Essentia: Rise & Thrive Featuring Dr. Mindy Pelz of The Resetter Podcast and Bestselling Author.

Dr. Mindy Pelz, renowned holistic health and fasting expert, and Bestselling Author of The Menopause Reset, The Reset Factor and Reset Kitchen joins us to discuss how creating a fasting lifestyle can help to heal the body, including diet variations, detoxing chemicals, stress management and lifestyle changes that are key to achieving optimum health and slow the aging process. 

Dr. Mindy is a wealth of knowledge and so informative on helping you create a fasting lifestyle, or even understanding where to begin creating your own fasting lifestyle. The passion that Dr. Mindy exudes is contagious! We have no doubt that Dr. Mindy's mission to get a million people fasting will be hit, and we're happy to be a part of that journey. 

We encourage you to subscribe to Dr. Mindy's YouTube channel, her videos are easy to follow and will help you understand and begin to create your own fasting lifestyle. Dr. Mindy has also been so awesome to share with the Essentia community a download of her Fasting Benefits Chart that you can access here. 

You can can also keep up with Dr. Mindy on her Resetter Podcast that features great conversation and guests to give even more layers to your fasting lifestyle. And as always, for more fun and quick tips follow Dr. Mindy on Instagram.

Want to keep up with all of our new episodes and awesome guests? Sign up to get on the list!

You can also read the full transcript of the Essentia: Rise & Thrive podcast featuring Dr. Mindy Pelz here: 

Whitney: Hello, and welcome to Rise and Thrive. This is a series where we explore some of the biggest topics in wellness and how they affect our sleep so that you can learn to wake up every day, feeling rested, recharged, and ready for anything. I'm Whitney Lauritsen, the moderator. And I'm joined by Jack, the CEO and founder of Essentia natural memory foam and our special guest, 

Dr. Mindy Pelz, a functional health expert, and best-selling author of The Menopause Reset, The Reset Factor and The Reset Kitchen. We're recording the podcast on Clubhouse today to have a live discussion about creating a fasting lifestyle and how that helps to heal the body. Mindy will talk about diet variations, detoxing chemicals, stress management, and lifestyle changes that are key to achieving optimal health and slowing the aging process.

If you're live with us on clubhouse, you'll have the chance a little bit later to come up on stage to ask questions of Dr. Mindy, and we encourage you to visit my https://myessentia.com/podcast to get more information about this broadcast. If you're on clubhouse, you can tap on my profile or Jack's. We have it linked to there.

And Dr. Mindy has something special. That'll be in our show notes. So you're definitely not going to want to miss it. So with that said, I'd love to turn it over to Jack and Jack. I love hearing the way that you introduce the special guests that we have here. So let's hear it from you. Why Dr. Mindy's today and why are you excited about this topic?

Jack: I'm actually going to try to control myself because I'm too excited about this one here. We'll keep the faith really is. First of all. Thank you, Dr. Mindy. I really appreciate you coming on here and. Ultimately I've been intermittent fasting. It's something I've been dreaming about for years. One it's, so it's a topic that I love and wellness is something that I've been focused on for 18 years.

And we work with a lot of, wellness enthusiasts, a lot of people, but really I, what I love about you is that you really dig into the science and, I'm always faced with this when I'm giving when I'm talking to people and I'm talking to people with a lot of different conditions and I don't want to be giving advice that I'm not qualified to give.

So what I love about having you here is I get to share. Get to get all of our followers, all of our essential users to learn about it because it's something I want them to learn about. And I feel that you're qualified to do it, not me. So that's why I really appreciate you being here and people are wondering maybe why or why is essential talking about fasting.

But I think when people think about fasting, they automatically think about weight loss. But, and while it's amazing for weight management, I think what truly connects us together here is that it's about healing and recovery and healing. And we focus on healing and recovery when you're sleeping environment and you focus on healing and recovery through fasting.

And these are so connected and anyone who thinks they're not is completely wrong, this is a full cycle. So again, thanks again. And I know everyone's gonna learn and if this is just an inkling of them getting to know you and getting on your podcast and listening to you after. I think I've done a good thing.

Dr. Mindy Pelz: Thank you Jack. Thank you, Whitney. I'm excited to be here. I'm as enthusiastic about fasting as you are. And I'm like you, I want the world to fast. I really strongly believe that once you learn how to fast, this is our fastest, no pun intended our fastest way out of metabolic syndrome, which is a major problem for the world worldwide right now.

So I'm just like you. I want to get this message out to everyone. 

Whitney: You're on a mission to get 1 million people fasting. And I'm curious why that number, why 1 million and where are you at in that path right now? 

Dr. Mindy Pelz: That's a great question. I'm a big thinker, so that's the first thing to know. And it was just the first number that came to my mind. I actually, you guys know the hundredth monkey theory, right? When you hit a hundred. Oh, it's a great, it's a great concept in science, which is it was a study done long time ago. And when they were looking at the behavior and I forget exactly the way they were doing it, but they were looking at the behavior of monkeys.

They figured out that when they hit the hundredth monkey, that the whole community of monkeys would change their habits. So there was a tipping point of a number that forced all the monkeys to change their behavior. So I decided what's the hundredth monkey number for fasting. I don't know what it is, but I just picked a million and I was like, let's just get a million people fasting.

And we actually, and Jack you, and I didn't really talk about this the other day, but we're going to be launching in January and international fasting day where we're going to work to get a million people on that day fasting so that we can hopefully hit that hundredth monkey part. But that's the idea is there's going to be a tipping point here where once people understand what fasting can do for them, you're going to see everybody doing it.

