#155 Optimal Autophagy and Stress: Improving Your Cell Cleanup and Regeneration

The information provided in this podcast is educational and not intended to diagnose or treat medical conditions.

Dr. Donnie Wilson struggled for decades to solve her numerous health issues and heal her body. But with focused determination, she healed herself. And in doing so, she discovered the Dr. Donnie stress recovery Protocol. On this show, you're going to hear from doctors, nutritionists, and Experts along with Dr. Donnie, who will give practical advice and wisdom to help heal your body. This is how humans heal.

Hi, and welcome to how humans heal. I'm Dr. Donnie Wilson, and in today's episode, I'm going to be talking about something called autophagy. Some people say autophagy, and lately I've mostly been saying autophagy. So what is this, and how does it influence your health, and what can you do to increase autophagy? Okay, that's what I'm going to be covering today, and I'm looking forward to going through it with you because I'm curious, how many of you have heard of autophagy before, and are you already aware of how it might be affecting your health and the things you can do to support it in your body? I'm so curious. And if you're like, yes, I'm aware, but I want to learn more or I've never heard of it, please tell me, Dr. Donnie, either way, you're in the right place. So autophagy, I think, is a really amazing and cool to understand because it has such power and influence on our health, and it's happening all the time in our bodies without us even realizing it or thinking about it. Right. So it's so fun, I find, to learn things that are going on in our bodies, and there's actually things you can do to help your body out with autophagy, things that you might already be doing or things you could be doing. But I want to make sure you know how to do it in a way that's going to optimize autophagy the most. We don't want to overdo it. And this is one of the biggest messages of autophagy is how to do just enough to improve function and not overdo it. Because as humans, let's face it, we tend to be really good at overdoing it. We were so willing to try harder and do more, to create more chains and change and. And get the gold star. Right? We're so willing to sacrifice ourselves and in the hopes of achieving more that. But the thing is, our bodies don't really respond that same way. Our bodies actually do better when we give it just enough Change and support to create a beneficial outcome. But not too much because if we overdo it, it actually works against us. So I feel like one of the best lessons we can get from autophagy is, is that it's actually less is more than overdoing. It works against us, but doing nothing at all works against us too. So let's, let's dig in more to this so you understand what I'm talking about. So autophagy is actually how our bodies and our cells do a clean out process, a natural detoxification if you will. Actually, have you ever thought about that? Like how you know, our bodies are made up of a hundred trillion cells and those cells aren't just sitting around there doing nothing. Those cells are actively making energy for us to function. They're actively making all of our processes work for us without us having to think about it. Right? Our nerve cells, our muscle cells, our digestion, our hormone production brains, our everything is cells that are working for us constantly, nonstop, even when we're sleeping. So how are these cells doing that? And how are they taking out the garbage, so to speak? Right? How do they. Did you ever think about that? Our cells actually need, have garbage that needs to go out or recycle. They can actually recycle sometimes and sometimes the cells are just done and they need to get rid of that cell and make a new cell. Our body has the ability to make, replace. The cells can replace themselves in most areas of our body. So how is all this happening? And it just so happens that I was studying science back in the early 90s. I, that's when I was getting my pre med degree and my bachelor's in science. And so I was taking all these science classes which I really loved. I have essentially a minor in chemistry and, and was taking all kinds of biology including cellular biology and embryology. So all of this study of the cells and then histology, all of it I just think thought was so interesting and I loved it. And so, and biochemistry. And so bringing that back is it's one of my favorite things. And that's what I do a lot of. In my book, by the way, the Master's trust book. I'm always helping to you to understand what are these things going on in our bodies that then once we understand then we can make different choices to help our bodies out. If we don't know what's going on, then we might be making different choices without realizing that it's going to affect the way our cells function.

So back in the 90s I learned about autophagy and, and how our cells have this natural cleanup process. And so it's so interesting to me to go back and read that information and realize, oh wow, I do remember learning this back when I was learning about how our cells function. And actually the researcher who identified, really discovered and made so much more clear this process of autophagy, he received a Nobel Prize for the research he was doing in the 90s. So right around that same time is when a lot of this research was being done to understand how our cells clean themselves out. And that researcher, his name is Yoshinori, Yoshinori Osumi. I'll, I'll write it in the notes for you. So Yoshinori Osumi and he received a Nobel Prize for his research related to autophagy. So I'm so grateful to that and his work to help us understand that in our cells there's this process of where the body can identify the cells, can identify what substances need to be recycled or taken out of the cell. And there's a process where the cell sort of back packages it into, you know, what's called a lysosome. It puts all the garbage into the lysosome and then it is able to transport it out of the cell. Isn't that amazing?

