How Menopause Upgrades Your Brain with Dr. Mindy Pelz
Show Snapshot:
Think brain fog, rage, and restlessness means you’re falling apart? Your brain isn’t backfiring—it’s rewiring for power and clarity. Get ready to rethink everything you know about complicated emotions and menopause with Dr. Mindy Pelz, bestselling author of “Age Like a Girl." Mindy helps us reframe menopause as a "neurochemical storm" that upgrades your brain for leadership. Discover the evolutionary science behind this transformation, how your hormonal "girl gang" shifts during menopause, why depression and rage are signals not to ignore, and how postmenopausal women are biologically wired to lead. Learn to work with your body's upgrade instead of fighting it.
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Quotable:
“What we can see when we look at it through the lens of neuroscience, is that the brain is actually changing for your benefit as we go through menopause.”
Transcript:
Dr. Mindy Pelz 0:00
There's a place in your brain. It's called the anterior cingulate in the prefrontal cortex, that looks at your outside environment and matches it to what you feel on the inside, and it will tell you if you are living congruently or not. And we as women have all experienced this where we're just like, I have this feeling I'm supposed to do something different. I've seen my girlfriends do this. I'm gonna move or maybe I'm gonna leave a marriage, or maybe I need a career change. That is neuroscience, that is your body and your brain squaring what it needs to become the best version of you. You Katie,
Katie Fogarty 0:43
welcome to a certain age a show for women who are unafraid to age out loud. I'm your host. Katie Fogarty, beauties, what if brain fog isn't a problem to fix, but instead a signal that your brain is upgrading? Menopause does not have to be an end a decline. It can be your most powerful reinvention. Today's guest is here to help us reframe and rethink the menopause conversation. Dr Mindy Pelz is a New York Times bestselling author. She's the host of the resetter podcast, a leading voice in women's health. She has millions of podcast downloads and over 110 million YouTube views her latest book, age like a girl, which came out just last week, reveals why your brain is biologically wired for transformation after 40, we have a fantastic conversation ahead. You're going to discover why your symptoms are not random, how to work with your biology instead of fighting it, and why this stage of life is definitely not the beginning of the end. It is instead your evolutionary awakening if you are ready to stop feeling like you're falling apart and recognize that you are instead being rebuilt, if you want to reclaim clarity, energy, power, this conversation is for you. Welcome to a certain age. Dr Pels,
Dr. Mindy Pelz 2:03
oh, thank you, Katie, thank you for the beautiful introduction. I love what you said about the book, because it's spot on.
Katie Fogarty 2:09
Thank you. Oh, well, the book was so beautiful. It was really a pleasure to spend time with frequent listeners to the show know that we've explored menopause a lot. I've done more than 70 episodes on this topic, and it's sort of you the different ways it impacts all of our lives. But this book is really, I think, a very different angle and really a unique approach to it. So I wanted to sort of kick off about what I think is sort of the biggest grab of attention. You call this an evolutionary awakening, which really is a radical reframe from the narrative that most of us grew up with, or at least what I grew up with, what sparked this perspective for you?
Dr. Mindy Pelz 2:50
Yeah, it's interesting. I actually started with two statistics that were haunting me over 10 years ago. I heard these two statistics, and you may have talked about them here. One is that between 45 and 55 that decade of life is the most common time for a woman to kill herself, and 70% of divorces over 40 are initiated by women. And when I saw those two statistics mixed with what I was seeing in my practice, where women were pouring in unhappy, moody, a lot of irritability and rage, I started to try to figure out what is going on with us neurochemically during this time. And so through a series, I tell the story in the book, but through a series of many interviews and a lot of research, I identified that the brain is changing as we go through menopause. We all know that. We know the brain fog, we know the irritability everybody listening is like, yep. But the part of the story that you don't know that comes from an anthropologist, comes from our evolutionary lens is that the brain gets rid of the neurons. It prunes the neurons away that it no longer needs, and creates new neurons in the brain so that you can move into a new place within the culture. And that's why it's an evolutionary upgrade, because your brain is rewiring itself for leadership. That when we go all the way back to the hunter gatherer days, we go back to the grandmother hypothesis, which I talk about in the book, what we can see we got, we look at it through the lens of neuroscience, is that the brain is actually changing for your benefit. And if you understand what this benefit is, you can actually come out on the other side a happier, more certain, more clear, more energized, more confident human.
Katie Fogarty 4:54
Well, let's talk about that evolutionary change and sort of this liminal space that we all wanted to. Reverse. We all want to get through that tunnel, get out on the other side and sort of access more of this power and this upgrade that you identify, I know in the book you call what's going on in our brains, this sort of neuro logical transition. We have a girl gang, right? That's what you refer to it in the book. And I love that. That cracked me up, because I'm like, I have several girl gangs, and I want my brain girl gang to be working a little bit better Exactly. Walk us through what the girl gang is, how it affects our brain and what's going on when we're kind of in the tumult of the change.
