The Morning Habit That Burns Stubborn Fat (Why Weight Loss Is Hormonal) with Dr. Mindy Pelz

On this episode of the Resetter Podcast, I got a treat for you. I know you all have keep asking me questions about losing weight and I'm here to guide you and support you and give you all the hacks. I love nothing more than somebody falling in love with their body again as they drop weight. So in this particular episode, I'm doing something really fun. I'm talking about a habit that you can do first thing in the morning. It's easy. It's free. All of us can do it to burn stubborn fat. And you can do this in one week. You'll see in the podcast, I'm like, do it. Try it 30 days. But you will see a result in just one week. So listen all the way through. This is dense. This is a really important podcast for you to understand what allows your body to lose weight and how sometimes it's just a little small tweak that's going to have a big result. And then I'm doing something new with my podcast now where I am answering five questions at the end of these solo episodes. One of these might be one of your questions. So make sure you stay all the way through so I can answer some of the questions like this episode. We had some questions on what do I do if I get stuck with a weight loss plateau? And why is fasting easy sometimes for me and hard for others? And what do I do about cravings? How do I build muscle? These were some good questions. So make sure you stay all the way through so you can hear the nuance on these answers. But as always, I hope that this podcast moves your health forward and has you believing in yourself again because you're worth it. You're worth loving. You're worth enjoying living in your body. And I hope this information teaches you that. Welcome to the Resetter Podcast. 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. okay on this video and podcast depending on where you're listening or watching this i really am excited to go through a morning habit that's going to help you burn stubborn fat which is a nemesis of so many people so and this is a really easy one i've done a lot of videos a lot of podcast interviews, trying to give you all different ideas on how you lose weight. And this one is one we can all do. Now, before I go into the tool, I want to talk about this concept of a toolbox. This is really important because what we often do, especially when it comes to weight loss, is we often just do whatever we see on socials. We do what a friend did to lose weight. I call it shiny object syndrome, where we see an easy path to lose weight and we go and do that and then we fail at it or it doesn't work for us. And then we think it's something wrong with us. I want you to think larger than that. I want you to think from this lens of you've got to create a weight loss toolbox and you have to know how to pull out the different tools. So this one that I'm, this video I'm doing right here is going to be one of the tools in the weight loss toolbox. And some of you, this is going to be the thing. This is going to be it. And it's going to be unlock that stubborn fat. And some of you, you're going to need to build some more tools. If this is a confusing concept for you, go watch the video I did or the interview I did on the diary of the CEO. The second one I did with Stephen Bartlett, I literally at the end, I pull out a toolbox and I show him how we all can create these toolboxes depending on what our intention is for our health. Okay. So with this mind, here's a tool you're going to put in your weight loss toolbox. So first, we got to make sure you know that weight loss is not a calorie in calorie out situation. Weight loss is a hormonal issue. It is a challenge with two hormones in particular, insulin and cortisol. So if we want to be able to lose weight permanently, we have to put our hormonal lens glasses on. We got to look at this through the hormonal map. And there is a foundational idea around hormones that does not get enough credit. You will be in hormonal disarray and dysfunction if you are low in vitamin D. Vitamin D is massively important to be able to make hormones, to be able to regulate hormones. It is one of the most important markers on your blood test. And you want your vitamin D for hormonal health to be up around 70. So go look at the lab work that your primary physician did and go and look at where your vitamin D levels are. Because if they're under 70, that could be the reason why you can't get insulin under control. Now, the piece I want to talk about for this video and podcast is that how do you get your vitamin D levels up? And there are really only three ways to get vitamin D up. It's one of these interesting ones, which is why so many people are deficient in it. You either get it up through the sun, you get it up through fish, sardines. So sun, sardines, the three S's or supplementation. I want to talk about how you get the free version, which is the sun. And for this video, I want you to know that the most important time to get sun for being able to raise vitamin D and