The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode #255 - Dr. Mindy Pelz

TRANSCRIPT

(Note: This is generated by AI with 98% accuracy. However, any errors may cause unintended changes in meaning.)

Melanie Avalon:
Hi friends, welcome back to the show. I am so incredibly excited about the conversation I am about to have. I have been looking forward to this conversation for so long for a lot of reasons. So as listeners know, I'm also the host of the Intermittent Fasting Podcast. So I get a lot of questions on that show for guest recommendations because I've had that show longer than this show. And people have been asking for years, years, years that I interviewed Dr. Mindy Pelz. She does so much work in the sphere of women's hormones and intermittent fasting. So we will obviously be talking about that. But when she had a new book come out, although I guess it was a while ago now, but she came out with the incredible book Fast Like a Girl. I was just so excited at the potential of actually diving deep into her work and having her on the show, which is manifesting right now. And so not only did I read Fast Like a Girl for this show, I also read her book Prior, which was the menopause reset. Get rid of your symptoms and feel like your younger self again. The subtitle, by the way, is fast like a girl, a woman's guide to using the healing power of fasting to burn fat, boost energy and balance hormones. So these are two really big massive topics. And Dr. Pelz, I really love her perspective and the science that she brings and just the guidance. And so there is so much that we can dive into today in today's episode. So Dr. Pelz, thank you so much for being here.

Dr. Mindy Pelz
Oh, thank you for having me. I appreciate the kind introduction.

Melanie Avalon:
I don't think you were on the chains, but we were emailing with your assistants leading up to this. And I was like, is there a certain book she wants to focus on? Because there's like so many things to talk about. So I just decided to read both the fasting and the menopause, which was a really good decision because especially because I get, like I said, questions about fasting, but I also get a ton of questions about women's hormones and menopause, which is not my forte.

Dr. Mindy Pelz
A note on that, it's funny because I always think of my books as like a continual conversation I'm having with my reader. It's like, to me, the books all link together, so I'm glad you read both of those because there's some overlap and there's a lot of differences. So good choice. I'm glad you did them both.

Melanie Avalon:
No, thank you. Actually, okay. And this is like a super specific question, but I noticed, for example, like with the fasting and the menopause book, I think like you had a different number of fasts and you focused on different types. What was your mental process behind that?

Dr. Mindy Pelz
Yeah, so what's really interesting is that with the menopause reset, at that time, I was just literally swimming in the research on fasting. I was so excited about it that I was teaching it in my videos on my YouTube channel. Every week, putting out a couple of videos with new studies and just so excited about it, I was sharing that I had used fasting as a tool to be able to help some of my perimenopause symptoms. My following on YouTube started asking me, they were like, well, what else are you doing for menopause? What else? I was like, well, let me just write a book because that book is an easy read. People can devour it in a day or two. I was like, let me just tell you the five major things I changed in my lifestyle, fasting being one of them, that really helped my perimenopausal symptoms. I throw that book out into the world, and then all the 20 and 30 -year -olds were like, well, what about if I'm not in menopause? What about fasting for me? Then I threw out fast like a girl, and now all the postmenopausal women are like, well, what about me? It's been really interesting. I've got a couple of books down the road. We're in a continual conversation. It's been like an answer to what my following asks, and then I deliver with a book.

Melanie Avalon:
I love that. I was going to say major teaser there. That's really exciting. Oh my goodness. Okay. So so many directions. I want to go. Well, I guess before I dive into like actual questions, your personal story, and I'm sure a lot of listeners are familiar with your work, but would you just like to share a little bit about your journey and what led you to what you're doing today?

Dr. Mindy Pelz
Oh my gosh, it's always an interesting story, like how'd you get here? I'm still trying to figure it out. So just a little bit of a background on me. My educational background is as a chiropractor, I went to chiropractic school, which is really an interesting part of the story because in chiropractic school, you really learn that the body heals itself. And so all my training was through the lens of the body's always doing the right thing at the right time. And I launched into my practice in my mid -20s and I really, I've always had a passion for nutrition and detox and supplementation and what we call, now call functional medicine. We didn't call it that back then. And so I launched my practice and knew I wanted to do a more lifestyle approach, that my practice was going to be about teaching people how to eat, teaching people how to detox, teaching people how to use supplements, like it was all about how do we create a lifestyle that works for people. And I did that for 25 years, actually it was at 26 years. And about maybe 10, 15 years into my practice, I found the science on fasting. And it shocked me to be honest. It was like, wait a second, are you telling me that we now have science, that when you go without food, the body heals itself. Now that concept alone, when it first started to emerge, was like revolutionary. But I was raised by a health food nut mom. In chiropractic school, we learned about the body always healing itself. Like there were so many parts of this fasting, new emerging fasting science that fit into my ethos of health. And so I literally became obsessed with it and ended up spending 10 to 20 hours a week looking at the emerging science on fasting, experimented on myself, really brought it to my patients and was like, okay, let's look at how we can use this tool because it's free, it's time efficient. And once I took the science and I brought it to my patients and I saw that people I had tried giving weight loss results to by changing the way they ate, they all of a sudden got weight loss results just by changing when they ate, not what they ate. I started seeing that all the supplements that would help my patients, if I just taught them how to fast, they didn't need to be on the supplements. And that even went on to medications and things like that. So it just, it was blew my mind how the body healed in the absence of food. And once I started seeing it work for my patients, I really took it to social media and started teaching it on YouTube. It was on YouTube that everything just exploded. People got ahold of the videos, they were excited about what we call the timeline of fasting benefits chart was one of the first things I ever put out that showed, hey, 15 hours this happens and 24 hours this happens. Yeah, and the rest is kind of history and the world just started consuming the information and giving me feedback. We learned a lot. It's like what I bring you even today is a lot of years of research and a lot of trial and error and a lot of people who will stand here and tell you fasting really worked for them.

Melanie Avalon:
I love it. Okay. Some questions from what you just said. I have so many things I want to ask you. So one thing to start with, so you mentioned, you know, these charts, like, you know, at 15 hours, this happens and, you know, at this hour, this happens and people today really like, you know, they like like memes and they like charts and they like clear things and they like, this will happen when this happens. And at the same time, we also know, you know, people are so individual and like you said, the literature is always evolving. So how do you decide like when it comes to fasting, where you make, I guess, like clear promises about things happening versus respecting the individual and, you know, people like clickbaity things. So how do you navigate that whole world?

