I stopped fasting for almost a year and I want to tell you exactly why. Now, first understand I didn't stop fasting because I didn't believe in it. That is, that is absolutely not true. I sit here every week giving you video after video looking at the science. I watch the results people get with it. But last year, I made a personal decision based off of my cortisol levels if fasting was right for me or not and what fasting lengths were right and what eating lengths were right. And I went into a whole self-discovery and I had to let go of the rigidity of fasting. And in that I learned a tremendous amount about myself. And I learned a new way to describe fasting, which is what I'm now calling flex fasting. And I want to teach that to you today.

So, first I want to go into this mixture between cortisol coming from stress and cortisol coming from habits like fasting. You also, by the way, get cortisol from exercise. So, let's start there and then I'm going to walk you through exactly what flex fasting is and how it might help you in your fasting efforts because there's so many variables within flex fasting.

So, here we go. First, let's look at cortisol. So, there's some really interesting research that I want to bring to your attention. One of them was a study out of Nutrients journal, which is a very prestigious journal. It was published last year in 2025 and it basically says that prolonged—prolonged is the key word. Prolonged fasting activates the HPA axis pushing cortisol up and keeping it there. Prolonged.

Okay. Then we also have a 2020 study by Endocrinology that said estrogen—this is another key one because I'm a menopausal woman—estrogen is woven into how you regulate cortisol, melatonin, and sleep. So midlife women who are under stress, we're already working with a system that is renegotiating the baseline for cortisol.

So, for me personally, and I know a lot of you have this, this is why I'm sharing my story because I see your comments and I know a lot of you go through this. I went through a period where I lost a very good friend. He died at 52 years old. He was like a brother to me. I—I—it was a very hard loss for me. Uh, two months later, I was living in the area in LA that was burned. I was there that morning. Those of you who have read Age Like a Girl, I write that whole story. So, I had two major life stressors that put me into an acute PTSD setting.

Now, when cortisol goes that high for a 56-year-old woman—so this is for those of you who are menopausal, any version of menopause, perimenopausal transition, post-menopausal—if you have two major life events, one major life event, and your cortisol is through the roof from those two events. I don't care if it's fasting. I don't care if it's exercise. I don't care if it's calorie counting. Any hormetic stressor, which is a stressor that is going to provide cortisol to the body—a good stressor—is not good in those moments because like I just said, estrogen—according to this Endocrinology study—estrogen regulates cortisol. And when you lose estrogen, there is a new baseline of that regulation, which many of you are probably already noticing this where you just can't handle stress the same way.

So, it's really important when we go through those periods of time that we categorize stress. So, very similar to how I mentioned to you all, there's good fat and bad fat. There's harmful carbohydrates and there's nature's carbohydrates, but we call them all fat. We call them all carbohydrates. We do the same thing with stress. And one of the benefits of fasting is it taps into a good stress that makes your body stronger. Except when your system has been flooded with cortisol because of unusual circumstances like a loss of a friend or your neighborhood burning. Those are unusual moments and I know many of you have been under unusual moments and in those unusual moments that is not the time for a hormetic stressor.

So what I did over the last year taught me a lot because I started to use the clues of my body to tell me if I should even fast that day or not. Let's talk about some of those clues because you all may have this and this is a part of the flex fasting formula that I'm going to teach you. The first is anytime your heart is racing and running and you could feel like it's pounding out of your chest. Anytime you go from seated to standing and you get dizzy, that is a body that is in a fight-or-flight response that is stuck in fight-or-flight there.

If you remember from many of my videos, we have three nervous systems. One relaxes us. One gives us the energy to handle a stressor. And one is what we call the freeze nervous system, which is the nervous system that we start to dissociate with. When we are in fight-or-flight where we feel that heart racing, where we stand up and we are dizzy, that is a sign that you don't want a hormetic stressor. You don't want to add more stress when the third nervous system, this freeze nervous system, where all of a sudden you find yourself wanting to numb yourself with food, alcohol, or drugs, or maybe Netflix series—or you want to just numb yourself out. You want to hide. You want to not deal with life. That is a frozen nervous system that cannot adapt anymore. And a hormetic stressor like fasting is not okay.

