2. Dr. Mindy Pelz: How to Become Hormonally Literate through Ancient Healing Practices

If your doctor isn't your partner in healing, you find yourself another doctor. Yeah. The sooner that you can move yourself to the number one position in your priority list, the rest of your life will feel easier.

Yeah.

You'll feel more fulfilled.

If your body had a language, it would talk to you in symptoms. It doesn't have words, so it gives you feelings.

Whatever symptom they experience on the scale of suffering is suffering. If you are fatigued every day, that's a form of suffering.

Yeah.

In this modern world that we're calling biohacking, nature was the original biohacker. The solutions are there.

If you are not lining up with nature, you are going to have a massive hormonal imbalance. If you want to balance your sex hormones, you can't leave nature out. You can't leave circadian rhythm out. We've got to root ourselves back to these ancient healing strategies.

We have lost our way going back to basics. Right.

The following is an operation podcast production. Welcome to Rooted in Wellness with me, Mona Sharma.

A podcast focused on shifting your vibration.

From imbalance to balance, allowing your body to heal and thrive naturally in a modern world that often challenges our well being. We'll explore how to navigate through these obstacles to emerge rooted in your health, yourself and your life. Drawing upon the wisdom of ancient healing practices merged with the latest scientific research. From growing up living on an ashram, recovering from two heart surgeries, to becoming a celebrity nutritionist, I'll guide you on this beautiful journey of becoming rooted in wellness.

My heart is so happy that you're here.

My heart is happy too. Of all the interviews I've done, this might be the one I've look looked.

Forward to the most, which is why I called you first.

I love it. I love it.

Nice to be with you.

Yeah, thank you.

So the intention around this podcast, honestly, is to really bring forward these ancient healing practices in a modern day world. Right. To really help us feel rooted, rooted in our health, rooted in our life, rooted in our bodies, but also our inner wisdom. You and I talk about this a lot. Like what do we do to turn down the noise of imbalance and stress in the outside world to come back to what really matters? We know that this is where our brilliance exists. Women have this divine intelligence. When we can turn on our inner wisdom, everything else comes into place. Right.

So true.

So to start off, I thought, you know, for something fun, what makes you feel rooted in your life and why?

Oh, you're starting with the difficult questions first. That's good, that's good. The first thing that comes to my mind is my family. And it's really interesting because my kids are technically grown. They're 23 and 21. But, you know, as a mother, and I think this might be a universal woman, definitely a universal mother thing, that when you're with your kids, you feel complete.

Absolutely.

So there, that has to be like, number one. And it's just being in my home with my family, and then I'm like a body person. So when I work out, when I eat right, when I fast, when I'm doing all the right things for my body, I'm grounded, I'm rooted. I can be my best self.

And would you say because of your journey? Like, for me, my healing journey had to take me back to all these practices that I knew inherently were there. But what about your healing journey?

Yeah, well, my. My healing journey is complex and still going. Yeah. Oh, it's way. It's totally still going. The emotional journey is happening now. Yeah. But, you know, my. My first indoor in to really being in a health crisis that needed repair was when I was 20. I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome and I was actually living here. Well, I was in college and then I came home for Christmas to LA and. And I couldn't get out of bed. And my mom sensed something was wrong. Another female moment. My mom had that intuition of, like, this is more than just college fatigue, and ended up taking me to one of the best top chronic fatigue specialists in the. In the nation. Was in down in Redondo Beach. And we went there, sat behind a mahogany. He had this big mahogany desk, white lab coat. And he basically told me, yeah, you have chronic fatigue syndrome and we don't know how to fix it. And here are the medications that might or might not work. So we're just going to start you on a bunch of trial medications. And my mom, again, another woman moment. My mom said, well, she's got to get back to college. And he in his arrogance, said, does she look like she can get on a plane and go back to college? And my mom turned to me and she said, we are not going to believe what this doctor is telling us. Let's go. And she literally pulled me out of that appointment and took me here to Santa Monica and to her holistic MD that changed my diet, did acupuncture with me, did IV drips, and within three weeks, I was back.

Oh, my gosh. Good mama.

Great mama moment.

And can we just tie that in? So you were in your 20s? Yeah, I was in my 20s when I was diagnosed with atrial tachycardia, had two heart surgery and had this aha moment also. But what was it about that time? Like if you could go back, was it hormonal? Was there stress in your life? Was there an impact from the external world? Was it toxins? Can you.

So it's such a good question because I think this is a big formula that I hope every woman understands, which is, your body is perfect. It is always doing the right thing at the right time. It just has to adapt to whatever environment you give it. And we call them interferences. We get physical, emotional, chemical, spiritual interferences. And at that point, if a barrage of interferences come in, the body doesn't know how to balance itself and it breaks down. So if we go back to the 20 year old version of me, I was eating wrong, I wasn't sleeping, I was a college student, I was drinking, I was a competitive athlete, I was being pushed physically, I was lost. Spiritually, I wasn't grounded. Grounded in anything. I was, I was com. A very different version of myself. And I just feel like it interfered with the wisdom in my body. So what I did is go back to grounding myself with diet and supplements. I, I won. A book that changed my life, was called Living in the Light by Shakti Goann.

Oh, brilliant.

And it, I started visualizing and meditating and so it just removed all those interferences and then the body was able to heal.

It's funny, I was given that book when I became a yoga teacher, which was a game changer. But, you know, I think this is something that's still relevant today. So here we are, we experience these symptoms, right? We live in a society where these symptoms have become normal. You and I speak with women day in, day out, where if we were to ask a room full of women, how many people here suffer from irritability, pms, fatigue, low sex drive, brain fog, constipation, diarrhea, bloating, irregularity, all the things right? Every hand in the audience is up. So we get used to living this way. Then because of what we know, we go to our medical doctors who aren't necessarily our partners in healing. God bless them. There's a time and a place for the medical community. They are trained to take away the problem. When I had my heart palpitations, they gave me a prescription for beta blockers which completely threw my entire off, right? This man told you that this was the only way that it was gonna be. And we leave these doctor's offices almost like a label, like, oh, I'M sick now. I have chronic fatigue syndrome. I have a heart condition, I have pcos. I'm never gonna be able to have kids, whatever it is. And we identify with that diagnosis. Right.