Dr. Mindy Pelz
Oh my gosh, this is such a good question because this is one of my pet peeves. So what I'm teaching everything I am trying to express to the world is here's a really cool tool called fasting, and it fits into this really cool system that is inside your body called your metabolic system. And your body was designed to, we call it a switch, a metabolic switch lives inside the system where you were designed to thrive when you eat, and you were designed to thrive when you don't eat. And I call it the sugar burner system and the fat burner system. And you were meant to go in and out of these two systems. That's the metabolic switch. Now here's to your point where it gets really interesting is that metabolic switch is unique to you. So some people thrive with a 13 -hour fast. There's one of the greatest studies that was ever done on women showed that women that had gone through traditional breast cancer treatment had a 64% less reoccurrence of breast cancer if they just did a 13 -hour fast coming out of traditional chemo and radiation that they saw that their reoccurrence of cancer was much less than compared to people who didn't fast. And that's as little as 13 hours. And then we have as much as Walter Longo, one of the greatest researchers on fasting, he was the one that brought the 72 -hour fast to all of us, which is the three -day water fast that shows your whole immune system reboots after three days in a water fast. So when I look at this metabolic switch that says we should have part of the day that we eat, and we should have part of the day that we don't eat, that that switch needs to be personalized. And this is why I put out so many videos, I have so many books, I'm trying to get that across. But you said something that was really interesting to me, which is unfortunately, the way I interpreted what you said, is that we live in a time right now where people are like, just tell me what to do. I just give me a spoon, feed me. Just tell me, I get this question all the time, what length fast should I do? My response is, well, what are you trying to achieve with your health? That's how you decide. So this is why we call it the art of fasting. What I am teaching is how do you improve this metabolic switch, and how do you know when to fast, when not to fast? How do you know what to break your fast with? How do you know what to eat? There is a whole discussion in this art of fasting, and it is personal to you. So even whatever I say today, you need to take it and apply it to you, as opposed to going to Instagram and just scrolling the news, your newsfeed, and making decisions based off of people saying, do this, don't do that. You will never hear me say that. The only diet I'm against is the Western Standard Diet because it's killing us. Otherwise, I really believe there's an art to understanding this that is unique to you.

Melanie Avalon:
I love this so much. This is how I feel exactly. So it's wonderful to hear that. Sometimes I'm haunted though with like social media and everything. I'm like, should I do like a clickbaity title? But then like when they click on it, you know, it's like the real information.

Dr. Mindy Pelz
Well, you know what, you can do what we do on my YouTube channel. We do look for trending topics. And when we see a trending topic, then we put my interpretation or my view in it. And you know, you bring up a really interesting point because it's kind of a catch -22. Like on one hand, it's a trending topic, but on the other hand, my God, can we have some unique conversation? Do we always have to be all doing the same -same? And so I think the big takeaway on this topic is for each one of us, we need to become better critical thinkers so that we don't fall prey to always falling into those clickbaity headlines. That's the way I see it.

Melanie Avalon:
I could not agree more. I love it. And you mentioned Valtter Longo. I'll put a link in the show notes. I think I've had him on the show, kind of remember, I think three times. I love his work. And I went to USC where he's, you know, the head of the gerontology school there, I think. So that's an example of something where there are so many different perspectives. But I know you have a really interesting and unique perspective on this. And that's protein intake with things. So on the intermittent fasting podcast, my former co -host was Cynthia Thurlow. I don't know if you, oh yeah. And then Vanessa Spina is my current one. They're both very much in like the high protein intake camp. And so reading your book was really interesting hearing your thoughts on protein. And so not to go into like a really specific question, but like protein, like that's an example where you hear all different things about recommendations. Do you have thoughts on protein intake with fasting?

Dr. Mindy Pelz
I have a lot of thoughts on it. Thank you for asking the question on protein because this is something that I just feel like we need a more nuanced conversation on. I told you before we started recording that we now have a sequel to Fast Like a Girl coming out and it's a food book. It's actually a cookbook called Eat Like a Girl and it will help that complete the information on this metabolic switch. So when I went to go put Eat Like a Girl, put all the front matter of that book together, I really had to sit with this idea of where we collectively stand today on protein. I know that we are living in a time that we are slanting towards one gram of protein for every pound of body weight. I know that that's what the science says and I know that there's some really interesting research on making sure that every meal has 30 grams of protein in it. We have some new research that came out in the last month or two that says your post workout meal should be up to 100 grams of protein. So protein, protein, protein is the message that's coming to the world. Now, here's the challenge that I see is that that high amount of protein for some works incredibly well and for others will make them gain weight. So protein in my book has now become something you really need to personalize. So I'll give you an example. I actually have a woman that I am coaching right now one -on -one. High -performing woman has a very stressful life. Whenever I up her protein to one gram of protein for every pound of body weight, she gains weight. So with that in mind, I kept looking and I'm like what is going on? It's so interesting. I have her fasting. I have her doing the ketobiotic and hormone feasting foods that I talk about in the book and we ran a gut test on her. Turns out that her microbiome has a makeup that turns protein into a higher form of glucose that can be stored as fat, not burned for energy. And it was in conjunction with working with some different functional medicine doctors that were helping her that I saw, oh my God, her microbiome isn't built to break all this protein down. So we started to bring her protein load down and she started to drop weight. Now, that's really, really, really confusing to those of us that are looking at Instagram, looking at Facebook and are making these really bold lifestyle decisions and trying to get one gram of protein in for every pound of body weight. So I really just want to say this has to be personalized too. So in Fast Like a Girl, I talk about keeping protein a little lower like 75 grams. I find if you're trying to lose weight for a short period of time, that's a very good strategy. In the new book, I go into exactly what I just explained, that there's more nuance here. And if you are wanting to build more muscle and you can have that high amount of protein and you don't gain weight, then by all means, please lean in to more protein. But if you are one of these people that eats a lot of protein and you gain weight, you may have one of these microbiome profiles that really cause protein to have a higher glycemic response for you. So I don't think it's as simple as one -way again. And I know that's confusing. I wish I had a one -way answer. But again, you're always going to hear a personalized approach from me.

Melanie Avalon:
That is so fascinating. I'm just hearing, I can like hear the listeners listening right now and probably their mouths are probably dropping open just because we've talked so much about protein with so many different guests on this show. I'm really curious like so with that patient example, was she adding purely just lean protein or was it protein with fat coming along with it or was she swapping it out?

Dr. Mindy Pelz
Just to give you a background, she's a very famous woman in Europe, and she had a team of chefs. We had her food dialed in to the macro. We had the right fats. We had the right carbohydrate load. I was doing exactly what I taught in Fast Like a Girl where I was having her go a lower glycemic type response to foods. I had a continuous glucose monitor on her. I wanted in the first half of her cycle to bring that glucose levels down and then during her ovulation and right before her period, we wanted her glucose levels up. We had this dialed in as scientifically as we could.

Melanie Avalon:
Wow. Okay. That is fascinating. And speaking of, so I never, I had not heard that before about the bacteria that could preferentially turn it into, you said a different type of glucose?

