Diary Of A CEO: w/ Dr. Mindy Pelz on Fasting (Transcript)

There’s a lot there. But I can show you how to compress your eating window into a 10 hour eating window, leaving 14 hours for fasting, something as simple as 14 hours. And I can show you how you can start to heal yourself. Without money, without time, you are literally tapping into a healing state that you never knew was there.

And I think part of why we’ve had so many people pour onto YouTube and so many women gravitate to the book is that once you learn how to fast, you start to see your body in this whole new way. It can absolutely heal itself. So for me, fasting became this incredible tool that everybody could do and we just had to learn how to do it.

The women that I’m watching that are just dropping, I mean, men and women, hundreds of pounds and medications they’re getting off of and mental health that’s coming back, just because I taught them how to compress their eating window and leave a longer time for rest so their body can repair. That is all each individual is doing. I didn’t do that.

The Science Behind Fasting

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m the type of person that very much needs stats to believe things. I’m one of those people. And once I’ve got the stats or some kind of scientific evidence, then I’m all in. What do I need to know from a scientific standpoint? What research has been done on fasting?

DR. MINDY PELZ: Okay, so let’s go through the basic principle of fasting, and I think this will help everybody. You have two metabolisms. So you burn energy when you eat and you burn energy when you don’t eat. But there are two different mechanisms.

So when you eat, let’s use myself as an example. I had eggs and some avocado around 11 o’clock today. So that’s going to bring my blood sugar up. Now, as my blood sugar starts to drop, what’s going to happen is my body’s going to switch over into this other energy system. I call this the fat burning energy system. I call this one the sugar burner energy system.

When it switches over into this fat burning energy system, it starts to make a byproduct called a ketone. And that ketone will go up into the brain and it starts to repair your brain. And what most people don’t realize is your brain needs 50% ketones, 50% glucose. So you’re giving a fuel source to your brain that it desperately needs. Which is why people, when they fast, their mental clarity goes up, their cognition improves, their brain fog goes away. Because you’re literally giving a fuel source to your brain that it may never have been given before. It takes about eight hours, somewhere between eight hours, to metabolically switch over into this fat burning place.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so if I’m doing a podcast and I want to be sharp.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I shouldn’t eat eight hours before.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Ah, f*. Did you come back in seven hours?

DR. MINDY PELZ: Seven hours before? Yeah, sure. I should have given you the memo before we got here.

So I think of it like a hybrid car. You switch over into this fat burning place. So at eight hours, you start to make the switch. By about 12 hours, your body’s now starting to make a good dose of ketones. The brain is excited, so you’re getting that mental clarity. Ketones turn off the hunger hormone. So when you switch over, there’s going to be a point where you’re not hungry. And that all happens at about 12 hours.

But if you stay there a little longer, if you stay there and you go 14 hours, 15 hours, check this out. Research shows at 15 hours, we see growth hormone go up. Growth hormone is the hormone that keeps you young and helps you burn fat. We also see in men, a 1,300% increase in testosterone just from somewhere between a 13 to 15 hour fast, a 1,300% increase in natural testosterone stores. And we can explain why that happens in a moment.

And then we start to see inflammation go down. So all of a sudden, if you have people who have joints that are hurting, they start doing 15 hours of fasting every day and they’re like, “God, my joints just don’t have that same stiffness in them anymore.”

But if you stay in that fasted window and keep going to 17 hours, your brilliant body turns within. And it goes, “Wait a second, no food’s coming in. We better get stronger.” So it literally takes the bad cells, the cells that are slowing you down, the cells that are turning into cancer, and it gets rid of those. They’re called senescent cells. And it literally recycles them out of your system. And it goes into the cells that are still usable and it makes them stronger. It fixes the inner cellular parts. We call that autophagy.

And if you want stats, the Nobel Prize in 2015, awarded to a Japanese scientist, Dr. Osumi, was won in medicine and physiology for this term called autophagy. And that’s when you go without food, your cells will heal themselves. That was back in 2015.

Where Did We Go Wrong? Busting the Breakfast Myth

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I want to go into all of that. I want to start with why fasting helps so much. And really, what I’m getting at is, if the effects of this are so profound in so many ways, then where did we go wrong? Because from what I’ve been told, breakfast, lunch, dinner. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, and then maybe dessert. Yeah, that’s the narrative that I was brought up on.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah, well, “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.” I’ve done a lot of research on that phrase. Do you know where it came from?

STEVEN BARTLETT: No.

DR. MINDY PELZ: It was actually, and I don’t mean to diss any companies out there, but it was a tagline that they came up with for Corn Flakes, for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes back in the 1970s. They needed a tagline that made people eat cornflakes in the morning. And so they came up with, “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.” And that has continued until this day. I can’t find any research, and many other fasting experts, many other blood sugar experts will tell you the same thing. There’s just no research showing that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. So that became a myth that we need to bust.

Second myth we’ve been taught is you can speed your metabolism up the more you eat, six meals a day. Remember that one? Also a myth. There is no evidence that the more you eat, the faster your metabolism will be. If you want a faster metabolism, you need to know how to metabolically switch. You need to know how to go from sugar burner to fat burner, and that’s where you start to lose weight.

The other myth that I feel like we have to break apart is, and I can tell you as a mother, and this is not for anybody to have mommy guilt, but what we do as parents is we have certain statements we make to our kids. Like, “Dinner’s being served. The kitchen’s closing in an hour. You need to eat lunch. You need to eat breakfast.” Like, we are programmed when to eat by a clock, not by our own internal sense. So kids are raised to eat according to a clock, not according to when they want to eat. We don’t say, “Am I hungry right now?”

STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s so true. We all wait until 1pm to have lunch, and in the morning we wake up, we feel like we have to have breakfast or we’re doing something wrong. And then dinner time, anytime between six and eight, we have to sit down and eat again or we’re doing something wrong.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yep. Like, if you just unwind that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. Where did that come from?

DR. MINDY PELZ: Usually from your parents, and it came from a schedule.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What did my ancestors do before my parents existed and the schedules existed?

DR. MINDY PELZ: I can tell you exactly what they did.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What did they do?

DR. MINDY PELZ: They came out of the cave. I’m going to go back to our primal friends. Go back to our cave friends. They came out of a cave. They didn’t have a refrigerator. They didn’t have a pantry. They didn’t have DoorDash. They had to go find food.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Did they have Uber Eats?

DR. MINDY PELZ: They didn’t have Uber Eats.

The Science of Feast-Famine Cycling

STEVEN BARTLETT: Delivery.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah, I’m pretty sure they didn’t have Uber Eats. But what they did is they came out of the cave and they went to go hunt food. Sometimes they could make a kill really easily and bring it home, and they would feast. Sometimes the kill wasn’t as easy, and they had to go far to find an animal to kill.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Exercise.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Exercise. But what did they do when they had to go super far and they couldn’t get food? They switched over into this ketogenic energy system, and that ketogenic energy system supercharged them. Because every cell in the human body — the number one priority of our cells is survival. So we were built to make sure we could stay alive in the absence of food.

So their ketones kicked in. And when ketones kicked in, they became mentally very focused so they could go find food. They were able to stay calm. Ketones will affect a neurotransmitter called GABA and cause GABA to come on. So you feel calm, you’re focused. Ketones will power up your muscles so that all of a sudden you have this incredible muscular energy. All because they were meant to go find food so they can bring it home.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay. So the body, which is orientated towards survival when you hadn’t eaten, it invests a lot of its sort of resources in your brain to increase the chances that you’ll catch something to eat. So that’s why when I fast or when I haven’t eaten, I’m very focused, I’m very articulate. It seems. And I perform at my best.

DR. MINDY PELZ: That’s right. Bingo.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It makes sense.

DR. MINDY PELZ: And then what did they do when they got a kill? They came home and they feasted. They didn’t necessarily ration it out. They ate and then they divvied up amongst the tribe, and then they went out again. When the food was gone, maybe a couple days — maybe they’d feast for a couple days. When the food was gone, they’d go out again.

It’s called feast-famine cycling. It is how humans were meant to live. The challenge we have is we have access to food all the time. Feasting has taken on a really negative connotation because we’re feasting on the wrong foods. But if we could go back and just be like our primal friends and we could learn how to go in and out of this feast-famine cycling — using fasting as a tool for performance, for healing, and using food in the proper way and eating the right food so that our brains will work well.

There’s a whole hormonal package or a sense of food that can help support hormones. If we’re really conscious about the quality of the food that we eat, we’re now mimicking what our primal ancestors were doing.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Does that also imply that we should exercise fasted? Because I was thinking, if thinking about my ancestors, they would have been doing the most physical activity when they hadn’t eaten yet.

DR. MINDY PELZ: That’s right. Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: They would have been doing the most physical activity right before they ate.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah. Really interesting point. When you exercise in a fasted state, you’re going to get rid of the glucose that’s been stored in your muscles. As that glucose comes out, because your body needs it — you don’t work 100% off of ketones and 100% off of glucose. You’re needing both of them at different moments of your day.

So when you’re exercising in a fasted state, you’re getting ketones and your muscles are releasing stored sugar, which is great for anybody who wants to lose weight, because now you can lean out those muscles.

Now let’s go back to what our primal ancestors did when they came home. They ate meat, they ate protein, and they stimulated something called mTOR. mTOR is when you actually create muscle growth. And what we now know is it takes about 30 grams of protein to trigger these amino acid receptor sites in the muscles to cause them to grow stronger.

So for you, if you work out in a fasted state, you’re going to release all those stores, you’re going to have those ketones for performance, but then you want to follow that up with protein so you can build your muscles strong. And that is a hack that has worked incredibly well for so many people.

The Six Types of Fasting

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay. Historically, people have thought that fasting is a one-size-fits-all technique. There’s one kind of fasting which is you just, I don’t know, you might just not eat for a prolonged period of time. But in your book and throughout your work, you describe these six different types of fasting. What are the six types of fasting? And tell me what the difference is in outcome and benefit?

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah, it’s a great question. So again, fasting is when we switch over — so now we’re in the fat-burning place. At about 13 to 15 hours, we start making ketones. This is intermittent fasting. That’s pretty much what most people, when they say they’re intermittent fasting, that’s what they’re doing.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, that’s like 12 to 16 hours.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah, they’re making ketones, testosterone’s going up, inflammation’s coming down, hunger might be going away. A lot of people lose weight with that. It’s kind of the most common fast.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Does it matter what time I start and what time I end?

DR. MINDY PELZ: You get to choose. You choose what that window should be.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I could eat at 3am?

DR. MINDY PELZ: There’s a whole other level. We can talk about why you don’t want to eat in the dark.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s ideal? An ideal window, do you think?

DR. MINDY PELZ: It depends on the time of the year, but in the summer I really like — if you’re going to do an eight-hour eating window — like 11 to 7 in the summer. And then in the winter, because it’s darker earlier, you would do more like a 10 to 5 kind of eating window.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s not so hard to do 11 to 7.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Right. Not hard at all.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Not hard at all. That’s not fasting. That’s just a slight — having a slightly later breakfast and a slightly earlier dinner.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah, but it’s like being intentional, right?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, exactly.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Because you don’t want to — you’ve got to keep blood sugar low, otherwise the minute blood sugar goes up, you’re going to switch over. So you can’t, you know, if you walk past the kitchen and put a grape in your mouth —

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

DR. MINDY PELZ: You’ve pulled yourself out.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. So that’s the first type of the six fasting styles. The second is — I’m going to try and say this word. Autophagy.

DR. MINDY PELZ: It’s one way of saying it. People say either autophagy or autophagy. People say it different.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You can tell me I said it wrong.

DR. MINDY PELZ: I kind of landed on autophagy. I feel like autophagy is the best way to say it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Autophagy fasting.

Autophagy: The Body’s Self-Healing Mechanism

DR. MINDY PELZ: So autophagy fasting is about 17 hours in without food. Your cells will turn within and they’ll start to heal themselves. And that was what Dr. Ohsumi’s big discovery was — that the cells clean themselves up.

