Fasting for High-Performing Women to Reset Your Hormones, Brain & Body with Dr. Mindy Pelz

This episode of Earn your Happy is.

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Written off like, oh, your cycle is just a terrible thing.

This is what I'm trying to demystify. It is not a terrible thing. Our hormones are our superpower. And if you learn how to work your lifestyle to match them, you will witness your body in a new way.

Hey everyone.

Welcome back to the Earn youn Happy podcast. Today's episode is another throwback, one of my favorite conversations. And you guys know that I've had.

This podcast for eight years. So if you're newer to the podcast, I have literally recorded over 1400 episodes, you guys. So I want to make sure that.

You don't miss any of these super amazing, juicy conversations that I have chosen just for you. Because I can't tell you about the wealth of knowledge that is in this freaking catalog of throwbacks. I don't want you to miss it.

It.

It's truly what has changed my life and helped me on my journey of growth in entrepreneurship, in relationships, in personal development.

And I know that these messages are.

Going to hit you in the same kind of powerful way that they hit me. So I hope that you love this one as much as I do. And let's get started. Dr. Mindy Pels is a world renowned women's health expert. She's the best selling author of Fast Like a Girl. This book has completely taken off since she wrote it. I met Mindy backstage at a Brendan Burchard event in Los Angeles and I was introduced to her by Jamie Kern Lima. And Jamie said, you have to meet her. She has this book that's just going wild. She'd be great for your podcast. I'm not a dummy. So I said, absolutely, because anyone who Jamie says you should meet, you should probably meet them. They probably have a lot of great things to say. She's dedicated her career to perfecting the formula of fasting specifically for women to work with your cycle. So understanding when you should fast and when you should take a break. And this episode was really Interesting to me because I had been an intermittent faster for so long that this really helped me get in touch with kind of like my, my intuition around my body as well, which I feel so much better since taking her advice from this. And if you're an entrepreneur or a big dreamer, which I know if you're listening to this, you probably, probably are, this is such an important conversation about what you need to optimize your health and performance through. So Mindy shared a quote that went something like this. Your health as a founder is the ceiling of your business. And I couldn't agree more. When you take care of your health, it impacts literally everything in your life, from your mindset to your energy and your ability to be disciplined to accomplish any goals you set for yourself. We talk about the benefits of fasting and how so many people want to fast to lose weight, but there's so many more benefits from mental clarity to increase energy and motivation. I once did this seven day fast that I talk about complete fast with just water. And it was insane how much it unlocked my mental clarity. Like it was levels of connection and clarity to whatever you believe, God, source. It was like a crazy flood of information coming into my brain. Now I can't do it all the time, nor do I actually have any urge to do it again anytime in the near future, but I do highly recommend looking into it if you are feeling like you just cannot get that clarity or that connection or creativity and you know it's due to maybe what you're putting in your body. So listen in for practical tips on fasting, balancing your hormones, including for anyone that's pre menopausal or in menopause, and whether or not hormone replacement therapy is a great good option for you. So let's get into the show.

Mindy, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for coming on.

Oh, I'm so excited to be here. I can't wait for this conversation. So thank you for having me.

Yes, I'm so excited too. And we just, we literally just got stopped by my podcast producer and said stop talking about all the good stuff before the podcast starts because already I feel like, number one, you're so easy to talk to. Learned that very quickly.

Yeah, thank you.

Walked in.

Thank you.

And number two, I know that you are just a wealth of knowledge and I can't wait for people to hear this podcast because I shared with you that a lot of the audience is entrepreneurs or want to be entrepreneurs or big dreamers, and it is about the person who's going to Carry those dreams out. It's about the vehicle that we carry.

These dreams out in.

Yeah.

And you actually shared a quote with me right away that I really loved. Would you share that?

Yeah, it was a quote that actually a friend said which was the trauma of a CEO becomes the capacity block or another way or the ceiling of the company. And I think you could say the health of the CEO becomes the ceiling of the company. So it's either way, but it's working on yourself first and business follows. Yeah, absolutely.

And just that's going to be where, if you think about in business, if your business is stuck, you can kind of start to look at yourself. What part of me is this?