Dr. Mindy Pelz
Yeah, it's it's a higher glucose response. So your and then your body, the way that you're so let's back up a step because I really want I don't want to confuse people. I want I hope we reach the person who's like, this makes sense. This is exactly why I've been doing one gram of a protein and I'm gaining weight. Like this is the person I'm trying to I'm trying to reach in this kind of conversation. If you are eating one gram of protein for every pound of ideal body weight and you're thriving, then you're you don't fall into this category. But there is a set of bacteria that when you protein hits the stomach and it's our bacteria, by the way, that control our blood sugar. So there is a connection from the microbiome in your gut that connects to your liver. There is there is a literal like communication between the gut and the liver. And that communication is dependent upon the microbes in your gut. So certain microbes tell the liver to store. Let's just keep it really simple. Tell the liver to store protein as fat, not to use it as ready accessible glucose. So it has a response very much like you would if you were eating a higher carbohydrate meal, that there's this this higher response and then that gets stored as fat.

Melanie Avalon:
That is fascinating and actually related while we're talking about the gut microbiome, I learned something I love when I learned because having been the co -host on the Intermittent Fasting Podcast for like seven years, I've been like you studying all the fasting stuff for so long, I get so excited when I learned something about fasting that I never heard before. I learned something in your book about that and it was about the microbial like geography and how when you fast or would you like to talk about this? This is fascinating to me.

Dr. Mindy Pelz
It's great. I learned this from Emrin Mayer, who has written several books on gut health, and I brought him on my podcast, and we started chatting about it. Here's something to think about when it comes to the microbiome with fasting. I'm sure you've heard this from a lot of people, and that is that fasting destroys the microbiome. That statement upsets me. No other statement upsets me because it means that you don't understand what's going on when you're fasting to your microbiome. Here's what happens. When you're in the fasted state, your intelligent body and these intelligent microbes inside your gut, what they do is they reorganize themselves in preparation for when food comes in. There are several things that will happen to the microbial system when you fast. One of them is that the bacteria that are not serving you, things like Candida, which is really a fungus, but certain bad bacteria gets left off. This is why some people will get constipation. Some people get diarrhea, especially when they go into the longer fast, because these bad bacteria start to get left off. Second thing that happens is called geographical relocation, which is where the microbes, they don't stay all clumped together. They actually start to spread out. Now, why would the microbes do this? The belief is because they are getting themselves ready for when food comes in. Those microbes are sensing, hey, we haven't had food in a while. When food comes in, we better make sure that we are in the best place we can possibly be to pull the nutrients out of that food and start to bring nutrients back into this body system. They spread themselves out. The old ones go away. Then over time, because there's less food insulting that inner mucosal lining of the gut, things like leaky gut, the body starts to repair. We have some very interesting research. This was done on mice, so we don't know the exact time for humans. We've seen it in my community quite a bit that when you go into a 24 -hour fast or longer, you get a dose of intestinal stem cells. Intestinal stem cells can go in and repair that inner lining of the gut, repair the ecosystem that's in there. You have to think about fasting as a state of gut repair. Now, when we go to measure that, it may appear as if the microbe diversity went down, but we didn't ask what's going to happen when I add food back into that microbial diversity. What we now are seeing is, and this is the one that I am constantly recommending, is when we bring something like a fermented food in as that very first breakfast meal, or we go into what I call the three P's, the polyphenol, the probiotic, the prebiotic foods, when we're very intentional about that first meal and think, okay, I got to feed these microbes. I just changed the ecosystem. I got to feed the good microbes so they can live and they can grow. This ecosystem inside my gut can really support a positive, healthy body and mind. Then you start to get a more complete picture of what fasting can do for the gut microbiome.

Melanie Avalon:
It's so, so incredible. Do you find, and I love that part of the book where you talk about these ways to break your fast and really support the microbiome and all the things, do you find with all the patients that you work with and the people that, like you just mentioned, the polyphenols, the prebiotics, all the things, do a lot of those work for most people or do some people react negatively because of their gut dysbiosis state?

Dr. Mindy Pelz
Well, so here's what I would say is that I see it work for every single person who has a gut challenge except one, and I'll talk about the one here in a second. And the best way I can explain this is that I use the story in my office. We did a ton of detox, we did a ton of nutrition, ton of supplementation. And when I first saw the study from MIT that came out and said that you could get intestinal stem cells at a 24 -hour fast, I was like, okay, well, let's try this. Let's just see what happens. And I had a lot of patients with Candida. We treated a lot of Candida in my clinic. And so I started building in weekly 24 -hour fast for these patients. And what I saw was that if you did a weekly 24 -hour fast every day or every week for 90 days, that all of a sudden those people didn't need the supplements anymore, and then had them intentionally break the fast like I talked about, and that the majority of gut issues, everything from constipation, diarrhea, to leaky gut, which a major symptom of leaky gut is poor energy, serotonin is made in the gut, our immune system is in the gut, so many of those symptoms improved. And so to answer your question, absolutely, and it improved without supplementation. I literally stopped selling supplements. I stopped selling probiotics and a lot of little hacks that I used to be able to repair somebody's gut. I didn't need it anymore. All I needed to do was start to teach them how to 24 -hour fast and break their fast properly, and then the problem was solved. There was really only one patient that this didn't work well for, and that was the SIBO patient. And that's bacteria in the wrong part of the gut. That one, I'm still trying to hack, SIBO is a very difficult one, but what we did realize is that if people went into longer fast and broke it with bone broth, the glycine in bone broth, the collagen in bone broth really definitely can help with the SIBO, but you just have to stay away from the fibery things. You've got to do that enough times, and over time it starts to change.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, I had my own SIBO journey and that was a rabbit hole.

Dr. Mindy Pelz
Just so you feel better, I have sat in a room with some of the most brilliant doctors of all different backgrounds, literally trying to bring everybody's mind together to solve the placebo. We couldn't come up with a clear answer.

Melanie Avalon:
I believe it. I remember when I had it, it was probably like a decade ago and that's when I was in LA and I was seeing a GI docket, a cedar side eye and I remember I saw across the, I literally went to my appointment and across the room on the door, it said Dr. Pimentel who was like the, he's like the man in the SIBO world and I was like, oh my goodness, it's like a celebrity doctor. I was like, I wonder if I can just like go in there and like beg them to take me, like take me now. You didn't, you didn't go in? No, I didn't. I just thought about it. I peeked in, but it's funny after that, I did try to book him on the show and, but yeah, he's, he's really busy.

