My MB Alex breakdown is supported by Helix sleep. Bring is in the air and so are all of the allergens that come with it. Spring allergens means you need more sleep, but there are a ton of factors that can prevent us from getting a good night's rest. Night sweats, back pain, feeling the person next to you when they roll over a million times. We were so excited to hear that Helix wanted to partner with us. I've had my Helix mattress for about five years now and I have been sleeping so much better. Jonathan and also our kids love their Helix mattresses and all of those issues, night sweats, back pain, motion transfer, those things are significantly better with a Helix mattress. Helix delivers your mattress right to your door, which is so much fun with free shipping in the US. They have a 120 night sleep trial and limited lifetime warranty plus they're happy with Helix guarantee. Rest easy with seamless returns and exchanges. The happy with Helix guarantee offers a risk-free customer first experience designed to ensure that you're completely satisfied with your new mattress. Go to helixleap.com slash break down for 27% off site wide. That's helixleap.com slash break breakdown for 27% off site wide. helixleap.com slash breakdown. Shhh. Shhh. Shhh. Shhh. Hi, I'm Mayan Bialik. And I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to part two of our conversation with Dr. Mindy Pell's New York Times bestselling author, educator, expert and trailblazer in the field of women's health and hormone science and metabolism. Her current upcoming book, Age Like a Girl, is fantastic and a wonderful compliment to fast like a girl and eat like a girl. In part two of our conversation with Dr. Mindy, we're going to talk about how there are some very clear, very easy ways for the government to be helping us be truly healthy again. And what are the forces behind why Maha is turning away from what is likely the number one detrimental factor in all of our lives and diets? We talk about what hormone replacement therapy is missing and why it's setting so many of us up for recurring failure. We're also going to talk about sugar addiction, how to curb cravings, and the three things you should add to your diet to turn your metabolism around. We can't wait for you to hear part two of our conversation with Dr. Mindy, so here it is and enjoy. Break it down. Fasting also impacts the body's ability to detox from chemicals that have built up. Is that accurate? Yeah, yes. In your practice, what are some of the most common build-up of toxins that people are holding on to and how is that impacting them? Yeah. Who, this is the, now you want to go into a really complicated topic. OK, first, we have to acknowledge we live in the most toxic time in human history. So you have toxins everywhere. So you have them on your new clothes that come into your house, new furniture that comes into your house. You step outside, there's air pollution, it's laden in our, in our beauty products, it's in our food, it's everywhere. So avoiding those toxins, I'm going to be really honest, my clinic was built off of detox. And I used to give people long lists, here's what I want you to go home and throw this out.

It's gotten so bad, it's near impossible

to minimize your toxic load now,

which is another reason I love fasting.

Because when you fast, especially if you go 17 hours,

you stimulate something called a tophergy.

