Reverse, Reset, Restore

Foundation Friday - The Menopause Reset

• Season 1 • Episode 73

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In our latest episode, join me as we navigate the nuanced terrain of menopause with the wisdom of Dr. Mindy Pelz, whose chiropractic and holistic health expertise and personal experiences provide a refreshing perspective on reclaiming our body's autonomy and unlocking its inherent healing potential. From experimenting with intermittent fasting to adopting the Ketobiotic diet and mindfulness practices, there is a lot to uncover in this easy to read and readily accessible book. I'll recount some of my own transformative health experiments and we'll take a look at  3 of the 5 steps  of Dr. Pelz's five-step approach that serve as the foundations throughout the book.

We discuss the importance of a patient, personalized path to wellness, and how adopting these strategies can lead to a flourishing transition into the menopausal phase.

Tune in to discover how to reset your health, and don't miss the opportunity to engage with our community for a chance to win a copy of this life-changing book. How do you do that? Well, it's easy. Simply comment on  the FB group post - here's the link!


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Speaker 1:

Welcome to Foundation Fridays. This is an offshoot of my Reverse Reset Restore podcast, where we drop extra info on you on the last Friday of the month. This is the place where we talk about the books that are reshaping thoughts and belief systems, teaching us and guiding us into a deeper knowing of ourselves. Think of it as the book club for the soul. I'm your host, sally, and I am creating whole new worlds for myself, one page at a time. Hello, gorgeous, thanks for joining me today. If this is your first time listening to the show, a big welcome and a virtual hug for taking the time to be here. If you are a regular listener, welcome back and thank you for your support. It means the world to me. If you are a woman in menopause or pairing menopause, or just a woman who wants to understand what the hell is happening to your body as you get into your 40s, I highly recommend this month's book, the Menopause Reset by Dr Mindy Peltz. In fact, I am such a fan that I'm giving away a copy to one listener this month. We'll get into those details later on in the episode, but right now, be prepared to hear me gush about how awesome this book is. Now I've been listening to and reading content from Dr Mindy Peltz for years now, and we'll be covering another of her books Fast Like a Girl and another Foundation Friday episode later in the year. What she does is makes this information accessible.

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As a woman at the end of my 40s, I think I've probably been in denial about my own pairing menopausal journey. There is something terrifying about realizing that your body is changing once again, making you a foreigner trapped inside it, that these new experiences signal in a world where youth and beauty is appointed absolutes. It signals the death of an age, a youth that doesn't even feel all that long ago. I know you probably know exactly what I mean and I've been kinda mad about it. Why haven't the women who have gone before us been open and frank about what misery awaits us? I remember feeling that when I first got my periods and when I understood the inner workings of the miracle that is childbirth. Why don't we have these open discussions about the brutal realities of these hormonal changes? I mean, could someone not have warned me that nipple hair is a thing when you get into your 40s, or that the mood swings that can make you feel untethered to sanity aren't your cross alone to bear. Is it because menopaus, as like most women's symptoms and women's illnesses, are just not valued or understood? Or that we dare not speak out what is happening to us because we've got some weird generational or societal shame attached to our bodies and their inner workings? These questions are, thankfully, not just my own.

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Right from chapter one, dr Peltz delves head first into the same questions I've had and that you've probably had too. And for the first time in a long time, it feels deeply satisfying to read a book from someone who is not only a professional when it comes to these changes, but has lived experience, to get this information, from someone who gets exactly what the chaos menopause can bring into our lives. And by the end of chapter two, I am all I know. This book is about to change my life. It's gonna answer some of the questions I've been trying to answer for years and provide me with some solutions to make this transitional period a place to thrive in, even in the middle of a raging hot flash. So come with me as we explore this beautifully well-written and easily accessible and relatable book. We're gonna start, as we always do with these Foundation Friday episodes, with a brief biography of the author, as has been the case with all the previous authors we've discussed since we launched these special monthly episodes, I always find it so insightful and inspiring to see how their experiences have shaped their lives and work. We've seen this with Bessel van de Kolk and Gabel Marte and even with Charles Dickens. Our lived experiences always seep through and inform our lives, our interests and our responses to the world, and Dr Mindy Paltz is no exception. She, like so many in these fields of health and wellness and personal transformation and healing, has turned her own understandings and journey into a lifeline for so many.