So what I did is every single morning I checked in with my body. And I want to encourage you all to do this—where's my heart at? Where's my breathing pattern at? Do I feel like I just want to back away from the world? Am I using things like social media and, you know, binge-watching Netflix series? I was at that time binge-watching White Lotus. And am I finding that I want to withdraw? And if the answer was yes to any of those things, I ate breakfast. I ate that day. I did not fast. I used the signals that my body was giving me to tell me what nervous system state it was in to decide if a good stressor was going to be appropriate for me.

Now, I also want to tell you I didn't do heavy workouts. That's also a good stressor. Um, I also stopped all my supplementation. I didn't want anything from the outside coming in and I didn't want to put myself in any kind of situation where I would amplify the cortisol.

So, this is really at the heart of what flex fasting is. And since we're living in a very unusual time, and I see your comments, and I see how many of you are doubling down on fasting because you're stressed, because you're gaining weight, and you want to double down on that and make that tool work for you. Um, it may not be the right tool when you're in a crisis situation with a fight-or-flight nervous system or a frozen nervous system that's stuck.

So this is what we know about more of a flexible approach to fasting. So first I saw two studies that really hit home with me. The first one was a 2025 trial in midlife women. Yay. Thank you for studying us. Um, that found a flexible eating window, especially when combined with exercise—we'll talk about different exercising here in a moment—led to significant fat loss. With adherence to this fasting, the adherence rates was 83 to 87%.

There was a second study that was done in 2025. So, these are both very current studies and it was a trial that said when they let people pick their own fasting and eating window instead of assigning them one, they did just as well as if they had a restrictive—"you need to eat breakfast" or "you need to skip dinner". When they allowed people to make their own choice on what their fasting and eating windows were, they got as good of a result as if I stood here and said, "Hey everybody, you need to skip breakfast". I don't say that. You choose what's right for you. And this was a study in the Journal of Nature Medicine 2025 that—and this was a quote from the study—"letting your body have a say didn't cost the people in the trial a single thing".

So, who is flex fasting for? This is a new term I'm bringing out to you all here on YouTube. Flex fasting is for people who are going through crises in their lives or maybe with their health. They still want to use fasting as a tool; they just want to use it in a more flexible or subtle way. And here are some of those people that I want to point out. Obviously, grief. That was a big one for me. Like when you're deeply grieving the loss of something. So, somebody going through a lot of grief. Sometimes this can be grieving your health because you got like a cancer diagnosis or something of that stature. So, anytime that grief is around or loss is around, this is a time to embody flex fasting, which I'm going to explain to you what that looks like here in a moment. Um, recovering from an illness. If you are either recovering from a surgery or you're recovering from maybe a horrible diagnosis or any kind of injury, that might be a time you want to be more flexible with your fasting. Postpartum—a lot of hormones crashing down. I always say keep your fast short if you're nursing. But if you're going through emotional ups and downs from being postpartum, flex fasting is your go-to. Um, if you're not sleeping. If you're going through long periods of not sleeping and you're waking up at 2 and 3 in the morning and your heart is racing or your brain is getting OCD and thinking about problem after problem after problem, you're going to want to do flex fasting. Um, and then the one that is really important that I talk about so much here is perimenopause. Um, and even menopause, post-menopause, but especially perimenopause—that's a very turbulent time. One day you're up, one day you're down, your cortisol levels are recalibrating as estrogen goes away. If you wake up one morning and you don't feel like fasting, don't fast. You heard it from me. Find a new rhythm in this flex fasting routine that I'm talking about.

So what's interesting, I want to point out to women, is that especially menstruating women, the whole premise around Fast Like a Girl—the whole reason I wrote this book—was because people were fasting too much and that was damaging women more than men. That was the whole premise of this book. So I am not here to tell you all to keep fasting over and over and over again; I'm very excited to present the flex fasting to you. But what's interesting is I did find a study that cortisol shifts throughout your cycle. So one fixed fasting window for women was never going to work, and that was based off research done in 2023 in the European Review of Medical Pharmacology. I'll leave all the links here.