And a tophergy is you spark the intelligence inside the cell

and it can register if that cell needs to be detoxed. And it will actually push out bacteria, viruses, pesticides, plastics, almost everything except heavy metals. Because heavy metals are heavy, so they're a little harder to get rid of. So another reason I love regular fasting is if you can throw a 17 hour fast in on a once or twice a week schedule, think of it like you're detoxing. You're getting rid of all the toxins that you're breathing in. Now, I want to point out one thing because this has been a really powerful thing to bring forward at this time in our country. The worst toxin, the worst toxin that we are exposed to, is glyphosate. Glyphosate is sprayed on all of our foods. Here in California, we have strict glyphosate laws that don't allow farmers to use glyphosate. So if you're in California, eat local. But recently, under the new administration, all of the glyphosate laws and the regulations around glyphosate have been reversed. There was an article in the New York Times saying, roundup is fine for you. Don't listen to the, and it's like, it used to be the crazy hippies on the left. Now it's like, don't listen to the crazy Republicans on the right. Like, it's a big circle of crazy. No, the article was, I sent it to Jonathan and I was like, okay, now I feel like this is gaslighting on a global scale. Eat food that you sprayed round up on after everything and all the research we have to, I mean, I'll be honest though, I feel crazy because I don't know what's true anymore. Right, right, yeah. Thank you for saying that. I've been thinking about doing actually a series on my YouTube channel of like, and I don't wanna get too political, but do you wanna get political? No, it shouldn't be a partisan, it shouldn't be a partisan issue. The Maha movement has many things correct, and they have many things wrong, and they have turned their face away from some of the biggest contributors to chronic disease. And I'm fucking tired of it. I'm just gonna be really honest with you. I'm exhausted watching us go, red dyes are a problem for children. Fuck the red dyes. We need to think about roundup being sprayed on our food and being parade and put in baby food where there's lead, there's glyphosate. I don't care about red dyes. I care about what is happening systemically to us all. And I think to your point, and I really I'm happy you brought this up because everybody's getting confused now. The name of the game of the toxic game is to bring your toxic load down. And the toxins you want to go after first are the most dangerous ones are pesticides, specifically glyphosate. And the reason that glyphosate is so challenging is it drives the plastics into tissues. It drives the heavy metal into tissues. It deepens the severity of the toxic load you have already. And that should be what Maha is focused on. But they have turned their head away from this, well, okay, from, you know, That it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's point, we all start feeling crazy. Yeah. I mean, I never thought that I, I mean, it literally feels like the emperor, you know, the emperor is new clothes because I said to Jonathan, I was like, now I'm supposed to believe that food sprayed with pesticide that is literally made to kill things, to kill living organisms of all varieties that I'm supposed to be like no big deal. Here, child. What? Right. Right. When we have so much research showing how detrimental glyphosate is to the human body. Well, it's inconvenient. And I think this also speaks to sort of, you know, a bit of what we've been talking about. People don't like when things are complicated, nuanced or inconvenient. And that comes to their health, it comes to their information. And as we're seeing, it comes to politics as well. I don't want nuance, I want like you said, I want one rule that fits every situation and it's not that simple. And it takes effort to be able to try and parse through this so that you can figure out what actually works in your body and also for this planet. Yeah, yeah, thank you. And can I make it simple? Let's try to make it simple. Eat real food. Did it come out of the ground? Or was it highly processed? Just real food. So fruits and vegetables, meats, cheeses, legumes. Even some things like fermented bread, like sourdough bread, it can be really, really healthy. So eat real food. If you have the funds to eat organic, eat it organic. And if you don't have the funds

follow Clean 15, Dirty Dozen, go look it up on EWG and start tacking on 15 hours of fasting

every day. If all we did was that, we would improve the metabolic health of our country.

