But I also can’t stay quiet when new evidence starts coming in that these drugs may be creating health consequences that nobody’s talking about at your doctor’s office.

GLP-1 has become one of the most important conversations in women’s health right now, and I wanted to put everything I know in one place. What these drugs are actually doing in your body. What the research is starting to show about the risks. And maybe most importantly, what your body is already designed to do on its own, if you give it the right conditions.

Here’s what we’re getting into:

The bone density warning that came out of one of America’s top orthopedic surgery conferences and the five things you can start doing right now to protect yourself if you’re on these medications.

A real head-to-head comparison of GLP-1 drugs versus a fasting lifestyle, not to shame anyone off their medication, but because you deserve to make an educated choice.

And how to actually make your own GLP-1. Because the hormone these drugs are mimicking? Your gut microbes are designed to produce it. I’m going to show you exactly what to eat and how to eat to trigger it naturally.

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The bone density warning nobody’s talking about

An orthopedic surgeon at the University of Pennsylvania named Dr. John Hornoff started noticing something in his patients who were on GLP-1s. He had a suspicion these drugs were affecting bone and connective tissue, so he and his team pulled five years of medical records from more than 146,000 adults who had both obesity and type 2 diabetes. That’s a lot of people.

What he found: 4.1% of GLP-1 users developed osteoporosis, compared to 3.2% of non-users. That gap might not sound dramatic, but it represents a 30% increased relative risk. He also saw increases in osteomalacia, that’s a softening of the bone, and a 12% increase in gout (which, by the way, doesn’t surprise me, because when you’re burning fat that quickly your body is dumping a lot of uric acid crystals into your system, I’ve seen this with aggressive fasting too).

He presented this at one of America’s top orthopedic surgery conferences. And I want to be honest with you, this is observational research, which means it’s association not causation. Nobody is saying these drugs are definitively causing osteoporosis. But it’s a trend that’s showing up, and it’s showing up enough that there’s also now a study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism linking GLP-1s to higher fracture rates in adults. That’s enough for me to want to do a whole video on it. And enough for me to want you to know about it.

So why would weight loss drugs weaken your bones? There are two theories.

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The first is that when your appetite is suppressed, you’re just not getting enough in. You’re not getting enough Vitamin D, enough calcium, enough protein, enough collagen. Dr. Hornoff put it plainly: people start these medications and there’s a tremendous amount of upside, but with that they start to decrease their food and nutrient intake. Every single bite has to be intentional. Everything you put in your mouth needs to count, because you’re eating less of it.

The second theory is more mechanical. When you carry less weight, there’s less daily strain on your bones, and bones hold onto calcium and density because they’re being asked to work. Less weight, less demand. Dr. Hornoff actually compared it to astronauts coming back from space with low bone density. Nothing is forcing those bones to stay strong. For those of you who’ve lost a significant amount of weight on these drugs, this is worth thinking about, a weighted vest on your walks isn’t just a fitness trend, it may genuinely be protective for your skeleton.

And I want to say something specifically to the menopausal women reading this, because this is where I get a little urgent. A 2016 review in Nature Reviews Disease confirmed that bone density in women declines rapidly in the first five to ten years after menopause, because of estrogen loss. We know this. But if you are combining that natural decline with GLP-1-related bone loss, you could find yourself losing density much faster than the average person. I have osteoporosis in my family. I’m postmenopausal. I’m doing everything I can to hold onto bone density. This topic is personal for me, which is part of why I can’t let it go undiscussed.

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Thursday I told you I stopped fasting for almost a year.

I told you about the fires, the stress, the season where my nervous system was so overwhelmed that my body simply refused to cooperate with a fasting window and how instead of fighting it, I listened. I told you that what came out of that year wasn’t a failure. It was something I’m now calling flex fasting.

What I didn’t tell you is what happens next. What coming back to fasting actually looked like. How I rebuilt it, slowly, carefully, on completely different terms than before. And the research that showed up right in the middle of that process and made me feel like science had finally caught up to what my body had already figured out on its own.

That’s what today is.

This is the framework behind the flexibility, the specific principles, the study that changed my thinking, and exactly how I apply this day to day and week to week. The part I couldn’t put in Thursday’s piece.

Coming back slowly and what that taught me about rigidity

When I started fasting again after that year away, I didn’t go back to 16 hours. I didn’t go back to any number, actually. I just stopped eating after dinner and noticed when I was hungry in the morning.

What I found was that my body settled naturally into about 12 to 13 hours. Not through discipline. Not through white-knuckling a window. It just happened, because that’s what felt comfortable, and I was paying attention to comfort instead of compliance for the first time in years.

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Not because I’d changed my mind about it. Not because the research had shifted. But because my nervous system was completely overwhelmed, the stress, the uncertainty, the grief of watching places I loved burn, and my body was telling me, loudly and clearly, that a 16-hour fast was not what it needed right now.

So I listened and I ate when I was hungry. And I let the rigid structure go.

I want to talk about that, because I think there’s a version of the fasting conversation that gets left out entirely, the version where life happens, where stress is real, where the protocol that serves you beautifully in one season of your life becomes something your body actively resists in another.

That version deserves its own discussion.

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What I built fasting on and what it never accounted for

I’ve spent years teaching fasting. I wrote a whole book about it. I believe deeply in what it does for metabolic health, for autophagy, for hormone regulation, for gut health. None of that has changed.

But the way I used to talk about it, the way a lot of fasting culture still talks about it, implies a kind of constancy that I’m not sure serves most women. The idea that once you find your window, you hold it. That consistency is the goal. That deviation is failure.

That framing left no room for what actually happens in a human life.

It left no room for the seasons where everything falls apart, where there’s a loss, or a crisis, or a period of profound stress that fundamentally changes what your body needs. It left no room for the reality that a 20-hour fast on a normal Tuesday and a 20-hour fast when your cortisol is through the roof are not the same physiological event. The inputs look identical. The outputs are very different.

What I learned last year is that fasting isn’t a rule. It’s a tool. And the whole point of a tool is that you pick it up when it’s useful and you put it down when it’s not.

What was actually happening in my body

When I’m under significant stress, real stress, not the manufactured urgency of a busy week but actual, sustained, life-altering stress, my cortisol runs high.

And here’s the thing about cortisol and fasting that I don’t think gets said clearly enough: extended fasting is itself a cortisol-spiking event. Your body reads a long fast as a stressor. Under normal circumstances, the benefits of the fast outweigh that stress signal. But when your baseline cortisol is already elevated, because of fires, or a death, or a divorce, or a health crisis, or any of the things that bring real humans to their knees, stacking a fasting stress on top of a life stress tips the balance in the wrong direction.

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I wasn’t doing myself any favors by fasting through that period. I was asking a body already working overtime to do even more.

So I stopped. And something interesting happened.

