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What if you could get more of what you want in life? But not through pushing, forcing, or pressure.
You can.
When it comes to money, time, and energy, no one’s gonna turn away more.
And Kate Northrup, Bestselling Author of Money: A Love Story and Do Less and host of Plenty, is here to help you expand your capacity to receive all of the best.
As a Money Empowerment OG who’s been at it for nearly 2 decades, Kate’s the abundance-oriented best friend you may not even know you’ve always needed.
Pull up a chair every week with top thought leaders, luminaries, and adventurers to learn how to have more abundance with ease.
But when we look at our lives, what women do is I'm not losing weight. Okay. I'm gonna do a three day water fast, and then I'm gonna go keto, and then I'm going to gym every day. And I'm gonna do that in between, you know, balancing work and picking up the kids, and I'm gonna skimp on sleep. And then I'm like, wait a second.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Why am I losing weight?
Kate Northrup:I have such a treat for you. Doctor Mindy Peltz is here today. Her book, Fast Like a Girl, really changed my life and changed my relationship with my body. So if you don't know doctor Mindy Peltz, she is an absolutely incredible health expert who uses the wisdom of the menstrual cycle to teach us how to fix our hormones and and optimize the experience of living in a female body, specifically with using fasting in a cyclical cadence. So today, we talk about how to fast when you're in perimenopause, the incredible changes that happen in the female brain, and how we can fuel ourselves at every stage of life optimally.
Kate Northrup:What to do if you don't have a cycle? What to do if you do have a cycle? Her absolutely incredible, somewhat heartbreaking, but in the end, really beautiful story of getting to the breaking point in her own life around her work and her hormones and her relationship with her body. This conversation was so rich. We went so many places.
Kate Northrup:I felt like I was talking to an old friend. Enjoy. Welcome to Plenty. I'm your host Kate Northrup and together we are going on a journey to help you have an incredible relationship with money, time, and energy and to have abundance on every possible level. Every week, we're gonna dive in with experts and insights to help you unlock a life of plenty.
Kate Northrup:Let's go fill our cups. Please note that the opinions and perspectives of the guests on the Plenty podcast are not necessarily reflective of the opinions and perspectives of Kate Northrop or anyone who works within the Kate Northrop brand.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Hi. Hello.
Kate Northrup:Thanks for being here.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah. Thank you for having me.
Kate Northrup:It's so fun. It's so synchronistic. Like, we were just talking about how, you know, our D O O was just reading your book, and then it popped up that you were gonna be here, and then, like, all the synchronicity of I was on your podcast right as I was reading your book. And it's just like very meant
Dr. Mindy Pelz:to be,
Kate Northrup:and I'm so happy to
Dr. Mindy Pelz:finally I be know. It's funny because when I got here this morning, I was looking at my schedule. I was like, oh my god, we've never met face to face, but I feel like I know you. I love that about the way social media
Kate Northrup:works I know that it's really special. Sometimes it can be awful, but mostly I This think it's
Dr. Mindy Pelz:is true. This is true.
Kate Northrup:Okay. So I want to start off by asking you, were you always really into the menstrual cycle Oh.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:In your life? This is a really good question. It's a that's a really good question. Nobody's ever asked me that. The answer
Kate Northrup:is because you're mostly on men's podcast. Yeah. Maybe. No. I don't think I don't think that's actually true.
Kate Northrup:I'm sure you're on many women's podcast, but we were just talking about the in person ones No. That happen to be men.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Most the in person are men, which is really interesting. And most of
Kate Northrup:them I am breaking the trail.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah. Amazing. Thank you. Okay. So the answer is no.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:I mean, I have had and mostly because my menstrual cycle throughout most of my life was like just picture perfect.
Kate Northrup:Cool.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:It just came and I didn't have a lot of PMS symptoms, and then it went. And I never thought anything about it until I hit my early 40s. And because it was so regular, it was like a non event. But then I hit my early 40s and it was like spotting happened, and night sweats happened. And it went from every two weeks to every sixty days.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:And I was in my clinic teaching lifestyle to mostly women. I call them the mama bears, like there was just a huge group of mama bears that would bring all their family to me. And all of a sudden I started solving my own hormonal problems with lifestyle and dove into understanding the menstrual cycle. And then once I figured out my own hormonal challenges through lifestyle, then I started experimenting on the mama bears. And the next thing I know, like a formula started to emerge, especially when it came to It's
Kate Northrup:so cool. So I heard about your book from my therapist who lives in Marin. And it was so about a year and a half ago, let's I was about to turn 40, and I was just gaining weight, and I did a session with her about it because I was like, I feel like I either have to choose between just being heavier than I want to be Mhmm. Or being in a restrictive fight with my body. And I don't like either of those choices.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:No. Those are bad choices.
Kate Northrup:Also, don't wanna buy new jeans. I mean, just practically speaking, was like, I don't wanna buy new clothes. I have clothes I like. You know? And so she recommended Doctor.
Kate Northrup:Sarah Gottfried's Women Food and Hormones and Fast Like a Girl. Amazing. Yeah. She's the best. Anne Davin, shout out.
Kate Northrup:So, and I read your book. I first read Sarah Gottfried's, which was so helpful, and then I read your book, and I was able to create my own, you know, my own protocol. I lost that weight. I felt amazing. I felt like better than I ever had even before kids.
Kate Northrup:Amazing. Like phenomenal. It was great. So first of all, just thank you.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Oh my god. Love
Kate Northrup:it. And for someone like me who had a history of restriction and being in a bit of a war with my body, it did feel like it had this wonderful ebb and flow where there were times that hormonally it felt totally appropriate to be just eating less and almost living on the vitality from within, and then times when there were more these feeding cycles that also felt great. So I wasn't walking that tightrope of constant feeling like I can't have what I want, which was a lifelong history I had. So that's cool. So can
Dr. Mindy Pelz:I I just have to say something on this because when I started figuring out where women should fast and not fast according to their cycle, we had experimented on not just myself at my perimenopause phase, but all these women in my clinic? And then I took it to YouTube and I experimented on all these women on YouTube. And I was like, hey, tell me what you're finding. And that's how we came up with like when a woman should fast and not fast. And it was in that that I realized like, literally the question that kept burning my brain is like, why would we eat the same way throughout our whole cycle?
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Like, why have we been searching for that one diet? And then the second thing that came into my brain as I was watching all these women have the same experience you were having was like, oh my God, this is why every woman has failed at dieting. Because we hop on one, we're like, worked for a little bit and then it stops working. And then we hop on another one, but we never go, oh, wait. I'm a rhythmic being.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Totally. I have rhythms, food rhythms, I have fasting rhythms, I have sleep rhythm, I have work rhythm.
Kate Northrup:Exercise rhythm. Yeah. Sex rhythm. Yes. Yeah.
Kate Northrup:Like, we're just not supposed to be the same all the time. So obviously, we wouldn't wanna eat the same
Dr. Mindy Pelz:That's right.
Kate Northrup:All the time. Yeah. Phenomenal. So like, duh.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:And also Like, duh. Like, and like, I'm a little bit there were people like, Alisa VT wrote in the flow, and there are people that have done, like, you know, incredible stuff on this. But I was like, why haven't we why aren't we talking about this?