for being able to shed weight is direct sunlight early morning. So here's what it looks like. You go outside for 10 minutes early morning, exposing as much skin as possible. So if you have a backyard that you can go, you know, in your birthday suit, you know, and it's warm enough to go outside and you're not going to disrupt anything in the neighborhood, go out 10 minutes first thing in the morning in your birthday suit, getting all that direct exposure to sun. And you're going to not only raise your vitamin D, but your eyes have receptor sites in them for serotonin. So you're going to start to get your serotonin receptor sites to start to stimulate more serotonin production, which makes you happy. But also you're rebalancing your circadian rhythm, which is also really important for weight loss. So this morning, 10 minutes in the morning is really important with as much skin exposure as possible. I give you like, try a 30-day challenge of 10 minutes in the morning, out in the sun, and see what happens to that stubborn belly fat. More than just belly fat, the stubborn fat. Now, what we know about vitamin D is it's a huge regulator of your metabolism. It also is incredibly important for detoxing and brain function and cardiovascular health. And it has literally over a thousand different processes in your body that it controls. And without vitamin D, over a thousand processes go down. And the problem about making vitamin D from sunlight is most of us don't get enough sunlight. We've been totally given this massive fear that we are going to get skin cancer just by going out into the sun. If you go early in the morning, you're still getting enough sunlight to be able to convert that sun into vitamin D without having, getting a sunburn, without getting the adverse affections of sun. And most of us aren't getting enough sunlight. So it's interesting because our skin cells have receptors on them that will soak up the UV light from sun and synthesize this into vitamin D and our ancestors knew this. They didn't have any vitamin D problems. But right now, according to the Journal of Exposure Science and Epidemiology, they found that most Americans that spend 92% of their day either indoors or in the car. So we are not getting out enough into the sun So make it part of your morning routine We also have information from the Journal of Nutrition Research that found out that 42% of Americans are clinically deficient in vitamin D. Now, how vitamin D outside of helping you become insulin sensitive, what we have also found through research, and this one was really interesting. This is the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. It's a 2014 study found that women, we got a women's study, that women who took a vitamin D supplement daily for a year lost an average of seven pounds more than women who took a placebo. We also have another study, a 2012 study from the Journal of Women's Health that looked at over 4,700 post-menopausal women, and they found that adequate vitamin D levels was strongly correlated, a strong predictor of healthy body weight compared to low vitamin D. So this study looked at 4,700 women and it said women with high amounts of vitamin D had better healthy body weight than women who had low amounts of vitamin D, they had more of a weight gain problem. Think about that for a moment. So you can supplement, you can do sardines, but I really love this idea of going out into the sun. Now, when you are out in the sun, again, skin exposure matters. You also can just do it with a tank top and shorts, and you really want the largest body parts. So make sure your arms, your legs are exposed, the more skin exposed as possible. And what's also very interesting is that the speed of vitamin D synthesis depends on how much melanin is in your skin. And the darker your skin, the more melanin you have. So if you're very pale, if you have a very light skin, 10 minutes in the sun is enough. In the morning, get in, get out, you'll be fine. But if you have darker skin, you're probably going to need to do about 20 to 30 minutes in the sun. Now, what about sunscreen? Okay, I know this one is a very controversial one. And I really want to lay this out for you because one of the challenges that we have with sunscreen is A, it has chemicals in it. So please make sure you are getting the chemical-free sunscreen if you're doing sunscreen. And the important part of chemical-free sunscreen is it is the kind that when you rub into your skin, it takes forever. So it's the zinc oxide, mainly zinc oxide, not a lot of ingredients. And when you rub it in, you look like Casper the ghost. It takes forever and ever to rub in. Typically, you know you have a healthy, good sunscreen if you're doing that. The sprays that you put on yourself are really chemical laden. I know they're easier to put on, but think about this for the moment. And I do not understand why this is allowed in our culture. And it makes me really mad, but we spray chemicals on ourselves. And then we go out and heat those chemicals up. You heat those