The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett: E256: The Miracle Doctor: EVERYONE should start Fasting right now! (NEW SCIENCE) Dr. Mindy Pelz

Feminist women out there are not going to like this.

Women are perishing in this modern world more than men.

Well, that's terrifying.

If we want to exist on this planet, we're going to have to.

Dr. Mindy Pelt,

renowned functional health expert, best-selling author,

and keynote speaker,

one of the leading voices in educating us about our bodies.

Spending two decades helping millions worldwide.

You got pretty famous from talking about this certain subject matter,

which is fasting.

What do I need to know?

Research shows it's going to make me stronger.

More lean, 1,300% increase in testosterone in men.

Oh, wow.

We see inflammation go down, growth hormone go up.

It's the hormone that keeps you young and helps you burn fat.

You know where it dropped the most amount of weight?

Belly.

Yep.

Literally takes cells that are turning into cancer,

and it gets rid of those.

You are tapping into a healing state that you never knew was there.

I'm sold. Where do I start?

So the first place to start is...

Menstruation, or the big M, is considered a taboo topic.

I'm going to say something which is really embarrassing here.

I know nothing about menstrual cycles.

I'm in a relationship.

What advice have you got for me?

Well, the first is, do you know her cycle?

Moving on.

Tell me about your childhood.

Let me give you gold.

First two days, give her some space.

If you have any conflict you want to resolve with her,

do it between day two and day 12.

Her libido is going to be the highest between day 10 and day 15.

And then here's the gold.

You're going to have to report back to me how this works.

Round day 17, this is where you got it.

Once in a while on this podcast,

I have a conversation that I desperately wish I'd had sooner.

This is one of those conversations I'd heard about fasting,

but I had no idea, no idea at all,

of its potentially life-changing impact.

Weight loss, your sex life, a woman's menstrual cycle,

how to heal from illness and injury,

the incredible power of fasting.

I'm incredibly happy that you chose to listen

to this particular conversation

because if you're like me

and you've never really taken the time to understand fasting

and you don't understand the six types of fasting,

then maybe this is the conversation you've always needed to hear.

Because it certainly was for me.

You are really, really going to enjoy this one.

Take my word for it.

Mindy, if you took the full body of work that you've produced

over the last, let's say, 10 years

and the work that you're going to produce over the next 10 years

and you had to summarize the mission that you're on

and why it matters, how would you do that?

Wow, that's a great question.

I'm trying to empower people to believe in themselves again.

And I want to do that through everything in our lifestyle

that taps into our body's own ability to heal itself.

We've gotten so far off course.

We don't even realize that we're giving

so much of our health power away, our happiness power away.

And all we've got to do is come back home to ourselves

and learn that every single thing inside of us,

every cell, every neuron, everything is working for us,

not against us.

And we have to stop villainizing our body.

We've got to figure out how to believe in ourselves again.

We're the ones that are going to save ourselves

and we've just lost our way.

What have we fallen into the trap of believing?

Well, in the health world, we've totally fallen into the trap

that if I take this pill, if I do this diet,

if I do this exercise, then that will cure me.

Nobody cures you.

You cure yourself.

And so you have to start to look at the human body

as this self-healing organism

that's always figuring out how to keep you alive,

how to keep you at your best.

And if you're not feeling at your best,

then the only thing you to look at

is that there's an interference.

There's a physical, emotional, spiritual, chemical interference

that is pulling you away from this power that's inside of you

so that you can start to heal.

Once you pull those away, you see yourself in a whole new light.

And this is what fasting did for millions of people.

You just see yourself so differently

in what you're capable of doing.

Where have we gone wrong in terms of our attitudes

towards what it is to be a human?

Because I often think much of the health advice

that is thrown at us these days has this underlying belief

that in some way we're broken.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, oh my, I so agree with you.

It's the messaging.

It's like you did something wrong.

You have a genetic profile that you're doomed

to have a disastrous outcome.

And everything is exogenously blamed at us.

And I really think that that comes from

not only our healthcare system,

and I'm not trying to bash the healthcare system,

but we have lost our way.

And it comes from, for women specifically,

it comes from the messaging we get from social media

and magazines, like everything is outside in.

We got to go inside out now and start asking

what we want on a physical, spiritual, emotional level

so that we can create the life we want

and stop looking outside for the answers we got to go within.

I love that, inside out?

Inside out, inside out living.

You got pretty famous from talking

about this certain subject matter, which is fasting.

Now I want to talk about fasting because I've heard about it,

and I'm sure here I represent a lot of my audience right now.

I've heard the term fasting.

I've heard loads of people in recent times over the last,

I'd say, two years get really excited about it

and say that it's a good thing.

But that's really the extent of my knowledge on the subject.

So let's just start right there.

I mean, you wrote a book called Fast Like A Girl.

You've got so much content out on the internet

about fasting for both men and women.

This book was written in 2022.

Why? Why are you so focused on fasting?

Why do I need to care about it?

What's it going to do for me?

It's the quickest antidote to what we just said.

If we've got all this physical, emotional,

chemical stress coming at us, we've got taste buds.

We've got to change.

We've got behaviors we have to change.

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.

It's 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 on to YouTube

and so many women gravitate to the book

is that it's so 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 that.

I didn't do that.

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.

Beautiful.

What do I need to know from a scientific standpoint?

What research has been done on fasting?

Okay, so let's go through the basic principle of fasting,

and I think this will help everybody,

is that 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, like let's use myself as an example,

I had eggs and some avocado for 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.

And 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, are like,

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 somewhere between eight hours

to metabolically switch over into this fat burning place.

Oh, okay.

So if I'm doing a podcast and I want to be sharp,

I shouldn't eat eight hours before?

Yes.

Ah, fuck.

Did you come back in seven hours?

Seven hours?

Yeah, sure.

I should have given you the memo before we got here.

Yeah, so I think of it like a hybrid car.

You know, 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 you also, when you switch over,

there's going to be a point in which you're not hungry.

And that all happens at about 12 hours.

But you're also, if you stay there a little longer,

if you stay there and you go 14 hours, 15 hours.

So check this out.

Research shows at 15 hours, we see growth hormone go up.

Okay, growth hormone is the hormone that keeps you young

and helps you burn fat.

We also see in men, 1,300% increase in testosterone

just from somewhere between a 13 to 15 hour fast.

13% 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 like joints that are hurting,

they start doing 15 hours of fasting every day.

And they're like, God, you know,

my joints just don't have that same stiffness in them anymore.

But if you stay in that fasted window, you keep going.

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 that actually was the, if you want stats,

the Nobel Prize in 2015 by a Japanese scientist, Dr. Osumi,

he won the Nobel Prize 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.

So I want to go into all of that.

I want to start with why.

Why does fasting help so much?

And really like what I'm getting at there is

if the effects of this are so profound in so many ways,

then where did we go wrong?

Because from what I have been told, breakfast, lunch, dinner,

breakfast, lunch, dinner, and then maybe dessert.

