“I am not here to tell you what number you should be on the scale (or that you should be super thin). I just want you to love the body you live in.”
This episode is all about why you are struggling to lose weight (and what to do) about it.
In this podcast, Why You Are Struggling to Lose Weight (and what to do), we cover:
- The Stress-Weight Connection and Hormonal Harmony
- Breaking the Weight Loss Barriers & the Impact of Emotional Well-being
- The Hidden Culprits: How Toxins Stealthily Contribute to Weight Gain
- The Power of Building Muscle for a Strong and Vibrant Body
- Prioritizing Sleep for Optimal Health and Fat Burning
The Stress-Weight Connection and Hormonal Harmony
Are you feeling frustrated and stuck in your weight loss journey? Imagine looking in the mirror and feeling that pang of self-blame, thinking your body is working against you. Well, I’m here to tell you that your body is always on your side. It has your best interests at heart, especially when it comes to survival, but sometimes life throws us a curve and causes stress in our lives. It doesn’t distinguish between work overload, relationship challenges, or even sitting in traffic. Each chronic stress moment triggers the release of cortisol, the stress hormone. And unfortunately, high cortisol levels signal to your body that it’s not a safe environment for weight loss. So, where do you begin? Stress management is the key to unlocking your weight loss potential. Take a closer look at your life and find opportunities to slow down. These moments in your day and during the week where you can find solace and relaxation. These moments send powerful signals to your body that it’s safe to let go of the extra weight. Give your nervous system the chance to relax, bring cortisol levels down, and improve insulin sensitivity. Trust me, this approach works wonders for balancing things like your sex hormones and supercharging your weight loss efforts. Remember, weight loss is a journey that requires patience, self-care, and a mindful approach. By addressing your stress, rebalancing your hormones, and making space for relaxation, you’ll pave the way for sustainable and successful weight.
Breaking the Weight Loss Barriers & the Impact of Emotional Well-being
Picture this: you might be in a situation that isn’t working for you– a job that drains you, a relationship that feels dysfunctional, or other stressors that weigh you down. And guess what? These circumstances can take a toll on your weight loss efforts. I chatted about an experience I had with a friend where she started to fast to help aid some of these issues she was having, fell off, and then believed fasting wouldn’t work for her. But here’s the thing: fasting works for everyone. It’s like sleep – it’s crucial for putting your body in a healing state. So, if you’re not seeing the results you expect, like my friend experienced, there may be another underlying reason. For her, she was in a highly stressful marriage. For her, that meant ending this relationship. Now, I’m not suggesting you go out and change your relationship, but what I am suggesting in this episode, is to stop internalizing the idea that it’s your fault when things aren’t working out. When it comes to weight loss, here’s an important truth: chronic stress is a major obstacle. This becomes especially challenging as we enter the menopausal years, when hormonal changes make it harder for us to calm ourselves down in the face of stress. So, here’s my plea to you: stop turning on yourself. Stop thinking that you’re doing something wrong. Instead, shift your focus to your stressful environment. Ask yourself what you can change or how you can change your perception of the stressors in your life. Let’s approach weight loss with love, kindness, and the understanding that stress is a powerful factor we need to address.
The Hidden Culprits: How Toxins Stealthily Contributes to Weight Gain
While you listen to this episode, I want to emphasize how our cells are like little messengers, constantly communicating with each other. They rely on hormones and neurotransmitters to exchange information. However, when toxins come into play, they can mess with this communication system. It’s like a traffic jam, blocking the receptor sites that insulin needs to do its job effectively. This insulin resistance leads to glucose being stored as fat instead of being absorbed by cells. Talk about a weight gain dilemma! In this episode, I walked through some common toxins you’re exposed to that could be contributing to your weight struggles, like tupper ware, saran wrap, even those convenient plastic water bottles. Start with ditching these items and see what a difference it might make, even with your mood!
The Power of Building Muscle for a Strong and Vibrant Body
In this episode, I wanted to dive into an essential aspect of weight loss that often gets overlooked: building muscle. As we enter these transformative years, our bodies go through some major changes. Our adrenals, those little hormone powerhouses, work overtime to handle cortisol, produce sex hormones, and take over the role that our retiring ovaries used to play. This means they need more nutrients to keep up with the demands, which can lead to a sneaky problem – muscle breakdown. Trust me, I’ve been there too!
So, how do we build muscle? Let’s start with what you put on your plate. Protein, my friends! The more protein you eat, the more muscle you can build. Here’s a nifty trick: break your fast with a good amount of protein, around 30 grams. This helps trigger an amino acid receptor in your muscles, making them grow stronger. Throughout the day, aim to cycle in additional 30-gram protein servings every couple of hours. This protein cycling is crucial for muscle preservation and growth. It might sound like a lot, but trust me, your body will thank you! I want to leave you with one last reminder: when you embark on this muscle-building journey, don’t get too hung up on the number on your scale. Remember, muscle weighs more than fat. Instead, pay attention to how you feel in your own skin.