chemicals up and they're going in to your, your skin and they are creating a chemical barrage that now is throwing off other hormones within your body. So please, If you're going to wear sunscreen, make sure it's the healthy kind. But the sunscreen is going to block the vitamin D synthesis, which is why you need to make sure that you get this early morning sun where you're not getting a sunburn, but you're getting enough vitamin D. So 10 minutes, if you're pale, 20 to 30 minutes, if you are darker skinned, and you're going to have to find that sweet spot of what works the best for you. Now, I will tell you that for me, and I just, I'm super proud to say that I just got a full mole check. Everything is totally great. I have no signs of skin cancer. I go out for a 20 minute walk in the middle of the day, every day. And I do it for my vitamin D. Now, obviously I don't do it in my birthday suit. I do it when I can with a tank top on. I cover my face. I don't want to accelerate the aging of my face, but I try to get as much skin as possible. And in the summer, I can really see my vitamin D levels go up. Whereas in the winter, it's a little colder. I can't do that. I live in California, so I'm lucky to live in a climate that allows me to not have to bundle up all the time. But in the winter, I have to do more supplementation. And I'll leave my favorite vitamin D supplement in my clinic. When COVID first came out, we did a whole test of different vitamin D supplements. And this vitamin D by systemic formulas, it's a liquid. I'll leave it in here. I keep it by my desk. I have a bottle by where I brush my teeth. So I always do a dropper full. And we saw that this one had the most consistent upswing in vitamin D levels. So if you're going to use your son for the vitamin D, make sure that when it's maybe the winter months that you're not. I have a good friend that had spectacular vitamin D levels, and then she had to go to England for some work, and she was there for a month in the spring, and her vitamin D levels crashed. So next time around, when she goes to England, I was like, take some vitamin D supplementation with you. Now, there also is the fatty fishes. These are your mackerels, your sardines. In my new book, Eat Like a Girl, I have some amazing sardine tostada recipes that you can check out that will also help you add in through food some of this vitamin D. But please know that for weight loss. Vitamin D matters. And you can get vitamin D from the sun. And when you can't get it from the sun, you get it from fatty fish and you get it from supplementation. Now, I want to ask or answer some of the questions that you all have been submitting. And if you don't know how to submit a question, put it either in the best place probably is to, if you're watching this on video, So put it in the comments of this video. This video you're going to see on my Prime YouTube channel. You're also going to see it on, you can hear it on my Resetter podcast. So there's multiple places and the Resetter podcast has a YouTube channel. So there's like three places you can leave these questions. I appreciate all of you that leave the comments and the questions. So please, I have a team of people that scour the questions left on my videos and we bring them together and we're now answering them via my podcast and future videos. So ask away. Okay. First question is how do I get past a weight loss plateau? So weight loss plateaus happen for a variety of reasons. The first is that they can happen because you are often trying too hard to lose weight. Think about that for a moment. That really sucks because you are like muscling your way to weight loss. You got a really good momentum and then you get stuck. So remember that when we are muscling our way to anything, when we are pushing and we consistently see cortisol go up, when cortisol goes high, you become insulin resistant. So this is a primal way of your body making sure that you keep enough glucose in your system so that you can run from a tiger. So as strange as it sounds, sometimes these weight loss plateaus are a sign you have to stop trying to lose weight and you have to just chill out for a minute. So that might mean you don't fast as much. That might mean you don't calorie count. I hope you're not calorie counting, but that might mean you don't calorie restrict as much. You might not exercise as much. And maybe you do it for a week or two. Give yourself a chance to rest. My favorite term is courageously rest because sometimes it takes courage to trust that the body will figure it out in the rest. So if you have been doing too much extreme anything and trying to muscle your way through that plateau, try the opposite and see what happens. Now, the second piece, and this is going to sound like I'm contradicting myself, but everybody got a little different pattern here The second piece to this is some of you need to fast longer I always tell the story of a good friend of mine who when I first started teaching fasting I was teaching it over and over again, all over my