Unlock Food & Fasting Secrets For Your Hormones

Introduction and Dr. Mindy Pelz's Hormone Journey 0:00

Welcome to this episode of the PCOS SOS Summit. I'm your host, Dr. Felice Gersh, and I have a wonderful interview coming up for you. I was just chatting with a dear friend and amazing woman, Dr. Mindy Pelz She is a world renowned hormonal educator, telling women all the information they need to become hormonal literate. I'm telling you, this is one of my passions as well. She is a bestselling author and international speaker. We were just talking about some amazing conferences. She's going to be speaking at incredible spots all over the globe.

And now I got her to join me and talk about some really important issues that every woman with PCOS really needs to know. And we're going to touch on fasting, but much more than that. So first, let me welcome you, Dr. Mindy Pelz Mindy, please tell my audience here something about how you entered this field, how you got interested in hormones and fasting and just, you know, your journey. And then we'll do a deep dove into all these critically important topics. Oh, my gosh. For starters, I love that intro. Thank you.

That was amazing. And, you know, it's such a good place to start the conversation because I think as many women do, I started understanding hormones when I actually went into perimenopause because I started noticing that so many things that I was doing with my lifestyle didn't seem to be working anymore. And I was trying to figure out, like, how to help myself. And when I did, I realized that there was a whole life style that needs to match our hormonal profile. And as you know, going into perimenopause, that hormonal profile was shifting.

And I realized, like the diet I was doing at 42, it was the same diet I did at 32. But I was getting very different results. And so I started to dove in to really understand hormones and food and fasting and how to match those. And that's where I fell in love with fasting because something as simple as like estrogen.

How Fasting Affects Hormones and Metabolic Switching 2:34

Estrogen likes when we fast. But then I realized but progesterone progesterone doesn't like when we fast progesterone wants glucose to be higher. And so I started to kind of map out the different personalities of these hormones and how their lifestyle our lifestyle requirements needed to be different. And that's when I it just really hit my head that as women, we tend to just do one diet, one exercise, one therapy over and over and over again without ever taking our hormonal rhythm into perspective.

And that's kind of where I started from. Wow. So just on a personal note, how have you done by exploring your own needs? I mean, because personal biohacking can be sometimes the best way to learn. So, yeah, for everyone to sort of learn, like, how do you incorporate fasting? How did it help you? And how did you modify your diet? Yeah, such a good question. So 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.

She when when we go into perimenopause and menopause, we become more insulin resistant because of estrogen and aster dials decline. And so I started to realize I was running. I was I was actually paleo at the time. I was doing a paleo diet. I was running like 1 to 2 hours every weekend. I would go on these long runs and and I wasn't getting the same result. I was like gaining weight and I didn't understand what was going on. And that's when I started to look at things like hemoglobin, A-1 C and my fasting glucose and my fasting insulin and realized it was higher than it should be.

And I think 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 eight, six meals a day all day long. And I never left time for my body to recalibrate the insulin glucose system. And so I used it to really help my own, you know, weight gain if we're just really honest. That was happening. The belly fat that was accumulating, even though I had never done anything different. So that's how I got into fasting. Once I started fasting, this was really interesting because once I started intermittent fasting, I actually realized I didn't need to work out as much.

Now I'm not advocating that people don't stop working, that they stop working out. But I also noticed in my perimenopausal years that because of Esther Dial's decline, also collagen was falling fall following that decline and I was getting injured more. So as injured, I was gaining weight and I felt like nothing was working. And then I started fasting. And once I started fasting, I dropped weight. I didn't have to work out as much, so I didn't I wasn't getting injured. And I also started to notice, like cognition was better, moods were better.

And that's what I just dove into, to understanding fasting as much as I could. It was like, what is going on in my with my body when I don't eat? And how does that match to what my hormonal profile is now? Now everyone probably remembers the days, and for some the days are continuing because there are still many out there that are still, you know, 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, you know, that they would parrot that kind of concept.