One thing I wanna say on that is what I think we need to start realizing is that the healthcare system is a patriarchal system.

Yeah.

So it's like we, when we throw health care in, we talk about it. It's kind of like how we talk about fats. We used to say, oh, fats are bad. Everybody get off of them. And then we realized, wait, there's good fat and there's bad fat. I have a new phrasing with carb, carbohydrates. We, you know, everybody's like, oh, go low carb. It's like, wait, nature provided us some amazing carbs. But, yeah, the man made carbs we should probably get off of. So I feel like in the healthcare system, we need to start talking about a patriarchal and a matriarchal health care system. And the patriarchal health care system is you want a diagnosis, you have a symptom, I'm going to give you a solution. And then a matriarchal approach would be like, let me. Let me check in on my intuition. Let me see if I need to soften and recover a little bit more, if these symptoms would go away. And so I think the problem is we are not talking about a health care system in two different languages.

And I think even despite, you know, how far we've come today, I still feel that doctors, they're not asking those questions. They want to know, are we smoking? Are we drinking too much? How often are we eating out? Are we overweight?

Yep.

You know, for me, they never asked about, well, what was going on and what's. Why is your heart hurting?

Yeah.

Why do you feel sad? They just wanted to know if I was eating at McDonald's, drinking too much, doing drugs, which I probably was at the time, which didn't help, but that was my coping mechanism also. Right. We have these coping mechanisms that we adopt because of the suffering. Right. So that has to change. And this is where I think, you know, the power of the female spirit. When we're at our doctor's offices asking questions, you know, why is this happening? Where did this start? Why do I have those symptoms? What can I do to prevent it? And if your doctor isn't your partner in healing, you find yourself another doctor. Yeah, Right.

I have a really interesting story on that, where we took what a doctor said and then we applied a feminine Intuition to it. And it was with a client that I was working with last year who had a really bad cold. And the doctor said, you have to take an antibiotic. You have to, you know, otherwise, you know, like, all the doomsday, like, you're never going to get over the cold. And so we had spent a year fixing her gut, and I was like, oh, no. Like, we all know 90% of the good bacteria is going to be wiped away with one antibiotic. And so I just said to her, well, tell me what your intuition says. And she's like, I don't feel like I need it. I'm like, okay, we're going to check in every day. So literally every day I said to her, tell me what your intuition is. She's like, it's not. It's not an absolute. Yes. Yet I still feel like my body can do this. We did that for a week. She got over the cold, never had to use the antibiotic.

So perfect example of the fear component.

Right.

Had she not have had you.

Yeah.

You know, being that voice of reason in her life, echoing, Echoing a different way. She probably would have continued to go down this route of antibiotic after antibiotic. Right. Which is such a common scenario.

It's so common. But we've lost the. The appreciation of a woman's intuition. And we have a great intuition. Yeah. And a lot of women haven't tapped into it, but, I mean, most women I sit and talk to, you talk about a hunch you feel in your body, and women are like, oh, yeah, I get that. Okay. Now, are you applying that to your health care?

Yeah, we're never wrong.

Yeah, we're never wrong. It's so true. Our intuition's never wrong.

God, these gifts, we were just taught how to use them as children. Right. How different our experience growing up would be. Our own health and happiness and all the things so, so elaborating on this. Then if the people listening are like, oh, gosh, I have that symptom. I'm still experiencing that. I have an irregular cycle. I have bloating, I have acne. I have low sex drive, and I'm too young to be experiencing these things for you. You know, I'm calling upon your experience because I think that people look at us often and think that, oh, we're healed.

Right.

We figured it out. We've got all the right answers. We know what to do. But you said the most beautiful thing to me. You know, we had just finished a fast, and I'm like, mindy, I've Got mold. Why do I have mold? I have mold poisoning from having mold exposure in our house. And here I was on another really extensive healing protocol. And I thought, mindy, like, I've had the heart thing. I've had the heart surgeries. Like, I'm done. And he looked at me and he said, mona, you wouldn't be on this journey of being a healer out in this world if you weren't on your own journey.

Yes. Yeah.

And that stuck with me.

Oh, I love that. I'm like, oh, did I say that? That was good.

We were out in the woods, in n. Sure.

Yeah. No, but I think it's. We're always on a healing journey. And for everybody, you're all. Your body has to always adapt to whatever environment you are giving it. And if you're not paying attention to the environment, sometimes the environments are really stressful. Sometimes the environments are chemically toxic. And if you're not coming back home and figuring out how to build that body back up and you're just doing the same thing over and over and over again, at some point you will get disease, which is really disease. It's. The body can't handle all the traumas that it's being given.

Absolutely.

So to me, optimal health is. And a health journey is knowing how to course Correct. And how to adapt to whatever environment you're putting in. And I don't know any woman that's wrapped in bubble wrap that is like, sitting at home meditating all the time and has no stress.

Yeah.

So we have to learn to adapt to this new world. The modern world is really, really throwing a lot at the female body.

So over the years now, you've become so aware of your body and your symptoms. You know what you do not want to go back to when it comes to your health. Right. You're aware of your symptoms. So what are some of the things that make you feel uprooted then? So if we want the listeners to really understand, you don't just arrive at disease or disease. There's symptoms along the way. The instigation is often stress from different culprits. What causes you to feel uprooted?

