How to Nail Your 2026 Health Goals (Fasting, Hormones, & Cycle Timing) with Dr. Mindy Pelz (Part 1)

Growing up, it was like, that's all I heard my mom talk about. Like, oh, once you hit your 40s or your 50s, it's kind of like nothing's left for you. You don't feel good. Like, you don't feel good in your body. Like, there's just so many things that are happening. And I've been having this conversation with a lot of my girlfriends that were, like, maybe our moms, like, weren't crazy.

Yeah. Right. Oh, my God. That's a harsh reality.

They weren't getting the support that they needed, and they didn't know how to support themselves to eat and do the things that we're going to chat about.

Foreign.

Welcome back to the Earn your happy podcast.

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for having me back. I really loved our first conversation, so.

I loved it. No, I literally was just like, when can we get Wendy back? Oh, she has a book.

Yes. This is, like, the perfect time to have her back. The only time I come out of hiding. Yeah.

You have such a beautiful way of giving science, giving information, but also, I think, because you are probably also your own student.

You. Yep.

Practically in the world. That I really love talking to you because you also just. You combine the actual human.

Yeah.

And that is why I love having you on this podcast, is because, yes, I love talking about business. I'm obsessed with talking about building something big and, you know, going after your dreams, but none of that. None of that even works at all, especially for women.

It's.

I'm like, 95% women on this podcast. We know none of that works if you don't take care of yourself and you don't figure out how to feel good, how to eat well. And I don't know about you, but this, for me, has. You know, I'm an 80s baby. 1980. I was not taught how to eat.

Nope.

I learned the opposite of. Of how to eat well, to, like, feel my brain and my dreams and all this energy and relationships and all the things. So I love that you are now bringing this conversation into a whole different realm.

Yep.

So first was fast. Like a girl with your first book, which sold 1.3 million copies.

Yeah.

I'm like, can you even wrap your brain?

No, I. I can't. In fact, it still freaks me out when I go out in public and people recognize me. Like, I still. My brain's like, how do you know me? And then I start to think, oh, yeah, 1.3 million people read this book. Like.

Like, how many stadiums is that?

That's what my husband Always says he's like, think about how many stadiums, stadiums that filled. But that's still hard to quite wrap your head.

It's like all the NFL team stadiums, I think filled all at once, all together. Reading your book, like opening your book and reading it.

Wow, thank you for that.

Really, really insane.

That is.

Okay, so I, I just want a quick recap for everyone. And first of all, I'm gonna put the first podcast back down in the show notes. So you guys, I think you need to also go back and listen to this. But let's do a little recap of Fast Like a Girl where you were, why that conversation felt really hot for you in that moment. And then I want to fast forward.

Yeah. Oh, I love that question. Nobody's asked me that. Thank you. So what happened with Fast Like a Girl is that I was doing integrative health in my clinic. We were doing functional health before functional health was even a word. And so we were detoxing, we were hormone balancing. I was doing a ton of lifestyle. I was taking my patients to Costco and showing them how to read labels and how to buy organic. And so I was kind of this hands on clinic. And when I discovered the research on fasting, I was like, wait a second, I can teach people how to detox without taking a supplement. I can get put people into this fasted state and their body will go find stored glucose in belly fat and booty fat that glucose they stored years ago.

Say less.

Right? And we can talk about that. And it just excited me. So what I ended up doing was going to my YouTube channel and starting to explain the science. And in my office, I was playing with a whole bunch of different principles around fasting. Now, at that time, you have to remember that Jason Fung had come out with the obesity code. Dave Asprey had come out with fast that way. Will Cole had come out with intuitive fasting. So there was a lot of fasting manuals, but because my audience was women, I started to see that there was a specific way that women should fast, that there was a trend that that was happening where women who weren't following a pattern according to their menstrual cycle were losing hair, they were gaining weight, they were having the opposite experience. And the women in my clinic were not having that same experience. So fast Like a Girl was like a gift to women. Like, here's how you fast if you have a menstrual cycle. And I think that might be why it did so well, because it allowed women to step into a trend that was working so well for men, and now they could have it work well for them.