Now, maybe for people out there because they're like new to this whole thing, like what is happening when you keep eating like multiple times a day? And then on the flip side, what happens when you pause between meals that can enable your body to handle glucose and, you know, metabolism gets better aligned with what your needs are. So maybe just do a little overview of what is going on. Basically when you're eating and when you pause in eating. Yeah. So I think the best place to look at this is that we have to look at metabolic switching to really understand what our body does in the fasted state.

And what my. Aha. I can't believe it took me till my forties to figure this out was 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. So I call when we eat a sugar burner and when we fat fast, it's fat burner. And our bodies were meant to switch in and out of these two systems. So one thing that really has fascinated me is that every single diet that we have as women have tried on is only been operating from the sugar burner system.

Training Into Fasting and Building Up Gradually 7:27

And so 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 nother energy system. We are hybrid cars. We are literally hybrid cars. We have two fuel sources. So when you learn to go without food, you switch into the other fuel source. And in that in that fuel source, your body has to burn fat to be able to make something called a ketone. And ketones, as you know, go up into the brain. They start to give us mental clarity.

They upregulate gaba, which calms us. They they can also upregulate things like body enough to give us really good, clear, clear mindset. And they shut off the hunger hormone. So I mean, the ketone does so many things in small doses, but those are some of the highlights. But you can only really, truly access that when you go without food. And what the science says is you need to go without food somewhere between 8 to 12 hours. And at about that, 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 in so many ways.

But if all we ever do is diet, we never go 12 hours without food. We never access the ceiling state. Well, you know, you and I are both lovers of pausing in, eating, and in terms of some of the problems, like women with PCOS often have eating disorders, binge eating disorder. They've often tried all kinds of restrictive diets. And many people who lack what you're talking about, this metabolic flexibility of converting from glucose to fat burning, they go through the stage when they get famished feeling and they get panicky.

So when people are trying to modify and and they don't want to eat six times a day and they want to have fewer. And we're going to go into the nitty gritty of, you know, like, how do you do this? But and then they feel like I'm famished, I'm dying. I have to eat what do you do? Or how do you like do you ease people into this? Like like, you know, like sort of 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.

I feel like I'm dying even. Yeah. Yeah. It's such a good point. So I call it fast training that we have to train to start to fast. If you're going to run a marathon, you just you 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. Like there's there's an in and out of building yourself up. So I feel like the same thing with fasting. One of the greatest I don't know if you know this study, but one of the greatest studies ever done for women and fasting was done on 13 hours.

And they found that if a woman who and it was done on breast cancer survivors so women who had gone through traditional breast cancer therapy, if they tacked on a 13 hour fast to their lifestyle after that, after they'd gone through that treatment, they had a 64% less reoccurrence of breast cancer than women who didn't do a 13 hour fast. Okay. 13 hours. I could I could train anybody to do 13 hours. So. So you don't have to go into these long fast to get great. But, you know, physical benefit. So first, let's slowly, for the example you're using of somebody who gets really hangry, they boomerang back into food.

Just let's take small little baby steps and here are the baby steps. The first baby step is actually with food. So let's clean up your food system. Let's get you eating good fats. Not bad fats. So this is like, you know, your olive oils, your avocado oils. Those are all MCT oils. Coconut oils, those are all good oils. Let's get off the canola cottonseed corn oils like let's just change oils. It's actually the it's kind of one of those food changes that's the easiest and the hardest. It's the easiest to do at your home.

You won't notice that taste. The hard part is when you go out into the world, every restaurant has the bad oils in it. So but we want to clean up the oils system. The second thing is, you know, 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 flours, the refined sugars. And let's go into fruits and vegetables. And potatoes like the sweet potato is like amazing for every woman.

