening to my body I'm like this amount of protein just doesn't feel right yeah right even if I'm trying on that I just want to point out because again I'm always going to be the um The Voice of women's empowerment what I'm discovering in women is we are massively massively disconnected from our bodies yeah so

we look at Instagram we look at magazines and we're like I want to look a certain way so then I will manipulate my body to look that way we are we are not clued into the rhythms and cycles of our body and often you could end up looking that way but because the internal setup isn't right like we often think it's also oh I have self-worth or self-esteem but it's completely chemical that's right right like it's just a hormonal imbalance it's not even it's not this mental idea that oh I don't believe in myself or

I don't love myself it's like well of course if I've been shifting my body and diet and everything to look this certain way it could be that my hormones and nutrients and everything are so imbalanced that I can't sustain a healthy mood yeah something I've deeply thought about is that when we look at the woman who's size two or the who's a size four or size zero like we look at that we say that's what I'm supposed to look like because the magazines Instagram everybody says I should look like that but actually if you look

at what estrogen does to the to the female body is it makes us it's what I call a little more padded it gives us a little more of a of a cushion of fat on us and that might be what's normal for us we just have this skewed view based off of what we're seeing on social media that we're supposed to look that way but if have you ever stopped like for the women listening and asked yourself is that the healthy way I mean one of the things that came out of fast like a girl

that really Disturbed me and motivated me to write eat like a girl was how many 20-year-olds and 30-year-olds don't have a menstrual cycle and they don't have a menstrual cycle because they've been manipulating their diet their diet's too low calorie their weight is too too low because they're trying to look a certain way that the culture says this is beautiful and when you're beautiful you're worthy but actually is it possible that the female body is meant to have more fat on it and and trying to be the skinest version of you is actually making you

sick and destroying your hormones and and I think it would be really interesting if we had better conversations around that so what do they do in that scenario when they've ended up creating that situation with themselves well the first thing is we're back at the calories is let's make sure you're eating enough calories for the thyroid you have to have 1,200 calories a day consistently so if you're eating 900 800 calories a day you're you're causing thyroid challenges and that could be a hyperactive thyroid that could be I mean so you're you could end up

with a faster metabolism which would eventually lead to a a a hypothyroid situation so let's get the in that person who's in deprivation let's that would be the one spot I would say let's make sure we're above 1,200 so that would be the first thing the second thing is I think it's really interesting I don't even for you and men in general is like when we eat and we're hungry do we ask ourselves like am I hungry or am I bored am I hungry or am I sad am I hungry or do I need energy

like make sure we're seeing that the food and the emotional response like we're pulling those apart um so I think I think that's a really important one because people eat and don't eat for a lot of different reasons and then that leads to the last thing with this person who might be a little bit thin is I think for a lot of women it's control like if I can control my body a certain way then you know my life will be in control and as you know controls an illusion and maybe there's something else you

can control this is why I like the continuous glucose monitor control your blood sugar and then you'll that'll lead you down the path of Health control your symptoms after you eat control the amount of sleep you get like there's other things to control but if you're trying to control your weight you're raising cortisol and you're leading yourself into this dysfunctional relationship with your body so well said how how do you manage fasting and working out like how do you fit it in and when should you be fasting and working out do they happen at the

same time or do they need to be uh stacked yeah I I again I'm going to go back to what's your intention do you remember the um the book body for life I don't no okay that book came out when I was again when I was in college no so it must have come in in like the late 90s early 2000s and this it was a fitness trainer and he offered up a million dollars to the person who could lose the quickest weight the most weight in the quickest period of time and he had a

whole formula and the number one formula that he said is you never work out a after you've eaten because his whole theory was when you eat you've brought glucose up and then you go to work out the body uses that glucose whereas if you work out when the glucose is not spiked your body has to go find the glucose it stored years ago in fat so it's actually going to burn fat more quickly this is this was how we worked out for years I think it's I I taught people in my women and men both

in my clinic all the time this strategy it is an incredible way to lose weight here's the challenge is that it can break down muscle and muscle right now is like we said is in Vogue it's the thing we're talking about so when we are looking at do you fast and exercise in a fasted State I think you have to ask yourself what your obje is if you're trying to lose weight yeah I think it's a great idea especially on the days not your weightlifting days but the days you're doing cardio yeah and yoga and

yoga and we don't eat two year two hours before a yoga session those are great times to go in in a fasted state but when you're trying to build muscle on the days your strength training let's have a little protein before and let's have some protein afterwards so just different days different workout out different things you're trying to accomplish great Dr Mindy P it's been such a joy talking to you today you've given so much valuable Insight uh this is one of those episodes that I feel I'm going to recommend to all my friends thank

you uh I'm going to be encouraging a lot of people to listen to it together and I think everyone who's been listening and watching I hope you pass it on to a friend I hope you listen to it with a friend because I just think it's at the heart of so many of our issues today is how we eat how we think about our body how connected we are to our bodies and I just love how structured thoughtful and methodical all your advice is so thank you so much for writing this incredible book and bringing

so much value to our community uh we end every on purpose episode with a final five or a Fast Five okay uh and no pun included and uh and uh we'd love for you to answer each of these questions in one word to one sentence maximum okay okay so Dr Mindy Pals these are your Fast Five the first question is what is the best health advice you've ever heard or received or given don't eat in the dark I love that one only eat in the light it it balances almost every hormone I love that uh

