The COMPLETE GUIDE To Intermittent Fasting For WOMEN (How To Do It Correctly!) | Dr. Mindy Pelz

why do women need a different approach to fasting than men yeah yeah it's it's the perfect place to start so this the easiest way that I can explain this is we've got to look at the different profiles of our sex hormones so let's start with men men you are almost 100 run by a testosterone you in a 24-hour period you're getting testosterone every 15 minutes and that testosterone is going to go up into the brain and convert into estrogen so all you need to do when you look at your hormonal profile and work on your hormones is drive one particular sex hormone and luckily testosterone loves when you fast 1300 percent increase in testosterone if you fast for 13 hours 2 000 increase in testosterone for men if they fast for 24 hours women we are not just running off of one hormone we are running off of estrogen progesterone and testosterone and when we look at the personalities of these sex hormones what we can see is that estrogen loves when we fast so anytime we want to bring estrogen up low carb more fasting keeping ourselves insulin sensitive is going to be amazing but progesterone is completely the opposite way in fact the week before a woman's cycle she actually becomes more insulin resistant because we need glucose to be higher so that we can make progesterone and so it we should not be fasting the week before our cycle this is not the time to go low carb because we need that glucose to be higher yeah so much to pick up on there and I have to say Mindy one of the reasons I wanted to invite you onto the show was because this is a topic this is a Hot Topic that women are asking about fasting is growing in popularity at the moment and there appears to be this one-size-fits-all approach so that's certainly how it's getting applied out there and from studying your work is very clear as you just described that men and women are fundamentally different now you mentioned men run off one hormone primarily testosterone and I'm drawn to the one meal a day approach that many men like to do and about a year ago I spoke to this amazing cardiologist Dr pradeep jamdadas on this podcast he uses fasting with his patients has done for many years and someone on my team got so inspired by that he has gone to one meal a day and he is thriving right he's been thriving for a year but this is a guy and I know from your work that you don't think for most women that one meal a day is the right approach do you no it any reason approach so so that progesterone needs glucose to be higher if you're in one meal a day you're spending a large part of that day with glucose either dropping or at least staying the same depending on where your insulin sensitivity levels are so one meal a day is not enough to be able to keep glucose high for progesterone second thing and I think this one's really really important and I I didn't write about it deep enough in the book so I'd love to chat with you about it here which is when it comes to thyroid health and women are more affected by thyroid problems than men in fact many experts believe that women after about 45 as they go through menopause lose 50 percent of their thyroid hormones so the thyroid needs calories to be higher so when we're consistently doing one meal a day for women it's really hard to get calories up this is probably the only time you'll hear me talk about calories but it's really hard to get our calories up to the level that supports proper thyroid function when we're just eating one meal a day so there's a lot of nuance in that particular question which is what's happening to the female body when she's doing one meal a day over and over and over again it's damaging her from a hormonal level that she may not be aware of yeah really really interesting and you know my intention with this conversation is that it's going to be really really practical for people so that women at the end of this know oh for me at my age depending on where I am in my cycle this is possibly what I should be doing to optimize my health we've discussed some of the differences between men and women of course there's plenty more but before we get into the cycle and how things change throughout the menstrual cycle I wonder if you could Topline explain why should a woman consider fasting in the first place oh that's a great question so and the answer is really dependent upon her age as well so I'm going to start with women over 40. let's start with that because a lot of this conversation you're going to see me break down women into three phases we have our fertility years where we have a pretty regular cycle we have the perimenopausal years where everything is really up and down and all around and we'd have no predictability in our cycle and then we have our post-menopausal years so when we look at women over 40 what happens is as the ovaries start to make a slow decline they're not producing as many sex hormones we're gonna see estrogen do this wild ride where she'll be high one day low the next and it's in that up and down of this estrogen decline or this estrogen roller coaster is what I look at it like we become more insulin resistant so the way I look at this is when estrogen star starts to slowly Fade Away we need to do everything we can to keep her age appropriate levels high and fasting and estrogen go hand in hand the more you fast the more you cycle fasting the way I teach the more you're going to keep your age-appropriate estrogen at its highest level possible now with women that are in their fertility years you know we can look at things like PCOS the the number one hormonal problem for women that is an insulin resistant issue and there is no better tool in your biohacking toolbox than to use fasting to help make yourself insulin sensitive so whether you're struggling to get pregnant you have PCOS we want to bring fasting in to be able to let estrogen do her thing depending on where you are on your life cycle yeah okay thanks so much for that um before we go too much further I wanted to highlight something you write in your book uh the new book fast like a girl is fabulous it really is it's so practical for women I I really think every woman who reads it is going to understand themselves better and actually as a guy reading it you know all men have women in their life on some level whether it's a girlfriend a wife a work colleague a mother a daughter so actually although it appears from the outside that the work is designed for women I think it's just as relevant for men as well so I wanted to share that but in the book you say you believe that fasting is for everyone we were designed to fast now what if you could just expand upon that and at the same time you also point out in the book that there are some specific reasons why you may not wish to fast including of course eating disorders yeah yeah so let's go to the first part of the question and I think this is for both men and women we've got to go back to this concept and it's been slowly emerging in in the health space but we've got to go back to this concept of how was the human body designed you know we are in an evolutionary mismatch right now the amount of physical emotional and chemical stressors that are that the modern world is presenting to us has us really off course with how our original design was built to be and when we look at the Primal years what we know back in the in the caveman days is that we had to depend on another fuel source to be able to go hunt for food let me explain myself when we came out of the cave we didn't have a refrigerator we didn't have doordash we didn't have any way to get food so we had to go and hunt for food and in that hunting of food our body switched over into a different energy system it switched over into the ketogenic Energy System or as I refer to it in the book The fat burning system and in that system the body burned fat to make ketones as a fuel source so that we could go Hut so now let's fast forward to today what we know that's happening today is that it doesn't matter what diet you go on we are not accessing this secondary fuel source we're only operating from the sugar burner fuel source and so we are missing out on all the healing that happens when we switch over into this Primal fat burning system so I a really good example in the book I talk about there is a Thrifty Gene hypothesis they believe that the humans that evolved from those Primal days had a genetic profile that allowed them to switch into this ketogenic Energy System and go without food for long periods of time and that genetic profile is still in most humans today so if we are eating all day long we're literally going against our genetic design we're working against our genes not with our genes so it's really about going back to the body thrives in a fasted State because it can access this other Energy System that you can't access by manipulating your food you've got to let your blood sugar come down enough so that your body's forced to switch over into that system yeah and that's the same for men and women right that's the kind of both men and women Top Line overview we are designed to fast so we're we're designed to have periods of time where we're not consuming foods and I know from some of the research Professor Sachin Panda at the Salk Institute has done he has shown that a a a huge percentage of people in the western world are eating food over 15 hours in every 24 hour period This is a modern phenomenon isn't it it's not something that we would have done 100 200 years ago but now many of us are sort of as you say we're working against our genetic evolutionary heritage it's such a and the best way to look at this is it's like sleep we nobody's gonna say sleep is not right for the human body we know that when you sleep there's a whole bunch of healing mechanisms that happen in that time period which is why sleep is making a comeback and so many people are talking about sleep because it heals well guess what you are also designed to go without food and when you're not tapping into the to that experience for your body it's like skimping on sleep you're missing out on all these healing effects that can really support you metabolically and I also want to point out that in what we're seeing is in a time where the food source is so toxic we have so I mean especially here in America our food source is ridiculous and now it's permeated everywhere we've got to have some way to overcome the metabolic damage that poor food is doing and what the research is showing like something like a 16-8 diet is it's showing that when you go 16 hours without food you become metabolically immune from the damage of a western high fat high sugar processed diet your insulin does not raise your glucose state will has a chance to balance out hemoglobin A1c is better your CRP inflammation goes down you can literally and I don't recommend this but you could eat toxic food for eight hours and fast for 16 and your body would be able to repair itself from the damage that that's food that food source is doing in the eight hour period that you're eating yeah very very powerful so we are designed to fast and you're saying that in the current toxic modern food environment which frankly most of us most people listening to this podcast or watching on YouTube right now are going to be facing that wherever they are what we're saying is even if we don't change our food intake and I know that's not what you recommend but even if we don't a period of fasting is going to have profound benefits on our body we're definitely going to talk about those benefits throughout this conversation yeah just let's finish off that point then yes we're designed to fast but in the modern world because of a variety of issues there are a few groups where you advise a bit of caution I believe and I wonder if you could just at the top of this conversation just explain what those groups are yeah yeah and thank you I'm glad we're highlighting this at the beginning um of this conversation because you'll see in the book I put all the different scenarios that we have seen across all of our platforms of people fasting and there's some groups that really need to take caution so the first is if you have an eating disorder of any kind um what I my my stance on that is you really want to bring your therapist your doctor into that fasting experience with you um I have seen fasting change people's relationship to food it's a really because you really go within and start to understand why you're using food because we don't just use food for Hunger but that is if you have challenges with any kind of eating disorder you've got to involve your doctor or don't fast because I don't want I don't want it to trigger anything in in a bad pattern that will take you down a bad path um pregnant women