Neil Dudley: Okay, everybody, this is the Pederson’s Farms Podcast. It is this journey to find the most intricate details about where your food comes from and bring them to you. And Dr. Mindy is joining the show today. Thank you, Dr. Mindy, for being here. For our listeners that might not be familiar with you, just quickly, how did you become the expert of fasting, an author of a book called Fast Like a Girl? Where did that come from?

Mindy Pelz: Right? This is the question I keep asking myself all the time. As far as my fasting journey and where I’ve been with the information, I really came to fasting to solve my own health problems. And in my early 40s, I was looking for a solution to why I wasn’t sleeping, why my energy was tanking, why my mental clarity was going off. And I came across, at that time, there was only a handful of studies on fasting, and I came across a few of them. And I thought, well, gosh, I could fast for a day. I could maybe intermittent fast for a day. And once I started applying it for a day, I felt good. And then I applied it for a second day and then a third day. And before you knew it, weeks went by and I was like, this is amazing. Something has supercharged me. So, from there, I just spent endless hours in the science and trying to understand what fasting does to our body. And each time I understood something new, I threw up a video on YouTube. And before I knew it, we had millions of comments coming through on people who are having incredible results with fasting. But more importantly, we had a lot of women that were struggling with fasting, which is really, Fast Like a Girl is all of the questions that I’ve had from so many women about fasting now will be in a book. So it’s kind of you know how life works, it’s like you open up one door, and then you the next door appears and the next door. And before I knew it, I’m now one of the leading experts on fasting. So, it’s been a fun ride. And it’s such a powerful tool.

Neil Dudley: I so agree. Like, I’ve lived that truth. And I don’t know anything about it. I do this simple kind of intermittent fast. I don’t eat before 12 noon, don’t eat after 8pm and have coffee in the morning. Maybe- So how do you like that? Is that good? Is it not good? And then don’t let me forget, I want to explore the differences between men and women on these things, too.

Mindy Pelz: Yeah, of course. Well, this is like the million dollar question is about what do you drink in your fasting window? I would say what you just said is perfect. And what we want to do with fasting is create a lifestyle that works for us. So, people tend to think of fasting as being rigid. But that’s not the way I teach it. I teach it where it should be flexible, and it should fit in really effortlessly into your lifestyle. So, if you love coffee, and you get up in the morning and you want to drink coffee, there’s some really good studies showing that coffee can actually deepen our ability to get into what we call ketosis. So, I don’t know if you put cream in that coffee, but-

Neil Dudley: No, no black coffee, that’s my jam, they say.

Mindy Pelz: That’s the way to do it is just straight black. And it only will help you not only get into ketosis, but it helps with something called autophagy that really cleans the cells out. So especially if it’s clean coffee. Is it clean coffee?

Neil Dudley: Well, why did you have to ask that question?

Mindy Pelz: If there was only one thing to pick on your intermittent fasting cycle, that would be it. 

Neil Dudley: I’ll tell you what, I drink Community Coffee, dark roast, so the chances of that being clean is probably unlikely. So now here’s the reason I knew that was coming. I just got off listening to your episode with Danica Patrick. And by the way, folks, once you hear this conversation, you got to go listen to that one. And I’m sure there’s many more, but that’s just the most recent one that’s in my mind. And some of these same topics are explored, but they get really deep, spend a lot more time kind of on specific pieces with women, menopause, all these things that we probably aren’t going to have the time to dive in as deep as we want to on those things. But go listen to that. Follow Mindy’s content. You’re going to learn those things because I know as a husband of a woman, it matters to me. As a dad of daughters, it matters to me. So it was really valuable to me and I appreciate you for doing the thing you do because it slapped me kind of upside the head and said wake up, this is important stuff, and there’s people you really care about in your life that maybe they’ll hear it when you tell them or maybe you should tell them to go pay attention to Dr. Mindy and just those things makes it really accessible for the education. So high five, congrats.