So this, or it can identify aspects or proteins that it might be able to recycle and reuse. And this is all determined by genes. There's genes that determine these autophagy processes. And it's influenced by the state in our body, in our whole body. So all of this is signaled by our exposure to stress. So if we have, if we're under a large amount of stress in the moment, if we have an infection, if we have an injury, if there, you know, so anytime our body gets a stress signal, it shifts the signaling for autophagy. And to some degree, and this is why I always emphasize that it's not about having zero stress and there's such a thing as too much stress. Right? It's always, how do we find just the right amount of stress to signal appropriate and healthy amounts of cell turnover and cell clean out, cell detoxification, right? How do we, how can we give our bodies the right state and, and setting to create the optimal signaling? Because when it comes down to it.

What happens when we're, when autophagy is working well is it's helping to prevent aging. What is aging? What we experience as aging is when, you know, we have more cells that are damaged cells. We have, you know, we see it in our skin, we See it in our hair. We see it in our, in our, in our muscles, in our bones. We get weakness, we get fatigue, we get um, we in our nervous system. This is where we, you know, when people are experiencing dementia of different types, neurological conditions of different types, when the cells are not cleaning out. If you even just look at Alzheimer's disease and Ex as an example, Alzheimer's disease is completely a situation where the cells are not able to clean out the debris. And when this debris is stuck in the cells, it makes the nerves not work right. And so then we, it affects our memory and our functioning. So literally from the example of dementia, we can see that if our cells are not able to clean out unusable proteins and debris, that it's going to affect how our brain works and it's going to increase aging. So how do we make sure that our cells can identify what needs to be cleaned out and get it out of there? Another example is cancer cells. Cancer cells have cell are cells that are not healthy and not functioning normally. So in our normal bodily processes, our bodies can identify when a cell is not healthy and it can get rid of that cell. That's part of autophagy is identifying cancer cells and getting them out of there. Well, if our bodies don't have that opportunity to clean out potential cancer cells, then those cancer cells can perpetuate and that's when cancer then progresses. So we want to start realizing that our cells are in a constant process of identifying what should be taken out or recycled. And we as the human living in this body, we get to. It's really our choices that determine the opportunities and the how well our body gets to do this clean out and anti aging process. And if we're pushing ourselves to the max and we're under constant stress and not getting enough sleep and we're. And depending on the foods we're consuming because it depends on the nutrients that our body has access to. All of these autophagy processes need antioxidants. So this relates back to a couple other episodes that I've that I can link to in the show notes. One is just understanding how stress affects us. Two is oxidative stress, which is stress inside the cells, which is an again a normal process, but if it gets out of balance, it becomes a problem. So I'll link to the episode about oxidative stress so you can learn more about that and hormesis, something called hormesis. Hormesis is.

