Dr. Joel Rosen: Then I write Hello everyone and welcome back to another edition of the truth about your health where we teach exhausted and burnt-out adults the truth about their health so that they can get their energy back quickly. And what a pleasure it is to have our next guest Dr. Mindy Pels, who is a best-selling author, speaker, fasting expert, and renowned holistic health coach, and her mission is to get a million people fasting. She has a popular YouTube channel with videos about alternative health tips and fasting and has garnered over 15 million lifetime views.

She has the resetter podcast she founded and hosted and it’s Apple’s top 40 In the US, she’s also the author of three books, menopause, reset the reset factor, and the reset kitchen. And she’s soon to have fasting like a girl coming out. I could go on and on. But we only have a certain amount of time to get into the meat and potatoes of today. Talk. So Mindy, thank you so much for being here today.

Mindy Pelz: Oh, thank you, Joel. I’m excited to be here. It’s my favorite topic. So I love chatting about this.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, for sure. We like to be nerds together. And we can do that and go down these rabbit holes just sometimes. And I’m sure you’re not going to do it. But sometimes when we get nerdy we get too into the scientific stuff. So we’ll keep it on a very superficial level.

And I always like to know stories of how you got into this. I know you’re trained traditionally, as a chiropractor, you just mentioned to me you made a pivot during COVID. But maybe take us through the the the 32nd, almost elevator speech of how you got to where you are now from where you were before, let’s kind of go through there.

Mindy Pelz: Yeah, the short version of a very long story is that you know, I’ve been in practice, it’s been well, 27 years. And I started to notice about 10 years into my chiropractic practice, that people just weren’t healing at the same rate that they were when I first got out of school and symptoms were hanging around longer people were showing up with more symptoms. And so I started to look at what was happening, was it our food was our environment was it stress.

And, you know what I found was all of the above that the modern world had changed. It was dramatically affecting the way people were healing. So I went searching for answers and started doing nutritional work, detox work, and with patients getting good results. But it wasn’t until I had my health crisis at 43.

When my hormones started to shift going through perimenopause I truly found fasting, and realize that I could solve so much of my healing crisis, my healing crisis, and my patients healing challenges through the art of fasting, and it was free. And it’s time-efficient, and it’s backed by science. And so I geeked out and became obsessed with fasting, which was about 10 years ago, and I haven’t lost my enthusiasm yet.

Dr. Joel Rosen: No, that’s a great story. There’s nothing like living the health challenge for you to be fully invested and to be able to learn the ins and outs and talk with integrity because I find a lot of problems are with doctors or even you look at the broke financial planner, or you know, the teacher that’s not educated or the doctor that’s not healthy. So thank you for having that integrity. As far as the Thrifty Gene hypothesis. I think that’s a good springboard for you started 10 years ago, you had your health crisis, and you realize that hey, this thing fasting, so maybe take us through the Genesis or the evolution of that, and we’ll get we’ll start from there.

Mindy Pelz: Yeah, well, so you know, it’s really fun to tell people because when they go to look at my social media, they’re like, they assume that I’ve been fasting my whole life. And that’s not the case. I was the hangry person, if you didn’t feed me, I was going to take you down. And I got up and ate breakfast was the first thing I did in the morning. I was the belief that if you ate six to eight times a day, small meals, would raise your metabolism.

And so what happens when women go into their 40s is our estrogen production and progesterone goes down. And in that decline of hormones, we become more weight loss resistant, we become more insulin resistant, and the mitochondria have to work harder. So what I started to look at was just something as simple as the timing of when I ate. And that’s when I discovered the Thrifty Gene hypothesis, which is so fascinating.

And I have a whole section on it and fast like a girl because I don’t think it’s highlighted enough. This is, if we go back to the caveman days when we look at how cave people managed food, they were able to go long periods without food. And then when they made a kill, they feasted. So our genetics, our human body is programmed to do what we call feast, famine, and cycling. And in the famine, we tap into a whole nother energy system. A lot of people know this is the ketogenic energy system, I call it the fat-burning system, but the body will switch over to a different fuel source.

And that ketogenic energy system is like supercharging your cells. So you start to make ketones, it makes your brain stronger, it kills hunger brings down inflammation, and it makes you specifically more capable of going and hunting the next meal, which is what the Thrifty Gene hypothesis is, is that because of the need to survive in the harsh conditions of the cave person-days, we have a genetic expression that came out of that. And that genetic expression we are now is now infiltrated into our human bodies, which makes us programmed to fast.

And when we don’t fast, we start to become more insulin resistant. So because we’re going against our genetic expression, we can blame it on food, we can blame it on sugar, we can blame it on stress, we can blame it on toxins. And all of those are valid points why insulin resistance is so high. But we got to come back to the fact if you are not fasting if you have not compressed your eating window, or elongated your fasting window, you are going against your genetic makeup. And that is why when people learn to fast, they not only make themselves insulin sensitive again, but they tap into how their genes want the body to end the fuel to come in.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Now, that’s a great, great answer. And I think that the more simplified explanations, we give things, the more people that are studied in a sort of a six standard deviation of what we do resonate, and they can resonate with the same Yeah, it was a hangry person if I’m not eating every, every couple of hours my provider told me and you know, I’m trained in exercise physiology, I was a personal trainer.

And in the early years, I think I’m probably around the same age as you where we would tell people to have smaller meals, more frequent meals is what helps to stabilize that glucose. And so what I guess what was the AHA, that you had yourself personally, to know like, Oh, my goodness, I’m, I’m doing exactly the antithesis of my how my genes are telling me what I should be doing. What was that aha moment that you had?