So last time we had spoken, I. I definitely come from a bit of a fasting background. Not for a long period of time, but I'd say, like, probably like six, seven years I had, like, really fasted, but every day I didn't do it in the way, yeah, you know, that you had, that you talk about and you teach. And now I feel like I do it more, way more intuitively, like, especially after our conversation and just how I feel, especially around that time. But, but let. I. I want to talk about why that is important, fasting. And, you know, I was raised in a very restrictive religion, which also, like, kind of makes you learn that the Bible had a lot of fasting built into it, quote, unquote, for religious purposes. But looking back, I mean, that's from God and kind of like how we're supposed to be built and how we're supposed to be.

Bingo.

And then anyone who's watching any, you know, Netflix documentaries on blue zones and all of these places where there's calorie restriction, there's natural fasting, and they're living to be over 100 in a lot of these areas. So can you tell me a little bit just about, like, what.

Why.

Why are you so intrigued about fasting? And I would love to know, for women, if you could just tell us kind of if we're. If we're going to dabble in it. What does that look like?

Yeah, okay, great question. So the first reason why is I'm so fascinated by all the ways the body heals itself. And I think we have really outsourced our health. We've outsourced it to medication, we've outsourced it to piles of supplements. We've outsourced it to doctors and health gurus. We are chronically like, somebody else is going to heal me. And what I loved about fasting is I could take a woman in my clinic who was an overeater, and if I put her on an exercise regime or I put her on a diet where I put her on a supplement and she got a result, she would come back to me and she would say, oh, my God, that supplement was amazing. That diet was amazing. The workout was amazing. But she never said, I'm amazing. Like, this is really key. She never gave herself the credit. The credit always either went to me for delivering the information or to the spectacular technique that we did. Fasting. Didn't do that with fasting. When I taught a woman how to go a certain amount of time without food. And we watched her drop weight. Like, I would literally see these women come in my clinic door. They would open the front door and I would be sitting, you know, behind my desk, maybe talking to my front desk gal. And I'd look at them and it was like, it was like a coat of fat had just come in, come off them in a matter of weeks. And they would have these big smiles on their face and I would say, oh my God, look at you. And they would, they would. Then their response would be, I didn't eat for 15 hours. I did what you told me where I didn't. I tried a 24 hour fast or we started guiding people through three day water fasts. And they gave themselves the credit because they're the ones that had to not eat. And in the not eating, they got to experience how miraculous their body was. So that excited me because we, as women, we, we give our power away all the time, especially when it comes to our bodies. So I started seeing these really like, fired up women that were like, if I can do that, what else can I do? So it was like the door into self confidence.

So by giving themselves these, these windows, sometimes it's 15 hours, sometimes it's 24, 48, whatever. 72.

Yeah.

Their body was essentially just doing what.

It was built, built to do. Yeah. Going back to what you were saying about the Bible.

Yeah.

That, you know, every single religion has fasting in it. And when you go and the blue zones, you know, we've been like taking the Okinawa women and putting them up on a pedestal and we say, oh, they eat less calories. But we never asked in what time period they eat less calories because they leave a longer period for fasting. So fasting is, is been a tool that has been a part of our, our culture for years. And in fast like a girl, I went back and talked about even the hunter gatherers had to fast. Yep. So I laugh to myself when people say fasting doesn't work or fasting is dangerous. And because it's part of the human experience, if you haven't experienced it, try it, research it, Understand it for you before you knock it. Mm.

Okay, so what is. Let's talk about women now. What's the difference between men fasting and women fasting? I know, we have different cycles.

What does that look? Yeah. So the thing to know is that women operate when, when we're menstruating. We operate off a 30 day cycle around that 20 to 32. And men operate around a 24 hour cycle. So in a man, testosterone is coming in every 15, 20 minutes. And so they're getting pulses of hormones.

So lucky.

I know, I know, right?

Testosterone, just like energy drive. Energy drive, Yeah.

I like, I don't know if you've dabbled in testosterone.

I haven't yet, but I'm, I'm curious about it.

