Fast Like A Girl and Put Your Diagnosis Behind You

Introduction to Dr. Mindy Pelz 0:00

Okay. So Be prepared to have your mind blown. I have one of my all time heroes. I am actually a little star struck. I told her I told her before we came on today that I've been, like, giddy, like a schoolgirl all day in anticipation of getting to spend some time with this brilliant, brilliant woman. If you do not know Dr. Mindy Pelz, you need to know Dr. Mindy Pelz and what she has to say. She is a renowned, holistic health expert and one of the leading voices in educating women about their bodies, about their health.

And she is on a mission to start a women's health revolution. And I am right there with you. I would be one of your foot soldiers any day. Love it. Let's do it. I love. It. So for my breast cancer patients and actually for every one of my patients, because no one comes to me because things are great. Like people come to me because things are way, way, way off. Most of my patients have breast cancer. So like, you know, their horse is out of the barn. And one of the first things that I have them do is read your book Fast Like a Girl, and talk about getting them on a fasting routine.

So we start with the basics. I want to talk about why you wrote Fast Like a Girl. And I want to talk about the benefits of fasting and why it was so important to you to get that message out there. It's such a great question and make sure that I also highlight what fasting and breast cancer, the studies on that, because it's very, very profound. Sure. For sure. So so here's here's a really interesting lens in which to look at this conversation.

Why Fast Like a Girl Was Written 2:04

I was started to learn the science behind fasting, and I was using it with my patients and seeing results that I could not get with nutrition alone. And that intrigued me. So I started to learn more and more about, well, what's going on in the fasted state. And at the time, I don't know if you remember or you are familiar with the Japanese scientist, Dr. Yoshinori Ohsumi, but he was one. He was really the one that what became famous for a term called autophagy. And autophagy is this concept that when our cells don't detect glucose going up or nutrients going up, they actually go into an accelerated healing state.

So I became enamored with this work along with some other giants out there like Jason Fung and, you know, Sachin Patel like there are people like out there that are really have like profound teachings around Valter Longo around the concepts of fasting. And so I started to apply them in my clinic and then I saw such great results that I started to teach it online. And so I specifically YouTube. I brought my teachings to YouTube. I wanted to show people, Hey, you are more powerful than you've been taught.

We've never been taught to go without food. Let me tell you what happens when you go out without food. And all of a sudden my YouTube channel just took off and it literally overnight went from like 3000 subscribers to 50,000 subscribers in like 30 days. And I started to see over the course of that first year when YouTube took off, I started to see there were very clear differences in the way that women responded to fasting compared to men. The men would fast and they would get all the benefits that we saw in the research.

They'd lose weight. Their mental clarity went off. They were like became superhuman. But the women, it wasn't that clear. We didn't lose weight as fast. A lot of women kept fasting longer and all of a sudden their hair was falling out. Some women started gaining weight and so I took these over a course of several years now, took millions of these stories from women. And we started to see patterns and started to figure out how do we take amazing tool like fasting and map it to a woman's menstrual cycle?

And that's really where Fast Like A Girl was born that this there needed with the intermittent fasting craze the way it is there needed to be a woman's way that we had. And then in teaching that woman's way, I realized, oh, my gosh, everything thing in health needs to be a woman's way. And we just I don't write like, why have we not taught this? Why did it take till 2023 for us to have this conversation? Yeah. And I mean, even even in the pharmaceutical industry, the vast majority of drugs are trialed on men.

And so we end up taking these drugs that we have no idea what the response is going to be in a woman. Because when women and men are not the same on so many levels, and one of the biggest levels is our livers don't function easy, which is why men can tolerate small amounts of alcohol and women really don't. That's right. Yeah. No. Well, I mean, on that topic, your liver breaks estrogen down. So if you're not if you're drinking, you're not breaking estrogen down for men. Men actually make testosterone are in the outer cells of the testes and it goes up into the brain and converts into estrogen.

So their liver doesn't have much to do with estrogen production, whereas women it has almost everything to do with it.

Why Fasting Works Differently for Women 5:47

So it's as simple as that. And detoxification. Yes. It's not the same. Right. Right. So which is why a man can you know and we don't we're getting studies now that that chemicals like phthalates are destroying men's testosterone levels. But, you know, phthalates are actually be creating endocrine disruptors for women and they are actually causing, as I'm sure you've educated, more cancer. So it's it's like the same substance, the same lifestyle, the same thing is affecting men and women dramatically different.