So, how do you flex fast? And here are your five flex fasting principles. And then what I would love to hear from you is I'd love to hear how this works for you. Because for me, I found an intuitive way to some days eat breakfast, some days not. Some days have dinner early, some days not. I love the new state that I'm in. I'm playing with the tools, but I'm not rigid about it. Fasting is a tool. It is not a rule. And you decide your own rules.

Here are the five steps. Okay. First, I don't care what level you're at. If you've made it this far into the video, my sense is that you have an intuitive hunch that maybe you've been fasting too long. So, what I'd like to do—or too often or maybe you've been too rigid—what I'd like to do is bring you back to a basic fast and just do 12 hours consistently. This is where I landed. I'm doing about 13 hours pretty consistently now. Some days I intuitively want to pop up to 16 or 17, but for the most part I'm doing about 13 and I'm feeling equally as great as two years ago when I was doing a lot of 24-hour fasts. So that's number one. Start at 12 hours and stop trying to earn your fast. Stop trying to push through so that you get some badge that nobody's giving you. So, let's make sure that we all go back to the basics. Now, if you haven't fasted before and you're concerned because of the stress level, I want to encourage you to start at 12 hours. Whenever I was coaching people, I would tell them like that's your first ledge. Just get comfortable there. So, don't optimize this. Over-optimization that the whole biohacking world is obsessed with is getting out of control. Don't push through. 12 hours is the win. Okay, 12 hours is good. And some days you may just do no fasting.

Action step number two: Run a once-a-week body check before you set your window. What does that look like? And I mentioned a few of them. So I'm going to give you some lists of symptoms. So, let's start with trouble falling asleep and waking up at 2 in the morning, 3 in the morning with your heart racing and your mind running in circles. If your sleep is that disrupted, then let's lean more into flex fasting. If you can feel your heart really heavy, like there's sort of like it's going to pound out of your chest, then it's a time to do more flex fasting. If you stand up and you get dizzy, that's a sign your adrenals are maxed. So it's—it's actually a clinical sign that many doctors use called Raglan's. And when you go from seated to standing, if you get dizzy, it's a sign your adrenals didn't adapt to the change in position because your adrenals play a part in blood pressure. Clinically, doctors use this to test adrenals. So you can use it yourself and if it's not working, then if you're getting dizzy, your adrenals are maxed. Um, your reaction to stress. If a stressor hits you and you can't pause—you just turn around and lash out—that's a good chance that your cortisol levels are already really high. So take inventory. And I've shared this with you all before. When you sit with yourself, get to know your body and ask it. It might just be one morning and you just close your eyes and you're like, "Okay, do I want to fast today? How does that feel?" And start bringing your body into the inquiry. Start bringing your body into the whole decision, not just your mind. Okay? So you're not following a calendar. You're not following a protocol. You are collecting data on yourself and making a decision on that data. Remember N of one that I've been teaching here. You're going to be your own N of one.

Number three, you're going to match your fasting window to your season, not the goal. We are not pushing through. So if you have high stress right now, keep it at 12 hours. If you feel rested and grounded, then great. You can go over 15 hours. You can go into the six different tools, the fasting lengths that I talk about in here, which is great. I—I love that. Um, and it's okay for some days to be 15 hours and for it to feel effortless, and some days it's 12 hours and you're famished and your heart is racing and you're dizzy—and that's okay. You can mix it up however you want it. Um, the important thing is that you let your body give you clues. And the more you let it give you clues, the better off you'll be.

Number four: protect your fasts by making sure you don't deplete yourself anymore. So, minerals. When you go into a fast, bring your mineral load up. I've already mentioned multiple times I have two mineral companies that I love for fasting. Element is one; Beam Minerals is the other. I will leave links in here for you to access that with discounts. But the most important thing is that sometimes bringing those minerals up—and when you're under so much stress because all that cortisol requires minerals to make cortisol, so it's going to deplete minerals—and then you go into a fast that already depletes minerals—that's a problem. So, let's make sure that when you are fasting, if you're going to flex fast, even though stress is high, you're keeping your fasting length short and you're bringing in your mineral supplements to make sure your body has enough resources to make it through the fast.

