A Different Conversation About Menopause with Dr. Mindy Pelz

Give us a picture of how you describe this awakening of menopause.

Menopause is the moment that you're like, I did everything for everybody else and now I'm doing it for me. That it's like a metabolic switch. It's like parasympathetic, sympathetic. You go from being the one that is holding the space for everybody else to being the one that gets to do everything every single day on your terms.

Hey everyone, welcome back to Rooted in Wellness. Today's a very special episode. I have my dear friend Dr. Mindy Peltz here with me.

Yay!

Yay!

It's like a celebration. Do we get balloons or something?

Where's the confetti?

Yes, exactly. So happy to be here.

Let's start off by saying thank you. When I was absolutely terrified of starting my podcast, you were my first call.

Thank you.

Yeah, you, Casey Means, Dr. Mary Pardie, and you all said yes.. And because of you, it has awakened this part of me that has just fallen in love with this delivery mechanism and podcasting and community. To everyone listening, thank you so much from the bottom of my heart. But we're back in January sitting with my very first guest, and my heart is very happy. And today I really want to dive into, I think, what the essence and the spirit of what you and I always go deep into when we're solo. If we're walking or hiking, it's always been about the essence of what it means to be our divine feminine and all of the obstacles that have come up as a result of that living in our modern world. And we'll talk about everything that's in Age Like a Girl. Um, but to kick things off, we're going to go back to the original question. You know that this podcast is all about becoming more rooted, becoming rooted in who we are, our sense of knowing how to heal, which I think is, uh, an intuition that we all have but we've forgotten. So today, in this season that we're in right now, what helps you feel more rooted in who you are?

Oh, that's easy, because I found found something that I think we have talked about forever, but I never really fully embraced it, and it's nature. I, um, when I— so just to fill everybody in, I was here when the fires happened in LA, and I was there the morning I evacuated it 3 times. Super traumatic experience. And so I went back to Northern California, and I landed in Santa Cruz, And like within the first week I was there, I, somebody, a, a old friend of mine said to me, let the land heal you, Mindy. Like just let the land heal you. And so I took that really seriously and every single day I got my feet in the ocean or I took a hike in the mountains, but I prioritized nature and then I started surfing. And I was like, I've been really trying to figure out what happens to me when I'm in the water. There's all kinds of magical things. You don't have to surf to have it, have this experience. But I, after a year of literally putting myself in nature every single day, it was a game changer for my nervous system. And it is the thing that will root me. If I come back to even being up here, it's like, if I get to nature, I can find myself.

I love that so much. And I'm really happy that you shared that because I think a lot of people, we hear, go into nature, get into nature, and we write it off as something that's like, yeah, yeah, I get it. But there's a difference between going into nature and submersing in nature. At the ashram, when we go back, it's actually recommended to go in the ocean every single day because it's an act of cleansing and purification.

So I, okay, so you're the perfect person to talk about this because there's a couple things I've decided about the ocean. For starters, the water, the salt, the mineral balance in the water is the same exact mineral balance as human blood.

Crazy.

Um, when you look out over a horizon, you bring cortisol down because your brain's like, oh, you're— we're looking for the threat, we can relax right now. Like, you're on it. And then I've decided that the bobbing around in the water is almost like simulating the mother's womb. And so like, when I get in the water, there's a sense of coming home. I don't know. And I know, I don't know if everybody has that, but like I, you were saying, like we tend to go, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, let's go into nature. Yeah, it's beautiful. But I'm not joking. Like if you need to heal yourself, move somewhere where you can get in the ocean, get in the mountains and make nature a priority and it heals you.

Absolutely. Yeah. You feel different.

Yeah. Thank you.

You're welcome. Thank you.

It's working.

Yeah. Thank you. On the flip side, you know, you and I are very cautious when it comes to manifesting this year. We're in this act of surrender. I'm very aware of the things that are causing me to feel uprooted, and I feel like at this point in my life, and of course we can tie it into the female cycle also, but I'm very easily uprooted today. What makes you feel uprooted, and do you catch yourself, or do you still drift?

Yeah. So one of the things that I think that that I wanted to get across in Age Like a Girl, and I've been really thinking even more about it since the book's in people's hands now, is I think as women, we are meant to be super sensitive. Like, we're meant to walk into a room and feel the room, and we're meant to understand what's right for us and what's not right for us. And I think that we have learned to override that, to push on through, to ignore the sensations that that our body is giving us. And, um, I would say right now, off the judge of my body, I mean, I'm unsettled about, uh, what's happening here in our country. I'm, um, challenged. And I'm going to be really honest, because if we're just gonna go where you and I would go if we were talking, I'm concerned about the enthusiasm over a food pyramid that is lovely while women are being shot. This is, the country is in chaos. And I'm sure you have a worldwide audience, but I'm really challenged by where people are in their hearts right now. And I even wonder if we've gotten too greedy. Everybody just wants their thing, their stuff. And all I wanna do now is hide in nature because I'm feeling sad about humanity.

Yeah, I'm with you. And I need to set such firm boundaries on what I look at, what I listen to, and what I watch because it's everywhere. And although we can celebrate these micro wins, I guess, I feel like if we come back to the essence of what it means to be human, 99% of those problems go away. And when it comes to food addiction and the foods that we purchase, out of the need to, to feel soothed. We don't need that anymore if we feel good in our bodies.

Yeah. And, and it's the othering, like, you know, other people have what I want. Other people are doing what I don't want them to do. Like, why are we so focused on the outward of what everybody else is doing? And I think as women, this was such a big part of the book that I like had this vision, like if I could get women to understand when they go through menopause that they're leaders and the way a woman leads is very different than the way a man leads. And we lead through our nurturing and our instinct and our care. And that's what we need right now because everybody is like pointing fingers at the other person saying, you did something wrong.

This is probably the biggest challenge for me and probably so many of our female listeners. This conversation is going to be like you and I going for coffee.

Yeah, yeah.

This is what we talk about. My greatest challenge right now is exactly what you said. I assumed that I was in my feminine, in my intuition, but I would say I've got decades of conditioning of trying to do and be and act like someone else, to do more or to get the accolades of fitting in. Hypervigilance is my comfort zone. And here I am. My mantra these days is, you don't have to do that anymore. You don't have to be like that anymore. And there's a sadness that's really coming with it, because then who am I if I'm not that old version of myself?

Yeah, right. So this is This is so good. I forget people are listening, but because this is, this is what you and I would do. Um, here's, here's what I've really been challenged with is when I did all the research for this book, perhaps the thing I loved the most was the research I found from Carol Gilligan. And Carol Gilligan, I actually have located her. I'm actually in email contact with her now. I just sent her the book, which is really scary. Um, but her work back in the 1980s She wrote something called In a Different Voice. And I think this is something all women need to just sit with what I'm about to say, because what Carol did is she went to 8 and 9-year-old girls and boys and she asked them a question like, what do you want to eat? And both the girl and the boy will tell you exactly what they want to eat. Then she asked them the same question when they were like 10 or 11 before puberty hit in— hit, but they were getting close. And the boy would tell you exactly, exactly what he wanted. The girls started to waver a little bit. By the time the girl turned 13, the boy would still tell you what he wanted, but the girl would say, I don't know, what are you eating? And so Carol started to observe these behaviors in girls in their teenage years and identified that the culture teaches— back then she said it taught, but we're still living in this— the culture teaches girls that you are worthy if you are selfless. Unreal. So everyone I've talked to about this is like, yep, I've— I was that, I am that. But I think what happens is as we age, we wake up. And when we go through menopause, that neurochemical filter comes down. As a friend of mine says, is, yeah, we're not drugged on estrogen anymore. Like, when we're not drugged on estrogen, all of a sudden, like, I think women are waking up and they're like, Wait a second, I don't wanna do that anymore. I don't wanna make you dinner. I don't even know if I wanna diet and work out to be a size 2 so you love me. I don't wanna keep getting Botox in my face so you don't think I'm aging. Like women are waking up at this age. And this was such a big thing that I wanted to bring forward in this book is like, yeah, go speak up. It's time for us to speak up. But I think we have to understand what we've been living in.

We had a conversation like this way back when you were writing "Fast Like a Girl." Yeah. And it was leaning into the intuition that women had. And I think that we live in a society where like, let's face it, when we go on social media, there's so much of a negativity bias.