What’s interesting on this one, and this is something I really want to get out to the world, is that when you stimulate autophagy, what you’re doing is you’re turning on the intelligence inside the cell. And that intelligence is looking around and it’s going, “Hey, there’s a virus, there’s a bacteria, get them out.” So it pushes these infections out of the cell. “That mitochondria, it’s not working well, we need to repair it. That endoplasmic reticulum inside here, it’s lagging. We need to fix it.” So it literally goes in and fixes everything inside the cell just at 17 hours.

But one of the greatest studies that I’ve seen in fasting was done during COVID, and it showed that if a virus comes into a cell that’s in a state of autophagy, it can’t replicate. Viruses have to live off of your energy system. So when viruses go into a cell that’s laden with glucose, they have a party in there. They love that. They munch on that, and then they go out and they start replicating. If you were in a fasted state when a virus comes in, it can’t replicate. There’s nothing inside that cell for that virus to take over, and it dies.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why does that happen? What’s the reason for that? Sort of the CEO within my cells looking around and saying, “Right, let’s clean all this stuff up.”

DR. MINDY PELZ: Well, because once you’ve stimulated autophagy, there is one goal for that cell, and that is survival. So everything in there is on high alert.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Everything is going to be in your survival interest. So a virus is not in your survival interest, so it pushes it out.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So it’s kind of like an emergency signal because there’s not been food for a while. So it’s kind of like the last attempt to do everything the body can to help you make it through this period of hunger.

DR. MINDY PELZ: That’s right. That’s right. You’ve put yourself in this state of extreme healing. And it’s all based off of this idea that your body wants to stay alive.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay. So are you writing in your book that that’s good for balancing sex hormones and preventing colds?

DR. MINDY PELZ: So yeah, with autophagy, it’s great for preventing colds. Here’s what’s interesting about autophagy for sex hormones. The major part of your brain, for both men and women, that controls all hormonal control is your hypothalamus and pituitary. That part of the brain does not have a blood-brain barrier, so it’s very vulnerable to toxins. So whenever we have massive toxic exposure, that part of the brain starts to malfunction.

We see this with polycystic ovarian syndrome, the most common hormonal imbalance for women. A lot of that is this imbalance of testosterone and estrogen, and there’s a huge toxic piece that has destroyed or interfered with the part of the brain that controls hormones.

So when we look at autophagy, there are certain parts of our system that are more easily influenced by autophagy than others. It turns out the hypothalamus and the pituitary are easily influenced by autophagy and can repair themselves when they’re in the state of autophagy.

The other interesting cellular makeup that is highly influenced by autophagy are the cells around the testes and the cells around the ovaries. Those are the cells that are putting out sex hormones. If that whole system is malfunctioning, when you go into a state of autophagy, those cells will respond and become better cells and be better at producing these hormones. And that happens because of you dipping in and out of the state of autophagy.

The Decline of Male Testosterone and Libido

STEVEN BARTLETT: That really got me thinking, because I’ve been looking at a lot of companies from an investment standpoint at the moment that are trying to solve for this macro decline in male testosterone. I had a few guests come on this podcast and tell me that male testosterone has been declining year over year. And then kind of paired with that, we’re becoming more and more sexless. Our libidos seem to be in decline.

I’ve got a lot of close friends of mine that are taking certain hormonal supplements to try and get their libidos back up. And for the first time ever, on a show called Dragon’s Den that I’m on in the UK, we had someone come into the Den for an investment that was producing a supplement to try and get our sex drives back.

Feels like a big macro conversation that we’re not having. And looking at your work and the work you’ve done about fasting and what you said there, it seems like there could potentially be a link between the two — the ways we’re living our life and what we’re eating, and our decline in testosterone and our libidos.

DR. MINDY PELZ: There’s a beautiful book, I don’t know if you’ve read it, called Countdown, and it’s about the sperm counts going down across the world. I actually brought her onto my podcast, the woman who wrote the book. And she said that there’s one chemical that’s reducing sperm counts more than any other, and it’s phthalates.

Phthalates are in fragrances, they’re in our colognes, they’re in our perfumes, they’re in our laundry detergents, they’re in our air fresheners. They also have now infiltrated into our water. They’re now being sprayed on our foods. Animals that are drinking the water have phthalates in them. So it’s the number one toxin that’s destroying testosterone levels. And it’s a brilliant book that she wrote.

The Toxicity Crisis: What We’re Putting In and On Our Bodies

STEVEN BARTLETT: You talk about in the Reset Factory, your first book from 2016, chapter 10, you said something which I hadn’t quite appreciated. You said that even the things we put on our skin are absorbed into our body and then they go directly into our bloodstream and into our kidneys. When I read that, it got me thinking because there are so many things that I sort of unconsciously just spray on my body every day and I never look at what’s in them because I just think it’s on the outside and it will wash off. But now you’re saying that…

DR. MINDY PELZ: Your skin is a breathable organ, so it’s going to push toxins out and it’s going to take toxins in. Think about if you’ve ever eaten something that didn’t react well with you — you might get a rash. That’s your brilliant body trying to push that toxin out. But the same thing happens when you put something on your skin. It actually goes into your body.

So a good general rule is: if you aren’t willing to eat it, don’t put it on your skin. And beyond that, if we even look at the microbiome, you have bacteria on your skin that protect you. And that bacteria are actually talking to the bacteria in our gut. There’s actually a connection between the two bacteria. So if you start putting things on your skin that destroy that microbiome, you’re actually going to ultimately have an adverse effect on the microbiome in your gut. So what you put on your skin is massively important.

And then the smell — we know the hippocampus, which is the seat of Alzheimer’s and dementia, is also where the olfactory nerve innervates. So when we smell something toxic and breathe something toxic in, it goes straight into the hippocampus and starts to create degeneration in those neurons that can ultimately lead to dementia and Alzheimer’s. Toxicity is a huge human problem.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Toxicity. When you say the word toxicity, how are you defining that? You’re saying toxic chemicals that we introduced into our lives — on our skin, consume, inhale, have around us?

DR. MINDY PELZ: Bingo.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And that are in our foods, et cetera.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yep. Bingo.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What are some of the most toxic chemicals or foods or products that we consume without thinking, that you think we need to stop consuming on a day-to-day basis?

The Hidden Danger of BPA Plastics and Obesogens

DR. MINDY PELZ: The easiest one is plastics — BPA plastic. They say that it’s not a matter of if you have plastic in your body, it’s a matter of how much. So let’s use it in context of something that people are really motivated by, which is weight loss.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s BPA plastics?

DR. MINDY PELZ: It’s a chemical within plastic that’s within our water bottles. It’s in our Tupperware. They’re actually saying that they’re now in the microfibers of our clothes, and that’s being washed out too — it gets really depressing when you start talking about toxins — washed out into our oceans.

But for the sake of simplicity, it’s mostly bottles that you see. But we’ve got plastic containers, we’ve got plastic plates, we’ve got plastic everything. And that has BPA in it, and that is a toxin that destroys human health.

The biggest and most interesting thing that BPA plastics do — there was a study around something called a Neguti mouse. They took this mouse that had a gene for obesity, and they were twins. They fed them the same food, they gave them the same amount of exercise. But one of the mice got introduced to BPA plastic, and the one that got the BPA plastic all of a sudden started to gain weight, and the hair color started to change. And that was the only difference between these two mice with the same genetic profile. And then when they detoxed the BPA plastic out, the mouse lost weight.

So that was the beginning of us understanding a term called obesogens. And obesogens are toxins that actually make us insulin resistant, actually cause us to hold on to more weight. And that’s just one category of toxins.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, that’s terrifying.

The Most Toxic Time in Human History

DR. MINDY PELZ: It is terrifying. To be completely from the center of my heart — this is why we have to educate ourselves. This is why we have to wake up. We have to understand that we are living in the most toxic time in human history. And it’s not just mental stress. It’s not just social media. It’s a barrage of all of that that is pulling us off course. And I can tell you that I have sat with some of the most brilliant doctors who are genuinely so concerned about the direction of humanity and where we’re going because of the abundance of these toxins.

STEVEN BARTLETT: As you said that, I could see a sadness in your face. Where does that come from?

DR. MINDY PELZ: I think it’s really easy when you hear a podcast like this and what I’m saying to reject what I’m saying, because it’s too overwhelming to understand the evolutionary mismatch we’re in right now. So many people are suffering, whether it’s physical or mental. And they don’t realize that it’s everything from the food to their shampoos to the plastic water bottles. It’s so vast, and yet nobody’s doing anything about it. And that’s where my heart hurts. It’s like people are suffering that don’t need to be suffering.

If they understood that the modern world we’re living in has taken us so off course with our health, and we’ve got to start to, one by one, figure out how to bring it back on course.

Yesterday I sat with Dr. Dale Bredesen and interviewed him on my podcast. He wrote a book called The End of Alzheimer’s, and he laid out seven things that we need to do to stop Alzheimer’s. And he strongly feels that Alzheimer’s is optional — you don’t have to get that. And those seven things are so intense. It’s everything from detoxing to metabolically switching, to prioritizing sleep, to human connection, to understanding what the best exercise is for you. And it’s easy for humans to look at those seven things and go, “I’m out. I can’t do all that.”

But if we want to exist on this planet, we’re going to have to do that. That’s the new level of health we’re in right now. And I love being the cheerleader — I want to be the one that’s like, “Come on, we can do it.” But I also need people to understand that where we’re living as humans right now is a very, very dangerous place. And it’s just in the existence of moving in and out of grocery stores and restaurants and the drugstore — everything has a toxic insult on us. And it’s overwhelming. It’s overwhelming.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Drastic action. Because we’re so drastically far away from where we’re supposed to be.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yep.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Where our ancestors were.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yep.

STEVEN BARTLETT: We’ve built up this society that’s full of plastics and toxins and alcohol and drugs and sugar everywhere. And I can’t move in bloody New York City, which is where we are now, without someone offering me — you know, almost every block is really bad food.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Horrible.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Food that tempts this certain part of my brain that maybe is looking to help me stay alive and to survive, whether it’s pizza or sweets or whatever it might be. So it is difficult. And I have a great deal of empathy for anyone that’s struggling with it.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Me too. Me too. We’ve hit a point where the door out of poor health is multifaceted. It’s not just one door. And if you’re healthy and you just want to get in better shape, then the path is a little bit easier. But what do we do for the person that gets the cancer diagnosis? What do we do for the woman who’s suicidal going through her menopause years? Where are we helping her? How are we getting to them? And each time they walk into their doctor’s office, they’re typically getting a pill and not being taught how to live a life that works with their body. In this modern world, that’s where we have to get to.

The Five Styles of Fasting

STEVEN BARTLETT: Back to the episode — you told me about the first two styles of fasting. The first one was intermittent fasting, which is 12 to 16 hours, which is good for weight loss, brain fog, that kind of thing. The second is autophagy—

DR. MINDY PELZ: Autophagy.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What did I say?

DR. MINDY PELZ: Autography. But I like it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I said autophagy. I said autophagy or atrophy. We can play that back. I definitely said autophagy. And if I didn’t, we’ll fix it with AI. Autophagy fasting, which is 17 to 72 hours — good for balancing sex hormones and preventing illness.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah. Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Number three — we haven’t spoken about gut reset fast.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s that?

# 3. The Gut Reset Fast

DR. MINDY PELZ: So that’s based off a study that came out at MIT that showed that 24 hours without food and your intestinal stem cells inside your gut actually start to reboot themselves. Now, a stem cell is a cell that can go to anywhere in the body and repair itself. But at 24 hours, you get a plethora of them in your gut.

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

So now if I teach that person how to eat right, their food is actually starting to build a better microbiome in the gut. So that 24-hour fast became this go-to in my clinic where I could take all these gut challenges and I could start to unwind them, just because I knew the body had this capability of making these intestinal stem cells.

And it was incredible. We got people off supplements, we got people that weren’t making serotonin — which affects moods and comes from the gut — all of a sudden started to become happier. People who hadn’t had bowel movements in like three days, all of a sudden we started to put in this gut reset and it was like a miracle. It was incredible.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Number four — fat burner fast.