And then that's the narrative that I was brought up on.

Yeah.

Well, breakfast is the most important meal a day.

I've done a lot of research on that phrase.

Did you know where it came from?

No.

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 corn flakes

in the morning.

And so they came up with corn flakes.

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

And that has continued until this day.

We 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?

Okay, 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.

So that's the second that the other myth that I feel like we

have to break apart.

And then we have this, 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 breakfast, dinner is being served,

the kitchen is closing in an hour.

You need to eat lunch.

You need to eat breakfast.

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?

That's so true.

We will wait until 1 p.m. to have lunch.

And the morning we wake up, we feel like we have to have breakfast

or we're doing something wrong.

And then dinner time, any time between 6 and 8,

we have to sit down and eat again or we're doing something wrong.

If you just don't mind that.

Yeah, where did that come from?

Usually from your parents, and it came from a schedule.

What did my ancestors do before my parents existed

and the schedules existed?

I can tell you exactly what they did.

What did they do?

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.

Did they have Uber Eats?

They didn't have Uber Eats.

They didn't have Uber Eats.

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.

Exercise.

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

is 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.

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.

That's right.

It seems and I perform at my best.

Bingo, that's it.

Makes sense.

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 beat it up amongst the tribe

and then they went out again until when the food was gone.

Maybe a couple of days,

maybe they'd feast for a couple of days

when the food was gone, they 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.

That we are, you know, feasting has taken on

a really negative connotation

because we're feasting on the wrong fids.

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

and, you know, there's a whole hormonal pack

or 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.

Does that also imply that we should exercise fasted?

Because I was thinking about my ancestors,

they would have been doing the most physical activity

when they hadn't eaten yet.

That's right. Yeah.

They would have been doing the most physical activity

right before they ate.

Yeah. So really interesting point,

and you and I were talking about this in the beginning,

is that when you exercise in a fasted state,

you're going to get rid of the glucose

that's been stored in your muscles.

So as that glucose comes out, because your body needs it to go,

you know, 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.

Okay. Historically, people have thought that fasting

is a one-size-kind-of-fits-all technique,

and 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 described these six different types of fasting.

What are the six types of fasting?

And tell me what the difference is in outcome and benefit.

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.

Okay. They take 12 to 16 hours.

Yeah. They're making ketones,

they're testosterone's going up,

inflammation's coming down, hunger might be going away.

They're kind of having this,

they might be, a lot of people lose weight with that.

It's kind of the most common fast.

Does it matter from the window?

Does it matter what time I start and what time I end?

You get to choose.

You choose what that window should be.

So I could eat at 3 a.m.

You could. There's a whole another level we can talk about

why you don't want to eat in the dark.

What's an ideal window?

I really like, it depends on the time of the year,

but in the summer, I really like somewhere,

if you're going to do an eight-hour eating window,

11 to seven in the summer,

and then in the winter, because it's darker earlier,

you would do more like a 10 to five kind of eating window.

It's not so hard to do 11 to seven.

Right. Not hard at all.

Not hard at all. That's not fasting.

That's just a slight, having a slightly later breakfast

and a slightly earlier dinner.

Yeah. But it's like being intentional, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Because you don't want to, you got to keep blood sugar low.

Otherwise, the minute blood sugar goes up,

you're going to switch over.

Right.

So you can't put it, you know,

if you walk past the kitchen and put a grape in your mouth.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, which is guilty of, yes.

Yes.

So that's the first type of the six fasting styles.

The second is, I'm going to try and say this word,

One way of saying it, people say,

either call it autophagy or autophagy.

People say it different.

You can tell me I said it wrong.

I've kind of landed on autophagy.

I feel like autophagy is the best way to say it.

Autophagy fasting, what's that?

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. Osumi's big discovery was,

is that the cells clean themselves up.

So 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 let's push 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.

Why does that happen?

What's the reason for that sort of the CEO within myself looking around and saying,

right, let's clean all this stuff up?

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.

Okay.

Everything is going to be in your survival interest.

So a virus is not in your survival interest.

So it pushes it out.

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.

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.

Okay.

So are you writing your book that that's good for balancing sex hormones and preventing colds?

So yeah, with autophagy, it's great for preventing colds.

Here's what's interesting about autophagy for sex hormones is that the major part of your brain

for both men and women, 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, most common hormonal imbalance for women.

Well, 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.

Well, 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.

And 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

because of you dipping in and out of the state of autophagy.

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. We'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 one 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. It feels like a big macro conversation that we're not having.

And looking at your work and the work around 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.

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 in across the world. And 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 and it's phthalates. And phthalates are in fragrances.

They're in our clones. They're in our perfumes. They're in our laundry detergents. They're in

our air fresheners. They also are now infiltrated into our water. So they've infiltrated into their

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. 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's 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.

Your skin is a breathable organ. So it's going to push toxins out and it's going to take toxins

in. So 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 are ultimately

can lead to dementia and Alzheimer's. Toxicity is a huge human problem.

Toxicity. When you say the word toxicity, how are you defining that? You're saying like toxic

chemicals that we introduced into our lives on our skin, consume, inhale, have around us.

Bingo. And that are in our foods, etc. Bingo. 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? Here's the most 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.

What's BPA plastics? It's a chemical within plastic that's within our water bottles,

it's in our Tupperware. They actually are saying that they're now in the microfibers

of our clothes and that's being washed out. It gets really depressing when you start talking

about toxins, gets washed out into our oceans. But for the sake of simplicity, it's bottles

mostly 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.

And the biggest and most interesting thing that BPA plastics do is there was a study

around something called a Naguti mouse and 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 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 mouse mice with the same genetic profile. And so 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.

Well, that's terrifying. It is terrifying to be completely, you know, 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 doesn't,

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 generally so concerned on the direction of humanity and where we're going because of the

abundance of these toxins. As you said that I could see a sadness in your face. Where does that come

from? 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 what the evolutionary mismatch

we're in right now. So many people are suffering, whether it's physical or mental, mentally,

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 and 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. And you know 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 like 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'm

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 you know

and the drugstore everything has a toxic insult on us and it's overwhelming. It's overwhelming.

Drastic action because we're so drastically far away from where we're supposed to be.

Where our ancestors were. 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 every block is almost every block is really bad food.

Horrible. But food that tempts the 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. Yeah.

So it is difficult and I have a great deal of empathy for anyone that's struggling with it. Me too.

Me too. It's it's it's it's 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're just like you know someone like you

just wants to get in better shape then the path is a little bit easier. But what do we do for the

for the person that gets the cancer diagnosis. What do we do for the woman who's suicidal

and going through her menopause years. Like where are we helping her. How are we getting to them.

And each time they walk into their doctor's office they're typically giving 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. Quick one before we get back to this episode just give me 30

seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening

and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us and this really is a dream

that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place. But secondly

it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started. And if you enjoy what we do here

please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app.

Here's a promise I'm going to make to you. I'm going to do everything in my power to make this

show as good as I can now and into the future. We're going to deliver the guests that you want

me to speak to and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this

show. Thank you. Thank you so much. 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 autography. Autophagy. What did I say?