Prioritizing Sleep for Optimal Health and Fat Burning
Getting enough sleep is like having a fat-burning party while you snooze. When you fall asleep shortly after the sun goes down, your body gets prime fat-burning opportunities. Melatonin, our sleep hormone, kicks in, making us more insulin resistant. So, winding down and avoiding late-night meals is key to optimal sleep and better insulin responses. When you prioritize those solid 7-9 hours/night, you activate the fat-burning furnace within. I talk about some really incredible strategies for you to follow in my book, “The Menopause Reset”, which now includes a chapter dedicated to JUST sleep. Remember, quality sleep is a non-negotiable. It’s not just about shedding pounds but also for nurturing your body and mind for long-term vitality. So, set yourself up for sleep success by establishing a nighttime routine, avoiding late-night feasts, and embracing the power of deep sleep. You’ve got this!
Dr. Mindy
Okay, reset errs, I am back with you with another solo episode. And again, what I want to do is address a lot of the questions that we’re getting from both fastonic A girl and the menopause reset, which actually I put out a couple of years ago has been reissued, I’ve added a sleep chapter. And hopefully, it will be incredibly helpful to you as a really good companion to fast like a girl. So I really look at both of those books as being pivotal for those of you over 40 looking to build a lifestyle that works for you. And I’m such a fan of starting with lifestyle. Before we start tricking out into supplements and fancy treatments, we got to nail lifestyle. So in looking at your comments on social media, on the reviews on Amazon, I realized that there’s a portion of you that are really struggling to lose weight. So what I wanted to do in this solo episode was really give you my four specific things that you’ve got to think about. If you feel like you’ve tried everything you’re doing everything I wrote about in the menopause reset, you’re doing everything I wrote about in fast like a girl and you’re just not moving the needle on weight, then this is the episode for you. These are the four things I really want you to think about. So we’re gonna dive into each one of these four. And some of them are going to create a lot of a lot of introspection for you. So stick with me as as I take you through the four. Hey, Dr. Mindy here, and welcome to season four of the resetter podcast. Please know that this podcast is all about empowering you to believe in yourself. Again, if you have a passion for learning, if you’re looking to be in control of your health and take your power back, this is the podcast for you. Enjoy.
Dr. Mindy
Okay, ready, here we go. And we’re gonna start with the hardest one, like, let’s just deal with the elephant in the room. And that is, if you are struggling to lose weight, you’ve got to start to think about the possibility that your stress loads are too high. Now here’s the wit, the best way to look at this is I want you to think about weight from your body’s perspective. You know, I think there’s this moment when we look in the mirror, and we start shaming our self we start thinking we’re undisciplined, we think our body’s working against us. But I have to tell you, your body is always working for you. And if you are in a woman’s body, and men hang in here, because there’s a lot of things that I have to say, on this episode that you’re gonna want to think about for weight loss. But from a woman’s body’s perspective, there are two major priorities. One is to keep you alive. So your body is always going to prioritize survival that’s for both men and women. So when stress goes really high, your body thinks it’s being chased by a tiger. It doesn’t know that your boss just put a bunch of work on your plate, it doesn’t know that you’re having challenges in your marriage, your body doesn’t know that you’re sitting in traffic, each one of those chronic stress moments when you’re perceiving and taking that moment in and your brain is rejecting that cortisol goes up. And as cortisol goes up, the body says this is no longer a safe environment to drop weight. So stress is this huge elephant in the weight loss room. Because you’re going to need to be able to find some strategies to tell the body Hey, it’s okay. It’s safe, you’re safe. We’re not running from the tiger anymore. You can start burning fat. And this was this is a huge one and I will tell you in both books, I tried to give you some really sound advice on how to manage stress and the menopause reset will come out in the end of mid mid to end of June. pre orders are available right now. And I put in there something that I love called the rushing woman syndrome. And the Russian woman syndrome is really cool concept it I didn’t come up with it. Dr. Libby Weaver came up with it. And I love it it there’s a book called The Russian woman syndrome. I talk about it all the time because It changed my life. The moment I jumped into that book, but what was interesting about this concept around being a Russian woman, is that when we are constantly on the go, when we are constantly doing too much when we are constantly under stress, hormonally we shut down. And you have to remember that weight loss is a hormone issue, not a calorie in calorie out issue. And so when cortisol goes up from our rushing woman lifestyle, all of a sudden you become insulin resistant. And when you’re insulin resistant, now all of a sudden your sex hormones go off. So the first thing you’re going to need to address is how are you going to manage stress, and there is acute stress and there is chronic stress. If you live in this overscheduled life, where you’re just rushing from thing to thing to thing, the first tip I’m going to give you under the category of stress is you’re going to have to slow your life down, you’re going to have to create some moments in your week in your day where you just slow down because you will not lose weight. As long as that go go go mentality is present. So that would be the first thing.