# 4. The Fat Burner Fast

DR. MINDY PELZ: So the fat burner fast is probably my favorite for those people who want to lose weight. The research was done that 36 hours without food, followed by 12 hours of eating — they actually did it over a 30-day period. But we’ve been using it in our community, just dosing it in.

At 36 hours, what happens is that’s enough time where the blood sugars come down, where all of a sudden the body — it’s so smart — it goes, “Okay, blood sugar is not coming. We’ve been in this fasted state. We’ve triggered autophagy, we’ve brought inflammation down, we’ve made you ketones, we’re trying to go find food. But this extra weight — it’s not serving you, because remember, you’ve got to go find food.” So it drops weight.

And it’s the most beautiful way to get a person to unstick any kind of weight loss resistance. But most importantly — you know where it dropped the most amount of weight from? Where does everybody want to lose weight?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Belly.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yep. So I probably should have called it the fat burning belly.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Fat burning — yeah, the belly fat. Yeah, that would have banged. Yeah.

DR. MINDY PELZ: But yeah. And so that’s what they showed — that actually a 36-hour fast started to unstick weight loss, and it started with weight around the belly.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Compelling. Number five — the dopamine reset fast.

The Dopamine System and Fasting

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah. So number five, I found some research showing that when people go without food for 48 hours, the whole dopamine system will be rebooted. So what’s important to know about the dopamine system is it is our molecule of happiness. It is the thing that — it’s actually a motivation molecule and it’s a neurotransmitter that allows thoughts, happy thoughts, to go across from neuron to neuron.

So what happens — and I’m sure you’ve talked about this on your podcast — is that we’re so dopamine saturated right now. But specifically, people who are overeaters, they actually are finding — the study I quote in the book is that they found that people who had food addiction, people who had extra weight, like obese situations, they were not getting as much happiness out of their food because their dopamine receptor sites were saturated. So they had to eat more food to get more happiness.

Food is a state changer. It does make us happy. So what they found is if they put them into a 48-hour fast, they actually rebooted the whole dopamine system and new dopamine receptor sites appeared. So when they brought food back into the equation, they actually got more enjoyment out of food with less food.

The Sugar Cycle

STEVEN BARTLETT: This kind of got me thinking about a conversation I was having yesterday with some of my team here. We were talking about how it almost feels like sometimes if I’ve eaten sugar, I can go into a bit of a sugar cycle. What I mean by that is I’ll have some sugar and then a couple of hours later I’ll have another craving for sugar, and then a couple of hours later I’ll have another craving for sugar.

But then at other times, specifically when I did keto — I did the keto diet for about eight months. Eight weeks. Bloody eight months. I wish. Eight weeks. And throughout that period, I didn’t have any cravings for sugar. We had some chocolate come into the studio and I walked over to the chocolate and I smelt it, and I didn’t want any of it. It had gone.

But then when I’m in what I call the sugar cycle, I’m eating sugar maybe once or twice a day, and I’m getting the craving for it which I just can’t seem to resist.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Dopamine is the molecule of more. It’s not the molecule of enough. So what it does is when you get sugar, you get this dopamine rush and the brain goes, “Woo, love that, give me more of that.” And so it’s endless. You will never be fully satisfied. It constantly wants you to come back for more and more and more.

So when you start to go off of the ketogenic energy system, you’re getting the same euphoria. You probably felt the same high, the same mental clarity, but you’ve totally taken this molecule of more out of the picture. Dopamine will actually — you get those receptor sites that will be repaired, but you’re not getting a big dopamine buzz when you’re in a ketogenic state. You’re getting ketones.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I was mulling it with my team — how long I had to stay away from sugar to kind of get out of that vicious “give me more” cycle.

DR. MINDY PELZ: My experience has been it’s about three days.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Three days — that’s what I thought. Yeah, I think I said four or five. But it’s just from experience as well. If I haven’t had sugar for three or four days — like a chocolate bar, something significant in terms of sugar — then after three or four days, the craving for it seems to vanish.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah. If you think about that, that’s not hard if you’re trying to overcome a sugar addiction. Just bear it for three days and then that dopamine stops barking at you. And then if you tack fasting onto it, now you’re getting ketones and so you’re not needing that as much. Ketones kill hunger, and they make you so mentally clear, they give you this euphoric feeling, so you don’t have that urge to go for the sugar.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And the ketones come from fasting, which is when your body switches metabolic state. The last and final fasting style — immune reset fast.

The Immune Reset Fast

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah. So immune reset was built off of Dr. Valter Longo’s work, and he did a study on people who had cancer and were going through chemotherapy. One of the challenges we know about chemotherapy is that it wipes out the whole immune system. And so he wanted to see — well, what if I put somebody in a fasted state as they went through chemotherapy? Would there be a difference?

What he found is after three days of fasting, the white blood cells in our system actually reboot themselves. All old white blood cells are sloughed away and new white blood cells emerge. So people were able to come out of that chemotherapy experience and have a stronger immune system, as opposed to what we were seeing, which was that it was wiping the immune system out.

So that launched the whole three-day water fast sort of craze. At least here in America, we’re seeing a lot of people just going after three-day water fasts to prime their immune system. But you also, at three days, get stem cells — full systemic stem cells. All of a sudden your body is surging with stem cells going to all parts of the body, repairing it.

The great example I always use on this one — I had an Achilles tendon injury and nothing was helping it. So I threw a five-day water fast at it. On the fourth day I felt this buzz in my Achilles tendon and I was like, “Oh, wonder what that is.” And it stayed all the way through. I went five full days, and about the fifth and sixth day — the sixth day I was entering food back in — all the pain completely went away and it never came back. I tried everything, and that was the only thing that repaired it.

The Evolutionary Logic of Fasting

STEVEN BARTLETT: That does make evolutionary sense. If our body senses we’re injured because we’re not eating, or some other signal that we are on a course to not survive — to put it nicely — it does make sense that it might set about to repair whatever needs to be repaired. Because if I was a wounded human back on the savannahs of Africa, or wherever we came from, and I’m laid there and I’m not eating, my body should probably go, “Okay, Steve might need something fixed so he can get back to hunting.”

DR. MINDY PELZ: You’re getting it. Survival — that is the number one priority of the body. So when you go without food, you amplify every resource it has to keep you alive. And if repairing my Achilles means I can now go hunt for food, it’s going to do that. It’s going to make me stronger.

When I was writing the book, I stumbled upon a really cool hypothesis called the thrifty gene hypothesis. It’s a theory that the humans who evolved out of the primal days had a very specific genotype. This genotype allowed us to metabolically flex and be stronger in a fasted state because we had to survive. And the people that didn’t make it from that time period didn’t have that gene.

They think we all have this gene inside of us right now — this thrifty gene — where we can go long periods without food and we can survive. So what happens when we’re eating all day? What happens when we’re ignoring and not actually activating that genetic profile? What they are now believing is that diabetes, metabolic syndrome — all of that is largely happening because we are going against the genetic profile that we are now seeing in humans. We’re on the opposite end of this spectrum.

STEVEN BARTLETT: We’re overloading our bodies.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Which means that the survival gene you referenced there is not being activated to help us.

DR. MINDY PELZ: That’s right. That’s right.

Does Coffee Break a Fast?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Interesting. What about coffee? If I’m going to fast — I know people are so addicted to coffee, so I feel like I have to ask the question as their representative — does coffee break the fast?

DR. MINDY PELZ: No. Well, it depends. Okay, so this is —

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m deciding I need a yes or no.

DR. MINDY PELZ: I can’t give you a yes or no on it. I’m going to give you “most likely.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Most likely it’s okay.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Most likely it’s okay. There’s not a high degree of certainty and conviction there.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Let me explain myself. When you drink a cup of coffee, it shouldn’t spike your blood sugar. So if you have black coffee and your blood sugar doesn’t spike and you’re trying to metabolically switch over into your fasting window, you’re good. You’re golden. Drink that black coffee.

Now if I add some sugar to it — now you’ve pulled yourself out of the fasted state.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so no sugar — just a plain coffee with no milk or sugar in it is —

DR. MINDY PELZ: Most likely going to keep you in a fasted state.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Most likely.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Well, I’ve seen a few occasions where it didn’t. This is why we have people test their blood sugar — it’s unique to you. You can test your blood sugar, have the cup of coffee, half an hour later check your blood sugar again. Those numbers should be equal.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay. So for most people, coffee should be fine when they’re fasting.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But there are a couple of anomalies whose blood sugar does spike.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Which means they’re not going to switch over to the fasted state.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yes, exactly. And coffee mate creamers — those can be a little more problematic. But some people put full fat cream in there with no sugar. Some people put MCT oil in there. The buttered coffee became very, very common, and that was because of the fasting movement. The reason they did that was because when you put a fat in your coffee, you stabilize your blood sugar, and so you were able to stay in the fasted state and switch over.

The Glucose Monitor Revelation

STEVEN BARTLETT: I had Glucose Goddess on the podcast — Jessie. She talks a lot about glucose spikes. It was the first time my eyes were really open to the consequence of living a life where your glucose levels are constantly spiking and crashing and spiking and crashing.

I’ve invested in this company called Zoe, where they give you a glucose monitor, which I attached to my arm for 14 days as part of the initial test. And then they give you this big nutrition plan and profile. That was the first time I got to see — I was in America at the time, in LA for a couple of months. In LA, I pulled up at a gas station, and as I was walking through it, everything in there was sugar. Because now I was looking — I had my eyes open because I was wearing this monitor. I was about to see the impact within minutes that it would have on my body. And I was just looking around thinking, “Oh my God, the only thing I can see in this whole store that I can eat without spiking my glucose is water.”

DR. MINDY PELZ: Is it a monitor where you can see it, you can scan it?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. So they’ve got two — one of them you scan, and the new one they’ve got is automatic, by Bluetooth. So it just keeps constantly updating on your phone.

DR. MINDY PELZ: I honestly think we could dramatically change the health of the world if everybody put one of those on.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Amen. Amen.

The Individual Approach to Blood Sugar and Metabolism

DR. MINDY PELZ: Because then what you would do is you would just go. Because, you know, this is like coffee. Like you should. It should be so simple for me just to say, yes, drink your coffee, you’re fine. But your microbiome in your gut is going to determine what it does with whatever hits that. So it’s going to determine your blood sugar levels. You, your microbiome, my microbiome, completely different. So food no longer is a one size fits all. There’s an individual approach. So you have to know what your blood sugar is doing. You know, like when I eat, believe it or not, when I eat a grass fed steak, my blood sugar goes down. It’s amazing.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Wow.

DR. MINDY PELZ: So whereas other people eat a steak and their blood sugar goes super high. And so then again, you go to a thread of this conversation which is, how do we help humanity?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

DR. MINDY PELZ: And humanity wants the one size fits all. I can’t give you that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

DR. MINDY PELZ: You’re going to have to learn your own. You gotta learn you. And something like that teaches you, you. But you’re going to have to become very curious about you. Like you are. And what’s really fun to me when you put one of those things on, it’s my favorite thing to do with patients is I say just eat normal. Just eat everything.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

DR. MINDY PELZ: And then every day I have them send me their readings and we just talk it through. I just did this with a beautiful patient that I’ve been working with who has a long history of eating disorders. And she was counting calories and really wanted the control of being able to keep her weight where she was, where it needed to be. And I said, yeah, you can count calories if you want, but I just want you to stick this monitor on and let’s just eat and let’s see what you’re doing.

And she was vegan, and this isn’t an anti vegan conversation, but her spikes were up and down and up and down. Like there were like eight of them a day. And her moods followed those spikes too. And so then we started to go, okay, well, let’s add a protein here. Could we add fat here? Could we add some more fiber here? And she got to watch for herself and within four weeks she was free of any food control and she was off teaching everybody else. It was so beautiful to watch that.

