Why Your Nervous System Is Blocking Weight Loss with Dr. Mindy Pelz

Mindy Pelz (0:00)

I wanna invite you to something that I am crazy excited about. This October 3rd and 4th, I'll be joining an incredible group of speakers at Empower Your Life, a live event at the Alex Theater in Glendale, California. We'll spend two days exploring health, personal growth, mindset, and practical tools to help you create meaningful change in your life. I'll be there alongside speakers like Susie Orman, Jim Quick, Jamie Kern Lima, Brendan Bouchard, Nancy Levin, and many more. It's going to be an amazing weekend filled with learning, connection, and inspiration. I'd love to see you there. I'd also love to give you a big hug, and you can grab your VIP or general admission ticket by visiting heyhouse.com/dr.mindy.

That's heyhouse.com/dr.mindy.

I can't wait to see you.

Hey, Dr. Mindy here, and welcome to the Live Like a Girl podcast, where I bring you icons, disruptors, educators, scientists, and doctors that show you what can be possible when you love and celebrate the female body you are blessed to live in. Let's dive in.

Here's a myth we've got to bust right now. If you are not losing weight, it's not because you didn't try hard enough. Think about this for a moment. Three out of four Americans are either overweight or obese. Yet, we have more workout plans, more diet ideas, more supplements that will help us lose weight, more biohacks. We are not at a loss of information. We are at a loss of safety signals.

And in this video, I want to show you how teaching and training your nervous system, that it is safe, is your absolute greatest weight loss tool. So what you're going to learn in this video is how a stressed out nervous system leads to a stubborn weight loss experience. Those of you who will leave me comments and you're like, I'm stuck, I'm stuck, I don't know how to get unstuck. This is the video for you because a stressed out nervous system will stick your weight loss efforts and no matter how hard you try. In fact, if you try too hard, it's even worse, you can't drop that weight.

I'm also going to show you five signs that will help you understand if you are in a locked fight or flight nervous system. And of course, I'm going to show you what you can do about them. But more importantly, I want to give you fasting ideas, food ideas, movement ideas, sleep ideas, supplement ideas, a lot of ideas that I'm going to dish out for you here on this video on how you start to send a message back to your body, saying, hey, we're safe, we're okay. You can drop weight now. And these things, these techniques and tools I'm going to give you, they're easy because you can't do hard when it comes to a nervous system that already thinks it's under a stress. So let's dive into this.

First, we got, just like we have been tomming these conversations about your metabolic switch, that you are a sugar burner and a fat burner, and that you switch between eating food and your body using that food for energy and then you switch over into a fasted state so that your insulin can come down and your body will burn fat for energy. That is a switch. You also have a nervous system switch. And one side of the switch is what we call your parasympathetic nervous system. It is also known as rest and digest. And that is when your nervous system calms down and it feels like it's safe and it's not sending cortisol signals out into your whole body. Then we have your sympathetic nervous system, and your sympathetic is your fight or flight. And this nervous system will make cortisol. This nervous system is always agitated, always on the go, the mind is always running. And what you were built to do, just like the metabolic switch, is you were built to move in between these two systems. I can rest and digest, and I can move into fight or flight, and go into a state, a stressed state, without it tanking me. Stress is not the enemy. It is the constant stress that starts to shut down the metabolic system. So we want to get you back into this safety signal. Your body is not broken. It's guarding you. It's protecting you. If you can't lose weight, no matter what you're doing, what your body's saying to you is like, hey, we're still running from the tiger over here. You want us to drop weight? We still think we're in a massive crisis.

Now, there are a couple of ways you can understand where your nervous system state is at.