Hi, guys. Welcome to today's episode, and I'm so excited we are talking about your hormones and fasting. We have Dr. Mindy Pelz. You are in for such a treat. We are talking about what time of the month a woman should fast how to use fasting to balance your hormones. And it's going to be awesome. She's got a new book coming out, The Menopause Reset coming out April six. So we've got some fun things coming up. So, Dr. Mindy, please tell us a little bit about yourself.
Yeah, for starters, thank you for having me. This is my favorite conversation, is fasting and hormones. So, yeah, gosh, I've been on an incredible healing journey myself, as many of us, you know, in the health world have. And my background is as a chiropractor and about 10 years into my practice, I started to realize that people just weren't healing the same way that they used to heal before. And I started to look at the modern environment and that women were living in primarily. My practice has always been very family and women focused. And what I realized is that we may be living in the same human body, but we are living in a completely different world than we did 10, 20, 30 years ago. And I started to really take a close look at what we were dealing with. Toxic, wise, stress wise, lack of sleep wise. I mean, everything that women are going through.
And I started to make some adjustments to my lifestyle to see if I could really make some changes in my hormonal fluctuations. And that's how I stumbled upon fasting, is that fasting is an incredible tool when used right for a woman to help with weight loss and mental clarity and sleep and brain health, all of the things that we really stumble upon when we get into our 40s. I really found fasting and very near fasts and mapping that to your cycle to be like just key for women, especially over 40. And that's. Yeah, and I just have fallen in love with the tool of fasting.
So talk about the days. So if someone said I need to know the exact days that I should kind of do maybe an extended fast, what are those days?
Yeah, that's a great question. So let's this is the best way I can explain it. And this is how I sort of teach my Reciters on social media is I kind of take the big view and then I come down into the details. So let's take the the big view first. And the big view is that in order for us to feel normal, we really need to have three major hormones in place.
We need our progesterone, estrogen and testosterone. We call them your sex hormones, and they really need to be in balance. And in order to keep those hormones in balance, we really need to manage insulin. And this is why people come to fasting, is that they want to affect insulin. And what they don't realize is if they do it wrong, then they really start to tank those sex hormones. So what we started doing in our community was really looking at these three sex hormones and how insulin drives all three of them at different times in our cycle. So let's start off with this idea that we have a cycle like let's just assume you have a twenty eight, 30 day cycle and then we'll talk about the woman who doesn't know what her cycle is coming or going from day one to day ten. Day one is when you start bleeding, your body is ramping up to make estrogen. So on day one, you get the shed of the blood. You're you're actually needing to use some feminine care products. And then from that point on, your body just starts to build, build, build, build, build estrogen. In order to make estrogen, you have to be insulin sensitive. So if you are insulin resistant, you are going to mismanage estrogen in your body, whether it's estrogen dominance or as perimenopausal. Women experience a lot of estrogen decline. So I think people can go Kirito, they can fast, they can do three day water fast. And this is what we see in our community from day one to day 10 of a woman's cycle. Now, day 10 to day like day 11 to day 15, you're ovulating. So you actually have your sex hormones. Those three hormones are at their peak. So estrogens at its highest testosterone is at its highest and and progesterone is not at its highest. But it does peak. It has a little blip of progesterone. You get in that little weird four day window we call ovulation. During this time, you do not want to be in a long water fast. You could intermittent fast, 15 hours, you would be great, but you don't want to be in a long fast, otherwise those hormones will go down. They will suppress now coming out of ovulation around day 16 to around day 19, there's another little for a day period there where you can go back into a big fast. You can do I like 24 hour fast because they reset our gut and forty eight hour fast, like reset your dopamine receptor sites. There's so many cool things in these longer, fast, but you have only have a little four day window there after ovulation that you can do that. And then the real key and the one that messes every woman up is that starts to fast is day 20. Until you bleed, you really should not fast. If you're fat adapted, you're like, hey, I'm a pro, I can do this. No problem. You might be able to get away with 13 hours, but in general you need to make progesterone and pajares. Drone is your calming hormone. It helps you with mental clarity. It makes you feel good. It helps you sleep. It's the it's the hormone that's going to allow your cycle to start again. And it does not like to it doesn't respond well to cortisol spikes. And fasting is a cortisol spike. So we want you to step out of fasting. We want you to step out. Akito, you want to lean into some progesterone building foods like beans and potatoes and citrus fruits and tropical fruits. These are not keto foods. But you during that week, before your cycle, you really have to be in a more of a nurture phase, not in a cortisol spiking phase. Otherwise, progesterone goes down and then all the hormones start to fall apart.