Meal Timing, Light Hours, and Shift Work 12:11

It absolutely helps with progesterone and it's an incredible, incredible food. You and I talked the other day about phytoestrogens. Like I was geeking out on the thought of, like, the pomegranates and the soybean and, like, these are these are foods that I feel like when people decide to go keto, they, like, do away with. Let's just let's eat carbs, but make them nature's carbs. And then the third food change is let's get the toxins out. It's not the Diet Coke. Let's get off the NutraSweet. The the the diet foods in general.

And let's just start eating foods without a label would be the best way to go. But if you if you clean that system up first, now metabolic switching is going to be easier. So the second step from that then becomes you just push your you just push your breakfast back an hour. You just, you know, and there's going to be a little discomfort. And we can chat about this because in the discomfort, the body adapts. So push it back a half hour to a half to two an hour so that if you eat breakfast at eight, maybe now you're doing at 830, 845, and your body's now learning to metabolically switch.

And 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 and you just take slow steps into there. Some women I find actually want to bring dinner up so they don't push breakfast back. They bring dinner up. So 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, mixing it with the foods that you clean up your foods first.

Well, I 100% agree with everything. And actually, that study that you mentioned about breast cancer, I have that in many of my slide decks about it. But it's a great one. It's really it really is great. And it's always wonderful when you have what the conventional medicine world loves, you know, a peer reviewed study that is really well controlled and designed because I mean, that speaks, you know, so amazingly powerfully to the whole world. And so you've mentioned breakfast a few times here. Now, I cannot tell you how many of my patients skip breakfast altogether, often don't eat until late in the day.

And they say, I'm doing intermittent fasting. So I eat like only a late lunch and then often a late dinner. But they do have that prolonged window, but it is usually from like 9:00, you know, or 10:00 at night and then into about like one or two in the afternoon. So what do you think of that one? Because I bet we think the same. Yeah, I think it's a tough one because I mean, the only place I think that really works is if you're going to sit down with your family and you're eating at seven or 8:00 at night.

I say this all the time, that being in relationship with your family and enjoying a family meal, if that happens at eight, great then. And that's the only way it can happen. Keep it there. Otherwise we have to mind melatonin is a big thing that I talk a lot about, which is when it gets dark out. Now what's happening is melatonin is coming on the scene and we become more insulin resistant. So it's not really great to be eating when it's dark out. And the other part of this is that you shouldn't be going to bed with a full stomach because that's really hard on the parasympathetic nervous system.

So ideally, if you have control over your eating window, keep it within the light hours in the summer. This is really easy. Like we could do. We could do something from like an 8 to 10, let's say an eight hour eating window. Could be, you know, like ten, 10 to 2, six, something like that would be a great would be a great one. But in the winter, we almost need to really move that up where we go like, you know, 8 to 4 would be ideal. So I like people for great hormonal health. I want them eating in the daylight, not necessarily eating when it's dark out.

That's that. That would be the one little caveat. But I also feel like we got to mind our lifestyle. Like I don't want I seen a lot of women get really rigid with this and it should be flexible. And, you know, when you sit down to have a meal with your family, you got oxytocin surging through you. So you're in relationship like let's not lose sight of that as well. Absolutely. Because we know that loneliness and relationship trips or lack thereof are horrible for overall health. So definitely you have to live within your culture,

Carbs, Progesterone, and Choosing Better Foods 17:08

your family and talking about like jobs. Okay, so many of my patients have swing shift type jobs. In fact, a very high percentage of the population now either works into the night or through the night, but, you know, 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, half the time they're home in the day and so forth? Yeah. You know, it's funny you say that because my staff all the time says to me, Hey, can you do a video on shift working?

And I, I didn't realize it was so popular to be a shift worker. So it's interesting. Again and what I'm going to say, I don't know what the habit of a shift worker is, but let's say you come home at at eight in the morning and you go to bed and then you probably wake up at like four. Yeah. You're going to eat when you first wake up and maybe you're you're going to have to decide where you're 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 off your lifestyle where that eating window goes and the end for for simplicity's sake, the eating, the one of the greatest studies ever done on fasting showed that in 8 to 10 hour eating window at leaving the rest of the time for fasting was the perfect amount for overturning any metabolic syndrome issues like high blood pressure or or high cholesterol.