Dr. Mindy Pelz 5:33
Yes, so I was watching so many of my patients have depression, anxiety, their cravings change, the weight gain, like so many different things, that when you start to look at that, is that just estrogen? Is it just the loss of estrogen that causes all these symptoms? And the answer is no, I stumbled upon a research study that showed that estrogen actually stimulates over 12 neurochemicals in our body. Probably does even more, but I chose to focus in on 12. And these 12 neurochemicals not just control our moods, but they affect our memory. They infect our metabolism, they affect our sleep. And so the way I like to look at this is, if you look at estrogen like the popular girl, the popular girl who's in high school, who sits down at the lunch table and all her little posse of girls comes and sits next to her, and they do whatever she does, and they do whatever she they dress like her. They do what she tells them to do. And then when she gets up from the table and decides to leave, the girl gang gets up and goes with her. Well, that's what happens with estrogen. With estrogen goes dopamine, serotonin, melatonin, glutamate, GABA, oxytocin, BDNF, like acetylcholine, like major neurotransmitters, and some that aren't necessarily neurotransmitters, but affect your mood and metabolism, these are all left in jeopardy. And the beautiful thing about the girl gang, and the way I laid it out in the book, is it's your lifestyle that can actually bring the members of the girl gang back. And that was, I called it the girl gang, because I really think that we take hormones a little too seriously, and they all have these really fancy names. And I wanted to, like, get across to my following and the people that were reading this book, like, look, let's be playful about bringing these members back.
Katie Fogarty 7:30
Yeah, it's such a sticky concept. You know, it's like, lodged in my brain. I love estrogen as the popular girl. I think everyone who's ever gone to school and ever sat at a lunch table completely recognizes that, like when estrogen walks out the door, everyone else is like me too. I'm going with you. So we're going to explore in a minute how your book offers these lifestyle recommendations, sort of the three part framework that you bring to help us, the reader, kind of move through this entire transition and think about menopause as this sort of neurological upgrade. But before we do that, I want to take a minute you said at the beginning that there you had patients flooding into your door, as you yourself talk about in the book about this sort of, what you call a menopausal breaking point, and in the book that you share that yours was so much dramatic you were writing this book navigating some of the changes of menopause while you were dealing with a major life event, your home in your neighborhood was being decimated in the recent California fires. It was obviously traumatic, but extremely dramatic, and you say also in the book at the beginning that we need to start thinking about menopause as a neurochemical shift, which offers, quote, a mirror, one that reflects a true version of who we are. This reflection offers us an opportunity to change what no longer works in our life. So I'm just curious, like you had a lot going on, you were navigating a lot, what personal changes did you need to to to go through in order to look in this mirror and say to yourself, you know what? I need to take time to create this and bring it out into the world.
Dr. Mindy Pelz 9:09
So it's such a beautiful question, and I think a lot of women hit this point somewhere in our late 40s, early 50s, where we just can't tolerate the amount of stress, the amount of obligations, the amount of what I call wrapping ourselves up to please everybody around us. And for me, when fast like a girl, came out into the world, it was published in December of 2022 and it was literally just a book that I had discovered a fasting rhythm for women that was working in my office, and I wanted to write about it, and I wanted to share it with the world, but I literally had no idea what it was like to put a best seller into the world like that, and we've sold over a million copies of that book. And. That put me on a fierce path of podcast interviews and plane flights and in and out of hotels. And so I was already feeling quite frazzled and exhausted, and I had made a decision that I was going to after two years of that, I was going to come home and just start to rest. And then parts of my life started to fall apart. I lost a very good dear friend died of a heart attack at 52 years old. That shook me, and so I was had gone down to a house we were renting in LA that was like a getaway home for me to write and create, and I was resting and relaxing, and the Palisades fires came through, and I was there that morning, I dramatically evacuated from my neighborhood with houses on fire and embers everywhere. I literally that morning, thought that could have been the last day of my life. I was very nervous about dying as things were burning around me, and I ended up three times evacuating in about 36 hours, because everywhere I went, every house I went to, every place I went, the fires seemed to be following me. And so I share the story in the book, but the relevant part to all women is that that was my breaking point. It took one major event where I was like, I can't do this anymore. I can't keep showing up for everybody else. I need to stop I need to slow down, and I need to start to nurture and take care of myself. And so I did. I actually isolated myself for about five to six months I was writing this book. I came to this beach town that I'm living in right now, Santa Cruz, California, and I just every day I wrote, got into nature and healed myself. And I share the story, not for empathy. I share the story because so many women go through that where we're doing everything for everybody else, and then we hit something where we cannot hold on to that level of stress anymore. And this is very, very common in the perimenopause menopause journey, where all of a sudden we break. And I think this is why women kill themselves during this time. This is why divorces end, because we're not bringing this kind of conversation open to the world to discuss like we are changing. Our brains are changing. We no longer can go through self sacrifice for everybody else. We have to start to take our life back. Mine was more dramatic, but a lot of women are discovering this through the process
Katie Fogarty 12:39
100% I mean, the very first show I ever recorded is called, you know, it's toxic rage, the new hot flash, because I was having bouts of volcanic fury. I recently contributed an essay to midlife anthology called midlife private parts, which talks about me like shouting at my beloved husband of 20, you know, nine years I want a divorce in our gravel driveway. I mean, it was just like, I'm like, what is happening? I felt like my brain had been hijacked. My sense of so that's sort of that dislocation that you're talking about, this sort of bouts of mood swings, in the sense that I've had so much in my hands, it's all going to collapse, or I am. Is a very, very common, common experience that women go through, and if we're lucky, we make it through the other side. I'm still married. I love my husband. Me too. You know, I did what I needed to do to manage that period of time and that sort of these outsized emotions and mood swings that I was going through. Mood swings, by the way, sounds very Genteel. It was really a mood swing. It was like volcanic fury. But you say that these aren't necessarily problems, obviously, they're problems if we don't manage and handle them, but they're biological signals. So let's talk a little bit about that, and then move into some of why navigating this phase of life with some of the tools that you outlined in the book. Is this upgrade. Is this? You know, it's this emotional recalibration, but it's also a physiological one too, where our brains are literally changing walk us through that concept.