channels. And she was intrigued by it. And she tried fasting to lose weight. And she told me one day, it's not working for me. I asked her, how long are you fasting? And she's like, I tried a 24-hour fast. I've been doing 15-hour fast. It's not working. And she came up with this statement, because this is what we often do when something doesn't work for us. She said, I don't think fasting works for me. It's not for my body type. Now, I want to point out that I love, I think of fasting as like sleep. It works for everybody, but not everybody can do it. It's fasting as a healing state, sleeping as a healing state. So we've got to help you figure out your own rhythm. If you need some personalized help, please come into my Reset Academy. This is where we have a community of people that are fasting together. We do fat burner resets every other month. So please come into that so that my team of coaches and I can help you. But in this particular woman's story, I was like, the answer I have for you is you need to try to fast more. and she like kind of let out a big sigh and I was like yeah I know it's not the answer you want to hear but I don't think you're pushing your fast enough to signal the body to lose weight. So in Fast Like a Girl I write about this 36 hour fast and the 36 hour fast the research shows that it's enough time for the body to start to release specifically belly fat. I'm not going to go into all the details of that. Those of you that have Fast Like a Girl, I've mapped it out in there. I tell all the details there. But what you may need to get past that weight loss plateau if you're not muscling it through, remember, this is the opposite of the first scenario, is you might need to go into a longer fast. So here's the fun part of this story. Is this friend kind of grumbled and she was like, I don't want to do a 36-hour fast. I'm like, I know, I get it. I'm just giving you options here. And I knew that she wasn't trying too much of something. So I knew it had to be, you got to give your body a signal to go find that fat, that fat that it stored glucose in years ago. So I didn't see her for a couple of months. And then one day she showed up at my house and it looked literally like she had taken a fat coat off. And I was like, oh my God, what did you do? Look at you. And she's like, I finally found my rhythm with fasting. And she's like, I can start to pump out 36 hour fasts all the time now. And it's like her weight just dropped. The 36 hour fast is that fast to send a signal to your body to release weight. Now, where it won't work for you is if you are fasting over and over again, you are you are calorie restricting over and over again. You are working out too much over and over and over again, like the first scenario. But if that's not you, then the 36 hour fast is going to help you lose weight and get over that plateau. So hope that helps. Okay. Second question that I got is, should I be working out in a fasted state in the morning or not? Okay. This is really interesting because I'll share a story. There was a long time ago, a beautiful book. This came out like in the 90s, 1990s, and it was called Body for Life. And this personal trainer decided to create a weight loss challenge. And he offered up a million dollars to people who could lose weight the fastest or the most weight in a certain period of time. And he gave some guidelines. And one of the guidelines he gave was work out in a fasted state. And so when I read that book, I was always working out in a fed state. One of my go-tos before I discovered fasting is I would always wake up and I would have a cup of coffee and some toast with some nut butter and maybe some banana or honey on top of it. Or I'd have a smoothie in the morning. I was a full-on breakfast eater and then I would go and work out. Well, when I started to follow this guy's principles where I worked out in a fasted state, I started to see that I dropped weight quicker. It became such a powerful tool that I work out in a fasted state all the time now, with the exception on the days that I am lifting weights. And I'll talk about that here in a moment. But when you work out in a fasted state, what happens is the workout is causing your muscles to have to grab more glucose and use more glucose. So your system, your liver, your fat cells, your muscles in general, they're releasing sugar into the system so you can perform the workout. So it's a form of burning fat because the body has to let go of the stored sugar. Now, if you are trying to build muscle, you also need amino acids. So this is a really difficult because on the days that I'm going to lift weights, I make sure that I have some, I actually put protein powder and amino acid powder in my coffee in the morning. So I have enough aminos. I have enough protein to be able to do a heavy workout. So working out in the fasted state has some nuance to it and you just heard it. and should you be doing it in the morning or not, that's really up to you. So that's a personal preference. Now, I wanna talk about cortisol surges