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The Rich Roll Podcast
Dr. Mindy Pelz On Women's Hormonal Health, Cyclical Fasting, Health As A Verb, Reclaiming Your Body's Intelligence & Transforming Menopause Into Empowerment
02:14:23
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- [00:03]
Mindy Peltz
We have to always understand that the human body, for both men and women, has one major priority, and that's survival. Women have a second priority, and that's reproduction. The reproductive system actually will respond to whatever environment you put it in. So if you put this female body into a stressful environment, the reproductive system goes, wait, this isn't safe, and it shuts itself down. If you start to feed the reproductive system, which is our hormonal system, a lot of junk food, and you create this ultra processed agitated glutamate response is what it is. Where we amp up the nervous system, her reproductive system will shut down. This is pcos. This is infertility. So the environment in which we are sitting in, that we are living in, is not working for us. Think of it like antennas, like it's constantly looking around going, am I safe? Can I release an egg this month? So we have to think about our environment much differently than men do. Foreign.
- [01:10]
Rich Roll
Hey people, I am back on my jam today with some nutrition science, which going back to the beginning of the show was, and perhaps for a significant percentage of you long timers still is this podcast bread and butter. But when it comes to nutrition science, there's this unfortunate thing which is that it, and by it I mean the canon of research is quite embarrassingly deficient when it comes to studying, understanding and appreciating the very significant biological differences between men and women. By that I mean the many ways in which nutrition science is basically culpable for neglecting to adequately study and in turn educate women on the how and why of what holds true for men, often doesn't for women because it fails to take into appropriate consideration the unique complexity of female physiology. This came up in my conversation with Dr. Lisa Moscone, a neuroscientist who specializes in women's hormonal health and menopause and perimenopause and Alzheimer's prevention, which, in case you missed, it was episode 819 from March of 2024 and was and continues to be a very popular must watch, listen. And today my intention is to extend that conversation that I began with Dr. Moscone with another expert on women's health, Mindy Peltz, who is on this mission to set matters to rights when it comes to women's health by educating and empowering women with the knowledge they need and the tools they need to better understand their bodies and better nourish and care for them so broadly. This is about the mismatch between modern life and women's health, which really can't be reconciled without recognizing that there are biological differences between the biological sexes. And respecting the hormonal complexity and cyclical nature of women's bodies is critical to their well being. More specifically, this is about aligning dietary choice with hormonal fluctuations from menstruation to menopause. We discuss the body's innate self healing capacity and the role that fasting can play as a fundamental tool to improve not only metabolic health, but also weight management and blood sugar regulation. We get into the impact of environmental toxins on hormonal health, how to reduce your risk of exposure without upending your life, as well as the personalized nature of health and nutrition, and why it's important for women to take personal responsibility for reclaiming control over their personal well being. And it's all coming up quick. But first we got to take care of a little business In a world that's just absolutely flooded with tech for tech's sake, it's pretty rare to find innovation that truly elevates that serves the human not just in body, but also in soul. And that's why I stand behind on a brand that's pushing technology forward with intention to create elevated gear that elevates us all. Consider Lightspray, this incredible breakthrough in next gen high performance shoe technology that replaces laces with a revolutionary ultralight single piece upper that moves with you, not against you. Tested with elite athletes designed for anyone who values performance without Compromise. Head to on.com richroll to experience technology driven performanceware what if we've all been thinking about our future wrong? What if there is no finish line? What if there's only a through line? Well, that's the idea behind a special project I've been working on with Lincoln Financial, a four part series of mini documentaries in which each episode features me spending the better part of a day with a remarkable human to understand what it really takes to evolve with intention over the long haul and how to sustain what you love across the physical, mental and financial dimensions of life. My guests include something for everyone. Andre Agassi, tennis legend Olympian Sarah True, musician Walker Hayes and Morgan Housel, an expert in personal finance. So if you're drawn to the kind of depth that we explore explore on this show, I think you're going to really connect with this program. It's called the Action Plan and you can check it out now@linkinfinancial.com Richrola okay, finally I gotta say it. While this is obviously an episode designed to serve all you women out there in our audience, I really can't overstress how important Mindy's message is for us mental health, because we can't serve the women in our lives without a commitment to better understanding them. And I got to admit, there is so much about this world that I didn't know that I had no idea about, which is, frankly, kind of embarrassing, given that I have two young women for daughters, 21 and 18, and a wife with whom I just celebrated 22 years of marriage. So I'm really grateful to Mindy because what she shares has really helped me be a better husband and father. So, yeah, this is for the women. But, dudes, I'm telling you, pay attention, because the women in your life deserve to be better understood. And because understanding them better, really seeing them for who they are, can't help but make your relationships with them better as a consequence. All right, let's do the show. Mindy, so nice to have you here.
- [07:14]
Mindy Peltz
Thank you.
- [07:14]
Rich Roll
I've been looking forward to this for a long time. There's so many interesting areas to go into, a lot of terrain to cover. But just to start out, like, I want to allow you the opportunity to just articulate this mission that you're on.
- [07:29]
Mindy Peltz
I am very clear that I want women specifically to understand how powerful their body was built to be. And because we live in this world where women are completely pulled away from their own intelligence. So fasting was my first tool in was to show my patients that you could heal yourself if you just took food out of the equation. And when they got a result, they dropped weight, they got better mental clarity, their hormones balanced. What was so beautiful is when they came back, they couldn't give anybody the credit. They couldn't get the supplement, the credit, the medication, the doctor, they couldn't give it to me. They had to do it themselves. They had to step into their own intelligence. And when I saw women that were so frustrated with their health be able to use something like fasting to heal themselves, and then I just got to sit back and cheer them on. My mission became, we've gotta do that in every single aspect of women's health. Women have to start to understand that this incredible body that we are blessed to live in works so perfectly. You just gotta line your lifestyle up with it, and then you start to see that intelligence come through, which is not what women are getting right now.
- [08:52]
Rich Roll
You have said that the root cause of poor health are the indulgences of modern living. Now, this is no surprise to anybody, obviously, but on the heels of that, you also said that modern life Creates an evolutionary mismatch for women. So what does that mean?
- [09:10]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah, yeah, it's great question. So the best way we can understand the human body is to really go back to the hunter gatherer days. Yet we also don't live in hunter gatherer days. Right. We're in this moment of a modern life. So one of the things we're seeing with women right now is that let's just take our nervous system alone. So much physical, emotional, chemical stress coming in so many ways, that women are what I call. It's not my term, it's another author's term, what we refer to as the rushing woman syndrome. Like go, go, go, perform. Make sure you look a certain way, make sure you behave a certain way. That's the modern message that women are getting. That is the evolutionary mismatch with how she was designed. She was designed to go out and tap into that sympathetic nervous system and be able to do great things. And then she was meant to come home and rest. So when we look at what our hunter gatherer women did, there was a lot more balance of the autonomic nervous system. Stress relaxation. Stress relaxation. Now Fast forward to 2025. We're not getting that. We have women that are on, I call it the patriarchal hex. They've been caught in this. Like, if I do more, I'll be loved more, I'll be more worthy. I'll get, you know, a promotion, I'll make more money. I can take. Make sure that I can take care of my kids and I can work 60 hours a week. Like, women in general are being sucked into a culture right now that is destroying not only their nervous system, but their whole hormonal system. That's the evolutionary mismatch.
- [10:57]
Rich Roll
So how do we begin to understand the complexity and nuances of women's hormonal health versus that of men?
- [11:04]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah. Okay, here's the starting point. I feel like we have to always understand that the human body, for both men and women, has one major priority, and that's survival. So it will do everything it can to make sure it stays alive. Women have a second priority, and that's reproduction. So when a woman is cycling, she needs to make sure that she is keeping herself alive and that she is tending to her reproductive system. The reproductive system actually will respond to whatever environment you put it in. So if you put this female body into a stressful environment, the reproductive system goes, wait, this isn't safe. And it shuts itself down. If you start to feed the reproductive system, which is our hormonal system, a lot of junk food. And you create this ultra processed, agitated glutamate response is what it is. Where we amp up the nervous system, her reproductive system will shut down. This is pcos, this is infertility. So what we're seeing with women right now is the environment in which we are sitting in, that we are living in is not working for us because our reproductive systems think of it like antennas. Like it's constantly looking around going, am I safe? Am I not safe? Is it okay, can I release an egg this month? Because I don't know, it seems like we're still running from a tiger right now. So we have to think about our environment much differently than men do.
- [12:41]
Rich Roll
And what do we know or not know about how to parse that? Like, the environment is impacting the stress response in women, which obviously is a hormonal response to external stimuli. So how much of that is being impulsed by, let's say, you know, the toxins in beauty care products or the air that we're breathing versus our food choices versus the quality of our sleep or other lifestyle habits?
- [13:09]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah, you know, that's a great question. I wish I had a really clear answer for it. But since we don't study women, we don't know. Like, it would be beautiful to take a group of women and look at each toxic exposure, whether it was physical, emotional or chemical, and be able to have some feedback. So you'd have to break each one down. So, yeah, we're rubbing endocrine disruptors on our skin all day long. So that's increasing estrogen. So you have all this synthetic estrogen in your body at the same time. We are like going and working 60 hour work weeks. So now we've raised cortisol. So now that shuts, makes us more insul. Resistance shuts down all three sex hormones. So what about traumas? Traumas from childhood that are living and running a woman's nervous system telling her she's still not safe. Even though the trauma happened 20, 30 years ago, I don't think we have a good measurement of it, which is why I call it an evolutionary mismatch. Because the modern world is not working for women and because of the secondary need of a female body, we're getting the hit much bigger than men.
- [14:22]
Rich Roll
Well, we could do a whole series on childhood trauma or environmental toxins. We're gonna have to pick our lane here a little bit. So let's focus for now on the hormonal piece. When we're talking about women's hormonal health. We're really talking about three hormones. Estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone, and the interplay in between these. So help anybody who's watching or listening kind of understand what's going on here, how it's getting dysregulated and how we can kind of get it back on track.
- [14:54]
Mindy Peltz
Okay, so let's start with a concept that I put in both books, which is the hormonal hierarchy. So when we look at hormones and how they operate, we need to think of them as like a tag team. One hormone affects another hormone. It can affect it positively or it could affect it negatively. So at the bottom of the hierarchy are the three hormones you just mentioned. Estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone. The hormone that's going to impact those three the most is insulin. So if you are insulin resistant, you're gonna end up with those sex hormones completely off. Either too little or too much. Pcos. Perfect example. Infertility. Perfect example. Really? Increased menopause symptoms. Yeah. We've got a world where obesity has become normal, where hemoglobin A1c is up in the upper fives all the time. We have a metabolic mess on our hands. That's why so many women are struggling with menopause symptoms, because their glucose insulin system is completely off. So if we get insulin intact, we start to be able to balance these sex hormones.
- [16:07]
Rich Roll
So metabolic syndrome or metabolic dysregulation has a downstream extreme impact on just general hormonal health.
- [16:15]
Mindy Peltz
Absolutely.
- [16:16]
Rich Roll
And that is exacerbated in women versus men. Is that interesting?
- [16:21]
Mindy Peltz
Absolutely. Because of this hierarchy. So the minute insulin goes off, because the metabolic system is off, you now are going to throw those sex hormones off.
- [16:31]
Rich Roll
So we can't even talk about the kind of three big hormones without talking about insulin. Basically. Insulin, from your point of view and me being a layper person, you're saying that insulin is really the kingmaker here.
- [16:50]
Mindy Peltz
Yes. And then there's two more above insulin on the hierarchy. So I'm starting with insulin because it is the one that if it goes off, and we are seeing it so huge right now, it's gonna have the most direct impact on those three hormones. But above that is cortisol. So if we've got. Then let me run through the hierarchy, and I think you'll see the connection here. So we've got when stress go, we become more insulin resistant, and now we're eating more junk food, getting ourselves more metabolically health unhealthy. Now we've got the sex hormones off above cortisol, the One hormone that can balance all of them in a second is oxytocin. So when you get oxytocin, you calm cortisol down. When you calm cortisol down, you have a better chance of balancing insulin. When you balance insulin, you get those sex hormones in a row. So we have to look at it as a complete picture.
- [17:49]
Rich Roll
Got it. Before we go any further, maybe define insulin resistance and metabolic health for people who are new to these terms.