Yeah, I think that's the first place to look when your business is stuck is go within. When I was in clinical practice, that was always, whenever there was a growth moment that was blocked that we couldn't break through, I would always say, okay, what is inside me that needs to change in order for my practice to change? So it's an inside out way of looking at life and I just resonate with that so deeply.

Yeah. Do you think other people were looking at that?

That's a great question. I mean, it's really interesting having a comp. Now I've closed my practice because we do everything online now and we have a team of around 30 people. And because what we do is educating women on health. Most of my team is female and there is an expectation, a gentle expectation of what I call live it, to lead it. If we're going to live, if we're going to lead this type of lifestyle, then we need to live this type of lifestyle. And everybody seems congruent with that. But as you know, you know, as a, as a boss, you can't, I can't tell you what to eat, I can't tell you how to take care of your health. But I think as I've noticed, my, my staff is the ones that have fully embraced what we're teaching are the most, have the most vibrancy, they have the best stamina, their mental clarity is great. So I think they figure it out for themselves. Themselves.

So you wrote a book that you are kind of on a never ending tour right now. People just keep wanting to talk about it.

They do.

So you launched, but everyone's like, no, you're coming on my show, you're doing this, you're doing that because it's a hot topic. So your book Fast Like a Girl. And you've also written another book, but this one, this one was this last year.

Yeah.

And you take into account women's hormones, menstrual cycles, all of the things that weren't originally thought about when we started learned fasting. Yep, I had fasted and still do once in a while. I probably am doing it more like you're teaching, but I fasted for about seven years, and I loved it. Still actually love it, but want to learn more about it, which is why I feel like you're in my atmosphere. I'm like, oh, I want to learn more about how to do it where I feel a little better. So tell me about why this book. Like, what was inspired by this book?

Well, so originally, everybody always says, well, how did you figure out how to time hormones and fasting? It was because I was my first patient. I at. I'm 54 now, and at about 43, all my hacks for health, like, went away. So I am. I was a competitive tennis player in my younger years. I loved working out. I've always eaten really well. I detox. Did everything right.

Yeah.

And at 43, my health just started to unravel and. And yet I was doing everything right.

Oh, man.

So, like, I didn't get why it was unraveling. And so that's when about that time, fasting started to come to the surface. And Jason Fung wrote a book called the Obesity Code. And he was. He really gets a lot of credit for bringing this to the mainstream world. And in the Obesity Code, he was the first ones to say, weight loss is not about calorie in, calorie out. Weight loss is a hormonal issue, and the hormone you want to balance is insulin. So he started this huge fasting movement of people that I call O Matters. One meal a day, people. Everybody just started eating one meal a day, leaving all this time for fasting, and they lost a ton of weight. So as he was over there teaching that, I was discovering the principles for my own perimenopausal body. I started teaching how to fast in a cyclical way. I was doing it for hormones in my patient, with my patients, in my clinic. And one day somebody said to me, you know, you should probably teach this on for, you know, for the world. How about you do a YouTube channel? And I was like, okay, I guess. I guess I could do that. And so I put a couple of videos up about fasting and the benefits of fasting and the benefits of fasting for Women on my YouTube channel. And one day, one of those videos took off. Wow. And it went viral. And my channel just Just grew. And it was all with women who said, I loved fasting, but my. I lost my hair. I love fasting, but I lost my cycle. I loved fasting, but I'm really anxious and depressed now. Even though I'm the weight I want to be. Like, the stories from women just poured on to our channel, and I just started listening and tweaking and trying to understand how a woman was supposed to fast. And here we are. I mean, there's 63 million views on that channel now. And so many women gave me so much feedback. And we perfected, you know, as a group of. Of humans, I give them a lot of credit. We perfected a formula for women and fasting that works.

Oh, my God. So tell me what that looked like when you were. Because you said you were the guinea pig.

Yeah.

You're the first person.

I was the first guinea pig.

What were you first noticing because you had started fasting?

Yeah.

What were some of the things that you first started noticing about it that didn't, like, weren't necessarily working for you?