Kate Northrup:I know. And, you know, even my mom in women's bodies, women's wisdom, like, she actually did talk quite a bit about the different kinds of food at the different times, but I will be honest, I just and even sorry, I grew up with her as a mother, and then I knew Elisa in New York and read her books and stuff, and still I just was like, I didn't want to do it. And so it wasn't until I really kind of needed it and had a problem I wanted to fix that I tapped into it, which I'm kind of bummed about, but anyway it is what it And maybe my girls pick it up earlier. So I am curious for people who have resistance like I did, not with your work because I really needed it, but before when I heard about cyclical living, cyclical eating, cyclical alignment with our work, which now I have literally written a book about that, but early days I was just like, I'm too busy for this.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Oh, yeah.
Kate Northrup:I have too much to do. This is for women who wear feathers in their hair.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:And mullabeads.
Kate Northrup:Are at like ceremonies all day. Meanwhile, I'm like increasingly becoming one of those women. That works.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Welcome to aging.
Kate Northrup:Yeah. Oh my god. It's the best. But what do we what do you say when there's resistance around this of like, I don't have time or like, I'm too busy to pay attention to that? So I what I think is really interesting is we
Dr. Mindy Pelz:can get away with a lot more when we're 20 and 30.
Kate Northrup:It's so true.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:So I could probably If I had handed my own book to my 30 year old self, I probably wouldn't have read it. Yeah. Because I had a strategy. I was like eat clean and work out a bunch. Okay.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:And that kept me in a body that I loved. Yeah. So there wasn't a motivating factor. So to your point, I think I think we prioritize things when they're important to us. Yeah.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:So the women that I've seen, this has actually been a shock since Fast Like a Girl came out, was the number of twenty and thirty year olds that do not have a cycle. Like no cycle. Like that book just 20 and 30 year olds, like there's, they poured their questions onto my platform. They emailed me. They're like, I love this work, but how do I map it?
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Because I don't have a cycle.
Kate Northrup:Where's their cycle?
Dr. Mindy Pelz:It's gone. What's going on? It's gone. Thank you. This is the question that I was like, what do you mean?
Dr. Mindy Pelz:And I answer some of this in Eat Like a Girl because I was like, what do you mean you don't have a cycle? And I think it's two things. Well, I think it's three things. One for sure birth control. So birth control, many of them take away your cycle.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:The second is under eating. So if you don't eat at least a thousand calories or more, then you've got yourself a thyroid challenge over and over and over again. They'll throw your cycle off. And then the last one is stress. So women are under so much, they're so saturated with cortisol that the reproductive system has shut down.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:And that is a huge problem because what I mean, as you know, like not just the ritual of bleeding, but in Eat Like a Girl, I really did a lot of research because I wanted to address these women on how toxins are shed through our blood. And I actually found a study that said there's four toxins that are shed every single time we have a menstrual cycle. It's BPA plastics, forever chemicals, phthalates, which we breathe in. And now I cannot think of the fourth one. But there's pesticides.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Well hello. Those are
Kate Northrup:all the big ones. Wow. Pesticides, phthalates, BPA, and what was the last one? Forever Chemicals. Thank you, Forever Chemicals.
Kate Northrup:Wow. They come out. They pass during menstrual cycle, but I have a question about that. So does that mean that they're in the uterine lining if you get pregnant? Yeah.
Kate Northrup:Listen I'm like, dun dun dun.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:That So feels kind in my clinic for a good decade, I did a ton of detoxing. And we did everything from heavy metal detox to mold detox. You know, all of these chemicals are packed in us. And they are handed down, a lot of them by our mothers. Because when we're in the womb, this is really sad and I hate saying this, but when we're in the womb, it's the ultimate detox for the mom.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:So when hormones go up, these toxins come out of stored tissue and they go into the baby. And we enter into the world with our toxic load of our mother. And our mother entered into the world with a toxic load of her mother. And it just keeps getting passed down. And then we accumulate our own toxic load.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:So yeah, there's probably some level of toxicity on that uterine lining, and that is being absorbed into our systems and handed down.
Kate Northrup:But hopefully, if a woman is going to have a baby, she's not having the baby on her first menstrual cycle That's true. And so she has many chances to pass through many of those things before getting pregnant.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Definitely, when we're talking about the uterine lining.
Kate Northrup:I'm always going for the hopeful message. Yeah.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah. Yeah. Or just learn to detox before What you get
Kate Northrup:was your background? What was the nature of your practice?
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah, so I think it goes back to how I was raised. So I was raised by a total health food nut mom. In fact, Eat Like a Girl was dedicated to her because we didn't have sugar in our house. I introduced rice cakes to the elementary school back in the 70s. Literally had rice cakes with the natural peanut butter and honey and banana wrapped in a wax paper bag because I and we recycled our cans and like my parents were hippies.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:So cool. So, and then we didn't have a primary care physician. I mean, we had one, but we went to the chiropractor. And the chiropractor, every time we had a cold, every time I had a sports injury, we went to the chiropractor, he was our primary care physician. So I went on to school to learn nutrition and exercise physiology.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:I was a competitive tennis player. And I was like, I thought I wanted to be like do something with exercise physiology, but then I fell in love with nutrition. And so then I went on to chiropractic school because I wanted to teach the lifestyle that had been taught to me. And so my practice was a lifestyle medicine practice before we had like functional medicine as So a my background was as a chiropractor. And I literally taught everything from detox to hormones to food to exercise all through the lens that the body heals itself.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:And if you're not feeling that way, there must be some kind of interference. So we did, I mean, I took my patients to the supermarket and I taught them how to relabel. I did recipe nights where everybody would bring a recipe and we'd talk about how we made it. I did lectures on this is how your thyroid works. It was like a all encompassing lifestyle clinic.
Kate Northrup:That's so cool. Where did you grow up?
Dr. Mindy Pelz:In Malibu, believe it or not.
Kate Northrup:You grew
Dr. Mindy Pelz:up in
Kate Northrup:Malibu, okay, and then you raised your kids in Northern California, and your practice was in Northern California. When did you stop, I'm assuming you don't practice anymore.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:I don't
Kate Northrup:practice anymore. There's no way you could do everything you're doing now and also see patients.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:It was really sad. When Fast Like a Girl took off, Hay House put me in contract with more books and bought my self published books. And all of a sudden I became an author.
Kate Northrup:They're like, oh.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah, like, okay, what am I doing now? In my so career now. So I closed my clinic. It was really hard to do. But it was just in light of a calling to try to bring what I was doing in my clinic to a bigger level.
Kate Northrup:No, I mean you can reach What many more do you think it was about the timing of Fast Like a Girl that hit in this particular way in terms of our evolution as women?
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Such a good question. I've asked myself I I wanna say, what do you think?
Kate Northrup:I I'll tell you, but I wanna hear what you
Dr. Mindy Pelz:think first. Great. Okay. I think there's a couple things that happened in that book. For starters, fasting was already peaking.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yes. And women were being told you shouldn't fast. Right. Which really sucked because women were getting great results fasting. And it was like, it was a little bit like what the the culture was saying is here's this really cool tool, it's free, but women can't do it.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:So I had already been experimenting with fasting cycling within my practice, and I had already had like five years of working with the principles, and then I had had all these people YouTube. So I knew what I had worked.
