Book in one sentence: A practical five-step lifestyle protocol for menopausal women, built around fasting, ketogenic eating, gut repair, detox, and stress reduction (with the gut-hormone connection, the estrobolome, as the book’s most original contribution).
- What Is The Menopause Reset About?
- The Five-Step Reset: What Pelz Actually Recommends
- What Is the Estrobolome and Why Does It Matter for Menopause?
- How Does Pelz Use Fasting for Menopause?
- Is The Menopause Reset Worth Reading?
- Books Like The Menopause Reset
What Is The Menopause Reset About?
You’re eating the same food you’ve always eaten. You’re exercising. You’re doing everything “right.” The weight is still going up, the sleep is still a disaster, and you’re crying in the car for reasons you can’t entirely explain. The doctor offers two options: ride it out, or consider HRT. Neither of those answers tells you why any of this is happening.
Mindy Pelz is a chiropractor and functional medicine practitioner who spent ten years inside her own chaotic perimenopause before writing this book. That’s not a small thing. She came into it already health-conscious, already fasting, already eating cleanly, and still couldn’t sleep or lose weight. The book she wrote afterward is a sequenced five-step protocol that treats menopause as a system-level problem rather than a single hormonal event. The core argument is worth stating plainly: estrogen and progesterone sit at the bottom of the hormonal hierarchy, not the top, and most women (and most doctors) are trying to fix the wrong end of the chain.
This was Pelz’s first menopause-focused book, written before Fast Like a Girl. It’s shorter and more focused. If you’ve already read her fasting work and want the menopause-specific application, this is where she built that framework.
The Five-Step Reset: What Pelz Actually Recommends
The five steps aren’t a menu. Pelz is specific about the order, and the order reflects a biological hierarchy she lays out early in the book. Insulin sits above sex hormones. Cortisol sits above insulin. Oxytocin sits above cortisol. Trying to fix estrogen while chronic cortisol is running the show is like mopping water with the tap still open.
1. Change When You Eat
Intermittent fasting is the entry point because it directly reduces insulin, and insulin is the upstream controller of every sex hormone downstream. The immediate feedback loop also makes it the easiest step for most women to feel quickly. Pelz recommends starting at 13-15 hours daily.
2. Change What You Eat
The “ketobiotic” framework is ketogenic macros (under 50g net carbs, under 50g protein, over 60% calories from fat) combined with a hard emphasis on plant diversity. Standard keto done without enough vegetables slowly erodes the gut bacteria that process estrogen. The protein cap matters more than most keto books acknowledge. Excess protein spikes insulin, just less dramatically than carbs.
3. Repair Your Gut (The Estrobolome)
It’s underrepresented in popular menopause writing, and it gets its own section below. Short version: a specific collection of gut bacteria controls what happens to the estrogen you’re still producing. If those bacteria are depleted, the estrogen can’t be reactivated. Rebuilding them is a two-part process: stop destroying them first, then actively feed them.
4. Reduce Your Toxic Load
Menopausal hormonal shifts trigger the release of stored toxins (lead from bones, mercury from tissue) into the bloodstream. Those toxins migrate toward fat and nervous tissue. The hypothalamus and pituitary (the brain areas that run hormone production) sit outside the blood-brain barrier, making them unusually vulnerable. Mood instability, memory difficulty, and anxiety that exceeds what progesterone loss would explain may have toxic load as the upstream cause.
5. Stop Rushing
The last step is hardest because it requires restructuring a life, not just a diet. Pelz describes finding her own DUTCH hormone test results showing sex hormones at rock-bottom levels despite having implemented all four previous steps. The culprit was chronically elevated cortisol from an overscheduled life depleting DHEA, the precursor hormone from which both cortisol and sex hormones are made. She quotes the realization directly: “I realized that just because I am a skilled rushing woman doesn’t mean it’s in my hormonal best interest to keep rushing.”
What Is the Estrobolome and Why Does It Matter for Menopause?
Most people have never heard this word. It’s worth knowing.
The estrobolome is a collection of 60+ gut bacterial strains whose job is to metabolize used estrogens and reactivate the beneficial ones. In a woman with a healthy estrobolome, even the declining estrogen production of menopause is partially offset by the gut’s ability to recycle what’s still available. In a woman whose gut bacteria have been hammered by antibiotics, antibacterial products, and processed food additives, the small amount of estrogen still being produced can’t be properly activated.
The enzyme at the center of this process is beta-glucuronidase. When gut bacteria are thriving, beta-glucuronidase ensures that healthy estrogen gets pulled into the cells rather than excreted. When the microbiome is disrupted, that process breaks down, and even the estrogen you’re still making goes to waste.