Yeah. So when I learned how to fast, what I was noticing at 43. Let's start. There was weight gain for no particular reason, because my hormones were shifting. And we can talk a little bit about why that was then when I started to fast, I lost weight. My mental clarity, energy, everything felt great. But then I lost my cycle. So at, like, 45, I lost my cycle.

Wow.

And I thought, okay, am I going to menopause? But if you look at hormones, you want to have your hormones as a woman as long as you possibly can, because estrogen's very protective to our brain, to our cardiovascular system. So if you're going into menopause at 45, not a great situation. The average age to go into menopause is 52. So I went to a friend, and I was like, why do I love fasting? But my gosh, like, I lost my cycle. And it was actually a male friend, and he said to me, you need to step out of fasting. And so that's when I started to really look at the nuance of, oh, there's a time for a woman to fast and a time for a woman not to fast.

Okay.

And when I applied that rhythm to my own life, my cycle came back, and I just went into post menopause now at first at 54, finally in post menopause. So it was really learning that a woman's body needs it sometimes and sometimes not.

Okay, so what's the idea? Let's back up. For anyone who doesn't understand why fasting is, is beneficial.

Yeah.

Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Yeah. So this is the best way I can explain it. Okay. Everybody always says, my metabolism, oh, I did this. It speed up, sped up my metabolism, or I can't tell you the number of times people would come into my clinic and go, I think my metabolism has slowed down. So here's the deal. We, we actually have two metabolisms. One that gets triggered when we eat and one that gets triggered when we don't eat. And we, as humans, this is for both men and women, we are meant to switch in and out of these two metabolisms. So whenever we're talking about food, we're talking about what I call the sugar burner metabolism. Okay. So you eat food, it turns into glucose, glucose goes into the cell, stimulates the mitochondria of the cell, and the mitochondria makes something called ATP, which is energy. But the mitochondria also needs other fuel sources, and one of those is a ketone. So the second metabolism is your fat burning metabolic system. And this you can only trigger in the absence of food. And you have to go at least eight hours. 12 is best. And we can talk about all the different times to be able to get over into the fat burner system. Wow. When you metabolically switch over into the fat burner system, what happens is the liver senses the decrease in glucose and it starts to make a ketone. And how it makes that ketone is by burning fat. So it finds the fat in your body, burns, it makes this ketone, that ketone goes into your cell and supercharges you. So the sugar burner system, fat burner system, you are meant to metabolically switch in and out of these two systems. If you are never making a ketone, you've never in your life made a ketone, you are depriving your cells of half of their fuel source. The brain also needs half of its fuel source is ketones. So if you never metabolically switch into this fasted state, never making a ketone, you are depriving your brain of half of its fuel source. Wow. And the beautiful part, if you're looking for weight loss is that when you switch in and out and you give your body glucose and you give it ketones, the only way you can make ketones is by burning fat.

So in the window you had mentioned, you said it needs at least 12 hours.

Yeah.

What's the optimal window and how did you set it up? Like, how have you found for people? Has Been like, the most, maybe. I don't know, for lack of a better term, like realistic or like doable.

Yeah. So I laid out in the book six different length fasts, and they were all based off of research that I saw and then off of seeing what worked for women. So the first one is a typical intermittent fasting. And it's when you're. When you go without food, anywhere from 12 to 16 hours, your body switches over and it starts to make these ketones. 17 hours without food, the body starts to sense those cells, go, hmm, food's not coming in. I think what we need to do is get rid of anything inside this cell that's no longer working. So the cell literally detoxes itself. It's called autophagy. At 24 hours, the whole gut resets itself. You get intestinal stem cells that kick in. 36 hours, the research shows that the body really goes after that stubborn weight that you can't let go of. We'll do that. At 36 hours, 48 hours of fasting, the whole dopamine system gets rebooted. And 72 hours, though, anything in your immune system that's not working goes away and new, specifically, white blood cells will be restored. Wow.

So we were chatting before this because I was just sharing, like, I did a long fast at one period just to kind of prove it to myself. And I had heard some great things that really inspired me.

Yeah.