Dr. Mindy Pelz 14:08
So what I found in the research that I did is that there's two major neurochemical shifts that are going on. One is you're losing, you know, you've hear this a lot, you're losing part of your gray matter, but that's on purpose. You're losing neurons that you no longer need for the next phase of your life. This was Lisa moscone's work. We start to lose parts of our brain that were the people pleasing parts, the parts that we want to fix everybody's problem and the parts that we want to perform for people, so we will feel loved. Those neurons are sloughing away, and new neurons, neurons of independence, neurons of truth, telling, neurons of leadership, start to form. So we have this neuronal change. Then you mix that with the girl gang. The girl gang is all in jeopardy, and I call it a neuro. Chemical armor. It's like our neuro chemical armor comes down, and the things we've been holding on to, we can't hold on to them anymore. Now we can say depression, anxiety, irritability, rage, they're all a low estrogen problem, and we should put some creams and some pellets and some patches in our body. And I'm not saying don't do that, but what I am saying is, do not miss the moment. Why are you depressed? So I can tell you, I've learned that depression shows up when I am doing things in my life that I don't want to be doing. Julie Gottman, one of the top marriage experts, told me one time that resentment shows up when we say yes to the things we really want to say no to. So whenever depression shows up, I'm like, wait a second. I'm starting to say yes to things that I don't want to do. Am I putting myself first? Rage and irritability, I actually think a lot of women, have suppressed anger, have suppressed rage. I'm not here to get political, but we do live in a patriarchal world. We live in a world that is built for men. It men win in this world, and women are told to perform and look a certain way. And a lot of us have been playing that game. I grew up in a very loving family where my mom taught me that to be a supportive wife, you always put the relationship first. Nowhere in there did she tell me to put myself first. She told me the relationship becomes before me. So everything I did was put everybody else before me. And so yeah, rage showed up for me because I was tired of doing that. And I just point this out, because I think we don't want to miss these horrible emotions that show up and just slough them off as low estrogen. You are going through a massive neurochemical shift, and you are going to see yourself in a view that you haven't seen before. So get in touch with these emotions and understand what parts of your life you might need to change, or areas you might need to start to speak up for yourself. That is the gift, that's the opportunity, and if you do it, I mean so many women I talked to that use this moment to finally tell their truth. This doesn't mean you have to leave a marriage. This doesn't mean you blow up your whole life, but it means you stop keeping yourself quiet, and that you have an opportunity now to speak out and say what you really need.
Katie Fogarty 17:41
Yeah, this show is all about getting loud. You know, we are loud about how we're feeling. We are loud about our age. We're allowed about, you know, our experience right now and and by the way, Mindy, you're always allowed to get political on this show, either. So I, you know, I really like, I'm nodding in agreement with a lot what you're seeing, what you're saying. I had a wonderful therapist on the show early in season one, specifically about anxiety. And she was saying, anxiety, it's like a canary in the coal mine, all of these, these emotions that you're feeling, which we sometimes in our, you know, like a world that prioritizes, like, positivity and resilience and grit and hustle harder when negative emotions pop up, we're often stuffing them down and ignoring them as a peril to our mental health and our relationships. We're heading into a quick break right now, but when we come back, I want to talk a little bit about what happens when our modern lives are sort of clashing with our primal design the negative emotions that we feel, that all that women are forced to hold, and what happens when we move through this phase of life and how it changes. We'll be back in just a minute. Mindy, we're back from the break in your book. You really divide the book into a three part framework. We're going to touch on all of them, and in a minute, I want you to share with our listeners how the book is organized, and how you would love to see them interact with it and engage with it. But first, I want to ask you a little bit about something that I really resonated with. Our modern lives right now are not designed in alignment with our best mental health. We have too much going on women in this culture. I'm talking specifically about the US are really and it's probably around the globe, are forced to carry a lot, and oftentimes too much. Women have tremendous capacity, and people take advantage of that. So when we are out of alignment with our primal design, what happens and why is it so important, in your mind, after writing this book, for us to get back into alignment?