Mindy Pelz: Yeah, it’s, you know, I think the aha moment came around 43, when I was starting to gain weight, I was not sleeping, I was mentally exhausted crashing at three in the afternoon. And all my old tricks weren’t working. So I tried to exercise my way out of it, I tried to supplement my way out of it, I tried to change my nutrition like I was trying everything I could to get my body back to its 30-year-old version of itself.

And it would have been really easy at that moment to say, Oh, I’m 42, I’m aging. But what you and I know about the human body is it’s built to last, it’s built to thrive and well into your hundreds. So you’re not meant to go down at 40. And so I think the aha moment for me was, gosh, my old tricks aren’t working. So I need to implement something new.

And you know, what I know about the human body. And I think you and I line up on this is that it’s meant to heal itself. And so when the body’s not working the way we want it to work, you didn’t get the wrong supplement, you didn’t get the wrong diet, you didn’t get the wrong exercise program, there is something that you forgot that you have to tap into that that will turn on innate intelligence, and let that intelligence do its job. So I think that was my aha moment is the old stuff wasn’t working.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, for sure. And so as far as we have this Thrifty Gene is programmed into our DNA. And as you mentioned, it’s environmentally it’s that much more important to tap into that, let alone as we get older. And that’s a good segue into there’s this thing called metabolic syndrome, and how it’s just a crazy incident and how many people have it so maybe tell us a little bit more about that Mindy, and what’s actually what your research and what But the research is showing as to what’s going on with that.

Mindy Pelz: Yeah, it’s a great question. And this is a big part of how I started to, launch into educating the world was the rates of metabolic syndrome. And I think what got highlighted was in 2020, march 2020, when the pandemic was first to hit, there was a lot of discussion about comorbidities, and like what are these quote, comorbidities. And a study came out of the University of North Carolina, showing that here in America, we only have 12% of Americans that are metabolically fit.

Now let’s talk about what it means to be metabolically fit. You’ve got to have a great fasting, an appropriate level of fasting insulin, and appropriate levels of fasting glucose, meaning that when you wake up in the morning, and you’ve been fasting during bed, you need to have your glucose and insulin levels be in within normal range, you need to have the normal of whatever we’ve decided normal is waist circumference, you need to have normal blood pressure, you need to have normal cholesterol, you need to have no damage, and fatty liver issues, all of that needs to be normal without medication.

So this is the key, you have a lot of people walking around going well, my blood pressure’s normal, my cholesterol is normal, but they’re taking medication, if we took everybody off of medication, then you would start to see where this metabolic imbalance is growing. So then I will add to this because I think that it’s easy to just point fingers at bloodwork.

But I want to point out that if you cannot go without food for longer than 10 hours, you are metabolically unfit, you should be able to go 10 I think the optimum of 13 to 15 hours without food is considered intermittent fasting. If you can’t hit that without wanting to kill somebody or pass out, you’ve got some metabolic health issues that need to be addressed.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, that’s a great answer. It’s an interesting Monday, I went to the forum meeting, which was in Hollywood, Florida my first one to go. And while I was encouraged, for sure to see traditional doctors start to embrace the concept of food and nutrition. I usually don’t swear on my podcast, but it’s like, no shit, like food does this for you, you know, like, welcome to like reality. But it was nice. But one of the presenters who I liked, talked about when we go to bed, or let’s say you have your last meal at seven, and then you don’t eat until seven.

And now we want to call this intermittent fasting. But that’s like life, right? Like, how do we not just how did we get so far away from that? It’s just, it’s amazing. So I guess with to your point to that without medication, I think that’s a great, great way to quantify that. But even and also to make sure you could go at least 1012 hours without wanting to kill someone. I think that’s another way to quantify that. And then lastly, though, those ranges that they have are even still pretty broad, where I think that number maybe you would agree that would even be higher than 88%.

Mindy Pelz: Yeah, I think it I mean, that’s why I throw that last one in there. If you’re able to go effortlessly for 13 to 15 hours without food, your weight isn’t a good place, and your blood pressure and cholesterol are in good shape. without medication. Those are some pretty tried and true examples. But I think the problem is that when a symptom appears, we medicate it.

And now we call that body normal and healthy. But if we just take something like blood pressure, that the when blood pressure goes up, that is a warning sign, there is something in the body out of balance. So when we take medication to bring it down, we are killing the warning sign. And then what will happen is it’s going to something else is going to break in the body. So I love this idea that let’s start with the natural rhythms of the body and see what we can do to fix the body naturally and fast.

I don’t know why, but the timing of food hasn’t been given and highlighted as much as it should. It is now but when I get like last Christmas, I got on a bunch of new shows and people were asking, they’re like, oh, is this fasting thing still going on? Why is it so popular? And to me, that’s like saying, Oh, we’re still excited about sleep. Why is sleep so popular? Because it is a natural way in which your body wants to be treated. It’s not going anywhere. So it’s time for us to figure out how to create a rhythm around it. Because just like sleep is going to heal you faster and is going to heal you as well.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, and I remember I listened to your amazing lecture at the biohacking Congress conference and you’re saying something about? Well, the fasting thing didn’t work for me. And it’s like, well, that’s like saying sleep didn’t work for me. That’s right. So so why don’t you go into what happens when you fast and why it’s so important to do that?

Mindy Pelz: Yeah, oh, this is my favorite part. Because this is where if you’re not a believer, now you’re going to be a believer. So the thing to realize is that we’re burning energy from two systems sugar burner and a fat burner. When you eat, you’re now in the sugar burner system. If you eat a high sugary meal, it’s gonna take anywhere from eight to 10 hours for that glucose to come down. And for the signal to tell your body to go into fat burning. So eight to 10 hours is where the switch usually begins to happen.