It's literally that simple. Why are you not in RFK, Junior's visit? I like to keep myself separate from those. If we're gonna, you know what I'm talking about, am I used to, I've heard him speak a thousand times, like years ago and he was the environmental guy. I don't think people realize, you know, this is, you're gonna get me going, but I've been studying politics since I was a little kid. It was the dinner conversation at our dinner table all the time. When I was 18, my mom literally joyfully walked me to the neighbor's house where I could actually vote and it was like the biggest deal in my family. I think one of the problems we have right now is people haven't seen the how politics work, works in a broader sense. They're choosing their one thing. So Robert Kennedy Jr. was an environmental lawyer and what he discovered is that mercury was in our rivers, was in our environment, and it was causing brain damage to young children. And then he extrapolated that out into where else is mercury. He was an environmental protector, and now he's not. He is not of environmental protector. He is allowing, he's turning himself away from what our president is doing, which is ruining our environment, which is making us the most sick out of everything we're doing. It's worse than ultra processed foods. Air pollution kills more children every day than vaccines do. So the conversation to your point has gotten upside down. But if you if you look at history, if you look at where somebody like Robert Kennedy's roots came from, he was an environmental lawyer until now. And I don't know if it was power, I don't know what it was. Remember when he posed with the McDonald's, that made me sad, like a part of the diet inside when he posed with that McDonald's. It made me really sad. There's also a lot of conversation right now about lead in our soil and the degeneration of our top soil to not have nutrient rich foods as well as other chemicals that are just in this oil itself. So it sounds like, really, yes, you want to reduce load, but the only other option is to increase our detox pathways. You got it. You got it. So let's talk about detox pathways. So when you go into these fastened states, and by the way, the other thing I want to point out is everybody can afford money and time to go 15 hours without food once they train and they understand. So one of the things that I have been deeply trying to understand is how do we help the single mom in the south who is working two jobs And she has the only thing that she can do is drive through McDonald's because it's cheap, it's timely, and that's what she's doing. So what can we give her? Let's teach her how to fast 15 hours she can do that. And so that she's not, she's starting to get rid of these toxins at a cellular level. Then you bring up detox pathways. We need to make sure she's moving every day, is she increasing her circulation. If we can get her sweating every day, maybe she just does like a 20 minute jog around the track at lunch break, so that she's sweating. If we can get her sleeping because when we sleep, our brain actually shrinks and our cerebral spinal fluid goes up and washes toxins out. If we can get her having daily bowel movements, which is harder than you would think when you're eating those toxic foods. Now her natural detox pathways are getting rid of the accumulation of the toxins that she's getting from her food. The example I use is during the pandemic I was reached out to by a beautiful high school principal who was watching my YouTube channel. And this was September 2020. So we were deep and started into the pandemic. And so she wanted to bring me on to talk about what, to help her, her teachers understand how they could keep their immune system up. I was so beyond excited because I come from a family of teachers and I was like, oh my gosh, I can give back to these teachers. So I give this really fancy presentation on like, here's the food you should eat, here's the supplements you should take. And at the end of the whole lecture, I'm like, wow, I felt really good about it. And this brave man raises his hand. And he says, I really appreciate what you just said. But if I'm looking at a jar of peanut butter, and you're telling me, I need to eat the jar of peanut butter with the better oil, then the one that has the toxic oil, that is an eight dollar difference. And that is eight dollars I do not have. Another woman said to me, I get to my classroom at 4.30 in the morning. I work straight through. I don't take a lunch break so that I can sit with my students and be of help to them. I leave at 4.30 in the afternoon. I'm exhausted so I drive through McDonald's. And I realized in that moment that it's become so complicated that a tool like fasting is such a beautiful answer that everybody can take the calling on. My and B. OX break down is supported by by optimizers. You know, I struggled to get good quality sleep and I just assumed it was stress. But as I learned, during paramanopause and menopause, your hormones shift in a way that affects your magnesium levels. And low magnesium, it makes everything harder, not just sleep, focus, mood, your tolerance for stress. That's why I have added magnesium breakthrough by by optimizers to my nightly routine. It's a blend of seven different forms of magnesium designed to support relaxation and overall sleep quality. Try it, See if you wake up more rested and refreshed. You've got nothing to lose and a lot to gain. Bi optimizers offers a 365 day. No questions asked. Money back guarantee. Magnesium breakthrough is a huge breakthrough to improve hormonal balance, to help with focus, decrease brain fog, improve sleep hygiene overall. Bi optimizers makes it very easy. Jonathan, what do they get when they go to bioptimizers.com slash breaker and use the code breaker? You get 15% off your entire order and a free bottle of massimes. Bioptimizers best selling digestive enzyme. That'll be added to your order automatically when you use our exclusive code. That's a $20 product free on top of your discount already.

This is a limited time offer and while supplies last, you can't get it on Amazon, you can't get it in stores. This offer exists in one place. Our link, our code, that's it. So maybe you were already thinking about it. This is the sign. Go to buyoptimizers.com slash breaker. Use the code breaker, grab it before it's gone. and make 2026 the year, you finally start sleeping again.

This episode is sponsored by Wondering Jews

and Open Door Media Brand. If you've ever found yourself feeling like you have more questions than answers, you're in good company. The Jewish people have been like that for thousands of years. Wondering Jews with Michal and Noam is a podcast where two of today's most dynamic Jewish voices, Michal Beton and Noam Weissmann

dig into the biggest questions about life through a Jewish lens. It's the kind of conversation where you'll laugh, learn something new, and probably shout and disagreeman at least once. Michal and Noam tackled the tough topics, like anti-Semitism in America, what happens after we die, and the future of religion with guests like Brett Stevens, Michael Rappeport, and Sarah Herwitz. In this past month, in honor of Jewish American Heritage Month, they've been celebrating

some of the Jewish lives and institutions that have shaped- with guests like Brett Stevens, Michael Rappeport, and Sarah Herwitz. And this past month, in honor of Jewish American Heritage Month,