Second thing I want to say on this, and as far as protecting your fasts, is when you break your fast, you break it with protein. I've taught you a lot of different ways to break your fast, but what's really important is when you're under a lot of stress is you need protein because protein has amino acids and your brain needs amino acids. Your muscles need amino acids. So when you're done with the fast, refuel with amino acids. The general statement is 30 grams of protein at that breakfast meal. And you want at least 2.5 grams of that 30 grams to come from leucine-rich protein. This is how we—you know, have you ever seen like when people are under so much stress, their muscle starts to break down? That's because their adrenals are pulling nutrients from their muscles to be able to keep that cortisol level high. So, we want to make sure that doesn't happen to you. If you're going to do a shorter fast during flex fasting, we want to make sure that you are actually bringing your protein load up, your mineral load up, so the reserves don't go so low that you lose muscle.

Okay. And then number five, um, and this is my favorite: drop the all-or-no scorecard. I feel like I should have started this video with this, but what this means is we have a tendency to be like, "Oh, well, I'm stressed. I shouldn't fast. Then I'm just going to go eat". That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying, "Let's be flexible about it". So, I did shorter fasts last year because they were intuitive for me. It was like—oh, I started to notice after a couple months as I was coming out of an acute PTSD situation. I started to notice like, you know what, I actually feel more hungry in the morning, um, and I'm going to eat. And then I would count back and I was naturally at 12 hours. So, this doesn't mean you're so stressed that you can't even fast anymore. It means that you're going to give yourself permission to fast a low amount, 12 hours. You're going to give yourself permission to not fast some days. Uh, you're going to make a decision on what meal and eating window and fasting window based off of that day because when you're under stress, every day can look different.

So, those are the five. It is—you're going to hear me talk a lot more about this. I just want to say before rumors run rampant all over the internet, I am not saying that fasting isn't effective. I am saying that if cortisol levels are so high because you lost a friend and your neighborhood burned and you can barely function as a human on your day-to-day, then it's time to rethink your fasting behaviors. And we all have our different version of that. And this flex fasting—you'll hear me talk a lot more about it in coming videos because the most important thing is that you use fasting appropriately so it supports your body, doesn't deplete it. So, as always, let me know if that helps. Um, put in the comments if you needed this information. Let me know if you've maybe intuitively done this because my—my hunch is maybe you have. And I just want to say send this out to a friend who's given up on fasting because it was too rigid. I've—I posted this in Substack and, um, we got so many interesting comments and people were so grateful for a new way to approach fasting. As always, I hope that helps.