Dr. Mindy Pelz
Well, you know, SIBO is really interesting because I think the bigger question is why do so many people have SIBO? Again, because if you can figure out why we have something, then usually you can figure out how to reverse engineer solving that problem. I think it's very hard to understand. I do think multiple rounds of antibiotics contributes to this massive gut imbalance that can happen. I think something that never gets talked about is the gut damage, the microbial damage that happens to women when they're on birth control pill for decades and decades. When we're stressed out all the time, when we're eating the wrong foods, we are living in a world where people are continually destroying their gut microbiome and if you destroy it long enough, you're going to end up with SIBO. SIBO becomes, for people who don't know, this is that moment that you eat a vegetable and now you feel like you're pregnant, like you're just totally bloated. The anxiety that comes with SIBO is so intense. The one thing I've been able to see really work with SIBO, but you just can't sustain it, is longer fasts because you starve that out and the carnivore diet where you only eat meat. If I put my patients on fasting and meat only within a week or two, the symptoms went away. The challenge was the minute they went and ate again, you're back with the problem.

Melanie Avalon:
No, it's so confusing. And now I'm just getting, I'm just getting hit with all these different studies I've like seen over the years that have been further confusing. Like there was one study that has haunted me for so long, but it was looking at people with, who went on antibiotics and then whether or not they took probiotics, was it during or I think it was like right after. And they actually found that those who did not take probiotics had a quicker return back to their normal diversity. So I was like, well, that's confusing. And then like, there was another one, maybe a year ago, I don't know if you remember this one, and it was looking at giving people either fermented foods or fiber rich diets. Do you remember that one? Oh, I don't. Yeah, remind me again. It was looking at giving patients fiber rich diets or fermented foods and the beneficial effect on the gut microbiome. And it found fermented foods had a more beneficial effect than like a fiber diet.

Dr. Mindy Pelz
Yeah, so let's talk about fermented foods for a moment because I believe that fermented foods is the hero food of the day. Like, I know we started off talking about protein. That's amazing. Protein, we should definitely be having good conversations like this about it, but we cannot forget the power of fermented foods. So the first thing that fermented foods do is they bring new probiotic, new good bacteria into your gut, bacteria you might not have, which is amazing. The second thing in relation to SIBO is that we have this fermentation process that typically, depending on how long it's been fermented, will break down the oxalates and the lectins. And that is why for a SIBO patient they don't react to it as much is because these plant toxins have been in the fermentation process have been destroyed. So I'm not surprised to hear that fermentation worked better than fiber alone because some guts don't do well with that high fiber count.

Melanie Avalon:
my personal struggle with fermented foods. I love them. They feel so nourishing. I crave like sauerkraut. It's the histamine response that gets me. I'm like, why is there not low histamine sauerkraut? Where do I find this?

Dr. Mindy Pelz
That would be interesting. Have you tried pulsing in some of the carnivore diet? I don't know if you eat me.

Melanie Avalon:
Oh, I'm, I'm like, okay. So I'm, I'm major. I definitely, I was doing like carnivore diet, basically before it was a thing. Like in college, I went through a period of time where I literally would just wait until they, they would mark down the rotisserie chickens to like $3 after 11 PM. So I would go to, I would not eat all day fast. I would go to my night class and then I would go buy like a $3 rotisserie chicken. And I did that for like months. But yeah, no, so I have, I have played around with carnivore quite a bit.

Dr. Mindy Pelz
Something interesting, and you might already know this, but just to bring the listener into the conversation on carnivore, a pure carnivore diet upregulates what we call the T -regulatory cells of the gut and turns these T -regulatory cells on. The T -regulatory cells really balance that immune, overactive immune response. It does work with things like celiacs. I've seen it really help people who are really reactive to certain things like wheat. I've seen it work with food allergies, can really help overturn food allergies where you're reacting to a certain food. It's really interesting, but again, it's boring as all get out. I've used it in my community with my patients and our online community where we splash it in, I call it carnivore fasting, where you go 17 hours of autophagy. You're trying to hit autophagy, so you just do a 17 -hour fast where you hit autophagy. Then you follow that up with meat only. So now, the idea when I first started bringing this to my community was, okay, what we can do with this carnivore fasting is we can stimulate autophagy to clean the system, and then we go to the opposite side of autophagy, which is mTOR, and we can start to create some positive growth in the system, plus we're hitting these T -regulatory cells. We played with that for a long time, and it's a beautiful tool if you're trying to heal some serious gut problems.

Melanie Avalon:
I'll do something similar like some days i'll have like just basically carnivore days and i do a daily along fast and i so i eat a really really high protein intake sent the always call me the unicorn.

Dr. Mindy Pelz
You don't have the bike rubs that cause you to store it as well.

Melanie Avalon:
Yes, I guess not. Because I eat like pounds and pounds of like seafood meat every night, every night. And because I get questions all the time about how people want to know how to get enough protein in their eating window. And I'm like, don't ask me because I don't have any problem. I just like, I just love it.

Dr. Mindy Pelz
What we can talk about i mean there i have some hacks on trying to get the protein in and you're in a fasting lifestyle but so we can talk about that at some point.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, what are what are your favorite your methods?

Dr. Mindy Pelz
Well, again, one of the things that I've seen that just drives me crazy when we're looking for these absolutes is that people assume if I do thrive with a high -protein diet that I must have to give up then fasting. But my feeling is that there are several pieces to that equation and one of them is we need to look at your eating window and we need to make sure that every meal you're getting at least 30 grams of protein, especially that first meal in, I really like that idea of let's hit that first meal in, opens up these amino receptor sites so these receptor sites are more receptive to all the other amino acids that are coming in, I love that. And then every couple of hours, it's something called protein cycling, you can start to pulse in another 30 grams and another 30 grams, you can do it in protein shakes, you can do it in beef sticks, you can do it in a variety of ways. But if you struggle at the end of your eating window to get enough protein in, there's always putting in amino acid powders or taking amino acids so that you can just get the extra amino acid punch without having to eat all of that protein. And we have found that if you supplement your fasting lifestyle with amino acids, it works very, very similarly. So that's kind of our hack.

Melanie Avalon:
Do you focus on like leucine in particular with the amino acids?

Dr. Mindy Pelz
Yes, exactly, with leucine being the most important.

Melanie Avalon:
I'll put a link in the show notes to interview a Dr. Gabrielle Lyon for a deep dive into Lucene if people want to learn more because she's really big on the Lucene.

Dr. Mindy Pelz
Yeah, she's got some great information out there on it and is a great resource.

Melanie Avalon:
And then you mentioned, you know, autophagy, for example, and that's a question we get a lot about, you know, when does autophagy start? And so I'd like to put, I found this one paper on autophagy and it literally says autophagy is happening 24 seven. So I'm like, I'm like, actually, people, it's actually technically always happening a tiny bit, but we know that it ramps up, you know, significantly at these later times. I don't know the amount of time I spent like trying to find more studies on autophagy. I wish there was more. I just like I want to know like when it really ramps up and like, and something I'm really curious about is if we're fasting and we're doing autophagy, is that meaning that maybe we need a little bit less protein because we're, you know, recycling our endogenous protein. I'm really curious about that.