So I'm going to answer a I'm going to ask you a listener question, and this first question is from Jennifer in Montego Bay. She says, Love, love, love your podcast. I've been binge listening for the past two weeks. I listen to an episode about progesterone cream, but I wanted to see, what are your thoughts on this? I'm kind of scared to take it and have tried to just use fasting to balance my hormones. But I'm kind of thinking maybe it's time for me to add progesterone cream. By the way, I'm 43. Perfect.
I was just going to say, how old is she? Yes. OK, so here's let's again, let's go to the big vision again.
So the big vision is at 40, we have to realize as women, our ovaries are going to start this slow decline and they are going to over the next 10 to 15 years, they are going to slowly back out and stop doing their job. But you still need to have sex hormones. So what your body is going to do is hand the production of those sex hormones over to your adrenal glands. So I just want to point out that if you're trying to balance progesterone, you really need to make sure that you're watching your stress levels. It mean we talked about fasting, but especially just late nights and overdoing it and stress in general the week before your cycle. So that would be the first thing that I would tell her before she starts to lather herself up with progesterone cream, because we want to make sure that the foundational part of her life is is already in balance before we start going to external sources. If she is already like, yeah, yeah, I've been stepping out of fasting the week before I get that I'm supposed to like, eat. This includes workouts like you shouldn't be doing lots of cross fit or really intense workouts that week before your cycle. If you are already watching that, then yeah, progesterone cream could be helpful. The challenge we have with any external source of hormones is that you risk your body not producing it themselves. So we need to I always say fix the lifestyle first and then you can rely on the external sources. So just be very careful that you don't tank your progesterone with lifestyle, but add the cream back in to make up for what your lifestyle should be doing.
Yeah, I totally agree with that. So for me it's funny because it seems like if I had to pick an optimal three day window that I would say it would probably be like day two to five would be really good. And then day like, you know, 15, 18 or 16 to 19. So I always say that, like, those are like if I have to pick a three day window where I'm like, OK, I'm going to fast, those would be the days that I really feel the best. And it's so funny because I didn't realize this for so long, and I would always be like, why is it that some days I can do this fat like I could do a three day fast really easily, and then the next minute it's like, oh my gosh, this is like really a nightmare. So it's amazing how much your hormones affect that. So what would you say are some other tips that you would have for women, for tricks that they could do to make fasting a little bit easier for themselves?
Yeah, and for starters, I just want to say, that's exactly right. The thing we have to realize as women is we have a strong, intuitive sense what our body needs. And I had the same experience where I was like certain times of the month, I could fast like a queen. And other times I was like, I want breakfast. Like, I wake up. And I had that this morning. I woke up and I was like, I want breakfast. And then I'm like, yeah, my body's probably trying to make progesterone, so let's go have some breakfast. So I love that you had already gotten into that intuitive place. Other tricks. OK, so the first thing is what's really cool about what we're now calling the fasting circle is that once you clue in to what your hormonal needs are is that you can really start to map every lifestyle tool to this. So I know you got you have a lot of your listeners that love the ketogenic diet. You know, if you love it or you want to try it, just do it in the first ten days of your cycle and make sure that you're experimenting with it there. That would be one of my first my first steps that I recommend. Another really cool trick that a lot of women don't know is during ovulation, you actually have the highest amount of testosterone then you than any other time of the month. And I want to point out a couple of key pieces of that one. Is your libidos going to be the highest then? So it's really interesting to me how we once I dove to understand hormones, I realized that when you're looking at couples, a lot of times there are testosterone production is mismatched. So knowing when you're making testosterone, if you're in a relationship and you want to enhance your sex life like no, when you're producing testosterone, know when your partner is producing testosterone, if your partner is a man, they get it every couple of hours. But as a woman, we get it once a month. So I love women to know about testosterone production for just understanding how her libido works. The other thing about testosterone that is so cool is it helps us build muscle. So I've been using this fasting circle idea for my own workouts, so I will do. I love to run. So I'll do longer runs day one to day ten. I'll go and I'll push myself a little harder. When I'm making testosterone in that ovulation period, I'll do more strength training so you have more testosterone. It'll help you build more muscle. Testosterone also is the thing that motivates us. It gives us drive. So if you have a big project to do, do it in that ovulation window. It's a beautiful time to to focus in on a on a big project, but focus on building muscle then and then the next little trick to that is when you're making progesterone. That is a really awesome time to start to nurture your parasympathetic nervous system. So lean in to some more yoga, do some more of the breathing. If you're if you are like an ice cold plunger and you love doing that, do do that any time of the week except that week before your your cycle, because you don't want to spike cortisol then. And what I'm finding is as women are gathering, OK, I've got estrogen coming here, I've got testosterone here, I've got progesterone here. As we start to know where our hormones are at, we can start to put every little piece of our lifestyle together to be able to maximize what I call our superpowers. We our hormones are gifts to us. They are not nuisances, but we never have been taught how to use them. So I like to use the circle not only to know where to fast, but how to use the other parts of my lifestyle to be able to click it and maximize those hormones.