Introduction: Okay, Dr. Mindy here, and on this podcast, I'm going to do something very uncomfortable and I am going to tell you something that may appear to be in opposition of things I've told you for the last decade. Because I have morphed into a new mindset and I realize that for over 30 years for over 30 years I've been in the health trenches with people and the rules of health that I have put forward. Do this, don't do that. Um, take this is the length fast you want to do. This is the length fast you shouldn't do. All the "have-tos" I am unwinding. And I really feel like the rules of health that are being poured out on platforms like I'm giving this to you right now are actually blocking our health. And so what I want to do in this video and podcast is I want to talk about the five things that I am not doing in my personal life for 2026. And I'm hoping that these five things will free you from any guilt or shame or "have-tos" that you have chained yourself to that is spiking your cortisol. And yes, you're going to find some things in here are contradictions to what I have taught you for over 30 years. I know some of my patients still follow me on all of my socials. But in this day and age where we are right now in 2026, I strongly feel that we need a new approach to health. And so this podcast is to deliver to you the new approach that I am taking. So, are you ready? Here I go. Let's dive in.
The Problem with Modern Health Trends: So, I I started watching over the last couple of years so many health influencers creating more and more "have-tos" specifically for menopausal women. So much so that I know you all saw this. I have really seen that people making fun of like, "Oh, I'm 45 now. I need to eat 30 grams of protein with every single meal. I need to be drinking creatine three times a day. I need to go outside and get sunlight. I need to not drink alcohol. I shouldn't be drinking caffeine. I need to make a dose on magnesium. I need to get to the right OB so that I can find the right HRT path." Like enough. This has gone way too far. I'm calling this the great unlearning for me. I actually the other day said to myself, I think I'm in rewirement. I'm rewiring the way I look at my life, the way I look at my health and so that it can start to flow with ease and joy and I can be with the experience of a healthy lifestyle, not trying to manipulate my body with a healthy lifestyle. So, here are the five things that I am not doing anymore in 2026.
1. No More Counting: Okay, you ready for number one? I am done counting. Now, for years I told you stop counting calories. Now, my younger version did that. But what I did is I said count macros all over Fast Like a Girl are macros. And do you know how many questions I've answered in three years after over a million is we're at like a million five of those books have gone out into the world. So many people start to live their life by "oh I got 60 grams. Is that gonna am I going to gain weight? Is that going to kick me out of ketosis? Oh wait, I only got 75 grams of protein. Are my muscles going to fatigue?" like we have to stop the counting. And for me, what I've decided to move into and to transition to is more of intuition. And it's really interesting because I watched people over the years. I would always put on a continuous glucose monitor on all the patients that I worked with. Before we had those, we had the the the pin prick. And it was really exciting to be able to see what your blood was doing in relationship to your food and your stress and your workouts. We became so obsessed with counting blood sugar in my clinic. We had literally a little strips of for ketones and blood sugar and meters. When you checked in, you could actually count and see what your blood sugar and ketone levels were like. That's how obsessed with counting I was.
Intuition Over Tracking: And then I started to see a pattern for myself and I started to see a pattern for my patients. And that is that people knew when they went into ketosis. People knew when their blood sugar was too high or too low. Once they counted for a while, they could stop the counting. So some of you that are brand new, the continuous glucose monitor is still a very valuable tool. But I look at it as metabolic training wheels. Those tools are great. Even counting your macros on an app like Carb Manager that I taught you in Fast Like a Girl are great as training wheels. But for many of us, now is the time to take the training wheels off and go into an intuitive state. So, for me, what I started to notice was when I looked at my continuous glucose monitor and I looked at my blood sugar reader that somewhere around 9 or 10 o'clock in the morning, I wasn't in ketosis and I was starting to feel a little hypoglycemic. And I would then check it an hour later. I became so obsessed with checking it. And I finally realized that there is a click that happens when you go into ketosis. And that click is one of those scenarios where you can feel the ketones come in because your mental clarity goes up and your hunger goes away. And I know many of you know what I'm talking about. So I started to feel this click and what I would tell myself is "ketones are coming. Ketones are coming. Put the darn reader down".