Dr. Mindy Pelz 19:41
Yeah, and you really hit the nail on the head that we as women come roaring into our perimenopausal years already so dysregulated we are sympathetic nervous systems are completely on freeze mode, and freeze mode is where we're numbing ourselves with. Work. We're numbing ourselves with giving to others. We're numbing ourselves with alcohol because our nervous systems are already so frazzled and exhausted. And I do truly believe of all the things we do as we move into this phase of life, that's the first one to start to work at. So when we go and we look, let's go back again to the primal years. What happened? And this is comes from Kristen Hawkes. She's an American anthropologist that's a huge champion of something called the grandmother hypothesis. And the grandmother hypothesis says that what happened to women when they stopped having a menstrual cycle back in the primal days is that they were moved to a different position in the tribe. They were elevated to a position of leadership. And what that meant is every single day, the grandmothers would gather around in the morning, and they would go trek for seven hours a day, and then they would come back. They go look for food, they gather food, and then they'd come back and they would feed the tribe, while the men would go off for days looking for a big animal kill. They would come back 3% of the time. So it was the grandmothers that had to fill in the food so that we could keep our species alive. And then at the end of the day, what the grandmothers would do is they'd gather with each other and sit and rest and be in connection with each other. Okay, let's break that down. We are at an evolutionary mismatch that is not what's happening in our culture. We are so scared of aging that we had to put a word anti in front of it, and then we had to create a whole commercial business around making sure that you don't age, because so many women are worried about being invisible and being lonely and not being worthy or not being enough as they get older. And if you go back to our primal roots, that's not what happened to us back then. We actually got elevated to a new position in the culture, into a position that was needed. So when I talk about our evolutionary design, where I get really riled up is we should be in leadership training as we go through this. People should be asking us, leaning in on our wisdom. Companies should be using the post menopausal brain. It's the best brain a woman has ever had. Mix that with some life experience, and you really have a gem within your company. But that's not what we're doing. And so women are so scared that we're freezing our faces and we're dying our gray hairs, and we're making sure that you don't know our age, because we don't want to be invisible, because we are not teaching women that this is the time for you to step into truth and leadership, and we need you now. Instead, we're worried about being tossed away.
Katie Fogarty 22:57
Yeah, I know it's it's insane. I've had so many conversations on the show about this. I doing my research. I looked at your podcast. I saw that you've interviewed Dr Amanda Hansen, the midlife muse, who I had on early in my thing. And we had a wonderful conversation about this drop it, I mean, but the cover art of my show is me wearing a sweater saying age out loud. And I got into this because I am a career coach. It's my day job, and I work with so many executives who are so afraid of aging out loud in their careers, and it really, like broke my heart, and then it pissed me off, and I was like, why aren't we able to claim our years of experience? We're not going to shift the cultural conversation if we're not willing to age out loud. And that's what this show really leans into. Having created the show, though, and interviewing a bunch of experts, and having gone through it myself, I learned that aging does come with challenges that we need a fresh toolkit to address, like caring for aging parents and menopause and all these different topics, bone health, things we didn't think about in our 20s when you know, collagen was an endless supply. So it's true. You know, I completely agree with you on this, this notion of aging. So that's the first part of your book, right? It's the philosophy behind aging, like a girl. It's this cultural awakening, this neurochemical change, how we reconnect with our authentic selves. But your second part is really a practical toolbox, right, which is rooted in evolutionary biology, because this is not your first rodeo for listeners, and there probably aren't many who don't know you, but you've written a number of books, you've had a podcast, and you've been creating incredible science backed content for women to educate and help them advocate. And we're going to talk a little bit about what you recommend for your tools. And then the third part of your book is sort of the path to becoming a new you. It's this deep inner work that we talked about. You call it butterflying yourself. It's embracing our age, embracing who we are. So this is the three part framework your book is organized into. So for our listeners right now who are going to click clack over after they listen to this and buy the book on Amazon or book shop. Org or wherever they buy. How do you want them to interact with the book? Is it reading it straight through? Should they go to the glossary and pick out the sections that look most intriguing to them? What is your recommendation for getting the most out of the book?
Dr. Mindy Pelz 25:14
Yeah, I love that you're asking me this. I don't know why more people don't ask an author. How do you want me to read the book? Because when you're writing it, you're really thinking about how a reader will consume it. So I'll tell you, what I've told some of my friends that I've sent advanced copies to is you definitely need to read the intro in order. Because what I did is I didn't just look at the evolutionary lens, but I looked at the neuroscience. I looked at the societal impact that and messaging on women. And then, of course, I had to bring in a mystic and look at a little more spiritual side. And so I tried to blend all four of those together. So there's a deep philosophy that of aging that I hope you grab from that. So start there, part two and part three are very different. So part two is a toolbox, and I put pictures in there and cheat sheets, because I wanted women to look at each chapter and go, okay, my mood is low. Okay. What is she saying that we should do for my mood? And then you would just read the whole mood chapter, and at the front of the chapter is a little cheat sheet. So after you read it, you can come back and you have the cheat sheet, or maybe you're like, I'm not sleeping well, then read the chapter on sleep. You don't necessarily have to read part two all the way through. Go to the piece, to the chapters where you need help? Do you need help with mood, memory, connecting? Maybe your relationships. I have a whole chapter on relationships. Maybe it's sleep, maybe it's exercise, so you can piece that apart the third place, I really had fun in the third part, because when we go to Transform, there's actually a process that is helpful to know you're going to go through just like the stages of grief. That's been a very common thing out there in the zeitgeist, that you're going to go through these different stages. I wanted women to see themselves in the transformational stages, so I took Joseph Campbell's work and his hero's journey, and I blended it with Clarissa pincola Estes work on aging that she calls life, death, life cycle. I blended those two together, and then I show you why each stage. There's five of them, how it rewires your brain. Let me give you an example. One of the things we don't give enough brain credit to is resilience. Learning how to be resilience equates to neuroplasticity. So when we are having a culture that has women so scared of getting Alzheimer's, which is the opposite of neuroplasticity, it's neurodegeneration, where in that conversation are we explaining that when you actually move through difficult times, you improve brain function, and I show you the science behind that. So if you're looking for more of that emotional like, how do I start to shed parts of me, of my personality and identities that I don't really want to hold on to anymore? And how do I step into a new version of me. That's part three, and I show again through neuroscience, there's over 450 peer reviewed journal citations to this book. And I really wanted to break that down from a different lens in part three. I wanted to go more into the mindset, empowerment, transformational.