Absolutely.

And as happy as I am that there's being more attention given to women and our symptoms and our suffering as perimenopause and menopause enter, there's also like this anger that's coming up. Like, yeah, yeah, I'm suffering too. I'm really suffering too. Yeah. "but where's the wisdom? Where's the wisdom that comes with it? Because I'm sick and tired of being angry. These emotions seem to have come from out of nowhere and I don't even understand myself anymore." And to your point, what would the impact have been if we still live in community and villages and, you know, having relationships like this where we can rely on each other to really share openheartedly, like without like, "Hey, this is what's happening," right?

Well, it's interesting because so much of the research I did was going back to the primal days. And in the primal days, if you think about it— so this is like, I literally have spent so much time deep in this thought— but if you think about it, what happened was the alpha men went off to go get a kill. So they had to bring back animal meat. They only came back with it 3% of the time, which is 1 day out of 30. And I'm coming back to this part of the story in a moment. And then what they did is they would— like, the fertile women, the women that were pregnant, that were nursing, who were tending to the kids, they stayed home, but somebody needed to feed them. So it was the grandmothers— this is the grandmother hypothesis— that went and, and got the food and brought it back for the women and the children. Well, when the men came back from an animal kill, they fed the men first, then they fed the, the fertile women, then they fed the grandmothers. But think that through— the fertile women needed to be attractive to the, the alpha males. I know this sounds so sexist. In order to get food, the grandmothers knew that they weren't attractive to the alpha male, so they gathered around themselves, each other. So I say this to say that I think when we're younger, we tend to compete with each other as women. I think that is primally hardwired in our nervous system, and it's horrible. We do not Like I was talking to a friend who's in her early 40s and I was like, you'll start picking different friendships as you age. I'm like, you're not— you haven't been picking the best friendships, but it's— there tends to be this sort of competitiveness amongst women. And then we age and we move into collaboration. And I think if we could get the younger generation, because we're not living in the primal days anymore, women need to come together and nurture each other, to your point.

So this is a good call out. You know, you and I work with people who work in industries where they rely on their physical body and their appearances. And for those of you out there, I think it's great if it feels good for you and hopefully you're detoxing at the same time. But on the other hand, right now when we're talking about this like friendship elimination or looking at the current tribe that we're living in, I'm seeking more wisdom. I'm seeking more people who want to age, who will also like me like, you know, give me a rope and show me how it's done. And I'm even finding with healers, in a world that feels so overwhelming when it comes to health and wellness right now, I'm seeking the women in their 50s, 60s, and even 70s to hold space for me. And I feel a difference in the quality of care and the quality of education because they're speaking with me, to me. It's in dialogue. They're not speaking at me and telling me what to do. I trust their wisdom. So I love that you brought that up.

You know, I made a conscious choice, you know, to really lean into advisors that were older than me. I've just recently got an 83-year-old therapist. Wow, she is phenomenal. She's been a therapist like for 50-some years. She's— and the wisdom that oozes out of her is unbelievable. And I started to really— then it was really in writing this book that I was like, wise elders, where are the wise elders? Now I would say like my mom, a little different, maybe because she's my mom, but she also has sort of the 1950s mentality of, of femininity. But there are some real sage women out there that have lived through some really hard life and have learned a ton. And I, I too am seeking those women.

Yeah. My acupuncturist is 81 years old, and that's amazing. It's just different. There's like an intuition that she trusts. There's an energy that's there that I feel like I'm being held. And I really wish that we had that for more women.

Yeah, me too. Me too.

Instead of dismissing these elder women.

That's right. And I think you probably remember I went through a rant for a while where I was like, if we're all freezing our faces, how are we gonna find the wise elders if everybody looks 25? Like we need the wrinkles as like little roadmaps. Oh, there you are. Exactly. Yeah. It's really interesting.

All right, let's hop into a couple rapid fire questions. Okay. All right. What's the biggest myth about menopause that drives you crazy?

Oh, that you have— that it's that you're suffering through it. You don't, you're not, you're— it's an, it's a mirror. This is the big thing I wanted to bring forward. It's a mirror. If you're depressed, why don't you then let's look and see what's not working in your life. If you're anxious, maybe you're worried about something in the future. If you're irritable and you're full of rage, maybe you've had a whole lifetime where you've like pushed something down. And what we're doing right now in the menopause space is we're just saying you're suffering. You didn't get a doctor that understood the study on HRT. There's such a bigger part of this experience that we're not talking about.

We will today. Yeah. One thing every woman needs to know about her hormones before the age of 40.

Oh, your environment will affect them.

Toxins, personal care products, all of them.

All of it. Uh, anytime you put— wherever you move your body, your hormones are reacting to that environment. So if you're in stressful environment, your hormones will react. If you're eating toxic food, your hormones will react. So you are literally igniting these chemical messengers through each environment you put yourself in.

We should do a 1-hour podcast solely on the insults to a woman's body.

Oh, I love that idea.

We should. All right. To come. What's a common mistake women make during perimenopause?

Well, my big thing on perimenopause is you only have— you should have one target for your health, and it's hemoglobin A1C. Get your metabolic health in order. Get that A1C closer to 5, and your hormones are gonna balance so much easier.

The most underrated habit for brain health as we age.

Well, I'm gonna go back to nature. Yeah. I mean, nature does wonders for the brain and, and there's so much science supporting that. So I think nature, of course, you know, the trending thing right now is movement. You know, move your body. I think exercise probably is the most important thing we can do for cognition, but, um, You know, everybody exercises differently. And I'm just going to say that I think you and I agree on this, like this, this pressing women to go lift weights. Some women are going to love that and some aren't.

And some are going to get hurt.

Yes. I actually talked to one yesterday who got hurt and she was like, she was like, I'm just— I know I need to lift more weights, but now I've got a tennis elbow.

I also come from a lineage of women who live, who are centenarians. Who didn't have that aspect. Yeah. I digress. We'll go back to that. One food or practice that you'd never skip in your daily routine.

Food or practice? Well, I have a morning routine. Yeah. So let's start there. And I start the morning off with myself. I don't turn my phone on for about an hour. I meditate, I listen to music. I'm trying journaling. I'm not sure it's my cup of tea, but I'm doing some journal challenges 'cause it's January. I'm like, okay, let me see what I think of this. This, but I know that the first hour of my day needs to be whatever I want it to be before I give it over to work or my family or anything else. So I would say that would be the biggest like routine. My new biggest non-negotiable food are microgreens. I've fallen in love with microgreens.

You were on Sprouts last year.

Weren't you on Sprouts? Yeah, I started, maybe that was it. But since I've moved to Santa Cruz, I found this really great microgreen farm. And I put every meal, and you know, people listening, if you don't have, you know, access to microgreens, you can grow 'em. But I'm just, the non-negotiable is every meal has some kind of lettuce with it, and mine are microgreens.

So nutrient-dense oxidation for your body. Yeah. I love it. Last one. What's something that women dismiss as normal aging that's actually fixable?

Well, cognition. Yeah. Mood. I think mood is a big one. This, this was what I really wanted to start in the culture is a conversation around irritability and depression and anxiety. Like, you know, these are fixable with your lifestyle. And we are— these— this is not a 'I didn't get the right prescription' kind of situation. And I think we, we tend to look at mood and think, 'Oh, I'm upset right now because my job's not going right,' or 'I'm upset right now because this other thing is not happening. But in reality, your moods are dictated by your hormones, and you're— and you still have hormones as you age.

And yet still, going back to what you said about what's being reflected to us on social media, I don't think women understand that when we hit these walls with our mood and with our energy, we identify so deeply, oh, here it is, well, I'm in perimenopause, this is it, must be this This is the new me. Yeah, right, right. And I can say, like, you were the person to really kind of hold space for me as I entered perimenopause. And I remember saying to you, like, I feel like a stranger in my body. I woke up one day, I had frozen shoulder, I was getting hot flashes, I was really moody. One day I would feel amazing, and the next day I felt like so depressed, and it didn't make any sense. And, um, I think a lot of us, we start to identify with this new way of being as though, like, this is the decline I'm aging. My life is over. There's no space or community which is allowing me to grieve an older version of myself. And this is where I am.