Ooh, another great question. Well, for starters, bad food. I'm a little bit obsessive on good food because good food makes me feel so good. And bad food, even eating out, I love eating at home, but when I'm traveling a lot and I have to eat out, I try to make the. The best choices I can, but it takes me off my center. So bad food, for sure. Lack of movement. I have to be moving all the time. If I like I do. I walk three, four times a day. Like, I just got to get out and move my body. But if I'm not doing that throws me off. And a new one, I'm gonna throw a new one. And it's a work in progress. So this is what I'm working on, putting everybody else's desires for me ahead of my own. I'm in a really interesting point in my life where at 54, I'm like, I'm exhausted, taking care of everybody else around me, making sure that everybody is happy, and it's time. The next year is about taking care of me. And that is gonna take work because I've spent my whole life taking care of everybody else.

So I can hear people saying already, well, I could never do that. It's so selfish. I have a responsibility. I have a family. How do we help people understand? And I say this all the time to my clients. The sooner that you can move yourself to the number one position in your priority list, the rest of your life will feel easier. You'll feel more fulfilled. Right? You have a full cup to pour from.

So true. So the greatest gift you can give your loved one is optimal, incredible health. And I'll give you an example. I'll give you two examples. One was a journey that I walked with a patient of mine that had breast cancer, and she was, you know, kicking butt in her business. She was a community leader. I mean, everybody loved her. And then she was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, and she was given three months to live, and we worked on her lifestyle, and she turned it into 10 years. Now, if she had known 10 years prior to that how to take care of her health, I absolutely know she would be here today. And so the ultimate gift you can give your loved ones is incredible health. And we don't look at that as women. We often are like, well, I want to please my spouse, or I need to take my kids to the fifth activity of the week that they need to do so they can get into the right college. Like, we're always doing, doing, doing for everybody else. And we forget that if we lose our health in that they lose a loved one. So it's more. It's bigger than just you're not showing up your best self. You could literally lose your life. I had a Dutch consultation one time, a Dutch hormone test with a patient of mine, and her toxic estrogen was ridiculously high, and she ate out all the time. And I said to her. You got to get off the food, the pesticides. You got to get off the endocrine receptors. Your body's not clearing it. It's staying in your tissues. You are on a f path to some type of hormonal cancer. And what she said to me shocked me. She said, yeah, but that's how my husband and I bond, is eating out. And I said, I'm going to be really bold with you right now. He's not going to have somebody to eat out with if you don't start to clean up that toxic load.

You want that to be a lifetime bonding process.

That's right. So I think we have to flip it. As women, we have to stop thinking, oh, I need to perform and do for everybody else. I need to take care of me first, and then I can perform and take care of everybody else.

Absolutely.

It has to be reversed.

We used to live in villages. Right. With other women and aunties and sisters and mothers and grandmothers where the support was there. So, you know, I really feel. It's overwhelming. Right. The amount of responsibilities of a woman living in today's modern world. To be healthy, to do it all, to have a profession, career, show up as your best self. It's a lot. Yeah. But it all comes down to our choices.

Yep.

And listening to you speak, you know, there's two sides of this, I think. First and foremost, I hope that the women listening can really acknowledge that whatever symptom they experience on the scale of suffering is suffering. Right. If you are fatigued every day, that's a form of suffering. If you cannot sleep, if you have an irritable bowel, if you have bloating every day, these are all forms of suffering that we try to swallow. Right. And the suffering over time accumulates.

Yeah. It's well said.

So I think that they're. I think we need to give women permission to kind of hold space for the fact that they've been going through life suffering day to day. Right. As they try to show up every day.

Yeah. Oh, I have so many thoughts on that.

Yeah, I know. Because I just feel like, you know, despite living in an era of hyper wellness and what to do, we're going out into the world, we're trying to follow other people's protocols, other people's programs, without tuning into our intelligence and really acknowledging, okay, you know, I always ask, what are the three biggest symptoms that you want to take away? Let's focus on those three things. First, what would the impact be if we took away those three symptoms? How could you show up for your work, for your children, for your loved ones, for your friends, for yourself in your. In your life. Right. And then we can make the right choices or adopt a plan with those choices involved to take away the suffering.

Yeah, there's so much to comment on there, and it's so well said. But one thing that I've been trying to help women understand is if your body had a. Had a language, it would talk to you in symptoms. It doesn't have words, so it gives you feelings. And so when the feeling is low energy, over and over and over again, it's saying, rest me. If it's a digestive problem, it's saying, let's go back and look at your food. How can we look at food to heal me if it's a brain fog? The brain is saying, I'm inflamed. I need you to bring inflammation down. There's almost every single symptom that can be interpreted as the body's way of letting you know there's a. There's an imbalance going on. But again, we go back to the. To the patriarchal world. And. And I. And I, by patriarch, I don't mean men. I mean power. I really want to make that clear. But we live in a world where women are having to. To achieve. We're having to push. We're having to ignore these symptoms that are showing up, and we haven't been given a world where we can rest and we can honor, and that's a problem. And I think you and I have talked about this. I think the feminist movement actually created more of an issue for us.

Absolutely.

We need to rebrand feminism, and we need to look at it, hey, you're so blessed to live in a female body. And guess what? That female body needs a lot more rest and a lot more nurturing than the male body because you. Your body's able to house a baby. It grows a baby.

You're a creator.

You're a creator. So you have to start to look at your body differently and all the things it can perform and then match a lifestyle that fits that.

I can feel my heart going. I'm so excited about this. This is really the inspiration for this show. Right. Is to just call upon the fact that we have this innate ability to heal. We have wisdom within us. As you said, to recap, every single symptom that you experience, it's kind of like, you know, indication from our body to tune in and listen. It's telling us what to do every day, every second, at all times. But are we listening? No. Right, right, we're not listening. And to add to what you were saying, you know, you and I speak quite often about our circadian rhythm and our connection to nature and how we're losing that connection to nature, whether it's through the foods that she offers. The majority of what we're eating today is packaged, processed foods and it might be labeled as healthy, natural, organic, gluten free, keto, paleo. And we think that, oh, it must be healthy. Right?

