Unlock Food & Fasting Secrets For Your Hormones

Mindy Pelz, DC

Oh, my gosh. For starters, I love that intro. Thank you. That was amazing. It’s such a good place to start the conversation because, as many women do, I started understanding hormones when I went into perimenopause. After all, I started noticing that many things that I was doing with my lifestyle didn’t seem to be working anymore. I was trying to figure out, like, how to help myself. When I did, I realized that there was a whole lifestyle that needed to match our hormonal profile. As I went into perimenopause, my hormonal profile was shifting. I realized that like the diet, I was doing at 42, it was the same diet I did at 32. But I was getting very different results. I started to dive in to understand hormones, food, and fasting and how to match those. That’s where I fell in love with fasting because something as simple as estrogen likes it when we fast. But then I realized that progesterone doesn’t like when we fast; progesterone wants glucose to be higher. I started to kind of map out the different personalities of these hormones and how our lifestyle requirements needed to be different. That’s when it just hit my head that, as women, we tend to just do one diet, one exercise, and one therapy over and over and over again without ever taking our hormonal rhythm into perspective. That’s kind of where I started.

Felice Gersh, MD

Just on a personal note, how have you explored your own needs? because personal biohacking can sometimes be the best way to learn. Yes, for everyone to sort of learn, like, how do you incorporate fasting? How did it help you? How did you modify your diet?

Mindy Pelz, DC

Such a good question. If we just look at estrogen, and I’m just going to use estrogen as that, we won’t break her down. We’ll just keep her as one whole unit there. When we go into perimenopause and menopause, we become more insulin-resistant because of estrogen and estradiol decline. I started to realize I was running. I was paleo at the time. I was doing a paleo diet. I was running for one to two hours every weekend. I would go on these long runs, and I wasn’t getting the same result. I was gaining weight, and I didn’t understand what was going on. That’s when I started to look at things like hemoglobin A-1 C, my fasting glucose, and my fasting insulin and realized they were higher than they should be. A large part of that was because I hadn’t incorporated fasting. I was the person who got up every morning, had a smoothie, and then ate eight or six meals a day all day long. I never left time for my body to recalibrate the insulin-glucose system. I used it to help my weight gain if we’re just honest. That was happening. The belly fat that was accumulating, even though I had never done anything different, was how I got into fasting. Once I started fasting, this was interesting because, once I started intermittent fasting, I realized I didn’t need to work out as much. Now, I’m not advocating that people don’t stop working or that they stop working out. But I also noticed in my perimenopausal years that, because of estradiol decline, collagen was falling following that decline, and I was getting injured more. As I was injured, I was gaining weight, and I felt like nothing was working. Then I started fasting. Once I started fasting, I dropped weight. I didn’t have to work out as much; I did, and I wasn’t getting injured. I also started to notice that cognition was better and moods were better. That’s what I just dove into, understanding fasting as much as I could. It was like, What is going on in my body when I don’t eat? How does that match my hormonal profile now?

Felice Gersh, MD

Now everyone probably remembers the days, and for some, the days are continuing because there are still many out there who are still parroting this old idea that you need to eat frequently throughout the day, like you were doing like six meals a day, and that you need to do it to keep your energy up, to keep your glucose up, or whatever, that they would parrot that kind of concept. Maybe for people out there because they’re new to this whole thing, like what happens when you keep eating multiple times a day? On the flip side, what happens when you pause between meals? That can enable your body to handle glucose, and your metabolism gets better aligned with what your needs are. Maybe just do a little overview of what’s going on when you’re eating and when you pause eating.