Dr. Mindy Pelz
Well, that's an interesting I hadn't thought about if we're because we're recycling protein. I always look through it through the lens of mTOR and autophagy. They're both healing states. We shouldn't we just like night and day. They're both helpful. Like we need them both. So we're not trying to do one more than the other. So I as far as like, you know, this well, this is the way I look at autophagy autophagy you're right. It is a natural state that our body goes into all the time. You are stimulating autophagy when you sleep. You stimulate autophagy when you eat certain herbs. You stimulate autophagy when you work out. Like there's a lot of different ways. Coffee. Coffee. Coffee can stimulate autophagy. Phenomenal way to do that. So although in the research that I've seen, the absolute best way to stimulate autophagy is through fasting. And the research on it says that pretty much somewhere between about 17 hours into a fast, the autophagy starts to kick in. I look at it like a dimmer switch. It's like all of a sudden autophagy is turning on. It gets a little bit brighter, a little bit brighter, and the belief is that it'll peak somewhere about 72 hours. So in between 17 and 72 hours, this autophagy effect is heightened. It's ramping up. It's like starting to do its thing. And then when you go back into food, because you've been in this state where the body has been getting rid of the old, it's been repairing the cells, it's been recycling protein parts, you need to make sure that you are stimulating effectively mTOR. And that's where the protein, higher protein diet comes in. So then you go back to everything we've said about mTOR. Let's lean into, you know, you can stimulate mTOR with carbohydrates. I believe that protein is the hero macronutrient of the moment, and that we aren't putting enough power or giving it enough credit, but you want to make sure that you don't stay in this state of autophagy too long, because mTOR is really important for cell growth, and mTOR is really important for muscle growth. So we want to bring our protein back in over there, and then that's why I call it a switch. We're going from one to the other, in and out, and in and out. And so there's a time and place for both of them.

Melanie Avalon:
And speaking of different concerns, you know, people have concerns about the high protein, people have concerns about the low protein. Just the concerns in general, I'm really curious in your journey studying intermittent fasting and all that you've done, fasting has its different moments where like a study will come out and there'll be like this crazy concern. So there was, you know, there was the one a while a bit ago where they were comparing it to a calorie restricted diet and found no benefit. And then there was the one more recently where they, I can't even talk about it, it makes me so upset.

Dr. Mindy Pelz
Oh my God, I know where you're going. I'm like, okay, bring it on, bring it on. Let's talk.

Melanie Avalon:
about it than anyone. Yeah. So like the recent one where they were looking at the risk factors on cardiovascular disease risk and they basically, I mean, they said fasting was basically, you know, horrible for CBD and mortality and all these things. But basically what they did in the study was they did a dietary recall and they asked people what they ate on two different days. And then which is like ridiculous. It's like the worst set up I've ever, my mouth dropped open when I read that. I was like, how is anybody taking this seriously? Like anybody. And people did.

Dr. Mindy Pelz
Oh, so on that one, I just want to say, and this is for your listeners, like a good question. So when I saw that headline, I was like, literally, I'm like, this makes no sense because I have sat in the research that has shown over and over and over again, the cardiovascular upside of fasting. So it was like one study with 91% is in complete opposition of thousands of studies that have been coming out for the last several decades. How can this be? So I did what you did. I dove in to looking at how did they perform this study? And I had the same reaction you had. I'm like, are you kidding me? So the group that called these two days they called in, there was a couple of interesting things about them. For starters, they sectioned out the people that were intermittent fasting, and they didn't ask them what intermittent fasting meant to them. So they just said, do you do time restricted or intermittent fasting eating? So they didn't ask them what did you drink coffee in your fasting window? Did you drink juice? I mean, some people think they're intermittent fasting and they're drinking juice in there. So we have no idea what the behavior was in it. But what we do know about the sample size that they used on this two days in eight years, like that's crazy, is that 21% of them were smokers. And so there's some belief that actually the group that they looked at were people that actually came to fasting with cardiovascular problems looking to overturn it. And they never accounted for that. So I say all this, and it's just crazy, but what's happening in the fasting world right now, and this is what I really want everybody to understand, and you can go to my YouTube, you can read my reviews on Fast Like a Girl, is that fasting has now become this incredible tool to heal yourself without the need of medications, without the need of food. And I'm trying to get all the doctors on board with us so that they can understand the nuance of this, because you've now taken two major industries out of the equation when somebody fasts, the food industry and the drug industry. And you got to believe that the more people that are fasting and the more results that they're getting and the less food they're eating, the less drugs they're on, the more upset those two industries are. And they're going to do everything. Those two industries control the media, so they're going to do everything they can to help us see fasting as a harmful tool. And that's where I finally landed after weeks of researching this study that wasn't even a study. That's where I landed. I'm like, unfortunately, I think that's the only way I can explain that.

Melanie Avalon:
Because that's what I was thinking about. I was like, why? Why is there all this energy being put into these studies that are just very poorly constructed, which seem like they're made to create a sensationalized anti -fasting thesis? It just doesn't make much sense. But

Dr. Mindy Pelz
Yeah, and this is why, actually, I just want to point out, this is why conversations like this and the other conversations you have on this podcast are so important so that you can learn to critically think through the headlines that are going to keep emerging because this won't be the last bad, fasting headline that will show up.

Melanie Avalon:
It's so true. And people just lose their minds when they come out. It's just, it's like everybody calm down for a second.

Dr. Mindy Pelz
Yeah, everybody. And then the other thing that happens is all their loved ones go, no, see, you got to stop fasting. There's a whole thing with that too. I've watched this in our community so much where people lose so much weight fasting, and then it kind of threatens the people around them because they're not losing that same weight. They're not wanting to fast or whatever reason. So they're happy to tell you not to fast when they see a headline like that.

Melanie Avalon:
Oh my goodness. I'm so excited. You pointed that out for two reasons. One, and I don't think I'd ever really crystallize this in my mind, but you're so right. A lot of the times when we get questions, especially to the intermittent fasting podcast, it's not the person being concerned. It's, it's always like, my sister showed me this study, my mom, you know, so, and so that's really, really interesting. And then the second thing I love that you talked about this in your book, actually, you talk about being aware of when you make these choices, your prior food buddies. Yeah. So how do you encourage people to engage with that? Cause I mean, that's hard, especially if it's like your friends, it can be very confusing as well and make you doubt what you're doing.