It's so true. It's so true that, and that is what you're doing. You're, it, it's like a, a snake whose skin is coming off. Yeah. And, and you're being reborn into a new version of yourself. Um, in, in Age Like a Girl, one of the things I wanted to do is the middle part, what is like one chapter's on mood, one's on memory, one's on connection, one's on exercise because I wanted women to be like, Okay, like who are having days like that where they're like, I don't know, it was fine yesterday, today I'm totally depressed. And then they could go read the chapter and be like, okay, have I added in these things into my life? Because like depression, for example, and you know, a lot of times it's run by a lack of dopamine and serotonin. Dopamine and serotonin were being stimulated by estrogen. Estrogen went away, so you don't get as much dopamine and serotonin. But you can use your lifestyle to get dopamine and serotonin. Dopamine just wants you to do something new. So go to a new grocery store, take a new route to your gym, whatever you're doing. That little subtleness can give you a little burst of dopamine. Serotonin, we have receptor sites in our eyes. Are you getting out in the middle of the day and letting your eyes see this, you know, be in the full spectrum sunlight? You can stimulate serotonin that way. So I think we— I think the perimenopause thing is so interesting because those— it doesn't matter if you have a patch on or not, you're going to have up and down days, but you're not— you're not victim to it. You get to make sure every day you're doing something in your lifestyle that's balancing all these neurochemicals.

That's really interesting because I think a lot of us, especially now, let's put this through the lens of stress.

Stress.

One of the— one of many things that I love that you have said is, you know, we look at biohacking the body through these modalities. And again, media is telling us that that's the thing to do to get that dopamine hit, right? Women aren't meant to biohack, though. You say that women are meant to bioharmonize. So can we maybe break this down through the lens of stress and what's happening in the brain and the body during these changes? And how to bioharmonize back into homeostasis.

Yeah. So this kind of— it's such a good— I love the way you present this because you and I, it's our pet peeve. You know, the biohacking movement became so popular and women are trying to hack their health, and you can't do that with a woman's body. It has to be— we have to understand we're rhythmic. So that's the first thing. The, the second thing, I, and I kind of said a little bit before, but I just want to make sure people understand this. When you're living in a female body, doesn't matter what age you are, your body is always having a neurochemical reaction to everything you're giving it and every environment you're in. So if I'm cold plunging and some biohacker told me that I should get in water for 3 minutes and I get into cold water for 3 minutes and I'm just dying and it's horrible, that might not be right for your body. You're the female body is what's nurturing, loving care. Now, some people might get into the water for a minute and that's great, but we've got to start to look at ourselves with more, more, we're more sensitive than we really want to realize. And the essence of a woman is to nurture. So nurture yourself first. Yeah.

Right? Yeah, 100%.

So we, like, we've set— this has been like, I've been saying this for this book, and it's just like, I'm so disturbed by it. It's like, so what if an influencer gets up there and says you need 1 gram of protein for every pound of ideal body weight? Is that right for you? So what if another influencer who looks amazing, has muscles pouring out of her, says you need to go to the gym and lift the heaviest weight possible? Is that right for you? What if all of a sudden, like this trend of no alcohol, like everybody's like, alcohol is horrible. I'm not here to tell you it's great, but it's another like, don't do that, do this. And women in general, what we end up doing is we follow, we're like, okay, what do I need to do now? And then when it doesn't work, we turn on ourselves and we're like, well, shoot, you know, that person, started fasting, let's use my, my technique, started fasting, they didn't lose any weight or they lost weight and I didn't lose any weight, then it must be my problem. So we've got to come back to I love my body so much. I love the life. You know, even if you don't love the life you're living, I love parts of the life I'm living and I want to make sure I put myself in as many environments where I feel safe. That's a big one. And I feel cared for. Not, oh wait, I should buy a $10,000 what so that I can not, you know, age. Like, we just keep outsourcing our power.

The system is designed to keep us hooked on looking for fads, protocols, gurus, and programs. And if I really pull back, if we really pull back, I think every woman, there's this aha moment of like, oh, maybe I don't feel good when I do all of those things that people are telling me to do. Outsourcing, as you say. And I think this all goes back to ancient wisdom. Like, it literally was the intention of this podcast. Why did ancient wisdom know about personalization, know to never give two people, especially two women, the exact same protocol, and yet we're expected to do the exact same thing, right? And whether, like, you know, I talk a lot about digestion, obviously. Last year, there's not one person that I worked with with optimal digestion. If you're not digesting your food properly, period, how can you digest anything else in your life, right? And yet here we are, we're still— we're stuck on looking for the protocol and for the cure.

We need to think more holistically too. Like, this kind of ties into, you know, I'm just fresh off frustration around the food pyramid. I think it's, I think it's a great pyramid, but not perfect for everyone.

Not perfect for everyone.

And it came at a cost of an administration that is terrorizing people. And so what's— and destroying the environment. So we got our food pyramid right, we got food dyes out, but meanwhile, like, we're spraying— we, we are allowing forever chemicals to be sprayed now on our fruits and vegetables, which kills thyroid, by the way. And people are so stressed out because they don't know what's going to happen in the next day, you know, within this. And, and this isn't just America, the world in general is in a complete disarray. So I don't mean this as a depressive thought, it, it's like, take your power back and nurture yourself, put yourself in environments where you feel safe, because a female body needs to feel safe, and stop trying to do what everybody else is doing.

Yeah. And can we just hover on that for a second too, with the dairy industry? If we were to peel back the layer, like, I would— could we all just go to the farms and see what happens to the food and see the chemicals that are sprayed that we know are massive hormone disruptors, but also gut disruptors as well?

Yeah.

To see what's given to our cows to make them give us us so much, Dari. I don't know, just like lean forward with an air of caution, ask questions towards everything. I think that this is the motto to see if it's actually right for you.

I have a, I have a thought. And so I just started, I was telling you, I just started a Substack and I started Substack because I wanted to be able to talk to people in a different way. And what I've been telling my Substack subscribers is, um, I have to play to an algorithm when I am on any other social media platform. But here on Substack, we can talk about anything. The first thing I chose to talk about is how do we start to critically think about health? Because, and again, I'm very curious what you're seeing. And listeners, you know, wherever you're hearing this, we— I'd love this conversation with you. Like, we have gotten to the place where we're looking for absolutes. Like, well, this person says if I do this, then I'll lose weight. This person says I'll do this, I'll sleep through the night. If I take this pill, they said I'm going to lengthen telomeres. Um, what we have to start to go vertical with our thinking and go deep, like, and listen to things like this podcast. I've been really encouraging my following, go to long format, go get off of the reels, get off of the shorts, get off of the little trite little bite-sized pieces of health information and let's go into a deep discussion like we're having now, or go watch a YouTube video or read a book. You're gonna challenge your attention span, but we've got to get you into a deeper vertical thinking so you can make the right choice for you.

It's true. It's like building your own online digital community through education. Yeah.

Right?

And seeking the wisdom that you find also. No clickbait.

No clickbait.

Okay, let's just be against clickbait. Yeah. Let's just end that trend.

The next time you see somebody say, if you do this, you're gonna lose 30 pounds. Just take a moment and pause because you want to ask, is that right for me? For, for me, I mean, we do every 2 months in my academy, we do this fat burner reset, and I was really clear, we will never do pre and post pictures. We, we will never talk about how much weight people lose because I don't want somebody to come in and think that's the gold standard. We're teaching women how to understand their metabolic metabolic switch so they can start to lose weight for the rest of their life. And then maybe someday they don't even need us anymore. So much. So like, I'm just, it's just an ethical thing I won't do.

I wanna see pictures when I can see the mitochondrial function in your body turn on. Like that's the only picture that I wanna see. And that's a huge win.

Yeah.

Right.

And where are we gonna get that picture though?

I don't know. I'm not a scientist.

Okay.

So let's go back to something which is like foundational and, uh, that's nervous system regulation. Yeah. So moving, shifting through the evolution of perimenopause to menopause, you've always said it has never been a decline. It's been an awakening for the body. And I think looking back at my grandmother and perhaps my great-grandmother, there was more regulation at that time because life was simply more simple. So well said. One of my other favorites from you is that women are living at a generational mismatch. For our environment today. And I think it's pretty scary for a lot of women. I know certainly for a lot of the clients that I work with, there's a shift that happens through these hormonal changes where it's like, okay, all this stuff is coming up. I didn't think that I had mommy issues or daddy issues, but this is coming up now. All right, we've got to deal with it. And it feels incredibly overwhelming at a time in our life through that age. A lot of us had kids later in life. We can't afford to drop any balls. So it doesn't feel like an awakening, it feels like disruption. Can you talk to us a little bit about the aspect of having a regulated nervous system and what the impact through hormones changing, what that could be?