Mindy Pelz, DC

The best place to look at this is that we have to look at metabolic switching to understand what our body does in a fasted state. My aha. I can’t believe it took me until my forties to figure out that we have two energy systems. One, we make energy when we eat, when our glucose goes up, and one, we get energy when our glucose goes down, and we switch into what I call the fat-burning mode. When we eat, it’s a sugar burner, and when we fast, it’s a fat burner. Our bodies were meant to switch in and out of these two systems. One thing that has fascinated me is that every single diet that we, as women, have tried is only operating on the sugar burner system. If you don’t leave enough time for that blood sugar to come down, signaling to your body to go over to the fat burner system, you’re missing out on a whole other energy system. We are hybrid cars. We are hybrid cars. We have two fuel sources. When you learn to go without food, you switch to another fuel source. In that fuel source, your body has to burn fat to be able to make something called a ketone. Ketones go up into the brain. They start to give us mental clarity. They upregulate GABA, which calms us. They can also upregulate things like our BDNF to give us a good, clear mindset. They shut off the hunger hormone. The ketone does many things in small doses, but those are some of the highlights. But you can only truly access that when you go without food. What the science says is that you need to go without food somewhere between eight and 12 hours. At about that point, somewhere, as we get closer to that 12-hour mark, we’re now in this fat-burning system, making these ketones that are serving us in many ways. But if all we ever do is diet, we never go 12 hours without food. We never access the ceiling state.

Felice Gersh, MD

Well, you and I are both lovers of partying and eating, and in terms of some of the problems, like women with PCOS often having eating disorders or binge eating disorders, they’ve often tried all kinds of restrictive diets. Many people who lack what you’re talking about—this metabolic flexibility of converting from glucose to fat burning—go through the stage where they get famished and panicky. when people are trying to modify and they don’t want to eat six times a day and they want to have fewer. We’re going to go into the nitty-gritty of, like, how do you do this? But then they feel like I’m famished and I’m dying. I have to eat. What do you do? Or how do you like to ease people into this? Like, wean them off by taking an extra hour? An extra hour? Like, how do you do this when sometimes people say, “I can’t do it; I have to eat? I just feel like I’m dying?”

Mindy Pelz, DC

It’s such a good point. I call it fast training; we have to train to start fast. If you’re going to run a marathon, just don’t slap some shoes on and try to go 24 miles. You do, like, three miles, and then you might rest, and then you might do four miles. Building yourself up has ins and outs. I feel the same thing about fasting. One of the greatest studies—I don’t know if this study was done—but one of the greatest studies ever done for women and fasting was done in 13 hours. They found that if a woman who had gone through traditional breast cancer therapy tacked on a 13-hour fast to their lifestyle after they’d gone through that treatment, they had a 64% lower reoccurrence of breast cancer than women who didn’t do a 13-hour fast. I could train anybody to do 13 hours. You don’t have to go through these long, fast years to get great physical benefits. First, let’s slowly, for the example you’re using of somebody who gets hangry, boomerang back into food. Just let’s take a few baby steps, and here are the baby steps. The first baby step is with food. Let’s clean up your food system. Let’s get you eating good fats. Not bad fat. This is like your olive oils and your avocado oils. Those are all MCT oils. Coconut oils—those are all good oils. Let’s get off the canola, cottonseed, and corn oils. Let’s just change oils. It’s kind of one of those food changes that’s the easiest and the hardest. It’s the easiest to do at home. You won’t notice that taste. The hard part is that when you go out into the world, every restaurant has bad oils in it. but we want to clean up the oil system. The second thing is, that there’s a big misunderstanding that if you’re going to go into ketosis, you have to take carbs out. I’m not saying you have to take carbs out. I’m asking people to switch to nature’s carbs. Get off man-made carbs. Get off the refined flour and the refined sugars. Let’s go into fruits and vegetables. Potatoes like the sweet potato are amazing for every woman. It helps with progesterone, and it’s an incredible food. You and I talked the other day about phytoestrogens. I was geeking out on the thought of, like, the pomegranates and the soybeans, and, like, these are foods that I feel like when people decide to go keto, they, like, do away with. Let’s just eat carbs, but make them nature’s carbs. Then the third food change is: let’s get the toxins out. Get off the Diet Coke. Let’s get off the NutraSweet. diet foods in general. Let’s just start eating foods without a label. That would be the best way to go. But if you clean that system up first, then metabolic switching is going to be easier. The second step from that then becomes, You just push your breakfast back an hour. You just, and there’s going to be a little discomfort. We can chat about this because, in the discomfort, the body adapts. Push it back a half hour to a half to two hours. If you eat breakfast at eight, maybe now you’re doing it at 8:30 or 8:45, and your body’s now learning to metabolically switch. then, at first, it’ll be uncomfortable. You do it for a couple of days. It gets easier when it gets easier. Now, can you push it back another hour? Do that for a couple of days, and then when it gets easier, push it back another time, and you just take slow steps into there. Some women I find want to bring dinner up; they don’t push breakfast back. They bring dinner up. Instead of having dinner at seven, they have it at six. But you want to take your eating and compress it into one eating window, and you do that by slowly changing the times you eat and mixing it with the foods that you clean up first.