Autography but I like it. I said autophagy. 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. Number three we haven't spoken about gut reset fast.

What's that? Yeah so that's based off a study that came out at MIT that showed 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 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 and 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

crazy like we got people off supplements, we got people that weren't making serotonin which affects

moods, 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. Number four, fat burner fast. 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 and then another 30, they actually did it over a 30 day

period but we've been using it in our community just dosing it in that at 36 hours what happens is

that's enough time where the blood sugars come come down where all of a sudden the body it's so

smart, it goes okay blood sugar is not common, 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 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 or does

everybody want to lose weight? Belly. Yep so it is the I should probably should have called it the

fat burning, belly fat burning. Yeah the belly fat yeah that would have banged. But yeah and so

that's what they showed is that actually a 36 hour fast started to unstick weight loss and it

was started with weight around the belly. Compelling. Number five the dopamine reset fast.

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

and so what happens and I'm sure you've talked about this on your podcast 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 and a lot and you know food is a state changer it does make us happy so what they

found is if they put them into a 48 hour fast that they actually rebooted the whole dopamine system

and new dopamine receptor sites appeared so that when they brought food back in to the equation

they actually got more enjoyment out of food with less food. 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 and

what I mean by that is I'll have some sugar and then like 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 for example when I did keto I was 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 yeah I would we had some chocolate come into the studio and I

walked over to the chocolate and I smelled it yeah and I didn't want any of it yeah it had gone

yeah but then when I'm in my what I call like the sugar cycle I'm eating sugar maybe you know

once or twice a day and I'm getting like the craving for it which I just can't seem to resist

yep well 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 whoo love that give me more of that

and so you can't you it's 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 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 more out of the out of the picture it's in fact

dopamine will actually you know you 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

I was 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 yeah my experience has been it's about three days

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 yeah for three or four days I mean like a like a chocolate but

something significant in terms of sugar then after three or four days the craving for it seems to

to vanish yeah yeah it's not if you think about that it's not hard if you're trying to overcome a

sugar addiction yeah like just bear it for three days and then that dopamine stops barking at you

and then if you attack fasting on to it now you're getting ketones and so you're not needing

that as much ketones kill hunger and they make you so mentally mentally clear they give you this

euphoric feeling so you don't have that urge to go for the for the sugar and the ketones come from

fasting yeah which is when your body switches that's a state good yeah the last and final

fasting style immune reset fast 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 and 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 and what he found is after three days of fasting the white blood

cells in our system actually reboot themselves so what they do is all old white blood cells

are 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

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 that are just going after

three-day water fast to prime their immune system but you also also at three days get stem cells

full systemic stem cells so all of a sudden your body's got in surging with stem cells going to all

parts of the body repairing it the great example I always use on this one was I had a an achilles

tendon injury and nothing was 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 I wonder what that is

and it stayed all the way through I went five full days and about the fifth and sixth day so

sixth day I was entering food back in all the pain completely went away and it never came back

I tried everything I tried everything and that was the only thing that repaired it

it does make again evolutionary sense that if our body senses were injured because we're not eating

or you know 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 you're getting it

you know because like if I was a wounded human back in on the savannahs of I don't know Africa

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 yeah hunting so you're getting it so

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 and in the book I stumbled when I was

writing the book I stumbled upon a really cool hypothesis that's called the thrifty gene hypothesis

and it said that what it's a theory obviously it's a hypothesis it's a theory that the people the

humans that evolved out of the primal days had a very specific genotype and this genotype allowed

us to metabolically flex and 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 but think about this for

this moment so 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 we're not actually activating that genetic profile so what they are

now believing is that diabetes metabolic syndrome all of that is largely happening because we are

going against the gene the genetic profile that we are now seeing in humans we're like on the opposite

end of this spectrum we're overloading our bodies yeah which is meaning that the survival

gene you reference there is not being activated to help us that's right that's right interesting

what about what about coffee you know if i'm gonna fast for i know people are so addicted to coffee

so i feel like i have to ask a question as their representative if i'm gonna fast do any of these

six fasts that you just mentioned does coffee break that fast yeah it does break it no well it

depends okay so this is this i'm just i know yes or no i can't give you a yes or no on it that's fine

i'm going to give you most likely okay no let me give you most likely it's okay okay most likely

it's okay yes there's not a high degree of uncertainty and conviction there no let me let me explain

myself okay so when you drink a cup of coffee it shouldn't spike your blood sugar it shouldn't

should not it doesn't so if it does it shouldn't so if you have black coffee and your blood sugar

doesn't spike and you're you're trying to metabolically switch over into your fasting window

you're good you're golden drink that black coffee okay okay now i'm gonna add some sugar to it

okay now now you're not switched now you've pulled you've pulled yourself out of a fasted state

okay so no sugar just a plain coffee with no milk or sugar in it is is most likely gonna keep you

in a fasted state most likely uh well i've seen a few occasions where it didn't okay um this is why

we have people test their blood sugar like it it's unique to you so 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 okay so for most people coffee should be fine when they're fasting yes but there's a

couple of anomalies who their blood sugar does spike yes um which means that they're not going to

switch over to the fasted state yes yes exactly and you know coffee mate creamers um 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 so you know the buttered coffee became very very common

and that was because of the fasting movement so 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 i had glucose goddess on the podcast who um 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 spiking and crashing and spiking and crashing and 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 me this big sort of nutrition plan and profile and

that was the first time i got to see you know i was in america at the time i was in la for a couple

of months and i'd in la i mean i pulled up at a gas station and i was it's fun i was walking

through this gas station and everything in there was sugar it's because because now i was looking

right now i had my eyes open because i'm wearing this bloody monitor yeah so i'm about to see the

impact within minutes of that it has on my body and i was just looking around thinking oh my god

the only thing that i can see in this whole store that i can eat without spiking my glucose is water

so is it a monitor where you can see it you can scan it yeah yeah so so they got game changer

yeah so they've got two one of them you scan the new one they've got it's automatic yeah by bluetooth

so it just keeps constantly updating on your phone i honestly think we could dramatically change the

health of the world if everybody put one of those on amen amen 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 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 wow 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 yeah and humanity wants the one size fits all

i can't give you that yeah you're gonna have to learn your own you gotta learn you and something

like that teaches you you but you're gonna 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 yeah and then and then every day i

have them send me their readings and we just talk it through i 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 okay you can count calories if you want but i just want you to stick this monitor

on and let's just eat let's see what you're doing and she was vegan and and this isn't a this isn't

an anti-vegan conversation but her spikes were up and down and up and down like there was 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 calorie counting point

though there's a 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 yeah you know there's something called a set point

have you heard about the yeah which is the amount of calories that i need to consume in order to hit

my that's right so we all have a set point if you're going to go down the calorie path you

you have to understand you have a set point and the set point is there's a mo 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 1500 calories a day you exercise 500 you have

a delta of a thousand so if you want to keep your weight where it's at you always have to do a thousand

calories every single day yeah 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 your gaining weight and

you don't really understand why so you're like well let me count i need to restrict calories yeah

so then you start eating maybe i mean i have 500 less yeah and then you bring the set point down

well that's your new that's your new set point you're gonna have to stay at that set point now

if you don't ever want to gain another pound you see the game okay so my set point is moving the

crafty it moves because as you restrict and you if 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 gonna always have to make sure that that set point is a thousand calories or 800 calories