When we choose an optimal amount of stress, then it actually signals autophagy. So when we do something that's kind of a good stress. You could think of it that way. If we, if we exercise, this is a perfect example. If we exercise, it's a bit of a stress on our bodies. It signals some stress response and signals some oxidative stress. It signals antioxidant production like glutathione. It signals autophagy. This is why exercise is good for us. It signals for our body to do a normal cleanout process and reset all of these systems, dropping inflammation and anti aging. There's a ton of research on how exercise is beneficial in that way. So it's a good thing. If we do just the right amount of exercise for our body, that's going to become, that's going to be in that hormetic zone, in that stimulating hormesis. But if we overdo it, if our exercise is too intense, too long, too often, we go into too much stressing ourselves. And when that happens, it overdoes it. Now we have too much oxidative stress, too much inflammation, too much, too much cortisol, and we actually work against ourselves. So this is where again, I think as humans, this is one of the hardest things for us to learn is what's enough and what's too much. And it's not a clear line. We, it just takes, it requires us to be mindful and aware and to notice and to listen to our body signals and to notice, hey, if I do this much exercise at this time of day and this duration, then I see positive effects and I feel better. And if I overdo it, I feel worse. Because there's not great, there's not a great test for autophagy that exists at this point in time anyway. You really have to go by how your body feels. And you can do things like measure heart rate variability, which heart rate variability? I could do a whole nother session on that. Heart rate variability is there's different devices that allow us to measure the variability in our heart rate. And you can do this with your Apple watch. You could do this with your different kinds of different band devices you wear on your wrist or your fingers or your ears. You know, you're basically. These devices measure the variability in our heart rate. There's actually a very subtle variability in the heart rate that we don't even really notice unless you're measuring it. And this variability in the heart rate has been associated with how well our body responds to a stress and recovers to a stress. So it's all about response and recovery. Again, the goal is not having zero Stress. It's not to say all stress is bad. It's to say we want to be able to respond to stress and recover from stress. And so you can use your heart rate variability as a way to help inform you if you are exercising in a way that gives your body that positive hormesis, and then you recover and you're getting the positive autophagy from that experience. And so if your heart rate variability is in an optimal range, it gives you a sense that you're probably on the right track. And if you find that your heart rate variability says, oh, you're in a danger zone, then you know you need to adjust your. In this case, exercise. But there's other things that stimulate autophagy, too, and Horme says things like fasting. So if we, we. There's so much research on various types of fasting, whether you're talking about fasting during the day or fasting for 24 hours or fasting for an intermittent fast, when it. We refer to the term intermittent fasting. And there are other episodes in how humans heal on intermittent fasting, too. So I encourage you to listen to those if you have. If you want to learn more. But just to be brief, intermittent fasting, I think of as an overnight fast. It's the period of time you're not eating while you're sleeping, essentially. And then you can extend it a little bit longer than that. Right. If you think about it, we all intermittent fast for however long we're sleeping because you're not eating while you're sleeping. So you might have, you know, I mean, hopefully you're sleeping and you're getting to fast at least seven hours, eight hours. How many, how many hours are you guys sleeping now? Optimally would be at least seven and a half to nine hours of sleeping. And usually you're not gonna eat it right before you go to bed and immediately when you wake up. So usually you might be having, you know, maybe, let's say 10 hours of fast. So calculate it for yourself as you're listening. What was your last meal of the day? And what's your first meal the next day? That's your intermittent fast or your overnight fast. And the studies show that just simply having hours of not eating overnight can stimulate autophagy. And so what we look at as humans is we go, well, what if we extend it a little bit? What if we make it 12 hours? What if you have your last meal at 7pm and your first meal at 7am that's 12 hours. And they show. Okay, now for A lot of people, that increases autophagy, and that means it's helping to clean out debris and recycle cells and. And improve your health in general. Right? So people. A lot of times you'll hear people saying, hey, I'm gonna do more intermittent fasting. And so this is the reason why. But I always like to point out that it's important to know your body because there's also such a thing as too long of an intermittent fast. So if some. If for some people, you go all the way to, let's say, 15 or 16 hours of not eating straight, for some people, that raises their cortisol levels too much, and it ends up pushing them into danger zone. And so now they're not getting the benefits of autophagy. It's actually causing more damage to their cells and more damage to their. Their increasing oxidative stress, and it's working against them. So this is where I always want you to be aware. As much as we might hear about something out there and say, oh, this sounds good, I'm going to try this. Remember, like, the extremes are not necessarily good. You always need to listen to your body. And I would say optimally, when it comes to these kinds of health optimization tools that we can use, which I think are very important to know about, I always want to use them based on what I call your stress type. Stress type is your cortisol and adrenaline levels, right? So here again, it's about how your body's responding to stress, which is unique to each of us. So two people who have the same stress exposure, their body is going to respond differently. And so they need different ways of supporting their autophagy. They need different exercise, different lengths of exercise, different intensity of exercise. They need different intensity of intermittent fasting. Everything down the line, all these beneficial things, we need to modify it based on how your body responds to that stress exposure. So what happens when we're under stress is it tells our first, our sympathetic nervous system to make adrenaline and then our HPA axis to our adrenal glands that make more adrenaline and cortisol. So adrenaline and cortisol are our stress messengers. Cortisol is a stress hormone. Adrenaline is really a neurotransmitter. So they are communicating stress to our bodies. Again, it's not all bad. We need a certain amount of cortisol, and we need a certain amount of adrenaline to be healthy. How do we get our cortisol and adrenaline to optimal levels? Because when cortisol and adrenaline are optimal, we're going to get the Most out of all this good stuff you're doing, mo you're going to get more out of your exercise, more out of your meditation, more out of your sleep, everything, your diet, because your body's working with optimal cortisol and adrenaline. Which relates back to the heart rate variability, by the way. Right? Heart rate variability had to do with how your body's responding and recovering to stress. And cortisol and adrenaline has to do with how your body responds and recovers from stress. So if we know your cortisol levels, we know your adrenaline levels and we get them optimized. Now, you also have optimal heart rate variability because it all goes together now, then you can go about doing these things to improve autophagy and get the most benefit from it. However, if you're not aware of your cortisol and adrenaline, you might be walking into this saying, oh, I'm going to do all this good stuff. I heard about intermittent fasting or I heard about this workout, or I heard about this diet change and you just push yourself into it. But you're working with cortisol that's too high or adrenaline that's too low. Now your stress system's already out of balance and you're expecting you're pushing it more. So now it's going to be more out of balance and you're not going to get the same benefits out of these things you're trying. So that's why I always encourage you to first know your cortisol and adrenaline. First get your cortisol and adrenaline optimized. And that's what I refer to as knowing your stress type and optimizing your addressing your stress type. So there's five stress types. One is a stress magnet who has high cortisol, high adrenaline. Then there's the opposite would be Blonde and blue that has low cortisol, low adrenaline. Right? There are opposite ends of the spectrum and they need completely different help to get it back to optimal. Right. If your cortisol, adrenaline are too high, we're going to use completely different herbs and nutrients to get it back to optimal than if your cortisol and adrenaline is too low. You need different herbs and nutrients to get yours to optimal. So I feel like it's so important to know where you're starting from so you're using the right herbs and nutrients to get it to optimal. And again, the whole reason is because we know that when cortisol and adrenaline are optimal, you're it's going to improve your health, let alone it's going to Help you get more out of everything you do to improve ontology. To me, it's a really big oversight to just go out there and try to do all these things to improve hormesis and autophagy without first making sure you've optimized your cortisol and adrenaline. You see what I mean? Because now you're, you're putting, you're already in a stress state and you're putting yourself under more stress versus if we get you out of that stress state, we get your cortisol and adrenaline optimal, we get your heart rate variability optimal, then we can use a stress state like exercise to get the most benefit for you. So.