Whitney: That is incredible. And actually that's a great place for us to start, which Jack touched upon. I'd love to dig into a little bit more is how do you define fasting? What is it exactly in case anyone is feeling. Unsure or unclear because certainly it's a term that's very common, but there are different types of fasting and there might be a lot of misconceptions.

So how do you define it? And what's like a simple way to understand 

Dr. Mindy Pelz: yeah, this is such a good question. The first thing I want to say is fasting is not calorie restriction. I, that I am on podcasts interviews every week. And I get thrown that question, especially when we're dealing with women, especially when we're dealing with things like thyroid, what it is not is it's not calorie restriction.

It is time restricted eating. You are taking your food and you are compressing it in a certain time period so that your body has time to rest and heal. And the. The one of my favorite studies on this showed that if a and it was a mouse study. So when we talk about studies, we'll there's mouse, there's men, and then there's women because all of those seem to make a difference when we're looking at the statistics.

But this was in cell metabolism. Mouse study showed that when they took two groups of mice and they fed them a high sugar, high, fat diet, and one group, they let them eat that diet all day long. And the other group, they compressed it into a 10 hour eating window that the mice that was had the compressed time restricted eating were basically immune from any rises or elevations in insulin, glucose, cholesterol all of the metabolic markers, they were immune from any metabolic damage, even though they were eating the bad.

Now on that note, let's just apply that to the world right now. Fasting is free fasting. Doesn't take time and I don't have to go to you and say, stop eating your McDonald's. All I do is go to you and say, can you eat your McDonald's in a 10 hour eating window? And then leave 14 hours for fasting so that your body can heal from that high fat, high sugar diet.

This is where I see a million people is going to be transformative because we're, we don't have to talk . Vegan carnivore. If you love your, if you're addicted to sugar fine. And what you'll see as you fast, longer, your food behaviors will change, but let's start by just getting you to compress your eating.

Jack: What about the timeframe? I, we hear people talking about 12 hours, 16 hours, 24 hours, 72 hours. W what's the right time and or do they all serve, I guess these serve a different purpose. It's a great question as well. They absolutely serve a different purpose. So let me go through them.

Dr. Mindy Pelz: This is the, this is like the party trick that everybody wants to know. So it's cracks me up. We call it the timeline benefits chart. And I think I mentioned to you guys, we have it all written out. We were happy to give it to your community. But here's how it works at 13 hours, somewhere between 13 to 15 hours of not eating.

And we should probably talk in a moment about what that means not eating because a lot of people ask me that question. Your body starts to move from a sugar burner energy system. Now the sugar burner energy system is a little misleading because it doesn't mean you have to eat sugar to be burning energy from this system kicks in.

Whenever you start, whenever you're eating and your blood sugar goes up, you are making energy from this system at 13 to 15 hours, you start to switch that and you begin to make energy from the ketogenic energy system, or I lovingly call it the fat burning energy system. So at 13 to 15 hours, we see typically people start to make that switch over into the fat-burner energy system.

So in the byproduct of that switch company, So usually ketones will kick in 13 to 15 hours. Ketones will go up into the brain and they will turn off the hunger hormone. So that's the first thing to know. They also will start to repair any injured neurons. The other thing that happens at 13 to 15 hours is that we start to see that as your blood sugar goes down, it will signal growth hormone will you don't get any growth hormone.

After 30, you're done kids have growth hormone and at 30 growth hormone production stops in your body and the aging process begins. So you can make your growth hormone by intermittent fasting, which is amazing. That's awesome. Then at F that's 13 to 15 hours at 17 hours, you stimulate something called autophagy.

Autophagy is where this intelligence in ourselves looks around and it goes, gosh, it's been 17 hours since the are the blood sugar has gone up. We're burning energy from fat. We better get more efficient. So the cells will clean themselves up. They will kill out, kick out bacteria viruses, pathogens of all kinds, start to get destroyed in the cells.

And the cell makes itself stronger. If you if that cell was going to turn into a cancer cell, it will kick in the intelligence of your body will kick in and go, Hey this cells going rogue, this is going to be a rogue cell. Let's kill it. And it will. It's a process known as Apoptosis. So you start to kill old cells that could turn into chronic diseases.

At 24 hours, you reset your intestinal stem cells. So anybody with a leaky gut, anybody with a candida SIBO parasites at 24 hours. What we know from science is that the S the cells in the intestinal mucosal lining will start making stem cells and repair your mucosal, lining 36 hours. Your body goes and burns, finds the stored glucose that it stored in fat.

So I always say the 36 hour fast is like the fat burning fast at 48 hours. Your intelligent body reboots the dopamine pathways, and you create new dopamine receptor sites and the Krebs cycle, which is the cycle. The metabolic cycle of each cell will start up regulating antioxidants to slow down the aging.

And then at 72 hours, your whole immune system will be rebooted. Old white blood cells will be w will be recycled out and new ones will come in. It's crazy. 

Jack: The 72 hours, we're going to have to talk about what really w what we're really putting aside here. What is, what are we not touching? Cause I, we talk about w when you're fasting you can have beverages. I've also heard of a dry fast. If you're going to go 72 hours, w what are we still consuming for those 72 hours? 

Dr. Mindy Pelz: Yeah, this is the million dollar question, right? I do a Q and A's every week. And I'm like, every week I get this question. Okay. So typically anything that elevates your blood sugar is going to take you out of a fasted state.

So now the question to that or the next question to ask you, Is okay. What elevates my blood sugar. And this is where it's very personal. So coffee, which is the most common question I get may elevate Jack's blood sugar, but doesn't elevate my blood sugar because our blood sugar regulation believe it or not is built off of our microbiome.