this is not your tool this is not your tool fasting is not your tool you need to start to work work on things like your microbiome work on other things but fasting is not your tool and then women that are nursing I recommend that you keep your fast under 15 hours because after 15 hours as I'm sure we'll go into you can stimulate something called autophagy an autophagy is where the cells start to repair themselves and a lot of times they'll push toxins out and those toxins will go right into your breast milk and go right into your baby so those are the three like I I really caution now what I want to point out is a lot of people will be like well what about diabetics I think it's been proven you know Jason Fung really has shown us that this is an incredible tool for both type 1 and type 2 diabetics it just needs to be cut you need to be coached through it yeah thank you very very thorough super super useful um and the eating disorder conversation I think is very subtle a nuanced because there is this sort of feeling now that it's not relevant at all for people with eating disorders yet as you have pointed out and I've seen in a lot of the videos you make on YouTube and I've read a lot of the comments in preparation for our conversation today there are people who have suffered from eating disorders who have found as you're saying fasting when done in a mindful way went down in a responsible way potentially when being coached through it with help can actually be a part of the solution as you say not for everyone but we can't just throw it out necessarily but I would add that notice of caution as well if you are suffering from an eating disorder if you're struggling with it if you're recovering do speak to someone uh before you just jump in okay now the bit I'm really excited about there's so much right because you've got different length fast you've got different age groups but I think a good place to go now is walk me through the menstrual cycle and the different phases I love the name you give them to these phases in your book they're very evocative the phrases sorry the names very evocative but I think it really helps us understand that your body is in a very different state and the the kind of the goal of the body is very different at different parts of your cycle and therefore the inputs you have to give it whether that be stress or movement or food or or fasting have to be very different so let's go through that methodically yeah and and it's such a great conversation and you know we'll we'll go through it and I'll teach it for fasting and for food and we'll slip in some things about exercise into the cycle as well but here's the crazy thing that I've learned in in sharing this the these concepts with the world is we are hormone illiterate including women we don't even know like when our hormones are coming and going we just know our cycle starts one time a month and our moods change around that so I'm really as we go through the cycle you know what I'm hoping to bring back to women is an understanding to your point that we do have different hormones coming in which is going to change our behaviors it's going to change our moods it's going to change our Cravings it's going to change our energy levels we are not hormonally the same every day of the month so with that in mind let's run let's go through the cycle so day one and this is the other thing I've learned when I say day one not every woman knows what day one is it's it's crazy I'm like this this is this is what we should have been taught at 13. so day one is the day you start your period the day you need to use some feminine care products it's not when you spot the couple of days before it's literally when your flow starts and from day one to day ten you are building estrogen so day one your all your sex hormones will be very very low and over the next 10 days your body is going to start to make estrogen so we already briefly talked on this but the general lifestyle requirements for estrogen is be insulin sensitive so keep glucose low if you are keeping glucose High during that time you may find that you're going to mess your cycle up or you're going to mess ovulation up because estrogen needs a certain environment and that environment is glucose low the other thing that estrogen really is wonderful at is estrogen's very cortisol forgiving so you can run a marathon you can do a three-day water fast you can have a high stress time at work and you're not going to really mess estrogen up to too much you'll see as I go in the back half that is not the case for progesterone so I call this phase the power phase to your point all the hormonal languaging is very complicated and I wrote this so that we can Empower women and so I'm like we got to take follicular luteal out of the picture and really explain you can power up on your lifestyle to improve estrogen that's why I named it that yeah love that I love that a couple of couple of things to clarify we've mentioned insulin a few times in this conversation insulin resistance insulin sensitive now I think many listeners to my podcasts will be familiar with those terms but I'm always conscious of not everyone will so could you just briefly explain explain what insulin is and what's the difference between sensitive and resistance to insulin yeah thank you it's a really good point and funny funny in that the editor and I spent a long time really distilling down what insulin resistance meant in the book it was a funny conversation so there is a definite lack of knowledge on what that is and here's what it what the way I look at it is insulin is your glucose storing hormone so it think of it as what will push glucose into your cells so that your cells can use glucose for energy the mitochondria need need glucose to be able to do what they the magic that they do and insulin is the thing that opens that up and allows the glucose to come into the cell when we are insulin resistant we have kept glucose too high for too long and that is required the pancreas to keep making insulin and keep making insulin and that flooding of both glucose and Insulin into the cell makes that cell insulin resistant the greatest analogy for those of you that have kids that I like is when you keep asking your kids to do so something over and over and over again and they don't do it it's like they become deaf to your requests because you've asked so much and so it's the same thing the cells are like whoa all this insulin has been coming at me I don't know what to do with it anymore insulin sensitive is the opposite of that insulin sensitive is the cells are very open they can take glucose in insulin can do the job that it was meant to do so it's really at this cellular level that we see the difference between resistance or sensitive and we all want to be insulin sensitive yeah Grace explanation and I think another way for people to to think about that is you know type 2 diabetes is almost that end stage condition of insulin resistance there's other conditions as well but that's kind of when urencium basically just doesn't work very well anymore so your blood sugar your blood glucose starts to rise what I find interesting as I read your Bookman D and you explain the various phases of the cycle is that and I think people will will I hope find this eye-opening is that your state whether you're insulin sensitive or insulin resistance is not a static thing it actually changes throughout let's say a 28 day cycle and when everyone has a regular 28 day cycle well let's assume they do for the for the purpose of actually explaining at the cycle I think that's going to be a revelation for some people that right oh this changes throughout the cycle and then Mindy I was thinking about this about an hour ago as I was thinking about where I'm going to go in this conversation with Mindy I thought as a doctor we don't really think apart from some specific tests that are done around female hormones that we may have to specify what day the cycle is on I'm thinking well if I'm testing a lady's blood sugar or looking into that insulin or insulin resistance well that's gonna be different depending on where they are in the cycle I think the implications for that for the medical system are profound huge right you totally got it like I'm I'm listening to it I want to cheer up because this is the Paradigm I'm trying to shift of course I want to get fasting into women's hands because there's been a lot of media attention that women shouldn't fast but what we need to understand about women is that we are hormonally different on every day which doesn't just affect the release of an egg or not a release of an egg it affects exactly what you just said if so when we walk into our doctor's office and they do a blood panel what day of our cycle we are on really really matters so you know and it's not just insulin like our cholesterol raises in the front half of our cycle so if you get a high cholesterol reading does your doctor ask you what part of the cycle you are are you on we're going to become more insulin resistant in the back half of our cycle so if you have a a blood test done a week before your period and your doctor says you're you know he may hemoglobin a1c's High your insulin's high your glucose is high but maybe that's what it was supposed to be at that point in your cycle that's the Nuance of the conversation that we've got to have around Women's Health yeah and I want to just highlight that point your work for me goes beyond fasting because the implications and we'll talk about this later on in the conversation I think you're actually quite profound with respect to how we set ourselves up as a society not just as a medical system as a society I think there are some really profound implications but going back to the cycle for a second so day one to ten day one is first day of the period That's The Power phase right and you're saying that women are insulin sensitive generally speaking for those 10 days yeah and they can tolerate more stress so you said if they want to run a marathon that's the time to do it okay brilliant and it will bring in fasting into this a bit later but that's the first 10 days what is the next phase of the cycle yeah so the next phase is ovulation and and I decided to name it the manifestation Fab because we tend to think of ovulation as just oh I don't want to get pregnant or I do want to get pregnant but what I want to highlight is that during this time estrogen has now made her Peak so she's the highest she will be during your whole 28 30 day period depending on how long your cycle is so estrogens at her highest now this is this is the part that is crazy that not enough people know is testosterone comes roaring in during this manifestation phase it is the only part of a woman's cycle where she gets this massive dose of testosterone you know let's think of why the body would do that it would do that because it needs to bring libido up because you're ovulating and whether we want to be you know acknowledge it or not our bodies are built for reproduction so it brings testosterone up to to bring libido up so we've got estrogen at its highest we've got testosterone at its highest and we have a little bit of progesterone that really makes an appearance during this time three major sex hormones all in their Glory we become really we can we become great verbal processors we're super motivated we've got testosterone so it's a great time to start like a project and or start any kind of workout plan um and we've got a little bit of progesterone that keeps us calm this is our hormonal superpower time and so we need to shift our lifestyle according to that as well it's it sounds to me from what you're saying that both phases leading up to ovulation are sort of doing phases for women it's just from the way you're describing it it's we can do stuff you know get going get motivated start new things take on high stress and I'm guessing that it's not quite the same in the second half is it no it has said think of the first half of your of your cycle as the Doer ERS where we can conquer so much but then when we go into the back half of our cycle we need to think of that as recovery that's the time that we slow ourselves down which is why when we get to the last phase I called it the nurture phase because we really need to nurture ourselves first and and really slow the pace of everything down and when you start to see that there you you have these conversations with women women tell you that they're like yeah man the closer I get to my my period the more I just want to sit on the couch and and eat a box of pizza and a tub of ice cream I don't want to do anything and my response to that is yes because that's how hormonally you were designed recovery in the back half power up in the front half I guess that wider problem is that