If you take a lower carbohydrate meal, you’re eating more healthy carbs, and healthy fats, that switch may happen a little faster. But about it 10 hours, now your body is sensing that something is going that is that food isn’t coming in, and that it needs to make its chemicals. So that usually happens about 10, we got that switch, and you’ll start to see the byproduct of these chemicals, usually about 13 hours.

The biggest one is ketones. So ketones start to get made, your brain operates off of 50% glucose and 50% ketones, so when the brain senses ketones, it kills hunger, and it starts to create better mental clarity and better energy. Now, when you start to get to like 17 hours of fasting, the body is senses, gosh, foods not coming in, I’m going to make sure the cells all the trillions of cells in our body start to repair themselves so that they become more efficient.

So it stimulates something called a toughie g, where the cells start to clean themselves up against old recycled parts that aren’t working mitochondria, endoplasmic reticulum, things within the cells that are dysfunctional get repaired, I look at it kind of like a Roomba that you put in your house, you turn it on and vacuums the floor on its own. That’s what a toffee G is it’s cleaning those cells up at 24 hours in this fasted state, your digestive system goes, Okay, we’re not getting any food, let’s repair so that when food comes in, we can be more efficient.

So you get what we call intestinal stem cells, that you’ll get production of those, it’ll help with a leaky gut, it helps to change the microbiome profile that happens at 24 hours, 36 hours your body goes and finds the fact that it needs to burn. So those of you that are weight loss resistant at 36 hours, it’ll go find that and burn it and you can unstick weight loss resistance at 48. you reboot all your dopamine pathways, and you create new dopamine receptor sites. So you’re going to experience joy more deeply.

And then the big mac-daddy one is 72 hours where the whole immune system reboots itself. New stem cells go searching through the body, people spend 10 $20,000 on stem cell injections. And once you learn to three-day water fast, you can get yourself a nice dose of stem cells just from the act of doing that. So the longer we go, the more healing happens.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Right. Right. So and I know you have a reset Academy, but at the same time, Mindy maybe talks to us about I always say you have to earn the right to be able to do that in terms of, you’re not just gonna say okay, I’m gonna run a marathon, and I’m gonna go this weekend to run it, you know, you have to buy your shoes and put off put them on and stretch out the muscles. So how does because you and I see it where those people that it doesn’t work for because they don’t have the ability or they test it after 14 to 16 hours and they’re still at 123 or 135. So what’s going on there and how do they stairstep their way into earning the right to do that?

Mindy Pelz: Yeah, it’s a great question. So here are the first four changes to make if you want to start to get into the groove of fasting, the first three have to do with your food. So the first one, believe it or not, is to get the toxic oils out and add in the good ones. So these are your canola, your corn, your cottonseed, your soybean, and vegetable, those are all toxic oils that make it very difficult to switch into fat-burning mode. So get those out. The second thing is to get off the manmade refined carbohydrates.

Get the bread the cakes, the pasta. This includes concluding gluten-free, getting off the gluten all of these processed carbs that you’ll find in the middle of your grocery store, and switching to nature’s carbs. Nature created some amazing carbohydrates for you with potatoes Fruits and even vegetables. So switch over to that. The third is to get off any toxic ingredients.

These are your red dyes, your Olestra, your Splenda, your NutraSweet, you know, any of the artificial colorings, those are also going to make that switch hard. So once you’ve done those three things, and you could do it even 80%, you know, 20%, leaving 20% of the time, where you eat those things, if you choose, once you’ve gotten off those three, what you do is you look at when you eat, and you start to compress your eating window. And the easiest way to do this is to push breakfast back an hour.

Some people like to push dinner up the hour before the day before, but I usually say push breakfast back an hour, you want it to be a little uncomfortable. Because when you get to that discomfort hormetic a hormetic response will kick in. And hormesis is where when the body’s under a small amount of stress, it builds itself stronger. So you push your breakfast back an hour, so that every day for a week, the net, once that gets easy, you push it back another hour, get used to that discomfort, and then push it back another hour. And usually what I find is if you approach that within two to two to four weeks, you should be at 15 hours effortlessly because your body wants to do it. It’s just you have to undo what the modern world has conditioned your body to crave.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, you know, and that gets into we talked a little bit earlier about the role of the microbiome. And for those stubborn, I guess adopters to or adapters both things, just as an aside, I talked to one of the lecturers who’s a professor Ph.D. MD Joslin center, clinic director, mentioned that polyunsaturated are all oils are created equal, and that olive oil and corn oil, both canola oil are the same things. I asked him at the end of the lecture. Just a quick question.

I mean, you mentioned canola oil was very healthy that studies show that polyunsaturated will also lower triglycerides and raise HDL is Have there been studies that tested the different kinds of polyunsaturated and but there was no comment. So I think it’s unfortunate that we’re still at the Higher Institute, ivory towers are still teaching that these unhealthy oils are, and everything is created equal. And I think I love them the four things that you can do, especially the oils and the heating the oils, and you go to Whole Foods and you think it’s healthy, but then it has those oils. So maybe speak to just a quick little soundbite on do you feel that all oils are created equal? Or do you feel that there are challenges with some of those? You know.

Mindy Pelz: It’s such a good, thank you for asking it because I think what happens is when the ketogenic movement happened, and people started losing weight, what we heard is carbs are bad. But I don’t know about your job. But if you go out to dinner with me and a bunch of my functional medicine friends, the number one ingredient we’re looking at when we go out to eat is what oils are they cooking with.