What stopping taught me

My body found its own rhythm.

I wasn’t eating chaotically. I wasn’t eating junk. I was just eating when I was hungry and stopping when I was full, without the architecture of a fasting window around it. And what I noticed, over time, was that my natural eating pattern landed somewhere around 12 to 13 hours without me trying. My body wanted a rest from food overnight. It just didn’t want it to be 16 or 18 hours.

That space between what my body was asking for and what fasting culture told me I “should” be doing is where flex fasting started for me.

Not because I wanted an easier version of fasting. Because I needed a version that felt sustainable, supportive, and real for women’s bodies.

What flex fasting actually means

Flex fasting is fasting that responds to where you actually are, not where a protocol says you should be.

It means your window changes based on your stress load, your cycle phase, your sleep, your season of life. It means a 12-hour overnight rest counts on the days when that’s what your body needs, and a 16-hour window is available on the days when you’re rested, grounded, and your cortisol is in a range that makes extended fasting genuinely useful.

It means the question shifts from did I hit my window today to what does my body actually need today, and how can fasting serve that?

For me, coming back to fasting after last year looked like starting at 12 hours. Just that. Not pushing. Not optimizing. Getting comfortable with the baseline, paying attention to how I felt, and extending gradually on the days that felt right. Some days I’m at 15 hours and it feels effortless. Some days I’m at 12 and that’s the right call. The difference is I’m actually listening now instead of following a number.

The women this is most for

If you’ve ever felt like you failed at fasting like you were doing it and then you stopped and that stopping means you lack discipline, I want to push back on that directly.

There are entire seasons of life when fasting, especially extended fasting, is not the most supportive thing you can do for your body. Perimenopause. High chronic stress. Grief. Recovery from illness. The postpartum window. Periods of significant sleep disruption.

These aren’t excuses to not fast. They’re real physiological contexts in which your body’s needs genuinely change and a fasting approach that doesn’t account for them isn’t actually serving you, even if it looks disciplined from the outside.

Flexibility is not the enemy of results. Rigidity applied to the wrong season is.

Where I am now

I fast most days. Not always the same window. Not always the same length. I pay attention to where I am in my cycle, how I slept, what my stress load looks like. I have days where I push longer and days where I eat breakfast at 8 a.m. with zero guilt.

My results are better now than they were when I was holding a rigid window at all costs. Because I’m not fighting my body anymore. I’m working with it.

On Saturday I’m sharing the actual framework, the specific way I think about adjusting my fasting window based on cortisol, cycle phase, and stress signals. That’s for paid subscribers, and it’s the most practical version of what I’m describing today.

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If you’ve been thinking about upgrading, this is a good week. The specifics are the part that actually translate into your real life.

I spent years watching this pattern…

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The supplement industry is making a fortune off of women who don’t know that their grocery store already has most of what they need.

I know because I was one of those women.

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For years, I had a protocol. Morning supplements, evening supplements, things I added one by one because the research was compelling and the logic made sense. And some of it was useful. I’m not anti-supplement. I’ve written about magnesium, creatine, and targeted support for years.

But somewhere in my postmenopausal years, I started asking a harder question.

What if I’ve been outsourcing to a bottle what my plate was already capable of doing?

What if the real protocol wasn’t in my drawer at all?

This is the bowl I kept coming back to.

The Buddha Bowl from Eat Like a Girl is the meal I make more than any other in my kitchen. Not because it’s quick (though it is under 20 minutes). Not because it’s gorgeous (though it photographs like art and I make no apologies for that).

Because every single ingredient has a biological job.

Nothing in this bowl is decoration. Nothing is there because it sounds healthy. Every component was chosen because of what it does inside your body, specifically, inside the body of a woman navigating the hormonal landscape of midlife.

This is what I mean when I say food is medicine.

What this bowl is quietly doing for your hormones

Broccoli sprouts are one of the most targeted foods I know for women’s hormonal health. Ounce for ounce, they contain dramatically more sulforaphane than mature broccoli, a compound that directly activates the liver’s detoxification enzymes. When your liver can metabolize estrogen efficiently, it gets cleared. When it can’t, estrogen recirculates. That recirculation is behind the bloating, breast tenderness, mood swings, and weight around the hips that so many women live with and never connect back to the plate.

Go heavy on these. The recipe doesn’t specify an amount. I pile them on.

Purple cabbage is another sulforaphane source, and its deep color signals high anthocyanin content, powerful antioxidants that reduce inflammation and protect the gut lining. It also carries meaningful fiber that feeds your estrobolome: the community of gut bacteria responsible for breaking down and clearing hormones.

Kale massaged here until it softens and becomes genuinely digestible, gives you prebiotic fiber, vitamin K, and calcium in one of the most bioavailable plant forms available. The massage step matters. Don’t skip it.

Quinoa is a complete protein and a gentle, low-glycemic carbohydrate. It supports progesterone production without a glucose spike. That matters enormously in perimenopause and after, when progesterone is already fighting an uphill battle.

Miso in the dressing is a fermented food — probiotic by nature — adding beneficial bacteria directly to the gut that processes your hormones. You are healing your microbiome with the dressing. Let that land for a second.

Tofu brings phytoestrogens: plant-based compounds that gently modulate estrogen activity in the body. On days when you need more estrogen support, add more tofu. On days when you don’t, keep the portion modest.

Hemp seeds bring omega-3 fatty acids, complete protein, and prebiotic fiber. And this is exactly where I add my Beeya seeds, one scoop of whichever phase you’re in, right on top. Phase 1 (days 1–14): flax, pumpkin, and hemp to support estrogen modulation. Phase 2 (days 15–28): sesame, sunflower, and hemp to support progesterone. Postmenopausal: just rotate every two weeks regardless of cycle.

One bowl. Gut, liver, hormones, nervous system. All of it. Tell me what supplement does that.

The Recipe

The Miso-Ginger Dressing

• 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

• ¼ cup unseasoned rice wine vinegar

• 1½ tablespoons white miso paste

• 1½ tablespoons tamari

• ½ tablespoon agave or maple syrup

• ½ teaspoon grated fresh ginger

• 1 small garlic clove, minced and mashed to a paste Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

Whisk it all together. Taste and adjust. It keeps in the fridge all week.

The Bowl

• ½ teaspoon olive oil

• ½ cup dry quinoa

• Rinsed 1 cup chopped Lacinato kale, center ribs removed

• 1 cup diced store-bought baked tofu

• ¼ cup broccoli sprouts

• ¼ cup shredded carrot

• ¼ cup sliced sugar snap peas

• ¼ cup shredded purple cabbage

• 1 tablespoon hemp seeds

• 1 watermelon radish, sliced

• Optional: 1 scoop Beeya seeds

Bring ½ cup water to a boil. Add quinoa, cover, reduce to medium-low, simmer 10–15 minutes until absorbed. Let sit 5 minutes, then fluff. Drizzle the kale with olive oil and massage with your hands until softened. Arrange everything in sections in a bowl. Drizzle with dressing. Finish with hemp seeds and your Beeya scoop.