Dropping Biometrics and Comparison: And so one of the things that I could discover is I could feel when I went into ketosis and I knew and it was like a beautiful relationship with me and my body. So some of us need to stop counting macros and stop counting blood sugar and ketones and go into the intuitive experience. I've taught many times in the past about why I stopped the scale because every time I get up in the morning and I got on that scale, if that number wasn't what I liked, it set a bad tone for the whole day. I wanted to go into an intuitive experience with myself, like what weight do I want to be? What weight is comfortable? Do I need to let a number on the scale tell me what I am? So, I dropped the scale. One of the other things I dropped was all the biometric readers like the Oura Ring and Whoop Band. This is not to say those aren't great companies, but after I wore it for a while, I realized I don't want a darn ring to tell me if I had a good night's sleep or not. I want my own intuitive sense to know if I was well rested or not. Whenever we count, we start to compare and we start to judge. I'll tell you again, since this is a very personal podcast and video, another thing I'm not counting anymore are subscribers and followers and how many posts I do. I want to go into an intuitive experience with delivering information. So, a lot of you have heard that I'm now over on Substack having conversations with people so that we can all experience information and maybe only five people will be over there having conversations with me and that is okay. I have found counting has led me to comparison which has led me to suffer. So, I am giving up counting in 2026 of all kinds. And this is an incredibly I want to point out this is an incredibly hard thing for an ex-competitive athlete to do. I spent my whole life counting because that's how I knew if I was winning the game or not. But not in '26. The counting is done.
2. Breaking up with the Gym: Number two, I am breaking up with the gym. So when I started seeing all the incredible benefits of strength training, my motivation was at a little bit of low. I was working a lot and so I thought I got to hire a trainer because that's the only way I need an accountability buddy. Um and so I started going into the gym and lifting weights. And I did this for about two years. And I'll tell you that I noticed some minor muscle growth. It wasn't like all of a sudden I was going to be walking around in a bikini showing off my muscles. I felt a little bit stronger, but I hated going to the gym. I am a nature person that needs to be out in the open. Now, I know some of you love going to the gym, but what I decided to do was to go more into sync with where do I want to go? What do I want to do to enjoy my workout? The younger version of me was like, what do I need to do to look good? I think the menopausal conversation has so many women going, you got to lift weights or you're going to become osteoporotic and your brain, your cognitive abilities are going to go down. And what I want us all to get to is a place of functional fitness. What can you do functionally with your fitness to make you succeed in your everyday activities?
Functional Fitness Focus: I'll tell you an interesting example. I remember when my dad was in his early 80s, he had to have knee replacement surgery. And as I was helping him with the recovery process, I noticed that he couldn't use his hands to get out of the chair, like he had trouble pushing down on the chair to get up. And I told him, I said, "Hey, Dad, when you recover from this knee surgery, we need to get your triceps stronger so you can get up off the floor. You can get in and out of a chair". Um I wrote in Age Like a Girl. I didn't want to put a bunch of "have-tos" on fitness in this book. So, I started to look at what kind of activities do we need as we age. One of those activities is squatting. We need to be able to squat and get back up and down. So, I spend a lot of time just squatting throughout the day to loosen my hips up. Another big functional fitness measurement is grip strength. Longevity and grip strength have gone hand-in-hand forever. And so, I want to focus on better grip strength.
Enjoyable Movement Diet: On my Resetter podcast, I've brought you the idea or I brought you a great guest. It was one of my favorite podcasts. It was Katie Bowman that talked about creating a movement diet. And one of the things she educated us all on was how important like cooking is like whisking strengthens your muscles. Chopping strengthens your hand muscles so that you have good grip strength for when you're 70, 80, and 90 years old. One thing I do is hang from a hanging bar, one that I have here at my house, one to two minutes a day. I try to time myself to see how long I can stay on there, but I'm looking for ways to strengthen my grip strength because I know I'm going to need that down the road. I also know if I go out into nature and I exercise, I bring cortisol down. I know that if I'm out in the water surfing, which has become my new passion, um that I'm getting a good surge of dopamine and my eyes are seeing turning light into serotonin. So, I started to look at my fitness through the lens of what do I enjoy doing and how can I have a neurochemical experience with my fitness that makes me want to keep coming back to it. Surfing is a great example. Um, I'm getting great upper body strength and ab strength from surfing and I want to keep doing it. All the paddling, all the extension, the whole backside of surfing is a lot of extension. My back of my neck, my lower back, my upper back are all getting tremendously strong, which is so important for posture as I age, and I'm enjoying the activity while I'm getting the result. So, I'm sorry, gym. I know we have some gym hounds out there. Um, but I've broken up with the gym. Um, and I'm using things I enjoy to increase my fitness level.