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 two thousand calories a day and then if i'm under two thousand calories a day then i'll

lose weight that's what i was told yeah so you go now you go to 1500 calories you drop weight

yeah to lose the weight yep you go back up to 2000 and for most people they start to gain weight

again ah because my my set point has moved so now it's 1500 yeah to maintain my weight yeah

which is why if you think about it have we have we ever seen a calorie restriction diet work long

term no right i haven't long term being the keyword there 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 like

you're talking let's put a monitor on so that you keep your blood sugar spikes minimal it's like what

i did with this woman because i was like let's look can we have two two spikes in a day not eight

and we just keep your blood sugar at a at a 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 is going to want to switch over and it can start

to burn fat in the in and use that other energy system what do you think our relationship should

be with sugar well you know there's only 12 percent of americans that are metabolically healthy

as that means that they have the right blood pressure the right cholesterol that they're

hemoglobin a1c they're insulin all those metabolic markers are in balance only 12 percent

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 to bring back a a really traumatic concept a topic but during covid when

we looked at the people that fell prey to covid this is no no disrespect they were metabolically

unhealthy and the people that had less covid symptoms were the ones that were more metabolically

healthy in general so and largely because the virus could could really replicate if you had a

lot of glucose in your system so the consequence is huge and the health care 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

and metabolic health people think of metabolic health often as being you know i'm in good

superficial shape i'd like to think um but that's not metabolic health you could be i'm guessing you

can be metabolically unhealthy but also have abs oh oh yeah you could this woman i was telling you

about with all the spikes she was she's actually a model and an actress oh wow that that is beautiful

and we had to go back in and really work with getting her metabolically healthy so yeah you

we call it skinny fat you look 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 i think a

lot of people can relate to that skinny fat content yeah yeah so it's it's a major major issue and

you know 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 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 things 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 in chapter one of your book you talk

about this um metabolic health crisis in great detail you share some stats which i pulled out

which i i thought were terrifying it's page page four of your book you say according to the cdc

41 percent of women and 21 and older are obese 45 percent have high blood pressure out of two

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 two diabetes one out of eight will develop a thyroid problem

and 80 percent of all autoimmune conditions occur in women

why is that that last one 80 percent of all autoimmune conditions occur in women yeah so auto

immunity is a really interesting one um and um 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 the thyroid when we look at RA and joints

there's toxins in their bodies attacking that so it's happening more to women largely because well

this is this this could go dark real fast but largely because we have so many influences

that are affecting our 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 insulin resistant you're going to have trouble balancing estrogen

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 calm 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 can balance better so we need that hierarchy

as 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 which sugar and

sugar you're going after the sugar yeah so women are are perishing within this modern world more

than men so we've got to help a woman bring back more insulin sensitivity sensitivity we 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 does that imply that women and men have a different

relationship with stress oh yeah yeah yeah for sure we're not i okay so i'm gonna i'm gonna be as

bold as to say this and i know all my my feminist women out there are not gonna like this and i

was raised by a strong woman i am a strong woman i've raised just 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 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 when cortisol goes high progesterone becomes shy so now we're i mean 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 parents 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 that's a major problem

controversial idea but it rings true for a lot of people yeah 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 their menstrual cycle coming back um people very very close to me in fact that i've

i've struggled with because of this exact challenge yeah it is a controversial idea though isn't it

it's a it's slightly problematic um as an idea is there any scientific basis for that idea well

we know based off science that when cortisol goes up progesterone goes down cortisol is the

stress hormone 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

if 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 that's been proven over and over every hormone expert would agree

multiple studies but women don't realize that so we 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 that's a bit of a stressor it's why you shouldn't train for you know a big spartan race or

cross-fitting 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 that we don't

want cortisol up so in a in an interesting world this is sort of the vision i have for women right

now is what if there is this moment where the week before our period we have the the capability of

maybe not working as hard they're like spain they're giving a three-day menstrual leave to women

they with no questions asked before before the period well it's no questions asked they

anticipated it 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 interesting have you

shared this idea before publicly i've on several podcasts i've talked about it i had a great interview

with kate northrup um 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

and she said that she doesn't do as many zoom calls she tells her team that she's going to take

get off 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 so see what when estrogen comes in on on starting day one day two of our

menstrual cycles estrogen makes us really mentally clear makes us very verbal estrogen is an

incredible hormone for productivity but if you aren't minding that back half of your cycle and

you're not slowing down then 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 and what's the sort of evolutionary basis for this why is the

body doing this why is the body um not going to give us our periods i mean listen i don't have a

period but um well i have a version of it right i'm sure men have some kind of you guys you guys

have a you work off a 24 hour cycle okay so every 15 minutes you get testosterone okay you know we

joke about that right what do you say you're behind our backs kind of what do you say the joke is like

if you don't like what your husband's saying just ask him in 15 minutes he might say something

different that's what you've been saying oh just letting you in on what might be going on behind the

seeds okay so what is the evolutionary basis for why why that is true so think about the ads let's

go back to our primal days so you know testosterone is meant to have you go out and hunt it's a very

motivating it's you get it every 15 minutes so you know god this sounds as i'm saying it sounds so

sexist but when we look at the body this is actually how we're built so you were 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 what we are meant to be more outgoing before ovulation okay why is that

we need to connect we need to start to feel that that mental clarity you know estrogen

makes your hair really like full and your skin really glow and it starts to make us more beautiful

all leaning up to 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 okay well why is that because

now we are libidos 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 be

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 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 the hormones are influencing my behavior yeah and i want to know how hormones are influencing

her behavior yeah what advice have you got for me well the first is do you know her cycle

moving on we're going to talk about sugar again no no this is too good

so sugar it's really bad isn't it please to blame no seriously tell me about your childhood

no get to know her cycle i'm going to give you i'm going to give you a gold right now