Find the full recipe in Eat Like a Girl, page 135.

Make it yours

Ketobiotic days: Use less agave in the dressing, add a touch more olive oil. The net carbs here are already very reasonable, this works without modification for most people.

Hormone feasting days (days 20 through end of cycle): Use as written. The quinoa, tofu, and miso are actively supporting progesterone here. Don’t hold back.

Postmenopausal: This belongs in your regular weekly rotation. Your goal is metabolic flexibility, moving between fat burning and carbohydrate use, and this bowl supports that without the insulin disruption of processed food. Make it every Sunday if you want to. I basically do.

The supplement drawer is smaller now.

Not because I stopped caring about what goes into my body. Because I started paying closer attention to what was already on my plate.

Your turn: what’s the one food your body keeps asking for that you’ve been underestimating?

— Dr. Mindy

I needed someone who could cut through it. So I called Helena Bottemiller Evich.

Helena has covered food policy in Washington for over 15 years. She’s the founder of the Food Fix newsletter and the host of the new American Dish podcast. And she has a skill that is genuinely rare right now: she separates what was said from what was done. Every single time.

What she told me in this conversation stopped me more than once.\

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You did everything right today.

You ate well. You stayed on track. You felt good about your choices. And then 9 p.m. hit and you found yourself standing in front of the fridge wondering what happened to the woman who had it all together six hours ago.

I want to say something to you before we go any further:

Willpower had nothing to do with it.

What you’re experiencing at night is almost always one of three things — and once you understand which one is running the show in your body, the late-night eating loses its grip on you almost immediately.

Reason #1: You Didn’t Eat Enough Earlier

This one is so common it should be a public health announcement.

Women who eat too little at breakfast and lunch, or who skip meals entirely, almost always arrive at evening in a caloric deficit that the body then scrambles to correct. Your hunger hormones don’t care that it’s 9 p.m. They care that you’re 600 calories short of what your body actually needed today.

The fix isn’t more willpower at night. It’s more food in the light.

This is something I talk about in my work constantly: front-load your eating. Your biggest, most protein- and fiber-dense meal should happen at lunch, not dinner. When you eat in alignment with daylight, your insulin response is sharper, your GLP-1, the satiety hormone I’ve been writing about this week, is higher, and your body registers the meal as genuinely satisfying.

The same plate eaten at 8 p.m.? It doesn’t land the same way. After sunset, melatonin rises and pancreatic function drops. Your body is already winding down. So you eat, your brain doesn’t register it as a full meal, and you go back for more.

Reason #2: Your Cortisol Never Came Down

Cortisol is your stress hormone. It’s designed to peak in the morning to get you out of bed and taper off steadily through the day so that by evening, your nervous system is winding down alongside the sun.

But for most women living in constant low-grade stress, work, caregiving, the mental load, the endless scroll, cortisol never fully comes down. It just stays elevated, humming quietly in the background all day long.

Here’s why that matters for your evening hunger: elevated cortisol does two things directly. It raises blood sugar, which then drops, triggering a craving response. And it directly suppresses leptin — the hormone responsible for telling your brain you’re full.

So you eat. You eat again. And your brain just doesn’t register it.

The late-night hunger isn’t a willpower problem. It’s a cortisol pattern. And it needs a cortisol solution, not another rule about what you’re allowed to eat after 7 p.m.

A few things that measurably lower cortisol in the evening: a 10-minute walk after your last meal, a hard stop on work emails by 7 p.m., dimmed lights after sunset, and something that activates your parasympathetic nervous system before bed. Magnesium glycinate is something I recommend often for this, it supports the nervous system’s ability to downregulate at night.

Reason #3: Food Has Become Your Nervous System Tool

This is the one nobody says out loud. So I will.

For many women, food — especially at night, especially something sweet or salty or crunchy — is the most reliable tool they have to come down from the day. And here’s the thing: it works. That’s why you keep reaching for it. Eating activates the vagus nerve, releases a small dopamine response, and genuinely does calm the nervous system in the short term.

The problem isn’t that it works. The problem is that your body doesn’t need the calories. It needs the regulation.

And until you build other tools: breathwork, a hot shower, a few minutes of stillness, a magnesium supplement, a real conversation with someone who loves you, food will keep winning. Not because you’re weak. Because it’s the best tool available.

This is something I saw so clearly when I started working with women on their nervous systems rather than just their diets. The food wasn’t the problem. The food was the solution to a problem nobody had named yet.

A few things that have worked for the women in my community: a magnesium glycinate supplement before bed, a warm cup of herbal tea, an LMNT packet in sparkling water (it genuinely satisfies the 'something' craving without breaking your fast or spiking blood sugar), and five minutes of box breathing before you open the fridge.

What I’d Try This Week

Rather than overhauling everything at once, pick one thing and watch what happens:

Eat 30 grams of protein before noon. Take a 10-minute walk after your last meal. Put your phone face-down by 8 p.m. for three days.

Notice whether the 9 p.m. craving even shows up. Notice whether it has the same intensity. Notice what your body is actually asking for when it does.

You’re not broken. You’re not weak. You’re a woman whose body is communicating in the only language it knows — and now you’re learning to listen.

— Dr. Mindy

Food noise is having a moment.

You hear it everywhere on podcasts, in wellness circles, in every Ozempic ad that’s followed you around the internet for the past two years. And the conversation almost always lands in one of two places: food noise is a willpower problem, or food noise is something only a medication can fix.

I disagree with both of those framings. Deeply.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe after years of working with women on this: when food noise is loud, your body is trying to tell you something. Not punish you. Not sabotage you. Tell you something.

And one of the things it might be telling you, something I rarely hear anyone bring into this conversation is that a specific protein you’re eating could be actively driving the noise.

It’s Not Gluten. It’s What’s Inside Gluten.

We talk a lot about gluten. But the more interesting story isn’t gluten itself, it’s a protein component inside gluten called gliadin.

Here’s what happens when you eat wheat: your digestive system breaks the gluten down into smaller pieces. One of those pieces is gliadin. And gliadin gets broken down further into short chains of amino acids called peptides, some of which can bind to opioid receptors in your body.

Yes. The same receptor family your natural endorphins use.

This isn’t new science. It was first described in research literature back in the 1970s. It just hasn’t made its way into the food noise conversation yet.

Now, I want to be careful here, because this is exactly where wellness content tends to get dramatic. Gliadin producing opioid-like peptides doesn’t mean wheat is “like heroin,” the way some popular books have framed it. Whether these peptides cross the blood-brain barrier in meaningful amounts varies from woman to woman. The mechanism is real. The strength of the effect isn’t the same for everyone.

