Part 1: Age Like a Girl - The Real Purpose of Menopause with Dr. Mindy Pelz

So I'm super excited to chat with you all today about my new book, Age Like a Girl. I have been talking about this not only on my podcast, but also on my YouTube channel with my Reset Academy members, the material that went into this book. I've been studying for the last 10 years, and I've been writing and researching this book very intimately for the last three years. And then in the last six months, I literally sequestered myself and hunkered down and put all my thoughts onto pages. And the book is called Age Like a Girl. And it is coming out on December 16th. And so what I'm going to do in this episode is we're going to talk about what's in the book. I'm going to give you a little preview. And some of the stuff I'm really, really excited to bring forth to the culture so we can talk about it. We can have these deep discussions and sort of open up a really different way of looking at menopause since 1 .2 billion women by 2030 are going to be in menopause. I really have always stood for teaching women how to think on their own, not fall prey to social media, not fall prey to, you know, a doctor, a friend. We constantly outsource our health. And hopefully those of you that were fans of Fast Like a Girl and Eat Like a Girl and listen to my podcast and my YouTube, understand that at the heart of everything I'm teaching you is how to be an advocate for yourself, how to make smart decisions for yourself. So I'm going to go through age like a girl, and it is chunked down into three sections. So three parts. Part one is a question that I desperately have been trying to answer, which is what is the purpose of menopause. Now, that might not seem like the most earth -shattering question, but I want to tell you when you look into what other species do, females in other species do not live long past their reproductive cycle. So when their reproductive cycle ends, they end. Now, in the mammal world, we have examples of like the orca whales. There's a couple of different types of whales that actually live long like we do postmenopausally. And these whales exhibit very similar traits to each other. And as you'll learn throughout this episode, that these whales actually take their postmenopausal women and they put Thank you. anything about it. I'm going to give you a modern day version of it. And what did the hunter and gatherers, our primal ancestors do with this menopausal moment? I started to look at things like Lisa Moscone's work. Her, the menopause brain came out and I interviewed her on my podcast and I learned some really interesting things about how the brain remodels itself at massive moments of hormonal change. And so I started to dive into the research on, well, what are these hormonal change? What is the brain remodel? What is the hormones that are initiating this change? So I'll go through that with you. I then found the work of a feminist psychologist, her name is Carol Gilligan, who studied women back or girls back in the 1980s and discussed Once estrogen comes in, what we end up doing is making decisions from both of a relational and emotional place and a logical place. And sit with me. I'm going to go through this in a moment because Carol Gilligan's work really tells us how society has trained us to be good, how society has trained us to tell us when we're worthy or not worthy. And one of the big things I discovered in this obsession of mind to understand what the purpose of menopause was is I discovered that there's so many of us who hit our postmenopausal years and we do not care anymore, which is why a lot of you are seeing this. We do not care clubs showing up everywhere. Well, I have a little secret for you. You're not designed to care. And the only reason you cared in the first place is because you were drugged on estrogen. More on that in a moment. Estrogen came in, made your brain this cross -referenced relational brain. And when estrogen goes out, you go to more of what we call a lateralized brain, where you're either operating from emotion or you're operating from logic. we can move back and forth between the hemispheres a lot easier without estrogen, which also means that many of the traits and behaviors and things that we took on when we were younger and we had estrogen and we were drugged on estrogen, when we had estrogen pulsing through our body, we made decisions that were often for everybody else's benefit but our a lot. I gave this talk that you're receiving right now at my, at a retreat a couple of weeks ago. And 150 women in the room. And every woman was like, yep, when I hit my post -metapausal years, I stopped putting everybody else's needs ahead of my own. And that is really the work of Carol Gilligan that showing us that society told us to be good, to be worthy, we needed to act and behave and look a certain way. So we'll dive into that. has something called the life, death life cycle, where when we look at a female's life, we're meant to live our life a certain way, and then parts of that life die, and then all a sudden we live life anew, which is why you see statistics like 70 % of divorces are initiated by women after 50. Women are killing. The most common time for women to kill themselves is between 45 and 55. And so there is this awakening that's happening as we move into those postmenopausal years that we're not naming. We're not talking about. And so in age like a girl, I wanted to bring that forth and say, hey, postmenopause, menopause in general, moving us to those postmenopausal years, it is a combination of an evolutionary design, a neuroscience design, a societal design change, and a mystical one. And I brought those four lenses together to answer this question, what's the purpose of menopause? So in part one of the book, that's all those four people's brilliance and how it relates to menopause. So I'll be discussing that today on this episode. Middle section, part two of the book. This was the monster part to write. Because once I ended up down the rabbit hole of understanding estrogen, I