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Now let's get this out of the way because otherwise it may be the proverbial elephant in the room. Mindy is not a medical doctor and she doesn't claim to be. She is a qualified chiropractor, graduating with a Doctor of Chiropractic degree. There are a lot of people out there who try to debunk and discredit her work because she is not an MD and fair point in the stay in age. There is a lot of false information being passed around as truth. That is an inescapable fact and we've been raised, at least in the West, to believe that doctor knows best, which means that anything outside the normal parameters of Western medicine frankly gets the stink eye.

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I know because I veered off the Western medicine highway several years ago and now have this hybrid type of health philosophy. So that's why I will sometimes dedicate an episode to something scientific, like neuropeptides, and then swing wide to discuss in another episode, using affirmations or tapping or looking at how our self-hatred has been hurting us physically. Because this podcast is my journey of self-discovery and understanding of not just why my past traumas have left the imprint in my hair and now, but how I have responded to those events and others. To be right where I am now, we tend to delve into a lot of discussions in this podcast about our mental, emotional and physical wellbeing. That is really at the heart of Reverse, recept Restore, and these Foundation Friday episodes play a big role in that too, because they offer another way to bring understanding to us about life. I think my point here is and yes, I do have one is that when we remain open to the possibilities that new information can help us heal, we allow healing in.

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Do I agree with everything she says? Not necessarily, and I'll touch on this shortly, but I want to acknowledge that there are a lot of people who will immediately discount anything she says or does, mainly because she doesn't have the MD behind her name. However, mindy has spent decades looking at, researching and looking to understand the body and, in particular, how to help women with their bodies. And while we are on the subject of credibility, doctors MDs have little to no training in nutrition and diets and a whole lot of training in prescribing medication. I am not anti-medication by any means, but I think that there are not enough doctors around who are willing to look at any alternatives, mainly lifestyle shifts, which could offer way more benefits than any pills might do. And this book offers you the opportunity to look at your life and, in particular, your hormones, far more holistically. And this is important especially for women's health, which remains often overlooked to our detriment.

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Born Friday 17th of October 1969 in LA, mindy was the second child, second daughter, in her family. She has said her parents helped teach her so much about health, not by telling her what to do, but by modeling what health looks like, and this has clearly influenced her work and own practice. This philosophy of walking the talk is evident all through this book and you'll hear it in almost every talk or conversation she shares online. When Mindy was in sixth grade, she wanted to be a psychologist, but by the time she'd reached university this focus had shifted, although ironically, with her success as a world-renowned holistic health expert and her coaching practices, which have psychological aspects entwined with her teachings. In 1991 she graduated from the University of Kansas, lawrence, with a degree in kinesiology, which is the study of movement, before pursuing her DC, her Doctor of Chiropractic, at Palmer College of Chiropractic in San Jose, california. In 1997 she married her husband, Sequoia Hall, and the two have blended work and married life together for years, with Sequoia working at the Dr Mindy Paltz company as the chief strategist officer. The couple have two teenage children, son Paxton and daughter Bodie.

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Mindy keeps herself very busy with two podcasts, running two health centers that offer chiropractic services as well as functional testing, diet, nutrition and detox programs. She runs the reset academy, which is a coaching program that employs tactics such as fasting to improve health. We'll be talking about fasting in other episodes and a little in this episode too, as it relates to the book. All right, that's a little bit about Mindy. Let's get into the book.

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The Manipore's Reset, my measurement of health, was an outside experience. If I liked how I looked on the outside, I assumed all was well on the inside. Dr Mindy expresses here what so many of us probably have thought Healthy outside means no worries on the inside, right, and yet there are many cases where a person can appear to be the perfect picture of health and yet their insides are telling a different story. So often we can get sidetracked, focusing on what we think we need to look like that we may not stop to consider what's going on on the inside. It's often not until ill health hits us that we pay attention to our internal workings, and even then it's usually limited.