Katie Fogarty 28:40
Place Is there a section of the book that you enjoyed writing most, and it sounds like it might be three, but I'm just curious.
Dr. Mindy Pelz 28:47
Yeah, it was three because I have to see things through a science lens. And I like woo, woo stuff, but I'm also skeptical of woo, woo things. But if you take something that's like more obscure concept, and you show me that through a neuroscience lens, now it has stuck. Let me give you an example. I talk about something called The hunch. We all get these hunches, like I had a hunch before the day of the fire that I was breaking down, and the hunch is actually there's a place in your brain. It's called the anterior cingulate in the prefrontal cortex that looks at your outside environment and matches it to what you feel on the inside, and it will tell you if you are living congruently or not. And we as women have all experienced this where we're just like, I have this feeling I'm supposed to do something different. I've seen my girlfriends do this. I'm going to move or maybe I'm going to leave a marriage, or maybe I need a career change. That is neuroscience, that is your body and your brain squaring. And what it needs to become the best version of you. So Part Three probably was the most fun for me, although I maybe I should say this, the appendix to men was definitely the most fun. I literally just wrote directly to men, and I wanted women to take the book and hand it to the men in their life and say, just read this chapter. So the appendix to men was the most fun. But as far as geeking me out, the most part three was it.
Katie Fogarty 30:29
So make sure we close with the appendix to men, because we want to, besides just turning this over to the men in our life, I want you to walk through our listeners why and what's in it. But the middle part of your book is the toolkit, and listeners can dive into that if they want more on sleep, if they want more on exercise, nutrition, all these wonderful lifestyle choices that you put into the book and really building on your career. You've had a long career. You've written other books on food and nutrition, you've written other books on menopause, you've written other books on exercise and how it rewires our brain. So this is sort of, maybe the distillation of a lot of experience. But let's talk a little bit about this notion of resilience that you just said, which is so critical for our brain growth, for that upgrade, for that neurological pruning and sort of re flourishing that we can expect in this phase of life. And resilience is something that, like, you can't, like write a prescription pad for it. You're not handing somebody like, this is your workout, and you're going to be resilient after 30 days of this. So talk to us about how you would love to see us build more resilience included in your life, and maybe what going through the writing of this book, how it made you more resilient or not. I'm curious.
Dr. Mindy Pelz 31:39
Well, I'll give you a couple of examples for me. Resilience started when I was finally stood up for myself and so being able to speak my truth to the people I love, and that looked like I can't. Here are certain things I cannot do anymore, and when I did that, I felt horrible, like when the fires hit. I needed to isolate and so I had to tell my husband, peace out. I'm going to go find an Airbnb. I need to get away from everybody, and I need to figure out how to calm my nervous system. That didn't go over so well in the beginning, and he took it personal, but then the more we talked about it, the more we actually started to build new parts of our marriage that has made our marriage even stronger. But for me to stand up for myself that way and just say, I know this is crazy. I know this is totally crazy, and I'm going to do it anyways. The minute I stood up for myself. It wasn't like liberation happened. What ended up happening is I had crushing anxiety. I literally lived with body anxiety that would not go away for about 60 days after the fires. It was horrible. But you know what I learned in that moment? I learned meditation. I learned my morning time and evening time needed to be softer. I learned long walks on the beach. I learned the healing power of nature. I started to do new activities that caused that anxiety to relax. Okay, so not only did I take care of myself, not only am I reinventing my marriage? But I just created a whole new tool set that showed me that if you ever get in this place again, you're going to know that walking on the beach is not just play. It's actually a tool. I started doodling that was another thing every night, because I couldn't get my brain to stop. I would put chanting music on, and I started doodling. I'm not a very good artist. I just I found it so relaxing. So what resilience does if you don't turn away from the pain, is it gives you access to new thoughts and it gives you access to new tools that you now have for your whole life. And I think we live in a culture that comfort. We're just so focused on comfort. We don't even get off the couch to get food anymore. We just go to our phone we order DoorDash and boop. There it is. And I think when we put ourselves in these difficult moments. Actually, what we're growing is a happier, more resourceful brain. So I will tell you now, after this experience, I invite adversity, and my brain says different things, like, if I hit in a tough moment, in my thoughts, my brain's like, you'll find a way out of this. You've found a way out of a lot of difficult moments.