It's, it fascinates me because I've been dabbling in like, okay, where does testosterone hormone replacement therapy work for me at 56? And the first couple of times I took it, I turned to my husband, I'm like, oh, this is how you feel all day long. Wow. This is. Wow.

I can do stuff like anything.

Exactly. And then the rage hit. I had and I was like, oh, now I understand you even more. That's so interesting.

So if you want to understand men.

Totally, try some tests. I'm down, I'm down. So. But what's interesting is that's their main sex hormone. Like, that's the hormone that they have to. When it comes to lifestyle, all they have to do is line themselves up with making more testosterone. And testosterone will go up into a male's brain and it'll turn into estrogen. They don't have the hormone progesterone, which is the outlier for women. So let's go over to women. We have a 30 day cycle. The first 15 days, our body's making estrogen. Estrogen loves when we're glucose sensitive and insulin sensitive. So estrogen loves it when you work out hard. Estrogen loves when you go on your keto diet. Estrogen loves when you fast. Like estrogen can really flourish in that environment. Estrogen's also very stress tolerant. So if you're stressing out, estrogen's like, whatever, I'm fine. She can really do her things in those first 15 days.

And what are the drivers? What is she making us feel?

So everything okay, great. Because this ties into age like a girl. And this was sort of where my, my research went. So we have estrogen receptor sites throughout our whole body. So I don't know if you've heard that a lot in this ties into your fitness background. A lot of women when they go through menopause, experience frozen shoulder because we actually have estrogen receptor sites in our joints. Interesting. So what happens is when you go into ovulation between day 10 and day 15, estrogen has to peak and then that's what releases an egg. But she's not done there. Once she peaks, she goes into all your joints. She Goes up into your brain, she goes into your cardiovascular system. I even found some research for age, like a girl, that we have receptor sites in our bones for estrogen. She'll go into our bones. She, she, she stimulates over 12 neurochemicals. So she stimulates dopamine and serotonin and acetylcholine.

The good stuff.

Huge, right? So she was wickedly powerful. And she likes when you keep glucose down. A good example of this is the number one hormonal problem for women right now is pcos, and that is an insulin resistance issue. When you go insulin resistant, you throw estrogen off because your glucose is high, your insulin is high, and estrogen's like, peace out. I don't know what to do with that. So infertility is another one. We. With fast like a girl. We probably. I don't, I wish I could count how many babies we made. Because once women figured out, oh, when estrogen is around, I need to fast and do keto and keep more glucose, set glucose down and insulin sensitive. So it's a really. Once you start to understand the patterns of this, it's quite profound. Then when you get to that week before your period, that's where everything changes. And we innately know this. Right. Like, what happens to us the week before our periods?

I mean, I, I feel, I feel crazy. I personally feel crazy.

Yeah.

I feel more emotional.

Yep.

Yeah.

So here's why. The week before your period is when progesterone comes in and progesterone hates cortisol. The enemy of progesterone is cortisol. So if you're working out hard, if you're fasting a ton, if you are working, you know, in your business really hard and cortisol is really high, you're going to see worse PMS symptoms because you can't have, you can't make progesterone. The phrase I always say to help people remember this is that when cortisol goes high, progesterone becomes shy. And if you don't make enough progesterone, then that inner lining of your uterus won't shed. So we see this with athletes, extreme athletes. Women lose their cycles. Yeah. It's because they're just pushing their body so hard that progesterone's like, I'm gone. Yeah.

When I was competing, I think I lost it for like three years.

Right. It was bad. Right.

Maybe one a year.

Perfect. That's a perfect example. But. So this is why we don't fast the week before a woman's Cycle. Because really, if we go back to primal, our primal ways, we were meant to rest that week before our period. Everybody thinks when you actually start your period, you're supposed to rest. No, you're supposed to rest the week before, and then you won't have pms. The period when your period comes, it's much smoother because you let progesterone do her thing. And the last thing I'll say on this that frees a lot of women is the other thing that we do the week before our cycle is we crave carbs. So that's not because we're undisciplined. That's because progesterone needs more glucose in the system.

Like, you can't eat enough. Sometimes you're just like, what? I can't eat enough?