And the reason is that the current research is showing these it’s saturated, and it’s not, it’s the inflammatory oils. So it’s it can be polyunsaturated can be unsafe, and it can be saturated, there are a lot of different versions of these harmful oils. But what they do is they inflame the outer cell membrane, and what and think of it like congestion, so they congest, the outer cell membrane, well, that cell membrane is what is allowing hormones to get into the cell and nutrients to get into the cell.

So if you’re eating the bad oil is over and over again, you’re blocking vitamin D out from the cell, you’re blocking insulin out from the cell, you’re blocking estrogen and progesterone and testosterone, all the things you want and thyroid hormone to get into the cell, you’ve now created an inflammatory barrier where they can’t get in. So if a doctor is disagreeing with this, then they need to go see the research because this is the I would say the number one emerging nutritional concept that you are going to hear over and over again in the coming years. And it ties into this 12% of Americans being metabolically unfit. It’s because what happened when we went low fat it and we started to even went low carb is we started changing the structure of our food and putting more toxins in and putting more different types of oils in and it messed up the cellular inflammatory response.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, I mean, it’s not so much the food it’s been what’s done to the food, how it’s still adult there that creates the major challenges. So as far as with the fasting like a girl, and when you hit your 40s, and then sort of that that health crisis occurred, how is it different Monday as women get into the postmenopausal ages, and their progesterone and estrogen levels start to decline? Or there’s a ratio between them, that’s unfavorable, or they’re not detoxing them effectively, or all of the above? How does that relate to the impact it’s having on their health? And, and how they may have to do the fasting a little bit differently?

Mindy Pelz: Yeah. So I think what most women are not aware of, and I put myself in the same category, I was there is that at 40, there around 40, there is a switch that happens in our hormonal system. And literally, your ovaries are like, I’m out, I’m gonna retire. I’ve only got a few eggs left, so it’s gonna take me about 10 to 15 years to wind myself down. It’s not like a switch that happens overnight. But what it does is it has to send the job of making sex hormones, estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone, it has to send it over to the adrenal glands.

Well, all you got to do is go out with a 42-year-old woman to understand the stress levels that are hitting in the early 40s. You know, that’s usually a time when women are balancing family and work life, you get deeper into the 40s. You’ve got with you know, kids going off to college. Most you know, a lot of marriages have been long-standing at that point, and there might be a lot of stressors so switching over to the adrenals can send women on a crazy hormone. All right. So one of the things you want to do is mind cortisol production, you want to mind insulin. And so this is where fasting can help. Something as simple as intermittent fasting is incredible for women over 40.

And then what I did, and this is what is in the menopause reset, which women over 40 can get now, and will be highlighted and fast like a girl that comes out at the end of this year is how do we time different fasting lanes to our menstrual cycle. Women in their 40s are typically Peri menopausal. So there’s going to be kind of a little bit of chaos when things come and go. But when we learn how to fast to the rhythm of the sex hormones, it’s like magic. It’s magic. I mean, there’s I’m 52 I have not been on HRT, I’ve not been on bioidenticals I have navigated menopause with 100%. Natural and, and done it well.

And then you’ve got women with PCOS and infertility that are down in their 30s in their 20s. We’ve taught them how to fast like a girl and all of a sudden you got them coming out of infertility, we see PCOS being resolved. So the major difference is that we need to take into consider consideration cortisol and insulin to map it so that we can balance these sex hormones.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, I mean, that’s a great springboard into maybe unpacking that a little bit more in detail because I definitely as I used to call myself the adrenal fatigue recovery ninja, although my wife was like, no one knows what Adrenal Fatigue is, why are you calling yourself out? So. But anyway, so I do work with a lot of women that we do their Dutch test, and we look at their genomic and we start measuring their glucose and their ketones and get them more metabolically flexible, and dial down the inflammatory response and get them circadian rhythm aligned. But it does come down to different phases. Like I always ask them, Are you better at the very beginning of the month or at right around ovulation to get an insight on where their dominance maybe? or whatnot, but maybe unpack that a little bit for us, Mindy, in terms of once they dial that in? Of course, it’s going to be different from woman to woman. But as far as a general rule of thumb based on the different phases, where a woman is, and so forth. What is the, I guess ideal way to build that out with?

Mindy Pelz: Yeah, and the best way to do that is to map it to a 30-day cycle. And so I’ll just use the menstrual cycle as the map. And then we can talk because the postmenopausal and Peri menopausal women then always have little nuances there. And this really should be taught to 13-year-olds when they go through puberty. I don’t know why we’re not teaching this. And that’s a big part of my mission is getting all women to understand this idea. And here’s how it looks from day one to day 10 of your menstrual cycle. And I just want to point out that day one because this question comes up a lot is the first day you bleed. So the first day you got to use some feminine care, and help assistance.

So from day one to day 10, Your body’s trying to make estrogen and s Turgeon likes you to keep glucose down. Estrogen likes to when you fast that if you are insulin resistant, you will be estrogen dominant in a bad way the bad estrogens. And the good estrogens are many times don’t show up for you. So you throw estrogen off insulin resistance. So we want in those first 10 days, we want fewer carbs, we want more fasting, so we can make ourselves insulin sensitive. Now when we move into ovulation day 11 Today 15, you’ve got estrogen and testosterone at their peak and a little bit of progesterone.

This is the tricky part. When hormones come surging in you also get signals for the tissues to release toxins out of their out-of-store tissue. So like lead is stored in the bones. We’ve got Mercury stored in nervous tissue. So a lot of times what will happen is talking you’ll get this toxic dump at ovulation. So we don’t want to stimulate a lot of autophagy. We want to bring the fasting down. So I usually say somewhere about 15 hours of fasting during your ovulation window is amazing.