The Problem with Calorie Counting

STEVEN BARTLETT: That calorie counting point though. There’s a big school of thought that in order to lose weight and be healthy, all you’ve got to do is count those calories.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah. You know, there’s something called a set point. Have you heard about the set point?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. Which is the amount of calories that I need to consume in order to hit my…

DR. MINDY PELZ: That’s right. So we all have a set point. If you’re going to go down the calorie path, you have to understand you have a set point, and the set point is how much calories coming in and how much calories going out. What’s the delta of that? And that will keep you at whatever weight you want to be. So let’s use an example. You eat 1,500 calories a day. You exercise 500. You have a delta of 1,000. So if you want to keep your weight where it’s at, you always have to do a thousand calories every single day.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Okay, well, what happens on the days you decide not to work out? So now you have 500 extra calories that your body’s not used to. And so what does it do with those calories? Stores it. So then you all of a sudden start noticing you’re gaining weight and you don’t really understand why. So you’re like, well, let me count. I need to restrict calories.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

DR. MINDY PELZ: So then you start eating maybe 500 less. And then you bring the set point down. Well, that’s your new set point. You’re going to have to stay at that set point now if you don’t ever want to gain another pound. You see the game.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, okay. So my set point is moving. That’s crafty.

DR. MINDY PELZ: It moves. Because as you restrict, as food restriction goes down and energy output goes up, your set point goes down. And now you’re like, I feel great. But you can’t leave from that set point. You’re going to always have to make sure that that set point is a thousand calories or 800 calories.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I was told, I mean, this is the school of thought that I have to have for me as a male that has my weight, 2,000 calories a day, and then if I’m under 2,000 calories a day, then I’ll lose weight. That’s what I was told.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah. So you go. Now you go to 1,500 calories, you drop weight.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. To lose the weight.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yep. You go back up to 2,000. And for most people, they start to…

STEVEN BARTLETT: …gain weight again because my set point has moved. So now it’s 1,500 to maintain my weight.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah. Which is why, if you think about it, have we ever seen a calorie restriction diet work long term?

STEVEN BARTLETT: No.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I haven’t. Long term being the key word there.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah. It’s short term. It works great. But this is why I’m such a fan of metabolic switching. How about we watch blood sugar, we put a monitor on so that you keep your blood sugar spikes minimal. It’s like what I did with this woman — I was like, can we have two spikes in a day, not eight. And we just keep your blood sugar at a low level, so that when you’re not eating, you can switch over and now you can burn fat in the fat burning energy system.

So metabolic switching is where you’re keeping your blood sugar at a stable place. It’s not got all these spikes all over the place, so that when it starts to go down, the body’s going to want to switch over and it can start to burn fat and use that other energy system.

Our Relationship with Sugar and Metabolic Health

STEVEN BARTLETT: What do you think our relationship should be with sugar?

DR. MINDY PELZ: Well, you know, there’s only 12% of Americans that are metabolically healthy. That means that they have the right blood pressure, the right cholesterol, that their hemoglobin A1C, their insulin, all those metabolic markers are in balance. Only 12% of Americans have that right. That is a huge problem, and that is largely because we’re addicted to sugar.

So what’s the consequence of poor metabolic health? Obesity, cancer, heart disease, mental health challenges, I mean, you name it. Every chronic disease on the planet at the root has a metabolic thread. Now, I hate to bring back a really traumatic topic, but during COVID when we looked at the people that fell prey to Covid, this is no disrespect, they were metabolically unhealthy. And the people that had less Covid symptoms were the ones that were more metabolically healthy in general. And largely because the virus could really replicate if you had a lot of glucose in your system.

So the consequence is huge. And the healthcare consequence, the amount of money we pay trying to help everybody put their health back together because they’re metabolically unhealthy — if we just started with metabolic health, we would change everything.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And metabolic health, people think of metabolic health often as being, you know, I’m in good superficial shape, I’d like to think, but that’s not metabolic health. You could be, I’m guessing you can be metabolically unhealthy but also have abs.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Oh, yeah, you could. This woman I was telling you about, with all the spikes, she’s actually a model and an actress.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, wow.

DR. MINDY PELZ: That is beautiful. And we had to go back in and really work with getting her metabolically healthy. So, yeah, you could. We call it skinny fat. You look skinny on the outside, but you’re dealing with excess sugar on the inside. That is putting fat around your liver, putting fat in other areas.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think a lot of people can relate to that skinny fat concept.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah. So it’s a major, major issue. And we can look at different things like hemoglobin A1C. It’s a marker in the blood. Everybody gets it tested every year when they go to their doctor. It should be under five. If it’s not under five, what’s happening is all that extra sugar is going around your red blood cells and your red blood cells carry oxygen to your body, so they’re gummed up with sugar so they can’t deliver oxygen to the brain, to your eyes, to your muscle. So you’re not getting oxygenated because of the sugar, just gumming up these red blood cells.

The Metabolic Health Crisis in Women

STEVEN BARTLETT: In chapter one of your book, you talk about this metabolic health crisis in great detail. You share some stats which I pulled out, which I thought were terrifying. It’s page four of your book. You say, according to the CDC, 41% of women 21 and older are obese. 45% have high blood pressure. One out of two will develop cancer in their lifetimes. One out of five will develop Alzheimer’s. One out of nine will get type 2 diabetes. One out of eight will develop a thyroid problem. And 80% of all autoimmune conditions occur in women. Why is that, that last one? 80% of all autoimmune conditions occur in women.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah. So autoimmunity is a really interesting one. And if you look at what an autoimmune condition is, it’s the body attacking itself. And so when we look at where toxins go, we’re back at the toxins. Hashimoto’s — why is the body attacking the thyroid? There’s something there that needs to get out. So it’s usually a toxic issue. So the body’s attacking the thyroid. When we look at RA and joints, there’s toxins in there. The body’s attacking that.

So it’s happening more to women largely because we have so many influences that are affecting our hormones. So the best way I can explain this is something I call the hormonal hierarchy, where our sex hormones are going to be completely thrown off by insulin. So when you get insulin resistant, your sex hormones are off, and insulin is going to be so impacted by cortisol. So when you’re stressed all the time, you’re going to be insulin resistant. And when you’re insulin resistant, you’re going to have trouble balancing estrogen, progesterone and testosterone.

But at the top of the hierarchy is oxytocin. And oxytocin is that — we’re getting oxytocin right now just from connecting with each other. And it’ll start to calm cortisol down. And then when it calms cortisol down, you can be more insulin sensitive. And when you can be more insulin sensitive, now your sex hormones can balance better. So we need that hierarchy as women to be in balance in order for our bodies to be in balance. But what do we have women doing right now? We have poor diet, lots of stress, and our sex hormones are way off.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And sugar.

DR. MINDY PELZ: And sugar. You’re going after the sugar. So women are perishing in this modern world more than men. So we’ve got to help a woman bring back more insulin sensitivity. We’ve got to get her doing better stress management. And when we do that, now the immune system can regulate, now the immune system can calm down and stop being so hyperactive, attacking all the toxins that are in the body. So it’s very complex.

Women, Stress, and Hormonal Balance

STEVEN BARTLETT: Does that imply that women and men have a different relationship with stress?

DR. MINDY PELZ: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Okay, so I’m going to be as bold as to say this, and I know all my feminist women out there are not going to like this, and I was raised by a strong woman. I am a strong woman. I’ve raised another strong woman. And I have to tell you that we are not meant to handle the stress loads as well as men, and that’s largely because of two hormones.

So estrogen makes us very outward, makes us very much an extrovert, and we can handle a lot of stress when estrogen is present in our body. But progesterone, she can’t handle stress at all. So progesterone will start to diminish as cortisol goes up. I always say, “When cortisol goes high, progesterone becomes shy.”

So now, the number of women since Fast Like a Girl came out, that I have heard from — the 20 and 30 year olds that have no cycle, none — that is because they’re insulin resistant, they’re more stressed. Progesterone’s not making her appearance. So there’s no shed of the uterine lining. That is absolutely a stress issue.

And not having a period for a woman is a major problem because that’s how we detox. That’s how we get these hormones out of us. So if you’re not having a cycle, you’re not getting rid of estrogen, you’re not getting rid of so many toxins and it’s just staying inside of you. That’s a major problem.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Controversial idea, but it rings true for a lot of people.

The Female Menstrual Cycle and Hormones

STEVEN BARTLETT: And I know this because I’ve had women very close to me in my life talk to me about this exact thing. And specifically not having their menstrual cycle and then focusing on the stresses in their life and then it comes back, their menstrual cycle coming back, people very, very close to me, in fact, that I’ve struggled with because of this exact challenge.

It is a controversial idea though, isn’t it? It’s slightly problematic as an idea. Is there any scientific basis for that idea?

DR. MINDY PELZ: Well, we know based off science that when cortisol goes up, progesterone goes down.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Cortisol is the stress hormone.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah. So when you’re under stress, cortisol goes up. And so if you’re, let’s say it’s the week before your period, that’s when you’re supposed to have the most amount of progesterone. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to run a marathon, doesn’t matter if you have a work deadline, doesn’t matter if you’re skimping on sleep. As long as cortisol is going up, progesterone’s not going to make her appearance. And if she doesn’t make her appearance, then the uterine lining won’t shed. That’s been proven over and over. Every hormone expert would agree. Multiple studies, but women don’t realize that.

So if there’s ever a time to mind your stress, it’s the week before your period. Which is why you don’t fast the week before your period, because that’s a bit of a stressor. It’s why you shouldn’t train for a big Spartan race or a CrossFit event or run a marathon. You should be doing more yoga and recovery the week before your period. This is why we should prioritize sleep the week before our periods, because we don’t want cortisol up.

So in an interesting world, this is sort of the vision I have for women right now — what if there is this moment where the week before our period, we have the capability of maybe not working as hard? Like Spain — they’re giving a three day menstrual leave to women.

STEVEN BARTLETT: No questions asked before the period.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Well, it’s no questions asked. They anticipated that women would use it the first three days of her period. But a woman can use it anytime. I say use it the three days before your cycle is supposed to come.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Interesting. Have you shared this idea before publicly?

DR. MINDY PELZ: On several podcasts, I’ve talked about it. I had a great interview with Kate Northrup on my podcast and she’s an entrepreneur and she actually maps her whole business cycle around her menstrual cycle. And so we had a beautiful conversation about this. She said that she doesn’t do as many Zoom calls. She tells her team that she’s going to get off work a little bit earlier on those days. She slows everything down. Her workload goes dramatically down. And she said what ended up happening is that when her period started, her productivity went up.

See, when estrogen comes in on day one, day two of our menstrual cycles, estrogen makes us really mentally clear, makes us very verbal. Estrogen’s an incredible hormone for productivity. But if you aren’t minding that back half of your cycle and you’re not slowing down, then you’re coming into your period and you’re having — you hear so many women who are like, “I’m cramping, I’m bleeding a lot, it’s really painful.” That’s because you didn’t mind the back half of your cycle.

The Evolutionary Basis for Hormonal Cycles

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what’s the sort of evolutionary basis for all of this? Why is the body doing this? Why is the body not going to give us our periods? I mean, listen, I don’t have a period, but — well, I have a version of it, right? I’m sure men have some kind of —

DR. MINDY PELZ: You guys have a 24 hour cycle.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.

DR. MINDY PELZ: So every 15 minutes you get testosterone.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.

DR. MINDY PELZ: You know we joke about that, right?

STEVEN BARTLETT: What do you say? You joke behind our backs?

DR. MINDY PELZ: Kind of. What’s the joke? Like, if you don’t like what your husband’s saying, just ask him in 15 minutes, he might say something different.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, that’s what you’ve been saying.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Just letting you in on what might be going on behind the scenes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so what is the evolutionary basis for why that is true?

DR. MINDY PELZ: So think about — let’s go back to our primal days. Testosterone is meant to have you go out and hunt. It’s very motivating. You get it every 15 minutes. So — God, this sounds, as I’m saying it, so sexist. But when we look at the body, this is actually how we’re built.

So your body was driven to go hunt and go find and go achieve. That’s the number one hormone that it works off of. For the women, we are meant to be more outgoing before ovulation. Okay, why is that? We need to connect. We need to start to feel that mental clarity. Estrogen makes your hair really full and your skin really glow, and it starts to make us more beautiful — all leading up to ovulation.