Yeah, so I think the first thing is for people to understand how the nervous system works, because when you start to break down how the nervous system works, you actually realize none of us have a properly functioning nervous system. So you have two arms, you have parasympathetic, which is rest and digest, and you have sympathetic, which is fight or flight. And you're literally supposed to live most of your life in parasympathetic, which is calm. And I just want to point out, digest— to your point, you can digest your food, you can relax, the hypervigilant thoughts stop, you're much more joyful, much more social when you're in that parasympathetic. Like, you, you want to connect to people. Then you get into— you have a moment of a and you go into sympathetic and it's fight or flight. Now women have another, another response, which is tend and befriend. We actually have more oxytocin receptor sites in our amygdala. So when we go into a stress, we're either— we're not always going to run, we're not always going to fight, we're going to call our bestie. And because we go into tend and befriend, which is beautiful, and I think this is how we get manipulated too. But if you are over you're in, you have stress coming over and over and over again, you get locked in sympathetic dominance. And the polyvagal theory says that if you stay there long enough, you actually move into a different nervous system response, which is the freeze nervous system response. And I think we have to always look at where are we on that spectrum, because once you get to the freeze nervous system, You're in withdrawal, you are numbing, you, you want to disassociate. So I, once I learned the polyvagal theory, I actually put a big poster up in my clinic and I took all the teenagers in my clinic and I brought them over to the chart and I had the emotions that you feel when you're in parasympathetic, the emotions you feel when you're sympathetic, and the emotions you feel when you're in freeze. And I said, tell me where you feel like you are. 9 out of 10 of the kids, the teenagers, were like pointed at the freeze. And then I would turn to the parents, where do you— where are you? Pointed at the freeze. So when we look at regulating the nervous system, we have to acknowledge that we are all, especially now, in a whole new nervous system that if you are not intentional you are going to be locked into. And this is like my big aha from last year, from 2025. I had hit such a big freeze moment that the only thing left that I knew to do was withdraw from everybody, including my husband, including my family, because I literally could not get ahold of my thoughts. I could not handle any little bit of stress after the fires. And I went away for 4 months, wrote this book and lived by myself. And it was the first time I actually think I could feel parasympathetic. And I think for a lot of women, I was just reading a post about this on, on Instagram that a woman, there was a question about why does a woman feel so much better when her husband leaves, goes on vacation or has a work trip or leaves the house? And then, you know, it was a carousel and you went to the next picture and literally this woman nailed it. She said, because a woman is always tracking the people she loves to see where they are, how they're doing, don't upset them. You know, make sure they're doing the, you know, the kids have food and the husband's okay. You know, it can be the same thing in a same-sex relationship. But we, if we're not careful, we keep making sure that everybody else's needs is a priority over our own. And our nervous system is just tracking all these needs.

Wow.

Yeah. And then we can't, we can't regulate. Mm-hmm.

Does that hit? Yeah, that hits. And I think again, it's like it's part of our identity. Yeah. Oh yeah. So how do we change our identity? Especially if we have mothers that also had that, you know, oh, she's always doing something. She's always working. We feel like we have have to do the exact same thing. Something that I put out to my audience quite often is, if I were to step into your body, on a scale of 1 to 10, what's the number of stress that you feel? So if you answer that question typically on a scale of 1 to 10, what's the number of stress that you feel? More often than not, it's a 6, 7, 8, or 9. And then I say, well, if I were to step into your body, would I feel a 7, 8, 9, or would I feel like, oh my God, like, what is happening in this body? Because you've become So accustomed to living with such high levels of stress that you're not even aware of it.

That's the freeze.

That's freeze. You got it.

Like, go, you know, people listening, go Google polyvagal theory, freeze. Look at the, the emotions. You will see yourself there.

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It's such a beautiful inquiry that you do that with them. Yeah, I'll tell you, in, you know, last year I just went into me to understand me and as much as I could. And one of the things that I realized was my— I had a really really cool childhood, like young childhood. Um, and one of the reasons that I think I was so traumatized by that neighborhood burning in the LA fires was because that was the place I felt the most whole. And then when I left childhood, I started doing what everybody else wanted me to do. I got caught up in the production pace of the world. And I lost that feeling. So it's interesting that people say that to you, like 4 and 5, that feels, that tracks for me.

Something's coming up for me that I didn't expect. So I missed you in your hiatus last year. And as you're repeating that story, I thought what a gift it would be to do that for myself this year. Could I really just go so deeply into myself? And what just came up for me is fear. It feels fearful for me to actually take that leap of faith to open everything up and be with it.

Yeah, it's a little— Yeah, yeah. It's a little Pandora's box. So, you know, when I left L.A. after January 7th, I left about 4 days after that and I went back up to Northern California to figure out where I was going and what I was doing. And the only thing I knew to do was go be by myself. In the alone, I got confronted with a lot of thoughts that I used my busy lifestyle to not quite address. And I actually had some really supportive people around me, and one of them was a dear friend, another wise elder who's in her 60s, said to me, Mindy, I think you are codependent. You go look up, like, and she's like, take this with love, but go look up what codependent looks like. Now, I thought codependent was like, oh, only weak women were codependent. But when I looked it up, it basically for me shows up where I, if I'm around people, I want to make sure everybody around me feels good so that I feel feel good.

Yeah, same.

The door to me feeling good became everybody around me feeling good. But in the alone, I got to see where I didn't feel good because nobody was around me. So I really think, like, I, I've been like, if I could create something for the culture, it would be that women get little sabbaticals where they go and spend time, 3 days, days, a week, maybe a month by themselves and then come back to their family. I think the sabbatical should be much bigger when your kids— when you become an empty nester. I think you should go like do what I did. I, I had to because I couldn't function. But if every woman, when their last child went off to college, went somewhere for 90 days by herself, she would be able to recalibrate. From the experience of doing everything for everybody else.

Right?

But you can't do it around other people. Yeah.

And again, like we, as much as we're understanding the detriments of modern day life, it's the most impossible thing to do.

Yeah.

Having a morning routine for people that actually serves you is something that feels impossible to do because you're treating it like a checklist, right?

Yeah. You know, I saw this, I was, I don't know why this is coming up, but I saw this this because when I wrote the book, I realized that like not every woman has the capability to go somewhere by herself or, you know, have a second home or something like that. And I saw a woman like pack her suitcase on this reel and she's like, I'm going to go on a solo vacation in the other room. And she takes her suitcase and goes to another room in the house and closes the door and says, I've arrived. And I don't think it has to be complicated. Like, in, in my house in San Jose, I used to have a chair. I called it my thinking chair. It was where I went by myself every morning, and everybody in the house knew you don't sit in Mom's thinking chair. It was my space. And I think we lose sight because we do get so much with— we get so much, um, worth from doing everything for everybody else. We even get worth from having a bestselling book or having an amazing podcast. But if you actually isolate yourself, you're forced to find your own worth.

Mm.

Beautiful. And that I think is, women are desperately needing.

And it can be simple. Thanks for sharing that story. Yeah. Last year I did not do one yoga class, which is a big deal for me. I grew up with that. And, uh, January, just a couple weeks ago, I went to my first yoga class and I got to the mat and I, I literally just laid down and started crying. It was the exact release that I needed. So I share that to say, whatever our listeners are listening or taking from this, what's the one thing in your life that gives you that sense of release or ease or exhale? It could be that simple, and it's going to be different for all of us, so honor it.

So one of the things I've thought a lot about is because if women just every day was like, I'm just going to do the things that bring me joy, and we prioritize joy over what do I have to do today, women's health would change, autoimmune conditions would change, gut health would change. If all women did is say, I'm going to places of joy. But what we do is we're like, what are my responsibilities today? Who needs me? And we have to unhook ourselves from that, that juice. Because, and we have to acknowledge that we sort of set that up because we feel good if we help people. But I'll tell you what feels amazing is when you are, have found that you can help yourself.