Felice Gersh, MD

I 100% agree with everything. I have that study that you mentioned about breast cancer in many of my slide decks about it.

Mindy Pelz, DC

But it’s a great one.

Felice Gersh, MD

It’s great. It’s wonderful when you have what the conventional medicine world loves: a peer-reviewed study that is well-controlled and designed because it speaks amazingly powerfully to the whole world. You’ve mentioned breakfast a few times here. I cannot tell you how many of my patients skip breakfast altogether and often don’t eat until late in the day. They say I’m doing intermittent fasting. I eat like only a late lunch and then often a late dinner. They do have that prolonged window, but it is usually from like 9:00 or 10:00 at night and then into about one or two in the afternoon. What do you think of that one? I bet we think the same.

Mindy Pelz, DC

It’s a tough one because the only place that works is if you’re going to sit down with your family and you’re eating at seven or eight o’clock at night. I say this all the time: being in a relationship with your family and enjoying a family meal—if that happens at eight, great. That’s the only way it can happen. Keep it there. Otherwise, we have to remember that melatonin is a big thing that I talk a lot about, which is when it gets dark out. Now what’s happening is that melatonin is coming on the scene, and we are becoming more insulin resistant. It’s not great to be eating when it’s dark out. The other part of this is that you shouldn’t be going to bed with a full stomach because that’s hard on the parasympathetic nervous system. If you have control over your eating window, keep it within the light hours. In the summer, this is easy. Like, we could do something from eight to ten, let’s say, an eight-hour eating window. It could be, like, ten to six, which would be a great one. But in the winter, we almost need to move that up where we go; eight to four would be ideal. I like people for their great hormonal health. I want them to eat in the daylight, not necessarily when it’s dark out. That would be the one little caveat. But I also feel like we have to change our lifestyle. Like I don’t want, I have seen a lot of women get rigid with this, and it should be flexible. When you sit down to have a meal with your family, oxytocin surges through you. You’re in a relationship, so let’s not lose sight of that as well.

Felice Gersh, MD

We know that loneliness and relationship trips, or lack thereof, are horrible for our overall health. You have to live within your culture and your family and talk about things like jobs. Many of my patients have swing-shift jobs. A very high percentage of the population now either works into the night or through the night, but on variable days, they have variable schedules. This is a real challenge. Have you even tackled this at all? Like, what do you do when people are working half the time at night and half the time they’re home during the day?

Mindy Pelz, DC

Yes.  It’s funny you say that because my staff all the time says to me, Hey, can you do a video on shift working? I didn’t realize it was popular to be a shift worker. it’s interesting. I don’t know what the habit of a shift worker is, but let’s say you come home at eight in the morning, go to bed, and then you probably wake up at like four. You’re going to eat when you first wake up, and maybe you’re going to have to decide where your eating window is. Like, that’s the way I look at this, as you’re carrying this eating window around and you’re making a decision based on your lifestyle, where that eating window goes, and the end, for simplicity’s sake, the eating. One of the greatest studies ever done on fasting showed that an eight- to ten-hour eating window after leaving the rest of the time for fasting was the perfect amount for overturning any metabolic syndrome issues like high blood pressure or high cholesterol. Just take your eight-hour eating window and match it to your shift-working lifestyle. Maybe you would wake up at two and eat two to three, and then the rest you would fast. It’s just a matter of modifying it for your diet or lifestyle.