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 like she you know that she's transitioning

out of the back half of her cycle she might be having some heavier bleeding you know she's

moving into that extroverted place so the first two days give her some space now day three estrogen

starting to 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 the ovulation like in the middle of ovulation which is about day 12

day 13 where all the sudden estrogens at its peak if you have any conflict you want to resolve with

her do it between like day two and day 12 of her cycle she's going to be so ready to handle any

conflict with you between let me write that down day day two and day 12 day two like literally

my battles i had a 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 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 yeah 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 um menstrual menstrual cycles yep so talk to me

like i'm an idiot about the menstrual cycle yeah how long is it oh i love this and you know that

most women don't know oh really so i mean 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 okay and what day does the

period come on day one so day one is the first day she bleeds okay then how long that lasts for

what seven days uh everyone's different anywhere from three to seven days okay so day you said day

between day two and 12 is when to pick my battles yes so day two you're going to start to see her

be emerge a little more gregarious she may be a little more outgoing so i mean as she get closer

to day 12 you want to go party with her you want to take her out make her feel good like that's the

time to whine and dine her okay cool we'll put all the dates then and other fights and then

after day 12 what am i doing then after day 12 okay so day 12 is right when she's ovulating

so you're gonna 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 that's if this is the one i once i

figured this out i was like why don't why don't men know this um that's when she's going to be her

libido is going to be the highest okay so we're having sex yes so if you want to have sex with her

i'm just writing this down yes have sex with her around that time around that time she's willing

yeah she's going to be more motivated because she has testosterone she's going to feel more like it

okay then after she finishes ovulating after day 15 yeah so then there's gonna be a crash of hormones

you might see a change in her personality she might feel a little low so go stay in a hotel

but you could ask you know like if she's having a bummer day like or a low day ask her do you

know what day your cycle you on be really nice be really nice and then here's the gold here's

gold this is so good you're gonna have to report back to me how this works okay uh when around day

17 or 18 progesterone's coming in this is where you got to give her foot rubs you got to be extra

special and cater her like like she's the queen that she deserves to be okay so all my compliments

that's where i pull out the notepad yes 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 i don't feel beautiful but you know i should disagree i should say no no you

no you don't you look amazing okay cool and you do that till she bleeds and you can take

amazing care of her in the the week before her period and you will get kudos like you you can't

even imagine and then start it all over again and then start it all over again yeah i mean just

once you understand our patterns and then it also helps you understand that we're gonna be more

outgoing in the front half of our cycle we're gonna be more introverted in the back half what about

men you guys every 15 minutes you you're pretty you're pretty black and white really yeah you're

pretty straightforward so if she was asking you the same question about me would you say anything

to her about my hormone cycles at all you'd you just say what it really depends on the issue at

hand so if it's a a mismatch of libido then the best time to have sex with a woman is during

ovulation okay because she has the most amount of testosterone day 10 to 15 yeah yeah 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 yeah what's going on inside her body i the first time

i discovered this i started using an app called the clue app yeah 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 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 you know it because

of these three hormones our moods are much more volatile than yours you guys are pretty steady

eddy we're i'm this is general you know this is i hate to be sexist in this conversation but this

is hormones than the way they work 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 are

they have like mood swings or that they're you know people say things like they're too emotional or

they're whatever it might be but with this i actually think it creates a ton of empathy yeah

that's the certainly the reaction that i get from hearing that there's a there's 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 or i'm i notice that my my my

partner's just different yep and it's almost it catches me off guard sometimes i've actually

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 um and very difficult things as well yeah and there will be

times where um i come home or we go through a patch where just a week you know things are

making her upset which wouldn't normally make her upset it's tiny things that i'm doing

and i go what that's it like you know so see if you can track that to a certain part of her

cycle i'm gonna so like the week before our period we're pretty we're irritable and every

time i say that men go well you said it i didn't say it well but that's because progesterone we you

know 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 so generally we're a little bit slower we don't want to you know we

don't have the desire to push through stress and push through exercise and so we're gonna be we're

a little we're different that week where so 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 got

to do but if you're trying to resolve a big conflict or you're trying to come at us in in too

aggressive a way we will shut down the week before our periods so interesting whereas if you have

something you want to resolve with us make sure estrogen's there because estrogen makes us great

great verbal 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 and i have to say this is because

you know 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 this cycle yeah so it's a wonderful thing

it's beautiful and in 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 this is

a great time ovulation's an amazing time to start a new business project interesting it's a great

time like as an author like 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 like you know talk about something

about life and how to create something with us do it during ovulation your husband is behind that law

here in my home and does is he aware of your menstrual cycle he is until i started to lose it

i'm 53 so i'm starting to go um but yeah we talk like this all the time and and the way i like to

i like to take ownership over my hormonal moods so i will say to him after a long day of work

i will say 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 we um losing the menstrual cycle we the first time i started

as a young man that hasn't been exposed to that at any point in my sort of you know in the education

system or other um the first time i started to understand what menopause was and premenopause

and perimenopause all these things was from guests that have come here and it's such a big 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 yeah i feel like they are so misunderstood in so many ways thank you and i love hearing about

it now um because it's going to help me relate to those women in a better way and have and understand

how i can be a partner with them through that phase of life like you know certain members of

my family that are going through that phase of life what do what do we need to know as men but

also as women about menopause perimenopause and all those things yeah thank you thank you for asking

i think we're the most misunderstood um age group of women and the 45 to 55 year old in that decade

is the most common time for women to commit suicide really yeah this is why my next book i'm writing

right now is on the mental health of menopausal women because we're struggling and so the first

thing you have to know is that after 40 our sex hormones start to decline so estrogen goes up and

down so one day you're going to experience if you have if you live with a 43 year old woman

you're going to experience she's great 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 at 35 progesterone is starting to go down

so as progesterone goes down we are less stress resilient so 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 so we need to we just need to have

more breaks we need more nurturing like i explained in 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 as ultimately 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 way the same way we used to be able to we forget things

and it's really frustrating to us and so when people around us like 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 yes 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 of estrogen and then i worked you know getting i working with some

bioidenticals working with some lifestyle to bring my estrogen up but from 40 to about 55

that is about a 10 to 15 year period where the woman's brain has to recalibrate to these

loss of hormones and so our moods are all over the place during that time so 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 is we'll 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 it's brutal what about after 45 she said 40 to 45 yeah so once

we actually go a whole year without a period we actually do better so the brain is used to the

less hormones so when we get on the other side post menopausal we actually are great

we're women that once they go to that side of the hormonal process tend to actually be you know we

have so much wisdom i'd like to think we actually tend to be the opposite of everything i just said

we tend to be more stressed 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 and that's

that first phase that 40 to 45 phase what's that phase called is that the that's perimenopause perimenopause

and then menopause is beyond 45 yeah the average age for menopause right now is about 52 although a

lot of women are going in around 45 sometimes earlier okay but but i think that if there was

one thing i want want i could help the world understand is that we're trying to understand

ourselves during that time so be patient with us because we may not we may react much different

than you've ever seen us react before so 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 gonna have a beautiful wise wonderful woman on the other

side of that it's just that transition into perimenopause is really a treacherous one

it's so interesting it's so i find it staggering that no one told me this at any point in my life

agreed because irrespective of whether you are a woman or not and you're going to go through that

you're going to your relationships with women are going to be integral to your life and avoidably

your mother your grandmother your partner so having the insight gives me the empathy

you know and that's what that's why i'm so fortunate from having this conversation it was

gabby logan who came on this podcast to be in a mccall who wrote a book about menopause in the end

and knew that i've really helped to open my eyes about that and um it's interesting i just i don't