3. Not in Anyone Else's Hurry: Okay, number three. Oh, I love this one. I'm not in anybody else's hurry anymore. So, let me explain what that means. Many of you, if you've read Age Like a Girl, you know that I was in the neighborhood where the LA fires were and I was in the middle of writing Age Like a Girl. So, I came to Santa Cruz, California, found an Airbnb to sit down and rest and recover and finish the book. And if any of you know Santa Cruz, this should be named the town of bumper stickers because everybody has a bumper sticker, if not 20, on the back of their cars. And I pull into yoga class. That's the only gym I haven't broken up with. I love my yoga class. And I pull into yoga class and I pull right next to a car that's has a bumper sticker on it that says, "I am not in your hurry". And I was like, "Oh my god, I have lived my life by other people's hurry so much". Hurry can be other people's deadline. "You got to have it done by this time." Um other people's agenda for you, whether it's travel, whether it's social, whether it's work.
Setting Personal Priorities and Boundaries: Think about the phone. Oh my god, I've thought about this so much. Like if I'm having a conversation with somebody and I get a text, who's the priority? In my book, the person I am talking to is the priority. Does that mean I need to go and immediately answer the person who has texted? I can tell you right now sitting on my phone are about five texts. And if you're one of them, you now know why. I have about five texts that I have not responded to. I will respond to it. But one day I looked down and I was like, "shoot, I got so many emails. I have so many texts, so many Slacks that I got to answer all these people". I'm not doing other people's timelines anymore. I am doing everything on my timeline. And so this even goes with chasing the next shiny new object, uh trying to get the fastest weight loss result. The chronic urgency kept my nervous system in fight or flight. And those of you that are trying to lose weight, it halts you from weight loss. And so I am moving into radical presence. And I am going into "what's here now" philosophy. And if those of you that are friends of mine are trying to get a hold of me and you're wondering why, it's because I am staying in a present time moment. And I am not living by anyone else's time agenda anymore. And I will tell you that that has been the number one thing that I have found on a day-to-day that has calmed my nervous system. I even have caught myself in traffic and feeling like, "oh, I'm in traffic. I got to get home. I got to get home". And then I think, "why do I not have why do I have to get home? I'm not in a hurry". I literally rewired my brain to start saying, "I'm not in a hurry anymore. I'm not in a hurry". Over and over again. I'm not overwork. I'm not in a hurry. That is not who Mindy is anymore.
4. Prioritizing Health Over Productivity: Okay. The fourth thing that I am giving up is prioritizing productivity over my health. So what my schedule looks like now is my workouts, the things that bring me joy are all put in my calendar first and then work is backfilled in around that. And I'm going to share a really um potent story that I think a lot of you will recognize. Um I spent a large part of my 40s prioritizing my work over relationships. I have prioritized work over workouts. I have prioritized work over um healthy eating. I'm here teaching you how to healthy eat, but then tomorrow if I have five Zoom calls and I don't get to healthy eat, I become a hypocrite. That's the way I become incongruent. So at 56 years old, I have put work above everything else. It has challenged some of my relationships. It has challenged my sleep. It has challenged um you know the health that I the healthy body I want to live in and I have decided I am not prioritizing work anymore. And I know a lot of you don't have that luxury and some of you do have that luxury but for me work was an addiction. It was an addiction to productivity because I felt so good when I could produce a big day and I could watch how it had an impact in the culture. But it caused parts of my life to fall apart.
Redefining Health Priorities: So in 2026, my health is the top priority. This means I need to get out into the sunlight so that I can reset my circadian rhythm. I need to start moving slowly so I can reset my parasympathetic nervous system. I need to prioritize friendships that bring me joy so I can get more oxytocin to balance my hormones. I need to slow down and take time to have hour-long conversations with my aging parents because I don't know how much longer they're going to be here. I have flipped the priority of work and have made the the holistic health lens in which I choose to live my life a priority. And wow, and we're only to the end of January. It's a hard one to do, but I can tell you it's incredibly rewarding. So, while I might be saying no to late night events, um I am saying yes to more morning time because my morning time fuels me between meditation and reading and sunlight. Um I'm working on resetting my circadian rhythm. I'm working on resetting my nervous system, but I am not putting productivity ahead of my health anymore.