When you're doing those longer fasts or who do you recommend those longer fasts for? And we did talk about. There's like a history to fasting.

Oh, yeah.

Like a long.

A long way back.

Can we share. Can you share a little bit about that?

Yeah.

I was thinking, yeah.

There was this man named Jesus.

Jesus, kind of.

Jesus was a trendsetter, like everyone.

He had no idea.

Yes.

And he went long periods.

He's so popular in la.

He's super popular in la. He's kind of well known. And he fasted a bunch. Oh, my God.

Too good.

Every religion has fasting in it. And what's really interesting and actually is at the core of, like, a bit of a dilemma for me and teaching fasting is I understand that a lot of people want to use it as a weight loss tool. And I always say if you. If you want to use it as a weight loss tool, go ahead and come to the fasting party to lose weight. But I'm going to ask that you stay at the party to learn about all the other things that fasting can do. And one of them is this deep spiritual insight you talked about, the seven day fast you went on. When you go that long without food, the insight, the inspiration. The downloads are insane.

Insane.

Yeah.

I had no idea that was gonna. Someone had told me a little bit about theirs. So I think I was so curious about unlocking that potential. So I, I didn't understand though, how.

Clear things would be.

Yep.

And the amount of energy I actually experienced, don't get me wrong, there were some, there were some dips, but for the most part it was almost as if I understood. Well, I 100 understood that energy doesn't necessarily only come from food.

Yeah.

Because there is an outer source that I was getting fueled by that was. It blew my mind.

Yeah. The first time I learned fasting, I. Every January, I would pull all my patients together and I would say, okay, here's what we're going to do for the new year. This is how we're going to set our intention with our health. And they would bring family and guests. So there was. I had just discovered fasting and I thought, okay, I've been teaching nutrition to my patients, now I need to tell them to not eat. How the heck am I going to prove to them outside of the research that they're not going to pass out? So I said, okay, well, why don't I go on a really long fast and give the presentation in a fasted state? So I did it on the fifth day of a water fast. I presented to a couple hundred people in, in this church and I basically said, showed them all the science. And you could see the look on everybody's face was like a little dubious. And then I just revealed, I have not eaten in five days. Wow. And people were convinced. And I think you do not know until you go into it the amount of mental clarity and energy that you will get. It's. And that's a ketone. When you make ketones, I think of ketones. You know the movie Limitless with Bradley Cooper?

That movie, you know, he takes the.

Pill and he can like speak all those. That's a ketone. It supercharges you and your mental clarity, your energy. I mean, everything about you becomes more vibrant. And you would think in the absence of food, that would be the opposite. And it's not.

I want to know more about the. Do you know about the history of fasting in like the spiritual?

I don't know why. I know every religion has had it, but. And I know they do it as a devotional. What's interesting is actually Ramadan. There's When I first started looking at studies and studies on women, the ones that I found the most on were from. For. From Ramadan. Wow.

Yeah.

Because they've been doing it. Yeah. Every year they do it.

Yeah. That is really crazy. And I think the seven day thing, what it did for me is understand why they did do that in religion is because you do hear things like we talk a lot about just intuition and listening to yourself and your soul or whatever that means to you. But truly I understood that food can sometimes be a block. Like you can block yourself if you're not eating well and doing the things that is not great for your body. But that's so interesting that your body literally has a reward system for not eating. Like, please give me a rest.

Yeah. The best way to understand it is we're a hybrid car. We operate off glucose and we operate off ketones. Hybrid car works off electricity and off of gas. So if you're not accessing both fuel sources, you're actually not using your body to its full potential. And then outside of that, where I've come to learn how to use fasting from a mental health spiritual standpoint is anytime I have a problem I can't work out, I throw a couple day fast at it. And every single time the answer gets revealed to me. So, you know, Jesus was onto something.

He really, really was. He so was. And I just want to mention I did a seven day fast just once. Like that was something for me. It was a challenge. One of my friends had done it and gave me like just told me something amazing had happened for them. So if we're going to do that, if we want to do what you had just mentioned, is it like a one day fast, is it a two day fast? And how is that structured?