Katie Fogarty 34:42
It's interesting about this idea of comfort, you know, where we think that we are inoculating ourselves against the things that we're scared of feeling lonely or vulnerable or trying or effort, and what we're really doing is stripping ourselves of this sort of neurochemical armor. This ability to train our brain, to understand that we can do hard things, and it sounds like sometimes we wind up in those situations, we've got no choice but to confront it head on, and and how marvelous that you were able to have that conversation with your husband. And I also think I was saying earlier, I'm a career coach, and part of what I coach people to do is sort of to communicate about what it is that they want in order to move forward, because sometimes we just imagine that people are going to help us or read our minds or do all those things. And it's when we're willing to be vulnerable in our careers, but in our relationships that we can get the momentum that we might need, or the support, or, you know, the slow understanding. Because your husband, of course, is going through his own midlife upgrade. That's right where he is. He's doing. So let's talk a little bit about the appendix to men, since we're talking about husbands as a segue, and then I want to just get maybe into one or two really practical things that you want to leave our listeners with in terms of lifestyle choices. So the appendix to men. People are going to buy this book because they're excited and they're intrigued about what it is going to offer to them. They're going to hand it to their men in their lives. What will the men in their lives be getting in that chapter?
Dr. Mindy Pelz 36:07
Yeah, so first I wrote it to them. So I specifically want women to hand the book and just say, read this, so you understand what's going on. And I wanted it to be their chapter, because I was feeling like is a woman going to hand the whole book to a man like he might not want to read the whole book, so they're going to find me talking to the men in their lives. The second thing is that they're going to find an opening to a conversation. My hope is that the men in your life will read this appendix and it will start a new conversation. And my hope is that it will move from the conversation of but you always did it this way, but you're changing. But wait, why are we doing things differently now? There definitely is more of a cultural desire that I've seen in my community, the men want everything to stay the same, and this is not that moment women are meant to change. So I'm hoping that when they read that chapter, they will understand the evolutionary reason why you're changing, the neurochemical reason why you're changing, so it doesn't become your fault. It becomes an opening of a conversation that you both get to now step into maybe I have a lot of friends that are therapists, a lot of functional medicine friends, and I scanned a lot of different doctors and a lot of men, and asked how I could be of the most assistance in these appendices. And I think it's helping the men understand the process, so the conversations can change from one of blame to one of how can I support?
Katie Fogarty 37:51
Yeah, it's such an important conversation. You frequent. Listeners know my 22 year old son used to edit my podcast transcripts. He knows a lot, and he's going to be a better human for it. And I'm on the board of, let's talk menopause, and they do annual menopoes, IMS, and more and more men are coming to these because they want to support their partners. And not everyone knows that those are available, but this chapter is a wonderful tool for people. And I think most of the men in our lives, the men that we want to keep in our lives, quite frankly, do you want to learn and do you want to support us? And if somebody's not interested in reading a chapter, that's time for maybe a different conversation altogether. Agreed? So let's talk. I cannot let you go without talking about nutrition. You've written an entire book on this. It's a big one of the modalities that you practice in when you are trying to help women navigate their health. So what do you see as the focus on you've written a book on fasting, you've written a book about eating for optimal health, you've written a book about how they impact our hormones. What role does nutrition play in the brain rewiring process that we're experiencing, and how can we use it as a tool? And maybe, how do we want to mitigate against, maybe what's challenging?
Dr. Mindy Pelz 39:00
Yeah, I think the first thing that I would want everybody to know is that after 40 your body becomes less sensitive to both insulin and glucose, so that whole metabolic system starts to go awry. And whatever you ate at 35 that kept you skinny and kept you in shape may not work for you at 45 so we've got to start to change the way we look at glucose, which is just a fancy term for when your food breaks down into sugar molecules. All food, it breaks down into these glucose molecules. So one of the things that I really bring forward in this is how do we move away from high sugar? And I'm sure you guys have gone through this here, but we've got to get off the ultra processed foods, the highly refined flours, the highly refined sugars, the bad oils. They may have been okay. You might have gotten away with them in your 20s and 30s, but they are going to give you the worst. Menopause symptoms. If you continue to eat those types of food because you're no longer insulin sensitive, you are moving towards insulin resistance, whether you like it or not, whether it's in your genes or not. So let's get the junk out. Second thing that I brought forward is, I don't know about you, but I've been in the nutrition world for so long that I see people fatiguing with the idea of counting what we call macronutrients. And I see women on all my platforms get obsessed with, is it 10 grams of carbs? Is it one gram of protein for every pound of body weight that I want to be, and we start to get neurotic about this counting. So in this book, I was like, no counting. Let's just look at what good nutrition is, and I call it the primal, menopausal diet. And it's meats. If you eat meats, it's legumes. If you do beans and you're plant based, do legumes, it's lots of fibers, it's low glycemic fruits, it's good fats. And then the hero of the menopausal journey, and that I can find from all angles, is tubers. This is what the grandmothers went out to go searching for. And these are sweet potatoes, potatoes, sunchokes, jikma. So we need to bring in some new foods into our diet. So there's the diet change. The second thing that I think is really important, and especially if people have been following my work, is that menopausal women are going to respond energetically in their brain. They're going to get better energy from a ketone than they are going to get from glucose. And there has been a lot of conversation the zeitgeist about, should menopausal women fast? And I'm going to tell you, if you want your brain to function normally, you're going to want to learn how to at least do some low level fast, 13 to 15 hours intermittent fast, just enough to get a dose of ketones every single day, because ketones are not only energizing to our brains, but they're neuroprotective, so they'll protect from toxins in our environment. They're antioxidants, so they will help to give nutritional support to your brain. And they bring up the girl gang back, they bring GABA back, and they bring dopamine back. So I really wanted in this book to come back to the idea that fasting and eating good food is the Get Out of Jail Free card for brain fog, for irritability, for memory loss. And I show you in that chapter, in that food chapter, I show you exactly why that is, and back it up with science. So if you haven't fasted, now is the time to learn it. You will watch your brain come back online, literally within a day or two, if you start to eat right and tack on these fasting windows.