Mindy Pelz: And you know what, thank you for hearing it. And this is one of the things that I’ve been really talking to everybody about is women are driven by hormones, and our moods are dependent upon how balanced these hormones are. And fasting is a beautiful way to balance the hormones. So, when we talk hormones, men tend to tune out. But to your point, you have a wife, you have daughters, so it affects you. And if they can learn how to live in accordance with their hormones, your life is going to be a lot easier.

Neil Dudley: That’s the closest place it affects me. If I really pay attention, I’ve got female counterparts in business, I’ve got team members that are- so, the idea that it is not important to me at all or in any way or to you as a listener, like if you’re a man, you need to wake up and realize this affects people in my life. I don’t know if we can go around preaching you got to pay attention to these things, but we might- there’s never really any issue just admitting and saying, hey, I care, you might want to go listen to Dr. Mindy; it just might be something that works out to be really beneficial for you. Okay, so now then, basic building blocks, what is fasting?

Mindy Pelz: Oh, it’s such a good question. So, I think the term time restricted eating really helps people understand fasting a little bit better. Because I think we think of fasting as you just go without food. And yeah, you do, but what most people don’t realize is that you’re just taking the same, if you want to just take the same amount of food, the same type of food even, and compress it into an eating window of the research says six to eight hours, leaving the rest of the time to fast, you’re giving your body a metabolic rest. So, fasting, in its purest sense, is that the blood sugar has gone down in your body. And it’s forced your body to switch over into a different way of making energy, which is called your fat burner system, or a lot of people know it as your ketogenic energy system. And if you’re eating all day, if you never have gone more than eight hours without food, you haven’t even tapped into this energy system. You don’t even know the wonders that are waiting for you over there. So, when we talk about fasting, we’re saying that we’re going without food for at least 8 hours. If you go without food for 12 hours, you start to see some neurochemical changes. At 24, you get more; 36, 48, 72, like each hour that goes by without food when this blood sugar is coming down, more healing happens in the body. So fasting is that. It is exactly that moment where you’re not putting food in and you’re letting the body heal itself. And it depends on how long you go will depend on the number of results or the type of results you’ll get.

Neil Dudley: Tell me about that a little bit. I found that so fun to think about it this way. So, if I remember correctly, maybe up to 13 hour fast has a certain benefit. 13 and beyond to maybe, what was it, 24. Tell everybody that.

Mindy Pelz: Yeah, it’s so funny because one of the first things I did on YouTube that everybody got excited about is I created a timeline showing that this is what’s happening at each moment of your fasting journey. And this is what it looks like. At about 12, 13 hours, we start to see that you upregulate growth hormone. Now let’s talk about growth hormone for a moment. You’re not getting as much growth hormone after 30. So, at 30, our growth hormone production goes down, which accelerates aging. And I don’t know a lot of people who want to accelerate aging. The other thing we know at 13 hours is inflammation goes down. We know that fasting insulin starts to go down, so we see glucose go down. Even cholesterol can start to- toxic cholesterol can go down. So, everything, all those metabolic markers that so many people are suffering with right now, with just 13 hours of fasting, you start to see changes in those markers and you start to see them go down. Now, for men at 13 hours, testosterone starts to go way up. So, for men, about a 1300% increase in testosterone at 13 hours. For women, it takes us about 20 hours for that testosterone to start to get to that, peak to that level. So, I always throw it in at that 13-hour mark so that people, especially men, know if you’re trying to bring up testosterone, that’s a great plan. Then at 17 hours, we start to hit something called autophagy. And this is super interesting because autophagy is where our brilliant body goes, you know what, there hasn’t been any blood sugar coming in. I don’t sense any food in the gut. I’m going to go ahead and make the cells more efficient. So, they turn within, and they start to clean up the inner workings of the cell. The other thing that happens, and we call that autophagy, the other thing- 

Neil Dudley: Why is that such a big word? Like that word just confuses me. Can’t we just say, clicks into body cleanup? No, I’m just-

Mindy Pelz: Or body detox. A lot of people think it is- I mean, in the most simple way, it’s a cellular detox.