Yeah, I think it, you got to think of these longer fasts as like a marathon. If you're going to train for a marathon, you wouldn't just slap on some shoes and go run 20 miles, right. You would do like two and then you might do 10 and you would slowly build up. I believe fasting should be the same way. And that's why I wanted to put these six different lengths fasts out for women to give them choices. And so I think you should, if you start with 13 hours, see how you do, try it consecutive days as you get comfortable with that, then maybe one day a week, you stretch it to 17 hours. It'll be uncomfortable and that's okay because in the discomfort is where the body repairs itself. So if you're willing to Hang in there through the discomfort. And you probably had this in your seventh day, seven day fast.

Yes, definitely.

Like moments where you're like, I don't know if I can do this.

So many moments.

And then something switches you over and all of a sudden you're like, wait a second, I'm not hungry.

It would just take over.

Yeah, yeah. And that's because the other fuel source, the ketones kick in.

Yeah.

So. So you practice with the longer fasts. I find by the time you can get to 24 hours pretty comfortably, you're. You could effortlessly do a three day water fast. But we've now, I mean we've now taken millions of people that I've never met through three day water fast. We just did with my publisher in January we did a hundred thousand people in one week coming together. Which talk about spiritual, you know, bring a hundred thousand people together in for one benefit. Wow. And that was their health was the way we looked at it. But you could bring it together. I mean it would be interesting to bring bunch of entrepreneurs together.

Yeah.

You could do, of course churches do that. You can lead people successfully through these three day water fasts. And knock on wood, we have not had one situation where somebody has had to go the emergency room or any. Because the body was meant to fast.

Wow. I can't imagine just the like the insights and conversations.

Yeah.

And probably even crazy friendships that came out of doing something because that is, that's kind of a big moment for a lot of us. We've never ever, many of us have not ever been taught that not eating is good for you.

That's right.

Like I grew up in the 80s, like all they wanted us to do was eat right, you know.

Right. Yeah. Or eat more and your, your metabolism will be faster. Yes.

Eat more.

Yeah.

I went through the whole like six meals, eight meals. I was in the fitness industry for a while.

Okay.

Should I be eating eight meals? I mean I was exhausted just eating little meals all the time.

So it's funny because I spent a lot of time trying to understand this six meal a day.

Yeah.

And I can't find any research that can show me that each time you eat a meal, you speed up your metabolism. If anything, you should look at your 24 hours as I have an eating window and I have a fasting window and all of your food should be eaten in a certain time period and you're leaving longer time periods for not eating. And when you look at the research on that, like the greatest study ever done or one of the Greatest. There's so many good ones was done on 16, 8. So that's 16 hours of fasting, 8 hour eating window. And basically what they found was that you could eat whatever you wanted. You could eat the worst western standard, horrible inflammatory, high sugar diet. And as long as you ate that in eight hours, leaving 16 hours for rest, for fasting, you were metabolically immune from high blood pressure, from gaining weight, from cholesterol going up, from inflammation going up because you gave your body 16 hours of rest.

I mean, I can attest to that because I went from being in the fitness industry for a long time, meticulously, really watching my food and then getting to a place where my life got busier. I, you know, my job got busier, traveling became more. And that became something that was really challenging to like eat in these certain windows and get healthy food all the time. And so I, that's when I started dabbling in intermittent fasting. And I just noticed I was able to stay the same, like with eating things that I actually like, enjoyed a little more. There was a lot more wiggle room to what I was doing and my energy went way up. That was huge for me. I noticed that I just had all of this energy in the afternoon that I wasn't having. Like, I was that girl that 3 o' clock was like, I just, oh my God. I was like, I can't go on. I just want to sleep. So tell me about someone who's curious about it right now. How do we. You let us know about the timeframes, but how do we set that up as women? Like with our cycles and with hormones, how do we know what to watch for? What can we tweak? How do we ease into.

Yeah, it's. And this is such a good question. And this is where women kept tripping on themselves as they were practicing fasting. So here's the best way to understand this. Men work off a 24 hour hormonal cycle. So every 15 minutes or so they get testosterone and then it like pulls them. I know.