Katie Fogarty 42:56
And can you define for us what a ketone is? What are ketones? Yeah, thank you.
Dr. Mindy Pelz 43:01
A ketone is a byproduct of burning fat. So I'll say it as simply as I can. When you go without food for a certain period of time, let's just say 12 hours, your brain registers that your glucose levels are going down, and it switches over to another metabolic system, and this system is what I call the fat burning system. And your body goes and finds fat wherever the fat is. So a lot of skinny women will say, Well, what if I don't have any fat? We all have fat. We have visceral fat somewhere, and it burns that fat and makes a byproduct called a ketone, and then that ketone will go up into the brain, turn off the hunger hormone, bring all these neurochemicals and supercharge your brain. So it's a compound, an organic compound, that is made when your body burns fat.
Katie Fogarty 43:55
You had me at supercharge your brain. So I'm gonna do fast. You know what? I actually interviewed Dr Mary Clara haver several years ago when she came on to talk about her book The Galveston diet, which was all about intermittent fasting. And I read that book from cover to cover, and got myself all lit up about it, and then didn't do it.
Dr. Mindy Pelz 44:14
Highly recommend it. There is nothing that will supercharge your brain as quickly and as efficiently and it's free as tacking on fasting windows every day to your life.
Katie Fogarty 44:27
So two last questions for you. I want to ask you what you think of the role of HRT in supporting all of this, because I don't you know this is something that I know from doing shows and being in rooms with women that there is still some confusion, so I would love to hear your thinking on what is the role of HRT in managing the physical changes that come and the emotional and mental changes that come along with this phase of life?
Dr. Mindy Pelz 44:51
Yeah, I think the current science that's coming out is really supporting that HRT is of benefit to women. Yeah. Right? And I like that. I think, you know, in interviewing people for this book, a lot of women in their 60s and 70s are really upset right now because they were told never to go on HRT, and now the exact opposite is happening. So when we look at it through a Research Lens, yes, it's looking very promising, and we have some difficulties with it. For starters, one of the things I'm doing on my podcast is bringing as many cancer experts on, and they disagree. They're not completely sure, and I think we need to know more from a cancer level, although there was a study that came out recently this week saying that if you start HRT in your late 30s, that there's some hope for preventing breast cancer. So we need to look at that. We need to be open to that. Second thing that I feel like we need to address is that it's not like taking an Advil. It's not like you take it and you get a result. Every woman is going to experience the benefits or the negative of HRT differently. I'll use myself as an example. I started because we know we did them 56 and we didn't talk about HRT at 46 and so by the time that I went on it, which has been in the last couple of years, and luckily, I got it before my cycle ended, I played with pellets and creams and gels and patches, and I finally figured out that, oh my gosh, a gel is better than a patch. So there's a learning curve. There's a huge learning curve here. So find a doctor that can work with you. My doctor, what we do is, when we started to play seriously with HRT, every 90 days, we did blood work and we looked to see what was working and what wasn't working, and we adapted. I think this medicine that that is part of the game is you have to watch it closely. So I just want to point that out. The last thing I will say on it is, I think we have the HRT discussion backwards. What we're saying is get on HRT, and then if you need to be able, if you're still not feeling great, try changing your lifestyle. I think it's the reverse. I think we need to go to every woman in her late 30s and early 40s and say, look, let's get your hemoglobin, a 1c down to five, closer to five, so we know you're metabolically healthy. Let's get your nervous system more regulated so that we know that you're not going into this experience completely frazzled. Let's start to detox you a bit and just get some of the beauty and those endocrine disruptors and the estrogen mimickers. Let's just get those out of your diet, then let's see what happens, and if you need HRT, then we put you on HRT. The problem with the HRT discussion, to me, is it's not a one size fits all, and we can't lose lifestyle. We can't lose lifestyle. It is equally as important as putting a patch on 100%
Katie Fogarty 48:00
and they really do work hand in glove. And I agree with everything you said. And I would add also that we need to demand of because we're going to get political, we need to demand that our government does invest money in research so we had better answers to these questions. Yeah, that how this all impacts our health, and that there's just more information that women truly are given information rooted in science, because for a number of decades, frankly, we have been under researched and under invested in, and there are still too many questions about how 51% of the population navigates this change, and we don't have enough tools. But your book is a phenomenal star. There's so many wonderful lifestyle recommendations, and it sounds like you're working with a phenomenal doctor. Women can go to the menopause society@menopause.org or to Let's Talk menopause.org and find menopause trained specialists. So you too can partner with a wonderful doctor. Mindy, my last question for you, your book is really, as I've been saying all along, full of so much great information, but it's really full of optimism. It's written from a viewpoint that when women are given the tools and information, they can make changes to materially improve their lives, their mindset, their emotional I love that you mentioned spiritual. We didn't even have a chance to get into that. That's an important component of the book. We can do the things that are going to transform our lives. You end the book with a very optimistic message, this is your chance to rise. What does rising look like for you in your own life? And how do you want a reader to be impacted and moved by the time they close the last page of the book?
