Autophagy: The Secret of Youth with Naomi Whittel

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Welcome to the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show with celebrity nutrition expert, fitness hall of famer, and four time New York Times bestselling author, JJ Virginia. JJ is a warrior mom whose knowledge and expertise have helped change hundreds of thousands of lives. With over 3.5 million podcast downloads and appearances on Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, the Today Show, Rachael Ray, Larry King.

Love Whoa, whoa, whoa. This show is about you, not about me. I want to help you find practical, real world ways to dial in your health and mindset so you can finally lose that weight and feel strong and energized. Stop settling for less than your personal best. It's time to find out how to look and feel better than ever. And I'll be right here with you the whole way. All righty. Today, today we are going to be talking about autophagy. Or maybe it's autophagy.

Or maybe it's autophagy.

We're gonna get it all cleared up with my guest, Naomi Whittle. I've known Naomi for, I don't know, I guess, five, six years now. She is awesome. She is a total science nerd, which I just absolutely love, because when she comes out with something, I mean, she has done her research and she recently came out with a New York Times bestseller, Glow 15, a science based plan to lose weight, revitalize your skin and invigorate your life. And this is based on her trekking all over the world. Literally, she's been everywhere kind of obsessed with autophagy and I'm going to let her explain what it is and why the heck we should want to know more about it. And then what's super cool is she's going to give us some really simple, actionable steps. Some of them may sound familiar that you can put into place quickly to make this work for you. Let me tell you a little bit more about Naomi. She is the CEO of Twinlab Consolidated hold was named by Prevention as the lead nation's leading female innovator in the natural products industry. I've seen her win a load of awards out here in the natural products industry and she is recognized as the one to watch in the wellness from within space. She is just an amazing entrepreneur, but really paving the way for, you know, what we need to be doing out there in health and wellness. So I really excited to have Naomi Whittle on the show today. All righty, Naomi Whittle, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to have you on jj.

It's such a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

Well, I love. I'm in love with this brand, this book. It's just gorgeous. The book itself is fabulous. So I'm excited to dive into it. And we're going to be talking today, and I must tell you, until I heard you and Jeff Bland pronouncing it, I thought it was autophagy, but I guess it's autophagy.

No, it's both. It's like tomato. Tomato, right?

Okay, good. I was, like, going, oh, my gosh, thank God. I would have pronounced this totally wrong. We are going to be talking today about something called autophagy or autophagy. But before we get there, I want to, like, take everybody back a little bit to, like, how did you get, like this? This topic that you're going to make kind of a household name? How did you get into it, and what is it?

So, jj, it's a really interesting story. I'll start with what it is. So autophagy or autophagy. In Greek, auto means self, and phagy means to eat. So literally, it means self eating. And what happens inside of every single cell inside of our body is we have this process of autophagy where we literally remove and recycle and repair the parts of the cell that are damaged by environmental pollutants. You know, in my case, by my autoimmune disorders. Every sort of area of our health is impacted by the way that our autophagy is actually working in our cells. So I learned about this word that I had never heard of in my life four years ago when I was in Calabria, Italy, and I was actually just yesterday on the phone with the scientist who taught me about autophagy. And her name is Dr. Elizabeth Janda. And Dr. Janda, I was there searching out how this beautiful citrus bergamot fruit helps to improve our cholesterol profile. So it's got more flavanols, more antioxidants, benefits than any other citrus fruit. And it grows. It's a very rare fruit, and it only grows in this part of the world. And it helps to improve the HDL levels of our health and then lower the LDL levels for cholesterol profiles. So I got really excited and I was over there. And while I was there, after we had spent the day in the groves, in these beautiful groves with the farmers, and they were handpicking the citrus fruit, we went back to her laboratory and she started serving me this citrus tea. And it was delicious and wonderful. And at the end of the day, it was actually toward dinner time, we started talking about why she drank so much of it. And she kind of chuckled and said to me, you know, Naomi, it's what keeps me young. It's what keeps my anti aging in check. And so of course, I perked up and wanted to hear all about it. She's like, well, it's all about autophagy. And that's how I first learned. And I came back to the US and with my curious and obsessive nature, I started looking for all the scientists that knew about autophagy, the ones that could talk about it with the skin, with exercise, with sleep, with energy, with weight loss. I wanted to know everything I could find out. And that's how this whole book came about.

I love the name of the book. Glow 15. Why did you name it Glow? What is that?