Once ovulation hits, now we have estrogen at our peak, we have a little bit of testosterone, and we have a little bit of progesterone. Well, why is that? Because now our libido’s up. We’re motivated to reproduce. We’re looking beautiful because we have so much estrogen going through our body. We’re verbal, we can connect, and we have progesterone to keep us calm. So we’re supposed to reproduce when ovulation hits.

And then the back half — technically, we would have a fertilized egg, and we would be winding down. And if we didn’t get a fertilized egg, then we’re supposed to relax so we can go back and do the extroverted piece of ourselves in the front half of our cycle. So it’s all based off of reproduction.

Understanding Your Partner’s Hormonal Cycle

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I need some advice then, because I’m in a relationship, and I want to understand — I guess this goes both ways. I want my girlfriend to understand how hormones are influencing my behavior.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And I want to know how hormones are influencing her behavior.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What advice have you got for me?

DR. MINDY PELZ: Well, the first is, do you know her cycle?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Moving on. We’re going to talk about sugar again.

DR. MINDY PELZ: No, no, this is too good.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So, sugar, it’s really bad, isn’t it? Who’s to blame?

DR. MINDY PELZ: No, seriously. No.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Tell me about your childhood.

DR. MINDY PELZ: No. Get to know her cycle. I’m going to give you gold.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I shouldn’t.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Let me give you gold.

Okay, so day one of her cycle, day one to day ten, she’s building estrogen. First couple of days of her cycle, just let her be — she’s transitioning out of the back half of her cycle. She might be having some heavier bleeding. She’s moving into that extroverted place. So the first two days, give her some space.

Now day three, estrogen is starting to build. So you’re going to notice she’s more verbal, she’s going to be more present. She might feel more outgoing. She’s going to feel like she wants to connect with you. That’s going to go all the way through ovulation, like in the middle of ovulation, which is about day 12, day 13, where all of a sudden estrogen’s at its peak.

If you have any conflict you want to resolve with her, do it between day two and day 12 of her cycle. She’s going to be so ready to handle any conflict with you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Let me write that down. Day two and day 12.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Literally — I had a dad come to me and tell me that he was struggling to understand his teenage daughter. And I said, “Well, do you know her cycle?” And he’s like, “No, I don’t.” I said, “Well, you would never, ever bring a conflict to her on day 18 or 19 of her cycle. Bring it to her on day 10. And now she’s going to talk to you.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m going to say something which is really embarrassing here. I know nothing about menstrual cycles. At no point in my life did anybody teach me about menstrual cycles. The only insight I have in my life to what a menstrual cycle is is overhearing my sister when I was younger talking about it. And when I say overhearing, I mean maybe a sentence. And then maybe my girlfriend, once in a while, she’ll say, “Oh, I’m coming into my cycle,” or whatever. She’ll say, “I’m on my period.” That’s for most men — that’s, in fact, the extent of the education we have about the female reproductive menstrual cycles.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yep.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So talk to me like I’m an idiot about the menstrual cycle. How long is it?

DR. MINDY PELZ: Oh, I love this. And do you know that most women don’t know either?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, really?

DR. MINDY PELZ: Most women are ignorant to their own cycles. So it’s 28 days. Anywhere from 28 days to 32. Every woman has a different length.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, and what day does the period come on?

DR. MINDY PELZ: Day one. So day one is the first day she bleeds.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, then how long does that last for — what, seven days?

DR. MINDY PELZ: Everyone’s different. Anywhere from three to seven days.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so you said between day two and 12 is when to pick my battles.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yes. So day two, you’re going to start to see her emerge a little more gregarious. She may be a little more outgoing. As she gets closer to day 12, you want to go party with her. You want to take her out, make her feel good — that’s the time to wine and dine her.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, cool. We’ll put all the dates then and all the fights. And then after day 12, what am I doing?

DR. MINDY PELZ: Well, okay, so day 12 is right when she’s ovulating. So you’re going to have to choose your battle there. But ovulation occurs for most women between day 10 and day 15. There’s a small little five day window there. Once I figured this out, I was like, “Why don’t men know this?” That’s when her libido’s going to be the highest.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so we’re having sex on day —

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yes. So if you want to have sex with her —

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m just writing this down. Have sex with her around that time.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Around that time.

STEVEN BARTLETT: If she’s willing.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah. She’s going to be more motivated. Because she has testosterone, she’s going to feel more like it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, then after she finishes ovulating, after day 15?

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah. So then there’s going to be a crash of hormones. You might see a change in her personality. She might feel a little low —

STEVEN BARTLETT: Go stay in a hotel.

DR. MINDY PELZ: But you could ask — if she’s having a bummer day or a low day, ask her if she knows what day she’s on. Or just be really nice. And then here’s the gold. This is so good. You’re going to have to report back to me how this works.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Around day 17 or 18, progesterone’s coming in. This is where you’ve got to give her foot rubs. You’ve got to be extra special and cater to her like she’s the queen that she deserves to be.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so all my compliments — that’s where I pull out the notepad.

DR. MINDY PELZ: But what you need to know is she’s probably going to be like — if you’re like, “Oh, you look so beautiful today,” she might at that time be like, “No, I feel horrible. I’m bloated. I don’t feel beautiful.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: And I should disagree. I should say, “No, you don’t. You look amazing.” Okay, cool.

DR. MINDY PELZ: And you do that till she bleeds. If you take amazing care of her in the week before her period, you will get kudos like you can’t even imagine.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And then start it all over again.

DR. MINDY PELZ: And then start it all over again. Yeah. Once you understand our patterns. And then it also helps you understand that we’re going to be more outgoing in the front half of our cycle, and we’re going to be more introverted in the back half.

Understanding Men’s Hormones and the Menstrual Cycle

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about men, you guys?

DR. MINDY PELZ: Every 15 minutes, you’re pretty black and white, really. Yeah. You’re pretty straightforward.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So if she was asking you the same question about me, would you say anything to her about my hormone cycles at all?

DR. MINDY PELZ: You just say it really depends on the issue at hand. So if it’s a mismatch of libido, then the best time to have sex with a woman is during ovulation because she has the most amount of testosterone —

STEVEN BARTLETT: — day 10 to 15 of her cycle. It would be really handy, wouldn’t it, just to have a little menstrual cycle chart on the wall at home? I know that sounds a bit strange, but just so I know what’s going —

DR. MINDY PELZ: — on inside her body. The first time I discovered this, I started using an app called the Clue app.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

DR. MINDY PELZ: And it shows you in a circle. It kind of shows a little cloud, and then it shows you where PMS clicks in. And it actually has a button that you can share it with people in your life. And I thought, not only does my husband need this, but my staff needs this. They need to understand where I’m going. And what if all the women on my team actually shared it with each other and we could see where each other was at in the menstrual cycle? We would understand why a woman’s moods can be so up and down.

It’s really, because of these three hormones, our moods are much more volatile than yours. You guys are pretty steady. This is general. I hate to be sexist in this conversation, but this is hormones and the way they work.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s actually really helpful to know this because without this insight, it’s very easy to fall into the trap of just assuming your partner is moody, or that they have mood swings, or that they’re too emotional, or whatever it might be. But with this, I actually think it creates a ton of empathy.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s certainly the reaction that I get from hearing that there are significant hormone fluctuations in my partner and they happen at certain periods. It actually now would change my behavior, the way that I receive certain times where I come home and I noticed that my partner’s just different.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yep.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And it catches me off guard sometimes. We’ve spoken a lot about this, and we’re very open. We’re very much the same person in terms of our willingness to talk about everything, and very difficult things as well.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And there will be times where I come home, or we go through a patch where just a week, things are making her upset, which wouldn’t normally make her upset. Tiny things that I’m doing, and I go, what?

DR. MINDY PELZ: That’s it. So see if you can track that to a certain part of her cycle.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, I’m going to.

DR. MINDY PELZ: So the week before our period, we’re pretty irritable. And every time I say that, men go, “Well, you said it, I didn’t say it.” But that’s because of progesterone. We’re meant to be more inner. We’re meant to sit on the couch. We’re also meant, believe it or not, glucose goes higher the week before our period. So we crave carbs. There’s a reason we crave carbs — because we need to bring glucose up to be able to make progesterone.

So we crave carbs, we’re irritable, we don’t want a lot of cortisol. Generally we’re a little bit slower. We don’t want to, we don’t have the desire to push through stress and push through exercise. So we’re a little different that week. If you come up and you just put your hand on our shoulder and you’re like, “I love you. You’re amazing. I’m here if you need anything.” That’s all you have to do. But if you’re trying to resolve a big conflict or you’re trying to come at us in too aggressive a way, we will shut down the week before our periods.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So interesting.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Whereas if you have something you want to resolve with us, make sure estrogen’s there, because estrogen makes us great verbal communicators. Our verbal skills are incredible when estrogen’s around. Ask any menopausal woman, she’ll tell you what it’s like when she loses estrogen.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And I have to say this — because women have this incredible power to create life that us men don’t have. It’s like women are superheroes for being able to carry a baby for significant amounts of time and then give birth to this baby. It’s just the most magical thing that I can think of in existence. And women have that superpower. And with that comes the cycle.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So it’s a wonderful thing.

DR. MINDY PELZ: It’s beautiful. And in the book, I called it the manifestation phase — ovulation — because when all of those hormones come in, we can manifest anything we want. But it’s not just a baby. Ovulation is an amazing time to start a new business project.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Interesting.

DR. MINDY PELZ: It’s a great time. As an author, I’m going to write during those five days because my creativity is going to be at its peak. So we’re highly creative. If you want to talk about something about life and how to create something with us, do it during ovulation.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Your husband is behind that wall here in my home. Is he aware of your menstrual cycle?

DR. MINDY PELZ: He is — until I started to lose it. I’m 53, so it’s starting to go. But yeah, we talk like this all the time. And I like to take ownership over my hormonal moods. So I will say to him after a long day of work, “Hey, it’s been a testosterone-driven day for me. I don’t feel like I have a lot of estrogen right now. I can’t handle a lot of stress. I’m going to need to just take some time to myself.” We literally talk like that.

Understanding Perimenopause and Menopause

STEVEN BARTLETT: Losing the menstrual cycle — the first time I started, as a young man that hasn’t been exposed to that at any point in my education system or otherwise — the first time I started to understand what menopause was, and pre-menopause and perimenopause, all these things, was from guests that have come here.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And it was such a big light bulb moment for me because I have women in my life that are going through that phase of life, and I feel like they are so misunderstood in so many ways.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Thank you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And I love hearing about it now because it’s going to help me relate to those women in a better way and understand how I can be a partner with them through that phase of life. Like certain members of my family that are going through that phase of life. What do we need to know, as men but also as women, about menopause, perimenopause, and all those things?

DR. MINDY PELZ: Thank you for asking. I think that we’re the most misunderstood age group of women. And 45 to 55 — that decade — is the most common time for women to commit suicide.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Really?

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah. This is why my next book, which I’m writing right now, is on the mental health of menopausal women. Because we’re struggling.

So the first thing you have to know is that after 40, our sex hormones start to decline. Estrogen goes up and down. So one day, if you live with a 43-year-old woman, you’re going to experience she’s great, and the next day you’re going to be like, “Who are you?” That’s because her estrogen is on a roller coaster ride. So that’s the first thing to know.

Second thing is that progesterone is plummeting after 40. They actually say now that at 35, progesterone is starting to go down. So as progesterone goes down, we are less stress resilient. Little things are going to irritate us like they’ve never irritated us before, and you might be the recipient of that. So if you find we’re very triggerable, it’s because we’re losing progesterone. We just need to have more breaks, we need more nurturing. As I explained with the menstrual cycle, we need to have more love brought our way because we just can’t handle stress the same way.

And then, as estrogen finally goes into a place where she’s non-existent — once a woman doesn’t have her cycle — we can’t hold on to information the same way we used to be able to. We forget things, and it’s really frustrating to us. When people around us point it out — I went through this with my team when I was trying to get my menopausal hormones in check — they would say, “Well, you already told us that. You reminded us of that.” And I started finding I was repeating myself. And then I realized, oh, I’m at a new level of low estrogen. And then I worked with some bioidenticals, working with some lifestyle changes to bring my estrogen up.

