We love Dr. Mindy Pelz around here. She has taught us so much about women’s hormone health and the role that intermittent fasting and food plays into it. Her latest book, Eat Like a Girl is another empowering and insightful guide for women looking to improve their health, balance hormones, and build a better relationship with food. Known for her previous bestseller, Fast Like a Girl, Dr. Pelz takes her expertise in women’s health and nutrition to the next level in this book. In it, she offers practical advice, science-backed principles, and over 100 delicious recipes.
The Foundational Five
One of the standout features of the book is her “Foundational Five” eating plan. This plan simplifies healthy eating into five key principles:
- Blood Sugar Matters, Not Calories: Instead of obsessing over calorie counting, Dr. Pelz encourages readers to focus on foods that stabilize blood sugar. This sets them up for better energy and hormonal balance.
- Nature’s Carbs, Not Human-Made Carbs: She emphasizes choosing whole, unprocessed carbohydrates that nourish gut health. These foods also support hormones like estrogen and progesterone.
- Eat for Your Microbes, Not Your Taste Buds: This principle highlights the importance of gut health by prioritizing foods that feed beneficial bacteria over sugary or processed options.
- Protein is the Hero Macronutrient: Dr. Pelz recommends making protein the star of every meal. This tip allows us to support muscle health, metabolism, and satiety.
- Fat Doesn’t Make You Fat: Healthy fats are celebrated here as essential for brain health, hormone production, and overall vitality.
Dr. Pelz also provides practical tips for syncing your diet with your menstrual cycle or life stage (like perimenopause). This information making this book especially valuable for women navigating hormonal changes. It goes right along with what we teach in our online Hormone Reset Bootcamps and in our book, Realizing the Gift of Womanhood.
Why This Book Stands Out
What makes Eat Like a Girl so refreshing is its focus on empowering women to work with their bodies rather than against them. Dr. Pelz’s tone is encouraging and relatable, making complex nutritional science easy to understand and apply. Instead of promoting restriction or extreme dieting, she helps women understand how food choices influence hormones — including cortisol, our primary stress hormone.
Throughout the book, she acknowledges how modern stress, blood sugar instability, and inflammation impact women’s cycles, sleep, and energy. The recipes are thoughtfully designed to be both hormone-supportive and delicious. They help stabilize blood sugar, reduce inflammatory load, and create the internal safety signals the nervous system needs to regulate cortisol effectively.
Final Thoughts
Eat Like a Girl is more than just another diet book. It’s a guide to understanding how food can heal and support your body at every stage of life — especially in a world where stress and cortisol dysregulation are so common. When we eat in a way that stabilizes blood sugar, nourishes the brain, and reduces inflammation, we aren’t just supporting estrogen and progesterone — we’re calming the stress response that often disrupts them in the first place. Just like Hippocrates said, “Let food be thy medicine, and let medicine be thy food.”
Whether you’re looking to balance hormones, regulate cortisol, boost energy, improve sleep, or simply eat in a way that feels aligned with your body, this book offers practical tools and inspiration to get started. Highly recommended for any woman ready to take control of her health and support her hormones from the inside out. You can get this beautiful cookbook from our affiliate link here.
Ready for a change in your hormones? We’ve taken ideas from Fast Like a Girl, by Mindy Pelz, and combined them with practical knowledge and research of our own, to bring you this phenomenal guide to your hormone health. Practical and readable, with QR codes to pdfs and videos, this book can be read in a day, and will help you start implementing changes in your hormone health immediately! Find your book in our online store: HERE.