Whereas in those first 10 days, you can go up and fast 24 hours if that’s your gig, or if you want to do three-day water fast. The other thing that’s important about ovulation is that when you make these hormones, you’ve got to break those hormones down. So you’ve got to feed your microbiome, you’ve got to take some pressure off your liver, those two organs are key for breaking down the estrogen all of all three of them. So this is a great time during ovulation to up all of your leafy green vegetables, that five-day period gets off alcohol and anything that would stress the liver. Then when you come out of ovulation, there’s a dip in hormones again. So from day 16 Today 19. You can go back into keto you can go back into fasting you’ll do great, but on day 19 This is the clinch This is like the key.

What happens on day 19 is to make progesterone you’ve got to raise glucose. So all the women listening, how many times did we say our carbohydrate cravings go up the week before our period? Well, there’s a physiological reason that your body needs more glucose to make progesterone. So we want to feed it the right kind of glucose. So this is your squashes, your potatoes, your beans, your tropical fruits, things like that become very, very key the week before your cycle. This doesn’t mean you go sit on the couch and eat a tub of ice cream and a box of pizza. This is giving it the right glucose. And now you also don’t want to raise cortisol that week. So no fasting, you want to kind of just go into more of a nurturing phase up to your body. And it looks completely different than the other phases of your cycle.

Dr. Joel Rosen: No, that’s awesome. I appreciate I always say I do these interviews for my clients. But then meanwhile, like I’m taking notes because it’s like I get to listen over my shoulder. I had that mostly right, except I get I got it. Right for the wrong reasons. I do find that in the third to fourth week right before their cycle, they have those carb cravings and that they need to get those healthy carbs. I guess I didn’t look at it from 16. I looked at it basically, that sort of 16 through 21. That progesterone is stiff, but it falls once it’s not being fertilized.

And then that’s where that healthy carbohydrate support to support that progesterone fall I guess is super key. And then the other thing is right around that ovulation time I was right on board with the B vitamins and more that mTOR growth, you think about the body getting ready for fertilization and growing. So those are good. Can you maybe explain a little bit about what you want to keep that cortisol low at that during that last sort of week of the cycle?

Mindy Pelz: Yeah, really good question. So here’s the interesting thing about hormones is that three hormones require one precursor to be made. So cortisol, progesterone, and testosterone all need a steroid hormone called DHEA. And if you are low in DHEA, this is one of the major contributors to adrenal fatigue, which to your point is just a big kind of trashcan statement. But to make cortisol, you’ve got to have enough DHEA you got to have enough DHEA to make progesterone and testosterone. So when we go into the time when our body is going into Max progesterone making, if we’re under a lot of stress, and it could be stress in relationship stress at work, it could be too much exercise. It could be too much fasting anytime we’re requiring our body to make cortisol It will not make progesterone.

So we’ve got to be the most sensitive to cortisol presence that week before. Which is why if you again to the women that are listening, how many times do we feel like not working out? How many times do we want to eat more carbohydrates? How many times do we know we’re not feeling as social, we want to sit on the couch, we are biologically programmed to go into this more nurture phase that week before. And a big part of that is because your body’s saying to you, please don’t get me please don’t raise cortisol, because I got to take all the DHEA that’s in you right now and make progesterone. And if you don’t, you’re gonna start spotting, you’ll get you may miss periods, you may get infertility, you can end up with, like, clotting when you start your period. These are all signs that progesterone wasn’t Well, mine did that week before.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Awesome. So so the way I would look at it, too, is I would look at it because they’re potentially downstream Monday, I used to explain the clink or the Plinko in prices, right, and they would drop the Plinko. And it would go down the thing?

Well, I think that if you’re demanding cortisol to be produced, because your body is under stress, you’re exercising, you’re not giving it the carbs that it needs Plus is a stressful event, which really has a paradigm in terms of giving yourself the grace and understand physiologically your body needs those healthy carbs to support the physiology, but at the same time, you’re telling progesterone you keep your trapdoor from falling, and having to go and fulfill those cups that are empty that are requiring the demand and be available for yourself for all the physiological reasons.

So I No, no. And again, it’s not a correction to you. But the way my brain would be is it’s not so much that DHEA is making the progesterone it’s just that you’re not requiring that trapdoor to go down the point go sort of sideways, and rob Peter to pay Paul, so to speak, make sense to you.

Mindy Pelz: The same car, that’s the same thing that I’m saying just right.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Right. That’s what I mean. Right, exactly.

Mindy Pelz: I like the way you’re looking at it. And I think what we don’t realize as women for sure, we don’t realize that how much stress affects all the other hormones. And I think that isn’t emphasized enough. So when we look at DHEA s role in making cholesterol or cortisol and progesterone, you know, I look at cortisol and progesterone a little bit as competitors. And we need to make sure that we’re allowing product progesterone to shine when she needs to shine.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, you know, especially when they’re in that Peri menopausal range when let’s say it’s a relay race, and the anchor of the relay race has already ran 25 laps, and now you’re saying, Hey, you’re in your twilight zone, here take over the baton, like what do you mean, I got to take over I’ve already been running the race, meaning like, if you’re gonna make that transition from having your, your woman factory to say, Okay, I’m done here, you know, adrenals can take over the baton. But the batons have already been running around the track at Crazy rates. How do you expect it to do that? Does that make sense?

Mindy Pelz: Yeah. And you know, I mean, this is a bigger philosophical question. But I think that women aren’t given in this modern world, we’re not given enough grace for when we should not push on through stress. You can push on through stress pretty well, in the first half of your cycle, the back half of your cycle, it is going to cause hormonal havoc. So but you know, in this day and age, you’ve got a lot of women in the workplace. You’ve got a lot of women that are balancing kids and a career and there’s no opportunity to slow down so the hormones are sex hormones are going off at unprecedented, unprecedented rates. So it’s just this conversation alone is probably causing some women to go, wow, I never even thought about this.