- [17:58]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah. So insulin resistance. Well, let's back up. You eat something, and what happens is your body registers the food coming in, and so all of a sudden, the glucose levels in your system go up. As glucose goes up, the message goes to the pancreas to go ahead and make insulin. And the reason insulin is made is because insulin is the way that glucose can get into the cells to be able to energize all the components of the cell. So when insulin and glucose are matched together, insulin kind of does this S cord into the cell and is like, here you go, you can go in, you can power up the mitochondria, you can nourish all the cellular parts so that this cell can provide energy and do what it was meant to do. Now, if every. All day long, we're bringing glucose up and bringing glucose up, the pancreas is making more insulin and making more insulin. All of a sudden, that cell gets overwhelmed, and it's like, I can't take all this glucose and insulin in here. I'm already dealing with what you sent me an hour ago. So it moves that insulin, glucose onto fat. Fat is just storage. That is a big thing I try to get across to women. We sit and we look in the mirror and we start to ridicule for the extra fat. But your body actually found a really smart place to store it. It just took that glucose and that insulin and put it in another part of your body to save your life. It didn't put it around your heart and lungs and the vital organs. So insulin resistance at its core is your cell's inability to allow glucose and insulin into the cell to be able to energize you.
- [19:40]
Rich Roll
So, obviously, chronic, poor dietary habits, too much sugar, too much fat. These things will drive insulin resistance over time. But in addition to that, poor sleep, high stress, chronic, over long periods of time will also drive that outcome.
- [19:59]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah, so that's why cortisol is above insulin, because once cortisol comes in, the body thinks it's running from a tiger, so it doesn't know that. You saw a post on Instagram, you Didn't like it, just thinks that it needs to get up and move. Cortisol is the hormone meant to make us move. So what it does is it starts to move all the glucose to the muscles and it blocks the cells from being able to allow glucose to get in. It's gotta get out to the muscles so that you can run away. It doesn't know you're sitting on your couch. So cortisol is a signal to tell insulin what to do.
- [20:38]
Rich Roll
So for that person who is new to these ideas in these terms, who knows, I'm not sleeping that great. I'm definitely stressed out more than I'd like to be. But I don't know if I have metabolic syndrome or if I have insulin resistance. So short of getting a blood test and getting your hemoglobin A1C checked, how does somebody get to the bottom of it, or is that the best way?
- [21:04]
Mindy Peltz
Well, I like hemoglobin A1C, I think, because it's a 90 day snapshot of this system. So when you're looking at it, you want to look at it over time. I mean, my hemoglobin A1C, last time I checked was at 4.7. When I wake up with a fasting glucose of somewhere around 90. Like, I know that I'm actually insulin sensitive, but then you could give me three days of eating junk food and you would see my fasting glucose go up, but you wouldn't see my hemoglobin A1C go up because it's a 90 day snapshot.
- [21:40]
Rich Roll
I see.
- [21:41]
Mindy Peltz
So that's why I like that one. Because everybody deserves a cheat day. Everybody deserves a vacation. But I want to know what you're doing that System's doing over 90 days.
- [21:51]
Rich Roll
And what is the difference between a woman and a man when it comes to insulin sensitivity?
- [21:58]
Mindy Peltz
Okay, it's complicated. And a woman's body doesn't stay insulin sensitive all month long. If we're talking about cycling women, women who have a reproductive system, her insulin sensitivity is not the same all month long. Let me explain it. So the front half of her cycle, day one, all the way till she releases an egg somewhere in ovulation, like day 15, she is going to be more insulin sensitive. So her body's gonna be able to use the glucose insulin system in a very efficient way. The back half of her cycle, specifically, a week before her period, she's making more progesterone. And progesterone actually needs glucose in order to be able to. It's like an ingredient. It needs to make itself. To have enough progesterone, you have to have glucose so you are more insulin resistant the week before your cycle because of progesterone's needs.
- [23:05]
Rich Roll
So basically, the body is taking out an insurance policy to make sure that it's getting the glucose that it needs when it needs it most, at that phase of the cycle.
- [23:14]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah.
- [23:15]
Rich Roll
That's so interesting. I never heard that before.
- [23:17]
Mindy Peltz
But check this out. Every single woman I've ever talked to will all say, we crave carbs, we crave chocolate, the sugar is so bad that week before our cycle. And this is going back to what you originally said, which is where we think something's wrong with us. Like, I wasn't hungry the last 20 days. Now I'm completely hungry, and all I wanna do is eat every carb in the house. Well, that's your body saying, I need you to raise glucose so that I can make progesterone, so that progesterone can shed the uterine lining so that you can have a period.
- [23:53]
Rich Roll
Wow. And what happens when you're on birth control? How does that impact all of this?
- [24:00]
Mindy Peltz
Well, it's a manipulation of the system, a synthetic manipulation. And you will have a regular cycle. So you would just follow whatever the new pattern of your cycle is. It's just not your natural pattern. But the same rules apply.
- [24:17]
Rich Roll
I see.
- [24:18]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah.
- [24:18]
Rich Roll
How does fasting play into all of this? Where does this kind of intersect as a means of taking control of this process and setting yourself up for better health outcomes?
- [24:32]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah. So fasting's really excellent for the female on day one through day 20 of her cycle, because estrogen. Let's just pull each sex hormone out here. Estrogen likes you to be insulin sensitive. Estrogen likes it when glucose is low. So you can fast, you can do keto, you can do all of that when estrogen is coming in. And her big debut, she builds like day one is, by the way, is the day you bleed. A lot of women don't know that. So the day you bleed is day one of your cycle. So now, over the next 15 days, estrogen is building, building, building, building. She will peak somewhere around day 12. When she peaks all that 12 days, you need to be insulin sensitive because. Because that's the environment estrogen can thrive in. So let's use infertility as an example. So one of the things we know about infertility is there's a metabolic piece to it. So if you have a high hemoglobin A1C, there's a good chance that you're not allowing estrogen, your natural estrogen stores to hit a peak in order for an egg to be released. So she's. I always give them pronouns because they're literally like characters in our body. And if estrogen and I feel like they're PR team, like if estrogen could speak, she would say, keep glucose low so that I can build, build, build, build, and then I can release an egg. And progesterone would be over here saying, no, I actually need you to keep glucose high so I can shed the uterine lining so you can start the cycle again. So in fast, like a girl. I called them twins. They're like twins that look the same. We call them the same thing, but they have vastly different environments and personalities they thrive in.
- [26:35]
Rich Roll
So what is the efficacy of fasting in this environment? Like, what is it doing for the woman that's beneficial?
- [26:44]
Mindy Peltz
So if she does it at the right time of her cycle, it's bringing her back into insulin sensitivity. So let's break this down so we don't get off course too much. When you eat a meal, your body's gonna release insulin. It's gonna take that glucose, they're gonna come together, they're gonna drive it into the cell, and the cell's gonna use it for energy. That's when you eat a well balanced meal, which we can unpack what that is later. When you eat an ultra processed meal or you eat a meal that's really high in glucose, what ends up happening is that insulin says, I can't. Just like we said before, I can't get all of that glucose into the cell. So I'm gonna get as much as I can in there and then I'm gonna go store it somewhere else. And it stores it in fat. So then you add fasting into the picture. And what happens with fasting is the body starts to sense that glucose isn't going up. And so it's like, wait a second, glucose hasn't gone up in a long period of time. But you know what? I stored some glucose a long time ago. I stored it around the belly, I stored it around the back of the arms, I stored it in the booty. I'm gonna go burn that. And it is actually a trigger that happens within the liver where it tells the body to go take what it's already stored years ago. So when we look at the menstrual cycle, we know that when we put you into a fasted state at the right part of your cycle, you are giving your intelligent body an opportunity to burn the excess that perhaps was there from years before or from days before. So it's like, like cleaning the trash. It's like taking out the excess so that you can start the whole cycle again and eat. And then all of a sudden the body's sensitive, it's able to work it out. And then, and then you, you go and you build those stores back up, right?
- [28:43]
Rich Roll
And you do this. This is appropriate for that three week period of time, but not during that final week of the cycle. What comes to mind when you think about plant protein powders? Well, I don't know about you, but for years it's basically been thought of as this barely tolerable product. You want the benefits, but you're basically choking down chalk, flavor, disappointment. Well, Momentous actually decided to change the game on this and they've done it with their newly upgraded 100% plant protein formula. They took something that was already good, in my opinion, and actually made it incredible. The formulation is a combination of pea and rice protein sourced from the United States and Canada. It contains no gums, no fillers, no stabilizers, no soy, no allergens, and remarkably, the taste is really delicious. The texture is smooth. There's no grittiness, no artificial taste, no making weird faces while you drink it. And I say this in the context of understanding that when it comes to supplements, especially protein powders, there are just endless choices out there. And as we know, and as I have discussed at length, the supplement space is completely unregulated, which is why it's important to be conscious about the brands that you choose and why I feel so strongly about aligning with Momentous. Because these people and this company are truly, absolutely obsessive when it comes to quality and sourcing. And as a result, they have earned my trust. Every batch is NSF certified for sport. They are tested for heavy metals, harmful additives, everything. Olympic level standards. Which is why Momentous is the brand of choice, not surprisingly, for professional athletes and elite high performers across the world. So whether you're plant based or just trying to include more plant protein into your routine, please do not settle for good enough when you can have performance for life. So if you're like me and you want to take supplements that are made by and used by the best in the world, go to livemomentous.com richroll to save up to 35% off your first subscription order of protein. And if you don't want to subscribe, that's fine. You can still get 20% off all of my favorite products. That's livemomentous.com richroll this episode is brought to you by Whoop. I just returned from a week in Boston where I had this really amazing privilege of spending the better part of two entire days at the WHOOP headquarters. I got to spend time with Will Ahmed, whoop's founder and CEO, as well as dozens of key team members who pulled the curtain back to give me a rare behind the scenes look at what they do, how they do it, why they do it, the way they do it, the culture, the intentionality behind the technology, the exciting innovations that are on whoops Near Horizon. And it was all just so impressive and really affirmed why I not only love the product, but feel kinship with their mission. A mission I have been aligned with for years, evidenced by this band on my wrist right here and why I never take it off. In any event, in case you were wondering, WHOOP is the only wearable that turns your health and fitness data into personalized guidance, leveraging everything from resting heart rate, HRV sleep stages and efficiency and real time stress levels to inform how you train, work and recover so you can live better. And now the all new WHOOP is here and the recent updates upgrades are dramatic. In addition to the Sensor now being 7% smaller, the battery life now extends to a remarkable 14 days. The new Healthspan feature shows how your daily habits impact your pace of aging and hormonal insights provide personalized guidance throughout your cycle or pregnancy. And the new WHOOP MG even boasts a heart rate screener with on demand ECG reading so you can monitor your heart anytime and share your results with your doctor. And you can join now at join.whoop.com roll that's join.whoop W-H-O-O-P.com roll there's many different types of fasting. Yeah, it's confusing for a lot of people. Time restricted eating, intermittent fasting, water only fasts, prolonged fasting. When you're talking about fasting, what are you talking about specifically?
- [33:24]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah, so I'm time restricted fasting and in fast like a girl I map out six different lengths. So from the research I've seen from our community that's been fasting, what we see is the longer you fast, more healing mechanisms turn on because it's the ultimate hormetic stressor for our metabolic system, which just so everybody knows that's just the good stressor that causes the system to go find it elsewhere. So the longer you go, the more you start triggering these different healing switches. And it's everything from 17 hours the body starts to realize, hey, food and nutrients haven't come in. So I'm gonna stimulate autophagy so we can clean the inner parts of the cell out. At 24 hours, there's research showing that the intestinal tract's getting itself ready for food. And so it increases intestinal stem cells so that it can start to make the environment within the gut ready for when food comes in. At 36 hours, there's incredible research showing that over time, regular 36 hours fast causes the body to go get that stubborn weight that it can't seem to burn on its own. It will go in and it'll actually burn that because it hasn't had glucose go up in 36 hours, 48 hours, the whole dopamine system gets reset because you gotta go be motivated to go find food. So the whole dopamine system redoes itself. And then at 72 hours, the immune system resets. So the longer you go without food, what you're doing is you're telling your body to turn on these switches so that it can be ready when food comes back.
- [35:11]
Rich Roll
Why then would the advice be time restricted? Eating these windows, whether it's 70, 17 hours, 12 hours, 15 hours versus just 72 hours, this is what it's going to be. This is how you get the most bang for your buck and the most benefit from undergoing. You know, this. It's difficult for a lot of people to do this.
- [35:34]
Mindy Peltz
Well, I mean, 72 hours is a big endeavor. I mean, that's not it. Yeah, I mean, why wouldn't you just go to the best and do the 72? Most people aren't going to do 72 on a regular basis. So it's a big fast. So I'm looking at what I call building a fasting lifestyle. And that's what people did with used fast like a girl for, which is every day you're picking from these six different length fasts and asking yourself, am I going 15 hours is your typical intermittent fasting? Am I going 17 to get some autophagy, do I need to reset my gut? And you learn how to use them as different tools and to be able to heal yourself a little bit like a supplement. But you're actually tapping into your own body's healing. So you could do one 72 hour fast once a year, twice a year, and just clean the whole system. But we live in such a toxic world that these little microdoses of fasting on a daily basis are able to tap into these self regulatory processes.