Kate Northrup:So you were doing your practice at the same time as building your YouTube channel?
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Oh yeah.
Kate Northrup:Cool.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Everything. Yeah. Those years were not I wasn't paying attention to my hormones. Okay. Well, yeah, I needed know to your work at that time.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Literally. I mean, lot of what I tell perimenopausal women right now is like, my perimenopausal journey would have been a lot easier if I wasn't working so much. But yeah, it was ten, twelve hour days. I would see patients for three hours in the morning. I would do all my videos for three hours in the middle of the day and all my podcast interviews, and then I'd see patients three hours in the afternoon.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:And then I'd home and be a mom.
Kate Northrup:Oh my goodness.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah. And I did that every like seven days a week. Like, yeah, it was crazy. Wow. So but but back to your point, I think
Kate Northrup:By the way, we're coming back to that.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah. No, because I Okay. We can. But I think I just, it was like, I think it's an acknowledgement of how thirsty women were for please give me something that works, that's inexpensive, and speak my language. Really appreciate when women are like, I read it in two days.
Kate Northrup:Totally, it's a very easy read.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah, thank you. I think it's because I wrote it like I talk to patients. Yeah.
Kate Northrup:And it's so honoring of the reality of life.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah, thank you.
Kate Northrup:It was very easy to incorporate. Very easy to incorporate. I think that you're so right about fasting has been part of this more mainstream wellness conversation, but I also think that there's something about having a tool that we can use to feel so vital and alive that is deeply connected to our feminine cyclical nature. And I think we are at a time when the conversation around honoring the feminine is so much on the rise. And so to have that's like one thing, again, in more of a ceremonial space and in more of an ephemeral way in spirituality, and I love all of that.
Kate Northrup:And I love tools to honor the feminine, to honor how we were designed, which I think by the goddess, you know, depending on how people talk about it, that's how I talk about it, that in a very practical way, on a daily basis, knowing what day of your cycle you're on Yep. And knowing what phase of your cycle you're in Yep. Or, you know, if you're if you're no longer bleeding, just being able to track with your fasting cycle just according to what's in the book is so practical. Mean, I also tell women, you know, always always always we have the moon there for us, and that's never going away and way more predictable than your menstrual cycle anyway.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Thank you.
Kate Northrup:So, you know, you could probably organize your fasting cycle around the lunar cycle just as easily.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah. And eat like a girl, I put a little text box in about the moon cycle.
Kate Northrup:Thank you.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Because so many So great. Because so many people were asking, like, what if I, you know, don't have a period? What do I do? What if I'm menopausal? And that's when I started thinking about the moon cycle.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:And so then I mapped the fasting cycle to the moon cycle. Same. But here's the funny thing is you know how many interviews I've been on? Like, my this is my favorite. I was on and I won't say the name of the podcast, but it was a mainstream podcast, a female.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yep. And she loved the idea that we would map it to the moon. And she's like, yeah, because we are magical bitches was her was her response. Oh my god. The on her reel with that were insane.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Like, people ate me up. They in a bad way. They were like, what? This woman's crazy. What are you talking about?
Dr. Mindy Pelz:And one one woman this was my favorite. One woman, her comment was, I looked up the moon cycle and fasting thing she's talking about. There's no evidence on that. Therefore, I don't believe anything she says. And I was like Oh my god.
Kate Northrup:Okay. That is
Dr. Mindy Pelz:They're not studying us. Yeah. They're not gonna study us in the moon.
Kate Northrup:No. Also okay. And if anybody wants evidence about the lunar cycle, I would encourage you to do some research about biodynamic farming. Yes. Because if you plant carrots, for example, at a particular phase in a particular way, you get bigger carrots.
Kate Northrup:We are also nature. Same governing principles govern our bodies as govern carrots. And I know you might think, like, okay, now that lady is crazy. How is it possible that the science that governs tides
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Tides is the one I always used
Kate Northrup:not govern our bodies when we are largely made up of water?
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yes. Thank you. Thank Right. I know. No.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:It makes perfect sense to me.
Kate Northrup:It's also just I will just say, like, I find tracking the lunar cycle, whether it's for eating, for my more manifesting mystical practices, for my productivity, for whatever, like, just around my kids, it feels very comforting. Yes. I feel held by it. Yes. Do you do any lunar tracking in your life?
Kate Northrup:Anything around your own eating or your own like, how do you do your own fasting cycles now?
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah. So I'm postmenopausal, and I do all of it through the lunar cycle now. Cool. So I'm always I have a moon app. My my favorite moon app is Moonly.
Kate Northrup:Yeah. I love the Moonly app.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:I love the pictures on it.
Kate Northrup:I know. It's really beautiful.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah. And so I just go there and I go, okay, what day am I on? Okay. Knowing that, how long do I want my fast to be? Do I want more carbs?
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Do I want less carbs? So I everything's done by the man. I haven't thought to manifest a carnivale.
Kate Northrup:Oh, well, I'll send you a video about that.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Will you? I will
Kate Northrup:try High to level. Right? High level, like, the dark of the moon is the time to plant seeds. This is the very same as biodynamic farming. So this is just the metaphor of farming in our lives.
Kate Northrup:Okay. So the dark of the moon is the time to plant seeds, and then the the full moon is the time of of of harvest. Okay. And so really, it's like every new moon, what are the desires that we are putting into the cosmos, right? Like, what are we planting?
Kate Northrup:And then every full moon is also an invitation to ask, is there anything that the light of this moon is shining on in the shadow blocking this manifestation that I need to let go of, a way of being, a way of thinking, a relationship, a pattern, or anywhere that love needs to go that it hasn't gone before, and then so at the full moon, you're kind of clearing the way, and then the second half of the lunar cycle is really just, like, anything else that you need to bring about as you're manifesting your desire, and then you just kind of, like, start again
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Start again.
Kate Northrup:The next round.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:And then there's, like, a
Kate Northrup:whole thing with which I won't get into, but there's a whole thing with astrology, and, like, the new moon coincides with the full moon six months later in the same astrological sign. So the new moon in Aries is gonna happen in March, but then the full moon in Aries is gonna happen in October, Then there's a whole thing with 18 But On month your video? No. But now I'll make a new one for you. I'll do a podcast episode on it, and when I do it, I will send
Dr. Mindy Pelz:it to Thank you. A part of
Kate Northrup:me It was will be dedicated to Mindy.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Thank you. Thinking I was I was thought you were gonna say you plant the seeds at the end the new moon
Kate Northrup:Yeah.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:And then you wait for it to happen at the Right. At the full moon. Which is what would be like days later. It's not the
Kate Northrup:whole thing. Yeah. Some manifestations, of course, would take one lunar cycle, but as we know, some take longer. Yeah. So there's like a whole cool you know, and astrologers, of course, know more about it than I do, but anyway, that's manifesting with the moon.
Kate Northrup:Okay. So I have a question. Because when I did the fasting, I am and I love this about myself, but it's also one of my worst qualities. I'm a little bit extra. And so what happened was and I wanna know your take on this as a practitioner.
Kate Northrup:What happened was I felt amazing on the longer fasts.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Mhmm.
Kate Northrup:So I would do I did like, I worked up to a twenty four hour, and I felt incredible. And then I worked up to a thirty six hour, and it felt like amazing. Right? I didn't go beyond thirty six hours. And I started to work those in twice a month.