And that’s what happened to me when I went through perimenopause. It was like when I started to unpack this. I realized I call it it’s not this isn’t my term. Libby Weaver came up with it’s a great book called rushing woman syndrome. And when I read that book, it’s a biochemistry book about what happens when a woman doesn’t mind her cortisol levels I wept and was like, no wonder I have had some hormonal challenges. I’m not resting I’m not nurturing at the right times.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, you know, I love your mission with every 13-year-old and even younger, unfortunately, because the environment is, you know, accelerating that with growth hormone. And what we do with our food sources like adulterating as we talked about earlier, I got a 19-year-old daughter, and if her phone isn’t surgically attached to her hand, right, you know, and then not even the 5g, let alone six g and 10 G or whatever you want to call it. But maybe we could talk about that, because I find that at that age, too. They’re not only infallible, and they’re immortal, and they’ll live forever.

But they don’t realize the number of carbs that they eat if they were to track it, nor do they realize the epigenetic influence of foods that are adulterated or 5g that are in their hands or other things, but what impact and what’s going on? Like, what do you suggest or I guess, maybe take the conversation from young for that 19-year-old, that just doesn’t, it was never taught at 13. But now they’re doing all this, this sort of an unhealthy, nonaligned epigenetic lifestyle that is making things worse, maybe let’s talk about that.

Mindy Pelz: Yeah, yeah, I have a 22-year-old daughter and a 19-year-old son. So as you’re talking, I’m like, I can give the advice, but I’m not sure how to I can give the health advice, how to get it into them, parent

Dr. Joel Rosen: teacher and mom you don’t know what you’re talking about. Right?

Mindy Pelz: I’ll tell you what I would like to say if they were listening to me, you know, I think there’s a new concept that I’ve been studying. And I think it encompasses everything that you’re asking in this question. And the concept is called the cellular danger response that happens, it’s a defense response of our cells. And when our cells get the wrong oils, they get too many carbohydrates, they get toxins, they get stressed from the I was thinking when you’re talking about this, the phone is surgically attached to her hip. So every time she goes on there and sees something that somebody did on Instagram, that upsets her, she gets a stress a surge of cortisol, when we’re not getting enough sleep, when we’re getting Wi-Fi, I mean, you name it, when all of these things are happening to the cell, the cell goes into shutdown.

And in the shutdown, what those mitochondria inside the cell do is they use the production of ATP to create a B, a signaling molecule to the other cells saying, We’re in stress, we’re in a crisis, we need to go into running from a tiger mode. Well, once in a crisis, you won’t burn fat, you if you won’t bring down inflammation, the mitochondria aren’t giving you enough energy to be able to heal, you’re not getting enough energy to think and the body starts to go into this massive breakdown mode.

The challenge we have with a 19-year-old is they’re they feel invincible because the frontal lobe doesn’t fully kick in until they’re 25. So there they’re not understanding logical consequences. So on the parenting part of that what I’ve just done with my kids is really like, you know, if your energy isn’t where you want it, if your sleep is not where you want it, if your moods aren’t where you want it, how do we take your body out of this danger response.

And at night teen, honestly, this is what I love about fasting, just in general, if you put a 19-year-old on intermittent fasting, just 13 to 15 hours routine. And what you’re doing is you’re calming that response down, it’s bringing inflammation down. So it’s a becomes a cool tool to take you out of that response.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, I was gonna say that, hence the need for intermittent fasting, right. And now we’re back to and of course, the four things that they could be doing in terms of removing the oils and getting rid of the colors and the artificial flavor. So okay, so then, as far as what I like also about the concept of the reset and the reset Academy is there are so many different ways to customize fasting. So let’s maybe kind of go into that.

Mindy Pelz: Yes, thank you for pointing that out. Because in the new book, I talk a lot. There’s a whole chapter on how to build a fasting lifestyle. And there are three key measurements to a fasting lifestyle. One is that you vary your length of fasts. And the reason we want to vary it and this is common to people who fall in love with intermittent fasting is they want to do the same thing all the time. They’re like, Oh, this got me in a result. So I’m just going to keep doing it. And then one day they hit a wall and they’re like, Wait, this isn’t giving me a result anymore.

And it’s because they didn’t vary it. So we teach in our reset Academy How to vary this, your different fasting lengths. Now you can very Get to your cycle, like I explained earlier, you can do a weekly variation, you can do a seasonal variation. And knowing what you’re trying to achieve with your health becomes important. Step number two of the fasting lifestyle is you got to vary your foods we’ve got, we’ve got close to 4000 different species of bacteria in our gut, and we’re still discovering more.

And each one of those species of bacteria needs different food. So when we eat the same 15 foods over and over and over again, we create a monoculture of these bacteria, which affects everything from neurotransmitter production to estrogen breakdown. So we teach in our academy, how do you vary your foods? And then, as I said, how do you vary your foods to a woman’s menstrual cycle?

How do you vary them according to menopausal cycles, things like that? And then the third one and this one is really important, I think, for everybody. But I want to say it’s incredibly important for women, which is surrounding themselves with a community to do health. And here’s why. There’s something that I wrote about this in the menopause reset, there’s something called the hormonal hierarchy, where sex hormones to balance those sex hormones, you’ve got to be insulin sensitive.