But from 40 till about 55, that is about a 10 to 15 year period where the woman’s brain has to recalibrate these loss of hormones. So our moods are all over the place during that time. Understanding where we’re at, having more compassion for us, not taking us on, and just helping us understand ourselves — which is largely what I’m trying to do through my books — will be so helpful. But we don’t even understand our own selves. Menopausal moods are treacherous. It’s an extreme sport. It literally is an extreme sport.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s brutal. What about after 45? She said 40 to 45.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah. So once we actually go a whole year without a period, we actually do better. The brain is used to the less hormones. So when we get on the other side — post-menopausal — we actually are great. Women that once they go to that side of the hormonal process tend to actually be the opposite of everything I just said. We tend to be more stress resilient. We can handle stress better. We tend to be more gregarious. Our libido goes back up as our brain starts to recalibrate. We become a better version of ourselves.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And that first phase, that 40 to 45 phase — what’s that phase called? Is that the —

DR. MINDY PELZ: That’s perimenopause.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Perimenopause. And then menopause is beyond 45?

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah. The average age for menopause right now is about 52, although a lot of women are going in around 45, sometimes earlier.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.

DR. MINDY PELZ: But I think that if there was one thing I want — I could help the world understand — it’s that we’re trying to understand ourselves during that time. So be patient with us, because we may react much differently than you’ve ever seen us react before. We have to get to know ourselves from a new lens. That’s the gift that menopause actually gives us. And if you allow us to do that, when we make it through to the post-menopausal years, you’re going to have a beautiful, wise, wonderful woman on the other side of that. It’s just that transition into perimenopause that is really a treacherous one.

Breaking the Cultural Hush Around Women’s Health

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s so interesting. I find it staggering that no one told me this at any point in my life.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Agreed.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because irrespective of whether you are a woman or not, and you’re going to go through that — your relationships with women are going to be integral to your life, unavoidably. Your mother, your grandmother, your partner. So having the insight gives me the empathy. And that’s why I’m so fortunate from having this conversation. It was Gabby Logan who came on this podcast, Davina McCall, who wrote a book about menopause, and you — that have really helped to open my eyes about that.

And it’s interesting. I don’t know what it is. I think growing up, men just don’t want to talk about periods and menstrual cycles and all of these kinds of things. They’re almost taboo.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah. In a weird way, I call it — in the new book I’m writing — I’m calling it the cultural hush.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

DR. MINDY PELZ: I think we have a cultural hush around the menstrual cycle, around menopause. I can’t tell you the number of men, since Fast Like a Girl came out, that have read that book and gone to the chapter on women and hormones, and then come and found me and said, “I finally understand my wife.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

The Reality of Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT)

DR. MINDY PELZ: I finally understand my daughter. Well, why aren’t we talking about that? And then how many women — we don’t talk about the fact that I’m suffering because I don’t have as much estrogen. We don’t have a culture or society that allows us to talk like that. And that’s what I think is shifting right now. So many menopause books are coming out. Big people. Oprah’s starting to do a whole thing on menopause. The conversation’s opening up. But it’s going to take bravery from women to step up.

I’m a very, very capable woman who has a beautiful family and a great business. It’s really hard for me to say, “I can’t do one more Zoom call. My brain can’t do it.” That feels like failure. And then we have the other side of this, which is we have the men that are like, “Why are you being a b today?” It’s like, because I don’t have the hormone to stop me from being a b today.

Those kind of conversations are not happening. But if we did it with more empathy, if we could express ourselves like, “Hey, I just need a break right now. It’s just a lot on my hormones. Give me 30 minutes, give me an hour. I can come back and be a better version. I just need to take care of myself now.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: Someone’s going to be listening to this and they’re going to think, “It’s not a problem. You can just go get the hormones. You can just go get some HRT.” It’s called HRT, right?

DR. MINDY PELZ: HRT.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, you can go get some HRT. Throw that at the problem, then you’ll have your hormones back.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah. So this is the big thing — just because you take a hormone doesn’t mean your cells are going to use it. Let’s use thyroid as an example, because so many women specifically take thyroid medication and they don’t see any change in their thyroid symptoms.

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

So there are three very pivotal pieces. There has to be production of the hormone, there has to be breaking down of the hormone, and there has to be receiving of the hormone. So when you take HRT, you’re only handling one of those things. And lifestyle — this is why I’m so passionate about lifestyle. Lifestyle can handle the other two. It can take care of the gut and the liver. It can open up the cell so it can receive HRT.

I wrote a book called The Menopause Reset and we’re reissuing it in June. One of the things in there is I mapped out five lifestyle changes that women should do after 40. I lived that through my whole 40s. I didn’t start doing bioidenticals till about 52, but I had my lifestyle dialed in first. And now bioidenticals are working well.

The Five Lifestyle Changes for Women Over 40

STEVEN BARTLETT: People are sat there going, “Five lifestyle changes.” They want to know what they are. They’re going to buy the book as well, aren’t they? We’re going to buy the book and we’re going to find out right now.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yes. Okay, well, what do you think the first one is?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Fasting.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yes, there you go. The first one’s fasting. And actually, Fast Like a Girl came after The Menopause Reset because all the women asked me, “What if I’m in my 30s, what if I’m in my 20s, how should I fast?” So that was sort of the birth of that book.

So fasting is number one. Second one is you have to learn to cycle your food. Your ketogenic diet works really well at certain times. Cycle your food, cycle your food styles.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What does that mean?

DR. MINDY PELZ: So in the front half of your cycle, when estrogen’s coming in, go keto — keep carbs low, keep glucose low. Back half of your cycle, when progesterone is coming in, raise glucose. Don’t go keto, but do nature’s carbs. Do more fruits, more squashes, potatoes. That’s going to help with building progesterone.

So the perimenopausal woman has to learn that there are times to bring carbs down and times to bring carbs up. I called it keto variations in that book. So that’s step two.

Step three — microbiome. You have to pay attention to your microbiome. Too many women have been on birth control for decades. They go screaming into their perimenopausal years and their microbiome is completely off. We have a whole set of bacteria in our gut called the estrobolome, which is the bacteria that break estrogen down. So you need to be eating more leafy green vegetables, more nuts and seeds, olives — chocolate even is great for the microbiome. I list all those foods out in there.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And that’s for stage two of the three steps to making hormone replacement therapy actually work, which is being able to metabolize the hormone — break it down.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yes. You got it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, step four.

DR. MINDY PELZ: You’re going to be a hormone expert after this.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, not just a pretty face.

DR. MINDY PELZ: The fourth one is watch your toxic load. We talked about that. And then step five is my favorite — stop being a rushing woman. As I tell you from a rushing lifestyle, we need more as we go through perimenopause. We need more downtime. You have to schedule more downtime. You need to let that nervous system come down.

You can’t go through your perimenopausal years and thrive if you are go, go, go all the time. It will catch up with you. So you have to bring in more mindfulness, more meditation, more yoga, more vacations, more no’s. That has to be a part of your repertoire. You might have gotten away with it at 35, but you won’t get away with it at 45.

Rewriting the Blueprint: How Men and Women Should Live

STEVEN BARTLETT: I was thinking about how I could summarize all of these points into how we should be living our lives as men and women. Because obviously we’ve got dragged into a consumerist, workaholic, sugar-overloaded, toxin-ridden life because we’ve been unconscious. That’s the way that corporations and media narrative and social media algorithms have taken us.

So I was thinking, if we could just pause for a second and rewrite the blueprint of what it is to be a human and how to live — how would men and women work? What would be the differences? How many days a week? If you were in charge of rewriting that, which you might be one day?

DR. MINDY PELZ: I’d like to be.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’d like to be. Okay, so you’re taking on the responsibility. So how would men and women work?

DR. MINDY PELZ: And you mean from a business standpoint?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, like a professional standpoint.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Okay, well, let’s start with a man.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Both men and women have two nervous systems — one that speeds us up, one that slows us down. You could be in a speed-up mode most of the time, but you just need to make sure — actually, I just thought about this. Right now, the patriarchal work week works really well for men. Monday through Friday, work your fanny off. Saturday, Sunday, take it off. Now you’re moving in and out of your parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system, and you’re giving both of them a break. You are not meant to be working 24/7, seven days a week. You’re not meant to be working all the time and never taking a break.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What would you make the work hours for a man?

DR. MINDY PELZ: I’m a big fan of working in the daylight and resting when it’s dark. We’re supposed to rest when it’s dark. So in winter, you would work less. In summer, you would work more. We do the opposite — we take more vacation in the summer.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Women?

DR. MINDY PELZ: So for women, we would design our whole work week around our menstrual cycle. We could go full tilt all the way till day 19 or day 20. And then we would take a week off and bow out. So instead of doing it in a weekly amount like men would, we’d be doing it in a monthly amount.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And how long would you bow out for?

DR. MINDY PELZ: Well, ideally it depends — each woman is going to be a little different. But I would say anywhere from seven days, if it worked for a schedule, until you bleed. So day 21 till day 28, you would do it for a week. Bowing out might also look like just not taking on the high load that you normally do the rest of the month. Maybe cut it in half.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Maybe work from home?

DR. MINDY PELZ: Maybe work from home. Maybe I can’t do my full workload and my extreme exercise and go socialize with my friends during that week. I just need to start to slow everything down. So bowing out is really just about putting yourself first and slowing everything down.

Nutrition: What Men and Women Should Be Eating

STEVEN BARTLETT: Now, eating — men and women eating.

DR. MINDY PELZ: For men, I think just keeping blood sugar stable is great. I think men really work well off of a meat-based and animal diet. Men have more testosterone, which means more muscle. The way that we build muscle and keep muscle strong is through amino acids, and you get that in meat. So for men, that primal diet — the paleo diet of meat, vegetables, and fruit — is amazing. I don’t think refined flours and sugars, in overabundance, are good for men either. We’re seeing that with metabolic syndrome.

For women, we do well with meats. I think we need less of it because we have less testosterone, although protein is still important, especially as we age. But we also need to bring glucose up. So we need more fruits, more squashes, more potatoes — and that’s all built around your menstrual cycle.

As for eating times, I’m not a fan of eating when it’s dark out because when melatonin goes up, you become more insulin resistant.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Which means what?

DR. MINDY PELZ: It means your body won’t process the glucose from that meal as efficiently when it’s dark out.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It won’t take it away and store it where it needs to be stored as energy.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Exactly.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It will store it as fat or something.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah, it’s going to store it as fat. If insulin can’t drive it into the cell for energy, it’ll store it as fat. So the meal you eat at 9:30 is going to be stored more as fat than if you have that same meal at 5:30.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So night eaters aren’t doing themselves any favors.

DR. MINDY PELZ: No. Let’s go back to our primal friends. If people get lost in these theories — they didn’t have electricity, they sat around the fire. So most likely they ate during light hours.

And then the women — if we go back and look at cultures around our period, we were actually sequestered off into another part of the tribe. That’s the whole red tent idea. We didn’t have to do as many chores. We went more into an introverted place. If you go back and study what we did in those days, it was very much along those lines. And we’re just not doing that now.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about supplements? What supplements would you have men and women consuming?

The Most Important Supplements for Men and Women

DR. MINDY PELZ: Well, for women, the most important supplement she could ever take is magnesium. Magnesium makes every single hormone in your body. For men, I would say the most important supplement — there’s a lot of them — but for hormones, zinc, because zinc makes testosterone. Outside of that, for both men and women, the other supplement and the other measurement that we all need to be looking at are vitamin D levels.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. I’ve learned this from guests on this podcast. I’ve started taking vitamin D supplements.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah. If your vitamin D is under 30, you are in a critically depressed immune state. So you’ve got to get it definitely over 30. For hormonal health, we need to see it more up in about 60, 70 to have your hormones be working at their best.

This goes back to the HRT thing. If we’re taking HRT, but our vitamin D is 20, that HRT isn’t going to be as effective as compared to the woman who has a vitamin D of 55 or 60. That HRT will work better.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Interesting. And vitamin D comes from sunlight, doesn’t it?

DR. MINDY PELZ: Sunlight and sardines.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Sardines.