they've been celebrating some of the Jewish lives and institutions that have shaped American life. From food to music and comedy, thoughtful, joyful, and always honest, that's Wondering Jews with Michal and Noam, a production of Unpacked. Find it on your favorite podcast app or on YouTube and make sure to hit subscribe. Check out Wondering Jews with Michal and Noah podcast and subscribe at unpacked.bio slash nmx. I want to turn a little bit more to age like a girl. You know, I think for many for many women, you know, menopause does not feel like a glorious time. If you talk to holistic people, you'll get the like, oh, you're coming into your age of wisdom. And I'm like, I don't know. And this notion that we can have more confidence, more energy, more clarity, like it's in the title of the book, what are people getting wrong about how to approach aging in terms of what is waiting for us? Well, so the first question to ask yourself, and this is one that was sparked the whole age like a girl, is why do women live 42.5% of their life without a reproductive system if they're lucky? Because we're supposed to be dead. No, the opposite. So, if why would the body and stay alive as a system completely shuts down? men don't have that. We're the only species on the planet that stays alive after a reproductive system shuts down. When estrogen and progesterone start to decline, it signals to the brain to rewire itself. And the neurons in the brain that kept you stuck to people pleasing to being everybody's hero, to fixing everybody's problem, to doing the rosy, the riveter sort of, I can do it all mentality. Those neurons move away. They are sloughed off. This is Lisa Moscone, the top female brain researcher in the world. This is her work. There are neurons that move away so that new neurons can grow so that you are prepared for the next job in your life. What is that job, Mindy? Right. That's a great question. So let's back up one step at step. There are three times in a woman's life that this brain will rewire itself. The first is at puberty when hormones come in. When hormones come in, you need to prepare to be independent because if you get pregnant, you're going to have to care for a baby. So your neurons that kept you dependent upon mom and dad are slept away and new neurons are formed for independence. So you can lead yourself. Second time, postpartum after a baby. When those hormones drop, what ends up happening is the neurons that told you where your keys were. They also told me where my hair was, but go ahead. Yeah, that told you where the to-do list that you kept in your brain. Those neurons get sloughed aside and you need new neurons to be able to be more intuitive with your baby because your baby doesn't talk. So you need to know how to read your baby's clues. Right. Think about that. Most animals when they come out into the world. They aren't as reliant on their parent. They can like, you know, go watch the watch National Geographic channel. Those babies pop out and they're independent, but human babies they're not that way. So the mom's brain has to rewire itself so that it can read the clues of the baby. Third time, Perry Manipaz, hormones drop, and the brain rewires itself for leadership. We as women were meant to move into a leadership role. This goes back to the Hunter and Gather Days. It's under a philosophy called the grandmother hypothesis. Doesn't mean you have to be a grandmother. But the theory was that back in the Hunter Gather Days, when a woman stopped her cycle, they moved her into a different place in the tribe. And in that place in the tribe, her job was to lead the women and the children that were left back at the cave while the men went out for big animal kills. But I wanna say that those women were moving into a leadership role with this plunge of hormones that I'd like I do take issue with this because what we're being told now is you should never have that drop in hormones. You should never, you know, lose your hair. Your vagina needs to be as fresh and moist as if you're 20. Like and here are the drugs that will make that happen. And, you know, I feel like I'm 90 years old. I don't know if we're, you know, in a similar bracket, but from all the women that I know who are in Paramount Appause, it doesn't feel like leadership. It feels like I can't sleep. I'm up all night randomly replaying every mistake I've ever made, regretting everything I ever did. I don't like him anymore, whoever he is. I definitely don't wanna have sex with him and I don't even have the lubrication to have sex. What am I leading besides a gang of other unhappy, exhausted, shriveled vagina women. That's what I'm leading. Everybody follow me. The key word in this and the cruel part of it all is Perry Manopause is a 10 year process. That's what my midlife told me and I said I would never have lived past 15 if you had told me that. Okay, so let's go look at the 60 and 70 and 80 year olds. Let's look at Jane Fonda. So do I need hormones or I don't need hormones to be a leader? So let's go back to the hormone question. It is a personal choice. It's a personal choice. Right, but you understand what I'm saying. There's something about societies that does not exist now that allowed me to be on a throne of lilacs and lavender as everyone came to me for my wisdom. Right now it feels like we're being told you shouldn't have that drop. There's estrogen receptors everywhere. Your heart's gonna give out. Your bones are gonna break. Jump up and down 20 times on concrete every day and take all the hormones. Shmear this on your vulva. Put this on the back of your elbows. Put this behind your knees and stick this suppository in there. And now you're a leader. Exactly, exactly. The level of sheds that have now been placed upon women in paramanopause is egregious. And it's just like the food conversation, it's gotten so complicated. So let's make it simple. Yeah. When you go into your forties, there's lifestyle changes that need to be made. And we talked about one of them here. And hopefully just look at that hemoglobin A1c. Get your metabolic health in order. And then just tell me if that hemoglobin A1c gets down closer to five and you can start doing these slow levels of fast. What happens to the brain fog, what happens to the insomnia, what happens to the hot flashes, what happens to all of that? My experience with hundreds of thousands of women is that one change dramatically changes those menopausal symptoms. Now, along with that, again, you're in a conversation with your doctor, and if your doctor recommends hormone replacement therapy, I think you should consider it. I think you should think if it is a good option for you. But hormone replacement therapy without lifestyle changes is sets you up for failure over and over and over again. Wow. The two need to be in combination. And the problem with the menopausal conversation right now is we're putting all eyes on hormone replacement and we're not talking about lifestyle. They they to be done together and then I don't know about you, but every woman I've talked to was like, well, I went on my estrogen patch and then it was too much. I had to get it down. Then I started taking progesterone, but it was the wrong kind. I was taking the oral, so now I'm doing it vaginally. And now my motivation is gone. And so now they're sticking pellets in my butt so that I can up my testosterone. It is crazy making and we don't have a one size fits all with hormone replacement, which is why you need a good doctor with a good relationship. I'm 56 years old. I am on hormone replacement therapy. I do blood work every 90 days with my OB and we watch my numbers to see if that hormone replacement is working. We just, we've been doing that for a year and we just got it clicked. Now, not all the single mom in the south both is not going be able to do that. So, we've got to find a good balance between lifestyle and hormone replacement. We can't say one over the other, they have to go together. I worry a lot, and we've talked to Dr. Haver. We've talked to all the about this. And I mean, I've had two really, really good solid OBS retire in the last two years because no one knows how to handle this system that is being also like run by robots. These were not old doctors. These were not doctors past their prime. These were people who were like, I don't know how to help people, which is why I became an OB in the first place. Right. So for me, like a lot of this is like, the system is broken. The system does not benefit people who don't easily have access to this kind of care. And, you know, even, I mean, I'm grateful to you for the work that you do because at least we're trying to get it out there that there are lifestyle things like the fact that there are like foods that you should know about. Like if you are a hormonal, like if you're having a hormonal shift, here are the foods that you need like no one ever told us that. No, I mean, even thinking about, I mean, I'm a lactation person. Like, no