because an hour to two hours after you get up in the morning, you have this incredible peak of cortisol. And whenever cortisol is on the scene, it wants to make you move. So it's great for working out. So personally, I love working out in the morning, working out in the morning in a fasted state, or if I'm working out in the morning and I have my loaded coffee with the protein, those two work. The third hormone that kicks in in the mornings that can make a morning workout great is testosterone. Your testosterone for both men and women peak in the morning. So personally, I'm a huge morning working out, and then you have the nuance on the other side. So there you go on that question. There was a lot to say on that. Okay, number three, the third question. Why is fasting sometimes hard and why is sometimes easy? Oh, that's such a good question. So it really comes down to this metabolic switch. So when you're looking at the metabolic switch, remember that if you haven't gone into some of the longer fasts and you've just been staying in your eating window, your switch might be a little rusty. But in the middle of this switch is something I call a gap, or I used to call it the metabolic blockers, the things that make your switch really difficult. And here they are, because it may be that you just haven't been fasting enough, so you go back to fasting and it's hard, or you may have some of these metabolic switch blockers. And here are the blockers. One is you may be deficient in either minerals or amino acids, but specifically minerals. We typically see that sometimes it's hard to get into these fasted states when you're nutrient to nutrient deficient. So make sure you're doing enough minerals and you're doing enough amino acids. Okay, two, your stress loads may be really high. so you might need to make sure that you're like when it's hard it might be because it's really hard your stress might be chronically high like i'll use myself as an example the the year that fast like a girl came out i i i wrote that book while i was fasting i was super into all the long fasts and then i launched this book out into the world and i go out into all the interviews i go to all the seminars and the conferences and the speaking gigs, and my cortisol is going up, up, up, up, up. And I start to realize that I am too cortisol saturated and I should not be fasting And so I shut down I did small fast but not long fast So make sure you not like tripled up on like your cortisol saturating habits So that's the second one. And then the last one that I will put in here is make sure that you are eating the right foods. The door in to making fasting easy is making sure you have nailed your food habits. And in Eat Like a Girl, I have five food principles. I will go through them very briefly here. If you want more detail on these, go to get Eat Like a Girl. It's a cookbook plus a whole front book on principles like this and charts of foods and things that will be really helpful to make fasting a lot easier. So you wanna make sure that you're always looking at your blood sugar. So remember, blood sugars matters, Calories don't. You want to make sure when you eat carbs, you're eating fiber-rich carbs. So make sure you're eating nature's carbs. So not man-made carbs. These are your fruits, your vegetables, your squashes, your potatoes. Third one is make sure when you're eating, you're feeding your microbiome, not always looking at your taste buds and what you feel like eating, but what your microbes want to eat. So make sure you're eating the polyphenol probiotic and prebiotic foods. Fourth one is protein is the hero macronutrient. So make sure you're eating enough protein. And the fifth one is fat doesn't make your fat. So let's make sure we're eating enough fat. Follow these five foundational principles when you're eating and fasting will become much easier. So that those metabolic blockers become, can start to affect how deep you get, how easy the fasted state is. Oh, I just thought of one other metabolic blocker. So we have the minerals and aminos. We have the stress levels. We have make sure you're following the foundational five. And the last one is your toxic load. Your toxic load can oftentimes affect how easy fasting is. So make sure you go and you look at all the toxins in your environment. I've done a lot of videos on that. I'll really take you down rabbit holes if I go into toxins right now, but I've done a lot of videos on those. So that's the difference between easy and hard fasting. Okay, fourth question is, why does my brain still crave food even though I'm full? This is after breaking a fast. Yeah, honestly, a lot of times we crave food because we crave a state change. We wanna feel different. It's food is dopamine. So maybe we're upset about something going on in the day. Sometimes we crave food because we are, we have a hole to fill, an emotional hole to fill, or we are bored. Sometimes we crave food because we're bored. We crave food for a lot of different things and it's not always because we're hungry. So ask