- [36:41]
Rich Roll
Yeah. Do you know Alan Goldhammer Yeah, I had him on here a couple times. I mean, the water only like very long, 30 day fast. You can't argue with the results that he's getting. I mean, he's obviously dealing with very ill patients who are coming in with long term, very serious chronic lifestyle illnesses. But the reversals that he sees are quite remarkable. Like, it's undeniable that something is happening here. For anybody who's questioning the efficacy of.
- [37:14]
Mindy Peltz
This, I feel the same way with our community. When I first started teaching this on YouTube, I would just. I mean, I was a newbie to YouTube, I was a newbie to fasting, but I was reading the science, I was applying it on my patients. So I just used social media. We would do these things called fast training week. And I would say, here's the fast we're gonna do for five days. I want you all at the end of five days to give me feedback and tell me what happened to you. And we did that for years and years and years, and millions of people participated in this fast Training week. And what the results we got back were. I mean, people were dropping hundreds of pounds, people were getting off medications, people were getting mental clarity back. Like, I actually ended up hiring a team of people to gather all the comments because I was trying to look for patterns and see which fast was working best for which specific condition. But it blew me away. And when Fast Like a Girl came out in the world, I was like, okay, I've seen it on my YouTube. I've seen it. Clinical practice. Now let's see what happens when people get this book and it, like, just reviews poured on to all of the different channels with the same results. Something was going on when you took food out of the equation. The body was actually able to finally heal itself. And I don't think we give that enough credit.
- [38:43]
Rich Roll
And what is the lasting impact of this? I mean, it's not surprising if you're gonna do a very long water only fast, that you're gonna lose weight. But what is the impact? What does the evidence say about regulating insulin sensitivity or correcting metabolic dysfunction? Do these things rubber band back to where they were before? Do you get on a new track where you really are on top of it in a new way? Because I think, you know, especially for people of my age, like, the idea that you could reverse even type 2 diabetes was anathema. Right. And now obviously this is, this is possible. So what do you know about, like, that aspect of it?
- [39:29]
Mindy Peltz
Well, multiple studies show that it's a lasting effect. You know, where we have the greatest research is from Ramadan because we see fasting over 30 days. So when I first started going into all the studies, it was just really interesting how that's where we had these longer term studies that we could look at over a 30 day. And they were even, they were doing short, they were doing sundown to sun up to sundown, fairly short fasts, but we saw it over a longer period of time. So the metabolic results were lasting when done over a longer period of time like that. Which is how I started to look at it. Not as a one off like you were explaining before, like you were saying with Dr. Goldhammer, like I wanted to look at. Well, what would happen if you just gave people the opportunity to dip into different fasting styles through every day and then map that to a woman's cycle? What would the long term benefit be? Now we don't have research on that map to the cycle, but what I witnessed was a lasting result. I've even witnessed a lasting result with a three day water fast. You do it once and it unsticks your weight. And now your metabolic switch is more primed. So as far as long term, it really has a staying power more than any other diet that I've ever seen. And what's really interesting to me is that if you put me on the keto diet, you put me on any diet of any kind, it gets harder and harder and harder to stick to that diet. What I've noticed with fasting is it gets easier and easier. The more you prime your fasting muscle, it just becomes second nature. And people can stick with it over time, which is also giving them a better result.
- [41:17]
Rich Roll
Explain this idea of metabolic switching.
- [41:20]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah, I was gonna say, I feel like we need to go there to kind of get the big. So you have two metabolic systems. One that you initiate when you eat, and I call it the sugar burner system, and one you initiate when you fast, and I call it the fat burner system. Just like you have two nervous systems, you have the parasympathetic, you have the sympathetic. Our body is meant to have go in and out of these different rhythms. So when I eat, I stimulate my sugar burner system. Glucose goes up and then insulin kicks in. We talked about that. Now glucose and insulin are coming down. And at about eight hours without glucose going up, the body is gonna start to metabolically switch over to the fat burning system. That switch takes about four hours. So 12 hours after the last piece of food going in your mouth, you're now over here in Fat burning. And your liver is trying to burn fat to make a product called a ketone. And then the ketone goes up into the brain, turns hunger off and starts to stimulate the brain, stimulates gaba, calms you. And your body now will derive fuel from burning fat. You were meant to switch between these two systems. We weren't meant to activate glucose all day in the sugar burner system, which is obesity. And we weren't meant to access fat burning all day, which is what I saw with people who started fasting too much. We're meant to go in and out of those two switches. So if I tie this to your question before, because I really want people to understand, the lasting effect of this is that the more you tap into this fat burner system, the better these results will last.
- [43:16]
Rich Roll
One thing you talk a lot about is there's no one size fits all solution. We're all an n of 1. So is this appropriate for everybody? And if not, what are the whens and whys and what abouts that apply to this?
- [43:33]
Mindy Peltz
Great question. So first one that I always will say is if you're pregnant, not your tool, fasting is not your tool. Really work.
- [43:43]
Rich Roll
Yeah. I can't imagine you're trying to feed this fetus like your body needs nourishment.
- [43:48]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah. Yeah. But you'd be surprised how many people.
- [43:51]
Rich Roll
Watch out, people fast on pregnant. Why? Cause they're terrified of, like, the weight gain that comes with being pregnant.
- [43:56]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah. Or they were fasting beforehand and then they don't wanna give it up because it's an amazing tool. Or they're nauseous all day long, so they don't wanna eat, especially in the first trimester. So, yeah, the millions of questions we've had over the years, that has been a big one.
- [44:13]
Rich Roll
All right, so pregnant off the table. What about somebody who's trying to get pregnant?
- [44:20]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah, trying to get pregnant is. You gotta be. There's a lot of nuance to it. I would say back half. Let's just put it. Make it simple. Back half of your cycle after ovulation. Don't be fasting.
- [44:31]
Rich Roll
What about women who are struggling with their fertility who are infertile?
- [44:36]
Mindy Peltz
So that's when you really want to look at fasting.
- [44:38]
Rich Roll
Because.
- [44:39]
Mindy Peltz
So in Fast like a girl, I created something called a fasting cycle, which is front half of your cycle. You fast ovulation, you don't fast as much after ovulation, then you go back to fasting, and then the week before your period, you don't fast at all. So I split it into four different phases. And what we found, it was really interesting. Where I came up with it is I had an employee that was struggling to get pregnant. And every time she would go into her doctor's office, they were like, your BMI is too high. You're not going to get pregnant. And I was learning fasting at the time. So I said, how about we fast you day one through day 10, then we have you lean into more food during ovulation, then day 16, when you come out of ovulation till the back half of your cycle. How about we have you not fast and eat more food? And I said, let's just try a rhythm of this. And I'm like, maybe 90 days, maybe it'll. Let's see what happens within 30 days. She was pregnant.
- [45:42]
Rich Roll
Wow.
- [45:42]
Mindy Peltz
Because she primed estrogen. Estrogen was given what she needed, so she was able to release an egg finally. And then the back half, she was minding progesterone. Progesterone got what it needed, so it was able to be able to help with the implantation of the egg. So then I was like, well, one person, that's not a lot. Let me go try it. With a handful of my patients, we did five in total, still not a big study. And found that every single time somebody followed the fasting cycle where they were going in and out of no fast, then fasting, they got pregnant. So when fast like a girl came out, I was like, okay, well, let's see what the world does with it. And again, you can go read the reviews. It was pretty. Same results.
- [46:24]
Rich Roll
Yeah, that's traumatic. Yeah, that's traumatic. Obviously, if you have an eating disorder, this is problematic. I'm sure you have a lot to say about. That's sort of an obvious case. But what about in the athlete case? Like, I think this is. This is tricky. Right. An athlete, especially if you're training hard and it depends on your sport and what phase of training you're in. You need to replenish your body and nourish yourself or you're not going to be able to recover and, you know, repair your body so that you can get the gains. That's the purpose of the training.
- [46:59]
Mindy Peltz
Yep. But really well said. And again, if we can just look at fasting as like a tool, think of it like a supplement. So you take it some days and you may not take it on other days. So when we look at it through that lens, it's not like you're locked in. I fast 15 hours. I'm always I'm gonna go run a marathon. I still fast 15 hours. You gotta like pull that fasting tool out and know when you're gonna use it, when you're not gonna use it. On the longer endurance days, you are not going to use fasting as your tool. You're gonna wanna fuel beforehand so that you can make sure that you have the nutrients needed to go that day. Then maybe the next day's recovery day, then you're gonna fast a little longer. This is exactly what we did, Chris and I did with Jesse's group. I mean we were really looking cause he would have them on these extreme workouts and I would take their whole workout protocol and I would say, okay, he's got you doing pretty long runs on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. So I don't want you fasting on those days, shorter workouts, so let's do it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I want you to fast a little bit longer. And we found as a recovery tool for those extreme athletes, it was incredible.
- [48:16]
Rich Roll
That's interesting. When you mentioned Chris, you're talking about Chris Hout, who's my longtime coach and one of the things that he always says and certainly said to me many times is that during intense phases of training, you are fueling not necessarily for that workout, but the workout tomorrow. So even if you want to do your fasted workout, you could do that and maybe you'd feel great and even great for the rest of the day. But you really have to be thinking about what, what the workout is going to be tomorrow and the day after that, and the day after that. Because from an endurance athlete perspective, it's all about like being able to wake up and do it again and do, doing it again, doing it again. And it's not about any individual workout. And so, so being consistent obviously wins the game. And anything that you do to interfere or disrupt that consistency becomes problematic.
- [49:13]
Mindy Peltz
Right. Okay, so let's put it into an action oriented way. Let's say Monday, you're going on your big workout and so you eat breakfast. You don't fast, you do your long run. Let's just pick running. You're gonna run really long, you're gonna come home, you're gonna do your recovery workout the next day. On Tuesday, you might do an intermittent fast of 15 hours. Okay, why would you do that? You would do it to bring the inflammation down, to get the body to repair itself. Just a short little fast 15 hours. And then when you open up your eating window and you eat, then you're gonna make sure that you eat enough because maybe Wednesday you're now gonna use it as you're not gonna fast because you're going on another hard day. So this is why I'm like, you have to look at the fasting window as like a supplement. It's a little tool you're using to help the body heal itself. But then when you eat, you've gotta eat. And it doesn't matter if you're an extreme athlete or a menopausal woman. I'm not here to say that fasting is like this incredible thing and you should do it all the time. It is a tool that you should know how to when to pull it out and when to leave it out.
- [50:23]
Rich Roll
Yeah. A tool in a much broader, bigger toolbox.
- [50:26]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah, yeah.
- [50:28]
Rich Roll
Where does the when of eating come into all of this? I just know from my flirtations and experiments with intermittent fasting and time restricted eating that the when is really important. Like, I know for a fact, at least with my body, that if I don't eat all day and then I eat like, and then I'm starving and I eat a big dinner and then I'm exhausted and I go right to bed. If I look at my whoop data, the stress levels are insane throughout the night, they're very high. And also through experimenting with CGMs, the blood sugar goes haywire. I'm like, this is not serving me.
- [51:11]
Mindy Peltz
And in that scenario, you fasted.
- [51:12]
Rich Roll
I would think without that, like, oh, I'm doing, I went 17 hours or whatever it is, I'm doing the right thing.
- [51:19]
Mindy Peltz
Okay. But in that scenario, did you fast in the morning and then you ate in the afternoon?
- [51:24]
Rich Roll
In that scenario, I pretty much didn't eat all day until dinner.
- [51:28]
Mindy Peltz
Right. Okay. Was it dark out, light out? Do you not remember?
- [51:34]
Rich Roll
Probably like twilight.
- [51:36]
Mindy Peltz
Okay.
- [51:36]
Rich Roll
Like maybe seven. I mean, it depends on the time of year. Right. But probably dark. I know the dark thing is a big deal.
- [51:43]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah. So let's look at it this way. You're taking an eating window. If you're gonna fast 17 hours, right. Then you're looking at a seven hour eating window. So you're taking that eating window and you get to put it anywhere you want to put it. So in that scenario, I would say you would have been better off with an eating window somewhere between like 10 and 5. So then the next, that night, after 5, you're not eating. You're now in a fasted state. You go to the next morning and you maybe don't eat until 10 again, you've got your 17 hour eating window. We are meant to eat in the light, we are not meant to eat in the dark. When melatonin shows up, insulin, you get more insulin resistant. As Sachin Patenta told me, he's like the pancreas gets sleepy when melatonin comes in.
- [52:36]
Rich Roll
I know, but I'm only hungry when it gets dark out.
- [52:41]
Mindy Peltz
Well, that's a rich problem.
- [52:43]
Rich Roll
I know.
- [52:44]
Mindy Peltz
I can't help you with that.