You know, have you ever heard I was on Diary, the CEO, I was on Steven Bartlett podcast.

And he's like, what? And I'm like, yeah, you know what.

We say about you?

You've gotten it four times.

Yeah, I'm like, I'm like, you know what we say about you goes. You say stuff about us. I'm like, yes. We say, if you, if you don't.

Like what your male mate likes, just ask him in another 15 minutes because.

You might get a different answer.

Because testosterone might be at a little different spot. That's so good.

Yeah, thank you for that tip.

My marital tip for you.

Thank you so much.

Yes. Yeah. So he. So men really are simple. They make testosterone. Testosterone goes up into the brain and converts to estrogen. And they get this every 15 minutes or so. It's a 24 hour cycle. We are not that simple. So we operate off of three hormones, estrogen, progesterone and testosterone. And it's built off a monthly cycle. And estrogen loves when you fast. So whenever estrogen's coming in, go ahead and fast, which is day one of your cycle all the way through day ten. Estrogen's gonna peak at ovulation that whole front half of your cycle. Go ahead and fast. It's an amazing time. In fact, one of the things I think I'm the most proud of is when I look at my Amazon reviews, how many women got pregnant using the strategies that I talked about in the book? Because they cleaned up estrogen. So all of a sudden their estrogen system was so much more balanced. They went into ovulation and had a better ovulation.

Wow.

Super cool.

So the beginning of your period is a good time to fast.

That's right. Okay.

I would have thought opposite. Just because your cravings are up. So what happens around that?

Okay, I'm going to tell you because I. This is what I want every woman to know. Then during ovulation, you get the most amount of testosterone. So the other thing to know, as women, we only get testosterone, this strange little five day period called ovulation.

Wow.

The rest of the month, we have very, very low levels of testosterone. So another tip for the men listening who are in relationships with a woman, she's got a four to five day period when testosterone goes up and then it's gone. But once we come out of ovulation and we go into the back half of our cycle, the hormone progesterone is what's going to show up and peak. Progesterone has to peak for the uterine lining to shed. Progesterone wants glucose to be higher. Progesterone does not want you to fast. And you know how we know this? What do we crave before our periods?

I mean, I crave sugar, carbs.

Every woman I have not. I mean, surely there's some women out there, but almost every, every woman I talked to says, I crave sugar, I crave carbs, I crave chocolate, of course, because progesterone needs glucose to be higher. Every woman I've ever put a continuous glucose monitor on. When we get to that part of their cycle, they're like, I'm not doing anything different and my glucose is going higher.

Interesting.

I'm like, yeah, because progesterone think of it like a chemistry experiment. Progesterone needs more glucose to be able to, to make her appearance. That's what she is made out of, is glucose. So what was happening in the fasting world is in the keto world, it was the same thing. All these women were going into this low carb, low sugar experience the week before their periods. And that's how in athletes, we hear of athletes losing their cycle all the time because they're not minding the rules of progesterone. And so that's the worst time to fast. It's the worst time to push your workouts. It's the worst time to stay up all night because progesterone wants glucose to be high and cortisol to be low. When you don't honor that the week before your period, when your period starts, you have cramps, you have cravings, you are irritable. So that whole thing about us feeling horrible when our period starts happened because we didn't take care of what progesterone needed the week before.

Wow, she's a diva.

She's a total diva.

As like they're both diva.

Yeah, totally. Okay, so how do we set up the week before? Give me that rundown one more time because my mind is blown right now. Give me the week before. And then how do we set up the week of our period to feel better?

So around day 20, progesterone is going to come roaring in. Okay, so you need to eat more carbs. Okay, let's start with that one.

Yep.

This is not a box of pizza and a tub of ice cream. This is, sorry, Trying to get that.

Out of, you know.

Yeah, this is, this is nature's carbs. So the, this is your squashes. Butternut squash is one of my favorite. Yeah, yeah. Sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes are progesterone's best friend. Potatoes.

Oh, amazing.