That'S why it's important to know your stress type and that's why it's important to address it. According to. So when you, you can do the stress type quiz, I'll put a link. I have an online quiz where you just go to my website. It takes under two minutes. It shows you what likely your stress type is. I also give you the ability to order a test to measure your cortisol adrenaline through my website. So you can order it and learn how to optimize your cortisol and adrenaline from me through my book, the Master Stress Book, I teach you in here exactly how to optimize your cortisol and adrenaline, your adrenal glands, and how to recover from stress in general. Right. And all about autophagy too. So you can learn all of this in this book. So and from my website. So start there. If you don't already know your stress type and you don't already know your cortisol and adrenaline, definitely do that. And then we can say, okay, now let's implement ways of optimizing autophagy based on your stress type. Right? And that's where I'm hoping even more research is going to be done in the near future. So what else helps to support autophagy? Well, another that you may have heard of is cold therapy. So you'll hear of people doing, you know, either going in a cold or ice bath or going a cold dip in the ocean or cold contrast shower. Right. So when I was back in naturopathic medical school, this is Also in the 90s, we learned about all kinds of hydrotherapy. Which hydrotherapy was, came from Europe way back in 1800s, I think. So this is nothing new, right? This is not, there's nothing new hydrotherapy. But it's just that now we understand more the science behind it of how it works and what contrast hydrotherapy is, is where you say you could even just do it in your regular shower. You turn the shower to hot, and you get yourself all nice and warm for three minutes, and then you turn the water to cold for 30 seconds, and then you turn it back to hot for three minutes and back to cold for 30 seconds. And you repeat it three times, ending with cold. And this is classic contrast hydrotherapy. And actually, a few years ago, when I went to Iceland, they used the same contrast hydrotherapy in a spa there in Iceland, where we would go in a hot. Like a hot sauna, and then they had a cold tub with ice in it. So you go from the sauna to the cold tub for, let's say, 30 seconds because you don't want to get overly cold, but you do just enough. You go back in the hot sauna and back in the cold tub. Same contrast hydrotherapy. It's been used in so many different traditions and cultures around the world for. For probably way longer than hundreds of years. And yet now we know that the reason why it's beneficial is because it stimulates autophagy. It tells ourselves that there's a need to clean things out. It kind of says, hey, everybody, let's do. Let's do a check in and see if there's any cellular debris that needs to go. And it kind of. All the cells in your body get that message. Hey, we. It's. It's spring cleaning time. And cells all go, hey, let's. Let's identify who's not supposed to be here and either recycle it or get rid of it and make new healthy cells and new healthy mitochondria. And this is why it can be so invigorating. And people find that their energy improves in their focus and their memory and their. All the things. They are even losing weight because now it's resetting metabolic processes in the body. But maybe some of you have also experienced if you overdo it, right? If we push too hard, if we. If we. And it's again, different for each person. What is too much for you is different for the next person. This is what's called the Goldilocks principle, right? Goldilocks is the story of the girl who was trying out everything she would try. Oh, is this. Is this, you know, bed to the right size? Oh, this one's too. This. Was it the bed or the chair? Too small, and this one's too big, and this one's just right. Or she's trying her porridge. Oh, this one's too hot and this one's too Cold, but this one's just right. So I think really the message is all of us need to practice being more like Goldilocks. Noticing it's about, it takes awareness. We have to actually be mindful. First of all, just even having compassion for ourselves and a design and realizing we live in a human body. Right, let's start there. We, we have a human body and we can't go to the body store and get another body. This is your human body. So recognizing, okay, this is my human body, this is my opportunity to listen to my body, which requires that I take time out of my day. Even a few minutes. It doesn't take very long, but a few minutes to take a few deep breaths and become more aware of of your body's signals and more aware of the ability to make different choices. Now sometimes this is when all these messages from our childhood activate and make us, you know, try to make us feel guilty for not doing it or make us feel bad for not being perfect and these negative messages start popping in. And this is why it's so important to also be practicing mindfulness. So you become more aware of all those negative messages and you realize that's not gonna serve me here. I'm working on improving my health and doing something good for myself and having compassion for myself. This is not about perfection and it doesn't help to put so much pressure on yourself. That's more stress. Now we're again in the stress pot instead of the anti stress and healing focus. Right? So catch those thoughts and say thank you. I know you served me at some point in my life, but right now I don't need those critical thoughts. I'm focused on having compassion for myself and being in the moment and listening to my experience and making different choices. And I'm not going to be perfect. I'm going to learn along the way. We're human. We're not machines. We are going to try and learn and practice. This is a human experience. This is mastery of being human. Really? How do we master our human experience? How do we master understanding our human body? We don't come with an instruction manual. We have to.