- [52:46]
Rich Roll
It is true also that when you sleep really well and you feel rested, your cravings are very much held at bay. I know that when I don't sleep well and I feel off, that's when the cravings become more difficult to manage.
- [53:05]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah, agreed. And I think a good rule is two to three hours before bed, we should not be eating.
- [53:11]
Rich Roll
That's so hard for me. Yeah, that's the hardest piece for me. Most people talk to me about Ozempic. Most people, let's be honest, get excited about something like fasting because really what they want to do is lose weight. Like metabolic health, insulin resistance. These are like abstract ideas. But I know what I look like when I look in the mirror and what I really want to do is shed the belly fat. Fasting seems like a good way to go. Now we have Ozempic. Oh, I don't need to fast. I can just do that or I can. That makes fasting easier. So how do you think about where that fits into this whole thing?
- [53:49]
Mindy Peltz
Well, I'll tell you, my first reaction when Ozempic started to really gain traction is I kept walking around going, asking everybody, tell me what you're noticing on it. And they're like, I'm just not hungry. And my response was, well, that's what a fasting lifestyle does. When you learn how to use this metabolic switch where you're taking your eating window and deciding where it goes every day, leaving these longer periods for fasting, your hunger goes down because you're making ketones. In this fasted state, when you make ketones, it goes up to the brain and kills hunger. So to me what I see is that the symptoms or the positive experience of Ozempic is very much similar to what I saw with millions of people with a fasting lifestyle. Hunger stopped body burned fat. So. So with that in mind, it appeared to be completely useless to me because I was seeing people with really chronic obesity problems, bad cravings, couldn't get over ultra processed food addiction, and all I had to do is teach them a metabolic switch and they lost weight. So why would they spend 800 to $1,000 on a medication with some interesting side effects to be able to lose weight.
- [55:08]
Rich Roll
Because you don't have to go through the hard suffering part okay in the beginning, but that's the way it always is. Of course, you know, we'll do anything to avoid that part.
- [55:18]
Mindy Peltz
Even pay $800.
- [55:20]
Rich Roll
I don't know. For a lot of people, apparently the answer is yes. Mindy, you know this.
- [55:24]
Mindy Peltz
Yes.
- [55:24]
Rich Roll
You know, we live in Los Angeles, but essentially what you're saying is, look, I've got a natural way of achieving the same result.
- [55:32]
Mindy Peltz
Bingo. It is the same thing. So we actually then started doing on our YouTube channel, I started doing more videos. How do you get off Ozempic? Because where my brain went to was, okay, maybe if I could just this kind of tied into what you and I were talking about before. Maybe if I could be welcoming to the thought that Ozempic's helping a lot of people, which it is, then how do I integrate the fasting lifestyle into Ozempic? And the way I looked at it was, okay, somebody's on Ozempic. Teach them fasting lifestyle. And then create a plan to get off Ozemp. Use it as like training wheels for your metabolic system. And that worked really, really well. Because the goal of every med, I mean, any medication, the goal should not to be on it all the time over and over and over again. You haven't corrected the lifestyle problem if you have to be on it over and over and over again.
- [56:26]
Rich Roll
And time will tell what these downstream side effects are or aren't. You know, it's a, a, it's not a black or white thing. I mean, certainly people who are morbidly over obese and have tried everything and have failed, like this is a life saving. Yeah. Thing for them.
- [56:43]
Mindy Peltz
Agree.
- [56:44]
Rich Roll
So that's one thing. But if you're just trying to trim down a little bit because you got a wedding coming up or, or you know, you're going to walk some red carpet like, I, you know, I just don't, I don't know what the risk analysis is there.
- [56:58]
Mindy Peltz
Y. Yeah, well, that's where fasting lifestyle, I mean, you can drop weight so fast, just all of a sudden starting to do longer fasts. Maybe you have a wedding on Saturday. What you end up doing is 17 hour fasts starting on Monday. By Saturday, a lot of people will notice they've dropped five pounds and they're ready to go.
- [57:17]
Rich Roll
Setting aside fasting for the moment, what do people get wrong about weight loss?
- [57:24]
Mindy Peltz
I think my first thing that we get wrong about weight Loss is what weight is. And I wanna go back to what I said before, because this is one that has freed so many women, which is when we look in the mirror and we see fat, we translate that in our brain to undisciplined. I did something wrong, I can't stick to my diet, and we start to turn on ourselves. But if your body could, like, stand next to you and speak to you in that moment, what your body would say is, hey, you gave me a lot of excess. You gave me too much glucose, too many toxins, too many hormones. I didn't know what to do with them with. So I didn't really wanna put it around your heart and lungs and your liver, so I put it around your belly to save your life. So when we look in the mirror or we get on the scale and we see too much weight, can we start to translate that into, I have too much excess of something? That's the first thing that people get wrong with weight loss, especially women. We think it's our fault, we did something wrong. But the way that the food industry is now, the way the stress levels are back to the evolutionary mismatch that what's happening is all this excess is going into fat. So if I double down on calorie restriction or I double down on working out too much, which is raising my cortisol levels even more, what we're now seeing is the doubling down is not working.
- [58:51]
Rich Roll
Why not?
- [58:52]
Mindy Peltz
Because, well, for the female body, it's cortisol. You're raising cortisol. So now cortisol's so high because you're decided that you need to run 10 miles instead of five, and your body's like, wait a second, now we're back running from a tiger. So I need to be more insulin resistant.
- [59:10]
Rich Roll
Yeah, I get that. I mean, I think an analogous example just from my personal experience is, look, if I'm training super hard, like, I, you know, I can eat a lot and I continue to lose weight because, like, I'm just pushing my body so hard. But there's an intermediary phase where maybe I'm not training quite that hard, but my hunger is so intense and I'm eating a lot and I'll end up gaining more weight than I would suspect. And it works in reverse of what you would think. And now, like, you know, we were talking earlier, I'm recovering from back surgery and I'm really not doing anything. Like, I'm walking and I'm. And I thought, like, I'm going to balloon up, you know, I'm just going to get super fat. That and yeah, I've gained a little bit of weight but my hunger has gone down because my stress levels are down. I'm not pushing myself. So perhaps there's a greater hormonal balance that is helping me to kind of manage this, this, you know, period of inactivity.
- [60:09]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah.
- [60:11]
Rich Roll
Without like, you know, becoming obese or something.
- [60:14]
Mindy Peltz
You're, you're primed for some intermittent fasting is what that I just heard.
- [60:18]
Rich Roll
I know, yeah. I want to talk about fasting, something I used to think about in binary terms like you're either eating or you're not. Right. Well, if you're a longtime listener of this show, then you'll probably recall my conversations with Dr. Valter Longo who if you don't know, is one of the world's preeminent research scientists on nutrition and longevity. And this is the guy who pioneered a very, very novel middle ground approach to fasting where you can actually nourish your body while also triggering cellular repair processes that happen during fasting. Like autophagy, a Nobel prize winning cellular repair process that cleans house in your body and you get to eat while it happens. Which is nuts. Right. And now there is a safe and simple way to do this at home. Courtesy of Prolons fasting mimicking diet. A five day plant based nutrition program developed over decades at USC's longevity institute by Dr. Longo himself. It's got soups, it's got snacks and beverages that nourish your body while also keeping it in a fasted state. Prolon next gen features include 100% organic soups and teas with richer taste. Everything prepackaged and ready to go. It supports biological age reduction, metabolic health, skin appearance, fat loss and energy. Prolon is the first and only patented nutrition program for longevity through cellular rejuvenation. For a limited time you can be the first in line to experience the new next gen. At special savings Prolon is offering all of you 15% off site wide plus a $40 bonus gift gift. When you subscribe to their five day nutrition program just visit prolonlife.com richroll that's P R O-L-O-N-L-I-F-E.com richroll to claim your 15 discount and your bonus gift. Prolonlife.com richroll so I'm about 900 plus episodes into this thing now and one thing I can confidently say as somebody who spent quality time with so many world leading performers is this. Our greatest limitation is often our Own scattered mind. Meditation, personally used to feel like an esoteric practice disconnected from my type A personality, reserved for, you know, the ashram set. But I've discovered that it is actually essential to leading a self examined life. My personal practice having improved every facet of my life and well being, honestly I just want everyone to experience what I have. And Calm is a great way to help get you there. With guided meditations that can help manage anxiety, sleep stories that can quiet internal noise and expert LED talks that provide insights into mental well being in a world that constantly demands more and more and more. Calm helps me keep center and centered in the idea that inner clarity is the portal not just to true productivity, but to experiencing the full richness of living an intentional life. Calm is the number one app for sleep and meditation, giving you the power to calm your mind and change your life. And right now, calm has an exclusive offer just for you guys. The listeners of the show get 40% off a Calm premium subscription. A Calm calm.com richroll it's an amazing value. Go to C-A L M.com richroll for 40% off. Unlimited access to Calm's entire library. Calm.com richroll and you know what? Tell Calm you heard about them from me. The overall kind of global idea here is women empowerment and connecting women with their own well being in a way that isn't, you know, outsourcing it to other people, experts, professionals, but really encouraging women to look inward and take responsibility for their own path.
- [64:27]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah.
- [64:28]
Rich Roll
What's behind it? Was there an experience that you had or a series of experiences that led you to this sort of field as. As being so important?
- [64:38]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you. I just want to thank you for seeing me because that was really well stated. That is the mission of helping women just understand this machinery. So to answer your question, of course it always starts with your own disempowerment moment. And I was a competitive tennis player in college. I played on a scholarship at the University of Kansas and I ended up having compartment syndrome in my lower legs.
- [65:10]
Rich Roll
Are you familiar what is that? No.
- [65:12]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah. So Mary Decker. Do you remember Mary Decker? Yeah. She had it. And it's when you do too much pounding on your feet and the inner compartments of your lower legs start to swell. It's like the next step beyond shin splints. And these compartments become permanently inflamed and it feels like your lower legs are just gonna explode and the pain is just nonstop all day long. And so it's from too much exercise. And so what they did is they went in and they did a fasciotomy. So they just cut the fascia so that the lower leg can actually inflame. And they were like, six weeks. You're gonna be good. Back out on the court just in time for the season. And within four weeks, I couldn't get out of bed, and I was just exhausted. And my mom took one look at me and was like, something's not right. And we go into this specialist. He does all these brain scans and looks at what's going on with the healing power of my body and why I can't think straight. I can't talk straight. I have no energy. And he sits down at this big mahogany desk across from my mom, and I. I'm 19 years old. And he's like, well, you have chronic fatigue syndrome. And my mom was like, she's this short, little mighty woman. And she was like, great. What do we do about it? And he pulls out a list of medications, and he says, well, and they have hash marks next to all the times they worked. And he's like, well, we'll start with this medication and see what happens. And if that doesn't work, we'll go to the next one, and then we'll go to the next one. And my mom says, well, how long's that gonna take? And he goes, well, it could be months to years. And my mom literally turns to me and she says, don't listen to him. And she says, thank you very much. Picks me up and takes me. That was down in Redondo Beach. Takes me to her homeopathic MD in Santa Monica. We walk in, and she's like, Dr. Luke needs to see her right away. Dr. Luke stands in front of me, and he says, here are all the foods you need to eat to heal, and here are all the foods you need to avoid to heal. And it was basically the ketogenic diet. Meat, vegetables, get all carbs, all fruit out. And I went to his office every day, where he retrained my whole lifestyle. Within two weeks, I was back on a plane. Within four weeks, I was back playing tennis. All from a major lifestyle change and one doctor believing in me.
- [67:45]
Rich Roll
So what did you take away from that?
- [67:47]
Mindy Peltz
That I could heal myself. If I look at my lifestyle, I can start to heal myself. I even started doing a bunch of meditation and visualization, and I just started looking at all the different ways I could tap into my own healing.
- [68:00]
Rich Roll
I had Lisa Moscone on here, and it was really remarkable to hear from her the extent to which there's A lack of study and understanding when it comes to women's health and in particular women's hormonal health and what we know and don't know about perimenopause, menopause, et cetera. I feel like this is something that should have been well understood a long time ago. And we're only now at the beginnings of really grasping meaning from this in a way that can be translated to women in such a way that they can think differently about the various stages of their lives and take action on their own behalf during those various phases.
- [68:44]
Mindy Peltz
No, I mean, we have a one size fits all healthcare system. So everything is done. I mean, even if you look at the way medications are dished out, statins, blood pressure medications, all of those have been tested mostly on men, they haven't been tested on women. So everything is, you have high blood pressure, here's a pill, you have high cholesterol, here's a statin. I mean, again, not to keep bringing it back to fasting, but that's how fast, like a girl was really evolved out of. Everybody got into this intermittent fasting thing and it was like, oh, I should do it exactly how my husband or my brother or my best friend does it and come to find out that the female body needed it different. But our healthcare system is not taking women's needs, not just physiological but emotional needs into consideration.