Tropical fruits. Mangoes, papayas, bananas, some of the higher glycemic fruits. Fruits, all always. Greens are always good, but things that you typically, if you go low, carb, will avoid. So whatever nature provides that can give you more carbs like that. So you want to bring your carbs up, but do it with nature's carbs. Don't, don't do it with refined carbohydrates. It's because I, I, that is Another whole story that we can talk about later then you don't want cortisol to go up.

Okay.

So that means if you are fasting, if you are pushing a workout, if you are pushing your work schedule, if cortisone, cortisol goes high, progesterone's out. So I'll give an example. One of the biggest things I've seen in putting this book out is that so many 20 and 30 year olds have lost their cycle right now. It's a big problem. The other thing I want to my new passion and is coming out in my next book that I really want to get across to women is that when you bleed, you detox. You are detox. And I just, I have a team of researchers now that pull all this information together. And I got a study last week that there are four chemicals that women are detoxing that are in our blood, our actual menstrual blood, plastics, phthalates, forever chemicals and pesticides. Wow. Yeah. Wow. So when you're not bleeding, you're not detoxing.

Wow.

So you need to chill out. I called it the nurture phase. We got to just cut back our intensity a little bit the week before our period. So that might be with, with your workout. Maybe you move to yoga or Pilates or you go for a hike. That might be, you just say no on your social calendar to just, hey, I'm going to sit home this Friday night and I'm just going to watch tv. That might be that you decide you're going to take your workload and bring it down by a third during that time, whatever it is for you, maybe you're going to meditate a little bit more. Maybe you're just going to slow down. I've heard some women say that they just, that week they just move a little slower. They give themselves a little more grace. Just life intensity needs to come down that week. So cortisol isn't peaking because the minute cortisol's peaking, progesterone's done. Wow. So if you bring your glucose up in a positive way and you mind cortisol when your period starts, it should be a very smooth experience.

So when you're talking about the bringing in more of nature's carbs, is that like any time throughout the week? Is that like just have it at every meal? Is that have it at one meal?

Yeah, I mean, if you.

Or just however you feel.

Yeah, I think it's however you feel. Now remember the cool thing about nature's carbs is it has fiber so fiber slows down all that glucose coming in. So this is why I don't want you doing a box of pizza. Because if you're doing a box of pizza, it has no fiber and all that glucose coming in. If your cells can't take the flood of glucose, it will store extra glucose and fat.

Okay?

So. And this is a really important thing that I'm trying to free women of. All fat is. Is excess. It is excess glucose. It is excess cortisol. It is excess hormones. Your body didn't know what to do with that excess, so instead of putting it in your organs and killing you, it decided to put it around your belly, it put it on the back of your arms, on your booty and your boobs because it. That's a safer place for your survival. So when we eat carbs that have fiber in them, it helps to just make that influx of glucose a little bit easier. Because usually the message I get from a lot of women is, well, if I eat a lot of carbs a week before my period, I'm going to gain weight. So eat smart carbs.

Okay. And then during that time where you're not fasting, like, that's a normal.

You're.

When you say fasting, that window is the 8 or, I'm sorry, the 12 to 16 hours without food. But that week before, we're not really. We're kind of just doing. Okay.

You can go back to your six meals a day.

Okay.

So you're really just doing that during your menstrual cycle.

You're doing it or. Yeah. Day one through, like, day 20. Okay. You can fast during ovulation. I recommend a little shorter fast just because you have all these hormones in you. But in the book, I. I gave them all names and I gave a graph and I show it all there.

So you guys have to get the.

Book if you want to say it could be helpful.

Yeah, the book will be very helpful.

Yeah. But, yeah, I mean, if you want to make it, like, as simple as possible, I would just say don't fast the week before your period.

Okay, got it. Okay, so tell me about. Tell me about mood. A little bit related to this. Like, what have you noticed most with women and mood and what'd you notice for yourself?

Yeah. So, you know, this is a really interesting part. Since I. I was just telling. I was just telling Lisa this when I was over in her house. I was saying, you know, I thought I. I thought I wrote a fasting book, but what I realized is I actually wrote a women's empowerment book because so many women didn't understand how their hormones related to their moods and to their behaviors and their cravings and their sleep cycles. And so one thing that I think when we talk about mood that we should understand is whenever I.