So . Even though we have, we're as humans, our cells are more alike, our bacteria is completely different. What I always say is the best way to know let's use the cup of coffee. For example, is you take a blood sugar reading and then you drink your cup of coffee and then a half an hour, take another blood sugar reading.

If that second reading is very similar to the first reading you, the coffee is keeping you in a fasted state. If that blood sugar goes over 10 points, your it's kicked you out. If it's a point or two higher, that's your call. But typically it's anything that will raise your blood sugar. So I tell people water is probably the best coffees.

Okay. Even putting like MCT oil in your coffee can be okay. Some people can get away with cream like a full fat cream. A lot of our fasters we'll do mineral water. We have people who do like mineral packets in their water. So there's a lot of different variations. But in general, it's personal to you and that's the formula to follow.

Jack: He keeps saying things and it keeps generating more questions that I want to ask you though. Is there is there an age, is there a minimum age to start fasting? Is this something our children should be doing or is it, something once once we were kicked out of growth that we have to focus on.

Dr. Mindy Pelz: Yeah. This is also a great question. Okay. The first thing I want to say to everyone, Is fast teams, a personal journey. This is why I love it. So if you're listening to this and you're like, oh my God, my husband should fast. Your husband needs to want to fast. That's the first thing. There's no fasting bullying around here.

We gotta we gotta it lovingly encourage people. If we're going to get to this million, we can't manipulate people to a million. So it's a personal journey. So this goes for kids now, here's, what's really interesting about your question around kids is we, as kids will innately. But we beat it out of them.

I mean that with love when they're little, I've got, my kids are 21 and 19 now, but when they were little, it was like, breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Make sure you eat your lunch. When they came home from school, I was like, here's a snack. When they sit down to dinner, you're like, Hey, it's dinner time we eat.

So we train kids to get out of balance with their own natural cycles of hunger. So when I first I started to understand fasting. I actually went to my kids and I said, okay. And my son was about 15 at the time. And I I said, tell me when you're hungry. And he's I'm hungry at about 10 o'clock in the morning.

And so I said, okay, could you go off to school? And at nutrition, let's make that your first meal of the day. Let's make sure you're eating good food. So if you want your kids to do this, you've got to involve them in helping figure out where their natural cycles are. And then the second part of that, pretty much any, my, my dad is 85 years old and my mom is 82 and they both fast, they both intermittent fast and they've done.

I think my dad did a 72 hour fast. He's got like a massive, like mental discipline when he wants to apply it. So that's, we see people, seniors do it. And then, we've seen, I would say around if a 16 year old or a 17 year old wanted to fast, they had a good relationship with food.

I'd be like, okay, that, that would be fine. As long as they're asking for it, the only people that absolutely shouldn't fast are pregnant. And nursing women, shouldn't fast more than 15 hours because you don't want to stimulate any apoptosis and a detox reaction. 

Whitney: Wow. I love that point about first of all, it sounds like there's no one size fits. All right. You have to understand your body. And I imagine working with a doctor or medical professional or using some sort of protocol is incredibly helpful. If not necessary to figure this out versus just doing what your friends or family members are doing. And I also love this point about the children, because it's really amazing how big breakfast is.

And of course the roots of that word are break fast. But especially in America, we associate that with these big meals and they're often loaded with sugar and other carbs. And over time I realized I don't actually want breakfast. Like I'm going to back my fast at. But not in that like Americanized version.

I'm very content with having a cup or two of coffee before I eat and all I won't eat until lunchtime. And so there's a kind of a two part point here. And one of them is like, figuring out your unique, like rhythm and timeframe. So for someone like me, it's very easy for me to not eat in the morning, but I do know that you and other doctors and medical professionals advise not eating two to three hours before bed.

And I struggle with that. I tend to want to stay up late and I tend to just eat and then look at my watch and I'm like, I need to go to bed, but I just ate an hour ago. What do I do? Whereas in the morning I can go easily four hours before I eat anything. So what do you do for someone like that?

Do you just have to train yourself? Do you have to be really intentional? Or is that perhaps my unique rhythm. 

Dr. Mindy Pelz: It really could be your unique rhythm. And this is why I really am an advocate of us all finding our own fasting lifestyle is what I call it, where we are compressing that eating window, but that eating window may see a move around like my kids we're empty nesters now.

And so instead of having dinner at eight o'clock at night, when everybody came home from their sporting. I'm like, Hey, I think we can have dinner at five o'clock now. Like we can move dinner up. So this is why you have to look at your day and go, there's a fasting window and there's an eating window. Now on the breakfast point, I just want to point this out for people that are like, Nope.

My doctor said breakfast is the most important meal of the day. The first thing I want to encourage you to do is Google it and see if you can find the science on it. I've tried. I can't find it. What I have found is that in the 1970s, when Kellogg's came out with corn flakes, they needed an ad. And their ad line was breakfast is the most important meal of the day in order to get cornflakes in all American's homes.

So we walk around saying breakfast is the most important meal of the day, still saying their ad line. So that part is crazy to me now to your personal situation, the reason that we don't want people eating right before they go to bed is twofold. The first is the, and this is really for people who want to lose weight.

So you might Whitney bypass this reason, but it's something to think about when melatonin goes up, you become more insulin resistant. So if you are trying to lose weight and you were going one meal a day, which a lot of people do, and you're eating that meal after dark, when melatonin is already going through your body.

And you're eating like a high carb. Let's say you decide I'm just going to fast and I'm not going to care about my food and you eat a bowl of pasta your body. Isn't going to know how to process that because it will be more insulin resistant. So for people trying to lose weight, this is a problem.