Felice Gersh, MD

There is no great solution because, like you said, we’re who we are. We were designed to be eating during the lights and sleeping during the dark, but I don’t know. It’s hard. There’s not a lot of data on it except for the harm it causes. It is hard. because I know I lived a crazy lifestyle doing deliveries for many years, and a lot of that was running around in the middle of the night. It takes a toll. You have to think about that when you choose your career. These are important considerations. One of the things I loved hearing you say was about sweet potatoes and yams, because that’s such a wonderful food, and many people malign it because they say it’s starchy. Maybe you could talk a little bit about some of those you mentioned, specifically do not eat the manmade carbs. You could just go a little bit deeper into the world of carbs and the difference between manmade carbs and nature-made carbs and how they can be like nature-made carbs like yams, how you can incorporate them, and whether you should do carb counting or just how you deal with people who have carb fear. 

Mindy Pelz, DC

The best way I can explain that is through my lens. When I was in my early forties, I learned about the ketogenic diet and fasting. I immediately went into it, and I was like, “Oh my God, I feel supercharged. This is incredible.” I was about 43. By 45, I’d completely lost my cycle. I was like, and then I went like to my mom, I went to my sister, and I was like, “Hey, when did you all go into menopause?” It seems a little early for me to be completely losing my cycle. What I realized is that I was restricted on carbs; I wasn’t giving progesterone what it needed. The thing about progesterone that is interesting, and you and I haven’t even had this conversation; I’d love to know your opinion on this, is that the week before our period, I strongly feel like the reason we crave carbs is because progesterone is knocking on the door, saying, “Hey, I need glucose to go up to make my appearance. When glucose goes up, I can make my appearance, and the uterine lining can shed.” I started to look at the patterns of what progesterone needed. I also believe I’d be curious about your opinion on this. I also strongly believe there’s a reason we crave chocolate the week before our period: we need more magnesium, but that doesn’t mean we just go grab Hershey’s chocolate. You get good dark chocolate with quality ingredients. You can also take magnesium, but why don’t we get chocolate? That would be great. But we have this instinctive behavior that many women have that week before our cycle that we villainize. We don’t do it right. We eat a box of pizza in a tub and a pie of ice cream because we feel like we’re hungry. We want those carbs. I wanted to shift that for myself and other women. I looked, and I started searching for what the requirements are, what are the foods that would feed progesterone, kind of like you and I talked about, and what are the foods and phytoestrogens that support estradiol? Here’s what I found. All kinds of potatoes—sweet potatoes, primarily. When we talk about sweet potatoes, we’re talking about yams. We’re talking about the white flesh of sweet potatoes. We’re talking about the yellow flesh of sweet potatoes. We’re talking about the purple sweet potatoes. They’re all super supportive of progesterone. All the tropical fruits—bananas, mangoes, and pineapples—are the fruits that the keto world is shunned and scared to eat, but they’re supportive of helping progesterone races. This has been a harder one for me because white rice isn’t great, brown rice isn’t great, but like wild rice, like forbidden rice, or even like quinoa, that’s going to be a higher glycemic type event because your body can support what progesterone needs. When we go into the keto world, we start seeing the results of a low-carb diet, but we don’t realize that progesterone is the outlier. She needs you to bring glucose up. If we can just stop and think about that for a moment, when we go into a low-carb diet, we’re keeping glucose down, and that’s great for estrogen. She does well with that; progesterone doesn’t do well with that. What we need to do is bring glucose up, but not through a box of pizza and a tub of ice cream. We need to be strategic with foods that nature has already provided us, just like the phytoestrogens that nature has provided us. Let’s look at the foods that nature has provided us to help with progesterone. They’re yummy foods. They’re like tropical fruits: mangoes, papayas, bananas, pineapple, and then all the sweet potatoes. I’m a huge sweet potato fan. All of them—the purple, the white sweet potatoes, and the yellow sweet potatoes. then I also would say the rice, although this one’s a little bit harder because I can’t find anything good about rice, white rice. We had some heavy metal issues with the brown rice. We have the arsenic issue. But wild rice or forbidden rice, where it’s a little bit nutty, or those rice can be great for progesterone, even quinoa. You get a little more protein in there. But what I’ve noticed is that what people and women did when they started to discover keto or even paleo was just throw the cart of carbs aside, and they didn’t understand that there were good carbs and bad carbs, just like we now understand. There’s good fat and bad fat, and progesterone needs you to bring that glucose level up.