So let's talk about extended fasting for just a second.
I want you to talk about the timeline of what happens to your body kind of day one, day three, day five. And I you know, if you have not listened to Dr. Mendi, Dr. Mehndi was on our fasting reset summit. If you go to fasting reset summit dotcom, you can go check that out. And she was literally one of my favorite episodes. I remember finishing that episode and I was like, oh, my gosh, that was the best one. I loved it so much. But give us a little glimpse into what happens in your body as each day goes on.
Yeah, yeah, this is like a this is like a crowd favorite, everybody wants to know, like, tell me what happens at this time. So and I love I love the science behind fasting. So it's really phenomenal when you start to look at how well our bodies were designed. So the first thing I for me, I start afast to me the hour starts, the last thing you put in your mouth. So if you stop eating at eight o'clock at night, the clock, your fasting Clark clock starts at eight one. So that's let's just start there. Now, the first set of what I call healing switches that get turned on are around our 13 somewhere in between our 13 and 15. There's a couple of really cool things that happen at that moment as your blood sugar is starting to go down, you're at our thirteen, you'll get some growth hormone. And growth hormone is the hormone that burns fat, helps us build muscle, and it slows the aging process down. You also are working at about our thirteen to moving over into a whole nother fuel source, and we call it the fat burner fuel source. And so your body's starting to metabolically switch over into a different fuel source and the presence of ketones, when you get ketones that start to go up. We like them up above about point five. We now know that your body's operating from a totally different fuel source, which is why you feel so good. So 13 to 15 hours, you're getting ketones, you're starting to burn fat, you're getting growth hormone. And then the last thing we see at that time is inflammation starts to come down. So that is your first hurdle. If you have not fasted, that is the first hurdle that you want to get to. Now, if you continue on at 17 hours, autophagy will kick in and autophagy is the state in which your body, the intelligence in your body goes, OK, food's not coming. The blood sugar keeps going down. So I better become more efficient and it will turn within the cell and it will start to repair the cell. Now, something really cool about autophagy that is very relevant to this day, and I don't think we talked about it on the summit as much, is that once a cell is clicked into this autophagy state, it looks around that intelligence will look around the cell and it will kill bacteria, it will kill viruses, it will kill pathogens, and it will destroy them and get them out of the cell. So there was an incredible study that came out in October of twenty twenty saying that if you want to stop viral replication in your cells, get into a state of autophagy because viruses can have to live off of your energy source. So 17 hours is when the state starts. And it's it, I think a bit like a dimmer switch. It starts to slowly turn on at 17 hours. The other really cool thing, about 17 hours and autophagy is if that intelligence turns on and is like, hey, the cells going rogue, this is going to be a cancer cell. We need to get rid of it. It will kill the cell. And we call that apoptosis. And cell death is great if you have cancer cells. So when we do more 17 hour fasting, we are starting to regulate the intelligence starts to regulate the good cells from the bad cells. It cleans up the cells that need to be put into better shape. And this was all done without, you know, any supplement, without any food, without I mean, you just need to not eat, just need to not eat. So that starts at seventeen, then it continues on. Twenty four hours is what we call a gut. I call it the gut reset fast where your your intestinal stem cells in your gut will just completely start to reboot themselves. So anybody who has Sebo Candida parasites, leaky gut, twenty four hour twenty four hour fasting will change the train on the inside of the gut then thirty six hours. This is actually an interesting one based off of what I see in my receptors and not as much in the literature. We're just seeing it and running so many women through different fasts is at thirty six hours. You it clicks on that extreme fat burning. So if anybody stuck trying to get to lose weight, try throwing some