- [69:33]
Rich Roll
Talk to me about back to hormonal health in women. The differences, the phases that women go through the first 20 some odd years of their life into the 30s, then into perimenopause and menopause, what's going on? What do women need to understand about how to take care of themselves and think about their energy and where they're placing their attention during these phases?
- [70:02]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah, so it all goes back to estrogen. We have to remember that when you go into puberty now, you've got estrogen coming in on first half of your cycle. And estrogen helps a woman. Like when estrogen's around, it helps a woman become more insulin sensitive. That insulin glucose system is working well, like estrogen, I call it a phrase I got using a while back that people really responded to was estrogen has a girl gang, she has a bunch of neurochemicals that she influenced, and two of them in the metabolic system was glucose and insulin. So every time estrogen came in, you were insulin sensitive. So as long as you have a cycle, just make sure that you're working with estrogen when she comes in the front half of your cycle, when you go into Perimenopause, estrogen starts to go on a wild ride. And so she's up one day, she's down the next day, and all of a sudden you start gaining weight for no particular reason. This is, this is the most frustrating thing for a 40 year old woman who was able to control her weight through certain foods. In her 30s, she pops into her 40s and now she's eating those same foods, but she's not, she's gaining weight. That's because estrogen is slowly starting to decline. As estrogen declines now, you're becoming more insulin resistant, which is what menopausal belly weight is. It's all the extra weight that women are gaining is because estrogen is exiting. Now, I believe in the research I've done, and you mentioned this with Lisa Moscone, if we look at what happens all the way on the other side post menopausal years and we track that to evolutionary biology, we start to see, and I know Lisa spoke about this on your podcast, we start to see something called the grandmother hypothesis, where when women in the hunter gatherer days, when they went into their postmenopausal years, they actually were out foraging. And from what I can tell, it's about 17 hours total. Every day they do a seven hour trek is what they were doing. The Hadza tribe does it. Currently, this is the only one of the few modern day hunter gatherers we have. And so they didn't have fuel to do that, so they had to go into the fat burning state and start to use ketones as fuel. So when we look at it over the evolutionary span of a woman, okay, your period comes in, you've got to, when estrogen's around, then make sure that you're priming that system. When estrogen goes away, then we need to start to look at fasting and leaning into ketones to get our mental clarity back to be able to burn fat. Because as estrogen exited, your metabolic system got completely decimated and is less effective at doing what it was doing. So it needs that ketone more.
- [73:02]
Rich Roll
Where does hormone replacement therapy come into this?
- [73:06]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah, I think it's really beneficial that we're having these conversations about hrt. I think we need to continue to have a conversation about HRT in conjunction with lifestyle. So when we look at the trajectory of hrt, just as little as five years ago, we weren't talking about hrt. We were like, we don't talk about menopause. People still thought it was dangerous. Then people like Lisa Moscone came out and said, hey, the brain needs estrogen. We wanna revisit the HRT as a therapy. And all of a sudden now you have women that are lathering themselves with cream and patches, hoping that it's gonna take all the symptoms away. But there is a massive biological shift, a neurochemical upgrade that is happening, a massive change within the female body that requires a different lifestyle. And so that lifestyle needs to be one where fasting is brought back in. Because the ketone is a tool that if you hadn't been using it before, you're gonna wanna start to think about using it now to get that mental clarity back online and to be able to burn fat. So where I line up with HRT is when we say, yes, we need to bring it back into the conversation and see if it's appropriate for you.
- [74:27]
Rich Roll
But this is not a panacea, fix all situation. It is one thing that you can do in this toolbox that includes fasting. But what are the other pillars on this lifestyle shift of the things that women need to be thinking about and preparing themselves for when they reach that age?
- [74:48]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah, well, as you go through the process, stress is a big one. Most women go roaring into their 40s and they are like so stressed out and stuck in their sympathetic nervous system that now estrogen, well, all the sex hormones are starting to go away and women are raw. I mean, there's like an edge to us because we don't have the same neurochemical cushion. We don't have. Estrogen brought in dopamine, estrogen brought in serotonin, estrogen brought in acetylcholine. Like, there's over 10 neurochemicals that estrogen provided you with that are now gone. And your nervous system is going to be highly sensitive. I believe there's a reason for this, an evolutionary reason. So if you're still working insane hours, you're still pounding the treadmill, trying to make sure that you drop weight, you're still in a high stressed lifestyle, your symptoms are gonna be pretty gnarly.
- [75:52]
Rich Roll
It's interesting because all those behaviors are intended to ameliorate those symptoms, right?
- [75:57]
Mindy Peltz
That's right.
- [75:57]
Rich Roll
And in fact, what you're saying is they're exacerbating them.
- [76:00]
Mindy Peltz
Yes, yes, yes.
- [76:02]
Rich Roll
And so the lifestyle shift is what, towards a softer, gentler way? Basically.
- [76:09]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah. Let's go to workout. So estrogen stimulated collagen and creatine. So all of a sudden now collagen and creatine are gone. And so does that mean you should keep doing 100 mile endurance races, you don't have that same cushion in your joints. So women are like bringing in the collagen and creatine, trying to keep it up so that they can continue that same intensity. But what we look at when we see evolutionarily wise, they weren't running 100 miles, our hunter and gatherer friends, they were walking every day. They were going with other women in community, foraging for food. They would often carry like a toddler on their back or have a back of tubers. Was a big thing that the grandmothers back in the hunter gatherer days went and got. And so their fitness looked very different than the 52 year old woman who's like, I gotta drop some weight, I'm gonna train for the next marathon. There was more of a balance to it, it.
- [77:15]
Rich Roll
And how much of that transfers to men?
- [77:18]
Mindy Peltz
In what way?
- [77:20]
Rich Roll
In other words, similarly, you know, the, the, the male kind of like hormonal landscape is perhaps a little bit less complex. But don't those same principles apply to the aging male?
- [77:34]
Mindy Peltz
Not as acutely. Now first thing I'll say is I'm not a testosterone expert. I also, for men, I also, when we look at a male's hormonal cycle, it's pretty consistent. Testosterone comes in every 15, 20 minutes. You're on a 24 hour cycle. How does testosterone relate to collagen and creatine? From what I know, it doesn't have the same intimate connection. Now again, I haven't studied testosterone, collagen, creatine in men. So now that doesn't mean that you're going to have to have. If you pound too much, the joints are going to wear out. I do believe that we have overdone exercise. And the more we go into these extreme endurance races that you are going to see a breakdown of the human body because it's not natural to do over and over again.
- [78:30]
Rich Roll
What do men need to understand to better support, support the women in their lives through these various stages? Like, you know, we don't know what's going on.
- [78:40]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah.
- [78:40]
Rich Roll
You know, if, if women, you know, are, are lacking proper understanding and education around this. Like the men are just completely in the dark. So we're just reacting to a situation that we completely don't understand and that obviously prevents us from being supportive partners.
- [78:59]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah. Thank you for asking the question. And I really think we need to bring men into the conversation. I've had so many men reach out to us and say, could you write me a manual for my wife? And I think it's really as simple as this. When you have a cycling woman in your life, whether it's a teenage daughter or a wife, she is not designed to have the same moods, the same behaviors all month long. That is not in her design. So when estrogen comes in, we get all these girl gang members, we get dopamine, serotonin, all of that. And so you're gonna find front half of her cycle, she's gonna be a lot more jovial. You move into ovulation now you've got estrogen at her peak, you've got testosterone at its peak, and you've got a little bit of progesterone. I always say the most neurochemically magic time for a Woman is day 10 to day 15. If you wanna connect with her, you wanna resolve a conf her, she's neurochemically locked and loaded and ready to do that because all those neurochemicals are there week before her period. Now you've got progesterone coming in and progesterone brings gaba with her. And gaba calms her. So she's meant to be a little more laid back. She's not meant to. She's not gonna handle stress the same way. She's meant to slow down, she's meant to eat more carbs. So when she doesn't do that, that's when you're gonna see the irritability. So teenage daughter, she's irritable, it's day 27 of her cycle. Then you wanna take note that encouraging her to rest and chill out is a great time. Not coming to her and trying to solve why her grades aren't where you want em to be. I would never do that. At day 27 of her cycle, go do it at day 12 when she has all these neurochemicals. So once you understand how these neurochemicals affect her behaviors and her moods, you will understand the woman that you're.
- [81:02]
Rich Roll
But that presupposes, you know, from the male point of view that like I know when you know when the period is happening. Like how you know, it's like, I don't know, you know, it would be a great conversation. I could ask my wife, I'm not gonna ask my daughter, you know, so that's like, you know, that's like off the table.
- [81:20]
Mindy Peltz
It's. And so why, why should it be off the table?
- [81:24]
Rich Roll
It shouldn't, of course, but it's a delicate subject, you know, with a teenage daughter.
- [81:30]
Mindy Peltz
Believe me, I have had one of those.
- [81:32]
Rich Roll
The zone of privacy, you know, is very important. And as a dad, like, I need to respect that and want to respect that, you know? And I don't want to. I don't want to be. You know, I don't want to intrude. So. But there has to be a way to approach that so that you can be helpful.
- [81:53]
Mindy Peltz
Here's the way I would approach it. My daughter is 26 now, so I wish I had known more of this stuff when she was 16. But you could just say, hey, I brought this woman on the podcast. We got talking about this today, and I realized that I don't even know where you are in your cycle. Do you notice your moods are different? Do you notice your cravings are different? I find this really interesting. And that would open up the conversation. That's a good way, right? That way you can now be a partner with her in what I always tell men is, if you can, the week before her period, be supportive of her. Cause that's when you're gonna get the greatest backlash. And instead of being like, oh, my God, you're really edgy. Are you about to get your period?
- [82:37]
Rich Roll
I mean, I. Yeah, that's not gonna work.
- [82:39]
Mindy Peltz
That's not gonna work. But it would be. I can tell you my team would have appreciated if my dad had come over and said to me, hey, how can I support you? Anything I can do to make life easier for you this week?
- [82:53]
Rich Roll
Right.
- [82:53]
Mindy Peltz
That would have felt really loving to me. I didn't get that. So there's a way to have the conversation. The fact that we have kept the menstrual cycle in secrecy, and we're not supposed to talk about it, that has to change. We gotta bring it out into the light. Just like menopause is having its moment, we need to. It's the number two priority of our system. You should be able to talk about it if you can find a way to do it in a culture.
- [83:22]
Rich Roll
Yeah, 100%. And just to extend this conversation, what do men need to understand about the women in their lives that are going through perimenopause and menopause?
- [83:32]
Mindy Peltz
Again, thank you.
- [83:32]
Rich Roll
I mean, these are just mystery boxes.
- [83:35]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah. Okay. So thank you for asking. Because what we're seeing with women as they go through menopause is. Is if men could understand there's a brain change that's happening, and it's happening for the better. It's actually a brain change. This is Lisa Moscone's work. The brain is pruning away the neurons it no longer needs, and it's creating a new brain, new neurons that's gonna have the woman that you're married with or your sister or your mother is gonna have their behaviors looking very different. Different. So understand it's an upgrade that's going on.
- [84:15]
Rich Roll
Different in what way?
- [84:16]
Mindy Peltz
So let's use myself as an example. My family home was a family home in which our rule was all kids are welcome here. Everybody's welcome. Which meant it was like a circus in our home all the time. And so a lot of dirty dishes, a lot of cluttered spaces. When I went through my upgrade and through my perimeter menopausal years, all of a sudden the noise started bothering me. The dirty dishes. I was gonna gouge somebody's eye out if they left dirty dishes in the sink. And the behaviors that I could tolerate before, I could no longer tolerate that was confusing to my family. It was like, you didn't care about the clutter on the countertop here before, and now you're yelling at me for it. And that was because as my nervous system was changing, my hormones were changing, I became much more sensitive to my environment. So that was one big change I started. A lot of women start to see that they need more time alone. Like, they just need to isolate themselves, because what was happening is there's a neurochemical shift. And so they're learning to hear their own voice. They're starting to understand themselves anew with a different neurochemical system. Our teenagers, when they go from 10 to 13 and all of a sudden they love us, and then they're a little edgy, we understand that, but we don't give women in menopause the same grace. But there's a neurochemical shift that's happening here. That's the key to know. And most women, when they get into their postmenopausal years, most of them will say, I'm happier, I'm calmer. The people pleasing really goes away, which is great for the woman, but might not be great for the spouse.
- [86:11]
Rich Roll
There is this heightened. Heightened sort of commitment to authenticity. Yeah, right. Yeah, that's very interesting. But, yeah, these things are not talked about really very much. What is your sense of women either even being conscious of these changes and how to navigate them, let alone like the men in their lives, understanding it in a way sufficient enough so that they can see clearly what's happening and figure out strategies to be supportive?
