Weight loss is a topic that many people struggle with, especially women. Dr. Mindy Pelz, a women's health expert, bestselling author, and podcast host, offers valuable insights into how women can optimize their health, particularly through fasting, hormones, and metabolic health. This article delves into Dr. Pelz's weight loss tips, providing a structured approach to understanding and implementing her strategies.
Understanding Fasting and Metabolism
One of the most common mistakes people make with fasting is doing the same fast daily, which can slow down metabolism. The body adapts to repetitive fasting routines by reducing its metabolic rate, anticipating a limited food supply and conserving energy instead of burning stored fat. To avoid this, Dr. Pelz introduces the concept of "feast-famine cycling," stressing the need for variety in fasting durations and windows.
Fasting must be adapted to the individual’s lifestyle and, for women, their menstrual cycle. Fasting windows should align with individual lifestyles and goals. Women should also consider their menstrual cycles when structuring fasts, while those seeking strength and muscle gain should eat before and after workouts to fuel and repair muscles and keep fasting windows later in the day. Fasting should seamlessly integrate into your life for long-term sustainability.
Tailoring Fasting and Exercise
Dr. Pelz emphasizes the importance of aligning your fasting and exercise routine with your personal goals. Cardio or yoga on an empty stomach works best for fat loss, while strength training benefits from protein before and after workouts. Whether you're aiming to lose fat, gain muscle, or get healthy overall, Dr. Pelz stresses the importance of staying flexible and aligning your approach with your unique goals for lasting success.
Losing Belly Fat: Addressing Stress and Toxins
Belly fat is often stored as a survival mechanism to protect vital organs from excess glucose, hormones, and toxins. Stress and high cortisol levels play an essential role in our bodies storing belly fat. To address this issue, Dr. Pelz recommends walking in nature, surrounding yourself with positive influences, and avoiding negative environments.
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Toxins also play an essential role in weight gain, especially from products applied to the skin and chemicals in food. Obesogens (chemical compounds in pesticides, food packaging, and artificial additives) reprogram stem cells to create fat cells; not only do they alter fat distribution but also hijack taste buds, making processed foods addictive. Food companies manipulate products to trigger dopamine release, ensuring consumers crave more without feeling full. To become healthier and to lose weight, she advises switching to natural foods over processed ones and learning how chemicals impact your metabolism.
The Truth About Calories and Blood Sugar
While calories matter scientifically, they are impractical for most people to track accurately. Instead, blood sugar offers more insights into health and weight management. Wearing a continuous glucose monitor can help track your eating habits and your body's response to them. By adjusting their meal composition, such as adding fiber and fats or switching ingredients like oat milk, patients reduced glucose spikes, improved moods, and achieved weight loss.
A healthy blood sugar level should return to its pre-meal baseline within 90 minutes. If it doesn't, this may suggest insulin resistance. A 16/8 fasting pattern (16 hours of fasting, 8 hours of eating) allows the metabolic system to reset, prevents increases in insulin, hemoglobin A1C, and inflammatory markers.
Fasting and Eating Healthier: Breaking the Cycle of Cravings
Food cravings are often driven by gut microbes signaling the brain to feed them specific substances like sugar or carbs. These microbes thrive on repetitive diets and processed foods, making it seem like cravings are uncontrollable. Therefore, Dr. Pelz urges the listeners to turn to a healthier, chemical-free diet and diversify the diet to nourish a healthier microbiome. You can shift microbial populations and reduce unhealthy cravings over time by expanding food choices and incorporating fasting into your routine.
Studies on participants who alternated eating freely one day and fasting the next have shown that their metabolic health improved, and cravings shifted toward healthier options in a year. Fasting helps starve out harmful microbes, breaking the cycle of dependency on unhealthy foods. Dr. Pelz emphasizes the importance of momentum rather than motivation when creating lasting changes.