Dr. Mindy Pelz 49:40
Oh so beautiful. I want women to rise in their authenticity. Be you. That's what menopause is. That little girl. This is what I mean. We called it like a girl, because that's my brand. But there really is a deeper reasoning the desires of that little girl. Who was she and why did her voice get muted? It. Why have we changed we? Have we shied away from our authentic selves? So to me, rise means that you finally speak your truth, you finally do what you want to do. You finally live life on your terms, and you put yourself first. This doesn't mean that you tell everybody to fuck off. Sorry. I don't know if we can swear you, but I'll say whatever you want, but it doesn't mean you turn around and you just tell everybody, fuck you, but you say, No more, no more. I'm not putting you ahead of me anymore. That's what rising is to me, and what I'm hoping women come out of this. I'm really if we're going to get really political, what I'm hoping is that we have over a billion women that are going to be in menopause very quickly. Here we're hitting that billion mark. Imagine a billion women speaking their truth. We are living in a world where misogyny is trying to take hold and take us back to a time in which women couldn't vote, women couldn't have checking accounts, women had no rights. That is where we are going, and I personally think it's the postmenopausal woman that can stop this. But if we're too worried about the wrinkles on our face, or we're too worried, we're going to be lonely and we're going to become invisible, we are missing the moment for us to stand up and steer a culture that is very, very misdirected right now into a more empathetic, more understanding way. And it's going to be us. It's going to be us that stops this from happening. And I really, really feel doesn't mean we're letting all women into office, but we have to stop the twisting ourselves up into pretzels to please everybody, and we need to stand up and speak our truth now, and that's what's going to change the world at where we're at
Katie Fogarty 51:53
100 a rising tide lifts all boats, and if we rise in this moment for ourselves, we're going to surround and support our communities and create the world that we want to be living in, and frankly, getting the health care that we deserve. So Mindy, I love that you came on. I I am so appreciative that you found time. I know that you're all over talking about this book. It's so powerful, it's so needed. It really brings not only a toolkit, but an entirely fresh perspective on the menopause conversation. Thank you so much for being with me today, before we say goodbye, though, how can our listeners keep following you and your work?
Dr. Mindy Pelz 52:28
Well, I always tell people the first place to go to learn from me is YouTube. I put out four to five new videos every week on this topic, and I really trying to give you tools there. So that's my passion project over there. I'm on all socials. You can find me almost anywhere. If you want to grab the book, it's at age like a girl book.com, and, yeah, I'm kind of everywhere, but my real heart is in my YouTube. I love doing videos. I love bringing you the science. I go live every tuesday answering your questions. So come find me there.
Katie Fogarty 53:03
This wraps a certain age, a show for women who are aging without apology. What a conversation. This is exactly the type of show that makes me love podcasting so much. It's so incredible to have a conversation that toggles between rage and resilience, primal design, the power of hunches, why we are in a neurochemical shift that is upgrading our brain as we go through menopause and continue to age. Absolutely fascinating. Dr Mindy Peltz is incredible to spend time with. She is so smart, so interesting. She's created a really one of a kind book. It hit store shelves just last week. So this is hot off the presses. I think you'll enjoy the book. I think that you should be sharing the show with the women in your life, spreading the word that this incredible resource is out there. This show was phenomenal. It is also the very last show of 2025 thank you for being with me all year long. We are headed into the holiday break week. I am taking the week of New Year's Eve off. I hope you are taking time over the holidays to rest, recalibrate, celebrate and head into 2026 strong. I will be back the very first Monday of the new year. We have four phenomenal shows that you will not want to miss. It's women who have tools, ideas, resources to really jumpstart your January and send you into 2026 feeling your best, most vibrant self. I am so excited to bring you those shows. Enjoy your holidays. Thank you so much for being a fan and a friend of the show. I see all your downloads. I read all of your reviews. You are truly an incredible part of the a certain age podcast and community. Thank you for being a friend of the show and as always, special. Thanks to Michael Mancini, who composed and produced our theme music. It see you next year and until then, age, boldly, beauties.