So just take your eight hour eating window and match it to your shift working lifestyle. So maybe you would wake up at two so you would eat two to eat two, 2 to 2 or 2 to 3 and then the rest you would fast. So it's just a matter of modifying it to your diet or to your lifestyle. Yeah, I think, you know, unfortunately, there is no great solution because like you said, we're like we're you know, we are who we are. You know, we were designed to be eating during the lights and sleeping during the dark, you know.

But so, I don't know. It's really hard. There's not a lot of data on it except the harms from it. And so it is hard. I because I know I lived a crazy lifestyle doing deliveries for many, many years and a lot of that was running around the middle of the night. So definitely it takes a toll. So, you know, you have to think about that when you choose your career, right? These are important considerations. And one of the things I really loved hearing you say was about like sweet potatoes, yams, because that's such a wonderful food and so many people malign it because they say it's starchy.

So maybe you could talk a little bit about some of that you mentioned specifically don't eat, you know, the manmade carbs. And maybe you could just go a little bit deeper into like the world of carbs and the difference between manmade carbs and the nature made carbs and how they can be like the good will say the nature made carbs like yams, how you can incorporate them, and should you do carb counting or just like how do you deal with the people who have carb fear, you know, no matter what carb phobic. Yes.

So I think the best way I can I can explain that is actually through my own lens. I went from when I was in my early forties, I learned about the ketogenic diet and fasting. And so I immediately went into it and I was like, oh my God, I feel supercharged. This is incredible. So that was about 43. By 45, I'd completely lost my cycle. And 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? Like, seems a little early for me to be completely losing my cycle.

And what I realized is I was so restricted on carbs, I wasn't giving progesterone what she needs. And the thing about progesterone that I think is really 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 our the reason we crave carbs is because progesterone is knocking on the door saying, hey, I need glucose to go up in order to make my appearance. And when I can, when glucose goes up, I can make my appearance and the uterine lining can shed.

So I started to look at the patterns of what progesterone needed. I also believe I'd be curious your opinion on this. I also strongly believe there's a reason we crave chocolate the week before our period is because we need more magnesium, but doesn't mean we just go grab Hershey's chocolate. I think you get a really good dark chocolate with a really quality ingredients. And I mean, you can also take magnesium, but why don't we why don't we get chocolate would be great. But we have this instinct, bull behavior that so many women have that week before our cycle that we villainize.

We don't do right. We eat a box of pizza in a tub, a pie of ice cream, because we feel like we're hungry. We want those carbs. So I really wanted to shift that for myself and for other women. So I looked, I started doing a search of what are the requirements, what are the foods that would feed progesterone, kind of like you and I talked about, what are the foods and phytoestrogens that support estradiol? So here's what I found. All kinds of potatoes, sweet potatoes, primarily. And when we talk about sweet potatoes, we're talking about yams.

We're talking about the the white flesh sweet potatoes. We're talking about the yellow flesh sweet potatoes. We're talking about the purple sweet potatoes. They're all super supportive for progesterone. All the tropical fruits, bananas, mangoes, pineapples. These are the fruits that the keto world is like, shunned and scared to eat, but they're really supportive for helping progesterone races. This has been a harder one for me because white rice isn't great, brown rice isn't great, but like actually wild rice or like a forbidden rice or even like quinoa, that's going to be a higher glycemic type event for your body can support what progesterone needs.