Yeah, because if progesterone could talk to you, she would be like, hey, stop the dieting. Stop the working out. Stop the fasting. Chill out and give me some good nutritious carbs so that I feed me right. So that I have. So that I have the ingredients to be able to make my appearance. But what do we do as women? We're like, oh, I just can't stick to my diet.

Yeah, you feel bad.

You feel bad. Then you start to shame yourself. You turn on yourself. You think it's you.

So funny how after, like, years and years, every month, I'm still like, what's wrong with me?

Right.

And I'm like, oh, right.

And. And, and I don't know if you've found this, but when we've been really regimented with our diet, it gets really hard to, like, let go and eat. Eat more carbs. Yeah, because we're like, oh, I don't know. I wasn't supposed to. I've been staying away from that, and I've been losing weight, and now I'm supposed to eat this thing. But the week before your period. Yes. You're supposed to have more carbs. You. Not the ultra processed carbs. I call them nature's carbs. This. Fruits, vegetables, potatoes. Those kind of carbs. Not, not. Not our standard American diet.

Yeah. So when. When you're talking to someone, when somebody's listening to this, what's a great way to kind of start if you were just going to do the basics where you're like, okay, I want to kind of start wrapping my brain around it. First of all, tracking your cycle would be good. I should probably start doing that someday.

I have a general idea. I didn't start tracking my cycle till I Was like, in my mid-40s.

This is great. Good, good.

I've got.

Well, I'm 44, so I'll start this year, next year. We always joke about this because my brand coordinator and I. Because I'm always, like, a little surprised. I'm like, why do I feel this way? Oh, that's right. Okay, got it.

That's right.

Which is that. That alone in itself, you guys. If you don't track, like, I literally, I'm going to start tracking. Just because you can actually feel so much more empowered around anything you're doing. Like, why don't I feel motivated? Oh, this is very normal. Like, give yourself a break. Have a little grace. If I've learned anything in life, it is like, giving yourself grace is the only key to getting through anymore. Like, mean coaching, like, stops working at some point. So tracking cycle. What are some, like, basics?

Yeah. So, okay, so let's start here.

Yeah.

You have two energy systems. One that you ignite when you eat and one when you ignite when you fast. Okay. So I always say, when you start to fast, we got to clean your food up. First, we want to make sure that what you're eating is good quality food. And I'm sure you've talked about it here, but it's not that hard. You don't even have to count anything. Just eat real food.

Yeah.

Like, literally, when you look at something go, did that come from the earth or did that come from a lab or a warehouse? Did it sit in a warehouse for weeks and weeks and weeks? Because fresh food doesn't sit in warehouses for weeks. So we want people to clean. Clean up there and eat the good oils, not the bad oils. Get off the refined flours and sugars. So that's. That's the first goal. Okay. Second, you're going to want to work with this, what I call a metabolic switch. You're going to want to learn how to create a fasting window every single day. And for most women when they first learn this, they've only been staying away from food for about eight hours. It's not long enough.

Isn't that crazy when you think about it? Yeah, because we eat late at night and then we wake up.

That's right.

Like, oh, first meal of the day is supposed to be the best meal of the day, breaking that cycle. Okay, eight hours.

So. So let's start to move your breakfast back. Okay. The first question I get there is coffee. What about. Yes, you can have coffee.

Great. What about creamer?

Right. Careful what you put in. So anything That's a fat is going to stabilize your blood sugar. So we don't want sugar, we don't want honey, we don't want even oat milk or almond milk because those have a little bit of glucose in them and they're going to spike your, your blood sugar. It's not good. But heavy whipping cream, grass fed whipping cream.

Amazing.

Amazing. I put raw milk in my coffee every morning. A little bit of MCT oil can be really helpful for keeping the blood sugar stable. So some people are putting creatine in their coffee now some people are putting collagen in their coffee. So there are a lot, there's a lot you can do with that coffee that will.

That's great news.

That's great news, right?