Kate Northrup:I think about twice a month. Yep. And that was great, and I was probably stretching my fast a little longer than I should have.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Okay.
Kate Northrup:And this, what I'm about to share is obviously, like my own personal experience. Please, as you're listening folks, please do not be afraid of fasting based on what I'm about to share.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Okay.
Kate Northrup:Okay. Oh. Because I successfully fasted in various ways for over a decade.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Okay.
Kate Northrup:And I've backed away from it a little bit, but I want to go back, and so I'm gonna ask you. So what happened is I ended up, and I think for various reasons that were probably more spiritual, I got I got really sick, not because of the fasting, but then I didn't get a cycle for like seventy days.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yep.
Kate Northrup:And I think I had overdone it a Yep. Little bit based on what I have shared, it's clear that I did. And so what about for the like, just tell me what I mean, probably I just needed to back off about it a little bit, but I think I just kind of fried my adrenals or something. Do you think
Dr. Mindy Pelz:I did? Yeah. Okay. Well, so tell me how old you are.
Kate Northrup:I'm 41.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah. Okay. And when was this, in the last year?
Kate Northrup:This was yeah. So it was it was a year ago right now. Yep. I got really sick and hadn't had a cycle for about seventy days. Okay.
Kate Northrup:No. It came back, and I feel great now.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:So Yeah. So I think one of the things we have to honor as women is we can't stack all our cortisol rich habits together. Yeah. Right? So this is what this is the whole premise of fast like a girl was really when not to fast.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah. Because what was happening and why the media was like women shouldn't fast is because it is a cortisol inducing activity. So, you only want to do it in the longer fast when estrogen is coming in. Estrogen is very cortisol tolerant. She I always say that estrogen if estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone were at a party, I feel like estrogen would be like, woo hoo, let's go.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:And she'd be dancing on the tables like she could stay there all night. Testosterone would be more focused, like can we really stay till six in the morning? Testosterone, want make sure that the whole night was free and progesterone would be hiding in the corner. So we have to think about cortisol the same way. Like when estrogen comes in day one through day ten, she's okay if you fast long.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:We move into ovulation, she peaks day ten to day fifteen, we have a little bit of progesterone, a whole lot of testosterone, moderate fasting is good. Then we come out of ovulation, there's a drop, we can fast a little longer, but it's around day nineteen or twenty that progesterone's coming in and progesterone's like, I always say when progesterone goes high, or when cortisol goes high, progesterone goes shy.
Kate Northrup:Oh, yeah.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:So you lost progesterone. Yeah. So you needed to do this fast, like now that it's back?
Kate Northrup:Yeah. I could probably be okay. I also started adding in some HRT. Yeah. So now I'm taking some progesterone, so I think I'm more supported.
Kate Northrup:And I also think my estrogen was a little low, so also maybe Yeah. That was a factor. Now that I've like done the testing and stuff, I'm like, oh. Yeah. Got
Dr. Mindy Pelz:it. But here's like something I even do for my own self and I did it through all my perimenopausal years is I'd always check-in and be like, is stress maxed right now? If your stress is maxed right now, eat breakfast. Don't fast.
Kate Northrup:That is such good advice.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah. Yeah. And that doesn't mean for Regardless
Kate Northrup:of where you are in your cycle, like if your stress is at the max, because your body at that time needs to know That's right. There's fuel, there's resources. That's right.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:The feminine body does not do well with cortisol stacking. And so we go back to why these young women don't have a cycle. They're living in a cortisol saturated world that we didn't have to live in luckily. Yeah. But when we look at our lives, what women do is I'm not losing weight.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Okay, I'm going to do a three day water fast, and then I'm going to go keto, and then I'm going And do gym every I'm to do that in between, you know, balancing work and picking up kids, and I'm going to skimp on sleep, and then I'm like, wait a second, why am I not losing weight? Because your body's like, it's not safe.
Kate Northrup:Too much. Yeah. It's not safe, yeah. And then other things will tank out.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:That's right. Okay,
Kate Northrup:So I certainly have a lot of listeners who are in perimenopause and are wondering what's the best way to support myself so that maybe I could have as easeful and supported of a transition as possible into my post menopausal year. So obviously, I think your fasting cycling would be really effective. But when you are starting to have a cycle that's less predictable, would you recommend to go ahead and just shift to tracking with the moon? Or what do you do in those days when it's like, ugh, where am I? What's happening?
Kate Northrup:I don't actually know.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:So that's the hardest phase for me to teach. And I usually say there's one of two things. You either just go by the moon, and I've actually put women who are like, I haven't had a cycle in one hundred and twenty days, and we put them on a moon cycle, and then their cycle comes back. Isn't
Kate Northrup:that amazing? Same
Dr. Mindy Pelz:thing same thing with fertility. Yes. That is so cool.
Kate Northrup:I literally was just with a girl in her twenties. She's like very high powered, like running around LA, doing all this stuff, and she was like, I lost my cycle, what do I do? Obviously I'm not a gynecologist, but I was like, I know a lot about women's health, I'll help you
Dr. Mindy Pelz:here You in were the birthed by one.
Kate Northrup:So Here in the Air One Supplement aisle. And I was like I was like, just go outside at night and look at the moon. And she was like, really? I was like, yeah. That's what
Dr. Mindy Pelz:that's what brought mine back. Amazing. It was
Kate Northrup:just becoming aware of the cycle.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Oh my god. I love that. And this is the big thing that like, I always tell people that I thought I was writing a fasting manual, but what I didn't realize is I wrote a women's empowerment book. Yeah. And in that, I and then especially when I looked at what I was gonna write for Eat Like a Girl, I realized you can't take nature and the earth and a woman's body and separate those two.
Kate Northrup:Yeah. Mean, you can, but you get a mess. You get a mess. And we're so craving to bring them back together. Okay.
Kate Northrup:So you say like, okay, when things are all over the place, go to the moon.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah. Go to the moon. When in doubt, go to the moon.
Kate Northrup:It's so predictable.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah. It's very it's there. It's very predictable. The other thing perimenopausal women can do is they can look at their symptoms. Okay.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:So in I tried to like eat like a girl is consider it like a companion manual to fast like a girl. Fasting's the fasting window and then eat like a girl's eating window. But I also answered a lot of questions that we got from from fast like a girl. So in there I am, I have a thing of match your food style to your symptoms. And I'm like, if you are having these symptoms, this is where you need to go low carb.
Kate Northrup:Okay, great.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:If you're having these symptoms, this is where you need to bring carbs up.
Kate Northrup:Yeah. Okay. And what are some of the symptoms that you might need to increase carbs? Because I think that for so long since, you know, the early 2000s, depending on who you were following or whatever, we got the message that carbs are bad. And I certainly got programmed that So what are some of the signs that we may not need more carbs?
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah, okay, well the first one's anxiety. Like you need carbs to make serotonin. So anxiety, depression, constant like mood disorders, we need to bring carbs up for that. Hair loss, that was a big thing I saw on my YouTube channel. All these women were like, I'm losing weight, but I'm losing my hair.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:And that's when I realized that we are completely deficient of minerals because our soils are so horrible. So hair loss, spotting is another interesting one. So when I was playing with the fasting cycle for my own self in the back half of my forties Yeah. I would spot like on a Monday, and then I wouldn't have a period till the following Tuesday.