Neil Dudley: Why when I hear the word autophagy, I must be confusing it with some other medical term where I feel like muscles shrink. Does that ring a bell with you? Like maybe it’s autophagy instead of e-tophagy?

Mindy Pelz: Well, there’s a lot of- so a autophagy is basically the cells are eating themselves. So yes, there are muscle words where the muscles are eating themselves. But that’s typically more of a medical condition. The thing I think we don’t realize is that we have all these self-repair mechanisms built into our body. And sleep is a great example. You actually get autophagy when you sleep. Your cells go into a state of autophagy. So outside of sleep, we don’t really have another tool for autophagy. Exercise will do it. But fasting is your absolute best tool.

Neil Dudley: For all those entrepreneurs out there who think you in order to get ahead, you can only sleep two hours a night and you got to just be hammering down the rest of the time, please hear what she said. Sleep is integral to your performance as human, businessman, dad, father, husband, all those things. So, I think the world’s kind of waking up to that, that sleep is super important. And everybody’s starting to put that into their brain as, gosh, I got to make sure I’m managing stress levels in a way that I can get the right kind of rest. 

Mindy Pelz: Yeah, your brain actually shrinks at night so that your cerebral spinal fluid can go up and wash any toxins out. And it does this in our deep sleep. You need about two hours of deep sleep, but it typically happens sprinkled throughout the night. So, if you’re not getting good restful sleep, you’re not detoxing your brain. And at some point, that’s going to catch up with you. So well said that you can’t- the push on through entrepreneur or type A person does not live long with lack of sleep. So yeah, so that’s at 17. The other cool thing that I love about the 17-hour mark is that our bodies are so smart, that if they sense that a cell is going to turn into a cancer cell, or an aging cell, a cell that’s aging too quickly, we call them senescence cells, that the body will get rid of those. It’ll go oh, you’re a dysfunctional cell, you can’t be on the team anymore. And it’ll get rid of it. Which is amazing. Because now, I mean, think about that, all you did is go without food for 17 hours, and your cells figured out how to get rid of cancerous dysfunctional aging cells. And you didn’t spend a single dime. You just trained yourself to go without food.

Neil Dudley: And I want to highlight that doesn’t mean no water, does it? It means stay hydrated, but don’t eat food. Like don’t drink a Gatorade. Don’t drink- it has got to be water, coffee, tea, something that’s not kicking- What is the little trigger? Now, you’re doing a great job, by the way. You’re like the best guest I’ve ever had because you keep me on point. Like I keep trying to run the rabbit off the road and you keep saying okay, now back to this list of timeframes. But just I have to ask, what kicks the fast off? 

Mindy Pelz: Oh, such a great question. Anything you drink or eat something that raises your blood sugar. So, this is why coffee tends to do okay. Tea is okay. Water is okay. But a lot of people go well, what about diet soda? What about, to your point, what about a diet Gatorade that has like NutraSweet in it? Well, we do know that a lot of the synthetic chemicals like NutraSweet, even sometimes stevia, can raise your blood sugar. So, if your blood sugar goes up, you get kicked out of this fasted state. So, the best thing to do is just coffee or tea, water, mineral water is okay, but you don’t want that blood sugar to go up. So that’s the real key.

Neil Dudley: Okay, back on to what’s the next? So, we’ve gone to 17. What’s the next step?