Second question what is the worst Health advice you've ever heard or received or given uh lowfat low calorie foods are going to help you lose weight wait let's let's dive into that tiny bit I think we covered it but I just want to make sure for anyone who's choosing lowfat low calorie food thinking they're going to lose weight what are they getting wrong uh let's use a diet drink it has aspiran in it aspiran is an obesogen and it stimulates appetite so you're you chose the the low sugar you know I don't want to use

brand names but you the diet soda you chose that thinking it's going to save help you lose weight but actually what it did is it's an obesogen that is making you gain weight spiking your appetite got it gosh crazy right it's crazy it's absolutely crazy it's like like this is why like conversations like this need to be had because there's people out there thinking they're doing it all wrong totally totally and you're doing all of that and you're going why and you're looking in the mirror and you're so mad at yourself yeah yeah then you

turn on yourself meanwhile big food is doing it to you yeah why are we not being projected yeah like why why is it why are we allowed to put abens into our body and why are we allowed to put all these toxins Plastics into our body I think it's a really good question and it starts with the FDA um the Food and Drug administrat Administration and I have some quotes in there in the eat like a girl that are really important and for starters why do we have Food and Drugs in the same Administration we

should have a Food Administration and we should have a drug and then in within the FDA there is a category of food called grass generally recognized as safe and what that means is that if they're going to put a new food product a synthetic food product into the food system they're going to assume it's innocent until proven guilty it takes a lot of money to prove that these ingredients are harmful and carcinogenic one of the ones that I love to to point out is partially hydrogenated oils about 20 years ago they identified that partially hydrogenated

oils fell into into this grass category that it was generally recognized it's safe but they hadn't really seen research telling them it wasn't safe and then the research showed up and the research said that these partially hydrogenated oils were actually contributing a major contributor to heart disease and should be taken out of our food system so what the FDA did is they say okay food industry or food companies you have 20 years it was like 20 to 20 5 years to get this carcinogenic heart challenged food out of our food system and it was by

2025 which is next year that will be out of our system but why did they give them 20 years how many people died in those 20 years that when they discovered that this food was causing cardiovascular problems that kind of goes on in the FDA all the time they care about profits they do not care about our health end a story so so worrying and so sad and that's why we have to do it from the bottom up that's why you have to be you know responsible I I always say and I really want people

to take this to their to Heart where you sit with your health if it's not what you like today and you're hearing this podcast and you're like whoa nobody told me all this it yes your poor health your trouble losing weight is not your fault but now that you've heard this it is your responsibility your health is your responsibility and in this day and age if you're doing nothing you're not reading ingredient labels you're not waking up to conversations like this you you are choosing chronic disease I promise you you are the statistics are showing

that if you're just eating with a blind eye you are choosing chronic disease because the FDA cares more about making profits than your well-being thank you for sharing that yeah uh question number three how would you define your current purpose it's been the purpose I've had for a while and it's to reconnect women to their bodies and fall in love with their bodies again um I I'll share a story on that one I was running around my neighborhood a few years ago and this little old lady like 70-year-old lady with this cute little hat and

a little and she was walking her dog and she had a cane um I kep running past her and on the third time I ran past her she waved me down and she said to me I bet it's amazing to live in your body and it was like to have a 70-year-old woman reflect that back to me made me realize that there's only one goal with health specifically for both men and women but especially for women is I want women to love living in their bodies I want women to have a really positive relation ship

with food I want women to feel empowered when they go into their doctor's office so that they're not gas lit and told that they you know their BMI is so high they better go get on some low calorie foods like I want women to understand what the gift they're living in and love it that's my purpose I love that uh question number four you say in the book when women Heal the World heals why thank you for pointing that out we are the nurturers we're the Community Builders we are the leaders of of our family

and their health I mean it's very even though we have a lot of men staying at home now women in general are the ones that make the health decisions and we are also the overg givers when you take amazing care of us we can turn around and take amazing care of you so when women heal then all of a sudden the family heals and when the family heals now the community heals and when the community heals then the state heals and it it just keeps going out but if that woman is sick now it's a

house of cards and actually Maryann Williamson's a dear friend of mine and she sent me a message and with that quote and she said this is what you're doing and I was so grateful for that and I that's why I put it in the book it's like we need to heal women now we're half of the planet and it is we are sick and we are struggling and we are reaching out and we need to heal women so that we can turn around and heal everyone else absolutely couldn't agree more uh Fifth and final question

if you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow what would it be oh eat real food re eat real food Nature's Food food without chemicals that would that would solve everything without packaging without packaging if everybody was forced to eat a potato versus a potato chip things like that would be so much better but eat real food end the story I love it the book is called eat like a Girl by Dr Mindy pels if you don't follow Dr Mindy already please subscribe to our podcast follow her across social media

and of course grab a copy of eat like a girl I could not recommend this book more I promise you there are so many great insights tactics tips inside of the book and I really really hope that you take charge and accountability of your own health after listening to this please send this episode to a friend I know there's someone in your life who benefit massively from listening to Dr Mindy Pal's advice and Dr Mindy thank you again honestly for coming on the show I hope you'll become a friend of the show and come back

soon because I just feel there's so much value that you're giving to the world and I'm grateful to to have you be a part of our platform so thank you so much yeah and thank you I mean I should have probably started off and tell tell you like I I listened to your podcast for years and and I love the way you show up and the guests you bring and the authentic voice you give us all an opportunity to live in that authenticity and it's just really enjoyable so thank you thank you thank you so

much if this year you're trying to live longer live happier live healthier go and check out my conversation with the world's biggest longevity Doctor Peter ATA on how to slow down aging and why your emotional health is directly impacting your physical health acknowledge that there is surprisingly little known about the relationship between nutrition and health and people are going to be shocked to hear that because I think most people think the exact opposite