To be insulin sensitive, you’ve got to get cortisol in check. And to get cortisol in check, your fastest way to get cortisol to balance is by understanding oxytocin. And oxytocin, we get in so many places in our lives, but one of the biggest places we get is through human connection. So when you enter into doing an activity, like we just got done doing a three-day water fasting here, and not everybody did it, but the people that wanted to do it, we rallied around each other.

We do 15-day experiences of different facets all the time in my academy. And the purpose of that is a community because the community will raise oxytocin, which will lower cortisol, which will lower insulin, and will raise sex hormones. It’s that simple. But we’ve given so much power to medication, we’ve given so much power to our doctors, we forget that this chemical balance that I just spoke of, we can do on our own without any money, you know, without anything other than sheer intention and knowledge. And that’s what we’re trying to teach in the academy.

Dr. Joel Rosen: You know, as awesome, I was gonna say, like, as you were building up that I was gonna start to talk about oxytocin. Because what Mindy, I do a lot of genomics, like I’m a super nerd in that way. And one of the things I tell people is this is my evolution is I had my adrenal fatigue problem. And people looked at me like I was crazy.

When I would go to the doctor, I hadn’t even heard of it. I had an exercise physiology degree. I had a psychology degree at my doctor of chiropractic, and hundreds of 1000s of dollars in debt, my wife was pregnant with twins, and what’s this thing called adrenal fatigue, I would go to the doctors, and they would look at me like I’m crazy. And then I went down those rabbit holes. So then I heard about the HPA axis, which I don’t even think is a good term any that explains the extent of what’s going on.

So what I looked at now is that it’s a demand and supply problem, you are not producing enough energy the at the demand you need to, and then you go into cell danger and your body, you know, makes choices of what they can do with that available, limited amounts of funds. The other way I look at it from a genomic standpoint is if you have too many cars on your mast cell highways, mast cells stimulate your HPA axis. So anything that stimulates mast cells is going to stimulate your HPA axis is going to increase your demand.

Things like iron overload and iron dysregulation, which I talked about at the Biohacking Conference, which no one is talking about from a copper deficiency standpoint. Then there’s also EMFs, there are mTOR driving factors, there’s glutamate, there’s lime, there’s stress, there’s dopamine, that was the other thing I was gonna say is not only is that phone creating that cortisol, but it’s also creating a dopamine surge, which the dopamine is causing the mast cells.

So you but here’s the amazing connection oxytocin puts its foot on that whole process as well. So that’s an amazing thing. And then the other thing I’ll tell you is if we do an oxytocin receptor, Gene polymorphisms, studies have shown that those people are more likely to be empaths. Believe it or not. So ultimately that means we don’t know if the gene is upregulated or downregulated. So is that receptor increasing its activity, or is it decreasing this activity? We’re not sure but what we do know is that your antenna is higher, and it’s bringing in all the frequencies from the world and whether we’re going through social media or lockdown or isolation.

There is biased information that is being given to us from the media so that you have the Hatfields versus the McCoys, whatever it may be, all of that is that person is going to be more impacted by that, which is going to increase their oxygen consumption rate. And if they’re not respiring, at the cellular level, effectively, now they’re going to have a demand and supply problem even further.

So the very first thing that I explain to people when I do genomic interpretation is, I need you to be aware that you have this polymorphism whether it’s one parent or two parents, but we tend to see these people being social work, healthcare, education, community service, and you need to know that no is a complete sentence, you need to have a boundary, you need to know that you’re not Mother Teresa, that you need to save the world, you need to be able to like turn that off because that’s gonna like as much as you can do your fasting.

And as much as you can do, you’re a top of whatever your antioxidants and your nerf to and you’re no glutamine or no gluten, no gluten or whatever, you need to be aware of that tendency of your an empathic person and oxytocin is behind that. So I just wanted to share that with you, because I knew you were going.

Mindy Pelz: Yeah. I had never heard sorry, you seem that there is a gene that makes you more prone to be an empath isn’t that what it does is it creates resistance to oxytocin or creates in you when you have more receptors for oxytocin.

Dr. Joel Rosen: We know it’s the oxytocin receptor gene. So it codes for making the oxytocin receptor. We don’t know if it’s upregulated or downregulated. So does it produce more does it produce less, but the result is that person will be more empathic so that they’re getting more frequencies to their antenna, whether it’s up-regulated, and there are more antennas to hit or it’s down-regulated, you know, we’re not sure.

But that’s, it’s one of the very first gene things that I go over with someone, or they want to know like, well, am I gluten-sensitive? Or this, you know, was mold a problem? I was like, Well before we even do that, you need to know you have this tendency, and they’re like, oh, my gosh, I can’t believe that. Like, I knew that was a thing. But yeah, I’ll send you the information after.

Mindy Pelz: Because one of the things around the cellular danger response that I see is that, and Wi-Fi is a great example, we could sit and argue about Wi-Fi all over the place. And you’ve got people saying that 5g doesn’t affect the human cells, you’ve got other people saying it’s going to be our demise. And what I think we’re missing in that conversation, is that everybody’s cellular response is going to be different.

Genetics is one part of it, but what toxic load you have, what your diet like what your sleep, like, like everything we’ve talked about, it all is going to affect how your cells respond to your environment. So what you just taught me was, that there’s another way of looking at the fact that an empath is soaking up more of what’s going on in the world, and maybe having a stronger or quicker cellular danger response. So that was cool. Yeah, please send me the information.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, I will. And I learned that you know, we don’t want things too little. We don’t want things too much. You want it in sort of that hermetic. falcate bell-shaped curve. the amount and you’re right, everyone is different. And, you know, your mentor and colleague pomp Daniel Pompa was talking about Chornobyl and how the soils can adapt, and our bodies always adapting, but we don’t want it to be prolonged. Because then that way, it’s no longer hormetic stress.