DR. MINDY PELZ: The food sources are really bad. This is why everybody’s low in it. It’s sardines. It’s really fatty fishes and sunlight.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And we spend most of our time indoors.

DR. MINDY PELZ: That’s right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: We can’t get it from this kind of light.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Right. And you have to be outside with your skin exposed at the high point of the day of the sun, like 12, 1 o’clock, to get the most vitamin D. And if you’re in a city where there’s more air pollution, studies have shown that the rays that come in and hit your skin and turn it into vitamin D are less, because air pollution blocks it. Which is why so many people are low in vitamin D. Which is why taking vitamin D is a smart thing.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is that why people are doing these infrared saunas and stuff now? Does that produce vitamin D, or is that something else?

DR. MINDY PELZ: That’s more detox.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, detox.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Infrared sauna — what it does is it simulates a fever, so it burns things out from the inside of the cell out, which is why it’s a really good detoxer.

Opening Up Our Detox Pathways

STEVEN BARTLETT: There were a few things you said when I was watching some of your YouTube videos that I wrote down that I found really compelling. One of them was about the importance of opening up our detox pathways. And you just mentioned detoxing there. What do you mean by opening up our detox pathways?

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah, so if you look at our lymph system — the lymph is like, people know lymph nodes because when you get sick, you can feel them.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Mumps. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

DR. MINDY PELZ: So the lymph is always carrying toxins out of organs. The liver has a lymph pathway. The gut has lymph nodes in there that are going to pull all the toxins that are in there and move them out of you. So we need to keep these lymph pathways open.

The gut is a great one. You should be having a bowel movement every single day. If you’re not having a bowel movement every single day, then what the body’s trying to get rid of is staying inside of you and it gets congested.

A thing we teach women about the armpit — and it would actually work for men, too — is that you should have a pit, not a puff. What does that mean? If it’s a puff, look in the mirror. If your armpit is a puff, then that’s stagnant lymph. It means that you’re not pulling the toxins — for women, the toxins coming out of her breasts are not getting out. Toxins that are coming out from the head down into the thoracic area are not getting out because it’s congested.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So if your underarm is puffy and not like a pit, then you might be storing some of those toxins.

DR. MINDY PELZ: That’s right. They’re not moving. They’re not mobilizing.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why aren’t they? Am I blocking my pathways?

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah, the pathway’s blocked.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So with what?

DR. MINDY PELZ: Well, there’s the question. I feel like people are going to leave this podcast so depressed, because there are so many pieces of this. But deodorant — deodorant clogs that up, and so it doesn’t mobilize all of the toxins out. This was a big thing with breast cancer. A lot of women using toxic deodorants weren’t getting the toxins out of the breast, and it was clogging in the armpit because of the toxins from the deodorant.

STEVEN BARTLETT: That explains why we sweat in that area, right? Because it’s a pathway.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Why do we even have hair in that area?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I don’t know. You tell me.

DR. MINDY PELZ: It’s for detoxing. It’s to help get those toxins out.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, so the molecules go down the hair.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah, yeah. And what do women do?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Shave it off.

DR. MINDY PELZ: That’s right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you’re saying —

DR. MINDY PELZ: I shave just because I can’t walk around with it. It’s just not in my nature. But what I do is I have a loofah in my shower, and I just loofah under my arms whenever I shower to open up those pathways.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s a loofah?

DR. MINDY PELZ: It’s like a little organic sponge.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay. It scrubs it.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah, scrubs it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: We also have pubic hair.

DR. MINDY PELZ: We also have pubic hair. We are getting toxins out from the ovaries. The ovaries are the major area for the intestines. This is where hormones are being produced. And so as they’re coming out, they are supposed to influence everything biologically we need them to influence, but then they’re also supposed to get out of our system. And so the hair ends up becoming a way that we can mobilize the toxins out of us.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I never knew or asked why I grow hair under my arms and in the pubic region. No one ever told me about that. I never questioned it. I thought it was slightly inconvenient.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yes, well, it is, for sure.

The Body Is Always Working For You

STEVEN BARTLETT: But the body doesn’t do anything to inconvenience you. It does it to increase your chances of survival. Because I’m the byproduct of millions of years of survival of the fittest and evolution that has made me pruned and sculpted to survive.

It’s funny because we spend so much of our time — and this goes back to the conversation around sugar and weight loss and all these things — we live in a world where we think that our body is against us. It’s fighting us. It’s making me go for the sugar drawer. It’s stopping me losing weight. It’s growing all these pubes, right?

DR. MINDY PELZ: Inconvenient.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we fight it. We shave it off and we do all these crazy things to fight against our body. But our body is very much for us. Many of the things we’re choosing to do are against us. We are against ourselves, not our bodies. Our bodies cannot put a foot wrong.

DR. MINDY PELZ: You got it. This is what I’m trying to bring back — this respect for what the body’s trying to do. That’s what we’re missing. It’s all inconvenient. And it’s everything from even weight gain. Why is your body gaining weight? Because it’s so brilliant that it decided not to put that fat around your organs. It put it around your belly, and now you’re looking in the mirror and you’re villainizing it. But your body was trying to save your life in that moment.

Everything the body is always doing for you, not against you. But we continually discredit what it’s trying to do and manipulate it. Which is why the best thing I can think of is that we’re just in an evolutionary mismatch. The modern world does not line up with the human body’s design.

Weight Loss Injections: A Short-Term Fix With Long-Term Consequences

STEVEN BARTLETT: Something really p*ed me off this weekend. I was walking through New York City and I saw a poster for weight loss injections. Have you seen this?

DR. MINDY PELZ: No. But Ozempic is a drug that’s really popular right now.

STEVEN BARTLETT: There’s a couple of drugs right now. My friends were talking about it. There’s a diabetes drug, I think. And the headlines have been that so many people are taking this diabetes drug to lose weight that people with diabetes are struggling to get it. There’s another one called Semaglutide.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yep, yep.

STEVEN BARTLETT: This is people injecting things in their body to help them lose weight. And the poster, which my friend had sent me — I’d seen it earlier and then he’d sent it to our group chat — says, “One shot a week, lose weight,” and it has the little URL. Someone thankfully had actually ripped the URL off this billboard. What’s your take on all this stuff?

DR. MINDY PELZ: The new medications that are out there right now are creating a weight loss possibility — when we look at the scale and when we look at how people feel when they put on their clothes — but it’s at the expense of muscle. They’re actually losing more muscle than they are losing fat. So yes, you feel thinner, but it’s not because you lost fat; you lost muscle.

Muscle is the organ of longevity. If you lose muscle as you age, you are going to be in a bad situation. We need muscle to get out of a chair. You need muscle to perform daily life functions.

The other thing people don’t realize about muscle is that muscle contains insulin receptors. So if you lose muscle, you don’t have as many insulin receptors, which means you’re now putting yourself in a more insulin resistant state. Which means you have to stay on the medication forever to stay at the weight you want, because you don’t have the same insulin sensitivity.

So again, it’s like the calorie in, calorie out approach — short-term result, long-term consequence. It’s risky. And every medication has side effects. But I’m more concerned about the person who thinks they’ve solved their weight loss issue, when all they’ve done is made it worse down the road.

The Importance of Muscle Mass as We Age

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ve sat here with many a health expert and a fitness expert and nutritional experts and they all agree with what you just said about muscle. They all said to me, because I asked a question to, I think it was Tim Spector about, might have been Giles Yeo, asked him a question about does our metabolism fall off a cliff as we age, which is quite a popular thing. And a few of them said the same thing to me. They go at a certain point further down the line, metabolism does change, but really the thing that changes is muscle mass, and that means that we stop moving as much, which means that we gain weight faster. So he said the number one thing that you need to do as you age is keep doing resistance training. Keep your muscle.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yep.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And because I was asking him a question about my father, I said I went down this really steep cliff in Bali a couple of weekends before and as I was going down those stairs, I was thinking my dad couldn’t do this anymore. And at the bottom of those stairs was our activity for the day. We were going white water rafting. And as I was walking down those stairs, I was thinking, I want to be able to go down the stairs so I can do stuff with my kids, and getting into a place where I’m immobile by 60 — that is a choice. That is, for most of us, that is a choice and it’s one that we can avoid if we keep muscle.

And what you said there, from what I garnered from it, is I will actually, if I take those chemicals and if I inject them into my body, I’ll lose my muscle mass. And if I lose my muscle mass, I will have a higher chance of weight gain and obesity when I’m older.

DR. MINDY PELZ: And your functionality.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

DR. MINDY PELZ: The perfect example that is always stuck in my head is my dad had a knee surgery and he’s 86 years old. And I remember trying to help him get around a chair that he was sitting in and he was starting to lose his upper body strength and he literally couldn’t push himself up and out of the chair to be able to move into a comfortable position. And I thought, oh my gosh, that’s where muscle is so important — at 86 years old, just being able to get up and out of a chair after recovering from a surgery.

But if you think about the functionality of a human as we age, if you want to be able to not do as many activities like you’re talking about, just make sure you don’t have as much muscle. The minute muscle goes away, your functionality goes away. But more importantly, the minute muscle goes away, you’re more insulin resistant. So you’re going to gain weight more down the long haul.

Cardio vs. Resistance Training for Weight Loss

STEVEN BARTLETT: A lot of other people would say the way to lose weight is just to do lots of cardio, run a lot. Yeah, good idea.

DR. MINDY PELZ: No, no. So here’s another interesting thing, and I’m going to give it through a woman’s perspective because let’s go back to women over 40. Cortisol goes up with extra cardio, calorie set point goes up — you know, you’re more calorie output. So remember, that’s also happening and you’re changing your set point.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I need more calories, my calorie set point goes up and my cortisol levels go up.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.

DR. MINDY PELZ: So what ends up happening is that you actually now are tanking all your other hormones. So let’s follow the trail of progesterone. Cortisol goes up because you’re doing so much cardio, so progesterone goes down. Well, progesterone keeps estrogen in check, so now estrogen can go up. And if you have too much estrogen, eventually what’s going to happen is it’s going to be stored as fat. So long term, that’s not a great plan for women.

STEVEN BARTLETT: For men?

DR. MINDY PELZ: Well, the second piece applies to both men and women — if you’re doing a lot of cardio, most likely you’re breaking down muscle to be able to perform that cardio. A great example is, look at a marathon runner versus a tennis player or a soccer player. Even though soccer players are doing a lot of cardio, it’s a lot of start, stop, start, stop. But a marathon runner who’s done so much cardio is breaking muscle down to be able to do that amount of cardio. So it’s okay to do, just not at the expense of muscle. And for women, you can’t do it at the expense of progesterone.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So it won’t help me to lose weight doing cardio.

DR. MINDY PELZ: No. You know what’s going to help you to lose weight is more weightlifting — build more muscle so you have more insulin receptor sites, fast more so you can get rid of all of the glucose that gets stored in muscles, break your fast with protein. And yeah, I mean, that’s what we see all the time in both my clinic and my online world — those three things will get you in the shape that you want.

It might not — remember, as you build muscle, the number on the scale might not be that much different. It might not move, but your whole shape is going to change. You’re going to look different.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So is any level of cardio good for weight loss? Would you recommend it just for the broader health benefits?

DR. MINDY PELZ: I think cardio is more of a mental health improvement. You get all those endorphins. It’s so good for your mental health. I love to go running. It’s my favorite thing. But I do it for my mental health, not to lose weight.

Fasting and Oxidative Damage from Sugar

STEVEN BARTLETT: Another thing that I saw online, which is very curious, that you said — you were talking about how to undo the oxidative damage from eating too much sugar.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What do you mean by that?

DR. MINDY PELZ: Think about the cell as an ecosystem. Inside the cell, there has to be a balance of all the right components. So when glucose goes up, which happens when you eat too much sugar, that balance goes off. And one of the byproducts of that is that your body puts off these free radicals — it creates more oxidative damage within the cell. The more of that oxidative damage, the more it’s going to destroy mitochondria and the nucleus and all the cellular parts.