Now, let’s address the rushing woman’s lifestyle and men you’re the same way. I do feel like we as women, we actually this rushing lifestyle affects us more when it comes to weight challenges, but men, you could also fall into this category. Now, I also want to talk specifically to my menopausal women and women over 35. You know, I used to say 40, but it appears that we’re now seeing perimenopause hitting around 35. So at 35, what I want you to remember is that your ovaries are starting to wind down and in that winding down your ovaries are going to have to hand over the job of making sex hormones to your adrenal glands. So if your adrenals are working overtime to keep up with this rushing woman’s lifestyle, all of a sudden the sex hormones get thrown off it you become insulin resistant, and you will struggle to lose weight. So let’s start by reorganizing your workweek. Like reorganize it, I can tell you I’ve I’ve talked about this on many podcasts. I’ve written about it in my books, I have a golden rule Friday afternoons, and Sundays are my rest days. And when I’m traveling when I’m speaking at conferences, I make sure that I’m home on Sunday. So I can have that down day before I start Monday and Monday through Thursday, I pack most of my work in and then Fridays a half day Saturday, I do a workout with my reset academy that I love it doesn’t feel stressful to me and Sundays I have off. And I’ve been doing that lifestyle for many, many years throughout my whole Peri menopausal years my whole 40s That worked tremendously well for me to be able to have some down moments in order for my nervous system to relax for cortisol to come down for me to become more insulin sensitive, so that I can balance those sex hormones. So make sure you’re not putting your weight loss your fasting your your keto biotic your red, you know, we tend to have like a rigidity with weight loss. And the problem is, if you take that rigidity, and you map it to this rushing lifestyle, you will struggle. So make sure that you’ve got some time where you’re just chilling out. The second part of that rushing woman lifestyle that I really want to address is the over exerciser. So am the over faster, I’m seeing a lot of over fasters that are stuck with weight loss, as I’m out in the world speaking at conferences, and it’s really interesting, a lot of the women that are struggling to lose weight with fasting right now are actually they’ve been fasting too much. So think about this. This is also a stressful situation if you are pushing yourself with your exercise all the time. If you’re doing one meal a day all the time. If you’re pushing yourself with the extreme health habits, that’s added stress. And this is what I love about living in a female body is that our body is actually demanding that we let up on stress every once in a while. And one of the reasons are the ways your body will tell you it’s been too long there has been too much stress is that it will stop losing weight and in some situations you will start to gain weight I have in my clinic for so many years. I just sat in the trenches was so many women that just told me they couldn’t lose weight. And when I, a lot of them were like moms that had young children, and they just they weren’t sleeping, they were on the go all the time, they were, you know, taking care of everybody else, but themselves. So the first part of this weight loss journey, if you’re doing the 30 day fast teen reset that I mapped out and fast like a girl, if you are trying so hard to lose weight, and you’re so frustrated, I’m gonna ask you to relax, like you’ve got, you’ve got to have some downtime. And in the relaxation, your body will now know it’s safe enough to be able to lose weight. So take that in for a moment.
Second part of that, and I really, I really want to say this with love, and caution.
Dr. Mindy
A lot of you are in life situations that are no longer working for you, you’re in a job, that doesn’t work for you, you’re in a relationship that doesn’t work for you. You’re in, in situations that are incredibly dysfunctional. And you know it, and it’s hard to get out of those situations. And in this dysfunction, some of you are struggling to drop weight, because that situation needs to change. And I’m going to give you an example, I had a good friend who when I first started learning the principles of fasting, was struggling to lose weight. And so I was so excited to teach her what I knew about fasting and, and fasting like a girl and cycling, fasting and food. I was really struggling. You know, I was really excited to share that with her. But she, the minute she tried to fast she struggled. She couldn’t go longer than 13 hours, she would get really dizzy, she couldn’t metabolically switch. She struggled with low carb eating. And she finally came to me one day and said, I don’t think it works for me. Now, I want to stop for a moment, if you’re feeling like it’s maybe your genetics is different, I want to tell you that fasting is very much like sleep, it works for everyone you are putting yourself in a healing state. So if you are butting up against poor results, like my friend was, there may be another reason. And it may be what I’m what I’m walking through in this episode. But what shocked me about this situation with my friend and she ate healthy, wasn’t like she didn’t eat healthy was that she was in a very stressful marriage. And the minute she got out of that marriage, she started to drop weight. And it took a while, of course, getting out of marriage is stressful. And about a year after she got out she came to me and she said fastings working for me now. Now, I’m not saying go out and change your relationships. But I’m asking you what I’m seeing so much as I’m out there talking to you all at conferences is that so many of you are turning on yourself in that moment. You’re thinking that it’s your fault, that it’s not working for you. So therefore, you’re you’re feeling have filled feelings of guilt and shame. And some of you are boomeranging back into food to try to get that dopamine rush because you’re, you’re saying horrible things to yourself. And when it comes to weight loss, we have to remember that you cannot lose weight when chronic stress is around. Now many of us have experienced acute stress where something traumatic happens. And all of a sudden we drop a whole bunch of weight. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about chronic every day GO GO GO GO GO stress mixed with situations in your life that are no longer working for you. And there’s so many of us who have specially as we go through the menopausal years, especially as we start to lose some of these hormones. We don’t have the neurochemical resources anymore, to be able to calm ourselves down in the presence of stress. And so instead of us having compassion for ourselves, we turn on ourselves. And we start thinking it’s our fault. So I want to first relieve you of that, please stop turning on yourself. Please stop thinking that it’s because something you’re doing is wrong and look at your stressful environment and ask yourself what you can change. Or ask yourself how you can change that your perception to the stressors that are going on. And some of you therapy is going to be great. Some of you, there’s you know, you just need to change your environment. This is the whole next book I’m writing right now is based off of the mental health of women after 40 and I’ve got actually 10 different strategies that you’re going to be able to apply To be able to help your stress loads, so that’s coming sit tight. I’m currently writing it because I see the need so deeply for us to have a different approach to managing stress. So that’s the first one look at your stress. Now I can tell you a couple of interesting things I’ve done with stress before I move on to the second. The second thing, one is walking has become a major stress tool for me mindfulness tool. And let’s talk about that for a moment, it’s a really cool tool, because what can happen is when a stressful moment hits, the worst thing you can do for weight loss is to sit, what you want to do when stress hits is go walk, go move us that cortisol, so you can do air squats, you can go for a walk. But if you stay sitting, when stress hits, that cortisol is going to be turned to fat, and the where most of the that fat goes to his around your belly. So during the pandemic, I walked 345 times a day, every time I panicked, and I was like, what’s going to happen? Am I going to be able to pay my employees? How is this all gonna shake down, shake out, I and I could feel the cortisol coming in, I went for a walk. So I could use that cortisol not store it. So please know that when stress hits, walking is probably one of your best tools. Second thing that walking does, and I want, and I want you to think about this in context of how we use social media, you have to remember how primally designed you are. So when stress hits and we go and walk, especially in nature, what’s happening happens is that we start to scan our environment. And that moving our eyes from left to right and right to left, back and forth. And walking forward tells your body, we are moving away from the stress and we are looking for safety. As opposed to what happens when we stress out, we kind of go into this, I’m gonna sit down, I’m exhausted. And then we start scrolling our phone going up and down. I know like my social media, like my Instagram, my Facebook just going up and down and we make our eyes go in a vertical way, not in a horizontal horizontal way. And that increases stress. And then God forbid you see something on social media that you don’t like. And now the cortisol goes up again. So remember that your go to stress move is go for a walk in nature and scan the horizon, I can’t tell you how much that will help. That is an incredible tool. The other thing I want to say before I move on to the next reason you might be stuck losing weight is that you’ve got to give to yourself first. And this is something that I that I figured out. When I was in my early 40s I watched two really close friends dramatically change their lives by moving out of my town, which really upset me, I’m not gonna lie, it was really, really sad. But what I saw happen because they were my best friends is that when they moved to a different city, they, it created this pattern interrupt to their life. And all of a sudden, they started to see things different. They started to see their marriage different. They started to interact with their kids different. You know, dopamine loves novelty. So every day was exciting. And they were exploring a new town. And it like cut that stress moment. And they were able to rebuild the way they wanted their life to be. They were able to create more balance between stressful moments and non stressful moments. And I watched this and I thought to myself, Well, I’m not leaving my town. I’ve lived in the same house for you know, 20 years. I wasn’t leaving. I had a practice I wasn’t leaving. So what could I do to create a pattern interrupt for myself. So what I did is I totally changed the flow of my day. I stopped going to bed late. I went to bed early. I got up at five in the morning. And I gave to myself for two hours before I did anything else. I got up and I meditated. I listened to music. I listened to podcasts that inspired me, and I would read something inspirational. Like I would work out everything I did in those first two hours the day was to give to me. So what I found happened in that moment is because I gave to me first that throughout the day, that part of my brain was no longer saying like, you know, nobody, nobody takes care of me. And a lot of us especially women, we We have that we have that syndrome of like, I’m doing something for everybody. And everybody, somebody needs to do something for me, if that’s your thinking you need to give to yourself first. And so what happened to me is that because I gave to myself first because I filled up my bucket first, as I moved around my day, those things in my head, like, people aren’t giving to me, people don’t understand me. I don’t I never have time for me, all those one liners that I was saying to myself, completely went away, because I gave to myself first. Now, that