So true.

If it comes from a processed package, then it's dead food essentially for the body. Right. So one, there's the food. Two, it's aligning with the circadian rhythm of nature and her timing.

Yeah.

So when we start these protocols, when we understand the body, I think that we live in such a fast paced society, we want the quick fix. If we don't experience the solution or a shift fast enough, we give up on a protocol too soon.

So true.

The leaves in the fall don't just fall off the ground. It's a process. Right. It takes, it's a process for flowers to grow.

Yeah.

So what I say is in this modern world that we're calling biohacking, nature was the original biohacker. Right. The solutions are there. So let's talk about some of those rituals. When we align ourselves with the circadian rhythm of nature, when the sun comes out, getting outside the foods that we eat from nature, what is the impact on our physiology?

Yeah, well, when you dive into hormones, you start to see that if you are not lining up with nature, you are going to have a massive hormonal imbalance. And I'll give you an example is one of the things I wrote about in Fast Like a Girl was something called the hormonal hierarchy. And the hormonal hierarchy says that our sex hormones are going to be determined by our insulin sensitivity. So if we have a good glucose metabolic system with insulin, it's going to be. Our sex hormones will be nicely balanced. And the insulin system is highly controlled by cortisol. So if we're really stressed, it's very hard to lose weight. The body doesn't work that way. It has to be in a non stressed way to lose weight and to become insulin regulated again. But at the top is oxytocin. And when you. Oxytocin, is that what we're getting right now, talking to each other? It's what you get when you go out on a hike. It's getting connected and rooted back to the earth. You can find a lot of Oxytocin. You don't always need another person to get oxytocin. So if you just look at us, hormonally, we are set up to thrive when cortisol is low. When we eat foods that are balanced, the glucose is balanced. And when we're in environments that feel nurturing and loving and supportive, and nature does that for us. So, yeah, we could go into, like, receptor sites in the eyes for serotonin. When we get light, it stimulates those receptors, and then all of a sudden, you have light. We can go into cortisol, gets raised within the first half hour to an hour when you wake up. So that's a great time to work out. We can go into all of those little hacks, but we have to understand that if you want to balance your sex hormones, you can't leave nature out. You can't leave circadian rhythm out.

So it is that simple. Acclimate with nature. Like, start there before you go for another fatter protocol. Start with nature, Right, Yeah. Start with nature in the morning. Yeah, yeah. Eat the right foods that are grown in sunlight. And from an ayurvedic perspective, too, we often talk about the soil. Soils at different part of the year contain different microorganisms that support our gut microbiome with the change in seasons that help optimize our immune system. Right, Right.

Yeah. And, oh, my God, there's so much on that. So, you know, if you look at. This is one of the things I noticed when I first started fasting. So many people was everybody was having, like, heart palpitations, hair falling out, like, things. And then I realized, oh, if we add minerals back in either before our fast or during a fast, all of that went away. And it worked like a charm. It still works like a charm. But then I had to ask myself, like, why are we so mineral depleted? And that's where you go to the soil. Well, okay. Well, we've been monocropping, and so the foods that we're eating don't have the same mineral content that they did 10, 20, 30 years ago. So it's. It's. We're so, like. You know, I think of it like a. Like a baseball stadium. Like. Like, our recommended recommendations for health are, like, way up in the.

Yeah.

In the nosebleed seats.

Bring it down.

Like, bring it down. Like, we have. We've got to root ourselves back to these ancient healing strategies. We have.

We have lost our way going back to basics. Right. So do you think that in terms of hormone balancing.

Yeah.

What if we were to go back to the way that our ancestors ate.

Oh, yeah.

What would the impact be?

Well, okay, let's go to the. The cave woman. I've thought about her a lot. We're just gonna go all the way back to the primal days. So for starters, we have to remember we have two systems. So we have a. We're like a hybrid car. So we have a system that when we eat food, we can stimulate a certain energy system and we go without food. We can actually tip into these ketones and get a ketogenic or a keto response that amplifies brain power. So what she probably did, she didn't eat all day long. She didn't eat six meals a day to speed up her metabolism. She did not do that. She wasn't told breakfast was the most important meal of the day. She came out of the cave, she looked at what she might have had from the night before. Maybe it was plants that she. And berries. Maybe there was some leftover meat from a killer, and maybe she rationed that throughout the day. But then she had to go hunt for food and go find food again. So there she had to tap into this fat burning ketogenic system to be able to go and find food. She was also in community. The women didn't do things in a silo. So she was around other women that were supporting each other. We don't have any that I know of, any research on what women did with their cycles, but we do have the red tent theory, which is, you know, when she actually bled, she was rat, you know, brought to another part of the community. But that was so that she could be cared for.

Right.

Supported by the other women. She probably cycled with the moon because she didn't have synthetic light. So probably many of the women cycled together. And if I had to guess, they. Probably all the cycling women went into the red tent and then the menopausal women, if, you know, we didn't live as long back then, but they're most likely the elders of the community, took care of those women.

Okay, so women must have been happier.

Oh, for sure, for sure.

If there was synchronicity with hormones. Living in these communities where women were supported and nourished during the time of their cycle, there's probably way more compassion and understanding. Yes, right. There was empathy for each other as they were going through things at that time, granted. Okay, so if we look at that model in today's world, you and I talk about this all the time. Also, like, why is it more challenging so you have this incredible community. Often even myself, my gosh, if I've tried to go on a keto diet or through a water fast with compromised detox pathways, right. That like, you know, these people will start a fasting journey. They feel incredible. Some people get into a bliss state. Yes, right. Because they have more mental acuity and cognition and focus and joy. But for me, I was suffering and I think a lot of women experience this, whether it's through a keto diet or through fasting. But this is keto and fasting in a modern world where we're bombarded, where we are bombarded with so many chemicals and toxins from our environment, from the water, from the air, and of course from the food that we eat. So what can we do to counteract that? If people have never fasted, they want to start diving into this journey and what's the first thing that they should do to kind of ensure a better payoff for. For their fast?