and there'll be many theories as to why this is but of course males in general have been um in inverted commas kind of in charge and making the rules and doing the scientific research for a long time now and if you think about the way Society is structured it's kind of you know very day-to-day is the same right we don't recognize that Friday is going to be different from Monday I guess we have a seven day cycle but we don't have a 28-day cycle no we don't right so therefore it's hard not to make the case that women as a general rule are sort of you know the way a woman's body works is in some ways in opposition to how Society has set itself up would you agree with that oh my gosh it's so well said yes and you can look at that on every single level so let's even break it down to when we create a workout plan we don't ever why do we not create a 28-day workout cycle for a woman why is everybody on a seven day cycle to that when we look at the our capacity for our workload you know Spain last year came out with a three-day menstrual leave for women no questions asked you women could take three days every month for a menstrual leave it's actually quite brilliant although it should probably be done the week before her period but we women need more times for recovery and rest and to slow everything down yet we live in a very patriarchal society that is very black and white our Healthcare System is very you know you've got this marker so this is this is the medication you want to take we haven't brought lifestyle into the health conversation and once we do we see that that linear approach doesn't work for when women we need to bring what I've been saying is we need to bring the feminine back into health care and bring the masculine part of the Health Care system that works so well that black and white and match it to the Ebbs and flows that women are going through not only in the cycle but in life and the journey through menopause as well and once we acknowledge that now we are honoring a woman in the truest sense of what her health really requires yeah beautifully said and what's interesting for me is our reflect on that is that a lot of medical schools now I know in the UK I know in America and I was in the Middle East recently talking at a Book Festival and even there it's more than 50 percent of the students now in medical schools are women you know and conventionally you know 20 30 years ago it would have definitely been more men so actually as more and more women you know flood the Healthcare System more women than men are are becoming doctors with work like yours that helps them understand because here's the problem women can go into medical school but are still being taught by A system that was designed Maybe by men you know from a different era so if the knowledge doesn't get to them it's going to be hard for them to change it and that's that's why I I have been so excited to talk to you and I think your book is mandatory reading for women because it really helps them understand themselves better whether they want to fast or not okay I still think there's value in reading so let's go back again I know I keep reiterating this but I really want to make it clear day one to ten power phase day 10 to 15 roughly is that ovulation phase the manifestation phase you say testosterone comes in there I wonder if we could just pause on that because a lot of people think that testosterone is a male hormone yeah you've just explained that for five days in the female cycle testosterone comes in could you just help us understand why yeah I know you've touched on it but just to make that point really clearly about testosterone yeah it's such a good point because we do think a testosterone is a male hormone but let's talk about the three things that testosterone does for us not only is it libido but it's motivation and its drive so we want to keep testosterone coming in for women it's just going to come in in that five-day period it's not coming in every 15 minutes like it does for men so in that moment we want to use all the testosterone we have testosterone is going to help us build muscle so you know one of the conversations I've been having is why are we not why are women not doing the heavier lifting of Weights during this manifestation phase she has all this testosterone use it to build muscle use it to start a project you've you know it's not just about the libido piece of it and when we see testosterone go away for women like we often see in the menopausal Journey we see women that all of a sudden become less motivated to start projects less more motivated to go and work out and that part really needs to be highlighted because we can really keep an eye on testosterone through certain fast through Foods through behaviors so that we can have all of testosterone's Glory to be able to support the female body so after day 15 what happens yeah so after we have another hormones so you're going to go back into a low hormone phase and so I call it the second power phase because really the way that this this concept that we're talking about is the fasting cycle the way I came up with it was that I was watching all the people do one meal a day and all the women having adverse effects and all the people that want to do three-day water fast and so the power phases the day one through day 10 and then day 16 to day 19. this is when your hormones are the lowest and so if you want to go into a three-day water fast you want to do your one meal a day that's a great time to do it but during the manifestation it's not so great keep your fast around 15 hours you don't want to create a lot of detox effect during that time so and you don't want to be in keto during that manifestation phase as well and I and I spoke of that in the book but when you come out of that manifestation phase in the second power phase is let's go back to low carb let's go back to the keto diet if that's what excites you let's go back to some longer fast because we have a hormonal opportunity at that moment to do it and once we start to hit day 20 that opportunity is now gone and we need to completely switch again we'll be back to the conversation in just a moment now many of us struggle to find time to eat all of these incredible Whole Foods that's why I'm a big fan of good quality Whole Food supplements like this one that's been in my own life for over three years now it contains over 75 Whole Food Source ingredients vitamins minerals pre and probiotics and can help us support our energy focused digestion and our immune system athletic greens are giving my audience a fantastic offer one year's free supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first order you can see all the details at athleticgreens.com forward slash live more or simply click on the link below now back to the conversation is one way to look at these power phases that women are able to tolerate a variety of different stressors at that time whatever that stressor is because fasting can be a stressor on the body rights but it sounds like what you're saying is in that you know days one to ten but also then days what 15 or 16 to 19 those two power phases there where you can tolerate stress in whatever form that comes and then I can't help but think of societal implications and let's say a woman did have a regular cycle which again I know that's not the case for everyone and I know your approach and fasting can help renormalize them sometimes as well we'll definitely get to that but it makes me think let's say a Google Calendar for example knows with you know a fair degree of high predictability when they're going to be in those phases they could almost plan their calendar accordingly exactly you got it you got it that's that is like you got it that's the concept I want to take this book and help women understand that and then take it one step further and and I'll tell you you know she she wrote the forward uh Leanne Rhymes I've been working with her for the last year and we've had many conversations about how do we plan your touring schedule around your cycle how do we how do we look at your cycle as a tool to understand when you can go out into the world and do all the type A activities that makes you this amazing uh you know performer and when do we need to get you back home so that you can nurture yourself and reboot yourself so that you're not tanking your hormones but what what a lot of women are doing is just the same thing powering through I'm you know that sort of I'm a woman see me roar I can do it all month long and I want to sort of point out actually hormonally you're not designed to do it all month long we've got it easy as man don't we really yes I mean it's hot it's hot uh come a conclusion yeah when you think about because we just don't need to think about that in the same way and and again I want to highlight I think this conversation is as relevant for men as it is for women because we also need to understand the women in our lives and how they could be going through these changes at various times um I'm also I've got to be honest my daughter's currently 10 and I'm thinking as she gets a bit older into teenage years and things start to change and things start to happen I want to teach her this stuff right I want him to know this from a young age that rather than having to have issues in her 30s and 40s and then have to get your book and learn it's like well why not learn you know that kind of hormonal Symphony and how it changes throughout the month you know right from the get-go wouldn't that be wonderful oh my gosh again I just I appreciate so deeply that you read the book and you extrapolated it into our culture and you really looked at it from a bigger perspective because that is what I I keep saying that I'm hoping this book is going to crack open a societal conversation that we need to have and on that particular concept what think about this from your from a father to A daughter's perspective and I I've talked to many dads about this when we look at the behaviors of a teenager so all of a sudden your daughter let's say she hits 13 her cycle starts her behaviors start to change what you're going to see is she's going to be much more inner the week before her period she's going to want to she's not gonna be communicative with you teenagers in general are not communicative but the week before her period she's going to be really you know wanting to withdraw she's not even going to understand herself so if you have a conflict that you've got to resolve with her or a tough conversation let's say she's 16 and all of a sudden you got to talk to her about her grades or something that she's doing don't do it the week before her period you're going to get a wall that's not going to allow her to communicate but if you knew when she ovulated if you knew when all those hormonal hormones are coming in when estrogen's at her Peak we become more verbally outward we're much more extroverted with testosterone there we're more more motivated to resolve a conflict that when we get into the Nuance of hormones we start seeing wow how we communicate to women really or when we communicate with to women really matters yeah and this goes beyond father daughter doesn't it this goes uh well all kinds of relationships frankly um so let let me bring it back from societal implications back to the menstrual cycle because I want to get to fasting and how it changes throughout the phases so we're currently up to day 20 so we've had power phase one manifestation phase power stage two then what happens right at the end of the cycle yeah and so this is really a whole different part of our cycle and progesterone is coming in and we I spoke of this before but progesterone this is the time that your body's naturally more insulin resistant what and if we stop and just think about that one piece for a moment why would the brilliant body make you more insulin resistant the week before your period it's because you need more glucose to be in your bloodstream so that you can make progesterone this is the this is the most important Nuance to this conversation because we have seen massive uh blankets of media information out there saying women shouldn't do keto women shouldn't fast yes if we really boil that down we shouldn't do those two things in this part of our cycle as you've heard we can do it well in other parts but this is the part we've got to keep glucose high now if you talk to any woman you know she will tell you that that yeah the week before my period I just want to sit on the couch and just eat a bunch of carbs and eat some chocolate okay let's break that down that's not an undisciplined behavior that is your body saying raise glucose so I can make progesterone why do we want chocolate chocolate has magnesium in it so you need magnesium to be able to make progesterone so the