Dr. Mindy Pelz
Okay, so it's a really interesting discussion in the weight loss room that I feel like isn't had because it's hard to imagine that people we love would behave like this. So one of the stories I always tell is that early on in my career, I had a woman who ran my front desk who was fairly overweight and one day she just decided enough was enough. She wanted to lose weight because she wanted to be a better example for her daughter. So she stopped going to Starbucks with her friends and doing big frappuccinos and every day after work she went to the gym on the way home to her house. She did this for six months and in six months lost an insane amount of weight. She looked so good. She was so vibrant. Her friend group was pissed and they basically went to her and they're like, you're not being a good mom. You're not going home after a long day of work to be with your teenage daughter. You don't hang out with us anymore because what are you too good for us now that you've lost weight? But all she did is skip the Starbucks trip. It was really hard on her and she came back and was sharing with me how upset she was about these close friends of hers who had this reaction. Within a month of the friends coming down hard on her she went back to all her own old ways and regained all the weight again. It was really a sad example of when we make personal change to our lives and we become a healthier version of us we may actually now become a mirror for other people where other people start to see what they need to do. If they are inside their body they're like, I need to lose weight or I got to maybe clean up my diet and do better and I definitely know I could feel better. When you go and do that and they're struggling to be able to make that change it's a threat to them. They'd rather see you not succeed and it's all subconscious. It's not done in a malicious way so that they feel better about themselves. I think the best way, the thing I get asked all the time is, how do I get my loved ones to fast? I'm like, you don't. You just live your life in your lane, do what works for you, share it with them when they ask, but don't become like a zealot that's just oozing all over them. You got to do this. You got to do this. You got to do this because people who are really stuck in making their own healthcare change, that feels threatening to them. Wait for them to come to you. Wait for them to ask you and then from there you can share in a place where they may be more open. It's a really ugly side of humanity where if somebody's doing something that we're not able to do we'd like to see them fail. It's a horrible, horrible trait of the human brain.

Melanie Avalon:
It's so, so true. I remember when I wrote my book, I, I had that section to deal with, like, the social, you know, obstacles. And I literally said that I honestly think maybe, like, the hardest part about fasting isn't the fasting, it's the effect with social relations and how people respond to you. And then, and then on top of that, it's, it's people's reactions, and then it's your reaction to people's reactions. So, yeah, it's hard. And especially today, where we live in such a trigger, happy society and like a victimhood society and, you know, health at every size. And it's really confusing to me that, especially with like metabolic syndrome, you know, we have all these different markers of metabolic syndrome, and the majority of those markers we see as issues when it comes to health, and we want to change them. But for obesity, you know, and like abdominal fat, we praise that, actually, I'm all for like beauty at every size and loving yourself at every size, but the health at every size, I think, is problematic.

Dr. Mindy Pelz
Yeah, you know, I think you bring up another really interesting point, and this is what I always say is that we are not meant to all look the same and be the same size. We're just not some of us are going to be carry more muscle. Some of us will be more prone to carry more fat, like some of us are bigger bone, like we're just meant to all be different sizes. So stop going to Instagram and trying to look like the people that you see on Instagram. So that would be that would be the first thing I would say to the people that carry extra weight and and it kind of falls into the body positivity movement is the way that I sort of explain it. I think we should all love our body despite if if we look fit into our skinny genes and the number on the scale says what we we we want it to and yet, if you are living in a body that is 100 pounds overweight. I would and you're like, I'm gonna eat whatever I want. I don't care. I love my body. My next question to you would be, okay, if that's 1000% true, like you're literally telling me you're looking in the mirror and you love every single part of your body, then good on you. I'm so happy for you. I just want to make sure there's no subconscious shaming or guilting going on in your own brain because that's damaging to your body. If that is happening and you are your blood work is showing us that you are in a metabolically healthy place, then you you be whatever weight you keep eating the way that you're eating. If those two things are working for you, I have yet to see a person where those two things work like that.

Melanie Avalon:
So fast like a girl. And we've talked about a lot of different concerns that people come across in the fasting world. So another little pet peeve of mine with fasting is how a lot of the fears and concerns for women specifically in fasting and their cycle and reproductive health goes back mostly to like a single rodent study that may or may not be applicable. What are your thoughts on the big concern out there about fasting will actually negative for women's reproductive health.

Dr. Mindy Pelz
Well, so this is the premise of fast like a girl was that we have to fast according to our hormones and estrogen does really well when you fast. So whenever estrogen is coming in, she wants you to be glucose sensitive, insulin sensitive. She wants that system cleaned up and therefore, and when that system is cleaned up, you can actually have a really smooth estrogen production, whereas progesterone doesn't want you to fast. And we all know this because progesterone makes her biggest debut the week before our period. And in that week, we're always craving carbohydrates. Well, that's because estrogen is like bring glucose up. I need more glucose to make my appearance. So if I'm fasting, if I'm doing... Or progesterone is? I'm sorry, progesterone. Yeah, progesterone says bring glucose up because I need more glucose to be able to perform. If I'm fasting, this is really how I stumbled into the concepts of fast like a girl was a confluence of several things, but one of the things was that all the people who had fallen in love with Jason Fung's obesity code, and they became what I call oh matters, one meal a day people, like they started doing one meal a day. That was all they did because they lost so much weight and women never did that. According to their cycle, we started to see hair fall out, we started to see cycles stop, we started to see menopause symptoms get worse because we weren't cycling our fasts. So when we go back to some of these rodent studies, it's very difficult because we are not looking at absolutes. We need to look at fasting in a cyclical way for a woman. I would love for somebody to do that study. Take what I taught in fast like a girl and let's do that study in a research setting. We have never researched what happens when you cycle fast. We have a lot of testimonials. Just go to my reviews. I mean, it's insane how many people are improving their whole hormonal system, but to the point on fertility you had mentioned before, it's one of the major things we see. In fact, we have a Slack channel with my team and they're always putting the fasting wins in there. Every week, one just came through yesterday, we call them F.L.A.G. babies. There are all these women that couldn't get pregnant and they read fast like a girl, we call it F.L.A.G. for short, and they started cycling their fasts the way I taught them and they got pregnant. I mean, person after person after person and story after story we've heard of that. Now, we don't have any again, we don't have any studies on how to cycle your fasting for a woman, but what I'm seeing is it's having a massive improvement on hormonal health.

Melanie Avalon:
This is beyond incredible and this is where listeners if this topic that we're talking about right now is of interest to you. You have to stop right now and go get fast like a girl because you explain all of this in such great detail and provide plans and it's just it's all in there so if people want to actually do this like fast according to their cycle. Go get fast like a girl and if you want to hear dr pelt's talking telling it to you get the audiobook she narrates it funny story about decent fun so you know i've been looking up to him for so so long and then. I finally got to have him on the show but it was right when he released his book on cancer actually so I don't think we talked about fasting once it was just it was just kind of funny.

Dr. Mindy Pelz
So, you know, I had that. I had that with Stephen Gundry on my podcast.

Melanie Avalon:
Oh yes, yes, which book did you have them on for?

Dr. Mindy Pelz
Well, I really wanted to talk about what, if you repair your gut, could you handle oxalates? That's all I wanted to talk to him about, but he came on with energy paradox. I get a list right before he comes on from my assistant and she's like, okay, so just so you know, his staff has told us, please don't talk about oxalates and lectins. I'm like, are you kidding me? I've waited so long to talk to him. Now I've got to talk about energy, so I've been there. It's frustrating.