The second issue is that when you go into sleep is for repair. As you guys know, it stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system. And if your body is digesting food, it may not go into the deeper sleep and you need deep sleep to be able to repair your brain. So what I would tell you, Whitney is, I don't know if you have a whoop or an Oura ring or something to see if it's working for you, because you might say I'm not trying to lose weight.

I'm getting enough deep. I'm getting enough REM sleep. I'm doing great. And it might be that window works for you, but this is why we have to find our own path with this information. 

Whitney: Amazing. And actually sleep tracking, or just overall lifestyle tracking has come up a number of times. So it's the ordering is something I've been thinking about every time we have a guest, like you, I'm like, all right, I need to do this because I think the sleep side of it, especially if you're not aware of how you sleep, you may never realize how something like this is impacting you.

And that's part of the, like code of my health that I want to crack. So thank you for touching on that. And also. The impact of fasting on sleep is so important. And I wanted to know if you could talk more about that in detail about specific hours, right? We hear a lot of different things about how long you should sleep.

And now we know like approximately some of the ways in which we can eat after we sleep, but how does sleep play a role in fasting? And are there some recommendations around setting yourself up for sleep success? 

Dr. Mindy Pelz: Yeah, there's a lot of random, I'll say conversations around sleep and fasting. The most popular question that I get from people is that once they start fasting, they find they don't need to sleep as much.

So this is interesting because and my response to this is that we know the number one reason to sleep is to repeat. This is when the brain repairs, this is when like Oregon's will recycle old cells. The body needs sleep to be able to rejuvenate and repair, but check this out when you're fasting, you're repairing too.

So if you're repairing during the day, you might not need to repair as much at night. So it's very common, especially when we see people go on a longer, fast, it's very common for people to be like, I only got five hours. I only got four hours of sleep. And my response to that is you, might've not needed more than that.

I wouldn't want to see somebody go five hours of sleep night after night, but the more you fast, the more . You're healing during the day. 

Jack: Good could some of the circuit could also be touching on a mineral depletion. And maybe that could be something because obviously we want to make sure that people are.

All the tools, all the knowledge to make sure that they're getting as much recovery as much as repair as possible. So if it's a portfolio repaired, that's awesome that our cells are going that way. But if it's a mineral depletion, then we want to make sure that it's not that. And that, that we're, they're getting both sleep and fascinating.

Dr. Mindy Pelz: Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. That's a really valid point. So one of the things that I learned from taking, watching so many people fast is that especially here in America, we are a mineral depleted deficient country. And the question is why. And a lot of that goes back to regenerative agriculture. We are monocropping, all of our soils, we don't have the same mineral content in our soils, so that broccoli you're eating today has a different vitamin and mineral content than the same broccoli had 20, 30 years ago.

So when you come to fasting, I always tell people, just assume you're mineral depleted. There's a very good chance. You don't have enough. So when you fast, you're going to deplete yourself even more. And magnesium is the, as you guys know is the mineral that is going to mess your sleep up the most. So taking them mineral supplement is pivotal for fasters, especially if they're struggling to sleep.

Jack: I have a, on a different side of it, because again, we focus on weight loss, but basically I, I play hockey with what this one guy, he's completely fit. And he also does fasting, but his concern is usually been with lean muscle breakdown. And, but I think that's where people need to figure out the, and I think this is where varying your fasting comes in.

Can you speak of that? Because there's, there is that other extreme that people want to be lean, but still are competitive, or whether they're in endurance sports or team sports, they want to make sure that they keep muscle building and not depleting. 

Dr. Mindy Pelz: Yeah, it's this is another great question. And I just put out a video on YouTube this week. I'm talking about a new study that was showing when you fast, you end up causing a breaking muscle down. Okay. So when we see that just in a study as an athlete, you may run, but I'm going to tell you not to run because when we look at a study like that, it's in a silo. It's yes. When we are fasting, we are stimulating something called a and a is breaking down old muscles and getting rid of them and making us ourselves more.

On the other side of autophagy is something called mTOR and mTOR builds muscles up. It grows your cells. You can, that you stimulate autophagy when you sleep, you guys have probably talked about that on here, but the best way to stimulate a top to G is through fasting. That is the most efficient way. So when you are in a state of autophagy, you shut off mTOR.

And when you're in a state of mTOR, you shut off autophagy. So if you want to build muscle, what you do, and we've done this with Spartan racers, I've done this with so many competitive athletes who are now hitting new marks of time and like kicking butt in their sport. You want to spend a few days in autophagy, so you might fast 17 hours a couple of days in a row.

So that you're now in autophagy, but you break your fast with protein. And when you come in and stimulate mTOR immediately following a fast, you actually build your muscle stronger than ever. And if you take that one step forward and you make sure that break fast has 30 grams of protein, 30 grams of protein signals a sensor in the muscle to build itself stronger.

Now, if you really want to go like hack this thing out, which is fun to do is work D get into autophagy do a workout, a strength train workout. So you really are forcing that muscle to release all the stored glycogen. You're like putting extra stress on that muscle. And then immediately following that strength training work.

Go and eat a high protein meal that has 30 grams of protein. We have done this over and over again with athletes and they are coming back to us saying that they feel superhuman because they've applied both of those principles. 

Jack: I'm far from an athlete, but I've done exactly that I've done. I've done, the 1820 hour fast, and then I've gone into a workout training and then, just gone into protein to, to as my first meal.

And what's really amazing. And it's something that I kind of experience and I've been telling people how, the first few days takes an adjustment, but my energy level is incredible. And, to be able to go 1820 hours and then go work out even before thinking about eating is just amazing.