really saw that estrogen acts on a lot of other neurochemicals in our body. That estrogen, I like to think of her as the diva. She, yes, she came in, she released an egg. She went and bathed so many parts of your body. She helped give you collagen. She bathed your brain so you can think right. Like she was a busy hormone. And when she leaves, she actually leaves this huge neurochemical whole. So Estrogen stimulated over 12 neurochemicals. I called them estrogen's girl gang. And I think those of you have been following me for a while, you've been listening to this, you've been hearing it. And what I want to show you and talk about and what I wrote about in part two of age like a girl was that these neurochemicals, I call them the neurochemical armor. It's like they start to shed, but you can bring them back with your lifestyle. You can use your lifestyle to fill in these neurochemicals if you understand what they are. So I'm going to talk about that with you today, and that's part two of the book. And then part three of the book is really the transformational process. I spent a lot of time looking at Joseph Campbell's hero's journey. I looked at Clarissa Pincolla's journey of the life, death, life cycle. And then I looked at what is change, what is transformation, what is grief, what is resilience, what, what's that inner knowing that we get? What is happening in the brain when we are experiencing these different parts of a transformational journey? And so in part three, I break down a transformational journey so that I can really show you what it means. going to see that what menopause is setting us up for something incredibly brilliant that's going to occur in our life. And I like thinking of it like this. My hope with this podcast, with my YouTube videos, with my book, is that you see what's right with menopause, not what's wrong with it, because it is a transformational moment that is working in your favor. And I know some of you are in those perimenopausal years and it doesn't feel like that. Sit tight. I'm going to help you see that. I also know a lot of women postmenopausally feel like they got tossed aside. They also feel frustrated that they didn't get the option of HRT. We'll talk about that. And I also have met with a lot of 30 -year -olds that once the menopausal conversation started, they were like, ooh, I'm a little nervous about this menopause thing. It's like when we weren't talking about it, it was easier to ignore that it was coming down the road. And now what I'm hearing is a lot of women in their late 30s say, how can I prepare? How do I get ready for this moment? So we're going to bring that all together. This is in age like a girl in massive detail. One of the things I'm the most proud of with age like a girl is I have over 400 peer -reviewed citations of studies backing up what I discovered in there. For the sake of this conversation, I'm going to give you highlights. Please go pre -order the book, and it will be in your hands in December. It'll be there in time for Christmas, so it's a great present, but most importantly, the purpose behind age like a girl is really to change the conversation, to elevate the menopause conversation so that you understand how powerful you are. Just like Fast Like a Girl taught you how powerful you can be over your metabolism. I want you to understand through this podcast, through my videos, through this book, how powerful you are meant to be moving through this process we call menopause. Everything, it's like nature. Everything has an order to it, even though it doesn't look like it. So if there was a reason we stay 42 .5 % of our life post -reproductively, if there's a reason for that, we should probably know that, don't you? If you're going to spend over 40 % of your life in your post -reproductive years, Don't you want to know what's happening and where you're going? So when we look at it through this lens and we look at it through the lens that the body never does anything by mistake, I really went searching for experts to help me understand this process. And those of you who listen to me on my podcast know I've brought a lot of these experts on to really help us all understand this moment. In the last couple of years, as I've been interviewing these experts, one of the things that I noticed was we all can't agree on the menopausal process. So know that right up front, that you're hearing me on this podcast or maybe you're watching this on YouTube and it might click for you or make sense for therapy. On the resetter podcast, I'm bringing several what may look like conflicting opinions, but I really think that hormone replacement is a very personal decision and you have to decide what fits right for you. And I don't think there's a one size fits all. There's a learning curve to find your best hormone replacement therapy. So know that. I also, Mary Claire Haber and I talked about this on the resetter podcast, hormone replacement therapy does not give you a free pass from lifestyle. So if you put a patch on and your hemoglobin A1C is up at 5 .7, that patch may not be as effective or you might not notice the changes hormonally as much as if somebody puts the patch on that has a hemoglobin A1C of 4 .7, showing that they're metabolically healthy. Someone who has a high toxic load, something I talk about in age like a girl, I walk through different toxins, a lot of heavy metals, a lot of plastics in your body. If I give you a pellet or I give you some cream, that doesn't mean that you're going to all of a sudden have this instantaneous happiness that kicks in and that your menopausal journey changes. Somebody who's a complete rushing woman who is so frazzled and doesn't even know or have access to her parasympathetic nervous system, she may have a little more of a downside to her hormone replacement because her life is out of congruency with how her feminine body and with what it needs and how it needs rest. So this is why I will continue to hold the line of lifestyle. And in age like a girl, there's lifestyle all over it giving you really simple