Not my to-do list and then seek joy. Seek joy first and optimize your health first.

That's right. And I now, like, after a year of doing this, I now can sense like full transparency, um, when I flew down here today, as I was landing in the Burbank airport, I was like, I felt like a panic attack was going to come on. And then I just, because I was able to have this past year experience of getting to know myself, I went into self-inquiry and I was like, okay, you've had this feeling before, it came around the fire, so what are you feeling? And I just talked to my body. And my body was like, this feels very reminiscent of last year when you had to leave. Okay, I'm seeing my childhood friend, my best friend from my childhood today, and I was like, we're going to talk about our neighborhood that burned, we're going to talk about our aging parents. And I was like, I'm having anxiety about that. Again, full transparency, I was like, I'm gonna go see Mona and I'm feeling so sad that our friendship had to change because we weren't in the same town anymore. It like, and then, but I only had that ability to do that because I had isolated myself and got to know my own feelings outside of everybody around me.

And speaking from the wisdom of just having the trust and doing that now, right? Yeah. Like, I really hope our listeners today are taking this as doctrine, right? The things that you are recommending is completely changing the trajectory of how we can see aging and hormonal shifts. Give us a picture of how you describe this awakening of menopause.

Yeah, you know, I'm going to— you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to put it through the lens of a really interesting conversation I had with Darren Olien. So Darren brings me on his podcast and he says to me, I'm kind of a dude and I don't really— I had to ask the women on my— in my— on my team what to ask you. And then we get— I appreciate his honesty. Then we get in the conversation. He says, you know what, I'm going to tell this through the— I, I'm starting to look at my aging mother different by what you're saying. And he goes, what I realize is that she did everything for all of us, and that what I'm hearing from your words right now is now she gets to do it for her. And that is what menopause is. Menopause is the moment that you're like, I did everything for everybody else, and now I'm doing it for me. That— it's like a metabolic switch. It's like parasympathetic, sympathetic. You go from being the one that is holding the space for everybody else to being the one that gets to do everything every single day on your terms. Don't fall asleep to that. If you put all— if all of a sudden you're putting all these lotions and potions and patches and you're taking antidepressants, then you are missing the opportunity to become a different version of yourself. And I think we have to think about— it's uncomfortable. What I went through last year, incredibly uncomfortable. But who I sit as today, I am so in love with myself. I love who I am now more than I did a year ago. And that's because I did go into the self-inquiry. So that's what, you know, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, she calls it the life life-death-life cycle. You lived a life and now that life gets to change. It dies. The parts of you that you want to, to die get to die. Mm-hmm. And you get to create a new life. That's menopause. It's not that you didn't get the right doctor in the right patch. It's that you are going through a transformation and every transformation is bumpy. So let's get to know it. And experience it so that you can be, for the rest of your life, you get to be the person that you wanna be.

It's such a beautiful reframe because I'm really sick and tired of the narrative of, "Buckle up." Yeah. "Here's what's coming for you." And even the men, the great men who wanna hold space and be supportive, like, "Okay, I don't know what she's getting into, but I'm here for it." And it's like this, it feels detrimental and scary and awful. And what I'm feeling, and maybe this will land with some people, is in those moments of hardship or shift or change or something not working or hormones shifting, is like, what if this was just remembering? Like in all these years that I've been trying to repress and be and do and achieve and do more and all these things, I can now finally remember who I am and why I'm here.

Exactly. So it's so funny because we called the book "Age Like a Girl" because it fit into the "like a girl," But as I've been out talking about it, you're going back to who you were before the world told you who you should be. You got it. So you're going back to the essence. Now, I know everybody wasn't born into a happy environment, but there is an essence of who we were as little girls until we grew up and were told who we should be. And what you're doing as you age and you go through this is you're remembering, to your point, who you used to be, and you get to, to go back and be her now.

Absolutely. And what would you say then? You know, grief, I think, is something— it's a topic that's not even discussed when it comes to hormonal shifts. But should we be acknowledging grief through this transition? Yes.

Yeah.

Are we not talking about it because, you know, it means that we're not strong women if we're not acknowledging our grief?

It's— grief is a really interesting one. I'm super happy you brought this up because I didn't really understand grief until last year. And I really got into Francis Weller's work and Anderson Cooper's doing some cool things on grief. And I realized that I didn't have a relationship with grief, right? I didn't sit to feel the ending of something and what that, like, from everything from my kids growing up to my house, you know, changing neighborhoods to my aging parents, like there's grief with all of that. And so a friend of mine who actually studied under Francis Weller, said to me, you know what, Mindy, you should make a date with grief every day. Try this. It, you, it might work. You might— I can see it, you, you liking this. So what I did is I put on an album that had a grief song in it, and every morning last year for the first 6 months, I would listen to this grief song and I would cry. And I— but what was helpful for me is I allowed my brain to go every place. I'm crying because my kids are grown up. I'm crying because I can't produce the same way I used to be able to produce because I don't have the desire to. I'm crying because of my childhood neighborhood burning, whatever. I literally let myself just feel. The song was about 5 minutes and then I moved on. But I I think we are not giving ourselves permission to appear weak in any way, shape, or form as women because the culture doesn't like weak, weak women. The culture doesn't like angry women. The culture likes a woman who plays by the rules. So we've learned to play by the rules, but there's a lot of grieving that we as women need to do.

We have to get over and move on, right? And be strong. And if I'm suffering so badly, why do I want to feel Worse, right? Instead of understanding— this goes back to nervous system regulation, right? Like, if we actually come from societies where we were taught to, to feel and hold space, and ancestral-wise, if we were in villages together as women, yeah, I just think that we would be holding space for each other. I feel like I would be the woman with the teas.

Yeah. Oh my God, you were telling me that. Yeah. Um, it— you know what's You know what's really interesting? So in the book, one of my favorite parts is I studied the symbolism of the lime tree. So do you know the singer Trevor Hall? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he has a song called "The Lime Tree" and it's really catchy. And one day when I was living in the Palisades, I was driving through town and I was listening to this song and the words are, "There you are, I found you there. You were there all along in the lime tree." And I'm like, who is— is this a love song? What is this? So I went and looked up the lime tree. Back in Europe, back in the medieval days, they would use the lime tree as a gathering place for women to go, aging women specifically, to go and to cry and to heal and to nurture together. And everybody in the town knew that if a woman woman was having a problem, she went to the lime tree and gathered with other women. It was a safe space. And I put in there the thought of like, how do we create lime trees now?

Yeah, beautiful concept.

And how do we do it when we don't live in the same town? Like, we need to create a metaphorical lime tree for women.

Even communing with other women. I've been to a handful of women's circles here in LA, and there's a difference. You can see that some women will bitch and complain where other people will truly feel and release, and the difference in the energy between women— a woman knowing how to hold space.

Yeah.

But I think you're on to something with this grief, kind of our grief mourning. Yeah. If we could lean into that as part of our healing protocol, I think that that would not only bring a tremendous sense of relief but also regulate our nervous system and the cascade of kind of impulse on the body to be able to really— excuse me, relegate the impact on the body to regulate all over again.

Yes. Well, and that's that going back to the polyvagal is if you don't grieve, there's a couple of things that happen. One, you get stuck in freeze mode. That's how you, you stay over in that nervous system. The second thing is how many women are walking around with so much resentment? Like if you push sadness and anger down, that it just oozes out as resentment all over the place. So that's not good. You wanna experience it. And I know a lot of friends that I have are big journalers. I don't know if you're a big journaler.

No, but in my community we're doing like 100 things that we're journaling. Okay. To be grateful for every day. Amazing. But we're doing that because I also don't enjoy journaling. It feels like dear diary for me.

Yeah. I don't know why I don't love it. I like to write, but I don't like to journal.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's an interesting practice, right? Yeah. For us, we're bringing to mind gratitude and to think about, okay, if I don't wanna focus on negativity, then where's the gratitude in my life, right?

So go try, you should do a grief challenge. Definitely. Like a 5-minute, and what's interesting for me is that I literally cried like primal cries. And then 6 months later, one morning I listened to this song and like nothing came, no tears. And then the next morning, no tears. And then the next morning, no tears. And I was like, I think I've processed this. Wow. So, so there is something about acknowledging these other parts of us that we've turned away from. Yeah. And how cathartic that can be if you just dip in. You don't have to be there all the time, but if you dip in 5 minutes every day, you feel it. And now you come back to center. That's how we get ourselves out of freeze. That's how we regulate.