know what it is i think growing up like men just don't want to talk about periods and menstrual

cycles and all of these kinds of things they're almost taboo yeah in a weird way i call it in the

new book i'm writing i'm calling it the cultural hush yeah 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 that

has come out that read that book and they go to the chapter on women and hormones and then they come

and find me and say i finally understand my wife yeah i finally understand my daughter why aren't

we talking about that and then how many women we don't we don't talk about like the fact that i'm

i'm suffering because i don't have as much estrogen estrogen it would we don't have a

culture or a 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 you know oprah is starting to do a whole thing on

menopause like the conversation's opening up but it's going to take bravery from women to step up

i mean 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

bitch today it's like because i don't have the hormone to stop me from being a bitch today

so those those kind of conversations are not hand happening but if we did it with more empathy

if we could express ourselves like hey i just need i need a break right now is 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 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

called hrt right hrt yeah you can go get some hrt throw that at the problem then you'll have

your hormones back yeah so this is this is the big thing is that just because you take a hormone

doesn't mean your cells are going to use it so if you take it let's use let's use thyroid it's a

perfect example because so many women specifically take thyroid medication and they don't see any

any 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 you've got a there has to be production

of the hormone there has to be breaking down in the hormone and there has to be receiving of the

hormone so when you take hrt you're only handling one of those things you still and lifestyle this

is why i'm such a so passionate about lifestyle lifestyle can handle the other two they can take

care of the gut and the liver they can open up the cell so it can receive hrt i i've been i wrote

a book called the menopause reset and it'll come out in we're reissuing it in uh june and one of

the things in there is i i mapped out five lifestyle changes that women should do after 40

and in that book i lived that i did that through my whole 40s i didn't start doing bioidenticals

till like 52 but i had my lifestyle dialed in first and now bioidenticals are working well

people are sad they're going five lifestyle changes they want to know what they are they're

gonna they're gonna buy the book as well aren't we we're gonna buy the book and we're gonna find

out right now yes okay well what do you think the first one is fasting yes there you go the first

one's fasting uh so it actually fast like a girl came after the menopause reset because all the women

asked me well what if i have a site you know what if i'm in my 30s what if i'm in my 20s how should

i fast so that's you know that was sort of the birth of that book so fasting second one is you

have to learn to cycle your food so your ketogenic diet works really well at certain times cycle your

food cycle your food styles what does that mean so if in the front half if you have a menstrual

cycle yeah in the front half when estrogen's coming in go keto keep carbs low keep glucose low

you're great back half of your cycle when progesterone's coming in raise glucose so don't go keto

but do natures carbs do more fruits do more squashes potatoes that's going to help with

building progesterone so the perimenopausal woman has to learn that there's times to bring carbs down

and there's times to bring carbs up and that's what i explained in that i called it keto variations

in that book so that's step two step three microbiome you got 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 microbiomes and is completely off we have a whole set of

bacteria in our gut called the astrobalome 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 so i list all those foods out in there and then number and that's for stage two of

the three steps to act these hormone replacement therapies actually working which is being able

to metabolize the hormone break it down yes you got it okay yeah you got it you're gonna be a

hormone expert after this well you know much to pretty face yeah so then the fourth one is watch

your toxic load so we talked about that and then step five is my favorite and it's stop being a

rushing woman yeah i know as i tell you from a rushing lifestyle we need more as we go through

perimenopause we need more more downtime you got 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 and so you've got to bring in more

mindfulness more meditation more yoga more more vacations more nose that's got 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

i was thinking then as you're speaking i was thinking about how i kind of 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 of because

we've been unconscious you know so we 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 we could rewrite the blueprint of what it is to be a human and how to live

let's try and rewrite that so how would i work as a man and a woman what would be the

differences how many days a week what if you if you were in charge now rewriting that which you

might be one day i'd like to be you'd like to be okay so you're taking on the responsibility

so how would men and women work and you mean from a business yeah like a professional standpoint

okay well let's start with a man yeah so well both men and women we have two nervous systems

one that speeds us up one that relax that slows us down so you could be in a speed up mode most of

the time i would say you just need to make sure i mean it really actually i just thought about this

right now the the patriarchal work week works really well for men monday through friday work

your fanny off saturday saturday take it off now you're 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 seven seven days a week you know like you're not meant to be working all the

time and and never taking a break what would you make the work hours for a man well i'm i'm a big

fan of working in the daylight and resting we're supposed to rest when it's dark okay so winter

you would work less summer you would work more okay we do the opposite right we take more vacation

this summer women so women we would design our whole work week around our menstrual cycle so

we could go full tilt all the way till day 19 day 20 and then we would we would take a week off

and we would bow out so instead of doing it in a weekly amount like you guys would be doing

we'd be doing it in a monthly amount and how long would you bow out for well ideally it depends on

each woman's going to be a little different but i would say anywhere from i want to say seven days

if it worked for a schedule until you bleed so day 20 till you know if you're if day 21

till day 28 you would do it for a week bowing out might also look like i just am not going to take

on the the high load that i normally do the rest of the month maybe i'll cut it in half

maybe work from home yeah maybe i work from home maybe i can't do my workload and my extreme

exercise and go socialize with my friends during that week i just need to start to slow everything

down so that's what i want to say about bowing out is that it's just you're putting yourself first

and you're slowing everything down now eating yeah men and women eating yeah so men i think as far

as food i agree with just keeping blood sugar stable is great i think you guys really work well

off of a meat based and animal diet i don't think you have more you have more testosterone which

means you have more muscle we the way that we build muscle and keep muscle strong is through

amino acids and you get that meat so for men i feel like that primal diet the paleo diet

was meat and vegetables and fruit is amazing i think that's that's perfect i don't think refined

flowers and sugars um that we are exposed to i think that over in an overabundance they'll

hurt men too and we're seeing that with metabolic syndrome women we do well with meats you know i

think we need less of it because we have less testosterone so we may need less of it although

it is important protein is important especially as we age so i don't want to lose sight on that

but we also need to bring glucose up so we need more fruits we're going to need more

squashes we're going to need more potatoes and that's you know all built around your menstrual

cycle so eating times i'm i'm not a fan of eating when it's dark out because when melatonin goes up

insulin you become more insulin resistant so i'm a fan of which means what it means you so your

your body won't process the glucose from that meal as efficiently when it's dark out it won't

take away and store yeah where it needs to be stored as energy exactly it'll store it as fat or

something yeah it's going to store it as fat if it can't if insulin can't drive it into the cell

for inner energy it'll start 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 i know so 90s aren't doing themselves any favors no

so we go back to our primal friends right like let's go back and use that if if people get lost

in these theories so they didn't have electricity they sat around the fire so most likely they ate

during light hours and then the women what did the women do if we go back and look at cultures

around our period we were actually that's the whole red tent ideas we were sequestered off into

another part of the of the tribe we didn't have to do as many chores we went more into an introverted

place you go back and you study what we did in those days it was very much along those lines

and we're just not doing that now what about supplements what supplements would you have

men and women consuming uh 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 i mean there's a lot of them but for hormones is 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 our vitamin d levels yeah i've learned this from

guest on this podcast i started taking vitamin d supplements yeah if your vitamin d is under 30

you are in a critically depressed immune state yeah so you 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 so this this goes back to like the hrt thing if all if we're taking hrt but our vitamin

d is 20 that hrt isn't going to be as effective as as compared to the woman who has an hrt of like