thirty six hour fast in there. It's enough of a comedic stress on the cells that the body goes OK, we've been gone thirty six hours without food. I better go find the glucose and the insulin that I stored years ago and it starts to burn fat more efficiently. And then the last two that I really love to chat about is the forty eight hour fast. This is kind of a new one I've been throwing out. There is what I called the dopamine reset. So at. Forty eight hours are dopamine receptor sites in our brain start to open up and we actually start to create new receptor sites and our whole dopamine signaling pathway starts to get enhanced because you haven't had food for 48 hours, so you haven't had the dopamine coming in. So your your body's like, well, I'd better be more sensitive to dopamine, which is great if you are one of those women that I hear so often that say I'm just not experiencing joy like I used to. I really don't know why you're not getting that dopamine rush. And then the last one that I love and everybody I mean, this is the most famous one is Volter Longo's three day fast. You really three days in, you reboot your whole immune system, you start to make stem cells that will go throughout the whole body and repair musculoskeletal injuries and to repair your immune system. So the longer you go, the more these switches get turned on. So each switch that I said doesn't get turned off until you eat again.
So I'm going to ask another question, and this one is from Caroline in Stamford, Connecticut. She says, I love that you talk about extended fasting. You're one of the few podcasts that I seems that talk about it. I live in Stamford, Connecticut, and I broke my ankle about six years ago. It's healed, but sometimes it seems like when I eat gluten and daily dairy, it will start swelling up with fluid. I don't know if that's true, but it just seems like that's what it is. I do want to do some more extended fasting, but I usually get to about a day and a half and just break down and give up any tips to keep on going?
Yeah, well, for starters, I just want to applaud her for using fast as fasting as a healing tool. I've done that several times with athletic injuries. I just go into a longer, fast and it's amazing how your body figures out where to put those stem cells. So let's start off with. That's awesome. I love that we're using fasting for that. If you get there's two things you can do. If you get to that point where you're like, I'm going three days and it's a day and a half and I'm going to kill somebody, I can't do this any longer than a really good trick is to try some fat so you can do more oil in like a cup of tea. You could do a scoop of ghee. And just I mean, I sometimes just take a superguy and put it in my mouth. You could do an avocado, something that's just you could do a fat bomb like a cup, something that's just pure fat.
And the reason I say that is because fat typically doesn't have a strong reaction, will not create a strong reaction on your blood sugar. So now you might say, well, doesn't that pull me out of a fasted state? And anything that pulls you out of a fasted state is anything that is going to raise your blood sugar. So if you do a fat and it doesn't raise your blood sugar, you may be able to get over that hump and get to that next go all the way to the 72 hours to get the stem cells. So the real trick is to make sure that whatever you're going to lean into as a crutch, that it doesn't spike your blood sugar. Now, how do you know if it spikes your blood sugar or not? You might test it before you do your next three day water fast. So I love Ketel Cups. It's one of the things that I typically break my fast with in the afternoon. And so what I do is I what you could do is take a blood sugar reading, have a cup or have a whatever you think you'll break that fast with and then eat it, eat what you want to break the fast with. And then in half an hour to an hour later, take your blood sugar reading again. If that blood sugar reading is equal or at dips, you're going to stay in a fasted state. If it spikes, you're going to come out of a fasted state. So and then if you keep doing that over time, you're going to find that you're that it'll get easier and easier to go three days without having to lean on the fat, the little fat heck.
Awesome. So I want to hear what does the day in the life of Dr. Mindy look like as far as fasting and eating and kind of what does a week or a month look like? So kind of bring it down to like a daily, but then also expand out for weekly and monthly.