And what's that relationship between fasting. And blood sugar regulation, because obviously there's something happening with my blood sugar regulation, because when I used to eat bad, I'd be crashing and craving and I'm not crashing and craving anymore. Yeah, no, I love it. I love it.

Dr. Mindy Pelz: You're like the poster child for fasting here, and this is amazing Jack on this is great. Okay. The here's, what's really interesting. I've been following the science on fasting for a while now. And the new stuff we're seeing is all on the microbiome changes. So for example, we now know that you can lower blood pressure by fasting, but it's not because you're changing your human cells.

It's because you're making changes to your microwave. You can change your cravings cause cravings, believe it or not are because of different bacterial balances in your gut. It's I don't know if you guys know that are chocolate people who crave chocolate, there's actually a strain of bacteria that if you have it, a lot of this bacteria, you will crave chocolate.

So as you fast more, your cravings change your energy. And we can come back to that in a moment, your energy changes and your ability to regulate blood sugar changes because you are making changes to your microbiome. And the world of the microbiome is still very brand new. We're still learning a lot about what exactly happens there when it comes to blood sugar.

But I can tell you, I used to, for years, prescribe supplements for people that had SIBO, candida parasites. Now we just get them fasting and once they fast, the body figures itself out because it changes that microbiome balance in there. So that would be the first thing I would say. The second thing on the energy that I just want to point out is we do have these two energy systems.

You are making energy, either from the food you eat or the fat you burn done, like end of story. There's not another energy system. Believe it or not a better, more consistent energy system is the fat burning energy system so much your experience Jack mine with fasting was the first thing I noticed was I didn't crash at three in the morning.

In fact, on the days I fast, I struggled to be able to calm myself down because I have so much energy. So it's because I'm calm. Most of the time I'm operating from the fat-burning energy system, which is a more efficient system. 

Whitney: Wow. It's I love all the science behind this. It's so intriguing to like, understand what is going on in our bodies.

And, we have a lot of people that are interested in biohacking and like adjusting their lives and all of that. So I'm sure this is really exciting. And to that note, I wanted to see if anyone who's listening live on clubhouse has questions. We want to make this interactive. Or if you have any stories that you want to share, like Jack, if you want to be a poster child here, you can raise your hand, just tap on on the button at the bottom of the screen.

Come on up. Don't be shy. Any question is It's something that, we'd love to hear and address nothing is off limits. So we do have some, I think 

Jack: it's great that you're inviting anyway, that I can be asking questions for hours. One thing I do want you to touch on and then we'll get a, I know somebody raised your hands.

Let's bring them up. But one of the things I do want you to touch on because, and I, with this I'll prefix this with saying, I promise to stop bullying too fast in my own soft, delicate way. But I guess if I keep talking about it, I am bullying of it. But what are the things, what are the things that, like immediately happened when it had some weight loss is the comment was of course you're a man.

And and I understand from you that this is a myth that, men's metabolism is faster than women's metabolism which a lot of people believe that to be the case. Supposedly, this is a myth, but what do women, how do women need to approach it differently than men?

Dr. Mindy Pelz: Yeah, I just did an Instagram TV on this last Saturday it was a new study and it was, looks, looked at several different studies over a 40 year period on metabolism. So it was an observational study and what they found, they came out of that and they said, everything we've known and taught about metabolism is absolutely wrong, which is crazy.

They're like we should have had this right a hundred years ago, but we have it. And here were the myths that they decided to debunk. Men don't have faster metabolisms than women. I know that's hard for women that are like, but wait, my husband can lose weight fast and so much quicker than I women as they, or as humans as we age our metabolism doesn't slow down.

And I'll explain this one in a moment. And then women going through menopause, or if they're gaining weight, it's not because they have a slow metabolism. So that alone, those three things are like mindblowing. And it frees us from the limiting beliefs that I'm getting older. I'm gaining weight. It frees us from my husband can do this because he's a man.

So it leaves us with the question of, okay what does control metabolism? And this article went on to say that there were four major organs that make up 65% of our metabolic rate. And it's the brain, the liver, the heart and the kidneys. And that once these four organs start to become, toxified start to malfunction.

What ends up happening is that your metabolic rate will slow. So knowing that I just wanted to say that. So we can take that off the plate, that if your husband is losing weight faster than you, women still need to do fasting different. And what I love by the way of these four organs is fasting, addresses every single one of these and heals every single one of these.

So with women, here's our challenge. We have to mind something called a hormonal hierarchy and the hormonal hierarchy looks like this. Our sex hormones are closely determined by insulin. So if we become insulin resistant, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone will go out of balance. Insulin is highly affected by cortisol.

So when we get stressed, we're going to get more insulin resistant. This doesn't necessarily happen to men as much. I just want to point this. And then at the top of the hierarchy is oxytocin. So when we are in relationship, when we are working together, what ends up happening is that we make more oxytocin and it balances cortisol, balances, insulin, and balances, our sex hormones.

So we are just more susceptible to stress and we're more susceptible to surges as insulin. Now, having said all of that, if you are a woman that has a cycle, you can fast anytime throughout the month, except the week before your period, the week before your period, your body is making progesterone and progesterone.

When in the presence of cortisol, which fasting will spike, cortisol temporarily just like exercise in the presence of cortisol, progesterone shuts down and cortisol, even blocks progesterone receptors. So the first thing that every woman needs to know is not the week before your cycle. We don't want to raise cortisol.