So what you’re doing when you’re fasting is you’re reestablishing balance into the cell and you’re allowing your body to naturally undo the oxidative damage that happened from poor living. So it’s like a reset — a cellular reset.

Does Fasting Break Down Muscle?

STEVEN BARTLETT: People say that there’s been a school of thought that fasting breaks down muscle, that I’ll lose muscle if I fast. True or false?

DR. MINDY PELZ: So it appears to break down muscle. It depends on how long you’re in a fast. But it will appear as if your muscle is shrinking because it’s getting rid of the stored sugar. But when you now bring in a high protein meal and feed it amino acids, it will grow stronger. You’ll see more definition because it broke the sugar down, which you don’t want in there. So it changes the shape of the—

STEVEN BARTLETT: —muscle, makes it more lean, I guess.

DR. MINDY PELZ: It makes it more lean. But if you follow that up with good eating, you’re going to make yourself stronger. Now, the person who decides to go into a fast, breaks down muscle, and doesn’t follow up with good eating — yeah, you’re going to end up with less muscle. But if you follow it up with a lot of protein and you build that mTOR back up, now you’re actually able to build your muscle even stronger.

There are two ways to build muscle. One is through lifting weights, strength training, and the other is through food — protein. So all fasting’s doing is leaning it out.

Fasting and Sleep

STEVEN BARTLETT: And does fasting have an impact on my sleep?

DR. MINDY PELZ: It can in a couple of ways. If your brain’s inflamed, you’re not going to sleep. So fasting brings down inflammation — that would be the first thing.

The other thing is that a lot of people wake up, especially women, at 2 or 3 in the morning, and they kind of get a jolt out of bed. A lot of times that’s because you’ve maybe had dinner at 7 o’clock, glucose is going down, and so the body registers that glucose has gone down and gives you a cortisol spike. And all of a sudden you wake up at 2 or 3 in the morning.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is that why some people wake up — I’ve got a friend of mine that’s an elderly male and he always tells me, because I woke up at 3am last night. And he’s constantly saying it. He’s like, “I woke up in the middle of the night again last night.” And I’ve always wondered why. And when I’m with him, we do eat dinner particularly late.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yep. Yeah. So he’s probably getting — he has all that glucose, he goes to sleep and now the glucose starts to go down. And then there’s going to be a point at which the body registers that it hits a new low, and then it triggers cortisol and releases glucose from other body parts. And the body takes that as “we’re running from a tiger.” Get up out of bed — wakes you up. Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And to avoid that, what would you do? You’d recommend not eating so late?

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah, not eating so late. But the more you fast, the more you stabilize that blood sugar and you don’t have those highs and lows as much. It’s a way of bringing balance back to the whole blood sugar system.

Fasting and Eating Disorders

STEVEN BARTLETT: I have to say, we’ve talked extensively about fasting today. And one of the concerns I have about talking about this subject matter is the implications it has for people with eating disorders, because it’s quite easy to conflate messages if you’re not able to fully understand the context of everything. And I’m sure that’s a topic you’ve thought about. I think you actually write about it in one of the later chapters in your book — in chapter 10.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yep. It’s one that we thought a lot about when we wrote the book. So I want to say that first — when the book was put together, that was definitely something my agent, the publisher, everybody was really keen on. How can we tread that lightly?

And here’s my stance on it. The first is that if you have a severe eating disorder, I’m going to recommend that if you want to learn to fast, you need to bring your therapist into it, you need to bring your doctor into it. You need another set of eyes to help you navigate that. So that would be the first thing.

Second thing — I’m going to go back to this woman that I worked with who had severe eating disorders, and she’s been very, very public about her eating disorders. I didn’t start with fasting, I started with food with her. So we started by stabilizing her blood sugar first. And then once I saw that those spikes on her glucose monitor were in a place I wanted, were more steady, then I introduced fasting because she was seeing food as a real healing tool. And then I could put fasting on as an adjunct to it. And she’s doing incredible. So there’s just a different approach. But I really encourage that you work with your practitioner or your therapist.

Where to Start with Fasting

STEVEN BARTLETT: Where do I start? I’m sold. You’ve sold me on fasting. I’m going to become a faster. Where do I start, Mindy?

DR. MINDY PELZ: So the first place to start is you want to think about compressing your food into one eating window. So let me start by asking you — what time do you typically finish eating dinner?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I told you this off camera. And I told you not to mention it.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Sorry, sorry. Okay.

STEVEN BARTLETT: On a good day, on an ideal day. So my issue is, I’m going to be honest, because that’s the point of this podcast. The issue I have is I wake up in the morning, I then begin work and I’ll eat my first meal — this is quite shocking — I’ll eat my first meal around, I’m going to say between 2pm and 4pm, depending on how busy my schedule is.

Sometimes there’s been days — I remember one particular day, it’s actually when I found out that I do this — I took someone with me for the day, they were shadowing me for the day, and it got to 7pm and they go, “We haven’t eaten today.”

DR. MINDY PELZ: Oh, wow.

Personalizing Your Fasting Window

STEVEN BARTLETT: And I didn’t notice. I had no idea that I hadn’t eaten that day. So I’m a very late eater. But then the issue is I will go to the gym usually in the evening, usually after work, often between 9pm and 11pm, and then when I get home from the gym — I go to sleep like a good boy. No, I…

DR. MINDY PELZ: This is where you go around. This is it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. This is where it goes downhill. Then I’ll eat. Then I’ll eat something pretty late at night, and that could be midnight.

DR. MINDY PELZ: So what I heard in that is your eating window is 2 to 12.

STEVEN BARTLETT: 2 to 12, yeah.

DR. MINDY PELZ: So you’re in a 10 hour eating window.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Are you doing coffee in the morning?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, yeah, I do now, mainly because of this podcast, but…

DR. MINDY PELZ: Okay. But you’re not eating anything else in the morning.

STEVEN BARTLETT: No, not really. No. I don’t eat breakfast. There’s no days in my life where I eat breakfast. Really. The earliest I might eat is midday.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Okay. So if you choose to make two your time — I call it opening up your eating window — you’re going to start eating. So you would go 2 to 12. That’s a 10 hour eating window. That’s leaving 14 hours of fasting. About 15 hours, you’re going to start to get the testosterone increase.

So I would say, can we make it a nine or even an eight hour eating window? Especially because you told me your goals and your fitness goals. I would think for you an eight hour eating window would be great. So you have an option. You can either not eat when you get home from the gym — and now we’re at “I’m just so hungry” — or you could push it back to three, or four. You said sometimes you don’t eat.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What would be ideal?

DR. MINDY PELZ: Well, for you, definitely just don’t want to eat when it’s dark out. So ideal would be an eight hour eating window. Finishing — right now it’s summer — so finishing at nine. And then you would work back. So you would do like 1 to…

STEVEN BARTLETT: 9, or 12 to 8.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Or 12 to 8. Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Or 11 till 7.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s not going to happen. I’ll do the 1 till 9 that you said.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because I go to the gym often quite late in the UK, so that means I can eat after the gym.

Customizing Fasting to Your Lifestyle

DR. MINDY PELZ: And then here’s a little hack. I want to make sure that people don’t lose sight of what I just did with you — I customized it to your lifestyle, and I think that’s really important. You just take that eating window and you figure out where it fits best for you.

I do this with people who have families, they want to sit down and eat dinner. So don’t skip dinner with your kids. Sit and enjoy that. You sound like, from a fitness and work level, that’s working for you. So let’s keep it like that. Let’s not move that around too much.

But for your fitness goals, one day a week, I’d like to see you elongate your fast. Push your fast. Like, could you go 20 hours, 24 hours of fasting where you’re just having one meal a day? Because what you’re going to do is you’re going to put your body into a little bit of a state of stress where all the things we’ve talked about — the healing — is going to happen at a much quicker rate.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’re saying once in a while.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yes. Once a week for you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Once a week. So once a week go like 24 hours without eating.

DR. MINDY PELZ: That’s right. Or we call it one meal a day.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Wow. Okay. Anything else I need to know to get started?

Fasting Hacks: MCT Oil and Fasted Snacks

DR. MINDY PELZ: Coffee can be your friend. Putting MCT oil in it can help you get ketones a little bit quicker. So I don’t know if you ever put oil in your coffee, but…

STEVEN BARTLETT: I have MCT oil on my counter at home because I did the keto diet.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah. So just put it in your coffee. It’ll switch you over, and it’ll get those ketones going a little quicker.

There is something I wrote about in the book called a fasted snack, and the fasted snack is a pure fat bomb. They’re hard to find. It’s a fat bomb. So it has no carbs, very little protein — it’s all fat. So an example of one might be an avocado, which is pretty fat dense. It does have some carbs. But the one I love is something called a keto cup, and it’s MCT oil with cacao butter and some chocolate — just pure chocolate wrapped around it. It looks like a little Reese’s peanut butter cup.

You can do those in your fasting window, and they won’t switch you over because they’re pure fat. So fasted snacks can be really helpful. The research shows that you get all the benefits of fasting, but you’re popping these little keto cups in your mouth all day long.

There Is No Perfect Path — Only Your Path

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is the most important thing we haven’t talked about, in your view?

DR. MINDY PELZ: The most important thing is for people to realize that there’s not the perfect path. There’s just your path. So take everything we talked about and find the threads that resonate with you and put those into action. And then maybe you come back and listen to the podcast again and you take another thread.

But we have to stop trying to do our diet like everybody else around us. There’s your diet, and that’s really what I’m trying to get at — that people build a lifestyle that’s unique to them. N of 1. It’s really the most beautiful place to live.

STEVEN BARTLETT: N of 1.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah. In a study, they always say the N is how many people were in the study. So they’ll say N of a hundred, N of a thousand. So N of 1 is one person was in the study.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Be your own study.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Be your own study.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Your own experiment.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Yeah.

The Closing Question: How Do You Take Care of You?

STEVEN BARTLETT: We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest asks a question for the next guest. The question that’s been left in the diary of a CEO for you is interesting. It’s actually not that profound or interesting, but I feel like you’re the type of person that will interpret a deeper meaning than this question maybe is alluding to. But really think about this, okay? How do you take care of you?

DR. MINDY PELZ: That’s actually a great question. I could answer that question on a health level. I have a really strong health routine. I get up in the morning, I meditate, I have a hyperbaric oxygen chamber at home, I pop in my chamber, I read — the first two hours of my day are for me first, before anybody else. So I have that part of me.

But I want to give a deeper answer to that. I’m really getting to know myself and what my needs are, especially as a 53 year old woman who’s moving through menopause and really honoring that. How I care for myself is more important than anything else. And what I mean by that is when I say no to things, not over-scheduling myself, putting my needs before everybody else’s — these are things I haven’t done in my life. And right now I’m really working on caring for myself first so that I can pour love into the world after that. Love me first.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why is that important?

DR. MINDY PELZ: I think for me, I have been in the healing profession for so long. I’ve been a mother, a wife, and I’ve done everything for everybody else. And I stand here at 53 saying I’m going to start doing things for me now. And that feels like self love, and that feels like where health is going to live for me. I haven’t spent much time doing that in my life. So I’m learning to do it for the first time now.

A Conversation That Will Change Lives

STEVEN BARTLETT: Dr. Mindy Pelz. That is beautiful. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for your wisdom. You’re a remarkable, engaging, captivating storyteller, author, content creator, and a wonderful practitioner. Everything you do — you’ve helped so many people with your work. I was so excited when they told me I’d have the honor of having a conversation with you today. This is one of those conversations that genuinely will change people’s lives. And isn’t that an amazing thing?

DR. MINDY PELZ: It’s really cool. Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Isn’t that an amazing thing — that we can sit here and all the stuff you’ve shared will have a significant impact on one person’s life, millions of people’s lives, hundreds of thousands of people’s lives, which will mean that they live a more fulfilled existence. They can kiss and hug their kids for longer. And that is because of the work you do. So, on behalf of all of those people who may never get to meet you in person and thank you themselves — thank you.

DR. MINDY PELZ: Oh, thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here, for the thoughtful questions, and for really allowing me to express what I hope does exactly that. And I think the purpose of living a fulfilled life is touching humans you never actually meet.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Amen.

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