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Protein is the “hero macronutrient” because it produces hormones and neurotransmitters. While the mainstream recommendation is one gram of protein per pound of body weight, Dr. Pelz suggests prioritizing protein at every meal and building other components, like carbohydrates and vegetables, around it. This way, healthy eating becomes more practical and sustainable. Yet it is important to remember that each body works differently and that you need to find the protein pattern that works for you individually.
The Role of Fats in Weight Management
The type of fat we consume plays a key role in our health. Toxic fats, such as canola, corn, and hydrogenated oils, are stored in the body as fat because it cannot process them properly, leading to inflammation and weight gain. On the other hand, healthy fats like olive and avocado oil are easily metabolized, nourish the brain, stabilize blood sugar, and suppress hunger, assisting this way in weight management and overall health.
Incorporating healthy fats into meals, especially during periods of extended fasting or before high-performance activities, helps maintain stable glucose levels and prevent brain fog. Olive oil is good for its polyphenols, which support gut microbes and metabolic health.
Food provides the essential nutrients required to make hormones. Dr. Pelz identified 24 key nutrients, including amino acids, omega-3 fatty acids, and vitamins, as foundational for hormone synthesis. Furthermore, she encouraged the listeners to see food as hormonal medicine and be wary of weight-loss drugs that suppress hunger because the effect of these drugs may lead to nutrient deficiencies and hormonal imbalances over time.
Understanding the Female Body and Hormonal Changes
The female body is driven by rhythmic hormonal changes that influence energy, mood, and physical needs. Unlike men, who primarily manage testosterone on a 24-hour cycle, women navigate a 28-day cycle with varying hormonal demands, including more rest, recovery, and attention to diet and exercise. Women are more vulnerable to issues like insulin resistance, PCOS, and severe menopause symptoms due to hormonal fluctuations and toxicity sensitivity.
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Dr. Mindy Pelz outlined some high-level dietary strategies for women, according to their life stage:
- 20s and 30s: lower-carb diets during the first half of the menstrual cycle to support estrogen and higher-carb diets in the second half to cater to progesterone.
- Perimenopausal and menopausal: fasting and a lower-carb diet to address insulin resistance caused by declining estrogen levels.
Dr. Pelz urges women to prioritize a rhythmic lifestyle, balancing activity with recovery and alternating low-carb and nutrient-rich diets. She advocates lifestyle changes as the first line of treatment for hormonal and autoimmune challenges rather than immediately resorting to medications.
Lifestyle Changes for Women of All Ages
Dr. Mindy Pelz emphasized the importance of addressing menopause and perimenopause through lifestyle changes rather than solely relying on pharmaceuticals. While HRT can be beneficial, she stressed that changes in diet, stress management, and self-care are equally crucial.
The health expert's five key lifestyle changes include:
- fasting to regulate eating windows
- varying carbohydrate intake to balance hormones
- supporting gut health to process estrogen
- detoxifying her environment
- addressing stress through mindfulness and less intensity in physical activity
Fasting is a transformative tool for jumpstarting health improvements, particularly for weight loss and hormonal balance. While fasting is generally accessible, pregnant or nursing women or those with eating disorders or certain cancers should first consult a specialist.
High Protein Diet and its Benefits
Dr. Mindy Pelz discussed the growing trend of women consuming meat bowls. High-protein diets stabilize blood sugar and reduce insulin production, helping with weight loss and metabolic health. Ensure you consume protein from clean sources, such as grass-fed and hormone-free meats, and balance protein with fiber for gut health because fiber supports hormone breakdown and microbiome diversity.
Dr. Pelz uses short-term carnivore fasting as a therapeutic tool for patients with autoimmune conditions. The meat-only diets and fasting helped them regulate immune responses and manage conditions like small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO). However, these diets are only to be used in the short term because the body needs fiber for hormonal and gut health. Dr. Pelz wants to empower the wider public to make informed decisions rather than blindly following trends and to gain greater independence from the influence of the pharmaceutical and food industry.