So for me, it's something that I personally always looked for. So I believe that our glow, the cellular brilliance that we can have, comes from inside, deep within our bodies. And because I have autoimmune disorders, and I had so much eczema growing up and into my early 20s that I would never show my skin. And so this idea of being able to have glowing skin from the inside out has been something I've always strived for. So GLOW is this aspirational state of health and well being that I always look for. And then the reason we added 15 to the other side of it is after I got back from Calabria, Italy, I started to figure out ways that I could activate the autophagy inside my own body to cleanse and remove the toxins and detoxify. And while I was doing that, working with these different scientists to put the program together for myself, I started to test it on my friends and my family. And they were kind of like the guinea pigs. And everyone got such unbelievable results, jj that I went to Jacksonville University and we began a lifestyle study on tons of women. So women who were administrative assistants, there were CEOs, there were deans, there were exercise physiologists, There were all these different people, mothers, just women that were in this program. And 15 days, two weeks, just over two weeks into the program, the lead scientist gave me A call. And she said, guess what? Every single woman in this study has achieved benefits. And so that's how the name was born.

Wow. Now, let's talk about, first of all, because I was thinking, oh, 15. Is it 15 days? But let's talk about some of the things that you can do. So people listening right now that want to start doing this. What are some of the things that they can start doing right now that start to make a difference, that activate this?

Oh, there are so many easy things that you can do right now.

We love easy things.

We love them super easy. So I'm lazy. I don't like to go to the gym. I don't like to exercise too much. I don't like to put too much time into anything. And that's why this is so easy, because you're working with your own body to do what it naturally wants to do. So a couple of the things that I think are really fun are timing. I'll start with timing matters. So what you do is very important, but when you do it is equally as important. So I have this idea around the macronutrients, and it is fat first and carbs last. So you start your day with fat. And that could be avocado. You know, we have these amazing avocado. We call them avoglows recipes. In Glo 15, we have 15 of these great recipes. And you just start with fat in the morning, and then you have your carbs at night before you go to sleep. And what happens when you have your carbs at the end of the day is you're actually helping your body to repair and also helping you to sleep. But with the fat in the early part of the day versus the carbs, you're helping your body to balance the blood sugar. You're helping with the insulin spikes and reducing those. And for me, that's huge because it reduces my sort of moodiness that I would get. So I'm half English and half French, jj and I would always like to start my day with, like, a chocolate croissant or something like that. Or when I was younger, I'd be eating oatmeal in the morning. And ultimately, that was just destroying my health and was getting my blood sugar out of balance.

And so I know, isn't that amazing, too? I cannot eat oatmeal in the morning. I will. I go on a bad blood sugar roller coaster.

Yeah.

So, you know, the. The. I love the concept of it's not just what you eat, it's also when you eat it so totally Critical. And by eating fat in the morning, you're going to get your blood sugar balanced when you eat the carbs at night. I see so many people who have trouble sleeping and the minute they put some carbs in at night, boom, it's fixed.

Isn't that.

It's so cool. I love that. And it's really counter to what a lot of us heard over the years. But there's no question the science is there. And this simple action just by changing when you do things activates the autophagy from a food perspective. So that's an easy one. Another one that I think is great is that I call it ifpc, which is intermittent fasting protein cycling. And I've been fasting for 25 years. Again, because of my autoimmune health and intermittent fasting, I've been doing probably for about five years when the research first started at the university level to show us that, wow, 16 hours of not eating is unbelievably effective at supporting the activation of autophagy. So I started doing it about five years ago, not for autophagy activation, but really just to reduce the inflammation in my body. And it works so wonderfully. And then when you couple that with cycling of protein, which is where every other day you have low levels of protein and what I mean by that is about 25 grams of protein every other day, 5% of your calories, it makes a big difference in the activation of the youth within our cells.

So do you know why that is? I'm fascinated by that. That I knew the intermittent fasting. And one quick tip for everyone listening is it's so easy on the weekend. Sleep in and then just eat a later, you know, kind of brunch, skip a meal and have an early dinner. There you go, done.

I know, it's so, so, so, so.

Like we don't need three meals and we definitely don't need all those snacks either.

Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. So it's a great. You're right, it's a great tip to try it. Start on the weekends when you stop eating at 8 o' clock at night and then you sleep in and you start your first meal at noon and you start with fat first and that's so satiating and it makes you feel so incredibly good that it helps with the whole intermittent fasting process. And if you're fat adapted and you're into ketogenics, it also really helps with the intermittent fasting and makes it that much easier and energy producing the protein cycling is really cool. And, you know, there are protein fasts that are coming out now, and people are really looking at, wow, we've been a society that loves so much protein, but ultimately, when we deprive our body of. Of the higher levels of protein, what happens is the body is then trying to utilize the protein that is there and then ultimately also the fat that's within our cells. And that helps, again, to get us into more of a state of ketosis, which also activates the autophagy. So they're all sort of cycling and working together, the macronutrients.