body is doing exactly what it wants you to do but we sit around and [ __ ] about it we sit around and villainize it I don't want to talk to anybody I'm irritable all I want to eat is carbs okay now let's do this in a healthy way so I call it the nurture phase because we need to nurture ourselves during that time we need to know to say no we need to slow down we need to eat Smart carbs there's a whole mechanism that needs to change that week before our period yeah and I think just hearing that can really help so many people let go of guilt and shame and oh I can't stick to this diet I can't do this you know why am I craving this just that simple reframe is like no no this is my amazing powerful hormonally Driven body that's wanting this and I know in the book you talk about food choices and why sure you're craving pizza and ice cream and you explain why that's probably not the best choice you can get more natural real food carbs to kind of nourish progesterone at that time and have you know a health promoting effects I think it's a I think it's a really beautiful reframe for people so we've got these separate phases um I think I think I read in the book or maybe I saw one of your YouTube videos that whilst I've explained it in the power phase my understanding is that women can tolerate stress I think you're explaining how in that um in that nurture phase right at the end of the cycle that last seven days or maybe even 10 days the stress can't be tolerated as well there is that right and do they need to change not only fasting but even workout patterns and exercise yeah so this is where the mismatch The evolutionary mismatch is really showing up for women because we're now in a culture where women are in the workforce women are doing you know balancing work career with a family you know we we have uh we are able to do so much uh in this the time of of of human evolution but the problem is our hormones were not meant to push our hormones were not meant to have a lot of stress that week before and we're seeing that when what's been so fascinating to me in getting out into the world to promote this book how many women are missing a cycle young women that don't have a cycle or are spotting or having a a very light cycle and that's because we're pushing through this phase this is the nurture phase this is we have become stress intolerant and so we do need to slow things down but then to your point earlier how do we do that when the culture doesn't understand this when Society doesn't understand this we tend to think of ourselves as lazy we tend to go I don't know I just don't feel like doing things right now so we guilt and we shame ourselves but if we could reframe that and say oh I need to love myself this week I need to do up my self-care Behavior I need to say no to more things during this week and nurture myself that's where we're going to start to bring back this balance of hormones for women yeah I love that and and I was always thinking that because I have a few patients in mind and I just thought well with that knowledge let's take movement and working out as an example right you could quite easily think you know okay with that knowledge for the first 10 days of my cycle I'm going to be pushing hard maybe I'll be going running I'll be doing hits workouts maybe day 10 to 15 I because testosterone cyanide can build muscle I just go to the gym or I lift weights for those five days and then maybe in the final week of my cycle I forget about the gym I forget about weights and I practice yoga every night after work I put on a YouTube video and I do 15 minutes of yoga that's actually something that I just came up with at the top of my head but actually it feels like a very simple but practical way that people can immediately Implement that knowledge into their lives yeah yeah and and I hope if there's any personal trainers that are listening to this like you you nailed it instead of putting women on this weekly cycle of working out we should put women on their menstrual cycle are they 28 days 30 days 32 I mean every every woman's different but this the easiest way to understand this is that when estrogen is coming in those power phases when those power phases show up yeah push the workout do the hit training do the Plyometrics do it really go into a deeper acceleration with your Fitness your Bot your hormones can handle it what when testosterone comes in could we take that five days and maybe one day you lift really really heavy weights that for your biceps and triceps and the next day you do really heavy weights and really push your glutes and your hamstrings and your quads and then the next day you do abs like take five days and really power up your strength because you've got testosterone that will help you build muscle but then to your point when we move into that nurture phase in the back half that's where yoga Pilates go for a hike go for a walk that's your recovery time of all things can we bring that Fitness aggression or that enthusiasm might be a little bit better can we bring it down to a more soft softer level so the the female body can recover yeah wonderful really absolutely love that so many practical implications of people now let's get back to fasting I'd love to understand how you have these six lengths of fasts which all have different benefits so what do you think is that a good place to start yeah I was gonna say I think it's a great place to start because um this was a concept when we built the book out that really got a lot of attention between me and the editors and um there's a lot of belief like why would you aren't we just intermittent fasting should I just do 15 hours should I just do 16 hours and when you actually dive into the science what you see is that once you've switched over into your fat burning system using the tool of something like intermittent fasting the longer you stay there the more healing happens so in the book I lay out six different lengths fast and and this is the the general uh overview of them at somewhere between 12 to 16 hours you you're going to switch into the fat burning system so you will start to make ketones now what's interesting about ketones that I really want to point out is as ketones go up it also triggers the production of a key neurotransmitter called Gaba and Gaba is what calms us so a lot of people believe when they get into that fasted state they're going to be really anxious they're going to be really hangry but actually the opposite happens because once you make ketones you become you get Gaba so you become calm and ketones will will shut off the hunger hormone so you stop becoming hungry and all of that happens around 12 to 16 hours we also have some evidence that's that inflammation markers come down we know testosterone for men go up we see a little bit for women going up and we know growth hormone starts to kick in between 12 to 16 hours so that's the base phase isn't it what you call intermittent fasting it's a fast of some somewhere between 12 and 16 hours that's right and let's just Define fast what does that mean it means no food presumably but what about drinks yeah so it means that your blood sugar is not Rising that it's that it needs to start to decline it needs to decrease to be able to signal that you go over into that fat burning state so when you are fasting if you drink something that raises your blood sugar now you've pulled yourself out of the fasted state so you know there are a lot of people do coffee in their in their fasting window for many people that works and we can talk you know about all the Nuance around coffee and drinks um some people have asked me like well can I do like a diet soda and we know that NutraSweet can actually Spike insulin so that's not a good choice so we really need to be able to keep our blood sugar in this downward momentum to be able to switch over so like a black coffee wouldn't tend to raise people's blood sugar whereas you know uh um I don't know what is it mocha Frappuccino type uh modern sugar-filled chemical fields that it's still coffee but actually because of what's with the coffee that's gonna take you out of that zone so black tea would probably be okay as well but yeah milk and tea yeah and so this okay so this is where the Nuance really comes in and it's an individual thing so what controls our blood sugar levels is our microbiome and we all have a different microbiome profile so it's hard for me to say I can I can pretty much say off the experience that I've seen that 99 of the people who drink black coffee or black tea they're not going to have a raise or their their glucose will not go up and they will continue to go towards that fat burning system but once we put cream in there for some a full fat cream will actually accelerate the decline and the decrease of their glucose moving them even closer into that fat burning State and keeping them in a fasted state but somebody else with a microbiome profile that's vastly different they put cream in their coffee and now their blood sugar goes up so in the book I give a blood sugar test that you need to do to see if these drinks that you're leaning into in your fasting window are actually supporting you in a fasted State because there's a lot of Bio individuality in that moment are you on a on a slightest side hair I am aware there's a cost implication of these devices what is your thoughts on cgm's continuous glucose monitors I personally have found them to be an incredible tool for patience for myself to help Teach You How Your Body responds to something I think they can be overdone I think people can use them without full context and get health anxiety around them but I have to say I've very rarely in medicine seen something that can change Behavior so well so quickly I'd love to know your perspective on that yeah I no tool out that will change your relationship to food like a CGM yeah I think everybody should put it on and I'll tell you what I do I do when I'm working with women one-on-one to get their hormones back on track uh the first thing we do is we take the scale away we get this because the scale is not giving you any indication as to the metabolic health of your body that number on the scale will not tell you that but then we put a CGM on and then I have them test everything eat your favorite foods just go ahead and eat for for you know those cgms usually last about two weeks just eat the way you normally eat and let's see what your food behaviors is are doing to your blood sugar levels now it becomes intrinsic because they get to see yeah oh my gosh you know and and it can be healthy things the first time I did this I had cauliflower chips you know thinking it was grain free it spiked my blood sugar higher than a potato chip yeah it's a I agree and and you know I don't I want to go completely down there right behold the sea gems but you know I've written five books now the first four I covered food in detail in each one I know what a healthy diet is I've been using food as medicine with patients for years I was like oh wow I didn't realize that this healthy food was doing this to me and it really has changed my food behavior for the better and I can feel stable blood sugar more energy more stable mood on the back of it so I am a fan in a way that I'm not a fan of all Health trackers I certainly I don't think they should all be widespread the use as they are but I do think cgms have a particular unique Place back to fasting so you have these six length of fasts right length one is that 12 to 16 hour one uh length two is what you call the autophagy fast 17 hours plus what's what's going on there yeah so autophagy around 17 hours look at your body will start to go into this state of autophagy and it's like a dimmer switch it starts at 17 hours and there's based off science it Peaks at 72 hours so you're just starting this new state and here's what the state is your body was so well designed that at 17 hours of that blood sugar dropping it starts to go okay I get it no food's coming in I need to become stronger and the intelligence will turn within the cell and it'll look around at the cell and it'll say what inside this cell is not working for the survival of this human that we're in so it's going to start to look at bacteria and viruses and push those out of the cell it's going to repair mitochondria you're going to see things like endoplasmic reticulum and all the working parts within the cells start to become stronger and the body repairs itself the second thing that happens at 17 hours is some cells are incredibly damaged some cells are going to become cancer cells some of it are rogue cells some are aging cells we call those senescent cells and so the intelligent body if it decides a cell is going to slow down the survival of a human it will actually kill that cell and get rid of it and we call