change in routine was a bit dramatic. Like, I definitely had to think about the fact that I was no good at night, I was eight, nine o’clock at night, I had to go to bed earlier. So you know, there was a change there. The first couple of weeks that I did that. It was tough, I’m not gonna live when five o’clock came around, I was kind of crawled out of bed. But I made a commitment to myself that I was going to do my day different by starting off and giving to me, one of the most popular podcasts that we’ve had to date has been with Hal Elrod, and he talks about the Miracle Morning and how important it is and how he’s healed himself with the Miracle Morning. So go listen to that, because it was profound. But there are so many things you may start to incorporate into your daily life to handle stress, that might be moved the needle the most on weight loss. So that’s why I wanted to start with that one first. Because it’s yes, it’s the hardest one, and it’s the most impactful. So that’s number one. So the second one is your toxic load. So what’s really interesting about writing a book and putting it out into the world is that there’s, we can start to see trends of not only how people are reacting to the information, but we can see trends on what people are reading. So if you go to my Amazon page for fast like a girl, you can see what people in the who read the eBook are highlighting. And the biggest thing that you all are highlighting those of you that read the ebook is a topic that I don’t actually talk enough about, called obesogens. Now, I really thought about this when I wrote fast like a girl, if I wanted to include this topic of obesogens, I had written about it in in the menopause reset, I have a whole chapter on toxins. So if toxins are very unfamiliar to you, please go read that in the menopause reset I have listed in there so that you can see what some of the biggest obesogens are. But for this episode, I’m going to go through for the biggest ones. Before I do that, I want to talk about why toxins make us insulin resistant. So I want you to remember that your cells are like risk. Think of them like they’re receiving communication from other cells from Oregon’s from from your brain, your cells are constantly talking to each other. And they can talk to each other through neuro chemicals. And these neuro chemicals largely fall into two different categories. They fall into the category of hormones and neurotransmitters. Again, I’m writing all about this in the next book. But what happens is when you bring in toxins, you start to block what we call receptor sites. So the the concept behind insulin resistance is that you create, you ask your pancreas to make so much insulin, that it clogs these receptor sites, and there’s a traffic jam there. So now insulin can’t do its job and get glucose into the cell. So what insulin does is it pushes glucose into fat. That’s your classic insulin resistance. But when you have been exposed to a lot of obesogens, you also will struggle to be able to let insulin push glucose into the cell because these toxins will block these receptor sites from allowing insulin to go into to push glucose into the cell. So now you get both glucose and insulin and toxins get stored in fat. It’s a massive problem. It’s such a big problem. We don’t even call it toxins anymore. We gave it a specific name called obesogen, because it is a toxin that’s going to make you fat because it’s going to make you insulin resistant. And it’ll blow your mind when you start to dive into this. That’s something as simple as the plastic water bottle you’ve been drinking water out of over and over again could be causing you to gain weight. There was actually an incredible study that I’ve quoted from any yours I wrote about it in the menopause reset. And it’s the agouti mouse study. And that study showed they took two mice that both had the obesity gene. And they gave them the same amount of food, same amount of calories, same amount of exercise, except one mouse was exposed to BPA plastic, and the other mouse wasn’t. And the mouse that was exposed to BPA plastic blew up gained weight, and the mouse has hair turned completely yellow, you can go look it up the study is a very, very famous study. And it was the first time this was doubted back in the 1990s. It was the first time that we actually saw that chemicals cause weight gain.
Dr. Mindy
And so when they were able to remove that source, this is the part of the story you have to know is when they removed the plastic from the agouti mouse, just the removal of the toxin, not even detail. They didn’t even detox the mouse. They just took the plastic away, the mouse lost weight. So my first recommendation under this category of toxins is no your toxic sources. Plastic is a big one. Go into your kitchen, get rid of all the plastics get rid of the Tupperware, I did this. This is so cathartic. I did this about seven years ago in my own kitchen, and I just tossed anything that was plastic. And we only do do glass now. Get rid of the saran wrap, get rid of the plastic bags, stop drinking out of plastic water bottles, all of that BPA plastic is accumulating and causing you to gain weight. And it’s shocking when you actually think about that.
Dr. Mindy