So we go into these places where we're like, this is okay for your health. But what we need to. Ask. And be curious about is it okay for a man and not for a woman? And there's so many places in our health care, our lifestyle that we're not asking that question. Yeah, and it's and it's absolutely true that there are so many places where it is okay for a man and not okay for a woman. So I'd like to kind of dial down into the kinds of things that you saw. So why is it that men have such an easy time with fasting and they get these kind of very regular, predictable results?

Yeah. And then women are all over the place. Yeah. And this works for this one, but doesn't work for this one. And this one actually got worse. And but what's happening in women and how do we know. How do we know what to do? So here's the other part of the conversation that's not being had, is that men work off a 24 hour hormonal cycle. And women, whether you're a menopausal or not, you work off a 28 to 30 day hormonal cycle. So let's talk about what those differences are. So the research shows that men get testosterone increases of 1300 percent when they go 15 hours without food.

It can increase to 2,000% if a man goes 24 hours without food. Well, in his 24 hour cycle, he's getting every 15 minutes. He's getting a pulse in of testosterone all day long. Testosterone pulses in and then it stops and then testosterone pulses in and then it stops. So when he starts to fast, he really, really cleans up that whole system. For women, we only get testosterone at one part of our cycle. We get it between day ten and day 15. It's still around a bit, but not to the same degree. When it comes, testosterone comes in in spades during ovulation, which we have to stop and think about.

Okay, well, why is that? You know that, you know, as much as we maybe don't want to acknowledge it, the body is made for the female body is made to reproduce, which we can also chat about why I think that might be leading to more cases of breast cancer, because we're not addressing the fact that the female body is actually made to reproduce. So whether you're going to reproduce or not, you need to live in accordance with that so that the testosterone surge comes in ovulation. Right, to give you that drive.

Yeah. To give you that drive to reproduce. So I want to know what you mean by if you're not going to reproduce, you need to live in accordance with that. So what does that mean? Yes, that's correct. So we have to still honor that we have these hormones. We operate off a 28, 30 day cycle and estrogen comes in in the first ten days. She's an extrovert. She likes to she's a go getter. She's Rosie the Riveter. She's like, I can fricking accomplish anything, which we are so capable of doing. Then we go into ovulation.

We estrogen peaks and test drone shows up. So this is where our motivation, our drive, our libido kicks in. It's also where in the book I called it our manifestation phase because we're highly creative at that time, and then we have a little bit of progesterone to calm us down so that we, you know, don't don't complete that. We're you know, I have a theory that we calm down so that we can handle all the other two hormones that are showing up. And then when you come out of ovulation the week before your period, somewhere around day 20, you are actually progesterone showing up and progesterone just wants you to chill out.

She goes shy when cortisol goes high. She wants you to raise glucose so that she can. She can't. But you can't make progesterone if you're in a fasted state. If you're an akito state. So that week, you've got to lean into more of nature's carbs. You've got to sit your bum down on the couch. You got to say no to more things. You got to take your work out to make them more mellow. So when we look at what it looks like for a woman to live in accordance with their hormones, it's our outgoing push on through is great in the front half of the cycle the week before our period.

We need to rest and recover and that's not happening. So therefore what's happening is women's health is perishing. Everything from PCOS to breast cancer to menopausal symptoms is happening. Because what I just explained to you is not that messages are getting across to women. Now, why do you think that's the case? I mean, why are we just talking about this now? Right. I know this is why I'm like, I'm not I'm not the most the brightest crayon in the box. I'm just I think I think you're one of the greater currents in the box, actually. But.

You know, I was I was I yeah. I was raised by a very strong woman who told me, you're a woman,

Hormones, Cycle Phases, and Fasting Timing 11:16

your voice needs to be heard. And so when you have an opinion, express it. And I'm so grateful that my mom taught me that. And why I don't think it's been talked enough about today. And I'm going to get really, you know, again, take this with love. I want us to have a elevated conversation on the concept. I'm about to say we have been living in a patriarchal world and the patriarchal world tells us to perform. If you want to be in the work room, if you want to be sitting at the same table as men, then you need to perform at the same level that men need to perform at.