So I think, yeah, the but um, so anyway, the question, I want to be respectful for your time, and I could do part two, part three, part four, or initially, we’re gonna be okay, this should only be five hours today. So it was gonna be five hours. Yeah. So so what I like to ask and it’s probably a springboard to everything we’ve talked about. But of all of that, I always ask, Hey, this is the truth about health podcast, and there’s a lot of sacred cows. And there’s a lot of misinformation and completely wrong information, and not-so-true information. But as it relates to health Mindy, what would you tell the younger self Mindy the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed? Now that you’re the sage-like exploit experienced Mindy, what would you have told the younger one that isn’t necessarily true about how that could have helped you a lot quicker or faster or further?

Mindy Pelz: Oh, this one’s very clear. Get to know your hormonal cycle and map every lifestyle habit you have to your hormone to your menstrual cycle. I am still to this day blown away that I figured this out for myself at 43, I should have been taught at, you know, 13, like I said earlier, how to map everything from food, to exercise to supplements, I mean, everything.

And this is what we’re doing now with the book coming out at the end of the year we’re mapping everything to the cycle. But I think that is the biggest sacred cow that women, there’s one diet for women they should do all month long, I call BS on that. You should be changing your exercise you should be taking changing your supplements. I mean, there are so many things that we need to start to teach women how to map to their menstrual cycle. So that’s what I would have told her is to get to know that cycle.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Well, yeah, and you know, especially instead of what we have environmentally are epigenetic. Even much more important. I’m sorry to ask one more, but I do because it was on the tip of my paper. And I didn’t get to ask you it because I was enthralled with everything else. So one of the things I loved about your presentation was you went to a community, I think it was maybe in North Carolina or South Carolina. And you felt like you nailed that. I could resonate with it.

Like you were like, Yes, I’m hot stuff. I nailed the talk. And then people didn’t walk away with actionable, what can I do about it? So can you get started, give us sort of an overview of what that was, and maybe how that changed your mission to make sure that you’re not just giving information, but you’re making sure that you’re imparting change by giving people tools that can be implemented versus the theory that we feel as providers because I think that’s a mission for me too, you know,

Mindy Pelz: Yeah, it was a wake-up call. And the short version of that story was that at the height of the pandemic, well, I mean, it was like three months into the pandemic, a principal in South Carolina reached out to me, she had watched my YouTube videos, and asked if I would come and talk to her teachers, her high school teachers about metabolic syndrome and how to help. And they were at that time that town in South Carolina was having an outbreak of COVID. Everybody was very concerned. So I show up, I give the Zoom presentation, and it was all on Zoom. And to your point, I was like, I nailed it, I gave him the nutrition advice I give him so much.

And at the end of the call, a very brave man raised his hand and said, You know, I hear your theory on on oils. But I gotta tell you that when I’m looking at a set of peanut butter if I want to buy the one with good oil, it’s $8 More a jar than the one with bad oils. And that’s $8 that I don’t have. And then another woman raised her hand and said, You know, I honor what you just said, but you got to understand how hard we’re working. So when I leave school at five o’clock in the early evening, I just go through McDonald’s, and I pick up fast food because I’m so exhausted to do anything else.

And my takeaway was, that I had given all this fancy nutrition advice. I’ve given all this, these fancy treatment plans. But what these people needed was a free tool, that was time efficient. And that’s what fasting is. And so I came out of that sort of kicking myself, but also fueling my mission, that the what I love about fasting is that every human on the planet can do it. You don’t need the resources, you just need the knowledge. And I literally, we changed the motto on my, my YouTube channel is now called knowledge is your fuel, because that’s really what you need to learn how to fast you just need knowledge. And once you get that down, it all works perfectly for your body.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, that’s awesome. Thank you for sharing that, you know, just as a summary of what I picked up from the forum meetings is we as providers are in, I guess burden and I wouldn’t say burden but responsible for having a socioeconomic change, because you’re right like you look at how the food bill subsidizes foods and doesn’t give subsidies to foods that are more healthy for socio-economic people. It’s just such a travesty to me.

And I think that we are burdened to make an impact through the supply and demand of the customer. And if we avoided certain things we could make a bigger impact. I’m still toiling about How I implement that with my mission so that we’re not just giving good advice. We’re free doing things that are free but also impacting the way that legislature and public health are practiced. And farm bill is taxed? I think we’re charged with a mission as doctors and educators to do something more than just give the information so sort of carrying on what you’re talking about.

Mindy Pelz: Yeah. And it really when you start to look at the paradigm around food and health, it’s so broken, and we can’t the subsidizing farms that are our mono-cropping and have no nutrient value is not great. And there’s I mean, there are so many things we can unpack about how we do health and food that is causing contributing to the metabolic problem that we have. Again, this is why I used to say, We got to go after big food, we got to help correct Big Pharma. And I now believe that we may never crack those two, there are too many profits driven in it. And it’s people don’t want to wake up, they’d rather be told your cornflakes in the morning your frosted flakes are going to be just fine for you. So this is why fasting to me is a tool because it is a resource everybody can use.

Dr. Joel Rosen: You know, I’m listening, I appreciate your time and your dedication, and your mission. And I’m aligned with everything that you do. I’m excited to post the links to all the different tools that you offer and your reset Academy so far. So thank you so much for joining us today. Mindy and I wish you nothing but future success and everything you do.

Mindy Pelz: Oh, thank you joy that Joel this was enjoyable. I loved it. So thank you for this great conversation.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Thank you and you have a great rest of your day.

Mindy Pelz: Thank you. You too.

To check out more about Dr Mindy  and her teachings click here 

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