The second obesogen, that’s a really tough one. And and I, I want to give you some some easy answers for it. Our pesticides and pesticides are everywhere. I mean, I travel a lot. I eat out at a lot of restaurants. And I know that I’m not even at the finest restaurants. I’m not always getting organic food. So it’s hard and glyphosate. You’ve guys, you all have heard me talk a lot about glyphosate is being sprayed on everything in our in our system. Now. You know, if you stop and you think just just next time you’re at the airport, stop and look at how many people are carrying extra weight. We all have a massively different genetics. And yet, how can we all be we’re all eating different food by the way? How could we all be carrying extra weight? And in that, that question lives these obesogens and pesticides is a big one. So can you eat organic. And if that’s too expensive to eat organic, there’s a couple solutions I have for you. One is go and look up the clean 15 and the Dirty Dozen they are listed on the Environmental Working Groups web website. I mapped them out in the Reese in the menopause reset so if you haven’t read or it’s coming out again, it’s going to be here in June. So make sure you get a copy of that I have lists of toxins that will make you fat in that book. So make sure that you know what they are. But pesticides Can’t you know when I when I really understood agouti mouse, the gudi mouse study when I really understood the impact of of toxins on our body but especially on on gaining weight and cellular health. I I stopped eating out as much when I travel, it’s a little bit harder, but you know it when we’re home, my husband and I eat at home more than we eat out. And largely because we don’t want the chemicals that are in those foods. So look at pesticides, what foods can you get organic, it’s really massively important. Okay, you ready? This is another toxin and I get I get it, this one’s gonna like blow your mind. And I I’m just delivering the information so we can chat more about this. You know, join me in my reset Academy because this is the kind of discussion we’re having there. But this is a tough one. And it falls under the category of fat lights. Valet or a chemical that you find in fragrances. So this is your favorite perfume you’ve been wearing for years. This is the air fresheners that you have in your house. This is the air fresheners you have in your car. This is the laundry detergent with a fragrance. Anything with a synthetic fragrance has has these ballots and and phthalates are one of the number one obesogens. Who would have even thought like think about that. Like who would have thought that you’re perfume you’ve been wearing since you were 15 is actually causing you to gain weight, because the Falaise will block those receptor sites. So get the fragrances out I can tell you a my household we do all a central oils, we do diffusers, when I wear essential oils, it we do not when I get into an Uber, a lot of you have heard me say this and they don’t have a Christmas tree or there’s not a lot of synthetic smells, I always thank them. We’ve got to get those synthetic fragrances out, they can potentially be the thing that is holding you back from weight loss. And there’s there may be a part of you right now that that actually rejects that statement. And that’s okay, it’s fine. You but what I asked is try it. I mean, if what’s what’s the worst thing, you try it for 30 days, what’s the worst thing that could happen? You could decide after 30 days that that wasn’t the right solution for you, and you go back to it. So really looking at phalates is important. Okay, and the last category that’s also really important is called P fo A’s. These are forever chemicals. And forever chemicals are really interesting. You know, it just kills me that we have allowed these chemicals in our environment. And I, I’ll tell you a story that I’ve told before and it’s worth repeating. I was helping a woman in my practice, her name was Lanie. And she was diagnosed at 40 with breast cancer. And when she came into my office, we started to unpack all the toxic load possibilities that she had in her life. And one of the things I realized is that she was eating a lot of foods that had these forever chemicals in them. And so I was sharing, I actually went with her to the grocery store to show her which foods didn’t have the Forever chemicals and which one did. And here in California, we have a store called Safeway. And I remember the day she looked at me as I was describing the chemicals that were in food and she said, Mindy, are you are you telling me that the foods they put in a store called Safeway are not safe. And as sad as that moment was I told her I was like yeah, Lani. That is what I’m saying. They are not safe. So these forever chemicals are in your food, and I can’t even tell you what ingredient they are there but they are in your packaging. So staying away from the styrofoam. It’s big in the Styrofoam cups and the containers is really important things with a lot of extra packaging like the plastics also have there’s a mixture of BPA with these forever chemicals. So make sure it’s for starters that you’re moving away from the packaging that food is put in causing this forever chemical influx into your body. They also run meats so your commercial meats are because the grains they feed the animals and commercial meats have forever chemicals in them. So moving to grass fed meats will be really, really helpful. And then the last place I wouldn’t tell you and encourage you to look at is your drinking water, you can go to the Environmental Working Groups webpage, and type in your area code your zip code and it will tell you what chemicals are in your drinking water. If you have not pulled the chemicals out of your drinking water I highly recommend you do if you’re looking for some simple ways to change your drinking water so that those chemicals don’t affect you. Please go listen to the podcasts that I did with Mario from Anna lemme water it’ll blow your you’ll learn more about water than you ever even knew was possible. So but again, like I want to take this back to those of you that are sitting there turning on yourself again, frustrated that you’re not losing weight, thinking it’s something you did when these toxins are everywhere, causing you to be insulin resistant. You combine a high toxic load, that influx of toxins with high stress and you are going to struggle struggle struggle struggle to lose weight. I don’t care what fasting technique you are applying. Those two have to be addressed. We have you can go to my webpage, we have a whole program called our Thrive program that actually helps show women and men how to detox so that you can know how to detox for the rest of your life. Because these these these toxins are not going away. It is highly profitable for companies to have them and use them in food and packaging. They’re on our clothes are everywhere. So be aware of that and I hate being the one that’s delivering that information to you.