Regulate. And I believe you. I believe that no healing protocol out there will work unless you have a regulated nervous system.

Hard stop.

Yeah.

Yeah. You know, I've been thinking about, um, you know, the, the, the phrase, uh, you can't heal a body you hate. I'm like, we need to go one step further and say, and you can't love a body you don't understand. Oh, that's good. So to tell a woman, you got to heal your body because you need to, you know, you can't hate your body because you need to heal it. But she's like, but this thing I carried around with me has betrayed me over and over and over again. So what if you understand what it's doing?

Oh, that's good. Because we're also only in the era where most women are even understanding their hormones or understanding their biology. Right. We've never had an understanding of it before.

That's right.

It was always about fixing.

Yeah. Well, why do you think— how many times have you been with a friend who's like PMSing and they're like, oh my God, I'm so teary today. My husband's driving me crazy. And, you know, we didn't really fully understand. Yeah, that's because you're going into a new hormonal phase and maybe it's time for you to slow down. So everything's irritating you. Like, it's that simple.

Ever. All right, let's shift a little bit. I want to pull on your beautiful brain for our listeners who may be part of that scientific community who just— they want the data, they want deeper understanding. All right. So there's a difference between listening to your body and then becoming obsessed with, let's call it, biomarkers and things like that. I think we live in a world right now where we're being told to track everything— track your sleep, track your HRV, track your glucose, track your fasting windows to see what's going to make you feel better. How would you say, for people who are trying to understand their blueprint, where's the science between understanding, like, the intuition of the body versus all this data that we're being forced to look at?

Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, such a good question. Um, you know, I gave up my Oura Ring because— not Because I know I'm like, look at my fingers. I know, right? I'm like, well, for starters, I was bummed because it took up a whole finger and I have all these rings.

I'm like, it took me a month to get off it. I kept like a nervous twitch going to twist.

Oh really? Fascinating. Yeah. But I would play this game with myself where I would get up in the morning and I'd be like, oh, I think that was a good night's sleep. And then I would look at my Oura ring and I'm like, duh, what do you mean I didn't get enough deep sleep and REM sleep? That's not how much. And I found that I was arguing with it. It. And then I was like, I'm not letting this thing tell me anymore if I got a good night's sleep. So I think the tools are interesting, um, and I think they should be temporary. So for example, a big tool I'm a fan of is the CGM, continuous glucose monitor. Everybody should put one on, but put one on and eat all your favorite foods, including the ones you know aren't healthy. Don't put it on and try to have a good healthy, uh, appetite, like just eat and watch what it's doing for you. You only need to do that like once, and then you'll start to get into the rhythm of what that feels like. So I think we need to look at the tools as temporary, and we need to look at them as insights that help us start to discover our own intuitive rhythm, not as something that's wagging its finger at us telling us, oh, you did it wrong.

On, or another aspect of hypervigilance of something, an area that you could be better or perform better or be like someone else.

So, and so something interesting in Age Like a Girl, I was like, I am not putting any macros in this book. I want to look at what's the best diet for the postmenopausal woman. And so I did that and I put it in there, and there are no grams of carbs or protein. I mean, I talk about protein, but I really wanted women to stop obsessing because I'm sure you get this as well. I would get people on like lives on my YouTube channel that would ask me a question of like, is this food or that food better for me? I'm like, well, what do you think? How do you feel afterwards when you eat? Yeah. And I saw— so they're really lovely, these little measurement tools, but use them in combination with your intuition. Kind of like I was doing with my sleep. And don't, don't let them dictate if you're good or bad.

What is the glucose monitor that you love?

I know. Yeah, I'm— you know what's interesting is that we started with Nutrisense, and then we went to Levels, and then you can buy them at Walmart now. People can get them on it, you know, on Amazon. Like, they're sort of all over the place. So I think the best one is the one that you can use and understand.

I agree. Let's take that deeper. And with glucose monitors as well, like when I work with someone on nutrition, I can get data that allows me to see personalization for nutrition. Oh yeah, this person's good with purple potato but not sweet potato, with quinoa and not white rice, or white rice and not brown rice. Like it can— you can literally get that detailed. Yeah, on figuring out the foods or uncovering what you should be eating. But I think the bigger picture for this that is your area of expertise is how your glucose levels can actually impact your hormones, your energy, your mood, everything. And it's actually something that's quite ancestral also, because all of our ancestors did fast. Yeah. So one of the questions that came up from my community this morning is, I can't do it, I have such a hard time fasting, it feels impossible. Or people who used to be able to fast a little bit longer or go without a meal they can kind of skip breakfast, but doing a 48 or 72-hour protocol feels really challenging. So let's tap into one, the benefits, obviously, just for, for new people coming to the conversation, make the connection between proper metabolic function with hormones, um, and why this is something that we need to think about optimizing moving into perimenopause and menopause.

Yeah, and then also let's— let me give some of those people some interesting thought too, because, because, yeah, anyways, because you shouldn't be fasting like men. Yeah, exactly. So, um, the— I think the hormonal hierarchy really helps when people understand that your hormones work in a hierarchy, and at the bottom are sex hormones. So above sex hormones is insulin. So if you go insulin resistant, you're going to end up with an imbalanced sex hormone issue. Uh, PCOS is a great example of of this. If once you're insulin resistant though, the thing that controls insulin is cortisol. So if you're stressed out, and we see this all the time, so the people who are struggling to fast, the first thing I wanna know is what are your stress levels? Because if you're go, go, go, go, go, stress, stress, stress, stress, stress, what's gonna happen is if cortisol is high, insulin's hard to manage and fasting will be difficult. And then above that, above cortisol is oxytocin. Oxytocin. So if we're not prioritizing joy, if we're not prioritizing healthy connections, we're not getting enough oxytocin, then we're not bringing cortisol down. So, and if cortisol doesn't come down, then insulin is gonna be mismanaged and your sex hormones will be difficult. So understand that first. Okay, second thing, I put in Fast Like a Girl 6 different length fasts and they were meant to be tools. So some women, I do really well with a 15, 17-hour fast. The greatest study I ever saw on fasting was actually done on 13 hours, and it was done on breast cancer. And it was a group of women that went into traditional breast cancer treatment. If they fasted for 13 hours every single day coming out of that treatment, they had a 64% less recurrence rate occurrence of breast cancer than women that didn't fast. That was a 13-hour fast. Everybody can do 13 hours. So for these women that are struggling, your goal may not be 48 hours. Like, it— that might not be the right tool for you. If cortisol is really high, those longer fasts may not be okay for you, and that's just fine. Yeah. So I think we have to individualize this and understand that smaller fasts can be as effective when done fairly regularly as the longer ones.

But I think there's also an opportunity to say— I mean, this is why everyone knows you, right? You really brought fasting to the table for women in a way to do it that was really healthy. And you've obviously looked at all the science and the data. And I really want to hover on this for a second because I think as we're trying to disconnect from this world of what I should be doing fasting really is the most simple opportunity to kind of press the reset button. Yep. On your body.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, you'll feel it if you've ever fasted. Yeah, people in your community, myself included, when we do that 72-hour fast, there's something that happens. And I have to say, because of you also, you've put the lens on fasting that shifts you from something that's very mechanical and masculine into something that is a spiritual journey. So can you talk to us about that wisdom that comes with fasting and what can expect if we kind of like pull up the lid and see what was happening inside?

Yeah, so the first thing to know is the longer you fast, the more your body will make ketones, and ketones drive a whole array of neurotransmitters. So for the science buffs out there, just know that the ketone is the hero of the fasting journey, because when you make a ketone, you're also making GABA that calms you, you're making dopamine that motivates you, serotonin that makes you happy, BDNF that helps your brain come online. So there's a real interesting place that you neurochemically go that you can't get all of those at once with other lifestyle tools. That being said, what I find, and I'm curious if you've noticed this, is that when you first get into a fast, depending on everybody, the point will be different. The brain is like, like, why are we doing this? When we decide I can't do this, all those limiting beliefs come up. So the women that are like, "I know I should fast, but I can't fast," I wanna stop them at the mind chatter phase and go, "Tell me what your mind is saying." And then once you understand what your mind is saying, then the question is, did you put that there or did somebody else put that there? Ooh, that's good. So really it's an opportunity to see what holds you back from a positive relationship with food or a positive relationship with your body. Body. So does that, has that happened for you?