OK, yeah. So I time my farse according to my schedule. So there's a couple of things that a typical day for me is I'm a big fan of morning time. I get up early so that I can read, I can meditate, I can do some breathing exercises. So I'm all about the morning starting off slow and giving to myself in the morning. I do do coffee. It's organic mold free. A very particular about the ingredients I use. I do a little bit of raw cream. I'll do some oil. I've been lately doing some minerals in my in my morning cup of coffee as well. So I'll have that first thing in the morning and then I'm usually off to the office and I am like I'm the type of person that's just back to back to back to back working and just kind of how I like my life. So on most days will not break my fast till about two o'clock in the afternoon. Now, the only exception to that is the week before my cycle then. And I can always tell because I'm hungry at like nine, ten in the morning, so I'll break it at about two. But what I've been breaking it with, I've been experimenting with that. So I used to have my heaviest meal at night just because that's sort of when I sat down with my family. But I've been doing more protein and a little heavier meal around two o'clock and then eating a lighter dinner. And I'm noticing some changes in my quality of sleep, I'm noticing my HIV on my I wear a woop that that is really starting to improve if I don't have a real heavy meal at the end of the day. So I'm a protein and vegetable gal. That's pretty much what I eat most of the time with a lot of variance of different proteins and different vegetables. And then at night I may just have a continuation of of that kind of meal. Now, the exceptions of that Sun Sunday is my big family day, so that's pretty much Kaito and fasting about 17 hours Monday through Friday. On Saturday, I do a workout with my sisters, were done at nine thirty and I ate breakfast. I do eggs and sausage and I have a big breakfast and I'll probably eat pretty much throughout the day for that just all day long. Once I open my eating window, I'll eat. Now, Sunday is family day in our house. So we go to the farmer's market, we get a bunch of food and then I'm cooking all afternoon. So I love to bake. So I'll do a lot of I've experimented with different types of cheesecakes and Kaito cheesecakes and of course, always using quality ingredients. We use coconut sugar we don't use. Or if it's purely Kaito, I'll do more like my my son doesn't like stevia but will I'll try to throw in some urethral tall or something or monck fruit has been working really well. So I experiment with cooking and then my parents come over on Sunday night. So we do a huge like family to our family meal every Sunday night.
So it's kind of our community and family gathering day and then Monday back to fasting. I'm back to Quito and I'm back to about one meal a day. And that's pretty much what I do on a regular basis, with the exception of the week before my cycle. Now I'm fifty one and I sometimes my cycle doesn't show up for sixty, ninety, one hundred and twenty days. So I have to really mind my progesterone and sort of get a sense of when I feel like if it's 9:00 in the morning and I want to eat, I might eat a little bit more. But if when I was forty seven I used to look at my, I would track my cycle on a clue app and then the week before my cycle I was eating sweet potatoes and, and a lot more carby foods the week before and that really synched up my cycle well.
All right, this next one is from next question is from Stephanie Ann in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. She says, I love your new book and I wrote a review. Please send me the audio book. I love drinking coffee and I love the taste of it. In one meal and a tasting. I saw that you don't drink your coffee until about one or two with a one cup of coffee with a little cream to break your window. I will tell you, I feel like I love how I feel with coffee, but I don't feel great with coffee. It's weird and I know it doesn't make sense, but it's just really hard to explain. I can explain it. But how do you feel with coffee? And I remember you said you didn't have coffee, but then in this book you said you did. Confused Stephanie Anne in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. So I was just kind of explain that for a second. So I used to never drink coffee at all.
And then I started. Then I was like, you know, someone was like, you got to try this nitro coffee, whatever.
I started adding coffee. And so, you know, once you add one cup of coffee in, then you it's hard to get out of that cycle. And so I try to have a clean fast in the morning, but then around like one o'clock kind of to take me to that next level, maybe like at twelve or one, I'll have a little bit of coffee with some kind of cream or mkt oil or something. It'll take me an extra hour or two, then I'll actually start having a tasting around two o'clock or I'll have my meal at two o'clock. So that's kind of where that's coming from. And it's funny because people listen to what I say and then maybe I change it up. Right. So like, I used to never have coffee, so she's probably like, wait, you said you didn't have coffee. Now all of a sudden you are having coffee while we change things up every once in a while. And I really liked her question because she's saying, like, I feel the same way. And to be honest, I'm I'm actually weaning myself off of coffee again. So it's like now people are going to be listening and be like, oh, here she goes again. Now she's coming off of coffee. But because I don't I honestly don't feel great. And and the thing is, I think what really is important is what kind of coffee are you having? Does it have mold in it? Is it organic? And so I'll let you answer and then I'll give a couple more thoughts on it.