Kate Northrup:That just happened to me. I spotted for five days
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah.
Kate Northrup:Before I got a real period, and then my period was only four days, which previously it had been like six.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:So those are the moments I bring carbs up. Okay. So whenever I would spot yeah. And and do you know that like by the like by the time I was in my late forties, I was having the best periods of my life.
Kate Northrup:That's so cool.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:I was like on my on my way out. I was like, I had my cycles just nailed. Wow. Because any little bit of suppotting, any anxiety, lack of sleep, just agitation, I'm like, gotta have some carbs, and I gotta step You out of
Kate Northrup:knew. And so, you know, the carbs that you're talking about, right, like, just to be clear, if you're listening, we're not talking about, like, going through the drive through and getting McDonald's fries Yes. Or, like, you know, eating potato chips late at night in your pantry. That's right. We're talking about sweet potatoes.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Sweet potatoes.
Kate Northrup:What else?
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah. Sweet potatoes.
Kate Northrup:I'm like, I always go to sweet potatoes.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Well, I wanna tell you a story about sweet potatoes that I'm that I'm using for my next book because I think sweet potatoes and women go hand in hand. Think the I think nature gave them just to us. Cool. Yeah. I'm pretty sure of that.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:So anyways, but sweet potatoes, any kind of potatoes, legumes, quinoa, tropical fruits,
Kate Northrup:which
Dr. Mindy Pelz:anybody in the keto world, like
Kate Northrup:I know.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Getting the women in my practice to eat a banana again?
Kate Northrup:Oh my god, I have to tell you, I got a little brainwashed by the keto world, and it almost became like carbs became a avoid at all costs because I got so obsessed with checking my ketones, and so your protocol helped to heal me of that, and really see, okay, there are times for like, it just feels like more padding. Yes. Like, bringing in the carbs feels like cushion.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yes.
Kate Northrup:For me, it's nice.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah. And yeah. No. And and I always say, like, we're so lucky because we can have our cake our cake, meaning a gluten free, you know, low sugared cake and eat it too. Because there are times we need more food.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:And the fruit one, I'll never forget standing in line at a buffet at a conference with a friend who was super keto. And she turns to me, and there's all this whole fruit platter. And she goes, are you scared to eat fruit? And I was like, yeah. Like we like, it was like, you would have thought we were like, do you, are you drinking too much alcohol?
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Like, that wasn't the conversation. It was like two people who were scared to tell each other that we were scared to eat fruit. And finally, looked at her. I'm like, that's not good. I can't imagine anything from nature would be harmful to my body.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Totally. I'm like, I need to look that up because we both had gotten so keto that we were scared to death to eat fruit. And that was my wake up moment where I'm like, I am very clear the earth did not provide anything that's going to be a detriment to me. 100%. Yeah.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:So I started bringing foods back in and that was part of the back half of my 40s. Like having getting my normal cycle back.
Kate Northrup:And so for you now, and also of course this is what you're working with women on who are at any stage of life really. Like is your Fast Like a Girl protocol, and of course supported by the recipes in Eat Like a Girl, is that something that someone can do forever? Like can a woman in her eighties be using this protocol?
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah, this is okay, so I'm working on my book. It's gonna come out next year.
Kate Northrup:What's do you can you say the title? Yeah.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:It's called it's gonna be called age like a girl. Yeah. It's one of my one of my dear friends is Leanne Rhimes, and she said to me I love her. She's like, when do I get to be a woman? I'm like, no.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:It's a play on words.
Kate Northrup:Do you not You're always a woman, Leanne.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yes. Have you seen yourself? You're a beautiful woman. But here's the thing about whole process of aging. The reason that we have Alzheimer's and dementia is because the female brain becomes one of the reasons less sensitive to glucose.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:So that needs to be discussed more. Because as we go into the perimenopause and well into the postmenopausal years, I actually believe that a female brain does better with ketones than with glucose. So now, this is the next book, is the grandmother hypothesis. Do you know the grandmother hypothesis? No.
Kate Northrup:So excited.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:So Lisa Mosconi taught me this in her book, The Menopause Brain, and then I interviewed her on my podcast. We go back to those primal years, the grandmother, the woman who was in her post reproductive years had a purpose. She took all the energy that she had to reproduction and she put it towards taking care of the clan.
Kate Northrup:The hunter She was the wisdom keeper.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:She was the wisdom keeper. Was the food Medicine woman. And she was the food keeper. So the men and the people who could hunt went off and to go make a kill, and 3% of the time they came back with food. And when they came back with food, they fed the other men first because they were the hunters that needed And to go then they fed the woman who was birthing.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Right, the pregnant woman. And they fed the children. And if anything was left, the postmenopausal woman went and got it. But the postmenopausal woman's job was to go forage for things like tubers, like sweet potatoes, and things that were in the ground and she would pull that out and bring it back. She too would take all of that and give it to the mom who was pregnant.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:So the whole clan, the woman who had to know how to go without food the longest was the postmenopausal woman, which is why I think our evolutionary design was to eat less and rely more on ketones and we'd have better brainpower if we did that when we went into the post menopausal years. Wow.
Kate Northrup:Is that your sweet potato story?
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah. It's part of my sweet potato story.
Kate Northrup:Yeah. Do think of that? I think it's really interesting. And I think that so I'm in this dance as my reproductive years come to a close, about are we closing those years or are we not? And I'm thinking about how great I feel when I'm in ketosis, and I just wonder, sort of like from an evolutionary perspective and almost more of like the cosmic evolution of my being in this lifetime, like if I was trying to almost by getting, you know, I hesitate to use the word addicted, but like loving that feeling so much of the high of fasting that I wonder if there was a way in which I was like trying to skip a phase of life almost.
Kate Northrup:No.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:No. I have a theory that you're actually, what you just described is you're lining yourself up with your perimenopausal design. As you're moving into these postmenopausal years, postmenopausal women get the best results with fasting. That's so cool. We have like 80 year olds in my community that are like, I gained 50 pounds throughout menopause and then I bought your book and now I dropped it all.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Phenomenal. Like post menopause And
Kate Northrup:sure they feel like a million
Dr. Mindy Pelz:bucks. Energized. And I think it's because it's in our evolutionary design.
Kate Northrup:To like edge that way. Yeah. And well, is interesting, you know, as people get older, they do tend to want to eat less. That's right. That is a thing.
Kate Northrup:Yeah. Mean, that's just like we all notice that. Or like
Dr. Mindy Pelz:the Okinawa women, we've put them on pedestals forever and we say, oh, they live so long. And because they eat low amount of calories, they also eat sweet potatoes. They also form moais that gather women together and support women and share resources. There's a lot of things they're doing, But one of them is they're eating less.
Kate Northrup:Wow. So interesting.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah. I know.
Kate Northrup:Okay. So you're in Miami for the Miami Book Fair. Yes. And you said that tomorrow, which will have already happened by the time this is released, but that you are going to share your author process. And author to author, I wanna hear about what it's like for you to write everyone so different in that regard.
Kate Northrup:Some people write their own books. Some people don't. Some people research and write for years alongside. Like, what's your process like?