Yeah, I love that question.

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The word I use for what you just described is we're in an evolutionary mismatch.

Yeah. Yes.

Like the modern world and the female body are not thriving together. And the modern world to me is all the, the physical, emotional, chemical interferences that we're just bombard. Even the amount of information we have to deal with every day.

Absolutely.

So I think that's the first thing to say with, with fasting. This is. Let's go back to the ancient healing practice. The first door into fasting is clean up your food. That is the first door in. And we can count macros and we can do all that if you want. But let's make it really simple. And here are the three things you do. Make sure you're eating good fats, not bad fats.

Right.

Just clean up the fat system because it inflames these cells, it makes you very insulin resistant. And people think of sugar as causing you insulin resistance or carbs. It's actually bad fats. It's the corn oil, the cottonseed oil, the canola oil, the vegetables, all that like get just good fats, not, not bad ones. Then when we go to the carbohydrates, nature's carbs, not man made carbs. So we can debate keto. Not keto. I'm just saying go. Just eat what came from the earth and don't eat something that's in a box.

Yeah.

When you walk into the grocery store, don't go to the middle aisles, go around the edge or don't go to a grocery store. We go to farmer's markets all the time now. So that would be the next step. And then the third is really looking at toxins you're eating. So this is like the diet Cokes, the, you know, all the red dyes that are in food. Like, let's just get your toxic load down. If you just spent a week doing that, fasting would be so much easier.

Absolutely.

So I like it to start with food and that and then you can compress your eating window. You know, we got stuck as a culture in this idea that I got to eat when I wake up. I got to eat six times a day to speed up my metabolism. None of that is accurate. We have to realize that we have a window to eat and a window to fast. And that's how you look at your, at your 24 hour period.

I want to unpack that so much. So, so much goodness. So let's two parts, one, let's talk about the specific foods. So what you And I do to build a plate with simplicity.

Yeah.

I keep it so simple.

So simple.

Right. And then two, the kind of eating window that aligns with circadian rhythm for us. Okay. So first and foremost, if you were to build a plate, how do you build your plate?

Oh my gosh. Well, my plate probably looks very similar a lot. So there's always a vegetable. Usually it's a salad. I love salad. So I have like pre made salad mixes in my house all the time. So there'll be some salad, there'll be some meat. So I, I do eat meat. So you know, for. And, and I'm. That's just a personal preference that I know works for me. And then there's probably a carb. But my carb would be sweet potato. There's pretty much a sweet potato every day. Probably because I do love sweet potatoes. And then there's something fermented. So it's a sauerkraut. If I can't find the sauerkraut I love for the meal, I'll do like a raw kefir and drink it with the meal. But that's pretty much. And then I'll drizzle it with, with grass fed butter or oils. That's a pretty common meal for me.

Incredible. Okay, so when we look at our plate, there's a fiber focus.

Yes.

From fiber rich foods that come from the earth. That's right. I would add on this type this time of year for someone like me for my digestion I typically cook or steam those foods to make them easier to digest. Right. In the summertime I go more raw. Wintertime I go more cooked. Then we had a good quality protein. Whether you're vegan or meat eater, just a good quality protein. We've got something to feed the good bacteria in our gut, the probiotics and then we've got a good fat as a drizzle.

That's right.

Right.

Yep, exactly. So if you're vegan you could swap out lentils or something like that. But you do need some protein in there. Yeah. So I love the way you broke that down. Yeah. And the other thing is that when I put a meal together, I think of two things. I think of what my body, my body needs and I think of what my taste buds want. But I separate those out. Whereas I think everybody makes a meal choice based off their taste buds.

Absolutely.

And when I go to a restaurant, I look at the menu very different. I look at what on this, on this menu do I not normally eat and I pick whatever I don't normally eat because we have trillions of bacteria in our gut. And if we're feeding them the same foods over and over and over again.

You'Re again creating monoculture, less diversity in the gut. Right, but that's a good point too. Like, we have different taste buds for a reason. We were born this way. Different taste buds make us crave different foods. And if we were to tune into the intuition of that. Right. Sugar doesn't mean processed sugar if you have a sweet tooth necessarily. You know, growing up with Ayurveda, we would include dates or something once in a while or like a cinnamon tea or something that would honor and satiate that sweet tooth. Right.

I love that.

If there's balance amongst the flavors and stuff like that, then we feel a lot more satiated. And we're not looking at our diet as restriction. I think that's one thing that we need to stop focusing on. This isn't a diet, this isn't restriction. This is simply eating for our constitution so that we are nourished.

Yeah. You know what happens on that? And I just want to free women, because that statement is so important, is that we go into restriction and then when we don't succeed at restriction, we turn on ourselves and we go, oh, I'm just not disciplined. I couldn't stick to it. We don't. We. And we start to blame ourselves. And then we try harder. And now we're raising cortisol, making ourselves more insulin resistant, throwing our sex hormones off. So there's a rhythm. Our hormones have a rhythm. We have the circadian rhythm. Like, we need to be in rhythm with our body.

Let's throw the word vibration out there.

Yeah, great.

We can do that. So you and I, our vibration right now is uplifted. Right. Our hormones are like honoring us. We're here, we're hyper present, we feel really good. When we tend to go out into the world in this state, chances are we make better choices if we are not honoring our vibration. Most of us, it's very often in today's world that we are waking up with stress and anxiety and worry and tension and fear that causes us to live in this low vibration, contracted state where we crave the simple carbs, where we crave the extra coffee and carbohydrates and stimulants to help us get out there and go. Right. So do you have a mindfulness practice around your food choices or eating?