This leads the question. What about post-menopausal women? What about women that don't have a cycle? And with those women, I recommend what I call a five, one, one variation where five days a week, you intermittent fast. You can do 13, 15 hours one day a week. I want you to stretch your fast. I want you to compress that window a little bit more.

You'll start to discover some more of these healing switches. And then one day a week, you don't fast and women really need to follow that. But if you have a cycle, you can also follow that monthly pattern that I just mentioned. 

Whitney: Incredible. Thank you again for going into so much detail. And now we have Mateo up here to ask a question so you can unmute yourself.

Mateo. We'd love to hear from you. 

Matteo: And that was take, thank you so much for all the information that's been provided. Very useful stuff. I am a type two diabetic then for about 15 years and also suffer from metabolic syndrome. Obviously the issue of fasting even though it's it's it offers a lot.

Great benefits. And I'm just wondering as a diabetic, as a type two diabetic, if I can benefit from that without sacrificing or risking my blood sugar to go to low. 

Dr. Mindy Pelz: This is such a good question, Mateo. And thank you for asking it because a lot of the fasting myths out there says that diabetics should not fast and that is completely wrong.

So let's go back to the science again. New England journal of medicine came out in December of 2019. It was a meta analysis looking at over 1500 studies. And they said that fat intermittent fasting there, by the way, their eating window varied anywhere between six hours and 10. That style of fasting was good for about eight different conditions.

So diabetes was the first one. So diabetes pre-diabetes metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular problems, neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer's and dementia auto immune conditions like Ms. Pre and post-surgery they list them all in that science article. So the first question, or the first comment I would make to you, Mateo, is we want to involve your doctor in this conversation.

And because if they understand that new England journal of medicine article, now they can work with you to slowly build a fasting lifestyle. So whether you are pre-diabetic post diabetic or in, diet been diagnosed with it, what I really recommend is that you start by changing for foods. You want to get off the bat oils.

You want to bring down the refined carbohydrates, move more to nature's carbs, and you want to make sure you're not doing toxic ingredients. So no NutraSweet, no artificial colorings, those kinds of things. Once you've made those changes, what you're going to do is you're going to take your eating window and slowly compress it.

So you start pushing breakfast back an hour and then just get comfortable there. Watch mind your blood sugar. And then when you're good there, you're feeling like you have a rhythm. Now push it back two hours and then push it back three until you get to 13 to 15 hours. And what we're seeing in our community is that diabetics have to use less insulin.

I've even seen it and seen it in type one diet. And we would love to involve doc your doctor in this, which is why I put the science on all of my videos on YouTube. We're trying to send doctors there so they can feel more comfortable working with you on it, but absolutely Mateo, you should be fasting.

Just follow that protocol. I just gave you sounds good. This is some of the questions I've had. That's why. And like I said, I'm not qualified to give that kind of advice. That's why you are here. 

Whitney: It is awesome. And thank you Mateo for asking that. And next up we have Alipio if I'm pronouncing your name properly, who is also known as the water fast warrior, and I just want to give a heads up that we are recording this for the podcast.

So you will be in the recorded version, which is at https://myessentia.com/podcast want to make sure that we're very clear about. And we'd love to hear your question or your statement and anyone else who wants to raise their hand afterwards. We'd love to hear from me now. 

Alipio: Yes. Thank you with me, Dr. Mindy. It's good to see you again. I've missed seen you. Nice to see you hear you. I shouldn't say. Yeah. So basically I'd like to pick your brain specifically if on the latest research in terms of fasting and cardiac health. And then I'll explain why, and then I'll share something really cool.

Dr. Mindy Pelz: Oh, I love it. I haven't seen, if there's something new that came out, it slipped past me on cardiovascular health, but I will tell you that, let's just take car cholesterol cholesterol can often be elevated because of a microbiome imbalance and we know fasting will balance the microbiome.

We also know that cholesterol is made in the. So we know that when you fast longer, you heal your liver. So we can come at cardiovascular health from not directly at it from a Hey fat ketones healed the heart. I haven't seen that, but what I have seen are the microbiome changes really affect things like cholesterol, blood pressure, and all of that ultimately has better heart health.

Alipio: Okay, great. Thank you. So here's the latest, cool thing Dr. Mindy kinda knows me cause I've been posting how my hair has been growing back in. My grades been growing up because of the fasting protocol I've been doing and for Matteo's benefit. Collaborate with an a doc monologist. Who's also an assistant clinical professor with the school of medicine at USC.

So I am under medical supervision for everything that I do, because I do research specifically the cool things that I wanted to share with Dr. Mindy is, as we know, some of the changes in our body are chronic, meaning they're over the long-term. So if you're looking to heal that it's also, you got to take the similar type of long-term view.

I'm sure Dr. Mindy, you've heard anecdotal stories about people's reporting that their vision has improved with fasting. And I wanted to see for myself. So I saw my optometrist before I began my fasting lifestyle in August, 2019, and I saw my optometrist for the first time. And sh first of all, I've been wearing glasses since I was in grade four.

I had cataract surgery, my right eye due to diabetes. So I only have one good arm remaining. And she reported that the vision in my left eye has improved. So I'm actually going to have to upgrade my prescription glasses. So I want to emphasize, it took me two years because obviously I have impaired vision for such a long time, but I just wanted to point that at least personally, I am improving my vision.

So that's one thing. And then the third thing real quickly is I partnered up with a PhD in molecular biology, and I'm going to determine with my current fasting experiment, whether fasting can repair the damage from congestive heart failure, primarily by activating the cardiac stem cells. We'll see.

I'll report back in 90 days when I complete that experiment. So my name's Alipio. 