Yeah. You know, it's interesting. I was just at the biohacking conference here and there was a budg Ben was on that panel, Thomas Day Lour. He has a big YouTube channel. And we were talking about all the different variations and how people want just tell me what to do. Just give me the one thing to do. But here's the here's the concept to remember is that whenever we put something new in so let's say we put coffee in, we're going to have our body is actually going to have this very positive response because coffee can stimulate a autophagy. And if it's mold free and it's chemical free, there's not a lot around one cup a day that is destroying your your health, but it's the most impactful when you first put it back in. Now, if you keep drinking that cup of coffee over and over and over again, it becomes there's a diminishing return where it's not as impactful.
So I actually love your approach where you, like, go in, do some coffee for a little bit and then stop the coffee. And then I'm sure if we did this podcast a year from now, you might be like, well as off coffee for six months. Now I'm back on it. And people who are listening to you, you're right. They think you're crazy. But let's stop for a moment and and ask ourselves why we've never been able to figure out the number one diet that all humans should be on. And the reason is because there is no one, no one diet that all humans should be on. We are meant to go in and out of different foods and different states. And we're each time we try something new, our body responds positively. And if we stay with that thing, we get a diminishing returns. So I want to just say all that to say I like your approach to coffee. I think it's actually really good. Now, how does it work for you? So there's a concept that is gaining a lot of traction right now that I really want to point out to people. And it's called end of one. So when you hear one of us say, hey, this is what you should do, you have to try it on yourself and with coffee. I like the blood sugar test. And it's the same thing I just said about breaking your fast. Take a blood sugar reading, have your cup of coffee, take another reading a half an hour to an hour later. Are those blood sugar numbers equal if they are equal or their or your blood sugar, the second reading goes down. That coffee's working for you for now. I mean, again, do it again in a couple of months. But we've got to start to go into this place of bio individuality and understand that. Not everybody's going to do great with coffee and some people are going to do incredible with coffee. I mean, I brought Dave Asprey on to my podcast and I asked him about coffee. Now, of course, he's a little biased, but he was so funny. And he said, why would you ever want to give up coffee? Why would you do something stupid like that? And he's a believer. If you put oil in it, it will help you get into this ketogenic state. And when you get more ketones now, you start to suppress the hunger hormone so that so he use it, uses it as a hack. So, again, I tell you all that to say don't be confused when you hear us saying exactly what you said, which is, hey, sometimes I drink it, sometimes I don't. Your approach is actually brilliant and we all should be approaching everything we do with a hey, let me do it for a little bit and then I'll stop and then I'll do it for a little bit. And this is why I love when women time their fast according to their cycle. We're going in and out of all these different fasting states and we never get stuck. We never have that diminishing return.
All right. This next question comes from Cindy Ann in Austin, Texas. I'm going to be training for a bodybuilding competition, and my trainer is trying to get me to eat six meals a day. And I've already told him I'm not going to do it. I'm going to do, like you said, one meal and a tasting. But the one thing I have been doing is a keto ish diet, like you talk about in your book.
But he wants me to have grilled chicken and sweet potato or fish and white rice and lots more bread without any butter or anything like that and work on my macros. I look at him and that's what he eats and he is shredded. And I do want to get very lean and cut thoughts.
Oh, my gosh, I have nobody thought, OK? For starters, we as women should never look at how a man eats or works out or fasts and try to mimic that. So just let's let's this is a big message that I'm trying to get across to women is let's make sure that we're eating for our hormones and we're not comparing ourselves to men because they need to do something a little different. But what I hear from her is that she wants to get shredded. So let's go back to this idea of the fasting circle. You can do keto if you have a cycle, go really into those Quito's states in the first 10 days. And then his little formula do it in during the ovulation period when you have a lot of testosterone. If you want to eat six meals a day, then that you can do it. Then I think what's interesting, that I'd like to do a protein cycling approach where there's great research showing that if you do 20 grams of protein every two to three hours, you stimulate mTOR. And Amthor is what builds muscle. So you do that the best. You can build the most muscle by doing it every couple of hours, 20 grams, which is like an egg. Some, you know, you're going to have to take what you would have done in maybe one or two meals. And then that is where you could do it over six meals, but make them very protein rich and do that in your ovulation period. And when you come out of that, go into your style, Akito a little bit more go deeper into your workouts. And then again, like I said, the week before your cycle, if you want to take his six meal a day approach, the week before it your cycle and you want to do Kabeer Foods fabulous. So you can do a little bit of what he's saying. You just want to put those in the ovulation window and you want to put them into the into the week before your cycle window and then use your approach with keto. Make sure you're using that in that front half of your cycle and when you come out of ovulation. And then the last thing I would say is I'm not a fan of gluten in any way, shape or form unless you're outside of America. Our gluten is so heavily sprayed, it's going to be with glyphosate. It's going to cause inflammation. I'm not a fan of white rice, so I'd rather see you doing sweet potatoes, potatoes, nature's foods. Those are a little bit more congruent with what your sex hormones are going to want.