- [86:43]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah. You know, again, I think, because we're talking about it now, all of a sudden, more men like you are like, help me understand this. So one of the things that I think worked for my husband and I is. I started using language like a new version of me is emerging. I feel different. I can't cater to the family's needs anymore. I can only cater to my own needs. I talked about the cleanliness of the house. I talked about the solitude. And so you're gonna have to understand that I'm changing, so I'll take ownership over that. And he didn't love that so much at first. But what morphed out of that was a conversation that he would ask me. Tell me what you're discovering about yourself. What's new? That I don't know. I mean, we met at 21, and just that alone was really interesting for me. It was like, well, I've learned that this behavior doesn't work for me anymore. This one doesn't work for me anymore. And so it's really interesting to watch myself. And he was so present in that whole experience that it was like I brought him in to the neurochemical change that was happening to me, which made us connect more. When you look at women, the most common time for a woman to commit suicide, 45 to 55, because this neurochemical shift is happening in her. And so now, all of a sudden, what's ending up happening is she's changing, and the husband is like, wait a second. Why are you changing? You're not the woman I married.
- [88:23]
Rich Roll
That's interesting.
- [88:24]
Mindy Peltz
60 to 70% of divorces are initiated by women after 40. Why is that?
- [88:29]
Rich Roll
Because they change and they become more empowered with who they are and less. Less tolerant of, you know, their. Their. Their man's bullshit, Probably. Yeah, on some level. But also, you know, not being afraid to speak their mind and. And. And maybe alienating or pissing off their. Their partner, such that their partner's like, I don't want to be in this anymore.
- [88:50]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah. Again, I'll just use myself as an example. It took a lot of intentional conversations to be able to just explain that he met me at 21, and I'm sitting here at 55, and I'm very different than I was at 21, and I'm very different than I was at 45. And it took a lot of, like, my behavior used to be this. This, and I can no longer do that in order. Otherwise I don't feel true to myself.
- [89:18]
Rich Roll
There's something empowering about that in that it puts the lie to the. To the traditional idea that women go through this existential crisis when the children leave the home, and suddenly, you know, there's nothing left to nurture and there's a loss of meaning, purpose, and direction. It almost feels like what's happening hormonally with menopause is. Is like a way of reclaiming yourself and rebirthing yourself. It's like you've graduated from that, and now it's your time. Right. And you get to be you and do what you want to do, and you don't have to cater to everyone's nonsense anymore. Like, your tolerance level for that is sort of over with.
- [90:02]
Mindy Peltz
Bingo. Yeah, Bingo. And my response to that in the most loving way.
- [90:08]
Rich Roll
But there's decades of programming around this. Like, if you're in a family system where they're like, what do you mean? You're not going to do that thing that you've always done for me?
- [90:16]
Mindy Peltz
Yep.
- [90:16]
Rich Roll
And you're suddenly like, yeah, I'm not available for that anymore.
- [90:19]
Mindy Peltz
Bingo.
- [90:19]
Rich Roll
Like, without communication and understanding around that, you're. There's a. That's a setup for a fracture in the relationship.
- [90:26]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah. And so it's a. It's a moment for men to step up.
- [90:29]
Rich Roll
Yeah.
- [90:29]
Mindy Peltz
I mean that in so much. I mean that with love. It is a moment, if you are committed to the relationship, to get to know your wife in a new way.
- [90:42]
Rich Roll
Yeah. I'm in that exploration right now, and I've noticed these things. My. My wife is like, yeah, I'm not cooking anymore, you know? Or like, I'm doing me now, and here's what I want to do. And, like, this is what I'm doing. It's not like, hey, hey, let's talk about, like, how we're making sure that everyone's taken care of. Because I want to do this thing. She's just like, no, I'm doing this.
- [91:00]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah. Yeah.
- [91:02]
Rich Roll
And it's cool. I'm happy for her. Like, I want her to feel nourished and fulfilled and be in a place where she can feel like she can do those things. But, yeah, it is different. It is different.
- [91:17]
Mindy Peltz
It's liberating for the woman. I mean, so much. And again, I go back to. We talk about the patriarch as, like, we sort of throw it out with venom, but really, it's just a system that taught women to behave a certain way. Way. And so when they go through menopause, all of a sudden we're like, we don't want.
- [91:35]
Rich Roll
It's sort of like a fuck.
- [91:37]
Mindy Peltz
That we don't want to behave that way anymore. And so women start to stand in their power. They start to become more authentic to who they truly are. And that's really Unearthing for people, but.
- [91:49]
Rich Roll
It'S also a very attractive quality. Yeah, I mean somebody who knows them self and doesn't kowtow or bend based upon social circumstance. Like that's appealing.
- [92:01]
Mindy Peltz
Yep, yep. We need to have everybody look at that. I mean, is it the goal to have the person you love behave in the way that's pleasing you or is it to have the goal to have them behave? What makes them feel congruent with themselves?
- [92:19]
Rich Roll
Well, this is all a piece with your overarching kind of global message which is about taking ownership of your life and leveraging all of these tools. Be it fasting, you know, all of the things in the toolbox so that you're not only, you know, not exporting all of these decisions to other people, you're taking responsibility for, for yourself, but in so doing like you are, it's, it's like, it's an, it's an evolution. It's a becoming. Like you're becoming, you know, you're stepping into your more self actualized, authentic self.
- [92:55]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah. Well, if nothing else, you're stepping into your own authentic version of you that perhaps you didn't see since you were a little kid or maybe you never saw before. But so many women I sit with are like control freaks. The ultimate control is to control yourself and be the most congruent with yourself. Whether that's through the food you eat, when you eat it, the types of exercise you do. And this goes back to what I was saying before about my mission is to try to help women understand their design so that they can step into that congruency.
- [93:33]
Rich Roll
There's control, but there's also neurosis. Right. I think fasting attracts control freaks because it's like the ultimate expression of trying to exert control over your life.
- [93:44]
Mindy Peltz
Life.
- [93:46]
Rich Roll
And I do think that it's important to kind of at least address that. Like if you are so tied to your blood sugar levels through your cgm, or you're obsessed with your whoop data, or you're basically just hyper focused on the micro aspects of whatever your next meal is going to be, you're missing the bigger picture here. And, and maybe you lose weight, maybe you stabilize your metabolic health or what have you, but that's not really health. And I'm sure in your practice you've seen people who are kind of out of balance in that way.
- [94:27]
Mindy Peltz
Oh yeah. That's how fast like a girl came about is that I understood fasting. Started teaching it to the women in my practice. Well, everybody but I started seeing that the more women fasted longer, over and over again, same way that something was happening. Their hair was falling out, their periods were stopping, their agitation was going up. And so I could give a man a fast and put him on fasting protocols, and that wasn't happening. And so what the women started doing in those initial stages is they doubled down on, well, I need to fast more. And then more hair came out and more agitation. And then many of them started gaining weight. And so that's when I mapped it to the menstrual cycle. And I was like, wait a second, there's something missing that's different about the female body that needs to be treated different. But you can extrapolate that to all women's health. Women are rhythmic beings. We're meant to move in and out of stress. We're meant to move in and out of food. Our hormones move in and out much more than men. So the control freaks that double down and try to do more, more, more, more, more, that doesn't work for a woman's body. It's even like, I've even thought about this of, like, the typical work week is great for a male body, but it doesn't work so well for a female body. She should have a work month.
- [95:51]
Rich Roll
What would the optimal work schedule look like in your opinion? Like, if you were suddenly in charge and you got to dictate?
- [95:59]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah, we tried to do this in my own business and it's a little bit tricky to do. But let me tell you hypothetically, what would look really great is you would put in longer hours, day one through day 10, because estrogen's pretty cortisol resistant. Like, she can handle that. She's the diva. She can handle a lot. So you can put in longer days. I'm not saying that you would work 10 days in a row, but you can definitely work the longest. When a woman is in ovulation, put her in the boardroom to dream up some amazing business ideas because she's got estrogen at her peak. She's got testosterone, which is going to motivate her, and she's got progesterone, which is going to calm her. So creativity wise, she should be used in that time period. You should use her for innovating of ideas. The work week could be the same again. We tried this and didn't really master that. The back half. She now needs to slow down the week before a period. Give her the whole week off. If she's going to work a ton in the first half of her cycle, make the back Half of her cycle a little bit softer, a little less work. And every company would have to decide what that is. Years ago, an article came out from Spain that the federal government was going to try to give women three days every month off for menstrual leave, no questions asked. They got three days. I have no idea how they squared this with the men, but this came out in the news. And originally they said the three days were gonna be day one through day three of their period. And my brain was like, no, it should be the three days before her period. So every company would have to come come up with their own formula, but that's what the cadence would look like.
- [97:50]
Rich Roll
But if you're working in teams and every woman's cycle is different and it's not synced up or whatever, that could create chaos. The feasibility of that becomes challenging. But the principle is very sound.
- [98:04]
Mindy Peltz
This is why we were never as.
- [98:06]
Rich Roll
A company, if you couldn't even get.
- [98:09]
Mindy Peltz
It to work, we literally sat down with it because 95% of our employees are women. And my husband helps run the business with me. And so he and I sat down and really thought about it. We thought about doing the three day leave and giving no questions asked. And eventually, because we talk about this all the time in my business, I just said, hey, if you need more time off at different parts of your cycle, you just let us.
- [98:37]
Rich Roll
No. And that's working.
- [98:39]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah.
- [98:40]
Rich Roll
And also you can say, oh, this is the time of the. You go into the vision room right now. Like, this is your moment. Like, have you noticed changes in your business as a result of just being attuned to that?
- [98:51]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah. Full transparency. We haven't gathered everybody in ovulation to do that yet.
- [98:56]
Rich Roll
I do think that on some level a woman can try to do the best they can to take responsibility for that. Not like it's like the employer is going to do what they're going to do. Right. And it's not like most people don't have that much agency in their job, but to the extent that you do have some liberty or agency to look at the month and say, okay, how can I front load all these projects that I'm working on or whatever, so I can alleviate the stress at this period of time, because I know that that's going to benefit me the best and make those little subtle tweaks.
- [99:32]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah.
- [99:33]
Rich Roll
And that would probably be a good takeaway. Right.
- [99:35]
Mindy Peltz
Super easy to do. And then could you map your other health habits with it? So if it's. You have a big deadline on a project, and it's day 21 of your cycle. You know, progesterone's coming in. You know, you're not supposed to be working as long as you're working, then perhaps you skip the long run. Perhaps you don't fast. Well, you shouldn't be fasting during that time anyways. But give yourself some grace and some rest in other parts of your life if that's what's required of you at work.
- [100:06]
Rich Roll
Let's talk about toxins. What are we going to do about our toxic environment? Not just the toxic foods that we're all addicted to, but basically all of our consumer products, all of our beauty products. Now, it turns out. Did you see this study the other day about, obviously, plastics, microplastics, all of that? And now it turns out that. That the water in plastic bottles might just be just as bad because of the plastic lining in the cap. It's like, what are we doing? How are we escaping this?
- [100:40]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah, well, I mean, the first thing everybody needs to know is, like, we are definitely living in the most toxic time in human history. And you need to think about removing toxins. You need to think about some form of a detox. Like, where that might have been optional 20 years ago. It's no longer optional. So I'm super happy you're bringing that up. The second thing, and the way we used to detox so much in my clinic and the way we would always know where to start, is we would take a toxic inventory of, like, tell us about your beauty products, Tell us about your cleaning products, Tell us about your food. Talk about, like, homes you've lived in. Were they moldy? Have you lived in within a home that was remodeled? Like, we would do a huge inventory, and we would come up with what we called your toxic bucket. And in that toxic bucket would be all the toxins that you had accumulated. And what we found is the people with the most amount of toxins, all it took is one little toxin and, like, their symptoms were through the roof. So this explains how. Let's use mold as an example. I'm highly sensitive to mold. If I walk into a room with mold, I'll be the first one to tell you. You. I'd be like, there's mold in here. Because my mold toxicity had gotten so high at one point, my toxic bucket had gotten so high that I'm very clear what will tip it and make me symptomatic. So we have to go and look on a daily basis of what's your sensitivity to smells? Stress. I mean, a Lot of people, if they're not tracking this, they might go, well, this doesn't make sense. But if you track it, start to notice where you put yourself, where you react, you start sneezing, you're exhausted. All of those can be indications of an environment that's filling your bucket. Now, to answer your question of like, what are we gonna do about it? If you know you are hypersensitive to toxins, then every single day you need to have some version of detoxing. It could be as simple as sweating. Make sure your detox pathways are open. You can throw a fast, a 17 hour fast. You start to stimulate autophagy and you're releasing some toxins out of those cells. You could, for a woman, you could start eating more green leafy vegetables. Green leafy vegetables feed the microbes that can start to break those toxins down and get them out of your system. You can look at putting air filters, go around and look at your air filters in your environment. Look at your laundry detergent. Urgent. There's so many ways we can start to detox, but you just gotta take a door in and go for it.