that apoptosis and all of that happens without a detox supplement without any kind of special strategy you just go 17 hours without food and the body figures out what cells it needs to repair and what cells it needs to get rid of yeah it's just incredible and I hope we get time later on this conversation to go through the you know all the varied benefits of fasting but you just touch on a few there like you know you've already mentioned type 2 diabetes reduced weight I know you write about improved immune system function you just mentioned cancer cells there and how there is research now showing how fasting uh set periods can have an impact on your risk of cancer and all kinds of things so there is a case for us all to consider some form of fasting in our life whatever that might be however it might fit our lifestyle so I just wanted to highlight that that gut's Health right gut's health is something you also talk about and I think that's that third level of fast that's a 24-hour fast you say is very very good for your gut yeah yeah so the research on that one was done out of MIT and it showed that at 24 hours there is a reboot of intestinal stem cells so we have to stop and think why does the body do this so at 24 hours it's a long enough period for the body to go okay food is not coming in so I need to be prepared for that moment that food comes in I need to make sure that when food comes in we are utilizing food to its best our best Advantage so what it will do in these intestinal stem cells is we have this thin mucosal lining on the inner part side of our gut it starts to repair that so anybody with a leaky gut a 24-hour fast is an incredible tool for you anybody with sibo what we know is that what also will happen in that moment is that bacteria that no longer serves us the bad bacteria in our gut will actually we will get rid of that so with sibo with any kind of gut dysbiosis now we're seeing the bad go away and we're creating an environment where that good can really flourish and then the last thing on that and this one's really interesting I'm not sure if you've ever talked to Dr Ameren Mayer her but he wrote the gut immune he's wrote several books on on gut health but I interviewed him on my podcast to talk about gut immune health and he talks about the idea that when our bacteria are clumped together inside our guts that we cannot absorb the food and turn it in to pull the B vitamins out and all the nutrients that we need to pull out of our food that we actually need our microbes to be more evenly spaced on the inside of our gut linings for nutrition to be able to be broken down so at 24 hours we see a relocation of these microbes where they stop clumping together and they start to spread out so think about that the implication of that one day let's say one day a week maybe one day a month you go 24 hours without food that has a better chance at repairing your gut than all the probiotics in the world all the enzymes in the world I once I clued into this I literally really stopped giving supplements that supported gut health to my patients because I found a 24-hour fast was way more powerful information is not enough to make change in your life you have to take action so to help you take action after watching this video I've created a free nutrition guide for you this contains the five most important practices I've seen in over two decades of seeing patients they work for you no matter what your dietary preference there's a step-by-step action plan to help you implement those changes in your life if you want to receive that free guide right now just click on the link in the description box below I mean it's so powerful couple of things there you mentioned sibo for people who don't know that's an abbreviation s i b o small intestinal bacterial overgrowth and that can show up with symptoms such as you know bloating constipation just that kind of generalized discomfort often after eating it's very very common so I can see how fasting would do that into incidentally Mindy I don't know if you found this when people practice just a basic form of time restricted eating right let's say that would fit into your sort of phase one fast whether it's 12 hours of eating 12 hours of not or 10 hours of eating and 14 hours a knots the amount of people who report back my irritable bowel syndrome symptoms were better my constipation was better my bloating right so it it all highlights the point you made right at the start of the conversation that we are designed and built to have periods of time without food but the modern world has made it so that many of us simply don't do it anymore right so that's really great to understand that let's um let's go through four or five and say it's the fat burner fast the dopamine fast I found really interesting and the immune reset fast um let's just briefly go through them because I really want to get to the cycle and how these different lengths should be applied by women at different times yeah so quickly but they are incredible healing that 36 48 and 70 D2 so 36 I call it the fat burner reset you know so many what I saw and is that as I was teaching these Concepts on YouTube there were a lot of like people showing up saying okay I'm doing a 24-hour fast I'm doing all the things you're saying that I should do but I'm not losing weight and what I realized is that they needed to go into some longer fasts and at 36 hours there's some great research showing us that over a 30-a period that if people did 36 hours of fasting followed by 12 hours of eating that and then 36 hours of fasting 12 hours of eating repeating that cycle for 30 days that not only did they lose more weight than people who just did like one meal a day but that they actually lost the weight in belly fat now think about that for a moment because everybody you know wants to lose belly fat obviously that's a big motivator but that's visceral fat that's the fat that kills you so use dipping into a 36 hour fast you can really start to turn and one of the things that it does it'll turn white fat into Brown fat so that it's a lot more it's easier for your body to burn so that's why I called it the the fat burner reset at 48 Hours what we see is your whole dopamine system gets rebooted so the whole process in which we utilize dopamine is reset but that's not the most important impressive part we actually started to see D2 receptor sites dopamine receptor sites more rep receptor sites start to be produced and open up so that when you come out of that fast you actually are able to enjoy the simple dopamine rushes of life and so that happens at 48 and then 72 is the immune reset that Walter Longo brought us which is rebooting your whole white blood cell and your whole immune system yeah just I have to go back to that 48 hour fast because I think there's a really interesting point there for me right the whole dopamine system starts to reboot and you mentioned earlier on and I've spoken about this on the podcast before that we don't just eat when we're hungry right we eat our emotions we eat often to fill a hole in our hearts not a hole in our stomach and you you beautifully write in the book how when we're eating a lot of the time we're choosing foods that give us a dopamine Rush right you also mention Eating Disorders yes we need to exercise caution but I wonder if one of the reasons that people who have had a troubled relationship with food why fasting if done responsibly in the right way with support I wonder if one of the reasons it works so well is because it does reset dopamine and reset someone's entire relationship with food in the first place yeah yeah so it think of dopamine resistance a little bit like insulin resistance the mechanisms are not completely similar but the concept is is analogous so what we know about uh people who are obese people who have food addiction issues is that when they're eating they are not getting the same dopamine response as they used to and they're not getting the same dopamine response as per let's say somebody who doesn't have a food addiction so I quote a study in the book was done on obese individuals and they found that it took more food in order for that person who was obese to be able to have pleasure from that food so when we talk about food addiction a lot of it is we got to keep eating because we're not getting that same dopamine high now you throw in a 48-hour fast and all of a sudden we've got a situation where we've reset that system and you take somebody who struggled with food addiction somebody who's trying to reverse obesity you give them a meal and now they're getting enjoyment out of it now they're like whoa this I actually love this and they're not needing they're not craving more and more and more yeah so so so powerful now let's get back to the cycle right we've got the phases which you've you know beautifully explained for people now now that we understand that there are different lengths of fast how do we superimpose those fasting lengths on the different phases of the menstrual cycle yeah so this this is mean if if brand new hormone hormonal learner so I put a lot of graphs in in the in the book but you also can just Google A woman's menstrual cycle and when you see it over a 30-day period what I the the general principle is when hormones are high so manifestation phase nurture phase we need to change our fasting behavior when hormones are low we can really fast as long as we can do all six of those fasts so with that in mind let's go through what I call the fasting cycle the first Power phase you can throw a three-day water fast in in fact if you have PCOS I encourage you to put it try a three-day water fast and watch your body start to become insulin sensitive again and watch the symptoms of PCOS go away if you are struggling to get pregnant we've seen this so many times in our community and in my clinic where all of a sudden if your issue is insulin resistance and estrogen imbalances and that's contributing to infertility throw in some of those longer fasts in that first Power phase and in the the power phase that happens after you ovulate so those are that those six fasts all fit in there and I really want to encourage people to try to up your fasting game as you start to learn this tool and go into the longer fast for healing during that time so during the manifestation phase now this one's really interesting because we have all these hormones at their Peak and one of the things we know about hormonal Rises and decline we see this a lot in menopause is when hormones come up and then they they decline very quickly like what happens around that ovulation period is oftentimes toxins are released from our stored tissue so heavy metals Plastics glyphosate phthalates all the toxins that are in our world so because we know when hormones are up we're going to get a little bit of a detox effect I strongly recommend if your toxic load is high you're not going to want to do more than like a 15 16 hour fast drain manifestation phase or you're going to see some detox reactions this is where women start saying oh I'm gaining weight fasting I've got brain fog when I'm fasting I'm I'm I'm struggling to get into ketosis when I'm fasting a lot of that could be a toxic dump so I really encourage women to keep those under under 16 hours stay with an intermittent fast during that time yeah so let's just recap a little bit um first phase paraphrase Day Zero well day one to day 10. we've already said that's a that's a phase where women can tolerate a degree of stress you're saying in that phase fast as long as you want like within reason like you can do any length of those fast because you can manage it then okay but then when you go to sort of day 10 to 15 the manifestation phase the ovulation phase when testosterone is rising you're saying just be cautious then don't go above 15 or 16 hours and maybe even a little bit less potentially at that time now you also mentioned Mindy detoxification if your detox if you're if your tots and load is high now I think there's going to be some people listening who have no idea what that means and I want to bring in there something you also said I think it was in your book your favorite phase is the manifestation phase and you say the focus then switches from producing hormones to metabolizing hormones and I think just explaining that around detoxification I think those two things might fit quite nicely for people there yes yeah and thank you for bringing that up because this is another part of the hormone conversation that we're not culturally having which is taking a hormone doesn't mean your body knows how to use those cells are not always using that hormone and we see this a lot with thyroid medication where a woman will go on a thyroid uh medication but she still doesn't feel different and that's because all