one, I don't even think that's the only thing that I was taught is what are the allergens that might cause your baby to have blood in their stool or be fussy, right? And these are very important things to know. I know the common allergens, but I just read an article today. There's like a 43% decrease in peanut allergies because people were so freaked out about peanuts that they stopped giving everybody peanuts and everyone was allergic.

But I'm like thinking of these things in terms of food, like these are just not part of the conversations that we have at all. Thank you. Yeah, which is why I'm, you can tell, I'm highly agitated about that. Because again, I'm gonna go back to women when women try something because an expert gets up and says, do this. And they fail at it. They don't think that it was the expert's fault. They don't think it's the doctor's fault. They think it's their fault because women have been conditioned to always turn on themselves. So the menopause conversation started with an altruistic lens and Mary Claire was a big part of that and she's an incredible advocate for women's health. But now the whole conversation has gone to HRT and nobody is talking lifestyle, which is why I'm like this is why I sit and do five new videos for my YouTube and why I write books. It's like, and do podcasts like this. We have you, you don't get a free lifestyle pass because you do a drug of any kind. You don't, ozumpix the same thing. You don't get a free lifestyle pass. The minute you are off that drug, you're going to gain them weight back. If you get off the HRT and you didn't fix your lifestyle, all those symptoms are going to come back. They have to be done together. And that is where we see the greatest benefit. No one has ever said this on our podcast. No one has ever been that clear and explicit. Like no one has said that. Thank you. I mean, I mean, I mean. Mine be Alex Raydown is supported by optimizers. I struggled to get good quality sleep and I just thought like, oh, it's stress. But I learned during Perry Manipaus and Menipaus, your hormones shift and it affects your magnesium levels. Low magnesium makes everything harder, not just sleep, but focus, mood, stress tolerance. That's why we added magnesium breakthrough by bioptimizers to our nightly routine. It's a blend of seven different forms of magnesium designed to support relaxation and overall sleep quality. Try it, see if you wake up more rest and refreshed. You've got nothing to lose and a lot to gain. Bi optimizers offers a 365 day. No questions asked. Money back guarantee. Magnesium breakthrough is a fantastic way to improve that hormonal imbalance that especially happens with magnesium. And then you have better focus. You have better sleep hygiene in general. Bi optimizers makes it so easy. Here's what you get when you go to bioptimizers.com slash

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