- [103:24]
Rich Roll
It's overwhelming almost to even begin to tackle that. And obviously there's a hierarchy of things here. So in your practice with the people that you've treated and that you're in contact with, what are the top offenders? Like, if somebody's listening to this, it's a whole undercurrent of your message is like, we have to reduce stress, but it's stressful just to receive all of this information. And for many people, even the prospect of doing a fast, that's stressful also. Then the idea that everything in the world is out to harm you, like this is just making the whole thing worse, right? Like, what we want is people to feel empowered and to be making these small little decisions every single day that are moving them in the right direction, make them small.
- [104:12]
Mindy Peltz
So if you read that thing on plastic water bottles, you make a commitment to yourself, if that resonates with you, that you'll only do glass. That alone is a big step. So you don't need to take on everything all at once. Just take one of those things on.
- [104:30]
Rich Roll
And for somebody who is maybe just not as energetic as they feel like they should be, feels a little detached from their life, doesn't have the worst eating habits, but not great either. Like, how do you get to the bottom of what's going on with this person? Like, you could do endless tests to figure out mold and toxins, and you Know, obviously there's low hanging fruit, like processed foods and the like, or sleep patterns. But this, you know, can quickly become in a sort of Sherlock Holmes affair where, I mean, we all know people who have some affliction, they can't figure it out. And it takes years and years and years before they figure out, oh, it's this dust mite or it was this, you know, mold infested house that I lived in 15 years ago. Right before they can figure, you know, and that's only then can they begin to like, build the path towards getting over it.
- [105:27]
Mindy Peltz
Yep. Yeah. So. So this is where we come back to the metabolic switch. If you can go into periods of time where your body has a rest from at least the food toxin and it can start to repair itself, give it an opportunity to repair itself. And then when you go back into food, like, I like food as the door in, I think it's like, look at it and say, did nature provide this or did this come in a package and was it made by a human in a lab? And then can I give myself a certain period of time every day without food so it can repair itself and can I clean up my food system? I found that was the door in. We used to do heavy metals. To answer one of your questions. Is the worst lead is in our water? Lead is in our soil. There was actually a crazy article I saw in the Atlantic the other day about how they're even finding that that lead is like contributing to psychoses, that's leading to the mental behavior of murderers. Like, lead is gnarly and it's in our soil, it's in our paint, it's in our water, but hopefully it's not.
- [106:39]
Rich Roll
In our paint anymore. That was like, you know, a thing of the 70s. I remember growing up lead paint.
- [106:44]
Mindy Peltz
But a lot of elementary schools still. Yeah, they haven't gone in and redone them all, they just painted them. So it's still in schools. Yeah, lead's the biggest one for sure. So this is what I found is I used to do all these supplement detoxes with my patients. We would give them long lists of like, go look at your bathroom, go look at this. I would take them to the grocery store and I would show them how to read labels. And it was arduous, no doubt. And then I found fasting. And I realized if I just started by cleaning up their diet and giving them extended periods of time where they went without food, the body started to naturally detox itself. And once we did that, the toxic load came down and their sensitivity to all the other toxins were less.
- [107:36]
Rich Roll
We have a built in detoxifying organ. It's called the liver.
- [107:40]
Mindy Peltz
Yes.
- [107:42]
Rich Roll
And ultimately isn't the liver responsible for the vascular. Vast extent of, you know, whatever needs to be detoxified and everything else is sort of a cherry on top. So correct me if I'm wrong. You know, I'm just a layperson, but it seems to me that the best way to make sure that your body is. Is really getting rid of these toxins is to make sure that your liver is healthy and operating as it should.
- [108:07]
Mindy Peltz
And your gut, I would put your gut and your liver in the same. The same category.
- [108:12]
Rich Roll
So how do we tend to our liver and our gut? I mean, that's like another three hour podcast.
- [108:16]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah, well, let's make it easy. Let's just make it really eas. The liver loves bitter foods. So like a lot of dandelion greens, radicchio. So, you know, in Eat Like a Girl, I put a bunch of liver. Cause the liver is so important for women. So there's that, you know, liver. The liver also is the storage of anger. So resolving conflict, forgiving people. Like there's an emotional component to it. And then you do have your liver offending, like the certain medications and alcohol, you don't have to do much to help the liver out. It's a very forgiving organ. So if you just take a few things out, add a few things in resolve, work on forgiveness and some emotional pieces, it starts to function pretty well for you.
- [109:05]
Rich Roll
There's no one size fits all situation here. There's not just one tool. I've heard you speak, speak at length about fasting. And I like the fact that you said, like, this is a tool in the toolbox and an important one, and I think a fascinating one, and I think one that we're continuing to learn more and more about. When you think about what are the most important things that every person should be sort of practicing and thinking about. I mean, you have basically like these five principles, Right? So maybe as. As we're starting to kind of near the close of this, let's list them out so that people know this isn't just fasting.
- [109:45]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah, right. That's like people, when they first meet me, they're like, oh, you eat, right? Yes, I do eat.
- [109:53]
Rich Roll
Because you haven't transcended eating.
- [109:56]
Mindy Peltz
No, I haven't at all.
- [109:58]
Rich Roll
You're not a. What is it called? A breathitarian.
- [110:00]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah. Oh, right. Okay. Well, I guess you could be a breathetarian. I'm definitely Not a breath. So, you know, the first principle that I talk a lot about is, and we've spoken about it in here, is get your blood sugar stable. Understand how to stabilize your blood sugar. That could be by tacking on fasting windows. That could be by putting certain foods together, like put fat with every meal, put leafy greens with every meal, put protein with every meal, whether you're a vegan or not. But make sure that you have a composition of your meal that keeps blood sugar stable. So that's the first one. The second one is what I call feed your microbes, not your taste buds. So this is really interesting. And this ties into. You've asked me a couple times like, well, that's overwhelming for a person. Okay. When you go to eat a meal or pick a meal, usually what we end up doing is we tend to think, I just want what my taste buds wants. But what if you ask, what are my microbes that want? So, for example, when I sit down at a restaurant and I look at a menu, I don't ask myself first, what am I in the mood to eat? I look at the menu and I'm like, what haven't I eaten in a while? And I pick the food that is going to be the most unusual, because I want to feed my microbes a different food. We have trillions of microbes, and they all eat different things. So diversity is really healthy.
- [111:31]
Rich Roll
Gut microbe depends on a diversity of foods. And also fibrous foods.
- [111:38]
Mindy Peltz
Right.
- [111:39]
Rich Roll
And fermented foods, too.
- [111:40]
Mindy Peltz
Fermented foods are incredible. So just start to expand what you're eating, and those microbes will change. And as those microbes change, then your taste buds change. That's how you change your taste buds, is you change your microbes.
- [111:53]
Rich Roll
It's crazy, but that's true. Like, I have experienced that when you seed your gut flora with microbes derived from McDonald's, you will start to crave McDonald's, right?
- [112:05]
Mindy Peltz
Exactly.
- [112:05]
Rich Roll
When you start eating healthy, you know, suddenly you, like, have an appetite for, like, healthy foods. There has to be some kind of neurological connection there between the gut and the brain.
- [112:15]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I mean, another thing we should know more about is what microbes control different cravings. They actually have pinpoint. There is a microbe that, if you have an abundance of it, you crave chocolate.
- [112:29]
Rich Roll
I have heard that.
- [112:30]
Mindy Peltz
That. So we have examples. We just don't know enough. We haven't studied the microbiome long enough, so we don't completely know. Candida is a great example. Anybody who's Had. Candida will tell you, I have crazy cravings for sugar I can't overcome. Well, that's a fungus inside there that's trying to keep it alive.
- [112:49]
Rich Roll
So it gives you those contingent upon you feeding it sugar in order to perpetuate it.
- [112:55]
Mindy Peltz
And then the third one I really think is important because. Because my teachings initially were ketogenic origin and talking about carbs. And I think carbs have gotten a really bad rap. And what we need to do is do what we did with fat and separate it out and say, there's nature's carbs and there's man made carbs or human made carbs. And nature's carbs are fruits, vegetables, your potatoes, squashes. We should be leaning in more to nature's carbs than looking at something that comes in a package. Just if don't count, don't worry about counting carbs. Just make sure the quality of your carb is one that came from the earth. Super simple.
- [113:37]
Rich Roll
I also think there's some confusion when it comes to blood sugar stabilization around carbohydrate intake. If your goal is solely to make sure that line is flat and there's no spike, then certainly you can achieve that by avoiding eating carbs. But that's not a proxy for insulin sensitivity, because the minute you introduce that sugar, it'll go crazy. So you're sort of lured into or lulled into this notion that you're eating healthy because you're not seeing those spikes. But that doesn't mean that you're metabolically robust. The key is to have the metabolic health such that when you introduce those carbs, yeah, you'll get a spike, but it will come back to baseline quickly and it won't go haywire. And I think there's a lot of education that still needs to happen around that idea.
- [114:33]
Mindy Peltz
That's pivotal because we get all the time people asking, well, oh my gosh, I ate a meal and it spiked my blood sugar 40 points. Is that bad? And my response is, how quickly did it come down?
- [114:44]
Rich Roll
Mm.
- [114:45]
Mindy Peltz
That's what you should. The postprandial is what you should be worried about.
- [114:47]
Rich Roll
I mean, this is the concern that a lot of people have around cgms. I think cgms are a tool, just like a scale. They're giving you data and information, but without the education piece. You know, they can be misused. And that misuse can lead to, you know, even poorer health outcomes.
- [115:05]
Mindy Peltz
I had somebody tell me one time, they're like, I didn't want to. They stopped wearing their sleep monitor. Because they're like, I didn't want to wake up every morning and have my monitor tell me what kind of day I was going to have and how good my sleep was. And I think to your point, these bio wearable, biometric wearables are interesting, but when we start living our whole life by them, they now become more harmful.
- [115:28]
Rich Roll
You have to have a healthy relationship with them.
- [115:30]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah.
- [115:31]
Rich Roll
Otherwise. Yeah, otherwise. Yeah, it's that neurotic thing. If you're neurotic about it, like, this is. This is not good.
- [115:37]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah. So to your point, like the postprandial look at how quickly your blood sugar comes down. And if you're not wanting to wear one, are you energized by a meal or are you sleepy? By a meal. That's pretty easy to figure out. And if a meal made you sleepy, it probably was the wrong metabolic mix in there. So the fourth one. Yeah, the fourth one is protein is definitely the hero. Macronutrient. Whether you're vegan or you eat animal meat, we've gotta bring protein back in. Amino acids are important, important for making hormones, they're important for making neurotransmitters, making muscle. Like, we've got to be bringing in more amino acid rich foods and that comes in protein.
- [116:19]
Rich Roll
But do you really think that people are protein deficient or not getting enough protein? I feel like there's such an overemphasis on protein lately.
- [116:29]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah, 1000% agree with you. We did this within my community. We tried to, okay, everybody count your body weight and go grams of protein every day. Everybody make sure the first meal you eat, 30 grams of protein. And we did it for several weeks and then had. It was thousands of women I did it with. I have a membership group that we brought everybody into this conversation. And so then afterwards, I unpacked it. How did everybody feel? Everybody felt like they ate too much protein. Some people gained weight and everybody was like, that's not sustained. So I'm not knocking the research on it. I think that the research is what it is. But if we could just again go back and look at a plate and be like, do I have protein with every meal? Let's not be counting it and obsessing on it. Just keep bringing more protein in in whatever manner that feels right for you, then you're not going to be protein deficient.
- [117:26]
Rich Roll
Yeah, fair enough. I don't think protein deficiency is really a thing.
- [117:29]
Mindy Peltz
No, no.
- [117:31]
Rich Roll
But adding more protein, insane to me that everyone, you know, thinks that, like, people aren't getting enough protein. Yeah. Anyway, that's my little pet peeve.
- [117:39]
Mindy Peltz
Well, or just don't, you know, for women, it's like, can you stop giving me one more thing to track and count?
- [117:45]
Rich Roll
Yeah. I mean, it just adds. It adds to the stress of it. I will say that that eating protein early in the day helps control satiety.
- [117:54]
Mindy Peltz
Yep. And with every meal, it helps too, for sure. And then the last principle was one that hopefully everybody knows which is fat doesn't make you fat. And just like we have to separate out the carbs, we need to really look at nourishing good fat. Like olive oil is amazing. I drizzle high quality olive oil on everything. So are you adding that good fat in and keeping the toxic fat out? So let's stop villainizing from fat.