Pelz’s protocol for rebuilding the estrobolome:
- Stop destroying it first: Eliminate antibacterial soaps and mouthwash, avoid conventionally raised meat (which carries antibiotics), remove synthetic preservatives and artificial sweeteners
- Feed existing bacteria: Polyphenol-rich foods (cloves, dark chocolate, berries, olives, raw nuts)
- Fertilize them: Prebiotic fiber from chia, hemp, and flax seeds
- Add new strains: Fermented foods (sauerkraut, kimchi, kefir, kombucha)
- Target strains: Lactobacillus reuteri and Lactobacillus rhamnosus are the two she names specifically for estrogen metabolism
The liver matters here too. It’s the second estrogen-processing organ, and it needs the same kind of support: less alcohol, fewer unnecessary medications, more cruciferous vegetables.
For women who’ve been told their estrogen is “fine” on a standard blood panel while still experiencing classic estrogen-deficiency symptoms, the estrobolome offers a plausible explanation. The estrogen may be there. It’s just not being activated.
How Does Pelz Use Fasting for Menopause?
Pelz was already known for her fasting work before this book, and the fasting section here is more cycle-specific than anything in mainstream fasting literature. She identifies seven distinct fasting styles, each serving a different physiological purpose:
- 13-15 hours daily: reduces insulin, triggers light autophagy, the entry point
- 17+ hours (autophagy fast): cellular self-repair; protein must stay under 20g that day
- 24-hour (dinner to dinner): specifically repairs the gut’s mucosal lining by stimulating intestinal stem cells
- 3-5 day water fast, twice yearly: reboots the immune system entirely
One guardrail matters above all others: women who still have a menstrual cycle should never do a fast longer than 24 hours after Day 21. Extended fasting during the progesterone-building phase of the cycle drops progesterone further, and progesterone is already the hormone most at risk in perimenopause. This is absent from virtually all mainstream fasting advice, which is written for a gender-neutral audience. It also explains why some perimenopausal women try fasting, experience worsening symptoms, and conclude that fasting doesn’t work for them.
The 28-day eating protocol builds on this. Rather than static ketogenic eating, Pelz proposes a cycle that shifts food choices at key hormonal windows:
- Days 1-11: Ketobiotic eating with chosen fasting style
- Days 12-14: Estrogen-building foods freely eaten (flax seeds, sesame seeds, edamame, garlic, berries, crucifers)
- Days 15-21: Back to ketobiotic
- Days 21-28: Progesterone-building foods freely eaten (potatoes, beans, squash, quinoa, tropical fruits), extended fasts paused
For women in postmenopause (no natural cycle to track), Pelz simplifies it to 80% ketobiotic and 20% hormone-building foods without calendar timing. The insight underneath the protocol: long-term strict keto suppresses sex hormones if it’s never cycled. Many women see dramatic results from keto at first, then hit a wall at six to twelve months. This is her explanation for why, and the structural fix.
Is The Menopause Reset Worth Reading?
Read this if you’re in perimenopause or early menopause, you’ve tried some combination of cleaner eating and fasting, and you’re getting only partial results. The sequenced framework is the book’s real value: not a list of things to do, but an explanation of why the order matters and which upstream lever to pull first. It’s especially useful if you’ve noticed that the approaches that worked at 38 are failing at 50 and want a mechanistic explanation for why.
The estrobolome section alone is worth the read for anyone interested in the gut-hormone connection. It’s genuinely underrepresented in popular health writing, and Pelz explains it clearly.
Skip it if you need clinical management for severe menopausal symptoms. This is a lifestyle-first framework, not a substitute for medical care. Pelz doesn’t engage substantively with the evidence base for HRT, and women with serious symptoms shouldn’t use this book as a reason to avoid it. Some of the detox recommendations (chelation, coffee enemas, provoked heavy metal testing) are outside mainstream clinical practice and deserve a conversation with a qualified provider before you try them.
One caveat: The evidence quality across the book varies considerably. The fasting protocols and estrobolome material are well-grounded. The cycling-eating protocol (Days 1-11, 12-14, etc.) is plausible based on hormonal timing logic, but the RCT support is limited. Read it as an intelligent clinical hypothesis rather than established protocol.
Books Like The Menopause Reset
| Book | Author | Best For |
|---|---|---|
| Fast Like a Girl | Mindy Pelz | Cycle-synced fasting in full detail; the fasting chapters here expanded |
| Eat Like a Girl | Mindy Pelz | Pelz’s food and recipe framework for women |
| Age Like a Girl | Mindy Pelz | Longevity through the Pelz framework for older women |
| The Hormone Fix | Anna Cabeca, DO | A keto-alkaline approach to menopause; more clinically conservative than Pelz |
| Menopause Bootcamp | Suzanne Gilberg-Lenz, MD | A conventional OB-GYN’s perspective; strong counterweight on HRT evidence |