I feel like once you get off the sugary creamers, trust me, I know it's hard. That used to be like my little treat in the morning. But it is, it's almost like once you're off of it for about a month or two and just on the, with the fats, like a good fat cream. I don't know. Some people put butter in their coffee. What do you think of that?

First of all, it's all like fatten up that coffee.

Yeah.

Now the butter is fine. That's why I say whole whipping cream is the best. Don't go. And here's something for people to understand. The non fat milk actually spikes your.

Blood sugar greater than more sugar than milk with fat.

Exactly. Because they've taken all the fat out of it and they've highly processed, processed it. So now, now it's just a little bit of a sugar bomb.

Yeah.

And you can do the. If you like butter, put butter. MCT oil is spectacular and MCT oil is a fraction of coconut oil. And so when you put it in your coffee and I always tell people to start slow, do like a third of a teaspoon because it'll get your bowels moving.

Also great news.

Right? Which is also. Yeah, it could be. Just don't just try it on a weekend before you leave the house. That's my recommendation.

Yeah.

But what MCT oil does is it helps you flip over into this fasted fat burning energy system much quicker and it kills hunger. So this is why you saw everybody doing the bulletproof, bulletproof coffees. And you know, now it's morphed into a lot of different names but that actually helps you because it's almost like a meal. Your coffee becomes like a meal, which for fasters is incredible.

Okay, so we're creating A longer window. What is the, what is the ideal window for. For women?

I think the first place I want women to get to is somewhere between 13 and 15 hours. And, and let me explain why. One of my favorite studies on fasting for women was done on 13 hours. And it was done on women who had gone through breast cancer treatment. Treatment, traditional treatment. And what they found is if they came out of traditional treatment and they just fasted 13 hours every single day, they had a 64% less reoccurrence of that cancer. So we, I mean, even if you don't have to have cancer to want to benefit from that, something was happening there in the body. So 13's good. Most people, once they get to 13, 13, they can get to 15, which is where you'll start making growth hormone. Now, growth hormone is the precursor to every other hormone in your body. And so when you hit that 15 hour mark, your body starts to upregulate growth hormone, which we lose at 30. Growth hormone slows down aging. It helps you burn fat.

It's like the fountain of youth.

It's the fountain of youth. Okay.

It helps you burn fat, slows aging.

What else? And it helps you make the other hormones like testosterone, progesterone, and estrogen. So people pay a lot for that. Oh, my God, so much for growth, for growth hormone. But even I'll tell you, a really fun thing we're doing right now is we're playing with peptides that have growth hormone in it. Interesting. Just in my community and with some of the people that I've been coaching and seeing if we can get more growth hormone into their system, will they actually make more during perimenopause? Will they make more estrogen and progesterone down? And the answer right now is yes.

I mean, I'm a great volunteer. I really am 44. I'm great for you.

Yeah.

Okay. I love this. So you're so, you know, you started talking about fasting, which I know of course affects hormones. Then you're, you know, that affects perimenopause, it affects menopause. And you're really starting to change the conversation because you have discovered so many different things about what is happening in like the, the menopause phase for women. And, you know, I think about, there's so much amazing research around it now that's making us feel more sane about this change and also good about it. And I think, Mindy, that's why I'm so excited about your next book, because I think you're getting Women excited about something that felt like kind of like a death sentence. Like your life is done. Like, I know growing up it was like that's all I heard my mom talk about. Like, oh, once you hit your 40s or your 50s, like, it's kind of like nothing's left for you. You don't feel good. Like you don't feel good in your body. Like, there's just so many things that are happening. And I've been having this conversation with a lot of my girlfriends that were like, maybe our moms, like weren't crazy.

Yeah, right. Oh my God. That's a harsh reality.

Weren't getting the support that they needed and they didn't know how to support themselves. Eat and do the things that we're going to chat about. So I'd love for you to tell me about like the idea behind this new book and just like the rewiring of the brain and all the things.