- [118:25]
Rich Roll
You've said that the goal of health is adaptability. We've talked a little bit about that and that health is a verb. So I think maybe a good way to land the plane is with some reflections on those ideas.
- [118:42]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah, you found some of my favorite statements.
- [118:46]
Rich Roll
Oh, good.
- [118:48]
Mindy Peltz
I don't know why we made health a noun. Think about it. When it's a noun, it's an object to be obtained. It's something tangible. It's a destination. Health should be a verb. How many of us have been in the best shape of our life? If we stop doing what got us there, we would fall backwards. So it's an action. Health needs to be an action you do every single day of your life. If we keep setting it up like I'm going on a diet, I'm going to lose 30 pounds. What happens once you lose the 30 pounds? What's your next move? This is the Ozempic. What's your next move? You lost the weight. Where are you going now? Well, that was a noun approach to.
- [119:31]
Rich Roll
Health, especially if you think that that goal is then going to solve all of your other problems. You know what I mean?
- [119:39]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, that's the problem with weight loss in full transplant transparency. When we first discovered fasting, I kept saying, I don't want to be a weight loss expert and. Because what happens is everybody thinks they're going to lose weight and everything in their life is going to change. But what they realize is that there's a skinnier version of themselves that is still unhappy and that they need to deal with that. So, yeah, so I totally agree with that. But if you look at it as a daily action every day, what am I doing to keep healthy? What am I doing to keep myself slowing the aging process down? What am I doing to keep this metabolic switch? Be playful with it. I mean, we threw out so many tools here. If you get rigid with it, if you're like, oh God, these are like another level of have to. We're back at cortisol's high and the whole system falls apart. It needs to be something that's like flexible, enjoyable, that you're curious about and that you can sustain every single day over the course of your. Your life. And each time we set ourselves up for failure when we get really rigid with our health habits and then we do it for 90 days, six months, and then we're like, forget that. And we all of a sudden go back to the old habits that was building.
- [120:56]
Rich Roll
Disease, throwing out the baby with the bath bottle.
- [120:59]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah. I mean, how you. Surely you've seen people do that over and over.
- [121:02]
Rich Roll
Of course I've done it. Right, me too. What are you talking about?
- [121:06]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah, me too.
- [121:07]
Rich Roll
This is the most human thing in the world. World. It's so illogical. Right? You have a misstep and then you're like, this is too hard, forget it. And then you just abandon the whole enterprise.
- [121:16]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah. I mean, this is one of my. What I feel sad about with social media is that we have all these experts that get up and say, you should be doing this, and people are judging all their health habits off a 90 second reel. It's like, we have to stop making absolute. It's a toolbox. Here are a bunch of tools. Which ones are you pulling out every day? How are you using them? Which one works for you, for your time of life and the understanding that your body is always regulating itself to whatever environment you're putting it in. It's always working in your favor. It's always trying to heal you. And your job with your health habits is to have a lifestyle that has some flexibility in it and to develop.
- [122:02]
Rich Roll
A relationship with yourself and your own intuition that through experimentation and over time you will begin to understand which tool is appropriate when. Right. And it goes back to the agency piece. Like really, you know, honoring yourself and shouldering responsibility for this one life that we're living and not waiting until you have this doctor's appointment and they're going to tell you what it is that you should be doing or whatever the latest, you know, sort of morning routine is on Instagram that day.
- [122:37]
Mindy Peltz
Bingo. Bingo. I think the more we can hold it with curiosity and not judgment of like, all the things we see out there, even the down to the toxic thing you were saying about, about how we're just getting, you know, so much information about all the toxins. Like be curious if you can move to curiosity and just go, okay, wonder what in my environment, what toxins are high as opposed to, oh God, there's another thing I have to do. Then all of a sudden you've put yourself in a more healing environment just from how you're going to approach these things than originally. Yeah.
- [123:12]
Rich Roll
But it's also easier said than done. Like everybody's stressed out and is working too much and is under rested and the idea that like, okay, now I got to do this and it's just like it feels like a burden and it just makes the whole thing feel out of reach.
- [123:29]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah, I'm gonna disagree on that.
- [123:32]
Rich Roll
I'm welcoming you to disabuse people with that and to find a, like put matters to rights and you know, kind of diffuse that excuse.
- [123:42]
Mindy Peltz
I think we have put everything ahead of our own relationship with our body. So we are success driven. We are image driven. We at the end of the day, instead of sitting and just nourishing and loving on our, we go to Instagram and Facebook and we're on our phones. We have prioritized this modern lifestyle over our bodies. So if you actually understand how your body works, you would understand it needs rest, you would understand it needs sleep, it needs certain foods. And if you give it that and you pause enough to be able to do that, you will find that all these health habits are quite simple to be able to do do in your experience.
- [124:28]
Rich Roll
Is it that this is something that women find more difficult than men because they are caregivers and everyone's depending upon them for, you know, like their job is to nurture everyone and make sure that everyone's okay. And that comes at the cost of self care, which feels like an indulgence because at the end of the day, you've given everything that you've got to all these other people and there's nothing left for you.
- [124:56]
Mindy Peltz
Bingo. Which is why menopause, menopause is our freedom moment. Because we're neurochemically shifting so that those behaviors we can't do anymore. We just, we can't. So we, we start to take better care of ourselves.
- [125:11]
Rich Roll
So what about in advance of menopause? Right? Like, let's, let's like cut this off at the past.
- [125:17]
Mindy Peltz
Then you have to make sure that you as a woman, that you're resting more, that you're recovering more, that you're not go, go, go all the time that, I mean, we've got infertility rates up. We've got autoimmune problems happening to women. We've got, oh my God. The number of women when fast like a girl came out without a menstrual cycle in their 20s and 30s shocked me.
- [125:39]
Rich Roll
The statistics play that out, right? That is definitely something that's on the rise.
- [125:45]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah, I don't know the actual number. I just know because fast like a girl brought out this fasting cycle. And what I didn't see was how many women, I mean, tens of thousands of emails, well, what do I do if I don't have a menstrual cycle? And I was like, but you're 25, why don't you have a menstrual cycle? Some of that is synthetic birth control, but a lot of that is a cortisol rich environment that they're living in. So I think, to answer your question, and what I really want women to know is that there has to be a rhythm to everything. You can't just put your head down and like work out hard, take care of the family hard, eat, diet hard. Like at some point your female body is going to break. And if you allow it to stay on that rigorous course, your body eventually autoimmune starts to attack itself. Your body doesn't think it's safe to release an egg. So now we have infert you can't lose weight cause your body's like, we're not burning fat right now, we're running from a tiger. So this is why I love the word curious. If you could be curious about how the body works, if you can look at these lifestyle tools that we're talking about today and be like, okay, how could I bring that in? What modern thing could I take away? You would come back into your natural rhythm and you would be blown away at how easy these health habits are.
- [127:11]
Rich Roll
And curiosity is an antidote for or self judgment on some level. You know, when you're in the comparison game and feeling like you're not measuring up and being hard on yourself, it's difficult to be curious. Right. Because you're too busy beating yourself up.
- [127:30]
Mindy Peltz
I agree. And I'm just gonna say that you can put any excuse in front of you and at some point you have to decide, is your health a priority for you or not? Yes, it's difficult in this world right now. But I can tell you as a 55 year old woman, the most important thing to me at this point in my life is my human frame that I carry around with now. I'm not trying to build Muscles so I can look great on Instagram. I'm trying to sleep well, think well, move well, have energy and enjoy living in this body. That's my goal, is to love, wake up in the morning and be like, oh my God, I get to live in this body. How cool is that? We have all the targets are all wrong. I had a story that I tell often that I was running around my house one day and this 70 year old woman, cute little woman, all dolled up, with a fun little hat on, a little cane, walking her dog, was watching me run around in circles around my neighborhood. And at one point she waved at me, like to stop me, me. And so I took my headset off and I was like, hi, nice to meet you. She was a neighbor and she turns to me and she says, it must be amazing to live in your body. And I thought, wow, what a gift from a 70 year old woman. And I was in my 40s at the time to reflect back to me how awesome it is to live in my body. Like, I wasn't feeling like it was awesome. I was just checking off, working out for the day, day. But that perspective changed. That one conversation made me realize that the scale on the number didn't. The number on the scale didn't matter. Even my blood work was interesting, my cgm, all of that fascinating. But the thing I wanted to do every day was wake up and love living in it.
- [129:24]
Rich Roll
That's beautiful.
- [129:25]
Mindy Peltz
Isn't that incredible? I mean, one wise elder in my neighborhood gave me that gift in one.
- [129:31]
Rich Roll
Yeah, that idea that there's an older person out there that would like kill to be your age. When we're reflecting on, I'm old and I don't feel like I used to and all of that. It's an important perspective shift.
- [129:45]
Mindy Peltz
And yesterday, Leanne Rimes is a friend of mine. She says hello, by the way.
- [129:50]
Rich Roll
Oh, cool.
- [129:51]
Mindy Peltz
And so we were sitting and chatting. She's probably gonna listen to this episode now. And we were reflecting on her path. So a couple years ago we started working together to bring her body back into balance. And she's so happy right now. She's in such a vibrant time of her life. And we were kind of going back through the steps and she said to me, I don't remember, like when we first started working together, like, what were some of the hurdles that I had? And I said, don't you remember? The number one hurdle you had is you would come off of a weekend of touring and you couldn't sit on your couch. You were so Restless. Your sympathetic nervous system was so tightly wound, you had no parasympathetic energy at all. That Sunday afternoon, you were depressed. You could barely sit on the couch. You were exhausted because your body had never gotten the rhythm. I mean, her voice has a beautiful rhythm, but her body had never had that rhythm.
- [130:52]
Rich Roll
Wired and tired.
- [130:53]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah, she was wired and tired. So for the last three years, we've been just. Then we had fun looking. Well, how did that tool work for you? And what about this tool we did? We just kept bringing the toolbox together. We looked at other people who had certain sets of tools. We brought them into the conversation, and we created a village with a whole bunch of different tools for her to heal. And now she sits three years later in this place of the happiest, most productive she's ever been. It wasn't one thing. It was a willingness to bring herself after touring. I mean, how many years since she was 15 years old? Like, how do you take a body?
- [131:32]
Rich Roll
Adult life.
- [131:33]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah. How do you take a body that had been touring since it was 15, and then it wants to heal at 40? What do you do with that? I wasn't gonna give her a supplement or a fast. It was a lifestyle that needed to start to put her back into rhythm with her body.
- [131:51]
Rich Roll
Yeah. Of all the things that we've talked about, about, again, going back to 10,000ft as a closing statement here, like, what is the one thing that you want people to take away from your experience and your experience working with so many people?
- [132:10]
Mindy Peltz
Stop giving your power away. Stop giving your power away to medication, diets, gurus, an exercise. The power is within you. And your job with your health is to line your lifestyle up. What works for you and your lifestyle so you can access that power. You can feel that your body can heal from infections, that your body can drop weight, that you can fall asleep, that you can be happy, that you can have mental clarity. Your job with your health is to take your power back and look at your lifestyle as the twin tool to increasing this miraculous intelligence that you were born with.
- [132:50]
Rich Roll
Well put. I think that's a great place to end it for today for people that are interested, particularly in exploring the fasting piece here. Of course, there's Fast Like a Girl, your book, and there's Eat Like a Girl, both of which you guys should check out. In addition to that, are there any resources that you like to point people towards?
- [133:13]
Mindy Peltz
My pet project that I've poured a lot of time and effort and research into is my YouTube channel. So we have, like, 2,500 videos there. And so it's a great, like, if you want to go dive into it on each video at the bottom, I've, I've put the science. So if you're a science hound and you want to go see what I'm talking about, but I would say that's my favorite resource.
- [133:36]
Rich Roll
All right. Well, this was great. Do you feel good?
- [133:38]
Mindy Peltz
I feel awesome.
- [133:39]
Rich Roll
I feel awesome. You feel good in your body?
- [133:42]
Mindy Peltz
I already told you, I love living in my body. I feel amazing.
- [133:45]
Rich Roll
We did it. I think it was good and I appreciate you being here. So thank you and come back sometime. This is fantastic.
- [133:52]
Mindy Peltz
Yeah. Appreciate you. Thank you.
- [133:54]
Rich Roll
Cool. Peace. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's video guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page@richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra Voicing, Change and the Plant Power Way. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very helpful. This show just wouldn't be possible without the help of our amazing sponsors who keep this podcast running wild and free. To check out all their amazing offers, head to richroll.com sponsors and finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books and other specialists subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter which you can find on the footer of any page@richroll.com Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Cameolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis and Morgan McRae with assistance from our creative director, Dan Drake, content management by Shayna Savoy, copywriting by Ben Prior and of course our theme music was created all the way back in 2012 by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace Plants.
- [135:32]
Mindy Peltz
Namaste. Don't.