Melanie Avalon:
they literally told you, Oh, that's so funny. Yeah, I think I had him on twice. And I don't think I talked about liked it. Yeah, I don't think I talked about any of it during either of them. So, so funny. Well, someday. Oh, actually, I'm also interviewing this week, Megan Ramos, who is Dr. Jason Fungs. She's great. Yeah, I love her. So she has a, she has a love. I know she recently was working on her fertility, and she just had a baby, we actually had to push back the interview because of it. But another horror. Okay, so this blew my mind. I think this was actually in the menopause reset, probably. I never had heard it explained this way before. But you talked about a primary reason that women's hormones seem to go haywire when they go pre menopausal and the menopausal, mostly in that pre menopausal state is because of this transition that's happening between the HBO and the HPA axis. I was wondering if you could just tell listeners a little bit about that, because I was like, Oh, that explains so much.

Dr. Mindy Pelz
Yes. Yeah, it's such a good point to highlight. So here's what happens around 40 is that there's this hormonal handoff where your ovaries, specifically the eggs inside the ovaries, are sending your hypothalamus less signals of, hey, up the estrogen because there's technically less eggs. So the ovaries are going into retirement. That's the way I phrase it, is that they're like, hey, I'm going to be going into retirement over the next 10 years. So I'm kind of done this job for a while. I'm going to wind this down. But somebody in this system is going to need to be able to make some sex hormones because you're still going to need some. So the ovaries look over at the adrenals and are like, I choose you. You're going to make sex hormones. Now, the adrenals have been making, there are many different parts of our body that make sex hormones. The ovaries definitely are the primary drivers. But the adrenals have been making small amounts of sex hormones all the sex hormones since the day you started your period. But what happens to the adrenals in that moment is if you're a highly stressed out, rushing woman like I was at 40, you have little kids and I had a practice and I was taking on way too much, what ends up happening in that moment is the adrenals are like, uh, no. I'm over here making cortisol because we're running from a tiger every single day. So I don't have any room in this system of mine to make sex hormones. And it does that through a steroid called DHEA. I'm giving you the entertaining story of how this all goes down, but there is a whole chemical system that can explain this. So if a woman is stressed out going through perimenopause, I will tell you that after spending so much time trying to understand the menopausal journey from both the body standpoint and a brain standpoint, that the more stressed out you are in your menopausal process, the worst symptoms you're going to have because the adrenals cannot handle the load. And you mix that with a brain. I just had Lisa Moscone on my podcast and she talked about how when you go through perimenopause, the brain prunes the parts of the neurons that it no longer needs. So it can create a new brain in the postmenopausal years. So there is this massive transition that is happening at 40. And we're showing up all these women. I mean, millions of women right now are talking about this. We can't sleep and we're depressed and we're anxious and we're gaining weight and we have hot flashes and nobody's sitting down and explaining to us what the heck is going on. And it's because there's a massive transition that's happening in the body that there is a lifestyle that needs to match that transition. Otherwise you're in for a wild ride.

Melanie Avalon:
So, so crazy. And so, you know, a lot of when I get this question all the time, people will say, isn't fasting just going to add to that stress, you know, and make it worse? But do you find that it mitigates it helps?

Dr. Mindy Pelz
Yes, so this is why we can't put fasting in an absolute. So fasting is a healing tool. So this is the best way I can explain it. If you had a toolbox, and in that toolbox, you had some screwdrivers, you had some hammers, you had some pliers, you would never pull out like a hammer and the screwdriver and go, I love the hammer more than I love the screwdriver. That wouldn't make sense. You use the hammer in certain places, and you use the screwdriver in other places. They both are tools for building a house if we're going to put it in that context. Okay, with that in mind, let's look at estrogen and progesterone. So estrogen really does well when you fast and it really cleans up the insulin system. Well, what's happening to the menopausal woman as estrogen, specifically estradiol, is going on this wild ride where she's up, she's down, she's up, she's down. You become more insulin resistant. So your feminine body starts to gain weight just with the same lifestyle that you did at 30. You're still doing that. You're eating those same foods. You're doing the same workout, same exact thing at 40, 42, 43, but you're not getting the same result. That's because the loss of estrogen. And when you fast, you will start to get that result back, and you will start to drop weight. But on the other side of the equation, we have progesterone. And progesterone doesn't want you to fast, and you're also losing her. And with the loss of progesterone comes the loss of a powerful neurotransmitter called GABA, where now you can't calm yourself down. So anxiety is going up. Maybe you start spotting a lot. And so you need to cater to progesterone. And progesterone is like, please bring glucose up. So they're completely opposing messages. So we can't say that fasting is not good for the perimenopause or menopausal woman, just like we can't say that a hammer is not good for building a house. A screwdriver would be better. They're both tools that you can pull out when you know how to pull them out and what symptom you should pull them out for.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay. So similar question. I'm really curious about this. So going back to women fasting differently during different parts of their cycles. And again, friends get fast like a girl because the specifics are all in there. But for example, you talk about fasting less during, I believe, ovulation and right before your cycle. Is that the... So even with that, how much is that an absolute versus an individual thing? So like if a person feels seemingly great, never changing their fasting habits, would you still suggest they attempt to modify it for their cycle?

Dr. Mindy Pelz
It's such a good question. The first thing I would say is that if you are rocking your fasting lifestyle and you don't want to make any change, the one change I would really encourage you to think about is to bring your fasting length down the week before your period. That is the most important because that's when progesterone is really coming in. I added in a reduction of your fasting window during your ovulation time because one of the things that I saw with just fasting so many people is that a lot of times when our hormones are high that it actually acts like a detox. It stimulates our toxins to come out of our tissues, lead being the biggest one. There are a lot of studies that show that when a woman goes through this wild estrogen ride in her perimenopausal years that it stimulates lead to come out of the bones. When it comes out of the bones, it can lead to osteoporosis. Plus, where does that lead go? It goes up into the brain. It gets stored in fat and starts to affect things like memory. When we have this superpower hormonal moment like during ovulation where estrogen is at her peak and testosterone is at its peak and you get a little bit of progesterone, it sure made sense to me that we should not be going into a three -day water fast. We should not be going into a 24 -hour fast. We don't want to stimulate a lot of detox because you're already having a bit of a detox with your hormonal production. Now, the second part of that is you have some progesterone showing up during that time. Progesterone doesn't like when you fast. I added in making sure that we use common sense as to if fasting works for you and you're doing great during ovulation, then keep it. But I've met a lot of women that don't do well fasting during ovulation and usually that's a toxicity issue.