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah. Okay. Well, each book has brought a new process. Did you find have you found that?
Kate Northrup:Actually, both of my books were written very similarly, but I hope to write the next one in a different way.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Okay. Yeah. So I'll tell my I'll I'll tell my way and then you tell your way Because it is really interesting. So I do have a co writer. We call him a ghost writer, it's really collaborative writer.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:So we meet we just met this morning. We meet every Friday morning, and we kind of talk about where I'm going with my thoughts. And then I map out the whole TOC, and then underneath just table of contents. And then underneath each chapter title, I just start bullet pointing, like, what do I like, mind dump. Yep.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:This is what I'm going put in So then she and I bounce that off. But when I start my book, I actually feel like I'm starting a conversation with the reader. And just as if I was telling you a story, I wouldn't take too many detour. I would want to have a linear way to tell you a whole story. So I write it in order.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:I tried writing my book out of order and I cannot do that. So it has to have like when I sit down, I'm like, Okay, now where were we in the story?
Kate Northrup:Where were
Dr. Mindy Pelz:we in the story? Okay, now I need to tell you about this. Now that you understand this, you're gonna be able to understand that. It should hopefully my books feel like a conversation because that's how it's mapped in my mind. And then this other thing I have a rule that if when I'm in process, full process of writing a book, if I wake up at two in the morning, if I wake up at three and a thought comes to my head, I get out of bed and I write.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:And I start writing in the dark in the middle of the night. Most of my writing is done before noon. I can't write afternoon. And it's all done in that space. I learned this from Bruce Lipton that the going into sleep and the coming out of sleep is a really magical time.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:And so I use the coming out of sleep to write then. So it's the best writing I can do.
Kate Northrup:Like first thing in the morning?
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah, first thing in the morning.
Kate Northrup:Sometimes fasting, depending on what's always Always fasting. Right. Because you're not really probably eating until the sun comes up, no matter where it is in the cycle.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:But also because then I'm working off ketones and my brain works a lot smarter.
Kate Northrup:What about coffee?
Dr. Mindy Pelz:I do do coffee.
Kate Northrup:So do you drink coffee while you're writing? Yes. Oh, that feels very permissive to me. Okay, so I really want to drink coffee first thing when I wake up, but I've been making myself wait ninety minutes. Oh, yeah.
Kate Northrup:Do I need to do that? It feels hard
Dr. Mindy Pelz:every day. Okay, I'm going to tell you here's what I'm going tell you. I'm going to tell you what Sachin Panda, circadian rhythm expert told me.
Kate Northrup:Love it.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:I feel like he is a good Within the first half hour of you starting your day, cortisol is going to spike. I know we have said two hours, you're probably doing an hour and a half because you want to So ride the he's like, Just wait a half hour, and cortisol is starting to ramp up. The minute cortisol is starting to come up, you can drink your cup of coffee. Now, I'll tell you what Doctor. Stacy Sims told me.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:She said that she wants people to get some kind of nutrition first thing in the morning because it triggers the hypothalamus to start hormonal production. So I've kind of combined everybody's ideas, and I say within the first half hour, have coffee. I like raw cream because raw cream has probiotics and enzymes in it. I put collagen powder in mine. You do?
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah. And I put creatine in
Kate Northrup:mine. And
Dr. Mindy Pelz:then sometimes I'll put some MCT oils. So you've
Kate Northrup:a whole bunch of stuff going on So in
Dr. Mindy Pelz:I took everybody's theory and I put
Kate Northrup:You it put it in your own. I love that. Okay, that's great.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:So
Kate Northrup:you don't have a problem with collagen. What do you do you know anything about this? Like, it create it's a problem with the it puts, like, deuterium in your body. Do you even know what I'm talking about when I say that? No.
Kate Northrup:Is that a heavy metal? Let's strike it from the record.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah. I ever that's a new I
Kate Northrup:have another guest on my podcast mentioned it, and I need to, like, go deeper, but Yeah. Great. Neither here nor there. Okay. Fantastic.
Kate Northrup:So you do that every morning, and that's your writing process when you're in a book Yeah. Process.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah.
Kate Northrup:Okay. When does this Age Like a Girl come out?
Dr. Mindy Pelz:It it comes it so the manuscript's due in in March Okay. And it comes out at the end of twenty twenty five. I think we're gonna put it out the last couple of weeks of the year.
Kate Northrup:Okay.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:The new year, new year kind of thing.
Kate Northrup:I'm so excited.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:But okay. So then I have to be fully transparent about what happens when there's a deadline. Yeah. And I have to write at night. Oh.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Have you had that?
Kate Northrup:No. So the way I've written both of my books is I wrote them in an hour a day right before the deadline, and I think it is because my books are not nearly as research heavy.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah, mine are
Kate Northrup:pretty You're very you know, mine are more like what's in my head goes on the page. You know, there's research, but it's not like science y.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah, no, have like a team of researchers, and then I gotta pull them all together. Yeah, so
Kate Northrup:my next book is going to be more research heavy because I'm bringing in a lot more about the nervous system and neuroscience, and I'm very excited about it. And I cannot just like, you know, No. Do
Dr. Mindy Pelz:An hour a day.
Kate Northrup:Yeah, no. What's it on? It's about women and money in the nervous system. I love that. My God, let me know when it I comes will, I will.
Kate Northrup:Okay, so when you're
Dr. Mindy Pelz:on a this happened with Fast Like a Girl because it had to be turned in on February 1, and I was facing a deadline. So January was right all day, and many times I was at ten at night. And so I did three things. And this is full transparency. Great.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Hugh chocolate gems.
Kate Northrup:The greatest thing ever.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:The salty ones. Literally, if I'm chewing something and typing, absolutely worked. Okay. Okay. A glass of organic biodynamic wine.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Okay. Not too much because I need my brain to work, but enough to just not have my to have my brain stop telling me deadline, the deadline, dude, you're going to freak. You know, this is horrible. The deadline, like I had to just calm my brain. And then the third one is really funny because I found this musical artist and his name is Tom O'Dell.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Uh-huh. And he plays this kind of jazzy, like, sultry music. I started typing to him, to Fast Like a Girl to him. And then he came to San Francisco. And I'm like, I'm gonna go see the guy.
Kate Northrup:Of
Dr. Mindy Pelz:course. And I paid for a meet and greet. Oh. And I was like, I need to go tell the guy that he got me through writing Fast Like a Girl. And then when the day actually came, I couldn't go to the meet and greet to tell him, but I went and listened to him.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:But I'm like, he's like a 27 year old guy that got me through writing Fast Like a Girl. Have you
Kate Northrup:ever like DM'd him or anything? No. You should tell him, because your book is a pretty big deal.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah, thank you.
Kate Northrup:And I think it's cool. I don't know that we would consider ourselves artists, but there is something when you put something out into the world, I personally love knowing on the other side what it helped people with.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:That's right. Should I send in a message? I should. I should. Especially now that it's done so well.
Kate Northrup:Because that's gonna be an unusual message.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:I know. Right. Like like, hi. It's Mindy. I'm a post menopausal woman.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:I'm not your typical fan, but you got me through this thing.
Kate Northrup:Yeah. And also, you know, the energy of that is also in the book.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah. That's How beautiful. Almost thank you for the energy. You did. I love that.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:That's so fun. And then I'm like, that would have been really funny.