Mindy Pelz: So, the next one is my favorite, one of my favorites, is 24 hours. And this is so important because at 24 hours, the inner lining of the gut goes, okay, we haven’t had food in 24 hours, we better become stronger. And your body secretes what we call intestinal stem cells. Now, stem cells go to parts of the body and repair them. We get a lot of stem cells when we’re little. We get none of them when we’re older, which is why a 7-year-old will heal from a cut a lot different than a 77-year-old. But when we go into 24 hours, we get stem cells that repair the inner lining of the gut. So, if you’ve been eating improperly, you know you have a leaky gut, you’ve been on a lot of antibiotics, women have been on a lot of birth control. I mean, gut health is really emerging as the number one challenge, especially here in America, that we’ve got. Well, throw a 24 hour fast at it, and you reset and reboot and repair that whole digestive system. Again, I want to say you didn’t take a supplement, you didn’t pay a doctor, you literally did this on your own, which is why I’m so excited for people to fast is throw some- you got gut problems, you got constipation, throw some 24 hour fast, and you’ll start to- 

Neil Dudley: It seems like the body is so beautiful. Like all we have to do is learn how to help it help itself. I feel like I’ve seen the word holistic come up. Is that right? Do you think about things in that way?

Mindy Pelz: I think about things in I’m always trying to guess what the body is doing. Why is the body doing that? So, let’s use an example. A lot of people or some people when they start to fast, they get either like a Keto flu or they get a rash. And then they go, oh, I don’t want to do that anymore. Because rashes are bad, not feeling good is bad. But really what your body did is your body decided to push out all these toxins that are no longer serving you. And it just pushed it out through your skin. That’s a beautiful thing. So, one of the challenges we have is that we tend to think symptoms are bad, and we tend to think that medication is our solution or surgery is our solution. And we’ve lost complete sight that our body can heal from so many things. And a great example of that is you cut your finger, you don’t stress about it, you just know the body is going to heal itself. But what about if you have fatigue or lack of mental clarity or you’ve got digestive problems? Or what if you’re depressed or anxious? Have you ever thought that you might have a mechanism inside of you that if you tap into it, your body can heal from it? And fasting is that thing, which is why I get so excited about it.

Neil Dudley: Me too. I’m so glad to have you on here. I’m so glad you’re listening to whoever is listening, and maybe they know everything that you know already, but I guarantee there’s a piece, there’s little things, there’s just little intricacies of how you trigger your body to repair itself, how you really build relationships and a community around keeping you accountable and making sure you feel real comfortable doing those things. So that is part of the goal of doing this podcast.

Mindy Pelz: Yeah, 1,000%. So then after 24, we go to 36. And I call this my fat burner reset. So all of you out there that are like I can’t lose weight, I’ve tried everything, it’s amazing when you throw a 36 hour fast, it really forces the body to go find the glucose that it stored years ago. When we’re insulin resistant from poor diet or eating all day long, our body has to find a way to store all that extra glucose. So, it stores it in fat. Well, it usually takes about 36 hours in people that are really insulin resistant for the body to clue in, gosh, nothing’s coming, glucose isn’t coming, but it’s good that I stored some around the belly, it’s good that I stored some on the backside. Let me go find that and burn that. So, 36 hours is what I call my fat burner reset. 48 hours is probably my favorite of all favorite because your whole dopamine system in your brain gets reset. And we live in a dopamine saturated world right now. So, people who are obese tend to have less sensitivity to dopamine, which is why often they have to reach for more food because they’re trying to get that dopamine rush from food. So, a 48 hour fast will reset that whole system so that you experience more joy, you’re more dopamine sensitive, which is a beautiful thing. And then at 72 hours, our whole immune system reboots. All the old white blood cells get flushed out, new white blood cells come in. Again, I don’t even know a better- I can’t give you a supplement, I couldn’t give you a medication, I couldn’t give you an exercise program that could accomplish that in three days. It is crazy.

Neil Dudley: I mean, it’s almost, I want to make an analogy, like when your computer freezes up, and it’s just glitchy and it’s not working, you look for the reset button. These are the reset buttons in our life. And they’re findable or discoverable through fasting. Gosh, it’s so cool.