Yeah. So this book actually started 10 years ago. Even, like as I was tinkering with fasting and for women in my clinic, I started to see a trend in women that were hitting their 40s. And the trend looked like this. They would come into my clinic and they'd be like, listen, here's the thing. I'm gaining weight. I'm totally fatigued. I can't remember anything, I can't focus, I'm depressed, I'm anxious. And yet if you look at my life, my life on paper is amazing. My husband is incredible, my house is amazing, my kids are incredible. And all I'm experiencing is depression and anxiety and suicidal thoughts. A lot of them were having or a handful of them were having suicidal thoughts. So I started to see the pattern and I was like, what is going on here? And so I dove into the research and I found two really interesting stats.

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Common time for a woman to kill herself is from, in, during the decade between 45 and 55. Oh wow. I was like, what? Like these are not teenagers who don't have a well formed life. Yeah, these are like moms, these are, these are grandmas, these are community leader leaders. Why are they killing themselves? Yeah. And then the second stat that I saw was that 70% of divorces over 40 are initiated by women. So I, I looked at those two, I looked at my patients and I sort of started to answer, what's happening in menopause? What is the purpose of menopause? And I found a statistic that said if a woman is lucky enough, she will spend 42.5% of her life in her post reproductive years. Now if you look at that stat, might not seem that amazing until you realize that every other mammal on the planet, the minute of the female loses her reproductive cycle, she dies.

Oh yeah, Interesting.

So it's only us and a couple of whales that live like seriously that live that long. So I was like, what is going on here? That is there's something that the body and the brain is, is doing that's changing us. But, but we're not left to live and suffer. There's a reason we're left for 42% of our life. Yeah. And so I found two things from there. I found one was an article that said a peer reviewed journal that said estrogen didn't act alone. She had what I call the estrogen girl gang. She had these 12 neurochemicals that she stimulated. So when she goes away, dopamine goes away, serotonin goes away, acetylcholine, gaba, glutamate, bdnf, oxytocin, melatonin, you become insulin resistant. Like she Was that powerful that this whole neurochemical shift happened? And I was like, well, there you go. That's why women are killing themselves. They're not just losing a hormone, they're losing a whole neurochemical system. Wow. Which was the first piece of the puzzle for me. Then the second piece of the puzzle is I stumbled upon something called the grandmother hypothesis. And the grandmother hypothesis says that back in the hunter and gatherer days, when a woman stopped having a reproductive state system, the tribe actually moved her into a place of leadership, and she was needed by the tribe in a new way. And here's what this tribal life looked like. The men and very strong. I've been doing a ton of research on this, and I think also the very strong teenage girls went out to go make an animal kill. And so they would be gone for days. Now, back in those tribal days, they only came back with a big animal kill about 3% of the time. That's one out of 30 days that they came back with food.

Those sets are not real good.

There are not really good. But back home at the tribe, you had the pregnant women, you had the nursing women, and you had the little kids who was going to feed them. So it was the grandmothers, the post reproductive women, that no longer had a cycle. The concept of the grandmother hypothesis was that she had energy given back to her. She now had energy for fitness, she had energy for mental clarity, and she had energy that was built for social leadership. And every single day, they would get. The grandmothers would gather around the tribe and they would go forage for food, and they would go bring food back every single day and feed not only themselves, but the children and. And the fertile women. And that is how we were designed, was to move to this place of leadership. Now, fast forward to today. We're not foraging for food. We can just stay on our phone and have door dash. We don't need a pack of grandmothers come in, give us food. But what I started to connect all these dots and say, well, why. Why does our culture toss women aside? If we look through a primal lens, we are meant for leadership. And so that question started haunting me. And then I started. I talked to Lisa Moscone. Have you. Have you had her on your podcast? She's the top female brain researcher. And what she showed is that when we lose estrogen and we lose all these neurochemicals, the brain actually rewires itself. And what it does is it prunes away the neurons you no longer need. So I looked into what those neurons were they're the people pleasing neurons. They're the neurons that kept us addicted to everybody else's opinion of us and that kept us addicted to being, you know, looking good and acting a certain way so we can be loved by the culture. And new neurons grow in the brain that actually help us start to stand up for ourselves, tell our truth, and become amazing leaders that our brain rewires itself for leadership. And the first person we lead is ourself out of an outdated societal conditioning that had been placed upon us.

Wow, this is mind blowing.