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It's always amazing to me that we will spend an entire lifetime in our bodies and yet understand so little of it, and so many people seem to be quite happy to go about their lives, never taking the initiative to develop a deeper understanding of how our bodies function or what we can do for ourselves. We've become so codependent on the system society has put in place that we've abdicated our own autonomy for our health and our bodies. This life of ours, as Dr Mindy reminds us in the beginning of chapter three, is where we get to be our own hero and understand our own internal power. The hero of the day is not your doctor, the quick fix diet your friends are on, or a magic pill that will take all your symptoms away. The hero is you. The magic is within you.

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Your body was designed to heal. Let me read that last sentence again your body was designed to heal. For those of us who are, or have been, struggling with health issues that seem to go on to infinity and beyond, this is a really important reminder. It serves as a great affirmation for health my body was designed to heal. My body is designed to heal. If you get nothing out of this book or this episode, let that sentence be your takeaway, because if you can do that, repeat and believe in those six words, you can change the course of your relationship with your body. So the next time your body is creaking and moaning or groaning or fixing to stir up some trouble with a dose of pain and discomfort, flip the usual narrative of self-ladulation and repeat after me my body is designed to heal.

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But you've got to do more than just say it or even believe it, my friends, as Mindy quickly follows up, there are steps you need to take to help your body heal. She says you will need to implement several lifestyle changes to thrive during these years. Your toolkit may include intermittent fasting, the Ketobiotic diet, eating to feed your hormones, detoxes to rid yourself of toxa, estrogens and mindfulness techniques. In other words, we are taking a holistic approach to how we treat our illnesses or, more specifically, in the case of this book, our experience with menopause, and Dr Mini promises to teach us how our bodies work and to help us understand our hormones during the menopause process, providing practical steps along the way. Here are the five steps she encourages us to implement that she walks us through in detail in the following chapters of the book.

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Step one change when you eat. Step two address what you are eating. Step three repair your microbiome. Step four detox yourself and your life. Step five stop the rushing. Now I want to point out something important here these steps are not concurrent, but cumulative. In other words, we are not going to try and implement them all at once here, and there is no rush or pressure to try to hurry yourself through them, which seems like a good point in this part of the episode to say that I am going to do an update on this book several months from now, when I have implemented the steps here and seen some results. As I often put it when trying out new things, I tend to treat myself as a bit of an experiment, and I encourage you to do the same, because what may work well for some may not be the same outcomes for you. Case in point I love body tapping, or emotional freedom technique, eft as it is also known by and yet for others it is just not their jam. That's why I'm always encouraging you to explore different forms of modalities that may work for you.

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This is not a one-size-fits-all podcast, because your life is not a one-size-fits-all life. Your thoughts, belief systems and behaviours are all tied up or knitted into the fabric of your being through your experiences, family history, genetics, predispositions, culture, age and so much more. We are the sum of many parts, and some of those parts can't be changed, like our birth date and our genetics. But much of what we may have been led to believe can't be changed, maybe like our cultural beliefs or thoughts can. And even the inevitable hormonal adventure of perimenopause or menopause can be a different journey than the ones our mothers, grandmothers and generations of women before us had to endure. This book is about recognising the changes that menopause brings and being able to find ways to harness those changes into something that can work for you to thrive and not just survive the season of our lives.

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And Mindy is going to offer throughout the book some ideas here that I am 100% on board with and that resonated strongly with me throughout reading this book. And there are other things suggested here that I know are not going to be the right fit for me. For example, she suggests the use of vibration therapy, like vibration plates, to help engage more of your muscles than just standing alone. Does I actually have a vibration plate laying a machine away in my storage? And it's in storage because every time I try to use it it sets off my motion sickness. So, in spite of me wanting to use it, it makes me unwell. So that's a no for me and it's a no from my body. And there might be some suggestions within the book that will be a no for you. But my guess is is that more of the steps or processes presented here would do you a world of good. So be brave and give them a go. You never know what might be the magic elixir that works well for you and your body.