Mindy Pelz: It is so cool. And it’s free. I mean, one of my biggest things is if we’re going to change healthcare, we have to have a free tool. It can’t be- health cannot be only accessible to those that have money. So, when you look at fasting as this incredible self-healing tool, the only hurdle you have is you got to learn how to do it. It’s just like you don’t just jump into a three day water fast, just like you wouldn’t, if you want to run a marathon, you don’t start at 26 miles, you start at 2. So that’s why I like to show people that it’s a training process that once your body catches a hold of what you’re doing, it will be like thank you, and it will get easier and easier.

Neil Dudley: There’s the human problem. We all want it now. So, get over that, everybody. You’re going to need to learn. You’re going to need to practice. And I want to say this, and Dr. Mindy, you need to correct me if it’s wrong. But I say okay, cool, if you’re not eating meat, then eat hotdogs, like eat some meat. It is not the best meat. So if you’re not fasting, do some fasting. And then, I mean, don’t worry so much about the diet that comes during the eating time, then you get a little bit of practice there. Then you start saying, okay, cool, I’m going to try to start by cleaning the diet up a little more. Is that correct?

Mindy Pelz: Yeah. And the one thing I would say on that, this is what gives me so much hope, is a couple of years ago, there was a study that came out of University of North Carolina, saying that only 12% of Americans are metabolically fit. So metabolically fit means your blood pressure, your cholesterol, your fasting glucose, your insulin, all of that is balanced without medication. Only 12% of Americans are metabolically fit.

Neil Dudley: That makes me feel like I’m probably not. I mean, that’s such a low percentage, it  makes you start saying, uh-oh, how could I possibly be in there? I need to pay attention to some things. 

Mindy Pelz: Do you do yearly bloodwork? 

Neil Dudley: No, I don’t. Like I’m kind of a good example of not great way of thinking about it. So I’m trying to get better. I’m trying to process some of this. I kind of do this hard line, get up, workout hard, fasted four days a week, don’t eat until- do this intermittent fasting. I don’t eat really, really super good. I don’t drink super verifiably no mold and toxin coffee. And I guarantee that leaves inflammation that I deal with. I’ve kind of got always this sore back, this sore lower back that just never will go away. But I always say that doesn’t prevent me from doing anything, but I bet that’s inflammation, it is poor diet, it’s all those things.

Mindy Pelz: Well, so the research shows that if you just compress your eating into an 8 to 10 hour eating window, that all those markers, all the metabolic markers start to come down. So, what I finally got to was understanding that I’m not sure we’re going to ever be able to fully combat the food industry. There’re so many chemicals that get poured into our food. And even those of us that are so like conscious about eating good food, you’re still getting exposed to a lot of toxins. And then you mix that with a lot of people don’t want to give up their Doritos. They don’t want to give up their toxic coffee, those kinds of things. So just compress your food into an 8-hour window. And what the research shows is that you’re metabolically immune from the damage that happens from that kind of highly processed diet. So, let’s stop like- okay, keep what you want to eat, but just eat it in 8 hours. Just do that. And that’s a huge step forward, which is why I love fasting again, is we don’t have to- okay, fine, changing food behaviors is so hard and food preferences is so hard. So let’s not focus on that anymore. Let’s focus on trying to take that food and shorten the time period in which you’re eating it. Crazy, right?

Neil Dudley: It is crazy. I mean, I just feel almost embarrassed because I make my living making high quality food, bacon, sausage, keeping the junk ingredients out and making sure the animals are raised the right way. And then I have to be honest and admit on this podcast, I do, I mean, I feel like I’m pretty good, I go 90% of the way there and then I just leave the other 10% out there waving in the wind. It wouldn’t be that much harder to clean up the 10% too.

Mindy Pelz: Yeah, you know what I noticed people will start to notice is that the more you fast, the more your cravings change. So, the food that you’re eating now that might not be the most healthy, you’d be amazed because there’s microbiome changes that happen in the gut. And those bacteria, those microbes control your tastebuds. So, as you fast more, especially that 24 hour fast, it’s crazy how sugar cravings go away. And some of the things that we don’t know why we eat them, we just crave them, they all go away because you change the whole internal environment.