But the opioid piece isn’t even the part I find most compelling.

What Gliadin Does to Your Gut Lining

Dr. Alessio Fasano at Harvard has done fascinating work on this. Gliadin triggers the release of a protein called zonulin — which loosens the tight junctions of your intestinal lining. In plain language: gliadin transiently increases gut permeability in most people who eat it.

In women with celiac disease, this is dramatic and pathological. In the rest of us, it’s subtler. But it’s real.

And when the gut barrier loosens, even briefly, two things happen that matter for food noise:

Inflammation goes up. Even low-grade inflammation interferes with leptin, the satiety hormone that’s supposed to tell your brain you’re full. When leptin can’t do its job, you keep eating even when your body doesn’t need more food.

The gut-brain conversation gets noisier. Your gut produces and responds to most of your appetite signals. When the lining is inflamed and permeable, those signals don’t get through cleanly.

So you eat. Your brain doesn’t register the meal the way it should. And you reach for more.

That is food noise. And gliadin can be one of its drivers.

Here’s Where I Want to Be Honest With You

I’m not telling you gliadin is the secret villain behind every craving you’ve ever had. When women remove wheat and suddenly feel quieter and less hungry, that effect is usually coming from multiple places at once.

Removing wheat also means removing refined carbohydrates, and that alone stabilizes blood sugar and quiets the glucose-insulin roller coaster that drives so much of what we call hunger. Removing wheat usually means removing ultra-processed foods, which are loaded with seed oils and engineered flavor compounds that blunt your satiety signals. And removing wheat means paying closer attention to what you’re eating. That attention alone changes outcomes.

So is it gliadin? Or is it everything that leaves when gliadin does?

For some women — especially those with genuine sensitivity, gliadin is doing significant work. For others, the benefit comes mostly from what got replaced. Both are true. And both are worth knowing.

This is why I always come back to the same principle: your body is the laboratory. Not someone else’s book. Not a trending wellness claim. Yours.

What I’d Actually Do

Rather than take my word for any of this, test it yourself.

Try a clean 30 days with no wheat, rye, or barley. Replace those foods with whole, hormone-supporting options — quinoa, sweet potatoes, lentils, leafy greens. The foods that feed your estrobolome instead of inflaming it.

Pay attention to what shifts. Is the background hum of food thoughts quieter? Is your hunger between meals different? Is your energy steadier? Is your face less puffy in the morning? Are your joints less stiff?

Then, and this is the step most elimination protocols skip — reintroduce. A good piece of sourdough. A bowl of pasta. Pay attention to what happens in the next 48 hours. Not just in your gut. In your mood, your sleep, your hunger the following day.

You’re not collecting opinions. You’re collecting your data. That’s the only kind that actually matters for your body.

For my perimenopausal and menopausal women: this matters even more for you right now. As estrogen falls, your gut lining becomes more permeable on its own. Your inflammatory threshold gets lower. Foods you tolerated easily at 35 may genuinely not work for you at 50. That’s not a failing. That’s your biology asking you to listen more carefully.

The Bigger Pattern

The food noise conversation has been hijacked by a single solution, a medication that mimics a hormone your body already makes naturally. Your body isn’t broken. It’s responding.

When food noise is loud, something is driving it. Sometimes it’s blood sugar instability. Sometimes it’s poor sleep. Sometimes it’s a nervous system that’s been in low-grade stress for so long that food has become the regulation tool.

And sometimes for some women it’s something specific in the diet actively creating the noise.

Gliadin is one piece of that picture. Not the whole picture. But a piece worth knowing about.

Have you ever removed wheat and noticed your hunger change? Did the food noise get quieter, or did nothing shift? Are you in the gluten is totally fine for me camp, or have you suspected for a long time that something about wheat doesn’t sit right in your body?

Drop it in the comments, I’d love to hear from you.

— Dr. Mindy

And I have never done an episode about mothering.

I don’t know why it took me this long. Maybe because it felt too close. Too personal. Too complicated to know where to start.

Elinor Cleghorn gave me the place to start.

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When I pulled up her glucose data, I saw these wild spikes and crashes, over and over, all day long. And I asked her: “Is that what your moods look like?”

She didn’t miss a beat. “Oh yeah. That’s definitely my moods.”

That moment has stayed with me, because it captures something I see constantly in our community: we blame our hormones, our age, our “broken metabolism,” when what’s often underneath it all is blood sugar instability. And blood sugar instability is, in large part, a GLP-1 problem.

Here’s what most people getting GLP-1 injections don’t know: your body already makes this hormone. Every time you eat, the microbes in your gut produce GLP-1 naturally. It tells your brain you’re full, slows digestion, and tells your pancreas to release insulin so your blood sugar doesn’t spike. The shot just mimics what your body was designed to do on its own.

The issue is that much of what we eat harms the gut microbes that support it.

Ultra-processed foods, refined sugar, vegetable oils, artificial sweeteners, they don’t just add empty calories. They actively blunt your body’s ability to produce this hormone. No wonder so many of us can’t feel full, can’t stop snacking, can’t get off the blood sugar roller coaster.

The good news is the fix is surprisingly specific. There’s a real, research-backed way to build a meal that feeds the microbes that make GLP-1 naturally and I walk through every bit of it in my latest YouTube video.

Whether you’re on a GLP-1 medication and want to support it with food, you’re considering it, or you want the benefits without the shot, this video is for you.

Watch it here:

As always, I love hearing from you in the comments. Have you noticed a connection between your blood sugar and your moods? Tell me what you’ve experienced, this community always surprises me with what you already know.

-Mindy

The response I received from Sunday’s article was overwhelming. So many of you wrote in asking the same thing: “Okay, I get the science. But what does this actually look like as a meal?”

That is exactly the right question. And today I want to answer it. But if you haven’t read the article yet, I highly encourage before you get into this one.

The Health Incubator with Dr. Mindy Pelz

You Already Make Your Own Ozempic - Here's How to Turn It On

There’s something Big Pharma would rather you didn’t know: your body already makes GLP-1 hormone. The same hormone that Ozempic and Mounjaro inject into you? You were built to produce it yourself. The reason millions of people can’t is not a flaw in their biology, it’s a consequence of what the modern food industry did to their gut microbiome…

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a month ago · 23 likes · Dr. Mindy Pelz

Because here’s the truth, knowing the six food categories that trigger your body’s natural GLP-1 hormone is powerful. But knowledge without application is just information. What we’re after is transformation. And transformation happens at the stove, not on a page.

So today I want to walk you through a single meal, one you can make in under 15 minutes, that delivers all six GLP-1-triggering food groups on one plate. And it starts with the most underestimated meal of the day: breakfast.