5. No More Overconsuming Information: Number five, this one is also a challenge for me. I am not overconsuming information anymore. I'm a highly curious human and I I'm fascinating by the human body and brain and I find the fact that we can get so much information at at at our fingertips that's like a dopamine hit for me. So, what that might look like for me is I go on a walk with my dog and I put a podcast on and now all of a sudden I'm like hearing that podcast. Or I'm sitting at a stoplight and I reach down for my phone and I start to look at my social media. Or I have an hour between Zoom calls and I start to research down PubMed. I just am. It's the constant overstimulation shoving information into our brain. And why I'm giving that up is I started to notice that in the quiet moments. My brain's like, "What else? What else? Give me something else. Tell me something else". This was happening to me in my sleep where all of a sudden I started to realize that my brain was not didn't have enough stimulation. So if I woke up at 2 in the morning, it was like, "Hey, let me give you a problem to fix". And then I couldn't fall back to sleep. So I have chosen to slow down the amount of information that goes in my brain. I spend a lot of time looking at trees in the forest and looking at the ocean. I ask myself, how many rounds of boredom did I get that day? I am not overconsuming information.
Deep Learning vs. Surface Consumption: Now with that comes the way in which I am I am consuming information because I still love to learn but I'm doing it through books. I'm doing it through long format. So yes podcasts are great just not every single moment of the day. And I am going back to what I call old school learning. I actually live really close to a community college and I've already been taking some classes there just for the fun of it. Get off my computer, get in front of somebody who can teach me how to do something. I'm going back to the way we used to bring information into our brains. The amount of information that we are exposed to every single day is a large reason we are cognitively overloaded. And so what I have chosen and you've heard me say this before here is I want to go vertical and deep on a topic. We have become a horizontal learning environment in this culture. By that I mean we don't we know a lot of people know a lot on the surface but they don't know the depth of a subject. Health is this is one of the things that is driving me crazy in the health world is that I see a 90 second reel, the person tells me I should eat breakfast, I shouldn't skip breakfast. And then I see another 90 second reel and the person says skip breakfast and you'll lose 20 pounds. And you are bouncing from thing to thing to thing, trying to find the next piece of information that's going to change your life. It's all done on a superficial level. I am choosing to go extremely deep into one subject that I'm interested in.
Health Incubator and Critical Thinking: So, you're going to see that actually in my content. For example, I just did a master class on creatine. And it was really fun to just look at creatine from as many angles as possible. And I'm bringing it to you here on my podcast. I'm bringing it to you um on YouTube. And then if you want to talk to me about creatine, come over to my Substack. I've started something called the health incubator over in Substack where you can have conversation with me and other people on a topic. But the problem with health right now is we have shiny object syndrome and we are staying on the surface. Nobody knows how to critically think through health. The only way we can start to learn to critically think is if we go deep into a topic and we look at it from as many angles as possible and try to understand if it's right for us. So, in order to best teach this, I'm getting off the addiction to more more more information, and I'm wanting to go subject by subject. And if you want to join me in that, please join me over in my Substack as we start to look at topic by topic and critically think this through.
Summary and Conclusion: So, there you go. Those are my new my new my new health strategy in 2026. Um, it's not about doing more. It's about removing the noise. It's about training my my brain for presence and patience and joy in the individual moment. It's about shutting down the FOMO brain that is has a fear of missing out or the achiever brain that is wants to have consume more and do more. I am moving into radical presence and staying with even the discomfort that shows up in that moment so that my brain can come out of this modern world and can start to be a more joyful a more cognitively flexible human. And I think right now in a world where we are all pointing fingers at each other and reacting left and right to each other's opinions, it's time for us to each go inward and learn how to critically think about information and how to be in the present moment and how to be in a place of compassion and love with the people that are in the room. The people that are in the room, not the people that are one of your Facebook friends that are on social media. I am coming back to falling in love with the way we used to do it back in the 70s before the phones, before the internet, before we had all of the noise. I'm coming back to old school living so that I can find the happiest version of me. So, there you go. 2026. Let me know what you respond to and what you're giving up this year.