Habits and Hustle
Episode 511: Dr. Mindy Pelz: Fix Your Metabolism with the Right Type of Fast
16 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: How did a viral misquote change Dr. Mindy Pelz's career?
Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it.
I have Dr. Mindy Pelz on the podcast.
Chapter 2: What are the common misconceptions about testosterone and fasting?
You guys, she's a friend of mine. And so this happens all the time, right? When I have people who I like very much and we start doing this podcast, all the good stuff happens before we start building.
So I'm like, stop it. Stop talking. Yeah, stop talking.
let's start yeah okay so dr mindy peltz she uh is like the she's known as like the fasting guru like you we were just saying before we started filming that you were on such a trajectory when i met you and now you've become like a mainstream like name and she's written a ton of books fast like a girl that her newest book is called age like a girl you wrote like a couple other books prior like a girl was in between it's a trilogy now exactly
Chapter 3: What are the biggest fasting mistakes people make?
It's like eat like a girl. I mean, you guys are getting the point. So we're going to go, we're going to like get right into everything. But I was actually just saying to Mindy just now, and we stopped so we can start recording how you, how she kind of skyrocketed. And she was telling me that Steve Bartlett. So can you kind of just go from there?
Chapter 4: What are the six core types of fasting and their applications?
So.
Yeah, so Fast Like a Girl came out in December 2022. And I knew what I put in that book was going to work for people because I'd already done it in my clinic. I had seen it in my online world. But when the book went out, people started getting results. And so they started sharing it. And then all the podcasters started bringing me on.
The podcast interview that went viral, it had like 10 million views within like a month or two, was Stephen Bartlett's Diary of the CEO. Yeah. He does a great job. He's a great interviewer.
Chapter 5: How should athletes adapt their fasting strategies?
And what ended up happening is it was like a weird configuration of at the time I was 52 and he was 31. And it was like this 52-year-old woman. educating a 31-year-old man on women's hormones and fasting. And there was something about our rapport that just set the whole thing into motion. And everybody loved it, both men and women. We got questions from men saying, comments saying, thank you.
Chapter 6: What is cycle-based fasting and how does it affect women?
You taught me a little more about why my wife operates the certain way and why she acts a certain way. But the thing that we were talking about was it's a very famous quote in a very negative way that some of your listeners might know. He asked me about fasting for men. And I quoted a study that was a misquote. And I said, when a man fasts for 24 hours, he improves his testosterone by 1300%.
Okay. The actual study was growth hormone. And whenever you improve growth hormone, you improve all the other hormones. So Jason Fung, all the fasting experts that came before me, we used to say, we know all these other hormones are going to be increased with fasting because you increase growth hormone. So there's a lot of nuance there. But the interesting part of the story is I got bullied.
And literally bots, people... Health influencers that had big bro culture podcasts bullied me, made fun of me, did TikToks with like, look at her thinking that 1300% increase in testosterone. They tagged Huberman in it. They tagged Thomas Daylour, if you know him. And literally everybody laughed. It was like a public embarrassment. It was horrible.
Wow.
And I wanted to go onto my YouTube channel and say, here was the original study. This is what we found. This is what it looked like. But everybody on my PR team said, don't say anything. You've got to let this moment run its course. Because the minute you speak, it's going to inflame everybody.
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Chapter 7: What are the long-term risks of quick-fix weight loss trends?
Yeah. So I never could speak on it. Yeah. And so after that, that moment, not only because of the 10 million views, but because of the bullying, I started getting recognized everywhere. Everything went crazy on my socials, book sales went through the roof, invitations for other podcasts. Like it was the defining moment of my career and it was both good and bad.
Chapter 8: How does fasting impact fertility and hormonal health?
Oh my gosh.
So even though you misquoted, you said, it didn't matter because that just proves that any press is good press, right? That's right. Very true. You can say whatever the hell you want, like real, fake, misquoted, and it doesn't matter. It will skyrocket you. That's right. That's really scary, actually.
Yeah. And what's really interesting is I really wanted to go back and really explain it to everybody. And I have since, once it kind of calmed down, I went back to... I mean, the thing to know about a Stephen Bartlett interview, he had me in the chair for three and a half hours.
Yeah.
At some point, you're going to say something that's sloppy.
You're probably like, you probably need like a protein bar or something or like a cup of coffee.
Well, when I got done, I told him, I'm like, you never put a menopausal woman in a chair for three and a half hours and ask her to focus. And he and I joked about it. But yeah, but you're going to say something at some point. What was the actual, what was the real, what was the... So 24 hours of fasting will increase growth hormone in both men and women.
Mostly, they went on to study it even deeper in men by 1300%. That's huge. So the question is, what does growth hormone do and when does it diminish? Wow. So growth hormone diminishes at 30. So you don't get as much growth hormone, both men and women. So when you go into a fasted state of 24 hours, you increase this hormone that is the precursor to making every hormone.
Now, this is really interesting because in a man's body, the main sex hormone they have to focus on is testosterone. Testosterone gets made in the testes and it goes up to the brain and converts to estrogen. They don't make estrogen in their bodies, and there's not much progesterone.
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