Neil Dudley: Is there residual? Like so we’re kind of using these breaking points, 17, 24, 36, 72. Is that the moment that thing triggers? Now you need to stay fasted for a little bit, so it can actually go get to work? I mean, sometimes, yeah.

Mindy Pelz: So I like to look at them like switches. So, at 17 hours, you get autophagy. At 24, you get these intestinal stem cells. 36, you get the fat burner, fat is burning. So once the switch gets turned on, the only thing that will turn that switch off is you eating. So, if you want to clean your cells out more and you know at 17 hours, autophagy clicks in, stay in that a little longer, just be there a little longer. Because if you’re there a little longer, you’re getting more and more autophagy. I’ve had people that I’ve worked with who have like serious diagnoses, and we’ll get them to three days, and now they’ve got full body stem cells. And we’ll keep them there a couple more days because now for two more days, it’s like they’re getting a massive stem cell injection. Well, right now, if you follow stem cells, people are paying $10, 20, 30,000 to get stem cells. You can just fast for three days and start to get them yourself.

Neil Dudley: That’s a good savings in money right there. Now, let’s see, I had a good question. I was kind of curious about is there a limit? Okay, so now I’ve heard that that person is kind of going up to five and we know that’s not the first thing you want to do. Like, be smart about it. Don’t just jump in and go- Oh, and then how often? Like so okay, I did a 72. When’s the next time I should do a 72?

Mindy Pelz: Yeah, each one of those fasts, the frequency of them really depends on what you want to do. So, I think if you want to prevent disease, you want to slow aging, or if you have a scary diagnosis of some kind, twice a year doing a three day water fast is a really good way to clean everything out. And if you want to go five days, you’ll get more stem cells. So, it really depends on a lot of people get to three days, I know that sounds crazy if you’ve never fasted, but many people get to three days and want to keep going because they feel so good. 

Neil Dudley: Yes, I’ll tell you, if you go three days, just you’re not hungry. So, we kind of service the Keto community, we service the Whole 30 community, we service the kind of better for you group and healthy lifestyle people. That’s what our business does. That’s what Pederson’s job is. So, I get real serious about putting myself through that a little. So I went and did like 30 day keto strict and fasted, and I got in three days, and my wife’s kind of like, I don’t know, you probably should just eat because your kids are thinking you’re weird. I mean, I had no- I just wasn’t interested. I was not having the cravings. So that’s been a true experience for me. I can testify on that one.

Mindy Pelz: It’s very, very interesting because when I first went to go write the book Fast Like a Girl and get it out to the world, some of the publishers that we pitched it to were like, I don’t think people are going to want to go into these longer fasts. And I was like, you don’t- go look at my YouTube channel. People, once they understand fasting, they want to go into the deeper fast. So, in Fast Like a Girl, I put out six different length fasts, the ones I just talked about, and I timed them for women to their hormones. But really, men shouldn’t be left out of this book because the whole first section is about what fasting can do for you. And once you get the vibe of how great you feel, you’re never going to want to go back to eating all day.

Neil Dudley: That is so right. But that never is just- Dang it, why isn’t that true for me? I mean, it’s stress, it’s some kind of, I don’t even know, I don’t want to hold myself like too accountable or shame myself for not staying there. But you’re right. It makes sense you would never go back. But we do. We do. And that’s kind of also maybe just a mental thing we’ll have to try to work on along the way as well.