No, but you just made me think of something. So you and I talk often about the intelligence of the body. What if that was the ultimate aha moment where you realize that your mind's been getting in the way the entire time? Right. All of those thoughts that come up, right? The power is in your mind instead of in the wisdom of your, of your body.

Yeah. Well, so I had this, the first 24-hour fast I did, cuz before I wrote Fast Like a Girl, I experimented with all these. Yeah. And I remember I was about 18, 19 hours in. In and all of a sudden I could hear my mother's voice. Oh, wow. And it was like, honey, you're not feeling well. You should eat. If you don't eat enough protein, you're going to pass out. You're not going to be okay. You won't have enough energy. And all of a sudden I could just hear all the food messaging that she gave me. And I was like, oh, wow. Okay, do I want to believe that or do I not want to believe that? Wow. So it— I don't know another way to get a mirror to your relationship to your body and food like fasting can give you. Now, the other piece I want to talk about with the spiritual, because this one has been so important to me— I go into 3-day water fasts at least once a year, sometimes twice, and I usually go in with a very clear intention of what I, I want inspiration from. Because as you go longer down the fast, what happens is that hypervigilant thoughts, they actually stop. Yeah. And all of a sudden you're like, a thought comes in and then there's space, and then there's a thought and then there's space. It's really beautiful. So I started asking myself questions, and I'll never forget this one fast. It was when my daughter was in college. I was really concerned about her. She was hanging around the wrong people, she was not doing well in school, and my husband and I were really trying to decide, do we need to go with a, like, moving truck and, like, show up at her apartment and say, get your stuff in, we need to take you home? And I, I decided I didn't have clarity on that because that's kind of a big, bold move. And so I went into a fast, and on the third day, I was sitting in meditation with the thoughts very slow, with the neurochemical experience of just feeling very calm, and I was like, what do I do? What do I do? And I heard this thought, and it was, she's gonna be okay, let her figure it out on her own.

Your intuition woke up.

And do you know that the next day after the fast, she called and said, can I come home? Wow. So that's why I do the longer fasts. It is the greatest downloads. You get the greatest downloads, you get the greatest inspiration.

I'm with you. So all my clients, I like since I met you, I've sent them to your academy to be part of this because it's guided. And I know your level of training, that the coaches really hold space for that to really describe. And we're hovering on this for our listeners just to know, if you're looking at how to heal the body, really any dysfunction within the body, fasting really needs to be the place to start.

And so much— like, I sat with a guy who had been fasting for 200 days. Oh my gosh, it was crazy when I first learned fasting. And I— and you should hear the number of things that he it's like at some point when we can't figure it out, let the body figure it out.

Let the body figure it out. And if you have any hesitation, this is a time to work with a practitioner one-on-one. And yeah, for me, the thoughts that came up day 1, day 2 were, you can't do this, you don't have to do it, you're not safe, you're not safe, just go and eat, just go and eat. So what is that? It's safety. I needed to recognize that my body, my nervous system did not feel safe. By recognizing that and sitting with that, by day 3, you'll feel your acuity turns on, your intuition turns on, turns on. You can see precision in the leaves and in the trees outside. There's a sense of ease. My exhales were longer naturally because my system shifted. So all this to say, yes, fasting is, is where to begin. Um, when we're thinking about that hormonal hierarchy then that you mentioned, we put so much emphasis on, on cortisol in today's world. I think cortisol for many of us, especially looking into this year, is going to continue to be this epidemic? Yeah. Is cortisol the hierarchy? Um, are we looking at HbA1c first? What are we looking at? Like, if we're going to go get our biomarkers checked when we're thinking about optimizing this journey, what do you want to see with the people that you work with?

Oh, A1c is the first because everything else goes around that. Metabolic health is such a pivotal part of our bodies that if we don't have that mastered, we can't master master the nervous system. We can't master the endocrine system. Like, it's really difficult. It's such a powerful system. Immune system. I know you and I talked about how during the pandemic it was like only 15% of Americans were metabolically healthy. Well, that's why we had it. We had it. We had a metabolic problem. We didn't have a viral problem. So I do think we have to— if every 40-year-old could just dedicate, or anybody going into their 40s, just that one marker, hemoglobin A1C, get it as close to 5 as possible, you will see these other things start to shift. I think we've overcomplicated all the biomarkers. So I, I don't know where you sit on this because we haven't talked recently, but, um, there's so much you could do in the functional health world. There's so many tests you could take. And I've gone back to a place where I just put a CGM on for 2 weeks, maybe a month, and understand your metabolic system, and you are not gonna need all the other tests.

I'm actually moving away from doing the boatloads of functional medicine testing. Maybe it's from experience now, like 15 years of doing this. But I think that when I get the foundations right with the people that I'm working with, everything else kind of goes away. I would say that doing all these testings and biomarker testing and lab findings and stuff like that, they're often an entry point for people. I understand my biology. It gives them the commitment to go ahead with some sort of a protocol. Yeah. But then with those people, the people who've stuck with me longest, that prescriptive protocol often turns into a spiritual journey. I think everyone's healing must turn into a spiritual journey in order for it to be long-lasting. Yeah. And to really feel the impact of, of wellness, because I think that we've overcomplicated what it means to be healthy in today's world. And I think that when we can lean into just like trusting our bodies, then we know we're going to age well. And a lot of that you put into Age a girl. Like, a lot of the, the practices that you put in here, just knowing you, they're holistic. You will always go to natural ways to look at nature to heal the body first before we get prescriptive about it. Yeah. And this is what I think the world needs right now.

Yeah. I was thinking as you were talking, you can't— you can't— there's no measurement for a spiritual journey. Like, you have to go into intuition for that spiritual journey. Body to go to, to work. And, um, I think this is one thing that I've been working on in my own health recently, which is allowing my body to express itself. Like I mentioned today, when I felt this panic come on, I was like, okay, body, talk to me. And what I realize is that we're often thinking that the mind controls the body, but if you actually dive into the current research, that, you know, when you look at even just the neurons in the heart It's like, no, it works both ways. The body is informing the mind. So if we're always letting the lab work tell us what to do, it's like, are we going into relationship with the clues and the cues of the body? You're seeing what the body was giving a reading of for one moment as the blood was being drawn or the stool test was being taken. You're a snapshot as opposed to doing just self-inquiry. We just did, um, we did a big fast for the new year. We had 100,000 people. We, we love doing this. And one of my recommendations to people was when they brought food back in, I'm like, I'm not a fan of a food allergy test. What I'm a fan of is you eat something and you sit, you, you ask yourself, am I Am I more mentally clear? Am I happy after that meal? If the answer is no, you need to go back and look at what you ate because it's possible that you put the wrong combination together. You, you ate food that wasn't right for you, but your symptoms will tell you where to go.

And the state in which you ate. Yeah.

Right. Absolutely.

And that too, for sure. Yeah. And I think right now too, we can have our own hormones just for a hot minute. Um, we're putting more and more into our bodies. And if you're putting more and more into your body with dysregulation, what is the impact, right? Are we really waking— awakening the body's intelligence to heal, or are we impeding it? And when it comes to hormones too, and you and I have talked about this also, what's the long-term impact? And if women are being given this cookie-cutter ratio, I know there's no one out there that looks like me who's talking about hormones. Right. Right. I was just in Dubai looking at an audience of women who all look different, mostly with darker skin complexions. There's no one out there talking about us. Right. But whether it's skin color or not, we all come from different backgrounds. Yes. And yet we're cookie cutter. We're cookie cutting this prescriptive measurement now for women when we still don't have the science or the data or the—

Yes. Yeah. I mean, there's so much in that, you know, So it's like where my brain went with the Dubai audience is like, we also don't even— we're just beginning to understand the impact of generational trauma and emotional inheritance. Like, it's— there's— we have to get out of this idea that somehow we're just a body of parts and you can measure us and you can manipulate us. I think that's what we're getting at here is that does it— we're way too sophisticated sophisticated. We are— the female body is so sophisticated that it cannot be manipulated. It can't be hacked. It's hard to even measure us. What we are being called to do is go into intuition and have a relationship with our body.