And so we've been working really hard to do that, and it's given us great strides. You and I are both benefiting from all the women that have come before us that have have paved that way for us to sit at the table with men. Yeah, but the female body needs to rest more than the male body. We need more softness. That's part of our femininity. That's part of what makes us so unique. So I have this dream that the next version of us, the next to replace that, that we're going to come out of this patriarchal world is in a mixture of the patriarch and the matriarch.

To me, the patriarch is just power. Anything that holds power over you and the matriarch is anything that nurtures you. So our our goals are drives the things we're trying to achieve. They do have a little bit of power over us. We go into this girl mode and that's fine. I'm look at me. I'm writing books. I'm on interviews all day long. Like, I'm I'm a product of the patriarchy. But then I'm also learning how to nurture myself. I'm learning how to soften. And that's what my message to women is, right now is I'm not telling you to slow down all the time.

I'm just telling you to slow down some of the time so you can be that badass you were born to be at the rest rest of the time of your cycle. That's the message that needs to come out. But we've been trying to keep up. And so in keeping up, we really have thought of ourselves as many men, whether we realize it or not. Yeah. And we and we pay the price. I mean, yes, I spent 25 years as a surgeon and, you know, and, you know, I actually, more than anything else, lived like a man because that's what was required of me to live like a man, to behave like a man, because that was a completely male dominated field.

And, you know, during my time as a surgeon, the other women in the part department came and went because it is not a natural fit. Yeah. Just like they were saying. It's not a natural fit. But it doesn't mean I. So I don't know if you saw my interview on The Diary of the CEO last week, but it's the largest podcast in Europe and it was a Stephen Bartlett who interviewed me is a like early 30 year old very successful man. And so we had this beautiful conversation where he really wanted to understand a woman's menstrual cycle.

He wanted understand how to support his wife or his girlfriend. And what I found in discovered in that conversation as as I watching millions of people comment on it, is that it's not a weakness for us to say we need to rest. I really want women to know that it's actually part of the strength that we can now bring to the world, because we have a world that is so hyper vigilant in production that we are killing ourselves, both men and women. And so I believe right now it's going to be the women that are going to stand up and say we need to do the pattern of life differently.

And you're seeing this like New Zealand is coming up with a four day workweek like they are. They're they're working on totally transforming the way that we work. But we've got to learn to soften and rest. And that is not being highlighted enough. And that's our superpower. That's what we can bring. Mm hmm. Absolutely. And and, you know, women can be productive and still and still respect their their physiology and capabilities. And so I don't mean to say that women can't be surgeons and women can't be CEOs.

They can't but they shouldn't do it exactly like a man does it. And we should embrace our uniqueness because we bring something to the table that men can never get right. We bring a unique perspective. We bring a unique skill set. And it's part of that softening that makes us better at some things than men. That's right. It sharpens us. It's art. It's it's how we are able to do what we want to do in this world. And we but. We also see a different perspective. I think we see a broader perspective.

Our hormones make it that way, if you think about it. So like estrogen, the first couple of days of our period, you're actually getting access to both sides of your of your brain as the hormone comes down, crashes down, we start to bleed. There's this this like hand-offs between progesterone and and estrogen. And in that handoff, you're actually getting access, those first couple of days of your period to both sides of your brain. Okay. Men don't get that. Men don't get access to both hemispheres of the brain.

So that does give us a wider perspective. And, you know, estrogen makes us very outgoing, which, you know, testosterone for men is makes them very motivated and driven, and yet progesterone makes us very inner. So we have this ability to go outward and inward and outward and inward in a monthly cycle. If we truly honor that, wow, that's a hell of a superpower that we can really start to nurture. So I think what you're really describing is at different times of our menstrual cycle, we are living physiologically different and and that includes eating and fasting, I'm assuming.

So can you talk to us about what eating and fasting looks like at different phases of the menstrual cycle? Absolutely. So one thing we've got to start to look at in our 24 hour day is that there's a time to eat and there's a time to fast. And in order to get the healing benefits of fasting, you need to go at least more than 8 hours. So without food, you got to let that blood sugar come down. Usually around 12 hours. We see women start to shift or both people start to shift over into this fat burning ketogenic state.

So this idea of eating all day long speeds up our metabolism. Metabolism is completely erroneous. So we need to make sure that we're clear that when we understand fasting, it means that we're compressing our eating window, leaving longer for fast for a fasting period. With that in mind, when you look at the cycle, day one through day ten is when estrogen is building. So not only is estrogen cortisol tolerant, you can stress yourself out in those first ten days and you'll be just fine. But she also wants you to keep glucose and insulin down.