free things you can do. But in this quest to answer, what is the purpose of pause. In just the three years I've been writing this book, the conversation has changed dramatically. And we've gone from this hush to this chaos where everybody's giving you advice. So again, I want to remind you as I go through this podcast, as I go through the YouTube videos that if you're watching this, it's you are the boss of your own health. You are the one that makes that decision for you. So you listen to the podcasts like this so that you can become educated so that you can walk into your doctor's office so you can have a collaborative conversation around what's best for you. So I really just, I want to keep putting that forward that this is your decision. I'm just opening up another part of the conversation that hasn't been getting enough oxygen. So here's an interesting thought. Why would your body shut down a major organ system? Like, think about that. You know, we didn't, it's not like we have mistaken parts of our body. Why would the body, like, shut that down. And why in the shutting down of this organ system, why are we seeing the rest of these neurochemicals go? And why are we seeing this massive brain change where we go from a cross -reference brain to a lateral brain? Why is all of that happening? And I will tell tell you, as I go through these four experts that I looked at and these four theories I looked at, I will tell you that the number one reason is because your body is preparing you to change. You are shedding old identities that no longer fit you. You are letting go of people pleasing. You are done with the time of your life where you've thought about everybody else, and you're stepping into a new version of you. So new versions need new environments. And so there is the reason the body shut the organ system down is so that you can change. You can transform into something new. If it didn't want you, if the human body and whoever made us, depending on or belief systems, if it wanted you to stay the same, it would have kept you in the reproductive cycle. But it literally shut down a whole organ system and it made this massive change to your brain. It changed your neurochemicals so that you can change. What you're going to hear throughout this whole series is that depression, anxiety, irritability, is it possible that these things are showing up because you are resisting in. talk about this as we go through the series because there's something magical that happens to the caterpillar that makes it turn into a butterfly. So stay tuned. I want to go through that because we need resistance. We need to push against this change for a short moment in order to launch into this new version of us. The other thing I just want to point out is that when I've looked into the anthropology, so when I looked back into the grandmother hypothesis, Hold on. I know you're like, what? I get fitness back. We get cognition back. Wait, what? We're supposed to actually be more cognitively brilliant in our postmenopausal years. Yep. Yep. I know that's not the message you've been getting. And we are meant to be collaborators and leaders together with other postmenopausal women. Now, they call it a renewed energy that the energy it took to actually release an egg every month, all of that energy gets put back at you. Like your body gives you that energy back, which is why you can get in better shape. You can use your days, instead of focusing it on kids, perhaps, you're focusing it on fitness. This is why you see people like Michelle Obama and Jane Fonda. And I mean, so many postmenopausal women that just change their careers or come into their career because they have renewed energy. They have renewed purpose. They have renewed cognition. And that was by design. So you're going to hear me talk a lot about the shedding of the old and the stepping into the new. Now, I want to introduce you to the grandmother hypothesis. It is a hypothesis that has been going around for a while in the menopausal circles. Some people love it. Some people don't. I'll tell you what I think about it and what it tells us. We are living in primal bodies. I just want to say that. The human body has not changed much since the hunter and gather days. But we don't live in a primal hunter ancestral world. We live in a modern world. So we need to look at the grandmother hypothesis through a modern lens. So when I dove into this hypothesis, I actually brought the Kristen Hawks, the anthropologist who has been studying this for many years, she actually found a tribe in Tanzania called the Hadsa tribe. And the Hads of Tribe still exhibit this grandmother hypothesis. And what she discovered was that when you looked at tribe life, now I know this isn't modern day life, sit tight with me for a moment, what happened around the tribe in cave life, let's call it that. What we saw was that the very robust, strong members of the clan went off to go for an animal kill. So these were usually the alpha men. These were many of the men, most of the men. These were also your grandfathers. I get asked this question all the time. There were the grandfathers, and they were some of the strong grandmothers. Actually, some of the grandmothers went out with them. There's some interesting research showing this renewed fitness actually made them great, big animal hunters. So a whole group went off to make the big animal kill. They only came back to the tribe with an animal kill for food 3 % of the time. That's one day out of a month. So they several people that might be able to do that. One was the fertile woman. But she's either pregnant or nursing was her job or the babies or the little toddlers. They don't make good foragers of food or hunters by any means. Their job, you know, babies weren't big enough, but the fertile reproductive woman was birthing and having babies. That was her job back in those primal days. So the only person left to go find food while they waited for the big animal kill was the grandmother. So the grandmother every single day would go out seven hours a