That's a great question. So you know for sure there's gratitude before I eat. Like, there's A thank you for this meal that definitely is a part of it. I. It's something I've been teaching my community recently. Is the environment in which you eat in is almost as important as what you're eating.

Yeah.

If you think about it like we don't, we don't really talk about that. We're so obsessed on are you, am I eating the right thing or not? But then we don't think about the environment. So I think about that like, I think, okay, if I'm standing sometimes, you know, full transparency. Sometimes I'm standing at the kitchen table.

Yeah.

And I'm just throwing stuff in my mouth because I need to get somewhere after that. And then I just remind myself, could you just slow down for a moment? You're just like a minute or two. Chew your food, put your phone down, sit your body down. So I try to remind myself that the environment I'm in is definitely gonna dictate how this meal is going to be taken in vibrationally by my body.

I love that you're changing your state.

Yeah.

And I can hear, you know, a lot of women, mothers especially, we're throwing things down the hatch, we're standing in the kitchen, we're getting things done. But simply tune in. Notice how does your body digest food in that state? Especially for all those people who eat while they're driving versus when you sit down, you're hyper present to the meal or with someone that you're enjoying the meal with and the impact of what your digestion is like.

Yes.

Right?

Yeah. Yeah. Again, we go back, I think about the cave women a lot. Like they sat around the fire in community eating. So community is really like in our family we have big elaborate meals like all the time. There's pretty much always dirty dishes. Because we're cooking, we're connecting and, and that's really important. We've lost the art of, of just a good meal with good friends. If you go to Europe, they're like, you know, I remember this one time I was in Italy and I watched this family sit at a meal for three hours. These five year old children without a phone.

Yeah.

Sat there talking and interacting for three hours. Like, we've lost that art.

I agree with you.

Yeah.

Let's bring it back.

Right.

Hold each other accountable to doing that. I love it. All right, so we've talked about nutrition and some healthier choices. I think that's something we should address also. Is this fitness. You talk about this. I know that you're working on a fun project also that's going to be launching. You know, men today continue to be the shareholders of information on fitness and nutrition and longevity for women.

Ah, so well said. Yes.

And God bless them. Like a lot of these incredible doctors are friends of ours and colleagues, and they're incredible. They're brilliant. But when I hear these men speak on hormones, the first thing that comes to my mind is you will never know what it's like to experience PMS or missing your cycle or having pcos or having miscarriages or menopause or pregnancy. Right. And I love you, but all the data and science in the world will never help you understand how I can cope with this.

Yes. Yeah. Can we talk about children?

Speaking of babies, do you know in Japan, the elders will go sit outside of children's schools to take on their energy and watch them laugh? Yeah, yeah. So in Okinawa, where they. It's a blue zone. It's something that they practice.

I want to. I want to. I want to go to Okinawa. Okay, let's do a girls trip. Yeah, a girls trip. So I've got a couple of women that want to go, and I'm. I'm in the. Either next year maybe. Well, it depends. Maybe not next year, but 20, 25. Let's go. So it might take me some time to organize it.

Okay, perfect.

I'll find out. Right, we're good. Whenever you're ready.

Okay. So men being the shareholders. Yeah. So let's talk about the fact that, you know, men have been given this space, women are following their advice, but they are still experienc suffering and symptoms.

I think this is so important. And, and it's a delicate topic because there are some amazing men.

Absolutely.

That are really supportive of. Of women. What we need our hormones. They're bringing great education to us, but they don't. It's only from the head. It's not from the heart, it's not from the soul, because they don't know what it's like to live in a female body. I'll give you an example. I rarely talk about men and testosterone because I don't live in a male body. I mean, not to be crass, but I don't know what it's like to have an erection. I'm not gonna make a comment on it. Now, I could tell you lots of thoughts about testosterone and how it plays out in men, but I don't know that sensation. So it's really challenging for me when we have male doctors, male podcasters, male biohackers that are standing up and saying women do it this way, I think. Thank you for buying in. But the women, we need to rise up and say, hey, this is what the science is showing, the science that's mostly done on men and mice. This is what I've experienced with the information as a woman. Now you go experience it and you, you tell me how it works for you.

Yes.

You and I have talked about this a lot, and it's really starting to be like nails on a chalkboard for me.

Absolutely. And we have the shared vision, you and I. I know a big priority for us breaths this year is to really showcase these women who are doing the work, who have the experience. Massive communities have the data, have lived through it, through experience, but they're not given the same platforms.

That's right.

So let's shift that, make it more part of the conversation and maybe in discussions with our friends, like, this has to be part of our conversation as a woman to seek out other women in our communities globally so that we can go back to what we know is going to serve us.

That's right. And one other thing I want to say on this is that let's talk about science for a moment. We have lifted science up as the hero. And, and I can tell you, in. In the world that I live in, there's so much arguing about science. It's like, well, this study said this, and then this person said this. Okay. All science is a very controlled environment where we are taking, like, again, a mouse or. Or a man, and we're. We're taking as many variables out of the picture as possible to study one thing. And then we get a little glim, gleam, glim, glimmer, glimmer of what that one thing is. But a female body doesn't work like that because our hormones are always adapting to our environment, so you can't isolate us. I think it's gonna be really interesting to see here in America. Jill Biden just said that she's taking a bunch of money and putting it towards women's research. It's the first time ever done. I think as happy as that is, I'm worried it's going to be a little problematic because you're going to need to take women that are all cycling at the same time, women that are all in the same time of life. And I also just have to point out that I fear that much of that money is going to go towards pharmaceuticals.