So let's go back to something you said in the beginning, which is PCOS. So one of the biggest things about PCOS is that it's insulin resistance. So, you know, if you're a woman listening to this, I just would ask you on the first ten days of your period, are you bringing your carbohydrate load down? You can, if you like, too fast. You can fast a little longer and fast like a girl. I mapped out six different six different light fats. You can put them in during that time. Then we move into ovulation.

We've got estrogen and her peak, testosterone at her peak, but a little bit of progesterone so we fast times good you can go about 15 to 17 hours you don't want to go longer than that. But really your focus then becomes more food oriented. You have all these hormones, so you've got to break down those hormones. So focus on your liver and your gut. This is where you want to stay off alcohol. This is where you're going to. You're going to want to lean into more probiotic prebiotic and polyphenol foods, more leafy green vegetables, because during that five day window is when you are going to break these hormones down.

Menopause, Softness, and the Rushing Woman 19:48

Then we come out of ovulation day 16 to day 19 and everything crashes again. I called it in the book A Power Phase. You go back to keto, you can go back to hard exercise and go back to more fasting. You can throw a 2436 hour fast. It's one of my favorite for losing weight. So all of those work in that small little window, but it's on day 20 around there that progesterone is going to start to build and progesterone needs glucose to be higher. So this doesn't mean you sit on the couch and you eat a box of pizza and a tub of ice cream.

This means you eat more tropical fruits. That's a big, big nutrients in there for making progesterone eat more chocolate. But this isn't like a Hershey's bar. This is like really good quality, dark chocolate. Like, I always look for something 70% or above. You eat more sweet potatoes, you eat more regular potatoes, more rice, more quinoa like you want to bring your natural carbs up during that time to be able to help progesterone. And you don't fast, long or fast at all because you you don't want to raise cortisol.

And, you know, fasting is like exercise even done in appropriate doses. It will absolutely spike cortisol, which is fine. And the other times of the month, except the week before your period. And then once you bleed, it starts all over again. So in the book I laid out two different styles of eating keto biotic and hormone feasting, and six different lengths fast. And then I showed how to time that to what I just said. And I just do want to stress that anything that anyone here is in the course of this talk, this is not medical advice.

We are just educating you right now. But and we couldn't possibly cover all the immense nuggets of wisdom that are included in in the book. So please, by the book, read the book. Right. So I want to talk about what all of that means when women stop cycling. What, menopause? Yeah. Yeah. So my menopausal women. I just want to give you a big hug. Yeah, we need it. Yeah, right. It's time. It's time to hug us. We sure need it. We are that we are the forgotten population. And we. We. We need to remind everyone that we.

We are here. And we need as much help as anyone else. Amen, sister. And we need. We need to be nurtured like you and have compassion placed upon us, just like you placed compassion upon the teenage girls when they first learned their cycle. We are losing our cycle now and it's the same intense experience. We just aren't giving it enough credit. So what I want women to know about age and I wrote a whole book on it just you just got relaunched. I call it Rebirth today at population. Yeah. Thank you.

I put this book out a couple of years ago during the pandemic and we added a sleep chapter and put it out. It's launched today. It's called the Menopause Reset. And in there I talk about five different lifestyle changes that need to happen after 40. And this is why 40 is so important. 40 is when your ovaries are going to go into retirement. You only have so many eggs left. The brain in the and the ovaries have been communicate for how many years together and they now know it's that it's time to slowly wind down.

But that winding down takes about ten years. This is not like it's going to happen overnight. So in that ten years you are losing estrogen and you are losing progesterone. Now you don't have to lose test astronaut if you if you follow the five things that I recommend. But here's what it looks like. When you lose estrogen, one day, you feel amazing. The next day you feel horrible. I mean, I in my mid-forties oh, my gosh, one day I would have crazy curly hair. And literally the next day was totally straight.

Like in one day, one day it still sometimes happens to me one day like I can feel like my skin feels so moist and then the next day it's like totally dry. So estrogen. Estrogen keeps our hair curly. It keeps our new our skin moist. It's it gives us collagen. It helps us with mental clarity. And so she goes on a bit of a wild ride in the forties and then eventually starts to to plummet where she will continue to decline for the rest of your life. So that that affects our memory. It affects dopamine and serotonin, the two neurotransmitters that she stimulates.