day. The grandmothers gathered around the tribe and they went out. They took some of the kids with them that maybe were a little bit older. And they went out on a seven -hour trek every single day to find food. And most of that food was plant -based. This is important because a lot of you asked me, well, what should I be eating in my post -menopausal years? I'm going to explain it to you in a moment. So seven hours, by the way, in a fasted state, we're going to come back to that. And then they would find mostly tubers they found. They also found a lot of berries and a few other plants, but there's a lot of stories around them finding tubers, which required that they had to squat down, dig in the dirt, and pull these tubers up. Now, they gathered at the cave every morning at the crack of dawn to do this as a collective group. They went out as a group of women that were like, we've got to feed the women. We've got to feed the babies. We got to feed the toddlers. They had a purpose. And every day they would go out collectively together. Now, this to me, if we want to put a modern day lens on this group of grandmothers that went out, the Okinawa women, they formed moyes where when they get into their post -reproductive years, they gather together. And the village and the town looks at them as these wise elders. And they create these moyes where they share resources. Sometimes it's food. Sometimes it's housing. Sometimes it's emotional support. But they intuitively, they are modern day examples of the grandmother hypothesis, where they come together in a collective, collaborative way to fit all of them. Now, interesting enough, I just want to point out, I'm not, and again, I am not anti -HRT. I think it's a personal decision. But I do have a question if we are at an evolutionary mismatch in the Western world, which is why we're frazzled. Our nervous systems are totally disregulated. We're eating the wrong foods. We're not gathering with other women. There's so many pieces we don't do that look like the Okinawa women. And the Okinawa women, that women in Japan only use H .R .T. 5 % of the time, they have the longest living seniors out of any country in the world. They have so many centarians in Japan, and there's so many reasons for that, and they aren't using HRT. So is it possible that there was something in their lifestyle that is showing this modern day version of this grandmother hypothesis. And it's in these moyes that they're forming. So just filing that away here. So we know evolutionary wise that we are meant to progress from a place of fertility, reproduction, you know, caring for the kids, making babies, into a new place of leadership. In fact, Lisa Mascone says that we as a species would not be here if it wasn't for the grandmother because the grandmother kept everybody alive because she was the one finding food. So really interesting thought that differently. It could look like maybe you're leading your family differently if you have a family. It could look like you're leading your community. You could be leading by example. But my prayer for this book is that you all will read this and see the evolutionary heroines that you are designed to be. And instead of fearing that you will be tossed aside, you will be excited that you were meant to step into a place of leadership. That is what menopause is preparing you for to stop caring, for you to stand in your own authentic identity. That is your evolutionary design. Now, the second thing, the Lisa Mascone understanding, the neuroscience understanding of this moment, Lisa told me, you can hear it here on this podcast, Lisa told me there are three major times that the brain remodels itself. And they're all built around these changes in hormones. The first is teenagers, that when estrogen comes in, that all of a sudden we have neurons that prune away and make it so that we aren't dependent upon somebody because what's the next phase for a teenager? You're not raising. Hopefully those of you that raised kids, you didn't raise children. You raised adults. You were raising them to be successful in their adult life. And so when a woman's, a girl's period comes in, she now needs to know how to stand on her own two feet. So Lisa says what happens is it's this influx of hormones that actually cause the dependent neurons to shed and the independent neurons to start growing so you can stand on your own two feet. Anybody who has a teenage daughter knows how that feels to be on the receiving end of a teenage girl who no longer needs you because she wasn't designed to need you anymore. That was her evolutionary design. That was what was supposed to happen during her teenage years. Then we know that post -belief, according to Lisa's work, postpartum after you deliver a baby, you don't need, your brain doesn't need those neurons to tell you your task list and help you remember your to -do list or help you remember where your keys are. Your brain needs to have the highly intuitive sense so that it can read the baby's clues because your baby doesn't speak. So your intuition needs to kick in. You need to know when your baby needs a diaper change or your baby needs food. So the brain reorganizes itself as the hormones drop after you've been pregnant and neurons that help you remember where your keys are go out the window and neurons that tell you what your baby needs, start growing. These are two designs of the female body that we cannot turn away from. This is this is neuroscience, which leads us to the third design where those neurons that kept you attached to what people think about, that kept you pleasing and doing for everybody else, those have to go away. They have to go away because you were designed for leadership. You were designed for authenticity. You were designed to finally live life on your terms in your way. So the modern design of menopause is old neurons that kept you tethered to the wants and desires of everybody else, including societal's desire, and allows you to step into your own desire. Gilligan's work is really interesting. The way I like to explain