Kate Northrup:Okay. But what was it like to write eat like a girl because now there's recipe well, were actually there are recipes in fast like a girl too, but like, this one is a more Well,
Dr. Mindy Pelz:and those recipes are done by professional chefs. So with Eat Like a Girl, that one, I literally went in a contract in November with them, with Hay House. They were like, we want this. And then the book was due March 1. So I'd write fast.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah. So luckily nutrition, I was raised by this mom who taught me nutrition from So day
Kate Northrup:just knew.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah. So I just knew, and then I knew all the questions that everybody had from Fast Like a Girl. So writing it was easy.
Kate Northrup:Oh, that's really cool. Yeah. And then you hired some professional chefs to do the recipes.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:So this was interesting because I'm not a chef nor do I wanna play one. So I hired two. One was a woman who's a plant based chef, But I'm not completely plant based, so had to make it congruent with me. And then we had trouble finding an omnivore chef. And I was like, I want a woman.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:I want this to be a woman's project. And I couldn't find one. But then a friend introduced me to this incredible man who has been the greatest gift to this book. He is your official chef. He studied under he learned meats and rubs and charcuterie under Spain.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:He literally like spent a couple of years in the back area with these wise women who taught him how to cook meat. I was like, you're it. You're my guy. That's so special. So he did those recipes.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Amazing.
Kate Northrup:So you don't cook, really?
Dr. Mindy Pelz:I do cook.
Kate Northrup:You cook, but you just like don't consider yourself like a chef y kind
Dr. Mindy Pelz:I'm of not a
Kate Northrup:chef. So you're like a straightforward cook.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:My son's actually a chef.
Kate Northrup:Yeah. That's cool. You guys have a food lineage.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:I know. So my 22 year old son has just put his steak in the ground and is like, I'm going to be a chef for prayer. So it's really sweet. That's so cool.
Kate Northrup:So you have a 22 year old And a
Dr. Mindy Pelz:24 year old daughter. Wow.
Kate Northrup:Yeah. Are they Okay, so your son does he's a chef. Is your daughter at all involved in health?
Dr. Mindy Pelz:No. I tried to bring her in.
Kate Northrup:I know.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:I'm sure you can I had a whole path for her?
Kate Northrup:Of course you did. Growing up, everyone would say to me and my sister, so are you guys gonna be doctors like your parents? And we were like, Hell no. Like, I see what that life is. No, thank you.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yes, yes.
Kate Northrup:And I do feel like I'm carrying on the lineage in my very own way. It's like,
Dr. Mindy Pelz:but, yeah, no. My daughter is an animal lover, specifically horses, she so is a farrier. Do you know farriers? No. It's where they change horseshoes.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:And Oh, she makes a living doing that. And she is learning to be a vet tech. She's more interested in horse and animals than humans.
Kate Northrup:So beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. That work, I don't know if you've ever done I know this is not what she does and this is a bit of a tangent, but have you ever done like an equine therapy session?
Dr. Mindy Pelz:No. But I've watched it. Wow. I've watched the work with horses heal her. But I'm yeah, tell me about it.
Kate Northrup:It's absolutely amazing to see how your energy communicate obviously horses don't talk, you know,
Dr. Mindy Pelz:English Or any other language
Kate Northrup:other Or any other language other than the language of energy. And you go in the ring and you can literally direct them with your loving intention, and it was wild to be in there with myself and a bunch of other people, and there was one woman whose energy was really erratic and all over the place, and the horse was not having it. Was just like Wow. Also all over the place. And then it would be another person's turn, and you could literally direct your heart at the front flank, the front, like, left flank of the horse, and, like, intentionally just with your heart and your energy, invite it where you want it go.
Kate Northrup:And if you were clear about it with your energy, it would just go. Amazing. And people like myself who like, I'm not a horse person. It's not like I grew up around horses. Wow.
Kate Northrup:So anyway, Where, how do I do that? You go to well, have it at Miraval, but all sorts of places have equine I have a client who does it now in Kentucky. I don't know. Like, all over the place.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah. And maybe my daughter can show me how
Kate Northrup:to do this. Maybe she could. Interesting. It's really cool.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:So you my assumption is you walk away from and you realize that your energy is affecting Everyone. Everyone.
Kate Northrup:Yeah. Because if if, you know, because as we know, 90% of communication is nonverbal Right. Between humans. That's right. Yeah.
Kate Northrup:So what's going on between us right now is not verbal. No. Largely.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Clearly. And isn't that wild? Yeah. It's really crazy. Okay.
Kate Northrup:So which brings me back to the time that you were running your practice in perimenopause.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Oh, yeah. You're not gonna let me I'm
Kate Northrup:not that it worked probably best. And doing the YouTube channel, and also, you know, and also seeing patients, and then raising your kids, and, kind of possibly frying your gears. What happened during that time in your life and with your own energy reserves? I just kind of want to know any stories you would want to about that time.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:I'll tell some good ones. I mean, it was the back half of my 40s. I mean, that's why I really discovered a lot of this. Because what I did is at around 45, maybe a little bit earlier, I started noticing that I was having all these perimenopausal symptoms. And I went to my mom because I was like, well, she's the closest mom and my sister should be the closest things to me reproductive wise.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Both of them were like, we had no problem. I don't know what you're talking about. So you're like, it's not genetic. It's not genetic. So I lost my cycle.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:I spotted, I couldn't sleep. I had massive anxiety, but I think I'll tell a story that I haven't really told and we're actually trying to figure out how to tell it in the new book. So I'll tell it in the softest way I can here. I had a moment where I was spinning out of control mentally and my family was all together. And my son walked into the room, who I just adore, and I just screamed at him in a way that I've never screamed at him before.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:And the look on his face was like, Oh my God, what is going on with my mom? And I went upstairs into my room and my brain went, If this is how I have to live, I don't want to live. And I laid in bed at 05:00 on a summer night, trying to think about how I might take myself out. Because if this is how I'm gonna live, I can't do that. My husband came up and I was like, I'm so scared.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:I don't know what's going on with my brain. And that was the beginning of me changing my workload.
Kate Northrup:Wow.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah. And the next day, my son was very honest with me. He's like, I never thought my mom would yell at me like that. And I said, I'm so sorry and I'm gonna become a better version of me. And I knew that that meant I had to work less.
Kate Northrup:Yeah. Wow. That's really
Dr. Mindy Pelz:That was like breaking point.
Kate Northrup:Yeah. Right. And so I would imagine your mom and your sister did not have the stress load that you had, the level of working that you had, which is why they sort of breezed through those years.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah, and my sister's a teacher at Boston University. She gets five months off a year. She works three days a week. My mom was a stay at home mom, and I was the primary breadwinner of my family.
Kate Northrup:So vastly different roles. So in the limited time we have left, that breaking point of needing to change the way you worked, so many of us feel, and I've certainly had these moments when my husband was ill, and I had these two little kids, and I had payroll to make, and it's like, it didn't feel like I had choices. And the work that I do now came out of that. But I'm curious for you, you're at the breaking point. Did it feel like you had a choice?
Kate Northrup:What did you do first?