“The meal that breaks your fast is the most important GLP-1 opportunity of your day. What you eat first sets the hormonal tone for everything that follows.”

A Quick Recap: The 6 Foods That Turn On Your GLP-1

If you missed last week’s article, here’s the short version. Your gut is lined with specialized cells called L-cells, and they are responsible for producing GLP-1 — the same hormone that Ozempic and Mounjaro inject into you artificially. The reason so many people have lost access to this hormone isn’t a flaw in their biology. It’s what the modern food system did to the gut microbes that feed those L-cells.

To bring those microbes back to life, you need six things at every main meal:

1. Protein — 20–40 grams, the single strongest GLP-1 trigger

2. Soluble Fermentable Fiber — feeds the gut bacteria that make the hormone

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I remember sitting with a very good therapist and thinking: why is this not landing? I’m doing everything I’m supposed to be doing. Why can I say something out loud and understand it completely and still feel it in my body like it just happened yesterday?

The answer, as it turns out, is that the brain is not the only place memory lives.

The body stores it too. And until you speak to the body — directly, in its own language — the brain can do all the processing it wants, and the body will still be running the old program.

This is what Jessica Ortner has been teaching for years, through tapping. And in our conversation this week, she articulated something that I’ve been feeling my way toward for a long time but couldn’t quite name:

Jessica is one of the world’s leading experts in EFT, Emotional Freedom Techniques, which most people know simply as tapping. She co-created The Tapping Solution app with her brothers, has taught this work to millions of people, and has just released a new book that I genuinely think is one of the most important things a woman in perimenopause could read right now.

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There’s something Big Pharma would rather you didn’t know: your body already makes GLP-1 hormone. The same hormone that Ozempic and Mounjaro inject into you? You were built to produce it yourself. The reason millions of people can’t is not a flaw in their biology, it’s a consequence of what the modern food industry did to their gut microbiome.

I’ve spent years studying fasting and metabolic health, and the research that’s been landing on my desk lately has been stopping me in my tracks. So I want to share it with you, because if you understand this, you will never look at weight loss the same way again.

Let me explain exactly what’s happening, and more importantly, what you can do about it today, starting with your very next meal.

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First: What Is GLP-1 and Why Does It Matter?

GLP-1 (glucagon-like peptide-1) is a hormone that controls hunger. When your gut produces it in the right amounts, food noise disappears. You eat, you feel satisfied, you stop like the way your body was designed.

The problem is that three things are silently killing the gut microbes responsible for making this hormone:

• Bad fats: Canola oil, cottonseed oil, corn oil, soybean oil, and all partially hydrogenated oils. These are your fried foods, your processed snacks.

• Highly refined carbohydrates and sugars: White flour, white sugar, bread, pasta, cookies, cakes.

• Not eating enough fiber: You need 25 grams per day, and most people aren’t getting close.

Sound familiar? That is the standard Western diet. And when those microbes die off, hunger becomes relentless. Food falls in your mouth. You feel out of control. Not because you lack willpower, but because you lack a hormone.

The pharmaceutical industry saw an opening and took it. But here’s what I want you to understand: GLP-1 medications create a temporary pharmacological change. They do not fix the underlying physiology. That’s why over 80% of people regain the weight within 18 months of stopping them. You change the drug state, not the metabolic state.

Food and fasting? They change your physiology permanently. And that is what I want to teach you.

The 6 Foods That Bring Your GLP-1 Microbes Back to Life

These are the six food groups I want you to start eating every single day. Not because I’m putting you on a diet, but because these are the foods that feed the microbes that make the hormone that ends the war with food.

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I want to start breaking down some of the most powerful hormones and neurochemicals that your body makes. Hormones that you can use your lifestyle to increase.

Let’s start with Growth Hormone (GH). This may be one of the most powerful hormones in your body. It triggers a cascading effect of over ten powerful hormones and signaling molecules in your body. Research shows that when you lose growth hormone, you age faster, gain weight quicker, and speed up the cognitive decline.

So let’s checklist this one.

• When do you start losing it?

• What does it do in your body?

• What are the consequences of it’s decline?

• What lifestyle habits bring it back?

Growth hormone (GH) peaks during puberty, stays relatively high through your 20s, and then declines roughly 12–15% per decade starting around age 30. This age-related decline is called somatopause. By age 60, most people produce less than half the GH they did in their 20s. So it’s a gradual dimmer switch, not an off switch — and the pace of decline varies significantly based on lifestyle.

What GH actually do in our bodies?

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Over the years I’ve spent teaching women how to fast and fuel their bodies, one thing comes up in nearly every conversation: nourishment.

And one of my absolute favorite foods for the women in my community? Sweet potatoes.

I call them nature’s kiss to us. They taste sweeter than a white potato but carry a lighter net carbohydrate load. They are loaded with vitamin B6, magnesium, fiber, and slow-burning complex carbohydrates, every one of which plays a direct role in keeping your hormones steady, your blood sugar stable, and your energy sustained.

And here’s what I love most: this food works for every woman in this community, whether you’re still cycling, navigating perimenopause, or well into postmenopause. Let me explain why.

If you’re still cycling: this is your nurture phase food

In Eat Like a Girl, I talk about the four phases of your cycle and how each one calls for a different food focus. Days 20 through your bleed, the nurture phase, belong to progesterone. This is the week many of us crave carbohydrates and can’t figure out why. Your body is not failing you. Progesterone actually needs your blood glucose levels higher this week to make her full appearance. Those cravings are your body being brilliantly intelligent.

But the key is choosing nature’s carbohydrates, not a box of donuts. Sweet potato sits at the very top of my progesterone-supporting foods list because it delivers that glucose lift alongside the vitamin B6 and magnesium your body needs to actually synthesize progesterone. Pair that with dark chocolate, a food rich in magnesium that raises glucose while nourishing every hormone and you have the ideal nurture phase treat.

If you’re postmenopausal: this food still deeply serves you

In Age Like a Girl, I dedicate an entire section to why our primal grandmothers foraged so extensively for tubers and why the menopausal brain and body are uniquely wired to need them. After menopause, as estrogen declines, the brain becomes less sensitive to glucose. That makes the quality and type of carbohydrate you eat matter even more. Sweet potato is one of the best answers.

Here is what tubers like sweet potato do specifically for the menopausal brain and body, drawn directly from the research in Age Like a Girl:

• Blood sugar stability — slow-burning carbs stabilize glucose without the spikes that can worsen insulin resistance after menopause.

• Feeds the estrobolome — the fiber and resistant starch support the gut microbiome subset that regulates estrogen metabolism.

• GABA and serotonin synthesis — rich in B6 and magnesium, co-factors needed to produce calming neurotransmitters that decline after menopause.

• Estrogen detoxification — fiber binds excess estrogen and xenoestrogens in the gut and promotes their excretion.