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The beginning of chapter four Mindy lays it on the line with a truth bomb. That made me feel well, pretty uncomfortable. She wrote I looked at menopause like a switch that got turned on when you reached a certain age. One day you have your period, the next day you don't. Nothing could be further from the truth. For many women, menopause can be a 10 to 15 year journey in which their ovaries shut down and other organs pick up the hormonal slack. These organs may already be overworked and not up for the job. The horror that permeated my whole mind reading this and thinking how many years lay potentially before me to get through menopause was Real Ladies. Like Mindy, I had similar thoughts or, as it clearly shows, a deeper misunderstanding of menopause. I expected a stop on monthly periods and maybe some hot flashes and a few mood swings, and thought that was probably going to last a year or so. That's why books like this are so vital and why a book like this is a must read, in my opinion, because Mindy breaks it down no holds barred, but it's an easy to digest format and she uses easy to understand language.

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A little further, in chapter four, mindy again raises a point that I know we can relate to, because I have pretty much had the same conversation with a number of friends. She says, the highs and lows of my emotions were so intense that I never knew if I was going to be filled with joy and gratitude or if I would want to kill anyone who looked at me wrong. My mental state didn't seem to come from circumstances being right. It felt like something else was in charge, like an alien overtook my brain and left me feeling out of control and unpredictable. I'm sure many of our partners or family and friends on the receiving end of these emotional pendulums would agree that we appear to be operating from somewhere off the planet sometimes.

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Luckily, we are beginning to have a much greater understanding that when our hormones are raging or shifting or changing or switching, that they can have a great influence not just on our bodies but also on our mind. This is in part why, as I've aged, my mantra has become get in tune with yourself, and one of the most effective ways to do this is by making yourself a priority in your life, something that younger generations appear to be doing with greater ease than most of us over the age of, say, 40. Although there is some debate about the fine line between boundaries and healthy self-care practices and the social media driven performances of it's all about me, me, me, which is a whole other issue on to itself and one for another day's discussion. Dr Mindy talks about a patient taking control of her own life by prioritising herself, and it's something that really stuck with me. She writes she course corrected so that the back half of her life was not built around managing disease.

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So often I have conversations with friends about growing old, the way the body doesn't move as easily anymore, how food seems to stick around in ways that it never used to. We all seem to be full of complaints about the inevitable ways our body responds as we get older. But what if we shifted the way we view our aging? What if we made ourselves a priority now, instead of waiting for retirement or the kids to get older or our work life to settle? The washing can wait. Yet somehow we have made so many other things be the main focus. We sideline ourselves for the household chores, our families, our workplaces. I know because I do do this, giving myself half measures, because I'm always at the bottom of the list, and I suspect you do this too.

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We think it's selfish to self-prioritise. We claim we don't have the time or the mental or physical bandwidth to practice self. Women in particular tend to try to kill two birds with one stone. Claiming a 10 minute shower is self-care when they usually only get a two minute shower, or taking the kids to a mummy and me class is somehow self-care, because you're out of the house surrounded by other mums. Let's make a promise to ourselves that we will stop putting us, our needs and our cares at the bottom of the list. Let's course correct now, so that the rest of our life isn't spent managing disease and illnesses that could potentially be avoided if we just started to pay a little more time and attention and affection into our own thoughts, emotions and body's needs.

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Okay, let's skip ahead to chapter six. Is breakfast the most important meal of the day? Mindy breaks down the two myths that we've been fed for decades. The first is that we need to eat breakfast. By the way, this actually is a slogan that was invented by Kellogg's to promote their new cereal cornflakes back in the 70s. The second myth is one I still have had a lot of arguments with people over. Well, not so much now, because I tend to just let people voice their opinions without trying to roll right over theirs with mine. But the second myth is one that irks me, and it's one that I've had rather long arguments with with dietitians and nutritionists and doctors and friends and colleagues and family members and anyone else who basically believes this myth to be true, and it is this that eating multiple times a day is necessary. Now, as a faster, this has always been a source of contention with non-fasters, who inevitably think I am starving myself because I didn't eat breakfast or lunch or three or four snacks during the day, and I didn't eat dinner or dessert or a snack at night while I was watching TV. If you fast, you will no doubt have experienced this for yourself. It's often guised as concern, but it's mostly driven by a lack of knowledge or even a lack of a desire to know or understand. So there kind of becomes the unspoken rule which I've borrowed from the movie Fight Club. The first rule of fast club is we don't talk about fast club.