Dr. Mindy Pelz: Can I make a comment on that? Because a thank you for sharing your story, I'll leave you up because this is, we always do this in our community. When I do a live or a video, I'm like, put your story in the comments so people can see it because you almost, it sounds too good to be true, but let's talk about why his vision may have improved.

And the reason is anywhere you have the most amount of mitochondria in your body, those mitochondria respond incredibly well to ketones. So the more you make ketones, the more those mitochondria heal. One of the greatest, most dense places that we have mitochondria isn't. So you, that makes perfect sense to me.

The second place that we have a lot of mitochondria is in our prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that helps us make logical decisions. That is optimistic. That is the can-do part of the. So as you fast more, you make more ketones. And to Alipio's point of view, to his point, he's been doing it a long time.

And this is what we want people to do is build this fasting lifestyle because these ketones keep healing and healing, and you can start to actually make better brain health. And then the last part is you have a lot of mitochondria in the heart. So I have no doubt everything you're looking for.

You're going to find as you fast, more lipo, that's just incredible. And I love that he's doing it with his doctor. This is what we want to create is a synergistic relationship. That the thing I'm going to tell you, that's really hard for some doctors and some people in the healthcare system. Is that a lot of people get off medications as they fast, and we need doctors to assist their patients as these medications become unnecessary.

So this is part of my million journey as we've got to get doctors like onboard with us so that people, the lay person can start to do this effectively. But I'm pretty sure big pharma is not going to be very excited about that. 

Alipio: Yeah. Just if you're in the chemical conditional comments, Whitney, 

Whitney: Sure. And then we're going to move on to Stefanie we've about 10 minutes and I want to see if anyone else has questions after that. 

Alipio: Okay, I'll keep it brief citing the same article that Dr. Mindy cited the new England journal of medicine, December, 2019. One of the things that the article talks about is one of the biggest obstacles for the proliferation of fasting is that most of your physicians have not been trained on the benefits of fasting either medical school or residency.

So I have been actually been educated in several MDs in clubhouse, myself, just from the results that I'm getting, but, and I've actually persuaded my P my primary care physician who was skeptical he's now might become my biggest friend and a true collaboration partnership. We now have, so it can be done, but always do work with a medical care professional in, and when you do stuff like that, 

Whitney: Thank you so much. We appreciate you coming on to, to encourage this. So next up we have Stephanie. And after that, we'll probably have time for one more question. Jack might have another one. I have one more. We only have about 10 minutes left and we're just so grateful to anyone who's listening to. The podcast are here with us on clubhouse. And go ahead, Stephanie. Hey, 

Stefanie Gomez: thank you guys so much, Dr. Mindy. It's been great listening to your story. I am one of the people that Jack has successfully bullied into fasting. I wouldn't call it bullying. I think I'm more just watched Jack's journey and. Great. He felt and how it changed, not only just weight loss, but how he was handling himself every day and it was inspiring.

So I've just started my fasting journey. I've also believed my boyfriend into it as well. But I wanted to just touch back on something that you had mentioned earlier, particularly in regards to females and not fasting the week before period, because obviously I'm intermittent fasting right now. I think I'm on, about going between 12 and 14 hours of fasting between meals.

So I just wanted to clarify was that no fasting the week before your period intermittent fasting or more than 24, 48 hours. Fast. 

Dr. Mindy Pelz: Yeah, it's a great question. So in general, it's all fast, but if you are already have a rhythm and you're like, but fast, team's easy and I don't really want to eat breakfast.

Then I would say at least keep it under 13 hours. Don't go more than 13 hours. Because we D we don't want to spike cortisol. Now you can also use some measurements to see if you are, succeeding at fasting around your cycle, and the first measurement is, are your cycles normal?

Like as long as you're not spotting, as long as you're not missing cycles, then a 13 hour fast or less that week before would probably be okay for you, Stephanie, because you already have, you've already been bullied into fasting. You've already got your fasting. But a brand new, faster, that would be a problem.

Now, what we saw on all my platforms, which was crazy was that women started losing their cycle. They started having their hair fall out because they weren't minding this week before. Ideally my politically correct statement is don't fast the week before your period, but if you are really fat adapted, just definitely don't fast, more than 13 hours.

Stefanie Gomez: Awesome. Thank you so much for that. Yeah, 

Whitney: definitely important. No, very, and I'm glad you asked that to Stephanie, because that leads me to my last question before we see what Jack's last question is and that is different types of fasting, but in a a different spin on it that I think I saw you posting them on social media.

Which ironically is a part of a fasting that you can do in spending less time on social media, less times on your screen, fasting from spending too much time, indoors and spending more time outdoors. And also you enlisted fasting from negative people. So I want to make sure we touched upon this because it's such a huge part of our mental health and our overall wellbeing, and not just thinking about taking a break from food and other nutrients, but fasting mentally, so could you please touch upon that briefly? And then if you have, do you have a section on your website that gets into more details that others could go check out after 

Dr. Mindy Pelz: this? Yeah, no, this is also a great question. Here's the thing I would say. The human body is suffering in this modern world.

And we are suffering because we live in the most toxic time in human history. And we can have anything arrive at our door in 30 minutes or less. So we have not had to create what we call very many hormetic stressors. Hormetic stress is a good stress where the body, when it's under just a little bit of discomfort, it will actually grow itself stronger.

So body mind, and we don't have to be in discomfort anymore. If I'm bored, I can go to social media. If I'm hungry, I don't even have to leave my couch. I can go ahead and just go to door dash and have it show up at my front door. If I want to read a book, I can have it arrive from Amazon. All of this is actually mentally and physically destroying the human body.