So it has a big effect on us. Then we're also losing progesterone because estrogen was what was releasing the egg. Progesterone is what caused the uterine lining to shed. So progesterone kept us calm. So let's just put that all together. And I want women to understand themselves. After 40, what's happening when these hormones go away as you can't think clearly your your oh estrogen loss also makes us more insulin resistant. We start gaining weight. We get injured more, we try to work out more. We get injured more because our estrogen makes collagen.

And so now you don't have that. We're not happy. And it doesn't it doesn't matter what you do to us. We just don't have estrogen to stimulate dopamine and serotonin. So we're not happy and we can't calm ourselves and we can't hold on to information. That's the menopausal process, process in its natural state. So how do we support women through that? And the first thing is you do these five style lifestyle changes and again, the books are quick read. You can you can devour it in a day. So do the lifestyle changes.

Understand yourself, have compassion for yourself, and make sure that you are explaining to others how you're feeling. It's time for the menopausal women to get vocal and to believe me, I am leading the charge on this. I am working really hard to open the door for all of us so that we can explain that we are suffering. And that's not a weakness. We need to be understood. And so when we look at that, that what the menopausal woman's going through it, it's she also needs more rest. She also needs more recovery.

She needs a lifestyle change. The diet and the lifestyle you had at 35 won't serve you at 45. And I do believe this is a big part of my next book. I really believe that as women going through menopause, we have an opportunity to reinvent ourselves. You have you're losing that nurturing part of you. You're losing your your neurochemical armor. And I got to tell you, I'm in from the post menopausal women I've seen and interacted with like your your badassery is is ready to be shown the new design of you you've given everything to everybody in your life.

And now's the time to give to yourself. So when those moments get difficult, get to know yourself, get curious, find out what needs to be released. Because once you get on the other side of menopause, there's this new version of you that can emerge if you take that time, that menopausal transition, as an opportunity to really reinvent yourself. I couldn't agree more. Can you be a little more specific about what kind of lifestyle changes you're referring to in the post menopausal population? Because I feel like most women just try to do what they were doing before.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. Harder. That's it. That's it. And it just. And it fails miserably. Oh, my God. That's so. Well said. Yes. So what how should we be thinking instead. So that you have to bring back your softness? So this is why you had your softness. If you have children, you had your softness in how you mothered your children. I want you to think of the menopause as you're going to get to know the little toddler version of you. Go back and think about the five year old girl that's in you. How would you nurture her?

That's the nurturing that you need to give yourself during menopause, which it means a lot of things. It means stop talking so harshly to yourself. Like think about this five year old version of you. Would you have spoken to her the way that you speak to yourself when you look in the mirror? So our self-talk is really important. We have to start doing what I call in the book Rushing. So the five things are the fasting, learning to vary your food, learning to address your microbiome, learning to minimize toxins and learning to stop the rushing woman.

The rushing woman is the one that I really want to highlight because that's what's killing us, is that we are not giving ourselves permission to rest. And in that what's happening is that our hormones are destroying and disease is prevailing. So I believe, you know, going back to what you and I talked about this, I really believe that if we taught every women these five steps that we would and cancers specifically hormonal cancers like breast cancer, ovarian cancer, if you look at the imbalance forces that happen with estrogen, which I know there's lots of versions of breast cancer, but in the estrogen driven cancers, progesterone is is the hormone that keeps estrogen in check.

And the only way you ensure you have enough progestin, age

Postmenopausal Eating Patterns and Lunar Cycling 29:38

appropriate progesterone is to slow down progesterone won't show up if you are in a stressed lifestyle. So there's so many ramifications to our health when we don't rest. And that's what the Russian woman chapter was really about. Mm hmm. Yeah. And you also become cortisol dominant, which is really a pro-inflammatory state. Yes. Yes. And so what does the diet look like in the postmenopausal woman and how does that differ from what what and how you're eating in a premenopausal plan? Yes. You know, so the premenopausal, in fact, like a girl I show you how a time diet and everything to your cycle for the postmenopausal women, there's two options you have.