And when we go into a keto world, we start seeing the results of a low carb diet, but that we don't realize that progesterone is the outlier. She needs you to bring glucose up. Like if we can just stop and think about that for a moment. When we go into a low carb diet, you're keeping glucose down and that's great for estrogen. She does really well with that, not progesterone doesn't do well with that. And so what we need to do is we need to 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's provided us. Let's look at the foods that nature's provided us to help with progesterone. And they're really yummy foods. They're like the 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, the the yellow sweet potatoes. And then I also would say the rices, although this one's a little bit harder because I can't find anything good about rice, white rice.

We got some heavy metal issues with the brown rice. We got the arsenic issue. But wild rice or forbidden rice where it's a little bit like nutty or those Rice's can be great for progesterone, even quinoa. You get a little more protein in there. But what I what I've noticed is that what people what women do when they started to discover keto or even paleo is they just tossed the cart of carbs aside and they didn't understand that there were good carbs and bad carbs, just like we now understand.

PCOS, Insulin Resistance, and Fasting Strategies 24:58

There's good fat and bad fat and progesterone needs you to bring that that glucose level up. Well, I'm so glad that you talked about these foods that so many people maligned. And I know. People that are, you know, really well-respected, even. And it's like, you know, you just have to rethink what they're saying, you know, like how could these foods be evil when they have so many wonderful benefits and you'll be so proud. Last night for dinner, I had mango and yams, so it was amazing. Yes. And I have a little expression, don't be afraid of fruit, you know, because, yes, here you are, like extolling the benefits of these fruits that so many people say, I would never eat it because they'll give me diabetes.

And of course, women with PCOS do have high incidence of diabetes. And in terms of this fasting and you talked about like insulin, insulin resistance, you know, sort of addressing the special needs of the insulin resistant crowd known as PCOS. Do you have any special sort of hints and what might be the best like say like time of day for eating in terms of like pushing even more of your food to the morning or know specific foods that you personally recommend for insulin resistant people. Just any helpful hints that may be specialized for women with PCOS?

Yeah. So the first thing would be eat in the daylight. Like just just eat when it's light out so that you are working with that melatonin system. So, so that would be the first one. The second thing, I mean, I'm sure you're along this lines as well. I am such a protein fan. Like how do we get more protein in? Because protein is not going to make your blood sugar spike. So it's going to be have less of a blood sugar consequence on your body. So when you're dealing with an insulin resistant person, how do we make sure that we 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.

So a lot of protein and a lot of fat with every meal. Like, I don't I'm not insulin resistant, but I don't skip a protein. I don't do just a straight carb meal, a eat every meal has protein in it. So let's lean into protein and fat. I even there's a term that's going around right now that I really like, which is protein forward, meaning eat the protein first and then eat the carbs. And I think that's really, really powerful for insulin resistance. And then the third thing that I think is interesting when we're looking through the lens of PCOS and insulin resistance is when we finish eating a meal like use the glucose, you just you just created in your body, go for a walk.

You know, 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 and my glutes. So, you know, it doesn't have to be deprivation. It just has to be strategic. Now, what I know was very popularized and 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 of a week.

So could you comment on that as a like a tool to either improve insulin resistance or lose weight because 80% of women with PCOS are trying often desperately to lose weight. Yeah. So the five to to me came out of a really interesting study. This was one of the first things I learned when I started to understand fasting, and it was called the Every Other Day Diet and it was done by a researcher. She actually ended up writing a whole book on it. And what she did is she took a group of people that had a metabolic mass, basically like insulin resistant high cholesterol.

Liver enzymes were off like they were not that lot of extra weight. And she said, okay, eat whatever you want to eat one day and then the other day, don't eat anything. So you're going to fast one day, eat one day. And they did that for a year. They studied this group. And at the end of the year, they they identified that there were some changes that happened that were really profound. So for starters, all the metabolic markers cleaned up, they all lost weight. Now, remember, they were eating whatever they wanted one day, fasting the next.