I agree. Which is frightening, which is why we have to have these conversations now. And I think that one of the best things that you've pointed out also is a lot of the studies that have been done around dieting, they were done on men. Right. When my heart health was at its worst, I was on the Atkins diet. I was working out hardcore at the gym every single day because I didn't acknowledge my hormones. One of the greatest things that I've learned from you is the fact that if we really think about our constitution and having optimal hormone function, to think of your body as a symphony or your hormones as a symphony, when there's one hormone that's out of whack, the symphony's off.

It sounds horrible. Yeah. It's really true. And, you know, the place that you learn this a lot is through the perimenopause menopause journey. I also am concerned right now because on one hand, we're opening the menopause conversation up. Amazing. You know, I'm so happy that's being had. But there's only been one conversation that's like, every woman should rethink about hrt. Now, I can tell you, as a woman who's watched hundreds of thousands of women go through the perimenopause and menopausal years, everybody does it different. So HRT might work for one, whereas it's going to need to be different. Bioidentical might need to be somebody else's solution, whereas another woman, all of those may be wrong. So the symphony has to be a personal symphony. And we have to understand that it starts with lifestyle.

Starts with lifestyle. And, you know, the expectation that there has to be some grace figuring out your perfect hrt. So hormone replacement therapy, what you need, but giving it time, giving your body the ability to adjust so that you find your rhythm and what suits you most. Right. And this is where you need to have a care team that's right in place.

Yeah. And a community. So a care team, A community. You and I were just talking about this earlier. You know, when I start working with a client, that's one of the things I do, is I look and go, okay, how do I pull together a group of doctors, practitioners, to be able to support this human that's trying to heal? And most of the people that I'm working with are women. Well, they're all women, and they're all wanting hormonal balance. So it's pulling a team together and a lifestyle together that matches that woman.

Yes, absolutely. Okay, so we talked about the importance of preparing the body for fasting. Right. We're gonna heal our hormones, we're gonna come back into balance, find our happiness. And joy again, for the people listening, give us an easy entry into fasting.

Yeah.

What does it look like?

Okay, easiest that I have found, and then we'll talk about variations, is after you've made the food changes that we talked about, just push your breakfast back an hour. Let's just start there. Now, what most people tell me is, well, I'll get two answers. Some people will be like, well, that was easy. I didn't want to eat breakfast anyways. I've just been eating breakfast because I heard it was the most important meal of the day. Which by the way, was a slogan that Kellogg's came up with for their corn flakes back in the 70s. Yeah, marketing, marketing. And we're still using that. So you push your breakfast back an hour and if it's easy, then the next day you're going to push it back two hours and you keep pushing back breakfast until it's difficult. Now if on that first day it's difficult, okay, stay there. You pushed it back an hour, do that the next day and keep it pushed back an hour. What you're doing is you're taking all your food and you're compressing it into one eating window. So instead of looking at little small meals throughout the day, you're now looking at your 24 hours as I have a window and time when I am going to eat and I have a window in time when I'm gonna rest and let my body heal. Yeah. And so you're taking this every eat every two hours idea and you're compressing it. But the part that I want people to understand is the difficulty is where you're healing. It's just like the gym. If you go to the gym and you don't push yourself, it's not hard, you're never gonna get fit. So I'm asking you to compress your eating window. Start hour by hour and when you hit a difficult spot, maybe stay there, you know, a couple of days and then push and until. Ideally, the first ledge we wanna get you to is where you're eating all of your food between in an 8 to 10 hour eating window.

God, this is just what I love about you so much. Okay, so when we're fasting, we're looking at that period of healing. Yeah. Intention.

That's right.

Right. It's not dieting. It's not, I can't, it's not, I'm not allowed to have that. It's not on a hardcore protocol. I'm giving my body permission to heal. Right.

And healing doesn't always feel good. A fever's healing.

Absolutely not. But from what you know and what I know, and I'll get to your book in just a second. The feedback with people who practice this, over time, they feel the physiological impact, biologically, mentally, spiritually, emotionally, on every part of our existence, really. Right. That is the joy behind this. And you were the first one to really honor that. So it's different when you can come at intention. It's different when you can come at fasting with intention. That way, and we only get one body, one vessel. Right. So everything counts. So, you know, people obviously will be able to check out your book, but, like, some of the things that people say about your book fast, like a girl. Life changing transformation. I finally feel happy in my body. Like, as an adult, can you imagine? Dr. Mindy finally has a voice for women. Right. Like, that even makes me just so emotional. And your book ties into everything that we spoke about today. So I'm excited for everybody to get a copy if they haven't already. And I guess to wrap things up. Are you cool with some rapid fire questions?

Yeah. I just want to say thank you because, you know, I don't read my reviews.

I had to. I'm like, this is ridiculous. I feel so happy about you.

So thank you. And the one thing I'll just say on that is, so last night we got, like, my agent sent me the total numbers of what this book has done in a year and less than a year, 500,000 copies worldwide of everything from audible to ebook to hardcover. It's crazy. And I literally sat in my hotel room crying, and I told my husband. I'm like, you know what I love about this is that the way I literally wrote it, just out of the kindness and compassion of my heart, knowing that women needed something that I was seeing, was working in my clinic. It was working with the people who are following me on YouTube. And I had no other agenda. I literally had no other agenda. It was like, this needs to get out to the world. We should probably write this. And then it started working for women, and then people started sharing it. And so to me, this is our book. This is women's books. It's not mine. I have no ego attached to it.

I know you. You don't. Yeah. And that's what's so beautiful. You have this incredible community where the feedback was just given to you. Right. Can you share just because I've heard this with you, off the record, speaking from your heart, like, the vision of what you have for this Moving forward.

Yeah.

What is the impact of people following this protocol and women stepping into their power finally.