You can do a weekly variation and I've thrown some out there publicly. I talk about and I think actually in the menopause reset, I throw out several weekly variations, but like a good one for a stressed out postmenopausal woman would be like what I call a 4 to 1, like four days a week. You're fasting and going lower carb two days a week, you're not fasting and you are doing a higher carb diet and one day a week you're at actually elongating your fast like one meal a day so that you can clean up the whole estrogen system.

So four days might look like 15 hours of fasting. Two days is no fasting and one day is a longer fasts like 24 and then you're eating higher carb two days of the week and the rest of them are lower carb days. So that would be like you're. When you're talking higher carb, you mean like fruits and and yes. Rice and things. You're not talking about chocolate chip cookies. No, thank you. Nature's carbs. And because they need to have fiber in them. Thank you for saying that. And about 150 net grams. So if you're measuring see and see what 150 net grams gives you.

Now, if you don't want it for the post menopausal women, if they don't want to do a weekly cycle. I've been talking a lot publicly about the lunar cycle for women and we used to, you know, if we did before we had all this blue light, we were much more sensitive to the ebbs and flows of the moon. So we do have some natural rhythm that we can reconnect with which with the lunar cycle. And I just want to point out, the lunar cycle is 28 to 30 days there. If we ever think we're not connected to nature, we just have to look at how the menstrual cycle and the lunar cycle have the same amount of days in them.

So so I. Have a lot of women that will use day one, the new moon day and postmenopausal women. And they'll look at that as day one of what their cycle would have been. And then they follow the protocol that I just explained. Yeah. I mean, before we had calendars, the way that people kept time is by the women. Yeah, right. And their, their cycle was timed with the moon and they knew that that was the new moon. And in, in the Jewish religion it was confirmed that, you know, a certain number of women had to enter their cycle.

And then, you know, the rabbi would confirm it and then they would light a fire to signal the next town over that. In fact, this is the new moon. Oh, my God. I did not know that. That is here's the thing. As I've been out there teaching the female body, all of a sudden you start going, Oh, my God, we fell asleep to so much of this. You know, like I read a whole book about the matriarchal world that we had in our B.C years and do you know, intuition and ceremony and community that was medicine, that was healing and now we call the womb well.

Is but we've right we've abandoned it for pharmaceutical sales and hospitalizations and what does that gotten us right. Women are we are materially less healthy. And, you know, we're not even as healthy as our mother's generation was, let alone our grandmothers generation like we have gone so far astray from healthy behaviors that we just walk around in this chronically inflamed state and we're continually looking around for the answers when the answers are really in us. Right, and following what we know to be historical, like clean living.

And we need to pile into that evolutionary cells. Yes. So if you're. Even in. Accordance with the lunar cycle, what does that mean? What does that look like? So New Moon is on day one. So it's the same thing. It would be day one, too. Did data and you want to go Quito lower carb, more fasting and then you would move in like the full moon usually is about day 1213 of the month. So then when the full moon is around, you want to actually support your liver more, support your gut, less fasting, bring your carbs back up.

And then as you go into the waning moon, you know, the like day, you know, 20 of the of the moon cycle or I'm sorry, day 16 of the moon cycle, you can do a little more fasting. But the week before the new moon, when the the biggest waning time we actually should be doing higher carbs, less fasting, less. We should work out less. We should everything should be that should be our recovery moment. And then the new moon can be thought of as our blossoming moment. Beautiful. I love that. Crazy, right?

It is crazy. So let's talk specifically about breast cancer, because there's so much data around the benefits of fasting in breast cancer. So can you address some of those and also maybe talk about are there different stages in breast cancer and the breast cancer journey where there are different kind of fasting techniques to employ? Yeah. So the great and I'm glad you brought this back to breast cancer because the greatest study ever done on fasting for women was done on breast cancer and every breast cancer survivor, everybody who is in the breast cancer process, every woman who wants to prevent breast cancer needs to know this.

So it was done on thousands of women. It was an observational study. And it showed that when women come out of traditional breast cancer treatment, if they just implement a 13 hour fast every day and they did that for 90 days, and I will encourage you to keep doing it. What they were seeing is that they had a 64% less reoccurrence of breast cancer. Now, you probably know the statistics on Tamoxifen and things like that, but I'm not sure that any medication can give you. Those or not that good. Right.