55 or 60 or a vitamin d of 55 or 60 that hrt will work better interesting and vitamin d comes from

sunlight doesn't it sunlight and sardines sardines it's the food sources are really bad this is why

everybody's low on it the food sources are it's sardines it's like really fatty fishes um and

sunlight and we spend most of our time indoors that's right we can't get it from this kind of

light no no and you have to be outside with your like skin exposed at the high point of the day of

the sun like 12 o'clock to get the most vitamin d and if you're in a city where there's more air

pollution study has shown that you're not going to the rays that come in that turn uh that will hit

your skin and turn it into vitamin d or less because of 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 is that why people

are doing these like infrared saunas and stuff now does that produce vitamin d or is that something

else that's more detox it's it's pushing infrared sauna it what it does is it uh simulates a fever

so it burns things out from the inside of the cell out which is why it's a really good detoxer

there's 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 you said about the importance of opening up our

our detox pathways and you've just mentioned detox in there what do you mean by opening up

our detox pathways yeah so if you look at our lymph system the lymph is is like you know people

know lymph nodes because when you get sick you can feel them mumps yeah yeah so the lymph is always

carrying toxins out of organs so 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 so the gut the gut's 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 the what's 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 and actually would work for men too is that you're you should have a pit not a

puff if it's a puff like look in the mirror and if your armpit is a puff then that's stagnant

lymph it means that you're not pulling the the toxins for women that are coming out of her

breasts are not getting out toxins that are coming out from the head down into the into the thoracic

area is not getting out because it's congested so if your underarm is puffy and not like a pit

yeah then you might be storing some of those toxins that's right and they're not moving they're

not mobilizing why aren't they am i blocking my pathways yeah the pathways block so with what

well there's the question yeah with i feel like people are going to leave this podcast to be so

depressed because there's 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

is a lot of women using toxic deodorants they weren't getting the toxins out of the breast and

it was clogging in the armpit because of the toxins from the deodorant that explains why we

sweat in that area right because it's a pathway why do we even have hair in that area i don't know

you tell me it's a detox it's for detoxing it's to help get those toxins out oh so the molecules

go down the hair yeah yeah and what do women do shave it off that's right so you're saying

i i shave i i'm i just because i don't i can't walk it's just not in my in my nature but i you

know what i do is i have a luffa in my shower and i just luffa under my arms at whenever i shower to

open up those pathways what's the luffa it's like a little organic sponge okay scrubs it yeah scrubs it

we also have pubic hair we also have pubic hair we are getting toxins out from the ovaries the ovaries

are the major area for end testes this is where hormones are being produced and so as they're

coming out they are supposed to influence our 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 like this

way that we can mobilize the toxins out of us i never want i never knew or asked why i grow hair

under my arms and in the pubic region no one ever told me about that no one ever i never questioned it

i thought it was slightly inconvenient yes well it is for sure 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 a sculpted to

survive it's funny because we spend so much of our time and this goes back to the conversation

around sugar we spend and just weight loss and all these things we live in a world where we think

that our body is against us right 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 inconvenient yeah yeah yeah and then

we fight it we shave it off and we you know do all these crazy things to fight against our body

but our body is very much it's it's actually it's actually for us and 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 you got it i mean you got it it's this is what i'm trying to bring back is this this

respect for what the body is trying to do that's what we're missing we we it's all inconvenient

and it's everything from like even like 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 like 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 we're just at the modern

world does not line up with the human body's design quick one as you guys know we're lucky

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26 vitamins and minerals and it's nutritionally complete in the protein space there's lots of

things but it's hard to find something that is nice especially when consumed just with water

and that is nutritionally complete and that has about a hundred calories in total while also giving

you your 20 grams of protein if you haven't tried the heal protein product do give it a try

the salted caramel one if you put some ice cubes in it and you put it in a blender and you try it

is as good as pretty much any milkshake on the market just mixed with water it's been a game

changer for me because i'm trying to drop my calorie intake and i'm trying to be a little

bit more healthy with my diet so this is where heal fits in my life thank you heal for making

a product that i actually like the salted caramel is my favorite i've got the banana one here which

is the one my girlfriend likes but for me salted caramel is the one something really

pissed me off this weekend i was walking through um new york city and i saw a poster and it is for

in weight loss injections yeah have you seen this this stuff no but ozempic is a drug that's

really popular right now there's a couple of drugs right now there's one my friends are talking

about it we were like there's a diabetes drug i think and the headlines have been that so many

people are taking this yeah diabetes drug to lose weight that people with diabetes are struggling

there's another one called sema glutide yeah yeah this is this is people injecting things in

their body to help them lose weight yeah and the poster which my friend had sent me and i'd

i'd seen it earlier and then he'd sent me the poster as well in our group chat says one shot

a week lose weight and it has a the little url someone thankfully had actually ripped the url

off this billboard um what's your take on all this stuff yeah the the the new medications that

are out there right now are creating a weight loss uh 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 i mean we need muscle to get out of a chair yeah

you need muscle to perform daily life functions the other thing people don't realize about muscle

is in muscle or insulin receptors uh 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 be able to stay at the weight you want because

you don't have the same insulin sensitivity so again we're it's like the calorie in calorie out

short-term result long-term consequence it's not it's risky it's risky and then you know every

medication has a side effect but i'm more concerned about the person who thinks they solved their

weight loss issue and all they've done is made it worse down the road 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 specter about

might be gels yo asked a question about do 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 it at a certain point

further down the line metabolism does change but really the thing that change 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 yeah and because i was asking him a question about my father i said i went down

this really steep steep cliff in barley 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 my dad's age and be able to go down these stairs so i can do

stuff with my kids um and getting into a place where i'm a mobile at you know in my what by 60

that is a choice that doesn't unavoid that is a for most of us that is a choice and it's one that

we can avoid if we keep muscle and we keep therefore we'll keep fat and what you've 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 be i will have a higher chance

of weight gain and obesity when i'm older and and your functionality yeah so the great the

perfect example that i 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 is just being able to get up and out of a chair after 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

like 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 a lot of other people would say you know the way to lose weight is just to do lots of

cardio run a lot yeah good idea no no so here's another interesting thing and i'm going to give

it through a women's perspective because we're good let's go back to women over 40 so cortisol

goes up with extra cardio uh calorie set point goes you know your more calorie output so remember

that's also happening and you're changing your set point so i need more calories my calorie set

point goes up and my cortisol levels go up yeah okay okay 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 you're doing so much cardio so progesterone goes down because cortisol

goes up 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 that extra hormone well so long term that's not a great plan