• Nervous system support — potassium and magnesium support vagal tone, parasympathetic balance, and sleep.

Now add seed cycling — and it gets even better

Seed cycling is a gentle, food-based practice of rotating specific seeds through your cycle or through a 30-day rhythm if you’re postmenopausal to deliver targeted nutrients that support hormone balance. Flax and pumpkin seeds in the first half of the cycle (or month), sunflower and sesame in the second. Each seed delivers something specific: fiber, lignans, healthy fats, zinc, vitamin E, and selenium, all nutrients that appear on my key hormone support list in Eat Like a Girl.

This is what I love about this recipe. It isn't trying to be a treat that's "not that bad for you." It is genuinely built on ingredients that nourish, a nurture phase food for cycling women, a brain and hormone food for postmenopausal women, and a beautifully satisfying dessert for everyone.

The recipe: Brownie Baked Sweet Potato

My friends at Beeya shared this one with me, and the moment I saw it I knew it had to come straight to this community. It starts with a roasted white sweet potato, becomes a rich chocolatey filling and finishes with a sprinkle of Beeya’s seed cycling blends on top. It genuinely tastes like a warm brownie.

Brownie Baked Sweet Potato

Makes 1 serving · Prep 10 min · Cook 20 min

Ingredients

• 1 medium White sweet potato1 medium

• 1 tbsp Almond butter

• 1 tbsp Butter or ghee, melted

• 1 tbsp Cocoa powder1 tbsp

• 1 tbsp Maple syrup1 tbsp

• ½ tsp Baking powder

• ½ tsp Vanilla extract

• Pinch Sea salt

• Handful of Dark chocolate, chopped

• 1 scoop Beeya seed cycling blends

Instructions

1. Cook your sweet potato. Roast, bake, or air fry until very soft.

2. Prepare your filling. Slice it open, let it cool slightly, then mash the inside with almond butter, melted butter, cocoa powder, maple syrup, baking powder, vanilla, and sea salt until smooth.

3. Add the chocolate. Stir in the dark chocolate chunks.

4. Bake. Transfer to a small baking dish and bake at 350°F for 20 minutes.

5. Finish and enjoy. Top with a sprinkle of Beeya seed cycling blends and enjoy warm.

This is the kind of treat I love sharing with this community, something that feels deeply indulgent but is quietly working hard for your body on the inside. Every ingredient earns its place. That’s what eating like a girl is all about, no matter where you are in your journey.

-Mindy

P.S. If you loved this recipe, there are more where that came from. Eat Like a Girl has a whole collection of hormone-friendly recipes, including more sweet potato favorites built on the same philosophy: food that nourishes you from the inside out.

Share The Health Incubator with Dr. Mindy Pelz

I started where most practitioners start, understanding that microbes help us break down food, that Candida is a problem, that heavy metals create an environment where bad bacteria thrive. I detoxed heavy metals in my patients. I watched the downstream effects. I kept pulling the thread.

And somewhere along the way I arrived at a set of microbes that I started calling the estrobolome — a collection of bacteria in the gut whose specific job is to metabolize, detoxify, and reactivate estrogen in the body. I became almost obsessed with this concept. Because once you understand it, everything about the menopause conversation changes.

When the estrobolome is healthy, estrogen moves through the body the way it’s supposed to. It gets used by the cells. The excess gets packaged up and eliminated. Hormones work.

When the estrobolome is depleted — from years on the birth control pill, multiple rounds of antibiotics, chronic stress, ultra-processed food, or the sheer accumulation of environmental toxins we are all swimming in — estrogen doesn’t get eliminated. It gets recirculated. And recirculated estrogen can cause a cascade of problems: breast tenderness, brain fog, joint pain, skin issues, weight loss resistance. All the symptoms we’ve been blaming on menopause. All the symptoms we’ve been told to fix with a patch.

But here’s what nobody told us: you can be in a low-estrogen state from menopause and simultaneously be recirculating too much estrogen because your gut doesn’t know how to clear it. These are not contradictory. They are two problems happening at the same time, in the same body, because the ecosystem that was supposed to handle this is broken.

That’s where today’s conversation begins.

, one of the most trusted voices in women’s health, host of the Everyday Wellness podcast, and the author of a book I’ve been waiting for someone to write for years, The Menopause Gut. She joined me this week and what she shared in our conversation is some of the most important, most overlooked clinical information available to women right now.

I want to walk you through the pieces that landed hardest for me.

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So if you’ve spent the last few years cutting bread, skipping rice, feeling guilty every time you looked at a sweet potato, and you’re still tired, still struggling with your weight, still not feeling like yourself, I want to talk about why.

The thing most doctors never explain about estrogen

Here’s what I wish someone had told me earlier: estrogen isn’t just a reproductive hormone. It’s a metabolic hormone. It was quietly doing three things to protect you every single day:

It was helping your muscles grab glucose from your bloodstream and use it for energy. It was minimising how much extra glucose your liver was producing on its own. And it was keeping your insulin sensitivity strong, meaning the same meal that never bothered you at 32 would be handled smoothly and efficiently.

Then, as estrogen starts to decline in your 40s, all three of those protections fade. A 2021 review in the American Journal of Pathology confirmed what so many of us have lived: your body’s relationship with carbohydrates genuinely changes as your hormones change. The same carb that caused zero problems at 30 can now spike your blood sugar significantly higher. Your body takes three to four hours to clear glucose instead of ninety minutes. In that window, you feel the brain fog, the sluggishness, the afternoon crash. It’s not in your head or a lack of willpower. It’s biology.

If you want to actually see this happening in real time, a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) is one of the most eye-opening tools I've ever used. Wearing one for even two weeks will show you exactly how your body responds to different carbs, and nothing motivates smarter food choices faster than watching your blood sugar on a screen.

But, and this is the part I really want you to hear…

This is not a reason to eliminate carbohydrates. It’s a reason to be smarter about which ones you eat.

What the new research actually shows

A 2025 study in BMC Women’s Health tracked 604 menopausal women and measured something called a Carbohydrate Quality Index. They looked at the glycemic index of foods, fiber intake, whether carbs were solid or liquid, and whole grain consumption.

Women with a higher carb quality score had fewer menopausal symptoms, less severity, and a better quality of life, particularly around mood. It wasn’t about eating fewer carbs. It was about eating better carbs.

That finding matters to me personally, because here’s what I know about your gut: the beneficial bacteria living there are making serotonin and dopamine for you every single day. Those bacteria need complex carbohydrates to survive. As estrogen goes down, serotonin goes with it. If you’re also cutting the fiber-rich foods that feed your serotonin-producing microbes, you’re losing those neurotransmitters from two directions at once. No wonder so many of us walk around in perimenopause feeling like we’ve lost ourselves.

The lithium discovery that surprised even me

I have to tell you about something I stumbled upon recently, because it changed my own approach to food.