Felice Gersh, MD

I’m glad that you talked about these foods that many people malign.

Mindy Pelz, DC

I know.

Felice Gersh, MD

People who are well respected, even if it’s like, you just have to rethink what they’re saying, like, how could these foods be evil when they have many wonderful benefits? And you’ll be proud. Last night for dinner, I had mango and yams. It was amazing. I have a little expression: don’t be afraid of fruit, because, yes, here you are, extolling the benefits of these fruits that many people say I would never eat because they’ll give me diabetes. Of course, women with PCOS do have a high incidence of diabetes. In terms of this fasting, you talked about things like insulin and insulin resistance, addressing the special needs of the insulin-resistant crowd known as PCOS. Do you have any special hints and what might be the best, like, say, time of day for eating in terms of pushing even more of your food to the morning or know specific foods that you recommend for insulin-resistant people? Just any helpful hints that may be specialized for women with PCOS?

Mindy Pelz, DC

Yes. The first thing would be to eat in the daylight. Like, just eat when it’s clear that you are working with that melatonin system. That would be the first one. The second thing is that I’m sure you’re along these lines as well. I am such a protein fan. Like, how do we get more protein? Because protein is not going to make your blood sugar spike. It’s going to have less of a blood sugar consequence for your body. When you’re dealing with an insulin-resistant person, how do you make sure that you don’t get this huge spike of blood sugar and then the huge crash that makes you hungry again, and then you have a huge spike? There is a lot of protein and a lot of fat in every meal. I’m not insulin-resistant, but I don’t skip protein. I don’t do just a straight carb meal; every meal has protein in it. Let’s lean into protein and fat. There’s even a term that’s going around right now that I like, which is protein forward, meaning eat the protein first and then eat the carbs. That’s powerful for insulin resistance. The third thing that is interesting when we’re looking through the lens of PCOS and insulin resistance is when we finish eating a meal, like using the glucose you just created in your body, go for a walk. Sometimes, like, I’ll even do air squats after a big meal that maybe had a lot of carbs. I’ll just do like 25 squats in my kitchen as I’m cleaning up, just moving that glucose to bigger muscles, my legs, and my glutes. It doesn’t have to be deprivation. It just has to be strategic.

Felice Gersh, MD

What I know was very popularized and is still being used is the five-two, where people don’t eat at all, just drink water, or maybe a very modified amount of food intake two days a week. Could you comment on that as a tool to either improve insulin resistance or lose weight because 80% of women with PCOS are desperately trying to lose weight?