But the most interesting thing is that their food choices changed. So as the year went on, they started wanting to eat healthier and healthier foods. So out of that then came, Well, what if I do? Two days of no eating, five days, I'll eat whatever I want. And that seemed to work for people as well. I think it's I think it's a little a little bit harder to do. We can talk about some more variations that I think are a little bit easier to do than two days off of food and five days eating whatever you want.

But what what what I want to unpack is why do do does it work for these longer periods of time without food? And here's what happens when you've been insulin resistant for so long. Your body doesn't know what to do with all the glucose. It can't get into the cell. So it stores it as fat. And the first thing I want to say on that and and I want to honor the struggles that women go through trying to lose weight, especially when they have insulin resistance. And 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, so 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 of your survival interest. So the best place for it to put it is in fat. So fat all fat is when you look in the mirror is your brilliance body's way of finding a different storage place. So the first thing we got to do is honor that the body was doing the right thing at the right time.

Second thing I want to say on that is when you fast what you're now signaling to your body in a loving way. When we look at this five two diet that you talked about, those two days off, the message you're giving your body is okay, no food's coming in. You're going to know this because the blood sugars going down. So I want you to go find the glucose you stored years ago and the body innately does that. And it's through gluconeogenesis and the breakdown of fat that it will start to release this glucose into the system so it can be used.

If you do that enough times over several months, you are actually rebalancing your insulin system and you become more insulin sensitive. So for the insulin resistant person, it's imperative that we pick something. Some 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, 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. And I know there's been so much in the news about the gut microbes.

And is there any data that you've come across in all of your research about how fasting during the day or intermittent on certain days of the week, how that impacts the gut in terms of the gut microbiome and then it's communication with the liver and how that could affect fatty liver, any of that, because that's such a big topic. Now, hot topic is gut and liver health. Yeah. So, you know, the greatest study and I quoted it in in my book Fast Like a Girl is a 24 hour study. It was a mouse study. I just want to point that out.

And I always look at mouse studies as they get to get us in the ballpark, but they may not be the end all, be all for for humans and especially women. But it's it's a general idea that I love that at 24 hours without food, your intestinal stem cell or your intestinal inner lining secrete stem cells. And when you get the stem cells, stem cells go and they repair the other whole internal environment. I also had some really interesting conversations. I don't know if you've talked to Dr. Mayer. What's his first name?

Emraan Mayer. He wrote he wrote a book on Gut Health. He has a thing called geographical relocation, where the as we fast those microbes spread out so now they can absorb the vitamins out of your food better they can produce serotonin better to your point, they can start to communicate to the liver better that when they're not when you're you change that internal environment through these periods of fasting, you are literally making it so that when food comes back into the equation, the microbes know how to use that food differently.

And it's all different. Let's fast that do that. The only one that we really have hard data on is the 24 hour fast. And that was done out of M.I.T.. Well, I'm so glad you brought that up, because women with PCOS, they've been shown now with the first study, came out in 2015, almost universally have impaired gut barrier or, a leaky gut and dysbiosis or the wrong gut microbiome. So I really do believe, you know, that this is a really key thing for women to know. And we had talked about this a few days ago, that there's a little bit of data on women and PCOS and fasting.

And this is one of the things that I'm working on with some of the nonprofits involved in PCOS to really get more funding because it's so underfunded. The research in PCOS, in spite of it being such a prevalent condition, but maybe could touch on what little research because you've done such a good deep dove into researching the world of fasting in females, that maybe you could shed a little light on what little data actually has been published on fasting in women with PCOS. Yeah, I mean, you and I have talked about this like the data for women in general in women's health is is horrible like and I have heard recently that that trend is shifting.

Gut Health, Research, and Closing Resources 35:40

We just don't have, you know, studies take years to get. So 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. So but there is a really interesting study on fasting and PCOS and it was done on women. And what it showed is twofold is that not only did fasting and the fast was around 17 hours, it wasn't this is not a huge, long, fast. It's like when women did fasted, it was 16, 17 hours on a regular basis.