it after studying it for a while is she looked at both boys and girls, and this is in the 1980s, for those of you who grew up in the 80s, she looked at both boys and girls, and she saw that if you asked them both a question at nine, you would get a very direct answer. So if you asked them a question like, what do you want to eat? eat. And you asked a boy and a girl, they would say, I want this, both of them. At 11, the boy stays very certain. I want this. And the girl's like, I think I want this. By the time she hits 13 and her hormones are fully in, the boy will tell you, I want this and the girl will say, well, what are you eating? Her relational brain came in. She is making decisions through the lens of making sure she's keeping the peace, she's... have they felt like they were not enough in their life? And like every single hand goes up. So what we know from her work is when estrogen came in, we started to change our behavior to please. And yet, when estrogen goes out, nobody's studying this yet. But when estrogen goes out, we no longer care about pleasing you, which is why you're seeing things like this Do Not Care Club just take over the internet, take over socials, because it resonates with so many women. And you were not designed to care. You were designed to step into a new purpose that leaves caring behind, that leaves everybody else's agenda for you behind so that you can step into this place of cultural leadership, which we'll talk about here in a moment. I also found some really interesting research showing this connection between estrogen and these other neurochemicals. So when estrogen came in every single month, when you had a cycle, she peaked around somewhere between day 10 and day 15. When she peaked, what we know is that she brought with her some key neurochemicals. So let me teach you in terms of the menstrual cycle. So between day 10 and day 15, one of the hormones that peaked two days before estrogen peaked was oxytocin. Why would oxytocin come in when an egg was about to be released so that you felt like connecting, you felt like bonding so that the species could continue forward. That's huge. You got a huge oxytocin rush. You also got a whole shot of melatonin a couple of days before estrogen peaked. Because you needed more sleep so your body knew how to regulate your circadian rhythm so that you could have more melatonin. We also know in the front half of your cycle, you had estrogen -stimulated dopamine and acetycholine and serotonin. So dopamine and serotonin are those neurotransmitters that kept you happy. And acetylcholine kept your memory strong. Glutamate kept you focused. BDNF helped you grab new information. Collagen and creatine, estrogen -stimulated collagen and creatine, which allowed for your joints to stay in good shape so that you didn't wear them out. It kept your skin moist. We also know that estrogen, a lot of you learned in Fast Like a Girl, that estrogen had a major impact on insulin and glucose. And so when you had a lot of estrogen, you were insulin sensitive. And when estrogen went away, you became insulin resistant because estrogen had an impact. So this peer -reviewed research that I found, this incredible article was, and this article was done like close to 10 years ago and we're still not talking enough about what I call the neurochemical armor. That as we go into our 40s, the brain is remodeling itself and the neurochemical armor is coming down. your life. That is so important. And if we lose this moment, you don't want to be, do you want to be the same person you were at 70 that you were at 20? I know I don't want to be the same person. I look forward each day that I, once I understood this information, I was like, my God, I get the opportunity to finally be me for me to be the most authentic version of me because my brain remodeled itself, my neurochemical armor came down and my evolutionary design was one of leaderships. And one of the best leadership skills is you be you. You step into the authentic version of you. We don't need 1 .2 billion copycats of women all acting the same. We need 1 .2 two billion women. They're all standing in their individual truth. So the neurochemical armor comes down so we can do that. And then like I said, this is also a transformational moment. So something really interesting that I started to look at over the last couple of months. I don't know if you heard Michelle Obama's podcast on on work in progress. Sophia Bush interviewed her on work and progress. And she made a couple of statements that the culture didn't like. And the statements were that she was finally doing life for herself, that she was making decisions for herself now, not through the lens of First Lady, not through the lens of Barack's wife, not even through the lens of being a mother. She was finally in her early 60s doing it on her terms and her way. That's by design. She's an example of it. And so there's a living example of a transformative moment. And once you start to see all these women changing their behaviors as they go through this process, it liberates us all. It frees us all. When Pamela Anderson. friendships and connections. We all said, yeah, yeah, that's what I, that's what lights me up too. So we have examples, but it is this transformative moment. So what do we need to change with our lifestyle to be able to match this moment? Hopefully you are gathering that there is a process here that is working for us once we understand it. Now I want to talk about, well, what do we do with the bumps? What do we do when we can't sleep? What do we do when we're not remembering? How do we handle the brain fog? Because there is this remodel. And like any remodel, it's dusty and messy before the brand new appears. So how do you handle the mess? So that's where I'm going to go into the girl gang, the estrogen girl gang, and talk about how do you reclaim your memory, how do you brighten your moods, how do you fuel your brain different, how do you find deep connections, how should you be exercising, and how the hell do you get a good night's sleep?