Like the best studies that we have around Tamoxifen or maybe a 49% decrease. Right. We've never gotten about 50. Right. Most of them aren't even that good. Yeah. So that is really impressive. And a 13 hour fast is not much. It's not hard. Everybody can do it. Everybody can do it. Yeah. And you're using night, you know, so stop eating at 8:00.

Fasting and Breast Cancer Prevention 37:18

You would go eight to that before and then you would eat at nine in the morning. So you stop putting anything in your mouth after eight and you don't put anything into your mouth until nine in the morning and your cup of coffee, you know, in the book, in both books, talk about a way to look at coffee and measure it. But that come on, that's everybody can do that. And every doctor that's listening to this needs to teach us that. We can do that for sure. For sure. And what what do you think breaks a fast?

So what can people drink in a fasted state and what can they not have in a fasted state? Yeah, anything that brings your blood sugar up. So if you're going to do coffee, black is probably going to be best. Some people need can put a little MCT oil in it a little fat to balance sugar. The a little bit of cream sometimes works if you do dairy but the almond milks oat milk do not work so creamer you know the the even stevia monk fruit sometimes those don't work sugar doesn't work obviously because it raises your blood sugar.

I think you need to check to see how you're reacting, because some people will be okay with me, but some people won't. What about what about cinnamon? Do you think Cinnamon is going to raise blood sugar? It should work. Here's here's the trick. Here's the here's the challenge is it's your microbes in your gut that determine what foods are going to be elevated or not. This is why, as women, it's a whole set of bacteria. I know you know about it. But for the listeners, it's called the Astro Bloom, and it's a set of bacteria that break estrogen down.

And then there's a set of bacteria that actually break help you regulate blood sugar. So we all have different bacterial profiles in our gut. So that's why in both books I really explain how you test this. But when I look at cinnamon, cinnamon is a it's a spice. And your microbes love spices. Yeah. So I'm guessing it would probably be. Yeah. I find for most people that is beneficial. I know we have limited time with you because you are such a busy lady. I want to ask you, is there anyone who can't fast?

Yeah, thank you for asking that. You know, I think if you have an eating disorder, you really need to work with your therapist or your doctor. So please be mindful of that if you are pregnant, fasting is absolutely not your tool. I do not recommend that pregnant women fast and then nursing women. You need to keep your fasts under 15 hours so that you're not detoxifying. You know your body can go into a detox state and the longer fasts and that will get into your breastmilk which goes into your baby but outside of that everybody else can fast and the big elephant in the room that people be asking is like, well, what about this cancer?

Or What about diabetes or what? Yes, yes, all of that. All of the answers. Yes. And it doesn't always have to be about weight loss because the benefits of fasting go far beyond weight loss. Exactly. And it I actually think that it helps with weight optimization, but it doesn't mean that you can't consume enough calories during your eating window to, you know, to make up for that fast. That's right. That's right. So this has been an awesome discussion. I hope that people are able to take away from it that there are ways to eat around your menstrual cycle to optimize your hormones, because ultimately this breast cancer journey is about hormonal balance.

And when you are when you have an imbalance of hormones, that is a very pro-inflammatory condition that ultimately ends up in my office or someone else who works with women with breast cancer. So it's so important. And this is this is an irreplaceable tool that people have. I mean, this is something that they they are free to do and they have the control over. And it's really it's amazing. So thank you for sharing all of this information. Make sure that everyone reads Fast Like a Girl. Thank you.

In and out of focus and tell me the name of your other book again, I'm. Forgetting. The Menopause Reset So they're meant to be like a like a duo for women over 40. You'll learn stuff from both them. And then the third book, it's coming next year will be it will make it a trilogy. We'll have you back. Before that, I'm going to have you on my podcast so you can talk all about that book. Dr. Pelz, It was amazing to see where where do people find you? Talk to us about your YouTube channel. Oh yeah. My YouTube channel is where most people go because you can binge watch my videos.

So it's just Dr. Mindy Pelz there Otherwise go to my website and you can you can find me everywhere. I'm kind of all over the place now. So awesome. So great to see you today. Thank so much. Appreciate you. With your brilliant voice, Keep talking. Keeping that loud voice that we all need to hear so much. Yeah. And back at you. same to you You know, we're all in this together, so you keep shouting it and. Yeah, you know, the more of us to do this, the more we're going to change women's health. So I really appreciate what you're up to. So thank you for that.

Thank you so much. Thank you so much. It's Dr. Jenn. Bye for now.