Book Review: Eat Like a Girl, By Dr. Pelz

Pelz, M. (2024). Eat like a girl: 100+ delicious recipes to balance hormones, boost energy, and burn fat. Carlsbad, Calif.: Hay House, LLC.

Summary

The book is a guide for how a “girl” should eat based on hormones and health goals. There is a lot of information on the power of food and fasting, in addition to how fake foods, constant dopamine hits, toxins, and more can negatively affect your health. Dr. Pelz provides tips, guidelines, and resources on navigating this world with a 30-day plan and recipes.

There are four parts: Part I: Eating for Your Hormones, Part II: Using Food to Support Your Fasting Lifestyle, Part III: The Fasting Cycle, and Part IV: Recipes.

Advantages

There are many strategies throughout the book. On page 96, the checklist for accelerated fat burning is a great guide that summarizes Dr. Pelz’s recommendations: follow your hormonal cycle, try longer fasts, eat fiber and good fat with every meal, eat enough protein, avoid liver agitators like alcohol, create an exercise variation plan, walk after large meals, minimize toxin load and obesogen exposure, detox, prioritize sleep, eat during daylight hours, and evaluate stress levels.

Disadvantages

Some may be deterred by the choices you have to make in order to personalize the plan and make it work for you. You have to (1) decide a track—omnivore or plant-based; (2) choose the intensity—beginner or advanced determine the length of fasts; (3) choose how to cycle your reset—menstrual versus moon cycle; (4) choose an accountability buddy—friend, Facebook group, health coach, Reset Academy. Also, it is a lot of information to absorb, so you may want to focus on a few concepts initially before diving all in.

Highlights

·       Page xiv, “We need to bring lifestyle back into the health conversation. It’s time to go back to the basics and talk about how our hormones respond to our daily activities, especially those we do repetitively like eating, drinking, sleeping, breathing, and moving.”

·       Pages 5-11, Foundational Five: (1) Blood sugar matters, calories don’t; (2) Eat nature’s food, not humanmade food; (3) Eat for your microbes, not your taste buds; (4) Protein is the hero macro ingredient; (5) Fat doesn’t make you fat.

·       Page 9, “Knowing how to feed the good microbes and starve out the bad ones will not only change your cravings but also your overall health.”

·       Page 10, Foods that destroy your microbiome: artificial sweeteners, high-sugar diets, processed and high-fat foods, antibiotics, alcohol, pesticide-contaminated foods, fried foods, emulsifiers and preservatives, refined carbohydrates.

·       Page 10, “When you build muscle, your body will be more insulin-sensitive, allowing you to use glucose better instead of storing it as fat.”

·       Page 11, “Generally, carbohydrates spike your blood sugar the highest, protein second highest, and fat last. If you pair a fat with your carbohydrate, you slow the spike. As mentioned above, the fat on your body is just a place where it stored the excess. So, if you don’t want to store more fat, you need to stop the excess from coming. The best way to do that is to always dress carbs up with fat.”

·       Page 61, Healthy noninflammatory fats; Harmful inflammatory oils

·       Page 62, Foods to help detox estrogen: fermented foods, bitter foods, cruciferous foods, leafy greens, sulfur-rich foods, citrus fruits, nuts and seeds, green tea

·       Pages 68-69, Best omnivore, animal-based, and plant-based protein sources

·       Page 84, Fasting guidelines for menopausal women

·       Page 84, “For menopausal women, insulin resistance is real. This is why you start gaining weight for no reason. As estradiol diminishes, your cells become more insulin-resistant. The food you ate in your 20s no longer works for you—the menopausal version of you is more insulin-resistant.”

·       Page 85, “Your belly fat is where your body stores excess hormones—specifically cortisol and estrogen.”

·       Pages 86-88, How to get rid of belly fat: (1) Eat a fiber-forward diet; (2) Stop the liver agitators; (3) Lower cortisol; (4) Open up detox pathways; (5) Try longer fasts

·       Page 86, “Cortisol is meant to make you move…If you sit and don’t move when a stressful event hits you, cortisol will be stored as fat, right in the middle of your belly. Make it a golden rule that anytime a stressful moment happens, go for a walk.”

·       Page 93, 30-day fasting reset, what to avoid: bad inflammatory fats, highly processed flours and sugars, toxic fat-stimulating ingredients, alcohol

·       Page 96, Checklist for Accelerated Fat Burning

·       Page 294-295, Appendix A: Obesogens