Awesome. Well, what have I not asked you about fasting or or hormones that you want women to know?
Well, I think I think the hardest, if you're listening to this, the hardest to figure out is if you don't have a cycle, so you're either postmenopausal. I'll talk about that in a moment or if you lost your cycle for birth control reasons. So we're trying to come up with something like a 30 day little program that women could tap into, more like just like a visual a 30 day visual that women could could tap into to really sink her cycle up. And I'll I'll sort of just explain it to you guys. So if you don't if you're listening to this and you're like, this sounds great, but I don't have a cycle, I would say you just take a 30 day period and you do 10 days of keto and fasting, do five days of more protein building, do another three days of marquito and longer fasts, and then finish it off with about a week of no fasting and more of the progesterone building foods I talked about that would be really important for women that are postmenopausal women that are. I had a woman this weekend say to me, I don't I don't have a cycle. I don't know. I don't know. I have PCOS. I don't know what I should do. But if we are using these principles of long, fat, short, fast protein, build, progesterone, build, like if we're clicking in and out of these, I truly believe we can start to sink our cycles back up. Not if you're postmenopausal, obviously, but if you're in your 20s or 30s, you can start to sink your cycle back up. If you follow that approach, we as women have to be have more variation with our food, more variation with our with our fasting than men. And I'll say one last thing to the post menopausal women. You can fast a little more like a man. You can kind of jump in whenever you want. But I would also encourage you to realize that you don't have as much progesterone as you did when you were thirty. So you're still going to need more feast days than a man is going to need. And actually, the last thing I'll say is if you haven't checked your hormones, check your hormones. I think every woman should run like a we do a Dutch test run a Dutch test every once a year on you and on yourself and understand where your hormones are at.
I love it. Well, this has been so amazing. Thank you so much for being with us. And you guys tell us a little bit more about your book. I know it's coming out April six, menopause reset. Give us like one or two little tips on there.
Yeah. So the book comes out April 6th, and it was actually a request of my following on YouTube because I started to explain what I did in my forties to balance my hormones out. So it is got five lifestyle tips that you can do. Fasting is one of them and varying Quito's another one. The third tip that I think most women don't know about is that you have a whole set of bacteria in your gut that breaks estrogen down. It's actually got a really cool name. It's called the Esther Bilum and it's there to make it so that estrogen is more useable to you. That's really important for perimenopause, menopausal or postmenopausal woman. So make sure if there was ever a moment that you were eating more leafy greens, it's after 40 because you've got to feed those bacteria so that you can break estrogen down. Just because you make estrogen doesn't mean you use estrogen. So you need to rely on all the different parts of our body that help make estrogen more usable. But the book is really those the five lifestyle tips that I did. It's a great quick read. I wanted it to be a book that women could pick up, read in a couple of days and be like often ready to go. So I didn't want it to be a book that sat on the shelf and people were like, Oh yeah, I should probably go read that. I wanted it to be a very usable book that people could put into action right away.
Awesome. We'll tell listeners where they can find you and where they can follow you.
My my passion, my heart, like what I spend so much of my time on is my YouTube channel. I put out two videos a week on fasting. And if you go there and you subscribe, if you leave me comment, my staff brings me those comments and we create more videos based off of what the audience wants there. I do a fasting Q&A. I go live once a week so you can you can join me over there. But I've got a podcast. I'm on Instagram. I'm kind of everywhere. So you can go to Dr. Mindy Pelz dot com and sort of see what I'm up to. Those are the sort the two hubs that we send people to.
That's awesome. Well, you guys stay tuned. We've got another episode coming up in just a few bye bye for now.