Now, you mentioned you didn't like exercise.

That's great.

So do you do any exercise? What's your take on that?

Yes. So I don't like exercise. I don't like to go to the gym and over, you know, like, to me, that feels like a big amount of time that I don't want to use, But I love to move. And what I found was that with autophagy, when I met with the researchers on exercise, that if you do 30 minutes of either interval training or resistance training, and for me, interval training is simply walking faster for a minute and then slowing down and doing that for 30 minutes, or resistance training can be as simple as, again, for me, using my own body weight. For resistance yoga, there's many yoga positions. So those are the two types of things that I like to do. And in glo 15, we do it every other day. And that's what the women in the clinical study did as well.

Now, what about sleep?

Yes. Okay, this was the tough one, jj. So at the end of the clinical study, I sat with all the women, and I said, okay, ladies, I want to understand what you love, what you didn't like, what we need to evolve and change. Let's really talk about this. And what I heard was that the way that they were trying to get the benefits from rejuvenating sleep were not really working to the level that they wanted. They were disappointed with the sleep program. So what I did is I went to our friend Michael Bruce, America's sleep doctor, and I said, michael, what am I doing wrong? Why am I not getting this right with the autophagy activation? Because you really activate most of it at night while you're sleeping. And so that's when he said to me, we need to get all of the women and their circadian rhythms really into check. And so we then put this little quiz where you look at the chronotypes. And we did the chronotype testing so that we could get the circadian rhythm that won the Nobel Prize in 2017. So autophagy won it in 2016 for all of the amazing benefits that activating autophagy can do. And circadian rhythm won in 2017. And if we think about every cell in our body has its own clock inside of it. Just by knowing what type of sleeper you are and when you should be doing things really helps to activate the autophagy at night. So we have a whole chapter dedicated, and it starts with doing the little sleep quiz to figure out, are you a lark? Are you a night owl? What type of bird are you? And then using that to adjust your autophagy.

All right, so I was reading in the book, and I loved it because you were talking about exercise, talking about sleep. We're very, very much in sync. And you've done all of the scientific research, which is fabulous. I love fact finders that go out and get all of the backup. But then you have this t. Yes. And it kind of reminds me it's sort of like the sort of felt sort of like a sort of like a bulletproof coffee type of thing.

Sure.

But with some added benefits. So can you talk about it? Because that's. That's what I was kind of looking. Oh, it's a. It's another type of warm drink with some fat in the morning, but then you had some other things put into it that were interesting. So let's talk about the tea that you made.

Sure.

So the tea originated and was born in Calabria, Italy, with Elizabeth, Dr. Elizabeth Janda. So it starts with the citrus bergamot. And citrus bergamot is found in Earl Grey tea. So for anyone that wants to make the tea, just go in your cabinet and look for some Earl Grey. And you have to make sure that it has the natural form of citrus bergamot. That's really important for activating the youth in our cells. Then. I have spent a lot of time throughout Asia and in Okinawa, where the largest group of centenarians live. They incorporate a lot of green tea, of course, into their diet. And so we added high, high levels of EGCG coming from the green tea into this. Into this mix. So you get a green tea bag, you get an Earl Grey tea bag, and then cinnamon. And those three ingredients together are specific for activating the autophagy. And then because fat is such an incredibly important part of Glo 15, you know, it's not about calories. We don't count any calories. We're looking at how much good fat we're getting. We Add. You know, you can add any, any type of fat. So you can add tea seed oil, which comes from the green tea plant. You can add coconut oil. You could add MCT oil. You can add an emulsified form of it. Whatever it is that satiates you and makes you feel good. And you can work that number up.

So what are some of the top supplements here to help with this?

So I love what we discovered around the supplements. So I've been a huge fan and I spent the last nine years of my life really dedicated to polyphenols and the power of polyphenols in our health. If you find it in a great glass of red wine or dark chocolate or whatever it may be. And I've spent a lot of time in France bringing those powerful polyphenols to the US market. And so polyphenols are great because they're antioxidants, they protect our health, they fight off a lot of the free radical damage that can occur. But I found these special polyphenols that I call my power phenols because they do two things. They protect and then they repair. And that's what berberine is. Berberine protects and repairs. It's a power phenol and I love it. Resveratrol protects and repair. And it's another power phenol. And EGCG that's found in green tea is another power phenol that protects and repair. And curcumin is a great one. Yeah, I love.