Mindy Pelz, DC

Yes. The five-two came from an interesting study. This was one of the first things I learned when I started to understand fasting. It was called the Every Other Day Diet, and it was done by a researcher. She ended up writing a whole book about it. What she did was take a group of people who had a metabolic mass, like insulin-resistant high cholesterol. Liver enzymes were off like they were not that heavy. She said, “Eat whatever you want to eat one day, and then the other day, don’t eat anything. You’re going to fast one day and eat one day.” They did that for a year. They studied this group. At the end of the year, they identified that some changes happened that were profound. For starters, all the metabolic markers were cleaned up, and they all lost weight. Now, remember, they were eating whatever they wanted one day and fasting the next. But the most interesting thing is that their food choices changed. As the year went on, they started wanting to eat healthier and healthier foods. Out of that came, Well, what if I do? Two days of no eating; five days, I’ll eat whatever I want. That seemed to work for people as well. It’s a little bit harder to do. We can talk about some more variations that are a little bit easier to do than two days off of food and five days eating whatever you want. But what I want to unpack is: why does it work for these longer periods without food? Here’s what happens when you’ve been insulin-resistant for a long time. Your body doesn’t know what to do with all the glucose. It can’t get into the cell. It stores it as fat. The first thing I want to say is that I want to honor the struggles that women go through trying to lose weight, especially when they have insulin resistance. especially with PCOS. It’s incredibly frustrating. But you have to understand that your body is doing the exact right thing. It did not know what to do with that glucose, but it had an option. It could put it in your brain. We can put it in your eyes. It could put it around your liver; it could put it in organs. But that’s not in your survival interest. The best place to put it is in fat. Fat, all fat, when you look in the mirror is your brilliant body’s way of finding a different storage place. The first thing we have to do is honor that the body is doing the right thing at the right time. The second thing I want to say about that is that when you fast, you’re now lovingly signaling to your body. When we look at this five-two diet that you talked about—those two days off—the message you’re giving your body is that no food’s coming in. You’re going to know this because the blood sugars are going down. I want you to go find the glucose you stored years ago, and the body innately does that. It’s through gluconeogenesis and the breakdown of fat that it will start to release this glucose into the system, where it can be used. If you do that enough times over several months, you are rebalancing your insulin system and becoming more insulin-sensitive. For the insulin-resistant person, we must pick something. Sometimes it doesn’t have to be two days; maybe it’s 15 hours on a fairly regular basis. But we have to have this period where we signal to the body to go find what you stored, and the more you do that, the more you’ll drop the weight and the more you’ll prime that insulin system.

Felice Gersh, MD

I know there’s been much in the news about gut microbes. Is there any data that you’ve come across in all of your research about how fasting during the day or intermittently on certain days of the week impacts the gut in terms of the gut microbiome, and its communication with the liver and how that could affect a fatty liver? Any of that, because that’s such a big topic. The hot topic now is gut and liver health.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Yes.  the greatest study, and I quoted it in my book Fast Like a Girl, which is a 24-hour study. It was a mouse study. I just want to point that out. I look at mouse studies as they get to get us in the ballpark, but they may not be the end-all, be-all for humans and especially women. But it’s a general idea that I love that at 24 hours without food, your intestinal stem cells or your intestinal inner lining secrete stem cells. When you get the stem cells, they go and repair the whole internal environment. I also had some interesting conversations. I don’t know if you’ve talked to Dr. Mayer. What’s his first name? Emran Mayer. He wrote a book on gut health. He has a thing called geographical relocation, whereas we fast those microbes spread out, they can absorb the vitamins out of your food better, they can produce serotonin better to your point, and they can start to communicate with the liver better than when they’re not. When you change that internal environment through these periods of fasting, you are making it so that when food comes back into the equation, the microbes know how to use that food differently. It’s all different. Let’s do that fast. The only one that we have hard data on is the 24-hour fast. that was done out of M.I.T.

Felice Gersh, MD

Well, I’m glad you brought that up, because women with PCOS, as they’ve been shown in the first study, which came out in 2015, almost universally have an impaired gut barrier, a leaky gut, dysbiosis, or the wrong gut microbiome. I do believe that this is a key thing for women to know. We had talked about this a few days ago: there’s a little bit of data on women, PCOS, and fasting. This is one of the things that I’m working on with some of the nonprofits involved in PCOS to get more funding because it’s underfunded. The research on PCOS, despite it being such a prevalent condition, could maybe touch on a little research because you’ve done such a good deep dive into researching the world of fasting in females that maybe you could shed a little light on what little data has been published on fasting in women with PCOS.