Thank you. Well, so what's really funny is I thought I was writing a fasting book, but what the world, world saw and what I see is that women were hormonally illiterate. They didn't understand their hormones. So in learning their hormones, they're taking their power back. So the vision I have for this book is that it's a self healing tool where women can do it, that don't have money, don't have time, don't have resources, to the best doctors who may, may or may not be able to even help them. That literally you can pick up this book and you could heal yourself and you could balance your hormones and. And you get the credit for that, not me. You get the credit for that. That's the vision I have for this book and that's how women are taking it.

Thank you for saying that. Because we are walking, talking miracles and we're finally taking our health into our own hands.

Right, Right. Thank you.

Okay, so what are some of the most common misconceptions that you're seeing women take with their hormones?

Oh, that we can manipulate them.

Yeah.

There's no manipulation. Whether it's a supplement or a patch or a cream, there's a lifestyle. Women are forgetting there's a lifestyle. We have to bring lifestyle back for hormones to be balanced. And we're not having enough conversation about that. In fact, I would probably go as far as to say I may be the only person talking about that. And I don't mean that again from an egoic, it means like, hello, why are, why are we not talking about lifestyle and hormones? It's the most, most essential part of balancing your hormones.

And what you just said, if we had you looking at us every day, you can heal.

Yes, you can heal.

Just believing in you. You can heal.

Yeah.

What's the one way that women are making health and healing too complicated?

Oh, the latest and greatest next diet. The latest and greatest next supplement. There's no latest and greatest next thing. You are the latest and greatest. It's your body. So when you start complicating it by like, and even I see it in my world, like, I want to count the macros. I got to get my blood sugar right. No, you just need to slow down and learn some basic principles that nobody taught you. And once you learn them, you're going to see how much control you have. Stop giving it away.

No more trap, no more going back into hardcore that's right.

That's right.

What's your favorite ancient healing remedy or recipe? Well, I have to say fasting, obviously.

But then, I mean, I think it's circadian rhythm getting your yourself back into light. So I've been spending a lot of time getting up in the morning with the red light, going walking with the red light at night, like I love again, I love thinking about what our cave people did. I prioritize sleep, I prioritize connection and community. So it's pretty much everything that you can imagine a cave woman would have done, I'm trying to do.

Beautiful. And what about modern medicine? You know, what is it about modern medicine? What is it about modern medicine that excites you?

Oh, crisis care. Like if I'm in a car accident, if something, God forbid, happens to me, what we do in the ER room is a medical miracle.

Absolutely.

And we do such good work in the crisis area, where it's the chronic disease area, that we've lost our way.

And do you think doctors are going to catch on to this idea of integration for healthcare?

Oh, I think they are, but I'll tell you, unfortunately, I think they are because of their finding that, you know, it's either financially beneficial for them to start talking about lifestyle. I mean, it's not. I don't believe it's all about altruism. I think they're just some doctors are getting fed up with the lack of results medications are getting. But, yeah, some are stepping out of that paradigm into the integrative paradigm. And I think the integrative functional medicine world is really exciting because you've brought all doctors into that. We've got to get out of this mentality that the medical doctor is the end all, be all. When again, let's go back to what I do when I coach somebody. I bring every doctor I've. Breathwork specialist, meditation specialists, everybody I come can bring together to heal that person. So I think we're going to have to put down that the old mighty doctor, whatever doctor it is you're choosing has the answer. It's a team that needs to come together.

Imagine going to your doctor's office, you meet with a meditation teacher, primary caregiver, physiotherapist, hormone specialist. Right.

Amazing, amazing, amazing. And we can't as, you know, as a health expert, I'll say the same thing. Like, I'm not an expert in everything. Yeah, I, I know fasting really well, I know food really well. I know lifestyle for hormones really well. But if somebody's got an Emotional trauma, that's not my specialty, but I'm sure gonna find you somebody to get that taken care of because it plays out in how your hormones will balance.

I love that. Build your care team.

Yeah.

Three simple things that women can do today to start optimizing their hormones.

Well, fast like a girl. And what that means is learn how to fast. According to you, wherever you are, hormonally pull out all the endocrine disruptors. Start pull up, think dirty app, scan all your beauty products or skin deep scan all of those. Easy. It takes it. You can do it on a Saturday and throw out anything that's throwing your hormones off and learn how to rest. Learn where mindfulness and recovery and slow your life down. If you do those three things, I don't care if it's pcos, infertility, bad menopause symptoms, or a cancer diagnosis. Those three things will get you so far in overturning those diagnoses.

We could probably do a whole show just on rest.

Oh, we could, for sure.

Next time.

Yeah, I'll come back. Just invite me back.

What's something that you're really passionate about now?

Well, my most current thing is what happens to the female brain after 40. I'm really upset that we are not talking about the fact that estradiol, as she goes away, was stimulating dopamine, serotonin, glutamate, acetylcholine, bdnf, oxytocin, and that when progesterone goes away, she was stimulating GABA. So we are not losing two hormones after 40. We are losing 10 neurochemicals, and we need a lifestyle to match that. And nobody's talking about that.

And then we don't have to suffer.

That's right.

And I just want to own that in because. Because up until you and your book, me going into my 40s and experiencing hormonal shifts, especially after the mold, it's really easy to identify as this being a way of life. But because of you, I know that it doesn't have to be.

Thank you. Thank you.

I adore you. Thank you.

I adore you. Feelings mutual.

Let's keep this growing.

That's right.

More to come. Lots on women, women's health this year. Just thank you for putting all of this out into the world.

Oh, you know what? I'm. I feel like I just want to open the conversation up, and then we all need to step into it. So I'm so excited for what you're doing with this podcast because it's so needed. And to everybody listening like your voice matters. So keep speaking up. Keep speaking up. Keep learning. Keep connecting. It's. The time has come, and. And we. If we do this together, 10 years from now, we'll sit back down here and talk about all the amazing things that are happening in women's health.

I love that. Thank you.

Thank you.