I have a family history of restless legs. I started looking for a food-based solution and found a study showing that as women move through menopause, the loss of estrogen causes an excess excretion of lithium. Lithium is a trace mineral — a nervous system regulator, that supports dopamine and serotonin production.

When I looked up where dietary lithium comes from, the top sources were wheat, rye, and barley. I’ve been wheat-free since I was 20. I’m 56 now. All those years, I wasn’t getting lithium from my food. Low dietary lithium is linked to increased depression, anxiety, and cognitive decline, the exact symptoms so many of us are navigating in midlife.

I had to supplement because I’m not going back to wheat (it doesn’t agree with me). But if you’ve been strictly keto, gluten-free, or grain-free for years, this is worth knowing. Some of what feels like a menopause symptom may actually be a missing mineral. And for those who do tolerate it, fermented rye, like a good sourdough rye, is a beautiful way to get those grains back in with less of the gluten burden.

The carbs I want you to bring back

This isn’t a permission slip to eat everything. It’s an invitation to upgrade.

Bring these back in: sweet potato, pumpkin, all the winter squashes, lentils, beans, chickpeas, quinoa, oats (the real kind, not instant), carrots, beets, fresh berries, and apples. These are the foods that score highest on carbohydrate quality — fiber-rich, blood-sugar-stabilising, gut-feeding.

Keep these out: white bread, pasta, crackers, packaged snacks, sweetened drinks, fruit juice, anything that comes in a bag with more than five ingredients. A 2025 study in Redox Biology found that fructose from processed foods and sweetened drinks triggers a strong inflammatory response, contributing to brain fog, bloating, and worsening symptoms. These are the carbs that earned carbs their bad reputation. The problem was never the sweet potato.

Five things you can do this week

Do a carb audit, not a carb cut. Go through your kitchen and ask: refined or complex? My rule: if the ingredient label has five or more ingredients, it’s probably the wrong kind.

Add one complex carb to every meal. Berries on your oatmeal. Lentils on your salad. Roasted squash at dinner. One simple addition per meal builds your fiber intake and stabilises your blood sugar all day.

Aim for 25 grams of fiber daily. Most women are getting 10 to 15. One cup of raspberries is 8 grams. One cup of cooked lentils is 15. Two tablespoons of beeya’s cycling seeds are 7 to 10. I call fiber nature’s Ozempic, and it’s free.

Cut liquid carbs first. Juice, sweetened coffee drinks, soda, most store-bought smoothies, these deliver carbs and fructose with no fiber and a blood sugar spike. This is the fastest win.

Time your carbs to your goals. If weight loss is your priority, keep complex carbs earlier in the day when you’re most insulin sensitive. If sleep is your struggle, a small serving of complex carbs at dinner can help calm your nervous system. Just try to eat before it gets dark — once melatonin rises, your pancreas starts to wind down too.

I know this might feel like shifting ground. Many of you came to me because of the fasting and ketobiotic work, and I’m not walking that back. What I’m saying is that the ketobiotic approach was always meant to include the carbs that nature packaged with fiber. If you walked into my pantry right now, you’d see sweet potatoes, lentils, berries, squash. You’d also, occasionally, see a potato chip, because I’m human.

The goal has never been perfection. It’s been giving your body what it actually needs at this stage of life.

I’d love to know:

Have you brought carbs back in? Did it change anything for you, your energy, your mood, your sleep? Drop it in the comments. These conversations are why I do this.

-Mindy

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And then the irony hit me. Because one of the first things we talked about is how the phrase “self-care” has become its own kind of overwhelm. More protein. More sauna. Cold plunge. No alcohol. Get into nature. The list keeps growing, and I’ve started to wonder if the list itself is part of the problem.

Melissa has spent 20 years in the wellness and biohacking world, as a chiropractor, a nervous system expert, and now as the author of The Connection Code, and what she’s landed on is both the simplest and most radical reframe I’ve heard in a long time.

Listen to the full episode here, then come back, because I want to go deeper on a few things that really stopped me in my tracks.

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I want to tell you about a friend of mine.

She had tried everything. Different fasting lengths, different eating windows.. she was doing all the right things. But the scale wouldn’t budge. Months went by. She stayed the course.

Then one day we made plans for lunch, and when I walked in and saw her, I did a double take. She had lost around 20 pounds. I immediately asked what she’d been doing differently.

“I finally started doing 36-hour fasts,” she said.

That was the key. Not a magic one-time fix, but adding this longer fast into her routine was what finally got things moving after everything else had stalled.

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I’ve been teaching fasting for years, and of all the tools in my toolkit, the 36-hour fast, what I call the fat burner fast in Fast Like a Girl is one of the most powerful. It’s not for every day. It’s not even for every month. But when your body needs a metabolic reset, this is the one.

I did a full breakdown of this on YouTube recently, watch it here, then keep reading for everything you need to know:

What Actually Happens in Your Body During a 36-Hour Fast

The reason this fast is so different from your standard 16:8 comes down to three distinct stages.

Stage 1 (Hours 12–24): Glycogen Depletion Your body first burns through its stored glucose, what we call glycogen. Think of this as your body finally clearing out all that stored sugar it’s been holding onto. Including, yes, the brownie from last week.

Stage 2 (Around Hour 24): Fat Mobilization Once glycogen is depleted, your body starts releasing fatty acids from stored fat tissue. This is where the real fat burning begins and why going past 24 hours matters so much.

Stage 3 (After Hour 24): Ketone Production This is the magic. Your body starts producing ketones, a fuel source that feeds your brain, kills hunger, and triggers what researchers call a metabolic switch. A 2018 study confirmed that it’s specifically these extended fasts that shift the body from burning glucose to burning fat for ketone production. Shorter fasts often can’t get you all the way there.

Ketones are so much more than a weight loss tool, I wrote a whole chapter on their brain benefits in Fast Like a Girl because for women over 40 especially, a regular dose of ketones can be genuinely life-changing for mental clarity and mood.

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What Does a 36-Hour Fast Actually Look Like?

Here’s a simple example:

• Sunday evening: Finish dinner by 6 PM

• All day Monday: Fast (water, electrolytes, herbal tea)

• Tuesday morning at 6 AM: Break your fast

That’s it. One full fasting day sandwiched between two evenings of eating. It’s closer to alternate day fasting than anything else, and the research on alternate day fasting is impressive, including significant fat loss around the midsection.

Who This Fast Is (and Isn’t) For

This fast is a good fit if you:

• Are already comfortable with intermittent fasting

• Have been fasting consistently but feel stuck with weight loss

• Want to prime your metabolic switch and get into deeper ketosis

• Are a metabolically healthy adult (hemoglobin A1C between 5–5.5)

Please skip this one (or work with your doctor) if you are:

• Pregnant or breastfeeding

• Dealing with an eating disorder

• Under 18

• Taking insulin or glucose-lowering medications

How Often Should You Do It?