Okay, A third on the on the stuck, can’t lose weight checklist is muscle, you’ve got to start building muscle. And this is massively important for those of you that are in perimenopause and menopause. Because what happens is as we go into these menopausal years, if we’re under so much stress, the adrenals are working so hard to manage cortisol and to make sex hormones and to take on this new job that it’s been given as the ovaries are retiring. And so it needs more nutrients. So what it does is it actually breaks down your muscle to get those nutrients so that it can handle the job of making sex hormones. So all of a sudden, you’ll start losing muscle. Honestly, this is what happened to me, I was a competitive tennis player in my college years, I always built muscle very, very easily. And I found that if I hit my 40s, I just my muscle like shrunk. It was crazy. So when you have less muscle, you have less insulin receptors, you have a whole host of insulin receptors on your muscles that help you take glucose in so that it can be used for energy and not stored as fat. So even though you might love the number on the scale, as you lose weight, I mean, that’s what I noticed, I was like, Oh, wow, like, I’m losing weight, but what I was doing was losing muscle. And as we age, you don’t want to lose muscle because A, it’s going to affect your ability to burn fat. And B muscle is the organ of longevity, you need it for functioning and overall functionality. As you age, you do not want to lose muscle. Those of you who who have done ozempic. And you’re and you’re looking you like that as a weight loss tool, I want to give you a very, very huge warning sign. The reason that many of these new drugs that are coming out on the market, that the reason they’re effective, they will move the needle on your scale, they will make you feel thinner in your clothes, because they are breaking muscle down and long term that is actually going to make you gain more weight. So please, please, please be careful of that. You don’t fall in there’s no magic bullet to weight loss don’t fall prey to some of these new weight loss medications. So we’ve got to preserve our muscle. And you can preserve your muscle by doing two things. The first is you actually can build muscle outside of the gym. And it’s called protein. The more protein you eat, the more you build muscle and you need to be getting at least a gram of protein every for every pound of body weight you want to be. So I don’t know what the kilogram measurement is, I’ll have to figure that out for those of you outside of the US, but we need to be eating more protein. So if like if you want to be 130 pounds, you need to eat 130 grams of protein a day to preserve your muscle. If you do less than that, you are going to start to break muscle down especially if you’re a menopausal woman. Now, hopefully you’ve heard me say that, you know, at each meal, I’m such a huge fan of you breaking your fast with a good amount of protein 30 grams will trigger an amino acid receptor site in the muscle so that you can grow that muscle stronger. So try to get that 30 grams. I’m a big fan of protein cycling. So make sure that you’re cycling in every couple hours, another 30 grams and another 30 grams and other three grams. That’s really really important. Be aware that you may be struggling to lose weight because you are not eating enough protein. This is one of my larger challenges with veganism and vegetarian lifestyle. I understand the ethical reasons behind it. I was a vegan for 10 years because of that. But what I eventually learned is that my body does better with protein and when I eat enough protein, I build muscle. When I build muscle, I have more energy I stay the weight I want to be my clothes fit better. Everything in my life seems to work better when I start to build muscle. So number three is pay attention to the fact that you might need to build more muscle. And those of you you know, this was a really hard lesson for me because I used to love to run I still run a lot and I realized that the longer I ran further I ran the more muscle I broke down think think about that for a moment. Think about the difference between like a CrossFitter, and a marathon runner, or even a yogi and a marathon runner. Because yoga you can build muscle in a lot of the, the movements. But when you look at a marathon runner who’s chronically doing cardio, they’re very, very thin with very little muscle on them. That is not what you want. So I had to actually change my my routine, my exercise routine as I went into perimenopause, and really let go of that chronic exercise and put it into the category of it’s for mental health, like the walk, the walk I do is for mental health. When cortisol goes up, I go for a walk. And that’s so that I can not store cortisol, and it’s also for my mental health. But cardio is no longer my go to weight loss tool. If you’re over 40, you’re going to find the longer you cardio more cardio you do, the harder it will be to lose weight. So I switched to a lot of resistance training, hit training, I love a TRX is it those those straps I have in my house, I still go for runs, they’re just shorter. And then I’ll do push ups, tricep dip squats, I’m always working on building muscle because I know how important it is not only to stay the weight I want to be, but also for my overall longevity. So that’s number three, build muscle, build muscle to lose weight. Now, I will tell you one last piece on this is that you have to remember that you might not see the scale change a number because muscle weighs more than fat, but you will notice your clothes fit differently. So just be aware that the name of the health game and weight loss game is more muscle, not the number on the scale. Okay, last one. Number four is prioritize sleep. Now this one’s really, really interesting. For many years, I actually had a woman who ran my front desk that that in my clinic that carried a lot of extra weight. And I used to always wonder, like, I watched what she ate and she actually ate really, really healthy. And yet one of the things she was proud of was the fact of how little sleep she could get away with. And so she and she was an energizer bunny. So I would say from an energy perspective, she was spot on, you know, she was able to keep her energy up, even though she struggled to lose weight.
Dr. Mindy