Melanie Avalon:
Awesome. Okay. I was really, really curious about that. And I loved reading about the heavy metal parts in your books because I personally went through mercury toxicity, which was not fun. And I didn't realize that mercury, for example, is excitatory and lead has a depressant effect. I thought that was really interesting.

Dr. Mindy Pelz
So, that part is just so fascinating to me because mercury is the anxiety, it's the OCD, it's the looping thoughts. The mad hatter. The mad hatter. It's like when that gets dumped into the system, there is like this wound up human. So you take a menopausal woman or a perimenopausal woman who's losing progesterone and GABA and now you've got mercury dumping into the system and yeah, you've got a pretty frazzled woman. Lead is a dumber downer. It's like when it goes into the system, it slows everything down. So it's the depressed person. It's the person who's fatigued. It's the person who can't remember things or like starts to talk and is like, what was I telling you? Or the person who goes into another room and is like, why did I walk into this room? That tends to be more lead. And both of those heavy metals are stored in tissues. We did in my clinic, we did like thousands of heavy metal tests, thousands of provoked heavy metal tests, which is the exact way you should do it. Not one of them came back low in lead. Everybody had lead off the charts. And then not one of them came back like not having mercury. Mercury was the second highest. Some people came back with low mercury, but most people had high mercury. So knowing that and basing that, looking at that experience, watching a lot of women who struggled during ovulation and knowing that this massive amount of hormones can just cause a greater detox reaction, it just felt like it was the best thing to do to encourage people to keep a more moderate approach to fasting during that time.

Melanie Avalon:
I love it. It's so helpful. When I went through the mercury toxicity, it was bad. My blood level of mercury was almost 30, which is not good. But yeah, I loved reading your book because you literally hit on all the topics I'm just so interested in. I was like, oh my goodness, another one. Okay. Here's a fun question to maybe end on. It's a thought experiment and it kind of relates to what we were talking about in the beginning with like clickbaity and culture and all that stuff. But sometimes I think about how we could do fasting studies differently and like control for placebo and things like that. And I've often thought they could do studies where they could have a pill. The rules about the pill would be you can't take it with food and you can't take it a certain amount of hours like before or after food. So basically it would be testing fasting. People would think it would be testing the pill, but it would really be putting people into a window. And then that got me thinking, so say they did that. And then say they made like a, sorry, it's just thinking creatively. So say that a pharmaceutical company came up with a pill because they realized that fasting had all these benefits and then they did that. They like sold the pill and it had to be taken a certain way. So really they were selling fasting. So my question is, I'm just like a morality question, but say you could like flip a switch and make that happen. And then everybody would be getting on this pill and fasting would be changing their lives. Would you do that if that was the method where it's like sneaking people into it?

Dr. Mindy Pelz
Hell no. Let me tell you why. It's because every time we look to a pill for a solution and we get a solution, we've now taken the power away from ourselves. This leads into, it's not a pill, it's a shot, but it leads to these new weight loss drugs. Every person I have sat down with who has been on the weight loss drugs, the question I ask them the most is, why do you think you're losing weight? They're like, well, because I'm not hungry anymore. I'm like, oh, okay, that sounds like a fasting lifestyle to me. Literally the biggest complaint we get when somebody has mastered a fasting lifestyle, they figured out their metabolic switch, is the most common question I get is, I'm just not hungry. This ties into the protein. People are like, oh my gosh, how am I going to get one gram of protein in for every pound of body weight when this fasting lifestyle I've been doing has got me not hungry anymore. What's happening right now with these weight loss drugs is we just keep outsourcing our health power. Those things are expensive, not to mention that and the adverse symptoms. To answer your question about would you take a pill if it would do what fasting did, again, we have that pill, I guess, right now. It's called Ozempic or any of the other crazy ones. There's no pill that doesn't have a consequence. There's no pill that isn't expensive. Every single pill outsources your empowerment. I don't believe that's going to help us long term.

Melanie Avalon:
I love that. I'm glad we got to touch on that hot topic of GLP -1 inhibitors.

Dr. Mindy Pelz
I'm not saying, like, if you're listening to this and you're on it and you've gotten great results, then my next question would be like, how about you try to get off of it? What's the off moment? You and I chatted a little bit about this when I first hopped on. This is why I wrote, Eat Like a Girl, is like, what's the principles of eating we're supposed to know in our eating window? And I look at Eat Like a Girl and Fast Like a Girl as a lifestyle that you could use to either not get on these drugs or you could actually supplement these drugs with this lifestyle and you'd find it much easier to get off.

Melanie Avalon:
I'm so glad you mentioned that because like we were talking about, so this should be coming out in July. So that book, Eat Like a Girl, is available for pre -order.

Dr. Mindy Pelz
Yeah, it'll be ready in July for pre -order. It'll be ready before that. But yeah, it's ready for pre -order now if you're listening to this.

Melanie Avalon:
Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Pelz. I've been looking forward to this for so long. I just love your work. And this conversation, I was just smiling. I just, this was so amazing. You are incredible. The last question that I asked every single guest on this show, and it's just because I realized more and more each day how important mindset is. So what is something that you're grateful for? Oh my God.

Dr. Mindy Pelz
gosh, there's so many things I'm grateful for. I'll tell you the biggest thing I'm grateful for right now is that we're in a really unique moment in history where women are demanding better healthcare answers. And for the first time when a woman walks into her doctor's office, if her doctor hands her a prescription, she's starting to ask questions like, how does that fit for my feminine body? How does that fit for my hormones? And I just read an article the other day that even the healthcare system is starting to acknowledge that women are discredited when it comes to, it was an article specifically on pain, how when a woman walks into her doctor's office, if she says she has pain, she is dismissed. And doctors are starting to acknowledge that they've been doing this and that they need to come back to looking at the female body in a unique way that maybe it has different requirements that a male body doesn't have. And that conversation is happening over and over and over again in this moment in time. And I am so grateful for it. So let's keep having it.

Melanie Avalon:
I love that. Thank you. Thank you so much. Again, so for listeners, cannot recommend enough checking out Dr. Pelz's work, you know, Fast Like a Girl, The Menopause Reset, Eat Like a Girl, all the things. We'll put links to it in the show notes. Any other links you want to put out there for people to follow your work.

Dr. Mindy Pelz
Yeah, you can go to my YouTube channel. It's my, it's where I'm putting out videos every week, new videos for you to learn from, and if you, and I'm on all the socials. If you forget it all, you can go to my website and it's just drmindypelz.com.

Melanie Avalon:
Awesome, well thank you so much for your time and all that you're doing. I'm just so overwhelmingly grateful for what you're doing and hopefully we can speak again in the future. You're just amazing.

Dr. Mindy Pelz
Yeah, thank you. And thank you for the great conversation. I love the detail in which we went into. So yeah, thank you for just a beautiful conversation. I appreciate you.

Melanie Avalon:
Likewise, have a beautiful rest of your day. Thank you. Bye.