This is important: once a quarter is my sweet spot recommendation.

The 36-hour fast is a reset tool, not a weekly routine. Done too frequently, it can contribute to muscle loss and electrolyte imbalances, neither of which we want. Think of it like a deep clean for your metabolism. You don’t deep clean your house every day. You do it when it needs it.

If you’re dealing with a severe chronic illness and considering more frequent extended fasts, please do that alongside a practitioner.

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Five Steps to Do It Safely

1. Clean up your eating window beforehand. In the 3–4 days before your fast, shift toward more protein, fiber, and healthy fats. Less sugar, less processed food. This stabilizes your blood sugar going in and makes the fast dramatically easier.

2. Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. Drink plenty of water in the days leading up to it. I love Gerolsteiner mineral water for its high mineral content.

3. Replenish electrolytes throughout. This is non-negotiable for a fast this length. I reach for Beam Minerals or LMNT packets (sodium, magnesium, potassium in warm water) throughout the 36 hours. Electrolyte imbalance is the most common reason people feel terrible during extended fasts — and it’s entirely avoidable.

4. Keep movement gentle. Save the intense workouts for after. During the fast, walk, stretch, do light movement. This is a time for your body to heal, not perform.

5. Break your fast with intention. Your first meal matters. Go for protein-rich, fiber-rich whole foods, and add some fermented foods if you can. I have a full collection of fast-breaking recipes in Eat Like a Girl specifically designed for this moment. Your gut will thank you.

Not Ready for 36 Hours Yet? That’s Okay.

If this sounds like a lot, here’s what I want you to hear: you don’t have to start here. I’d love for you to get comfortable with 17-hour fasts first, then work your way up to 24 hours, and then take on the 36-hour fast when your body is ready. Rushing into extended fasts before you’re prepared is one of the most common mistakes I see.

But if you’ve been fasting for a while and feeling stuck? This might be exactly what your body has been waiting for.

Have you ever done a 36-hour fast? I’d love to hear what your experience was like, drop it in the comments. And if you’re thinking about trying it, tell me. Let’s cheer each other on.

-Mindy

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But “Chili-Loaded” sounds better at dinner.

If you read yesterday’s post on why sweet potatoes are my favorite food on the planet, this recipe is the most natural next step I could give you. It takes everything we talked about, the progesterone-supporting sweet potato, the estrobolome-feeding fiber, the hormone-clearing legumes, and puts it all into one deeply satisfying, loaded bowl.

Chef created this one for Eat Like a Girl and I am obsessed with it. Three types of beans. A rich chili with cacao powder that adds a depth of flavor you won’t expect. Topped with whatever you love. And a sweet potato as the base that is doing more for your hormones than any supplement I could recommend.

Why three beans make this a progesterone powerhouse

Yesterday I talked about what the sweet potato does on its own — the slow-burning glucose progesterone needs, the B6 and magnesium, the resistant starch feeding your estrobolome. Now look at what happens when you stack three legumes on top.

Black beans, kidney beans, and pinto beans all in one recipe. Each one brings prebiotic fiber that feeds the gut bacteria responsible for metabolizing estrogen. Each one provides the complex carbohydrates that give progesterone the glucose it needs to peak without the insulin spike that would disrupt everything else. And together, the protein content rivals most animal proteins, keeping you satiated and blood sugar stable for hours after eating.

Cacao powder in the chili isn’t just a flavor trick: cacao is rich in magnesium, one of the most critical minerals for progesterone synthesis and for calming the nervous system. It also contains polyphenols that feed beneficial gut bacteria and reduce inflammation that can disrupt hormone signaling.

Red bell pepper adds a significant hit of vitamin C, which supports both the liver’s estrogen-metabolizing enzymes and the adrenal glands’ ability to manage cortisol, the hormone that, when elevated, suppresses progesterone directly.

This bowl is doing something at every level. Gut, liver, hormones, nervous system. That’s what eating like a girl means.

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Chili-Loaded Sweet Potato

From Eat Like a Girl · Makes 6 servings · Chef Leslie

Potatoes

• 6 large sweet potatoes

• 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil

• Kosher salt

Chili

• 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

• 1 cup diced yellow onion

• 1 red bell pepper, seeded and diced

• ¼ cup chili powder

• 1 tablespoon cacao powder

• 1½ teaspoons ground cumin

• 1 teaspoon dried oregano

• 1 teaspoon garlic powder

• One 28-oz can diced tomatoes

• One 15-oz can black beans, drained and rinsed

• One 15-oz can kidney beans, drained and rinsed

• One 15-oz can pinto beans, drained and rinsed

• 2 cups vegetable broth

• Kosher salt

Optional toppings Vegan shredded cheese · Vegan sour cream · Chopped chives · Chopped walnuts

To bake the potatoes: Preheat oven to 400°F. Rub the outside of each sweet potato with olive oil and sprinkle with salt. Prick each with a fork and arrange on a large baking sheet. Bake until fork-tender, about 45 minutes.

To make the chili: Heat the olive oil in a large pot over medium-high heat. Add the onion and bell pepper and sauté for about 5 minutes until soft. Stir in the chili powder, cacao powder, cumin, 1½ teaspoons salt, oregano, and garlic powder and cook, stirring occasionally, for 2 minutes. Add the diced tomatoes, black beans, kidney beans, pinto beans, and vegetable broth. Simmer, stirring occasionally, until the chili has thickened, about 20 minutes.

To assemble: Make a lengthwise cut in the top of each potato and pinch the ends, pushing toward the middle to open the potatoes. Ladle the chili generously over each potato. Serve with toppings of your choice.

Store leftover chili in an airtight container in the fridge for up to a week or freeze for up to a month.

Make it yours

Nurture phase (days 20 through end of cycle): This is the meal. Exactly what progesterone is asking for — complex carbs, legumes, magnesium from cacao, and enough fiber to keep your estrobolome working. Make it on day 20 and eat it all week.

Post-menopausal: This belongs in your regular rotation without hesitation. The fiber diversity here is exceptional, three bean varieties means you’re feeding a wide range of beneficial gut bacteria in a single meal.

Batch it: The chili makes 7½ cups and keeps beautifully all week. Bake fresh sweet potatoes as needed and you have one of the most hormonally nourishing dinners imaginable in under 10 minutes.

Add fat to slow the glucose: A dollop of avocado or coconut yogurt on top further slows glucose absorption and makes the sweet potato’s natural sugars work even more gently in your body.

Let me know if you've tried this recipe from Eat Like a Girl or if this is going on your next family meal. I want to hear about it.

-Dr. Mindy

Recipe from Eat Like a Girl by Dr. Mindy Pelz (Hay House, 2024)