They saw that they became more insulin sensitive. The measurement they looked at was hemoglobin a1c, so they kind of looked at what the system looked like over several months, but they saw that testosterone actually came back into balance and then their symptoms started to improve. So we have to remember that when you fast you are regulating the hormonal system. So if testosterone is too high, then now it's going to help regulate testosterone and bring it down. If if insulin is out of control, it's going to regulate it insulin 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. It the same thing happens for if you're low in these hormones, not except progesterone. She's the outlier, but it can bring for menopausal women. It can help you preserve your diet as you go through this menopausal experience. Now, you're never getting estradiol back to what it was years ago, but you can preserve it age appropriate. So what we have to understand is when we look at something like the PCOS, it's a hormonal imbalance.

It's two major hormones. We've got insulin and we have testosterone. And 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 so they did it on a regular basis. This isn't like you go in at one day and all of a sudden your symptoms go away. They saw the testosterone come down and they saw better insulin sensitivity. And that is really encouraging. Well, it is. I mean, when I saw the study, it's like, okay, bells go off, lights are going off and flashing that we finally have real data.

Yes, it's not enough. We need more because now we always, like you and I, were talking about metabolic issues, studies on diabetics, pre diabetics, you know, whatever the data is out there on people, right? Because 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, that the insulin comes down, the testosterone comes down, and we can you know, they didn't do microbiome studies.

But, you know, I think a lot of it does have to do with that. But, you know, we know the outcome, even if we haven't totally defined all the mechanisms involved. And everything is always multifactorial. But to for everyone out there with PCOS who's hearing this, to understand that by doing this timed eating or, you know, intermittent fasting during the 24 hours that women with PCOS had dramatic reductions in their insulin, improved insulin sensitivity and testosterone. So I'm so glad that you and I are one of the very few people out there who out of this data, you know, I'm so excited to to know that, of course, you know, in doing all of your research, you also came across this.

And I think this resonates. And, you know, even though it's not a giant study over a long period of time, it is so revealing. And I think that all the other data that you presented is so overwhelmingly strong, you know, that that this whole notion that developed of eating throughout the day and all this, you know, endless snacking, you know, 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. Right. And I cannot thank you enough for, you know, your your books and 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.

And you talked about that, but also when you should stop eating, you know, that incessant eating is not the the path to health and especially not for women with PCOS. So thank you so much. And I know everyone out there is saying I want to read her books and I want to learn more. So how can they find you and talk a little bit about, you know, what you've written, you know, just like, what are you interested in where you're heading? And, you know, just how can they follow you from this point forward?

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. And I love this discussion, too. I mean, again, I, I just geek out with you every time we chat. And I want to really say to the women that are struggling with PCOS, like we hear you. I mean, Dr. Gersh, you've you really are a champion for this. You're not out of answers. Your body's not turning on you there. There's just tools that haven't been highlighted, which is why, you know, a summit like this is so important, because this should be front page news that our that PCOS studies should have been front page news.

Why wasn't it? That is a whole nother discussion. So yeah, fast like a girl is was the book that I recently put out and it was a fasting manual for women. I think it has answered most of the questions that women had about how to how to fast their cycle. I think it's a great tool for a woman with PCOS really, really highly recommend following a 30 day fasting reset it that would be incredible for a woman with with PCOS. Otherwise I'm I'm kind of everywhere YouTube is my passion project so I have I have some videos I've done on PCOS on my YouTube channel so you can go find that.

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, you know, the mainstream media isn't doing it. So we got to we got to take control and do it ourselves. Well, thank you. And that's right. Everyone needs to harness their inner powers to find information. And then utilize it so that they can achieve optimal health. And I once again thank you so much, Mindy, for joining me, sharing your wealth of information and I look forward to many more.

Join collaborations and everyone out there, get her book, go to her website, follow her YouTube because she has a wealth of knowledge and information and that's really going to help you. So thanks again. Thank you.