Listen to our body and learn how our body works and then try new things each day in different routines. This is why I, in the book I really emphasize the need to fine tune your self care routine. And it's not that you. I never think that I'm ever gonna find one routine that's gonna stick forever. I figure every single day I'm learning something new in my body. I'm Gonna need to change and adapt based on what's going on in my life and my environment. How do I, what's the optimal routine in this day, in this moment? Okay, so just knowing, okay, the process is I wanna start to understand my body enough that I can start to give it what it needs, including starting with what I refer to as self care. C for clean eating, A for adequate sleep, R for recovery activities, and E for exercise. And this self care is all based on your stress type, which is your body's responsiveness to stress, understanding how your body responds and what it needs to recover. If we don't know how our bodies respond and what they need to recover, we're, we're working in an ignorant situation where that, and that's information you can get from the stress type quiz on the stress assessment. So then you have information you need to support your body under stress. It's not about trying to take yourself into a vacuum out of your daily life. That's not the point. I mean, you might be able to go on a retreat or you know, short term, but then to me it's all about coming back to my daily life and how do I integrate it into my daily life, how do I take care of myself in the day to day? Because that's what actually ends up making the biggest difference. So we have to, if we go away to learn something, it's how do we integrate it and implement it each day of our lives. And so that's where we want to learn to give your body what it needs to be in a constant state of stress recovery. Because the stress is gonna happen, we can't escape the stress. I'm not even gonna try. In fact, we're talking about choosing things that are stressful on purpose. Choosing to exercise, choosing for contrast hydrotherapy, choosing for intermittent fasting. We're choosing these stresses because we know they stimulate autophagy and help our cells clean out. But we also need to choose this stress recovery. How do I, how do all of these processes are flow, There's a stimulation that stimulates autophagy, and then there's a process where it's cleaning out the stress, the cellular debris. And then there's a recovery phase. Our bodies move in processes and flow and we, how do we support that process? That's the key. And so being able to know, oh, okay, here's the things I need to make sure that I can. I'm getting the nutrients I need, I'm getting the macronutrients, like the protein, the carbs, the healthy fats for our cells to function, the nutrients, the antioxidants, so that our cells can do these processes. If any part of this is missing, it's not going to go well. Right. If we don't have enough antioxidants, autophagy is going to come to a standstill. If we don't have enough.