Now you combine that with going to social media and seeing negative news, seeing people fight with each other, judging yourself against who you see somebody else's highlight reel. These things are destroying us as humans. So why fasting works so well? Why somebody like Alipio can get his vision back is that he is going back to what we used to do in the primal days where we had to wait for food.

We had to tap into other healing mechanisms in our body. So Whitney, to your point, we need to fast from anything that is giving us comfort in the. It's crazy to think about, but if you like, I'll give you an example. How many of you check your social media at a stoplight? That's a great opportunity to be bored.

Your brain will. Thank you. Just don't check that how many and as women, I hate this, but we do this a lot where we bitch with a friend about something. You're actually getting a dopamine rush. You're getting oxytocin with that friend, but you are destroying the relationships around you. So we got to go back to this primal idea that we do better in the absence of information, food negative people.

We got to re bring that back. The pandemic, the upside of the pan. Whereas we all were forced to do that in some sets. But what did we do? We sat at home and got on our phone and got on the news and yelled at each other. So it's really, we have, we can use the principle of fasting and apply it to all those other things.

And to your question about more information, my YouTube channel is really my passion project. I put out two new videos every day. I'm about actually, when I get off this call, I'm going to do a whole series on dry fasting. Cause a lot of people have been asking me. So you can go there. I have a book for women over 40.

I talk a lot about fasting called the menopause reset. You can. We actually just found out this week that a book of mine a fasting manual for women just got picked up by hay house and that will be coming out next year. So I have women, I've got a whole book on fasting. Every question I've ever had on fasting is coming to you. And so that will be next year, but yeah, those are the big places. 

Whitney: Fantastic. Jack, do you have one final question, at least for this session? I know you can go on and on. 

Jack: But I guess first of all, before we even close again, I repeat, I'm super grateful that you came on here today. We're going to do everything.

We can even post this event to get it in all of our followers, inboxes, social medias. I want everyone to follow you. So whoever out there is not following follow her on the committee on clubhouse, but also more importantly on that YouTube channel, like really off this platform listened to you have so much amazing information.

One of the things that that I kinda, I like people to take something away and one of the things I was listening to you speak about, which I think is also important is that, and I think I'm preaching to the choir with most of our followers that are not, they're w if they're fasting, they're not running to McDonald's when they're breaking their fast, but to reiterate that of what you said of really focusing to eliminate battles. Nature's carbs, no toxic ingredient. I think that's super important because that really makes this amplifies the goodness of this, right? 

Dr. Mindy Pelz: Absolutely. Absolutely. That is I think the door in is let's start compressing our eating window. And if you want to go another whole level with your health, just that's all I'm asking is those three ingredients oils.

If I came into your house and I changed all your oils out to the good oils you wouldn't even know you. And I put them in the same bottle, you'd cook with them and you wouldn't even know the tea. Notice the taste difference. It's just that when you're at restaurants, when you're at fast food, the cheap inflammatory oils are cheaper, they're cheaper to make.

So they're more profitable. When you walk into your grocery store, if you go around the outside, that's where the fresh food is. You go into those middle aisles. Think about how long has that cereal been sitting on the. And you're going to take it home and eat it. That's dead food, and it's just going to spike your blood sugar.

So we have really messed up our food system, so really pay attention to those three and then compress your eating window. And we will end metabolic syndrome. We only have 12% of Americans that are metabolically fit. This should have been the pandemic that we were worried about. We need to get metabolic health back into the world, but definitely back into Americans.

And those four steps change those three ingredients, compress your eating window and your metabolic health will go through the roof. 

Whitney: Amazing. Thank you for simplifying it too, because this, obviously it can be a very detailed, complex subject matter. And also we're going to be including something of yours in the show notes from this episode.

So for the Essentia: Rise and Thrive podcast, which you can subscribe to and listen to at https://myessentia.com/podcast. If you're on clubhouse, tap on my profile or Jack's the link is in there or find us on social media. We'll help you find that page. And Dr. Mindy, you have something special that we're going to put in the transcript and the show notes there. Can you tell everybody what that is? 

Dr. Mindy Pelz: Yeah the most popular thing we've done ever in the last several years is something I called a fasting benefits, timeline chart, and it shows exactly what happens at different hours when you're fasting. So that is a giveaway. You guys can, we'll send you the link.

You guys can get that, download that for free. What a lot of our community will do is they'll put it on their refrigerator so that when they're like, Ooh, I want to eat. They're like, okay, wait, if I go two more hours, I can get into a top of G. Use it as motivation, but also to understand that the more you fast, the more healing switches get turned on.

Whitney: Fantastic. Thank you again for providing so much value today. We will link to you on https://myessentia.com/podcast section. So everyone can easily find you if you're listening on clubhouse, be sure to follow Mindy. As Jack suggested, stay in touch with her. You'll find everything I imagined through your bio.

Let me see your Instagram and your Twitter linked there to make it really easy. And you have your three amazing current books and we can all stay tuned and look forward to your upcoming book projects as well. 

Dr. Mindy Pelz: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you guys. And thank you for, amplifying this message out and I just, see, so clearly the way out of poor health for humans and it's really through fasting.

So thank you for seeing that as well. And I will definitely be coming at you guys with international fasting day so that we can get this out to the world. 

Jack: We'll spread the word for that. Looking forward to that. Let's keep in touch. Thank you. 

Whitney: Thank you Mindy. And thanks to everyone else for being here today.

We'll be back with another session of Essentia: Rise and Thrive. soon so, be sure to check out the website and follow on clubhouse, social media so that you do not miss out on any of the amazing upcoming guests. We'll see you soon. Bye everyone.