hormones have to be metabolized a better way to look at metabolites is that all hormones have to be broken down into a usable formula that the cells can actually put into action so where does that breakdown happen it happens in the liver and it happens in the gut so when we look at the manifestation phase during this ovulation period we've got all these hormones really really high we've got estrogen and testosterone at their Peak the focus needs to now switch from producing hormones to breaking those hormones down so liver there's a lot of foods that will support the liver I think this is a great time to lean into the bitter Foods the radicchios the lemons the ginger the arugula I think this is a great time to avoid alcohol or anything that would put a stress on the liver because you need your liver to break down all of these hormones we also have to look at gut health so I talk in the book about the three p's which is polyphenol probiotic and Prebiotic foods can we bring more of those fermented foods in can we bring more nuts and seeds in can we bring more of the green leafy vegetables in if we support the liver and the gut during that time and use food as our hormonal tool to be able to break these hormones down now we're going to really take our hormonal balance to the next level yeah it's brilliant and in the book you do talk about alongside fasting the foods that will support whatever you're doing with a fast ingredient if you're not fasting the foods that will support various phases of the cycle which again is why I think this book is going to be useful for any woman because just what you said there right days 10 to 15. you need your liver working for you right so you don't want to be putting in alcohol then because you're just going to make it harder to detoxify the hormones you know clear those hormones out of your body I do think that's something that a lot of people even within mainstream medicine don't quite understand that there's hormones and then the hormones need to be processed and removed out of the body and that gets done through the liver through the guts and you know the regularity of your bowel movements you know what you're putting in you talk about cruciferous vegetables and all these other types of foods that you mentioned can really support detoxifying those hormones you also write about how if we don't detoxify those hormones well and they stick around there's an impact isn't there yeah yes and and such a great piece of the conversation that needs to be highlighted which is you have all these hormones come in and if you are not supporting the liver if you are not getting enough vegetables vegetables are key for that there's a whole set of bacteria in your gut called the estrobolome and it breaks down estrogen these microbes break down estrogen so how do we feed them how do we support them so they can break estrogen down and that's through a lot of green leafy vegetables it's through those three piece categories that I talked about if you are not supporting them during this key time then that estrogen is going to be stored and where it gets stored is in anywhere that there is fat so it's going to go into the breast tissue and and it can start to throw at the big place it goes is the breast tissue it can start to make you accumulate more fat your body will put it on belly fat it'll put around fat around your hips and your your glutes that you're trying to so actively perhaps get rid of so it's that is why it's like in that phase we have to switch our Focus to okay I made them now I spent the first 10 days trying to support an environment that allowed these hormones to do what they need to do but now I'm in this phase of my cycle where I need to support how to break them down not only to be able to use them but to prevent some of these hormonal cancers that we're seeing so popular in women yeah yes this is not just so you feel good in the moment it has that's right other implications as well okay so we're the woman's ovulated right we're at day 15 uh assuming there's a regular cycle then we move into the second power phase what should we be thinking of then when we're thinking about fasting and also our diet I guess that the two things fit alongside each other don't they yeah so when you come out of that phase around day 15 16 you can go back into some of the longer fasts so you're going to have a four day window where if you want to throw in a 24-hour fast you want to do the 48-hour dopamine fast you can throw it in there and because hormones are low you can go back to a more low carb style of eating if that's what the way that you eat so it's it's another dip and moment in the cycle where we can power up on these tools we can also you can push your workouts you can go ramp up your social calendar you can you know do a higher workload during that time because the hormones are are low so you can go back into any of these ex these longer fast to use them for their healing effect yeah that these three phases of the cycle one two and three and it goes one two back to one again that's right and then you hit three and this again I think it's a of course it's a very important phase it's that one week or so or maybe ten days at the end of the cycle it's that period of time before the periods where we've already said the body wants carbs you're trying to support progesterone I think you've already said at that time you want to nourish yourself we were talking about maybe doing more yoga and relaxation type activities at that period of time what should we be doing then regarding fasting then and uh I guess food intake we've already touched on a little bit but maybe just talk about that particular part of the cycle yeah so there's a lot to discuss on this part of the cycle when it comes to our lifestyle um when it comes to fasting if you're new to fasting I strongly encourage you to not fast that week because what you don't want to do is raise cortisol once cortisol goes High progesterone becomes shy she is not going to make her debut and you need progesterone to Peak in order for the uterine lining to shed so women who have a spot before their period women that have heavy periods a lot of times that's because we're not minding progesterone she is not in her you know able to be produced so if you're not if you haven't fasted then really be careful and and and don't fast during that time now the second part of that question that I get asked a lot is with women who um are like but I I rock fasting I I can do three-day water fast no problem I'm metabolically flexible um I would say still keep it under 13 hours it's this is not you know if you're concerned about like a lot of women say oh I'm going to gain weight during that that time I promise you you won't if you follow the pattern that we've just walked you through so we want to look at minimal fasting to no fasting and then on the food front we I talk in the book of something called hormone feasting foods and when it comes to Progesterone she wants you to eat certain foods so we already talked about chocolate I'm not saying don't eat chocolate just eat good chocolate make sure it's clean make sure it's not packed with sugar use that magnesium use your sweet tooth during that time to your advantage when you're craving carbs go to the potatoes the sweet potatoes go to the squashes go to things like quinoa the citrus fruits tropical fruits I map them all out in the book this is what progesterone wants you to feed her so we've got to change the diet we've got to cut the fasting out and you will see like it's crazy I don't know if you saw this on my YouTube channel but the number of women that are like I followed this protocol and especially did what she said before the week before my period and my cycle was totally became got back in sync yeah oh yeah I've seen those comments and I want to get to that because there's there's so many different scenarios for women I want to talk about ages under 35 I wanted to go about 35 to 50 above 50 post menopausal if we have time I mean you are such a bouncing of knowledge and the book has got it all in anyway um but I think even just that simplistic take home that at the start of your cycle you can tolerate high stress long fasts end of your cycle you need low stress no fasting potentially nourishing yourself even that right if if that's all anyone takes away from this conversation I think that can have profound implications for women and their partners and the men in their life just to even know that simple fact yes yes and and you know if you're listening you're like wait this is really confusing actually when you break it down even more it can be as simple as you just said um some people Mindy I think will have heard those lengths are fast and gone wait a minute the basic one is 12 to 16 hours I need to eat every few hours I can barely fast for 12 hours let alone the 17 plus one the 24 36 right so for that woman who's listing now who goes I can't do any of this what are you talking about what would you say to them yeah it's I'm so happy you asked me this question because one of the concepts around metabolic Health that we are not discussing enough is that if you struggle to go without food you are in the beginning stages of mitochondrial dysfunction you are in the beginning stages of diabetes if that's in your genetic profile so we have to look at our hangry person the hypoglycemic person the person that can't go without food that that is a warning sign I so what we have done is we tend to say oh it's just me I can't do that like I can't tell you how many friends personal friends of mine are like I love what you're doing Mindy I I just can't fast and I come back to if you have to eat all day and you don't and you struggle to go eight hours without food that is your body saying warning warning we are in a mitochondrial mess and we need to clean things up so in the book I talk about something called a pre-reset where I show how you can take a two-week period and you can clean up your food and you can slowly like back your way in to this fasting lifestyle it doesn't have to be where you're gonna suffer your way in your body wants to fast so the more you train it to do it it gets easier and easier and easier so please stay open as we're having this conversation because the fact that you've got to eat all day is on to itself a warning sign that fasting can really help you clean up yeah I completely agree very very important to pay attention and not just medicate that with more Foods because you're just kicking the problem down the road better to address and go let me see what I can do now to make sure I can go 8 10 12 hours because on an evolutionary um through an evolutionary lens if we couldn't go more than eight hours without Foods we wouldn't be here right man or woman so there is something not quite working with your metabolic system that potentially can be repaired certainly in my experience in most cases it can be repaired if we start small and build up slowly um sorry interrupt if you are enjoying this content there's loads more just like it on my channel so please do take a moment to press subscribe hit the notification Bell and now back to the conversation I want to get to some particular ages now because I know there's women of all different ages who listen to this show and I think the approach they may need to take might be quite different so I know for you something quite key happening your 40s where you were trying to get into the shape of your life you were trying to be fit healthy but the things that you were doing in the past that did work suddenly no longer were working and I know from friends from patients from the public many women in their 40s feel this oh my God why am I putting weights on that why am I seemingly not able to cope like I used to now this can be the perimenopausal phase can't hit and yes for someone for a lady who's in that phase how might they apply the principles that you know you've talked about so far can we get specific to people in that phase perhaps yeah absolutely so here's another highlight that I think women need to know is that at 40s your ovaries are going into retirement and it's going to take about 10 to 15 years and over this time your sex hormones start to decline and one of those major sex hormones as we've talked about is estrogen so as estrogen goes down you become more insulin resistant I really want you to women to own this because you're not all of a sudden becoming more in you know undisciplined at 43 there's not a reason why other than a hormonal reason usually that you're starting to gain weight the diet that you used at 35 to keep your weight and where you want it is not going to work for you at 45 because you're losing estrogen making you more insulin resistant so that is really important because there's so much guilt so much shame