You know what's turned me on the most out of anything that I've read lately is I was reading your fascia, the fascia in your body, the fascia and the mitochondria are the Wi-Fi of the body. And if we trust in that and listen to that, then we turn on the body's intelligence to heal.

Yeah. Well, you know, the fascia— God, you could geek out on the fascia. The fascia is like a web that's as intricate as the nervous system. Yeah. So, and it's— and it— I mean, it is innervated by lymph and nerves, and supposedly it holds emotion. Ligaments, and it's like this protective covering right underneath the skin that connects all of us. And it's really interesting. That's a, that's a whole podcast. You need to bring a fascia expert on.

Exactly. We'll do that next.

We'll tie it to hormones. Yeah, exactly. We haven't did the fascia hormone connection. Who's, who's figured that one out?

Absolutely. Yeah. Next, Mindy, what would you say to the listeners who are hearing everything that you are saying? And you've awakened a part of their intuition to really trust and lean into this, but they're struggling. What's your message for them?

Really get to know yourself, because I believe that the struggle sometimes happens when we're out of congruency with ourself. So something I did this year that I think really helped is when I spent time by myself is I literally kept asking myself, myself. Every single action I took every single day, I was like, am I doing this for me, or did somebody else tell me to do this? So it's as simple as, when do I want to eat? Do I like eating breakfast, or do I not like eating breakfast? When do I want my eating window? When do I want my fasting window? I found a great yoga studio by my— by the Airbnb I was at. I'm like, do I like going to night yoga, or do I like going to day yoga. Um, I started looking at like even something, because I was living by myself, I was like, do I, do I really care if the dishes are dirty, or do I feel like I need to keep them clean because that's what's right for the fam? Like, I went into every single inquiry that I could about my own behavior. So for women that are suffering, I just want to say that I think the suffering happens because we've been outsourcing our emotional health. And if we actually start to go inward and get to know ourselves and start doing this inquiry, like at every— like I went to what I was wearing. Why do I wear those clothes? Do I like wearing those clothes? Do I wear those clothes because my mother told me I should wear those clothes? Like really get to know yourself and you will start to see how much of who you are was conditioned by other people. And so the suffering is happening because you're still trying to hold a standard of those other people. I, I, and I've been doing this so much, it's so fun. I have to share this story because I had a big moment, went on the Today Show for to celebrate this book. We had a glam team come and they did my hair and makeup. And when I came home, my 89-year-old dad says to me, you didn't even look like yourself on the Today Show. And I have a whole long history of my dad telling me what I should look look like. And I stopped him and I said, you know what, Dad? I actually don't care what you thought I looked like on the Today Show. I had a total blast. A glam team showed up. I've never had a glam team, and I enjoyed the experience of it. Your opinion about how I looked on the Today Show doesn't matter to me. And that's where I want all women to get to. So when we're suffering ask yourself, am I suffering because I'm trying to live to a standard that I didn't even set?

It's so simple but so profound. And I love all the personal stories that you're sharing also, because unfortunately a lot of people out there, they still have the trust in the white lab coat, and that white lab coat is looking at them and saying, well, this is part of getting older, this is normal, your symptoms It's just this, this is what it is. Instead of the wisdom, as we've kind of nailed in today, that we need to be seeking.

I have lots of thoughts on the white coat.

Oh, me too. Down to my career. It's like me having to prove myself to people with a white lab coat instead of trusting my journey, my voice, who I am.

And can I, can I say something on this? Because this was a big part of my new sub— of what I'm putting out on my Substack around critical thinking. Um, I mean, I was in practice for 25 years, and when I— and I was 26 years old when I went into practice, and we were doing lifestyle and functional health before that was even a term. And so patients would come in with all these chronic problems, and I would create these beautiful care plans that was holistic like we're talking about. And these women would look at me and they'd be like, this is incredible, I'm just gonna go ask my doctor what he thinks. And I never saw them again. This was in the late 1990s, early 2000s. And then something happened, and it's called the internet. And all of a sudden, everybody could Google their symptoms, and they started to understand their, their health almost better than their doctor. And so they would go into the white coat and they would say, I've got X, Y, and Z problem. And the white coat would say, well, you need an antidepressant, you this. And now these women went from, I need to ask my doctor what to do, to be able to— a place of like, what they literally would come in and say, whatever you do, don't— I don't want to go back to my doctor's office. Okay, now fast forward to social media. Social media, the number one place that people get health information from right now is social media. But social media was never designed to be your doctor. And so now we're seeing a mad resurgence of the white coat. We're seeing a mad control of power by medical doctors. They don't want to lose that power because patients are getting information in all kinds of random places.

You, you follow me? Absolutely. Yeah. And people are taking this data to their doctors. Like, it's frightening, but the era of that doctor is going to die. And this isn't to say go look up your medical results. Like, everyone's taking their function adds to ChatGPT now. It doesn't know who you are, so don't trust all the advice that you get there. But what I, what I love about it— and I actually launched a Mona AI digital platform, which I'll tell you more about— but the intention behind that is to finally have a space for you to go be inquisitive, but also build out a care team of people where you can access research on your endocrine system, on sleep, on gut microbiome, and stuff like that. Like, that's— it is the future. Yeah. But yeah, when I see videos right now with the white lab coat on to point. She's like, okay, you're someone of authority that I should trust.

I'm like, well, I think, I think we're seeing culturally right now a dying of an old paradigm in many ways. And you know, when you've heard of the extinction bubble, yes, when like something dies, it rears its ugly head. Um, but I think for the people listening, like, what I want women specifically is to become your own best doctor. As you say, you are your own, you are the healer. So stop giving your power away to somebody because our culture has said, if I put a white coat on and a stethoscope around my neck and I have MD after it, then I'm the authority. The only person that's the authority on your health is you. So stop outsourcing it. And that's the era we're in. But then that gets scary because they're like, well, what do I do? And I got to go to AI. I'm going from guru to guru. But this is why conversations things like this is like, trust yourself, get to know the cues your body's giving. You can learn from a lot of different people and learn what your path looks like, not the one that is prescribed for you.

Absolutely. I love you so much for whatever gift our paths cross. And you opened up this, this world to me of just trusting and gosh, just the courage to kind of go deep into seeking other women like you who could have a voice. And show up in the world so powerfully. Yeah, we're going to link all of your resources out in the show notes. Something that I do whenever Dr. Mindy's books come out is I buy one for myself, my family, and for my friends. And Age Like a Girl is one of the books that I think that we all need right now in a world that feels really, really loud and overwhelming. You've brought so much truth and wisdom and simplification into a process that feels really overwhelming and complicated. So with that said, can you tell me something that you are most excited about in the world of, uh, can you tell me something that you're most excited about in the world of wellness?

In the world of wellness, um, like, well, I'm, I'm not sure I'm up to speed on all the trends right now, um, but I am seeing a trend of people really starting to look at lifestyle. Like, even if we just look— I mean, we talked about the white coat, but if I compare to 30 years go, it's like people are starting to understand nutrition matters. People are understanding they need to move their body. Like, these are conversations that 30 years ago, like, exercise was optional. Most people know now you got to exercise. So I think of the accountability. I'm excited to watch people take self-accountability and understand that you control how you feel in your health.

Oh, that's good. And for our listeners, if they were to wake up tomorrow morning remembering one thing from this podcast, from, from from your messaging, what's one thing that they can start doing tomorrow morning?

Start going into the self-inquiry. Get to know yourself. Start asking yourself questions. Get a relationship with your body. Just like I did on the plane. You're having a panic attack. Okay, body, what are you telling me? You have pain. Okay, body, what do you need? You have brain fog. Okay, body, what do you need? Just start going into your body and get a relationship and your body will speak to you.

I'm gonna try the grief warning, man. Terrified, but I'm gonna do it.

Good.

Feels so good. I believe you. I trust you. I'll give you my song. Thank you. All right, um, Dr. Mindy Peltz, thank you so much. Thank you for showing us, for showcasing, for doing the research, and also just living through and sharing the fact that aging like a girl means being in relationship with yourself and your body. What a beautiful concept.

Thank you. Appreciate you. I love you.