But what I started to see with her was it was her lack of good sleep hygiene that was causing her weight loss efforts to be have be such a hurdle. So one day she came to me and she asked me What can I do to start to lose weight. And I said, well, a let’s you got to move your body more because she wasn’t doing moving or exercising. And I’m like, and you got to go to bed earlier. And so as she started eating the same amount of food, she moved her body a little bit more, but she still lived a very busy lifestyle. But she started to prioritize sleep going to bed earlier. And waking up earlier making sure she was getting seven to nine hours of sleep a night and she started to drop weight. When you go to sleep, you are burning fat bottom line. So if you’re not asleep, within a couple of hours after the sun goes down, there’s a large chance that you’re missing out on Prime fat burning opportunities. Now in the menopause reset, I just added a mega chapter, it’s 20 pages long, it was really important if this book was going to be reissued. I wanted to have all of my favorite sleep packs. It’s now in that book so you can you can get it there. And one of the things I talk about is that when the sun goes down, melatonin kicks in and when melatonin goes up, you become more insulin resistant. So you’ve got to make sure that as melatonin comes on the scene a you’re starting to wind yourself down getting ready to fall asleep and be you don’t want to be a eating your meal when it’s dark out and then going to sleep because a you won’t get a good night’s sleep and be melatonin is on the scene and now you’re more insulin resistant. The meal you eat at nine o’clock when it’s dark out. And the meal that same meal at five o’clock when it’s laid out will have vastly different insulin responses in your body. So eat earlier when it’s laid out. Make sure you’re getting to bed once it gets dark and prioritize sleep and if you’re struggling to sleep. I’ve got all the sleep packs in the new book. Those of you who love your bio biometric wearables, like the aura ring, look at your deep sleep because this is where you will start to see how your brain is detoxing. When we go to sleep, what happens check this out, this is like, this like blows me away, when I actually stopped to think about it. When you go to sleep, the first couple of hours, your body and your brain start doing a scan of what in the body needs to be repaired. So the brain is talking to the liver, the brain is talking to the gut, the brain is talking to the adrenals, the kidneys, every single organ is communicating with the brain. And asking the brain is coordinating the release of cells in those organs that are not working, right. That is all going on, like you know to in the morning, I’ve talked a lot about this, that at two in the morning is when the liver starts to dump the stored sugar that’s in there. Well, that’s because the brain is saying, Hey, we’re seeing some glucose come down. I know liver you have stored sugar, go ahead and dump it now to in the morning is the perfect time to do that. So every single organ goes through this repair phase at night. The other thing is that you were so brilliantly designed that your brain actually shrinks at night so that your cerebral spinal fluid can come up from your your base of your sacrum go up into the brain and start to clean out any toxins that are in the brain that are holding you back from good hormonal control. So this is we’re back at the obesogens creating this disruption not only cellularly. But through the brain we’re at we’re back at the fact that you’ve got to have deep sleep to be able to detox. And you need about two hours of deep sleep. I’m a huge fan if you wanted. If you wanted to know like why can I lose weight, what kind of measurements can I look at, get a glucose monitor and get a get a an aura ring and put those two together and you will start to see if how many glucose spikes you have, you can start to see how well your body is resting at night. Those two pieces when I coach people, those are the two we start with so that I can see what’s going on with a person’s lifestyle. So super important that you make sure if you’re struggling with sleep that you understand where the struggle is. And if you’re struggling with with glucose regulation that you see what your foods are doing to your glucose levels. So there you go. Those four things I consider an add on to the five things I wrote about the five lifestyle changes I wrote about in the menopause reset, and the principles of fast like a girl, and how you can move in and out of different eating and fasting styles. When you when when if you have an active cycle. If we put those two books together, and then this podcast you now have everything you need to know about losing weight. So create a checklist for yours yourself. Try if you haven’t tried the 30 day fasting reset, we’re watching people get some amazing results with it. Because it is creating this metabolic switching in and out of sugar burner and fat burner. In the menopause reset there are these five different lifestyle changes I recommend you do and I put a checklist purposely at the end of each five. So that you know you can work those principles those, those should be your go twos so that you can unstick your weight unstick weight. But I’m going to end on on this thought. Please, please, please don’t think that you are genetically not designed to lose weight. The body is holding on to weight for a reason. Now some of us do have you know bigger, bigger hips than others. Some of us are have larger bone structures. Some of us are tinier. Yes. You know, I remember this one time I was in the Olympic Museum in Lake Geneva. And there was a picture of about 20 different female athletes all at the top of their game. They were all gold medal athletes. And you could it was such a beautiful example of how different a woman’s body could be and still be a high performance body. So I’m not here to tell you to be a certain number on the scale. I’m not here to tell you that you’re going to be super, super thin. I want you loving the body live in I want you to look in the mirror and say nice things to yourself. I want to I want you to love when you put clothes on in the morning that is health. You know regardless of what’s going on, on that scale. I always say this if you carry 50 extra pounds, and you absolutely love the body you’re living in and your blood work shows me that you’re metabolically healthy. Amazing, then maybe that’s you’re not supposed to drop that 50 Extra pounds. But from what I have seen that extra weight is extra storage it’s a storage unit for toxins it’s a storage unit for hormones. It’s a storage storage unit for things that do not serve the body. So your body and was so smart I decided to put it in fat as opposed to put it around your organs because you were built to survive. So again, you know, let me know how this how these tips work for you. I want you to love this incredible body of lived in your living in because when you get healthy, everybody around you wins. It’s not a solo journey. And when you love your body you will find that your your relationships improve and your your your your work, life improves everything in your life will improve when you love living in the body that you’ve been given. So as always, I hope that helps and I will look forward to seeing your reviews. And don’t give up on yourself. There is a there is a door out to weight loss and I hope this episode gives you that door. Thank you so much for joining me in today’s episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we’d love to know about it. So please leave us a review share it with your friends and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.
// RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
- Fast Like a Girl
- Pre-Order The Menopause Reset
- Miracle Morning with Hal Elrod
- Dr. Mindy’s Reset Academy Membership
- Thrive Program
- Mario Brainovich with Analemma Water
- The Agouti Mouse Model
- Effects on Antidiabetic Drugs on Muscle Mass in Type 2 Diabetes
Hello, another super helpful episode, thank you! Do you have a link to pre-order The Menopause Reset for those of us in the UK please? Thank you so much for all your help and support! ????
Thank-you. I am new here and this was quite helpful. I just started fasting a couple of months ago but I am struggling on how to switch to the ketobiotic diet whilst also cooking for my husband and 5 kids.