that happens to women as they go through the menopausal experience so with that in mind this becomes fasting becomes this imperative tool for a perimenopausal women to start to use because we can make ourselves insulin sensitive again through the concepts we've been talking about the second thing that I want to highlight for the woman going through perimenopause and even into the menopausal years is that we as we lose estrogen we also are losing a lot of our cognitive ability we have the most amount of estrogen receptor sites in our prefrontal cortex so as we lose our ability for memory and and to hold on to new information to keep our focus our mood disorders that are appearing during this time that is because estrogen has gone to its ultimate low and it's a whole new experience for the menopausal brain but we can use ketones as a way to to substitute and power up what the brain needs as it learns to recalibrate to this loss of estrogen so that perimenopausal time from about 40 to the early 50s this is where fasting has to be a mandatory go-to tool to support women through that process I mean just so much gold you just said Mindy just one thing I wanted to highlight there just so women don't feel guilt is that let's think about it through the lens of type 2 diabetes right so let's say you're well and fully insulin sensitive you can get away with a certain diet because you're insulin sensitive let's say you're very very insulin resistant as you know Mindy you've already explained what that means early on in this conversation I think we all understand that then with type 2 diabetes the same diet that worked 10 15 years ago when we were insulin sensitive is no longer going to be the right diet for us as our hormones have changed it's the way our body signals have changed and you're effectively saying forget a disease state just in the natural process of women getting older in their 40s ovaries as you say starting to shut down for retirements of course with different women it will happen at different times your signals are changing your hormones are changing you are becoming insulin resistant so of course the diet that worked for you in your 30s May no longer work for you in your 40s there's nothing wrong with you right a lot of women get frustrated with the weight gain but I think through that lens it's like well yeah maybe I need to change my diet maybe for example a lower carb diet may be brilliant in my 40s maybe I didn't eat in my 30s but I now need it in my 40s that's right that's right and I just I love your heart because this is the burden we need to take off of women there is so much guilt and shame around our our relationship with food and what we're seeing in the 40s is there's these dramatic body shifts and and I've experienced it myself I'm 53 and I've just gone through that whole process and you don't understand yourself you're like I've been you know for me it was I love to work out I was doing a lot of paleo I was you know really in and then I moved into the ketogenic diet I had found fasting I was like trying to play with all these tools because I felt like somebody hijacked my body like I was not able to use those old tools anymore I needed a new set of tools and I need to learn how to cycle them like I teach in the book but what happens you know I don't know if you've seen this statistic 45 to 55 is the most common decade for women to commit suicide now why is that there is a hormonal decline that is changing our brains and our bodies and we are not understanding each ourselves and we as a society are not talking about this hormonal shift so the 45 year old woman is depressed she's not sleeping she's gaining weight um she's having all these new health challenges but she's throwing the old strategies at them that are no longer working not realizing that something in her lifestyle has to shift yeah and not only that the medical profession and you know I've been part of it for over two decades now we're just not trained that well on the things that you're talking about so if a woman does go you know what I need some help here often they'll end up with a healthcare professional maybe a doctor maybe someone else and maybe you know I'm not trying to throw anyone under the bus here right I do think medical professionals are trying their best but I just imagine 20 years ago I wouldn't I wouldn't have known what to do for that woman I genuinely like I would have done my training and passed my exams but 20 years I just would not have known and therefore that woman then goes out thinking oh well the doctors can't help me or a common one which you will have heard I've heard a million times as my doctor tried to put me on on an antidepressants that's right I mean that's the common one and at that point women feel unheards they feel unseen they've lost faith in the medical profession quite understandably and so this is really really important that suicide static was startling when I heard that and it's it's one of the reasons I think we need to take this super super seriously Okay so we've covered um we've covered the sort of 35 Plus in in your 40s the perimenopausal period of time what about post menopause because after the periods have stopped I know you you've you've said before that after menopause fasting gets easier and I think you've also said that that post-menopausal group of women are the group that needs fasting the most so I wonder if you could explain that for us please yeah oh it's such a good point so what what has surprised me in educating the world on these Concepts is how many women go through menopause and symptoms stick so I've seen women that are 10 years into their men their post-menopausal journey and they still can't get rid of the the weight that they accumulated during the process they still have hot flashes they're still struggling with mood changes and so we're the it fascinates me that those the even though they don't have a cycle anymore those issues are still lingering around and the reason for that is they didn't change their lifestyle when they went through the process so they can change it now they can become use what we're talking about out as a tool to make sure that their age appropriate hormones are at the highest level possible now I'm not talking about bringing your estrogen or progesterone levels back to your 25 year old self that's not what we're talking about but when we are 55 and 65 we need to make sure that we keep estrogen and progesterone at her Peak and even testosterone otherwise we start to slip into more of these categories of dementia and Alzheimer's especially if there's a genetic profile for that so when we start to use fasting especially the longer fast we can clean up that estrogen system for a post-menopausal woman that's going to make her hot flashes going to go away that's going to make sure that she starts to lose weight and that's going to make sure that she cognitively stays at her best but then she also needs to know to step out of fasting to mind progesterone so we can have her go into maybe one day a week because she's not following necessarily a monthly cycle she could follow a a weekly cycle and one day a week two days a week she doesn't fast she brings her carbs up she leans into the hormone feasting Foods so that she can bring progesterone up so she can stop being anxious so that she can sleep a lot better so we still have to mine these hormones at that phase but we don't have a monthly cycle to look at it from yeah that's that's a really good point because we spent a lot of time in this conversation talking about this you you know 28 30 day type cycle but of course post menopausally that doesn't apply anymore and so but I still think what you've been talking about as you've just mentioned is highly relevant for this post-menopausal group I know you've got a variety of different techniques for postmenopausal women one I think was the five one one what's the 5-1-1 yeah yep so 511 is where five days a week she does her favorite length fast so let's say it's like 15 hours 16 hours um and in that time I really recommend she does uh more of a low carb style of eating I call it my my version of of Keto is something I call keto biotic I actually bring the carb level up a little bit more than most keto diets because I think that's more appropriate for women and I encourage women to lean into more of the the Nature's carbs the leafy greens to be able to to help so those five days a week she would do maybe a 15 hour fast with with the keto biotic diet one day a week I want her to stretch her fast in fact I would encourage her to try to get to that 24 hours so she can create some gut repair to break down the estrogen that she needs for her brain and then one day a week she steps out of fasting she does more hormone feasting foods and she looks at how does she bring progesterone up so that's a typical 5-1-1 for the post-menopausal woman I love that so instead of thinking 28 30 day cycle think more about a seven day pattern what about younger women because in the sort of under 35 age group let's say you know maybe the under 40 age group where women are you know maybe they've got a regular cycle but many women don't so what about women who have taken birth control and then come off birth control pills I mean that can be all kind of hormonal Havoc going on there I know we've mentioned the cycle so people can of course follow the principles that we've already outlined if they do have a cycle anything for younger women to pay attention to in particular and what about those younger women who don't have regular Cycles how might they approach your work yeah and and again this has shocked me how many women don't have a cycle so the first thing I want to point out about our Cycles is we tend to look at them as a you know something that's we don't want to deal with it's like oh I'm going to feel this way it's a hassle um but what I want to say is when we shed blood it is a version of a detox so we need that menstrual cycle it is how your body is removing toxins from your system it is a beautiful mechanism that has been born into us that we should cherish the fact that younger women are not having regular Cycles should be of great concern to all of us so now having said that we can start to bring back a healthy cycle by following what we've been talking about and in the book I call it the fasting cycle we actually have an app now where you can go in and you can put your day of your cycle in and track your symptoms and it'll tell you the best foods and fasting length we even go into nutrients that you can use so that's that's available for women but you can either choose your own length fast you can choose your own food Styles according to how I teach it in the book or I did put a 30-day fasting reset in there where you just map it to your cycle and it'll start to balance out those hormones but if you look at the majority of women that are 25 they're high stress a lot of them are eating the wrong foods and every single month they're working against their hormones and so all of a sudden now we're seeing a rise in infertility we're seeing a rise in PCOS and all at the root of these hormonal challenges is a woman not living in flow with her hormones and that is what we can change to dramatically change the needle on those type of situations occurring so let's say for a 28 year old young lady who is not on the pill a lot of people I don't realize when they're taking the pill they're not really having periods yes there's Bloods and it's happening at a certain time but actually that is artificially stimulated through the pill it's not a natural period so for women who are not on birth control pills and they don't have their period they just don't know when it's going to come some of them are not having it at all obviously Extreme Weight Loss will do that but let's say they're not super low weight right could they just follow your 30-day cycle and if they don't know where they are they don't know where day one is they don't know where day 10 is they're just like okay well why don't I just start would simply starting and living in accordance with day one to 10 power day 10 to 15 manifestation and changing the fasts changing the stress changing the exercise changing the inputs to the body is that going to help them and is it going to help them bring their periods back that's exactly what it's going to do and this actually shocked me because I came up with uh this concept the fasting cycle that we've been talking about and I started to use it on myself and my perimenopausal years and then I started to use it on my patients and then I expanded it out to the social media audience that was following my teachings and what really surprised me was how many women within 30 to 90 days could bring their their Cycles back into sync just by following what