yourself, am I looking for an emotional state change? And if the answer is yes, then come up with a new list of them. Like for me, I've been doing this wrecking. I've found put on a weighted vest and go for a walk and it changes my emotional state immediately. So maybe it's dancing, maybe it's listening to music. There may be some things that you need to work on. So think about that. The other thing that we know is that the microbes in your gut can make you crave things. I have a whole section on this in Eat Like a Girl. But certain things like candida. Candida is a fungus in your gut that makes you crave sugar. So you might need some microbiome repair. Again, in Eat Like a Girl, I map out a whole bunch of protocols on how to do that. So food cravings aren't always just because you're like undisciplined. That doesn't mean you're undisciplined. It can mean you want a state change or your microbes are needing something from you. So get to know those microbes and get to create a whole list of things you can do that will help you get dopamine and help with those state changers. Okay. And then the last question, I really love this one. I've done a lot of videos on this. And those of you who listen to my Resetter podcast, I've done a bunch of podcasts on this and that I did a whole podcast with Marie Forleo on this, on how can I build muscle with a fasting lifestyle? What if you are an athlete? Okay. So one of the biggest joys I've had over the last couple of years is that I've was a part of, or I am a part of a mentorship group that Jesse Itzler created. Jesse Itzler is a, I call him a serial entrepreneur. He was founder of Zyko Coconut Water and Marquise Jets. He is part owner of the Atlantic Hawks. Like the guy is awesome. Go follow him on socials, just incredible human. And so he brought me into this group with all these extreme entrepreneurs that were doing extreme athletic things. And so I, my job was to help these people figure out a fasting lifestyle that worked for these extreme events. And here's what I'm going to say. This is what we did with them. On the days, if you're an athlete, on your recovery days, or the days you're doing less of a difficult workout, you are going to use a little bit longer fast. So if Monday is an easy workout, you may fast 17 hours, where if Tuesday's a harder workout, then you might only fast 13 hours. So you can vary your fasting length. Second thing is it's incredibly important for every athlete before a workout when they are in a fasted state. If you're going to work out in a fasted state and you are an athlete, make sure you have taken enough amino acids. So put amino acids and creatine in some water, in your coffee and drink it before the workout. So you have the right amount of nutrients to build muscle. And then after your workout, make sure you are eating somewhere between 30 and 100 grams of protein. That's like eating like protein drink, a big steak. If cottage cheese has a lot of protein in it, beans, if you're a plant-based. I put so many lists of protein in Eat Like a Girl, list upon list, go find that book and you can tap into those lists. The protein that you, or the amino acid you really want to focus on is leucine. It is in eggs. It is in legumes. It, for your plant-based people, it is in cottage cheese. It is in poultry. I listed out the leucine content in proteins because leucine acts like an amino acid sensor and it opens up your sensor receptor sites and makes it so that the receptor sites in your muscles are making sure that they're bringing in all the amino acids and building your muscles stronger. Last thing I want to say on this is that when you are in a fasted state, you are stimulating, if you get around 17 hours, something called autophagy. Autophagy is where you break muscle down to clean it up. When you're lifting weights, you are breaking muscle down to build it stronger. So it's the same concept. But if you don't, when you go into the fuel state, if you don't eat enough protein, then you're not stimulating something called mTOR. And mTOR raises, it will help you build muscle. So make sure that when you eat, you're eating enough protein. I like the one gram of protein for every pound of body weight idea. Make sure you're eating that and that you're bringing up your protein load so that you can stimulate mTOR because in the fasted state, you're really focused on autophagy. Okay. That was a deep, very, very detailed answer. Again, I'm trying to get into the nuance of this. I love your questions. Please leave them in the comments. Please share them, you know, on socials you could ask. If you're listening to this on my Resetter podcast and this was a good episode for you, please share it out into the world or leave a review. This is dense. This was a good one. A lot of nuggets here. And as always, I just hope it moves your health forward and that it just helps your life in both your health and happiness. So I hope that helps. and cheers to more weight loss and more health. 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. Thank you.