Hydration and electrolytes, it all comes to a standstill. So it's a matter of how do we get the right amount of all of these things just so that we can create the best flow of these processes. And I know it can sound there alone, can sound overwhelming, but it doesn't have to be. It's something that if you start to walk down this path, this healing journey of human mastery, all of a sudden it starts to make sense. It becomes second nature and you won't even be, you won't, it won't be stressing you. It's a matter of pacing yourself. I always say to my patients, I'm here to match your pace. It doesn't help if I push you too much. Now I'm pushing you into a stress state again. I need to match your pace and help you integrate information in a way that actually helps you move forward. This is using the same, the same thing that ourselves use. They need just enough change to create positive difference. If we push them too much, everything comes to a standstill and, and breaks down again. Okay. So it's, it's really learning to, to harness that, that flow. And so that's what I do in my programs. That's what I do when I'm, whether I'm working with patients one on one or for example, in that I have programs related to leaky gut healing, MTHFR and methylation optimization as well as helping women to fend off HPV and, and prevent HPV related cancer. Right. Cancer. There's also this, the detox program. And the detox program includes this detox which has in it the macronutrients you need for optimal detoxification and autophagy. So it comes with these packets I was going to show you. In the packets is the, is the protein as well as the antioxidants, B vitamins, minerals, so that your body has what it needs to in nutritionally to support autophagy, but also liver detoxification. These same nutrients support phase one and phase two liver detoxification because it's up to your liver to move the toxins out. And the liver, what is it? It's made up of cells. And these cells are also doing autophagy so they need antioxidants, they need B vitamins, they need the minerals, they need the amino acids. This is what they need in order to help your liver to clean out and help your whole body to process the toxins. And so that's what's in this, including in the supplement packs is the antioxidants and amino acids. So you, you can just get this detox kit on my website. But what I'm doing is I'm setting it up as a 14 day supported detox, which means I've designed a meal plan. So you have, you're not only doing two shakes a day, but you have one or two meals per day. And we want them to be clean meals, right? You don't want to add more inflammation and toxins, right when you're trying to clean them out. And we have the, all of the guidance to do this to support your autophagy, right? All of the autophagy support during the 14 day detox. So you end the support to address your stress type using your care protocol. So I'm helping you to implement everything I'm describing in this 14 day intensive. Now again, even that needs to be done with the right pacing. How do you. Because a lot of times people think, oh, I'm going to do this on my own or there's a lot of different detox programs out there. But what I find is then you don't have the right support, right? And this is the thing, we oftentimes we expect ourselves to do things on our own, but then it's more stressful. It's very clear from research also that when humans have support and guidance and information, it takes away a lot of the stress. It makes it so you can have a more optimized experience. So why not choose to have the guidance and support to help you pace this information to help you implement in your regular day. You don't have to like turn off your regular life in order to do this. This is intended for you to be able to do it in your usual day. I mean you can do it with days off if you'd like, but you can do it in your usual day.