Mindy Pelz, DC

You and I have talked about this. The data for women’s health in general is horrible, and I have heard recently that that trend is shifting. We just don’t have; studies take years to get. I’m waiting with bated breath, hoping that three years from now, you and I are going to talk differently like that. But for right now, it’s horrible. However, there is an interesting study on fasting and PCOS, and it was done on women. What it showed is twofold: not only did fasting take around 17 hours, but it wasn’t a huge, long fast. It’s like when women fasted, it was 16–17 hours regularly. They saw that they became more insulin-sensitive. The measurement they looked at was hemoglobin A1c. They kind of looked at what the system looked like over several months, but they saw that testosterone came back into balance, and then their symptoms started to improve. We have to remember that when you fast, you are regulating the hormonal system. If testosterone is too high, then now it’s going to help regulate testosterone and bring it down. If insulin is out of control, it’s going to regulate it and bring it down. If you’re estrogen dominant, it’s going to help bring down estrogen and get rid of that toxic estrogen that’s in your body. The same thing happens if you’re low in these hormones, not just progesterone. She’s the outlier, but it can be good for menopausal women. It can help you preserve estradiol as you go through this menopausal experience. You’ll never get estradiol back to what it was years ago, but you can preserve it age-appropriately. What we have to understand is that when we look at something like PCOS, it’s a hormonal imbalance. It’s two major hormones. We’ve got insulin, and we have testosterone. What the study showed us is, gosh, if we put women in this state and they did it over, I believe it was about 30 days and they did it regularly. This isn’t like you go in one day and all of a sudden your symptoms go away. They saw the testosterone come down, and they saw better insulin sensitivity. That is encouraging.

Felice Gersh, MD

Well, it is. When I saw the study, it was like, bells going off, lights going off, and flashing that we finally have real data. It’s not enough. We need more because now we, like you and me, are talking about metabolic issues, studies on diabetics and pre-diabetics, and whatever the data is out there on people. We can’t just narrow it to PCOS, but we PCOS women are people, so we go by that. But when you have an actual study that shows that by doing this type of fasting where you have a limited window of eating and then you have more hours of fasting, the insulin comes down, the testosterone comes down, and we can see that they didn’t do microbiome studies, a lot of it does have to do with that. But we know the outcome, even if we haven’t defined all the mechanisms involved. Everything is multifactorial. But everyone out there with PCOS who’s hearing this, understands that by doing this timed eating or intermittent fasting during the 24 hours, women with PCOS had dramatic reductions in their insulin and improved insulin sensitivity and testosterone. I’m glad that you and I are one of the very few people out there who, out of this data, are excited to know that, of course, in doing all of your research, you also came across this. this resonates.   Even though it’s not a giant study over a long time, it is revealing. that all the other data that you presented is overwhelmingly strong, that this whole notion that developed of eating throughout the day and all this, endless snacking, and then eating late into the night and like I have to eat before I go to bed and all of that has got to finally be eliminated. Just stop.  I cannot thank you enough for your books, your lectures, and all of this to spread the word about how important it is to not just eat the right foods, which is critical. You talked about that, but also when you should stop eating. Incessant eating is not the path to health, especially for women with PCOS. Thank you very much. I know everyone out there is saying I want to read her books and I want to learn more. How can they find you and talk a little bit about what you’ve written, just like, What are you interested in where you’re heading? Just how can they follow you from this point forward?

Mindy Pelz, DC

Thank you. I love this discussion, too. Again, I just geek out with you every time we chat. I want to say to the women who are struggling with PCOS, as we hear you. Dr. Gersh, you’re a champion for this. You’re not out of answers. Your body’s not turning on you. There are just tools that haven’t been highlighted, which is why a summit like this is important because this should be front-page news. Our PCOS studies should have been front-page news. Why wasn’t it? That is a whole other discussion. Yes, Fast Like a Girl was the book that I recently put out, and it was a fasting manual for women. It has answered most of the questions that women had about how to fasten their cycle. It’s a great tool for a woman with PCOS. I highly recommend following a 30-day fasting reset; that would be incredible for a woman with PCOS. Otherwise, I’m kind of everywhere. YouTube is my passion project. I have some videos I’ve done on PCOS on my YouTube channel; you can go find those. Otherwise, you can just go to my website. drmindypelz.com and you can find everything there. But like you, I’m just trying to put out this information because the mainstream media isn’t doing it. We have to take control and do it ourselves.

Felice Gersh, MD

Well, thank you. that’s right. Everyone needs to harness their inner powers to find information. then utilize it so that they can achieve optimal health. I once again thank you so much, Mindy, for joining me and sharing your wealth of information. I look forward to many more. Collaborations with everyone out there; get her book; go to her website; and follow her on YouTube because she has a wealth of knowledge and information that’s going to help you.

Felice Gersh, MD

Thanks again.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Thank you.