we're talking about and beyond that the other surprising effect and I you know this is just me observing you know millions of women by now who have gone through the fasting cycle is that when women were infertile that that because they don't have a regular cycle that's a problem if you're trying to get pregnant so what we started to see was that fertility went up and within 90 days a lot of women that have spent years trying to get pregnant all of a sudden became pregnant so to your point it's that simple if you are not seeing a regular cycle just go to that fasting reset and do day one through day 30. if you do that for 90 days you will sync yourself back up that is what we're seeing yeah I just I really want people to take key to that if if there's someone a man or a woman listening and you have a daughter of that age who's struggling please send them this conversation send them in these books send them in this YouTube channel if you've got a friend share this with them because I I can't emphasize enough Mandy how much your work has touched me because as I've already mentioned I think the implications go far beyond improving that individual Woman's Health yeah sure great improve that woman's health but what does that mean well who are the women in society what are they doing they're they're usually the nurturing ones they're the ones who are looking after people they're often the caregivers they're the mothers they're the grandmothers right they're the people who carry babies which is how the population keeps going if you look at it through that level helping women to feel better to have more energy to have more vibrancy to have better memory cognition better guts health the implications are huge they're huge they're huge yeah I thank you for saying that I I we have to pause at this moment in human history and ask ourselves how we're taking care of women's health there was an article that went out in the New York Times a couple weeks ago around menopause and how we have a cultural acceptance of women suffering and what we're doing as women is that we're internalizing that we're creating more guilt more shame because we're not thriving in this patriarchal Health Care system and when we look at what women need from a Health Care system is we need to bring in all the Nuance of what we're talking about we need to bring in self-love we need to bring in doctors that have compassion for us we need to understand ourselves and where these hormones are coming in and out and we have to stop trying to do everything from how we eat to how we work out to the medications we take take at the same as men because we are massively different and we have been TR we've been taught to do it the way that we teach men and that is what needs to stop in order for us to thrive yeah I mean this conversation is always going to change so we're going to change how I approach things in my own personal life not only professional life but personal life I can see how it would make me more more aware let's say with my own wife for example how I can be more supportive potentially at different times you know I'd like to think of myself as quite enlightened and Progressive but you know I'm learning things uh from your work that I I wasn't that aware of which now that I am I can make changes so on a personal level I want to thank you for that um thank you what do you think people get wrong about fasting oh well here's the number one thing they think it's a fad diet it is not a fad diet it is a healing State you put your body into your body was div was designed to fast so if you're not fasting it's not like oh I'm not choosing to do that that fad diet you're actually taking this massive healing mechanism out of your healing picture your health picture so we have to stop looking at it like a diet and look at it as a therapeutic healing state that every single moment you dip into it your body is actually starting to build more health and instead of more disease yeah yeah for sure I think um if you just look at cultures around the world as well you know most cultures have had fasting built in within them for thousands of years so this modern idea that you know fasting is dangerous it's you know I get and we've we've we've caveated it several times throughout the conversation but fasting is not dangerous for humans healthy vibrant humans it's definitely not dangerous for you know how many people around the world follow the Islamic faith how many of those people fast for one month every single year yes there's some nuances to that first it's just incredible you know and actually I was I mentioned I was at a book vessel recently in the Middle East and I I was chatting to this wonderful lady called Sally who lives out there and she said a couple of things which really resonated with me one was she was really looking forward to Ramadan she was saying I'm really excited and she said wrong and you don't know how good a sip of water can taste until you fasted yeah on it I just thought wow it's something we take for granted every day you know I I yeah I get it I get it especially if you're in a hot country what must that be like that first set must be like an Elixir from heaven right when you when you first taste that but and there's other things she said to me which were really quite profound but this wider point for me Mindy and I towards the end of our conversation I wonder what your view on this is I think in Western Society a lot of the time we you know we we say what are the benefits come on tell me about insulin growth hormone tell me about cancer risk immune system function gut health okay these things are important yeah but my feeling from experiencing myself and talking to people is that a lot of the real benefits from fasting are actually psychological it goes beyond what's happening in the body it teaches us that oh we can go without food we're not going to crumble and you know disintegrate into Ash we are capable resilience humans who can tolerate discomfort I mean what is your view on that you know physical benefits psychological benefits how do you see those two things yeah oh there's so much to say on that topic um you know when you go into these fasted States and it gets difficult what I want you to remember is that your body thrives with small doses of difficult situations we call that a hormetic stress and if you keep the body in Comfort whether it's temperature Comfort or food Comfort or you know or just life comfort you are actually breaking the body down in a bad way you are aging yourself you are building disease we have to have have moments of micro discomfort so when we use like I always say to people once they've mastered a 15-hour fast I'm like great now let's try 17. and when it gets this in in this place of discomfort you have an opportunity in that moment to learn a new skill for example often we go to food as a dopamine rush but what happens at 17 hours when when you're hungry your brain is bored and you're like I need food but I can't eat it right now what's going to end up happening is you're going to have a whole new set of tools that are going to be revealed to you on other ways to stimulate dopamine like maybe turning on music maybe going for a walk like something is going to appear that you were not able to see because you never put yourself in that discomfort to be able to get the brain to search for it and then the second thing I want to say on this and this is how I ultimately see fasting being used as a culture is that when you're not bringing food in within the first couple hours the the brain will start to chatter at you and it'll keep kind of giving you that monkey mind but the longer you go the thoughts quiet down and there is there's a reason that every religion has used fasting as a spiritual tool you become very very clear and the thoughts you're thinking a lot less thoughts than when you're thinking when you eat so I've even used a three-day water fast as a tool to help me through difficult times the example I always use is with my 23 year old daughter was going through a really tough time in college and I was scared as her mother and I couldn't figure out how to help her so I went into a three-day water fast and I got the message that it's gonna work out it's all gonna be okay just relax and within a week after that I started to see some dramatic shifts that moved her in the right direction action but that Insight I don't think I would have ever received if I had been eating all day I needed to go into that quiet space to be able to hear that message yeah I think this is a I think this is a hugely underestimated benefit of fasting I don't think we realize all of us how much we medicate our emotions with food in a food abundance Society you know I've said this I think in a previous conversation fasting is self-imposed scarcity yes and I think there's an incredible power and wisdom we get from doing that you mentioned cultures it's interesting put around to see my mother this morning who's in her early 80s and I said mum you know fasting how did you approach this and she reminded me that after me and my brother were born I've got an older brother she would fast two days a week said every Monday and Friday I wouldn't eat all day I'd have a very small dinner Monday and Friday it was for her a symbol it was a symbolic thing that she did for the health of her children right so again whether people want to believe in that or not there was this kind of deeper cultural tradition better wisdom that yeah made I guess her feel as though she was doing something for my health and my brother's Health even though she was the one doing it but also she was gaining benefits as well and I think if you talk to people from different cultures they'll all have many different examples like that of how they're doing that yeah um and they for someone who is listening this podcast is called feel better live more when we feel better in ourselves we get more out of our Lives just to finish off for people who feel inspired by what you've said and think okay I've been skeptical about fasting and never thought it was for me but I think I'm gonna give it a go have you got any final words of inspirational wisdom to share with them yeah here's what I would really say is I hope that after this conversation you are at least your interest has been peaked and what I want you to know is look at it like you would run a marathon you don't just run out and try to do you know 26 miles as we as we do it over here that you really have to train yourself to get to that place so as you Embark upon fasting understand there's a lifestyle and I have a whole chapter on what a fasting lifestyle looks like in the book but it's a training process and difficult moments are going to happen that's okay we talked about that that's where the the physical and spiritual and mental growth is going to happen so be playful be curious about this tool and know that the more you exercise your fasted States the easier it gets I don't know any diet that gets easier with time it actually does the opposite so don't be discouraged if in the beginning it's tough your body's adapting and then you're going to see all these benefits that we're talking about so that would be my final thought yeah brilliant words and let's not forget fasting is completely free totally free it's completely free charge guys do check out fast like a girl it is absolutely brilliant jam-packed full of information Mindy you're doing incredible work I love your energy I love your passion keep it up and thanks for coming on the show oh thank you this was this was actually one of the best conversations I've had on fasting so thank you for the detail of your question because as you can see I want to get this out to the world I really that it is a free tool we can't make Health be this expensive thing that only people who have money can can access fasting changes that whole game so I appreciate being here and I'll definitely come back for a part two to learn more tips on how you can bring fasting into your life from a brilliant practicing cardiologist click here I've been a cardiologist for 30 years and I've tried everything but when I tried fasting I started seeing changes people began to lose weight people's blood pressures came down diabetes got reversed the progression of coronary artery disease went down

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 333,628

Keywords: the4pillarplan, thestresssolution, feelbetterin5, wellness, drchatterjee, feelbetterlivemore, ranganchatterjee, 4pillars, drchatterjee podcast, health tips, nutrition tips, health hacks, live longer, age in reverse, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, motivation, inspiration, health interview

Id: uIToWSXziWI

Length: 113min 18sec (6798 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 08 2023