And to have the guidance and the learning and the support so that you don't feel stressed, so that you can implement it and create change without overstressing yourself, so you can actually be more likely to get the benefit from it. And that's what I want for you. I want you to be able to get the benefit of all of this. And it just so happens that this is this is someone asked me today, like, oh, how did you get into. Into natural healing? And I'm like, it started at a young age for me. Here I was in my. At 20 years old, learning about autophagy and nutrition in college. This is what I. This is where I immediately went when I went to college just to learn this, but I'd take. Then I went into naturopathic medical school, and then I went into practice, and I've been practicing for now 23 years. So this is. This is my life. This is. This is what. This isn't something I just learned two years ago. This is something I've been in and practicing for my, you know, since I. Maybe even in my childhood, but at least since I was in college. And so it's. It's, you know, it's my passion, and I'm passionate about helping all of you to get the benefit from it too. It's something I do for my own health every day. I'm constantly in a process of learning about my body. Even knowing all of this information, I learn every day something new about the human body and what we can do to support ourselves under stress. So even just for you to know that, like, you don't have to learn all of this on your own, and you don't have to be on your own with this either. You. We're all human. We're all in this experience together. And. And wherever you're starting from is okay. You know, like, to me, it's all about acceptance. If you're showing up saying, hey, I want to change my health, I want to learn. I want to listen to my body, I want to do whatever I can to avoid these health issues and also avoid the need for medications and procedures. If you show up and you say, this is my goal, then I'm here to say, great, because I'm here to help you to achieve that. So it's a match, right? And not everybody's in that place. Not everybody's in that place of saying, hey, I want to do whatever I can to give my body what it needs. That that's okay. It's. It's. There's no judgment. It's. If you're there, I'm here to help support you, and I'm so glad you found how humans heal. There's so many more episodes you can learn from. I'd love to hear from you what you'd love to learn next. If there's a.

Aspect of our human physiology and you're like, what is this, Dr. Donnie? What does this mean? And how do I. What do I do about it? Please write into me and let me know. And if you enjoyed this episode, please like and share it and subscribe. You can subscribe both to the How Humans Heal podcast as well as to my newsletter so that you'll receive an email from me each Thursday with the latest podcast episode, as well as other articles and resources and information about the latest of what I'm thinking about and what I'm helping patients with. I learned so much from my patients and I'm so grateful to them because if it wasn't for working with other humans, I wouldn't have the chance to practice and figure out what's working. So thank you to all of you who've given me that opportunity to learn from your experience and any of you who are like, hey yeah, how can you help me? Just reach out. I can. I offer one on one to people around the world. I can do phone and video consulting to pretty much wherever there's wi fi and cell service. And I love that. I love that about what I get to do to help people anywhere. We can even ship to most places in the world. You just have to let us know where you are so we can figure out the shipping cost. Um, but this detox program is available.

Now and I'll put a link to it so you can learn all about it. And I welcome you to join in and I can't wait for you to experience the changes in your health. People who have participated in the detox program are reporting things like improved blood sugar levels, even patients with diabetes where who their blood sugar levels are way better than they've been in years. Also, we see weight loss, although sometimes that's not the immediate goal we do. People do often experience weight loss in a healthy way in a way where they're going to be able to maintain it. Not just short term weight loss that comes back again, but actually weight loss because your body's resetting and getting to a healthier state. Also, people experience improvement in energy, mood, focus, sleep, skin, hair, nails, digestion, you name it, just overall improvement. And also patients who've experienced extreme like extreme stresses, including mold toxicity. Also post Covid, if you're experiencing symptoms from that or other kinds of neurological conditions, anxiety, depression, autoimmunity, fertility issues, or even like chronic viruses like hpv. This type of optimizing your autophagy has the ability to reprogram all those processes in your body so autoimmunity can turn off your immune system, can fend off viruses that it wasn't Fending off before your body can fend off cancer cells and your nerves can heal and your neurotransmitters can rebalance and like these things that maybe you never thought were possible is possible. When we give your body the right signals, then your body knows how to correct itself. So it's a matter of how do we do that in a supported environment? Again, if we. If maybe you've experienced if you push too hard one way or the other, it ends up backfiring. And that happens a lot with, for example, methylation. People are tempted and push too hard or detoxification. Push too hard and then it works against you and backfires and you feel worse. That's exactly the reason why I'm emphasizing the need to harness and learn just the optimal amount for your body. And. And that's what I love to guide all of you to do. And it's not easy. It's not easy. It took me. I overdid it way too many times before I started to learn. Oh, I need to learn how to underdo it. And. And that's when I started to realize, okay, here's what I need to really be listening to my body. I'm doing less than I think I need in order to really understand optimal. Thanks again so much for joining me and I look forward to having you join me again in the next episode. Take care.

Thanks for listening to how humans heal. If you liked this episode, leave a rating and a review. And for more resources, visit drdani.com.