for women for women for men uh well so then the second piece applies to both men and women

is if you're doing a lot of cardio most likely you're breaking down muscle to be able to perform

that cardio and a great example is look at a marathon runner versus a tennis player you know

or a soccer player like 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 so it won't help me to lose weight no no you know

what's going to help you to lose weight is more weight lifting build more muscles 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 saw we see all the time in both my clinic

and my online world is those three things will get you in the shape that you want is might not

remember as you build muscle you're not going to lose the the the number on the scale might be

that much different you know it might it might not move but your whole shape is going to change

you're going to look different so is any level of cardio good for weight loss would you recommend

that just for the the broader health benefits you know I think cardio is more of a mental health

improvement improve you know 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

another thing that I saw online which was very curious that you said is you were talking about

how to undo the oxidative damage from eating too much sugar yeah what do you mean by that

so think about think about the cell as an ecosystem right and so 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 then and the nucleus and all the cellular parts

so what you're doing when you're fasting is you're re-establishing balance into the cell

and you're allowing to your body to naturally undo the oxidative damage that happened from poor

living so it's like a reset it's like a cellular reset 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 so it appears

to break down muscle you 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 the shape of the muscle

makes it more lean I guess 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's two ways to build muscle one is

through weights lifting weights strength training and the other is through food protein so all

fasting is doing is leaning it out and does fasting have an impact on my sleep

it can in a couple of ways sleep for starters if your brain's inflamed you're not going to sleep

so fasting brings down inflammation so that would be the first thing

the other thing is that a lot of people wake up especially women two three in the morning and

they kind of get the jolt out out of bed and a lot of times that's because you've maybe had dinner

at seven o'clock glucose is going down and so the body registers that glucose has gone down

and so it gives you a cortisol spike and all of a sudden you wake up at two or three in the morning

is that why some people wake up at I've got a friend of mine that's an elderly male

and he always tells me because I woke up at 3 a.m. 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 we

when I'm with him we do eat dinner particularly late yeah yeah so he's probably getting so 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 it and all

of a sudden triggers cortisol and releases glucose from other body parts and the the body takes that

as we're running from a tiger get up out of bed yeah and to avoid that what would usually you'd

recommend not eating so late yeah not even so late but the more you fast the more you're you

stabilize that blood sugar and you don't have those highs and lows as much it's it's a it's a way

of bringing balance back to the whole blood sugar system I have to say you know we talk a lot about

I mean we've talked extensively about fasting today and one of the concerns I have about talking

about the subject matter is the implications it has for people with eating disorders yeah

because it's quite easy to conflate messages if if if you're not able to fully understand

the context of everything yeah and I'm sure that's a topic you've you've thought about I mean you I

think you actually write about it in one of the later chapters in your book in chapter 10 yeah um

it's it's it's a common it's it's one that we thought a lot about when we wrote the book so I

want to say that first that um 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 that I would say

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 and 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 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

patch on fasting as a as an adjunct to it and she's doing incredible incredible so you it's

there's just a different approach but I really encourage that you work with your practitioner

or your therapist where do I start I'm sold you've sold me on fasting I'm gonna become a faster

where do I start Mindy 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 I told you this off camera I told you not to mention it

sorry okay on it on a good day on an ideal day so my my issue is um I'm gonna be honest because

that's the point of this podcast um the issue I have is I wake up in the morning I then begin

work and I'll get I'll eat my first meal this is quite shocking in fact I'll eat my first meal around

I'm gonna 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 I got to 7pm and they go we haven't eaten today oh 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 oh no I go to sleep like a good boy no I this is where you

go wrong this is it yeah this is where it goes downhill then I'll eat then I'll eat something

um pretty late at night and that could be midnight so you're so what I heard in that is

your eating window is 2 to 12 2 to 12 yeah so that you're in a you're in a 10 hour eating window

yeah so in if you in the morning are you doing coffee yeah yeah I do now mainly because of this

podcast but okay yeah but you're not eating anything else in the morning no not really no

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 okay so if you choose to make two your time that you I call it

opening up your eating window you're going to start eating so you would go 2 to 12 that's 10

hour eating window it's not and we'll work on your window here in a moment that that's leaving 14

hours of fasting about 15 hours you're going to start to get the testosterone increase so I would

say let's can we make it a nine or an even an eight hour eating window especially because you told

me your goals and 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 right or you could push it back to three before or four you said

sometimes where you don't where you don't eat what would be ideal well for it 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 yeah so you would

do like one to nine or twelve to eight or twelve to eight yeah or eleven till seven right it's not

gonna happen I'll do I'll do the uh the one till nine yeah that you said yeah because I go to the

gym often quite lately you go so that means I can eat after the gym and then here's a here's a

little hack is that and and I want to make sure that people don't lose sight what I just did with

you is customize it to your lifestyle and I think that's really important you just take that eating

window and you figure out what's the best where it fits 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 like sit and

enjoy that you sound like that that from a fitness and work level that's working for you so let's

let's 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 gonna do is you're

gonna put your body into a little bit of a state of stress where all the things we've talked about

are going to start to the healing is going to happen at a much quicker rate you're saying once

in a while yes once a week for you once a week so once a week go like 24 hours without eating

that's right or we call it one meal a day wow okay anything else I need to know to get started

I mean the 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 I have MCT oil on my counter at

home because I did keep the keto diet 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 pure fat mom they're hard to find I'll tell you it's a fat mom so it's

it has no carbs very little protein it's all fat so an example of one might be an avocado

is pretty fat dense it has it does have some carbs but the one I love it's a something called a

keto cup and it's MCT oil with cacao butter and some chocolate just pure chocolate around wrapped

around it it looks like a little Reese's peanut butter cups and I you can do those in your fasting

window and they'll keep they won't switch you over because they're pure fat so fasted snacks or it

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 what is the most important thing we haven't

talked about in your view you know I think the most important thing is for people to realize that

there's not the perfect path there's just your path so take all 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

is that people build a lifestyle that's unique to them and a one would be your own end of end of one

it's really the most beautiful place to live end of one yeah you know what they say in a

in a study they always say like the end is how many people were in the study and so they'll say

like end of a hundred end of a thousand so end of one is one person was in the study be your own

study be your own be your own study your own experiment yeah we have a closing tradition

on this podcast where the last guest asks a question for the next guest and the question

that's been left in the diary of a ceo for you is interesting it's it's actually not that profound

or interesting but but it's 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 that's actually that's a great question

um I could answer that question on a health level like I 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 like I 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 why is that important 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 that feels like self-love

and that feels like where health is going to live for me and I haven't I haven't spent much time

doing that in my life so I'm learning to do it for the first time now

Mindy Dr Mindy Pells 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 and I'm

so excited when they told me I'd be 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 it's really cool yeah 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 there 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 oh thank you I just really appreciate the opportunity to be here

for the thoughtful questions and really allowing me to express what I hope hope does exactly that

and I think the purpose of of living a fulfilled life is touching humans you never actually meet

amen

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