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In this chapter, mindy discusses fasting, beginning with intermittent fasting, which we all do, by the way, unless you are asleep either. While sleeping, we are in a fasting state. It's a good start, but fasting only while in sleep is not a long enough time for your body to do the repair work and get much needed benefits that come from a break in eating. The way to extend your fast, to get into a true intermittent fasting lifestyle, is to begin by pushing out your non-eating times. So instead of getting up and eating right away, try to push it out by an hour, then two and three, etc. You can also try the opposite way if your mornings are very early and eating is your only option. So have an earlier dinner and then close off your eating window as early as possible, as Mindy suggests. If you are new to feast famine cycle, here is the mindset I want you to have. In a 24-hour period, you should have a window of time when you fast and a window of time when you eat. Make eating the last thing you do as late in the day as possible and the first thing you stop as early in the day as possible, and you'll be amazed at the benefits fasting can provide.

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I have been fasting for many years. In fact, I fasted even as a child, when doing the 40-hour famine fundraiser. Of course we got to eat packets of barley sugars and drink juice, etc. So it wasn't necessarily a fast in the truest sense, but other than juice and boiled sweets, no other food passed our lips and I grew up understanding fasting from a spiritual perspective, so it's always been a part of my life, but I didn't understand until about seven or eight years ago how much fasting can improve your body's health and functions. I want to encourage you to take your time to work intermittent fasting into your life. I've actually fasted for about 21 days, but that took a long time to get there safely, and I know some people, usually driven by their desperation to lose weight or change their health issues yesterday, who have tried to jump ahead in the process and risk their health. I know the burden of impatience and the maddening feeling of wanting needing to see change now, but we are talking about lifestyle choices that need to happen in a gentle and loving way, which leads me to chapter 10 and the fifth step in this process Stop the rushing woman's syndrome.

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Here are the steps Mindy outlines throughout this chapter Schedule downtime, prioritise self-care, adapt your workout schedule, practice vacation, get a daily dose of oxytocin, show your adrenals some love. This chapter is full of simple ways to help you do this. I want to focus on just one example Adapt your workout schedule, because Mindy addresses how we can show ourselves some love by cultivating a relationship where we listen to and are in tune with our body's need, she says. I decided to tune into my body more and listen to what kind of workout it might need. Some days I felt like going on a long run, other days I wanted to just take a walk in the sun. I started doing less, push on through workouts and nurtured myself more with exercises like yoga and Pilates. I think the sentiment can be applied to many other areas of our lives, especially if you are a recovering perfectionist like me, or also, like me, a sufferer of rushing woman syndrome. There is a lot more that we could talk about and glean from within this book, and I'm going to touch upon that when I do the second part and lived experiences of this book later in the year.

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I do want to leave you with a great reminder and visual cue that Mindy uses in chapter 12. Move from surviving to thriving, because it reiterates what I was saying earlier about treating yourself as a bit of an experiment, as each of us are different. She writes Look at your health as a puzzle. Everyone's puzzle is different. Some of you may only have a 250 piece puzzle to solve, whereas others may have a thousand piece puzzle. Either way, I want you to be patient. Just like when you tackle a big puzzle, you can start off by pulling out the border pieces, then sorting by color, then building the border and finally diving into the centre of the puzzle. That's the same approach I want you to take with your health. We may have the big picture of the puzzle that is our health, but often we only get to see the big picture one piece at a time. Be patient, don't rush it and don't try to make the pieces of someone else's puzzle fit your own.

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Okay, at the start of this episode I said I was going to give away a copy of this book To get yourself into, when all you got to do is leave a comment on our Facebook or Insta page Menopause Reset Episode link post and share this episode with a friend you think would benefit.

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I'll wait a couple of weeks for people to hear it and comment and share and then we'll draw a winner and then I'll be in touch to get your details to send you your very own Menopause Reset copy. Pretty easy and totally worth it. The link to the Facebook post is in the show notes because I want to make it as easy for you as possible to win. And if you don't have Facebook or other socials, no problem, just message me via email that's also in the show notes and I'll put you in the drawer. If you like this episode or have thoughts about it, head over to the Foundation Friday Facebook group and let us know. As always, I close out our episode with a quote, and this is obviously going to be from Dr Mindy Pouts, and it's the running theme of Reverse, reset, restore. Nothing will save your life more than you making yourself a priority.