Mindy Pelz: Yeah, I think a good strategy once you- like I always tell people start with intermittent fasting. So just get to a place where you can go comfortably 13 to 15 hours. Once you’ve got that nailed in every day, then do what we call a 5-1-1, which is five days a week you do intermittent fasting 13 to 15. One day a week, just stretch it. Try to stretch it a little bit longer. And then one day a week, don’t fast. And the reason for that is you’re really mimicking what our cave ancestors did. They had times where they had to go long periods without food. And then they had times where they feasted. So, it’s the in and out of these different type of fasts that really create the greatest metabolic change. And then that release valve day gives you permission to be like, I’m going to eat breakfast. Okay, I’m going to eat it today. And then you’re not in this rigidity of I have to go 13 to 15 hours every single day.

Neil Dudley: That one little breakfast doesn’t just derail all the progress. I mean, sometimes it feels like that, I think, for me, personally – uh-oh, that one mess up now just derailed all that progress. No, not really. It just paused it, and then you just- Now, do you have an opinion on living your life, the rest of my life, intermittent fasting? Good, bad, what do you think?

Mindy Pelz: I think you absolutely should live the rest of your life intermittent fasting. Again, think of it like sleep. When we go to sleep, we repair; when we fast, we repair. So, to your initial point, if you want to speed up aging, just don’t sleep and eat all day. And you’re just going to keep speeding that aging process up. And what’s crazy is it doesn’t matter if you’re eating healthy food. Yes, we want you eating healthy food, but if you’re not tapping into sleep, and you’re not tapping into fasting, you can’t slow the aging process down by food alone. It’s a piece of the puzzle. But you’ve got to add that in. So, I think this is why I get a lot of questions people say, why are we still talking about fasting? And I say it’s the same reason we’re still talking about sleep. Because sleep heals everybody. Fasting heals everybody. And we’ve got to come back to prioritizing these.

Neil Dudley: Awesome. Okay, I can’t forget- that was just so great. Thank you so much for that conversation, that insight. There’s so much more to learn. Everybody, go find it. We’re going to put links to your book, your website, your social platforms for everybody to easily find them from the podcast or from the YouTube video that we do here. But I have to ask this Kathleen question, and it’s kind of off of this topic a little bit, but I think it’d be good. She asked about protein cycling. So, the intermittent fasting and the protein cycles, and explain that concept a little bit.

Mindy Pelz: So, we have really not given protein enough credit. And you need protein not only to build muscles, but they have amino acids in them that contribute to better mental health. So, what the protein cycling research is, is that when we eat 20 to 30 grams at a meal of protein, and we eat that, let’s just use 30 grams, every two to three hours, you stimulate two things. You stimulate something called mTOR. So, if you’re trying to build muscle, you want to stimulate mTOR on a fairly frequent basis, not all the time. The second thing you do is you trigger amino acid sensors in the muscle that will start to build your muscle stronger. So, think of it like night and day. You can’t have night and day at the same time. You can’t have mTOR and autophagy at the same time. So, when we have a day where we fast a little longer, 17 plus hours, think of it as you’re cleaning out those cells, but then follow that, the next day, maybe you only fast 13 hours, and every two to three hours you’re getting 30 grams of protein. Now you’re really getting the nutrients that your muscles need to grow stronger. And muscle is absolutely the organ of longevity. You have to fight for muscle more as you age. So, we need to lean into tools. It’s not as simple as just sitting down and eating 100 grams of a grass fed steak. It would be better to take that steak and divvy it up into every couple of hours, eating 30 grams at a time. We do know, based off research, if you eat more than 90 grams of protein, it turns to glucose. It’s no longer usable for the muscles. So protein cycling is about tapping into the power of protein, just not all at one meal.

Neil Dudley: All right, but stay on intermittent fast. Just eat the protein in your window of consumption.

Mindy Pelz: Exactly. And the amount of protein that a person needs is usually one gram per body weight.

Neil Dudley: Oh, yeah, she said that. I mean, she’s been listening. She’s been studying. It was fun. She saw it on my calendar. She’s like, “You’re talking to Dr. Mindy?!” And I’m like, “I sure am.” So, then I tell her, “Oh, come in here.” And, “No, I can’t do that.” “Okay, give me the question. I’ll go ask.” I know she should have. But she represents your audience, and I thought that was so cool.