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah. Well, I mean, luckily I'd already had momentum with like my YouTube channel. And so, and I think at that point, I think we were waiting to see if I had written the book proposal. So I knew that I was going to try to get a book. I had an agent.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:So I knew things were already changing. But here's the crazy thing. Oh, and this is so good for so many women. I had to stop the people pleasing, which meant for me, I had to start thinking about leaving my clinic. And I had raised all these families in my clinic.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:I had taught all these mama bears how to take care of their kids. And it was really hard for me to tell them I couldn't guide them anymore. So a month later, Hay House had given me another book deal, Fast Like a Girl. Like, things were starting like no, I guess it was no, a month later, I'd gotten the book deal with Fast Like a Girl.
Kate Northrup:A month after this month.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah. And things were starting to really like, okay, I'm going to go be an author now. And so I closed my clinic and what I did is I wrote all my patients an email and I just said, we've had a good ride. I love you guys. You've raised your families.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:It's been amazing. And I need to move on to the next chapter of my life. And I sent this email out to these hundreds of patients. And then for two weeks, I sat in the waiting room and hugged them all, cried with them all. And I closed that chapter of my life.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:And that was the beginning of stopping that level of chaos in work. That's amazing.
Kate Northrup:Yeah. And for you to also honor and really close that chapter so beautifully
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Thank you.
Kate Northrup:I think is also really amazing. It makes me emotional.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:I
Kate Northrup:I was was thinking about our pediatrician, and when she closed her practice, I was like, Oh my God, now I'm out here by myself! But it's this invitation to tap into our own inner wisdom.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:The hardest one was I had a man who had lost his eye in the Vietnam War. And he was a Chicano man who grew up on a farm on a field farm worker, had farm worker parents. And he used to come and tell me stories about how he was sent to Vietnam. He lost his eye. And when he was sent back, he wasn't honored because he was a Chicano American and he was just thrown back onto the field.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:So he started a publishing company, and he ended up writing Chicano history books. And so he would come in every week, and he would say to me, You need to write a book, Mindy, you need to write a book. You need to do what's in here. So the day, the last time I saw him, he walked in the door and I went back into my room and I literally lied down on the ground before I said goodbye to him. And I just heaved like a little baby.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Like I'd like, how can I say? And I called one of my old employees, I'm like, how can I say goodbye to him? I don't know. And I put my big girl panties on, and I went out and said, Charlie, this is happening because of you.
Kate Northrup:Wow. That's beautiful.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:So that was that. Was quite an experience, the whole thing.
Kate Northrup:Yeah. So beautiful. You know, to really honor all the work, all the grief, all the love, and also come out here in this other huge big way to be able to help the hundreds of thousands of more people. And both matter, right? Of course.
Kate Northrup:For anyone listening, if you have a private practice, it's not better than or worse than, but this is obviously your calling. I mean, you were meant to be doing this.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:It's You so know when the universe just lines a bunch of things up for you? You're like, Okay, I have to step into this. It's like coming here. It was like, I knew I was coming to the book fair. I had a good sense in my gut I should come.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:And then all these amazing women started popping up, and like, hey, I'll see you here. I'll do this. I'm like, yeah, that was it was just a hunch that I followed.
Kate Northrup:You got to follow the magic. Exactly. Right? Exactly. And following the magic doesn't mean it's not also going to be sad.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:That's right. That's right. The bittersweet, I feel like my life that after like 50, bittersweet pretty much sums Really? It Yeah. Like, I'm just right now I'm doing all the hard work to like really own my own voice to be true to myself.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:I had a friend tell me, actually the friend I saw here, one day this year, she said to me, you know what Mindy, I find so interesting about you is you're so willing disappoint. You don't wanna disappoint everybody else, but you have no problem disappointing yourself. Wow, that's a good friend. That's good feedback. Yeah, and when she said that to me, I was like, Oh my God.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:So in June, I made a pact to myself, I would not disappoint myself anymore.
Kate Northrup:Good for you.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:And so I've been on this real journey of like, I'm gonna tell you something that's gonna hurt you because I've been a professional people pleaser. But I need to tell you this because if I adapt to what you want me to do, I'm disappointing myself.
Kate Northrup:100%. And also, when we say yes to someone and something to please them, there's no way we're actually showing up in our fullness. We are also doing them a disservice every time, even though it's like one thing to say that in some whole other way.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:So hard. There's also I mean, not to throw more interesting thoughts here, But do you know about the feminist philosopher Carol Gilligan? No. Okay. So she wrote a book called In a Different Voice.
Kate Northrup:Okay.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:This is something to teach your daughter. Great. How many daughters do you have?
Kate Northrup:Two, six, Okay. And
Dr. Mindy Pelz:She did research back in the eighties on boys and girls at 11, and before they went into puberty. And she found that if you asked a boy and a girl at 11 what they wanted, like let's say, what do you want to eat? They would tell you both directly what they want to eat. Fast forward to 13 where their hormones had come in, both of them. Now you ask that same question and the boy will tell you what he wants and the girl will say, I don't know, what do you want?
Dr. Mindy Pelz:And what she discovered was that the brain changes that happen with hormones is that testosterone makes a man's hormone or makes his brain work from the back to the front. And he's very linear. Give me the rules. I'll break the rules. I'll create the rules.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Just need to know the game. For girls at 13, our brains start the hormones make our brains work right to left, and everything we do in our life is relational. Every single thing we think about, we think about the relationship of others, and that's the beginning of the people pleasing. What I think menopause is, is the moment we actually hear our own voice again. Because as those hormones come out, go out, I think what happens is we start to get this inner knowing that pops up that is our voice we lost at 13.
Kate Northrup:Wow. It's adolescence in reverse.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:It's adolescence in reverse, but not just the symptoms in the PMS. It's that women are hearing themselves. And this is one of reasons why if you look at 45 to 55 is the most common time for a woman to commit suicide. And I think it's because she doesn't know what to do when she hears her own voice. Yeah.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Because she hasn't set up her life This to support
Kate Northrup:is big stuff. Yeah. I'm so excited for your next book.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah. Thank you.
Kate Northrup:I'm so excited for the ones we
Dr. Mindy Pelz:have. Yeah.
Kate Northrup:Thank I'm so excited for what's coming next.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Thank Thank
Kate Northrup:you so much for being here, for saying yes to the invitation, also for what you do and who you are. Yeah, You're such a delight.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah, thank This is really fun. Need to do more together.
Kate Northrup:I would love that.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:I feel like we are speaking the same language, just in different ways. Very
Kate Northrup:different ways. But it's so cool. Thank you. So if people want to connect with you, where should they go?
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Well, would say just go to my web page, but YouTube is my passion project. So what most people don't know is I do four new videos a week. Wow. There's a lot there.
Kate Northrup:Amazing. What a library.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Yeah. So there's a lot there. Obviously, the books are everywhere. The books are sold. And then I have a podcast that you came on.
Kate Northrup:I did.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:The Resetter Podcast. The Resetter Podcast. We're gonna dive into even more of these kind of issues next year.
Kate Northrup:Amazing. Is it drmindypeltz.com? Yes. Okay, great. Yeah.
Kate Northrup:Amazing. And everything will be in the show notes. Yeah. Thank you.
Dr. Mindy Pelz:Thank you. What a pleasure. Yeah, appreciate you.
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