Listening to Your Body's Cues
Dr. Mindy Pelz shared accessible ways to assess health without expensive technology, like observing how meals impact energy, brain clarity, and cravings. She advises women to listen to their body’s cues rather than society's judgment. You can use fasting as an affordable and effective tool to improve your health, but you should approach it gradually, starting with delaying breakfast.
Dr. Pelz addressed challenges like under-eating, emphasizing the importance of consuming at least 1,200 calories daily to support thyroid function and overall health. She advocates for focusing on health metrics like glucose stability instead of controlling weight to achieve societal ideals.
Align your fasting and exercise strategies with your personal goals - to lose fat. The health expert recommends engaging in cardio or yoga on an empty stomach. Conversely, strength training is better supported by consuming protein both before and after workouts. Dr. Mindy Pelz emphasized the importance of recognizing your personal objectives and maintaining flexibility in your approach.
Additional Insights from Dr. Chatterjee
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee offers some real hacks for unsticking weight, because so many people are struggling with getting that weight loss journey going. He has authored five books on lifestyle, all of which include tips for weight loss, and he has really looked at obesity from a unique angle.
The Importance of Sleep
Sleep is a critical factor often overlooked in weight loss efforts. If you sleep five to five and a half hours a night compared to seven and a half hours, you will consume 22% more calories the following day. The timing of sleep matters, and sometimes you can lose weight by not even addressing your diet, but simply by sleeping better. We eat more the day after sleep deprivation, and we crave high-calorie, sugar-rich foods. Our willpower is lower the day after we haven't slept, making every other change you're trying to make more difficult.
Managing Stress
Stress significantly impacts eating behavior. On average, 80% of people change their eating behavior in response to stress, with about 45% eating more. Reducing stress can naturally lead to eating less. If someone is using food as a way of dealing with stress, helping them reduce the stress in their lives can often lead them to naturally start to eat less.
Timing of Food Intake
The timing of our food intake matters massively, and for some people, it matters more than others. Time-restricted eating involves eating all the food you're going to eat within a fixed window. Professor Sachin Panda at the Salk Institute has shown that if you just eat all the foods you're going to consume within 12 hours, you can get all kinds of potential benefits, including weight loss, better blood sugar control, better hormonal balance, better digestion, and better sleep.
Why We Eat: The Freedom Exercise
The issue for some people isn't what they're eating, it's why they're eating. At 9pm, they've eaten all that they want to eat, they're trying to be good, and they're on their sofa watching television, and they suddenly get this craving. The question isn't what they're eating, it's why are they eating it?
Dr. Chatterjee created this little exercise that he calls the freedom exercise or the three F's: feel, feed and find. When you have that urge to have ice cream, just pause. What are you feeling right now? Are you bored? Are you lonely? Are you sad? Are you stressed? The second F is, what do you need to feed? Do you need to feed connection? Do you need to feed love? Do you need to feed safety? What is the emotion behind wanting to eat that food? The third F is, can you find something else to do in that moment to feed that emotion? Can you call a friend? Can you read a book? Can you go for a walk? Can you do some stretches? Can you write in your journal? What else can you do that's going to make you feel good without the need for food?
Additional Tips from Dr. Mindy Pelz
Dr. Mindy Pelz offers a checklist to help with weight loss:
- Metabolically Switch: Learn to tap into fasting windows. If you don't ever go 12 hours without food, you are always operating from one metabolism.
- Know If You Are Metabolically Switching: Use a ketone reader to monitor your blood sugar and ketone levels.
- Eat Fiber at Every Single Meal: Make fiber your go-to food. If you're hungry, have a carrot. If you're putting a meal together, always put a salad with it.
- Protein with Every Single Meal: Be plant-based or omnivore, but ensure you include protein.
- Get Rid of the Liver Agitators: Avoid alcohol, some medications (like Tylenol), and the emotion of anger.
- Exercise Regularly: Incorporate walking, weight training, and hit training.
- Go for a 20 Minute Walk After Every Large Meal: This helps your body use the glucose.
- Love Yourself Now: Find peace and harmony within you first, and the weight will shed.