Mindy Pelz: And that’s one reason I’ve been talking about protein cycling. Because women after 40, we have to fight- all aging humans have to fight for muscle, but women after 40, because our hormones, our estrogen goes down. Estrogen makes collagen. And so, we’re not getting collagen. So, we start to wrinkle. We start to have more aches and pains. And then the body, to your earlier point, will start to break down muscle to find that collagen. So that concept of protein cycling is perfect for someone like Kathleen because we can still fast, but then we’ve got to throw in some protein, so we keep her muscles strong.

Neil Dudley: Do you care much about what protein? Do you need to rotate the different animal proteins or vegetable proteins?

Mindy Pelz: So, vegetable proteins, the challenge we have is you can’t get enough amino acids in vegetable protein. So, to the vegan, I would say honor that you want to be a vegan, but you’re going to need to take an amino acid and collagen supplement because you’re not getting enough in plants. To the meat eater, diversity matters. So, the more- each form of meat is going to have a different amino acid profile. So like eggs, for example, in my household, sometimes we do chicken, sometimes we do duck. When I go to a restaurant, if there’s bison on the meal or duck or elk, I was at a restaurant last night that had elk. I don’t normally eat elk. So, I ordered that because the amino acid profile will be different than the grass fed steak I have every couple of nights.

Neil Dudley: So, there you go. Rotate them. Diversity in that is valuable. You said something, I got to pass this along because the sounded so good. For breaking the fast, there’s a million different ways to do that. We can’t get into all of them. I promised we wouldn’t go for five hours. But that avocado with a couple of soft or hard boiled eggs and I forget what else you had on there, but it just sounded so good. 

Mindy Pelz: Yeah, so there’s a couple. I’ll give you two different ways. Well, there’s really three ways, but let’s talk about two of them on how to break a fast. My favorite and the one I always preach is avocado with sauerkraut. And the reason you do that combo is sauerkraut is adding good bacteria into your gut and the avocado is fat. So typically, when people come out of there fast, they can be like, oh my gosh, I’m just going to eat, and they eat, they go crazy. That usually happens in the beginning. So, if you throw a fat in there, it starts to slow down the spiking of blood sugar and will make you less hungry for that couple of hours following. Then my next one is protein. I love, like I break my fast with eggs a lot. I’ll do eggs and avocado and sauerkraut. I’ll do grass fed sausage. Protein is great because now you’re adding in all those aminos. So those are really your two best bets.

Neil Dudley: There you go, folks. Go learn more. There’s a whole ton of- I mean, this thing just goes forever, the depth of knowledge you have, and it’s so obvious in just your ability to just tell this right off the cuff. I mean, oh, no, let me go look at the reference. You don’t need it. It’s there, it is in your brain. You built it. So, so cool. I’m glad everybody in the PNFer Nation got to meet you and hear more from you. And keep it up. So thankful.

Mindy Pelz: Well, thank you, Neil, because we need farmers with consciousness that are trying to grow us healthy foods. And I know it’s not an easy job. So, I can show people how to go without food, but you can deliver high quality food, and that is so necessary. So, a massive thank you to you as well.

Neil Dudley: Well, you’re welcome. It’s fun. I mean, the community is great. I’m blessed to be a part of it. So, we just keep getting up every day and going after it and trying to get a little better.

Mindy Pelz: Yeah, amazing. Well, thank you. We appreciate it. 

Neil Dudley: Thank you. I appreciate your time. And check the show notes out, folks. Kathleen, there you go. I asked her your question.

Mindy Pelz: Keep up the good work, Kathleen. The fact that you asked that question tells me that you already have a level of understanding. And I think that’s what I love about the people who have poured onto my social media is that their knowledge on fasting is better than most doctors. So, hats off to Kathleen, that’s a great question.

Neil Dudley: All right, everybody. Come back for the next one.