Those are my favorite. You just named all my favorite. All my favorite. I call them polyphenols. We were right before we got on. I go, is it autophagy? Autophagy. But those, those are the ones that I think are just the powerhouse that we should all be doing. So. Loved hearing that. I'd love to ask, throw a little curveball over at you. What is one thing you do every day? One thing. And every single day that you feel like makes the biggest difference in your life?

Oh, I love that question. I love every single day before I get out of bed and it makes the biggest difference in my life is meditate. So, you know, when we wake up, our cortisol levels are at the very highest. And because I'm a type A personality, I'm like ready to go. And I'm usually anxious when I wake up, but I use this five minutes of meditation. I have this little meditation that I listen to and it helps to up regulate my parasympathetic nervous system and it changes the whole day. So that's my one thing I do that is awesome.

All right, now you have got something super cool for everybody listening. And you can grab this before I tell everybody about it. You will be able to grab this@jj virgin.com I'm trying to think of what's the easiest thing to spell because it's probably not. Well, I guess it'll. We'll do Glow. JJ virgin.com Glow15 will be the link for this. All right, now for the most fun part of the show, it's when everyone gets a gift from you. And Naomi, you've got something that I know my community always loves recipes. They love them. So thank you so much in advance for this Glow15 cookbook that you can't get. You can't just go on Amazon and grab this guy. So you got to get this here and you'll be able to get it at jjvirgin.com forward/glow 15. Tell us about a couple of the recipes in there. Make everyone salivate.

Oh, my goodness. So we put these recipes together because we went all over the world searching for the autophagy activating foods. So we've got, we have a chocolate macadamia and that bark that's in there, that's so delicious.

You know, you could just stop right there.

That's it.

No, I'm tempt us with a few more. So dark chocolate macadamia. How do we not love that?

Right? And obviously we have. I'm going to go over a couple of the recipes. We've got these egg 15 recipes that are filled with all sorts of delicious cheeses and we make them into these muffins. So you basically have on a high day or a low day. So just depending on which day of the program you're doing, one of the egg 15 muffins will have higher levels of protein and the other one will have higher levels of fats that you find in the egg yolks. So those are really delicious with chives and all sorts of different things.

All right, cool. So for if someone's not egg intolerant, then they can go over to that. Yes. Well, we have the eggs intolerant, but not everybody is.

And then something else that I think people will really love is our polyphenol smoothie. So we have a delicious purple, blue, purple smoothie that's filled with so many different power phenols and polyphenols. That's really yummy. Dark berries. It's wonderful and I think people will love that too.

Yum. Awesome. So that is fantastic. We always love More recipes. And guys, when she says she's gone all over the world, she really has gone all over the world checking these things out and putting together an awesome easy program. There's great things in here that can give you a jump start if you're looking to make a little sheet shift either to de age a bit, get rid of some inflammation, drop a few pounds. So I am really excited about all the info that you've shared. Everything is so actionable and, and makes so much sense. So thank you so much for all of that and thank you for the awesome gift. Super appreciate you.

Oh, thank you, jj. I love it.

All right, now after the break, I'm going to be answering a listener's question, so stay with me.

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Welcome back. This is the time where we answer a listener's question. And I hope you're jumping on to my Facebook and Instagram lives because I just love doing them and love interacting with you. And I grab some super questions when I'm on and I'm always looking for ones that fit well with the podcast that I'm doing. So love this one. And this actually comes from Shannon, and Shannon is from Australia. She says, jj, well, I can't. I was going to try to do an Australian accent, like, fail. I'm not going to try. But what she posted on my Facebook live was about snacking because she says, I've always been told you should have three meals and two to three snacks. And you're telling me to stop the snacking? What? Explain why. All right. If you've been in my community, you know that I'm the anti snacker. In fact, what's really funny is I got this big box from Frito Lay, I kid you not. And got invited to be on their snacking council. And I thought it's like, is, am I getting punked? Is there like a camera around looking at this going, really, really? But the reason I'm anti snacking is we talked about it. Naomi and I just talked about it. It's not just one what you eat, it's when you eat. And here's what happens when you eat. Your blood sugar goes up and your insulin goes up. Well, insulin goes up to bring blood sugar down. And the thing is that happens pretty quickly. But insulin doesn't come down quickly. So if you eat again fairly quickly, like two to three hours later, your blood sugar, your insulin never had a chance to come back down to fasting levels. Now you eat again and you keep that insulin elevated. And the problem is, if insulin is elevated, it's pro inflammatory. It's basically locking the doors to your fat cell so you cannot burn off stored fat for fuel. You heard Naomi whip out about being a fat burner. We want to be fat burners, right? You don't want to be burning off what you just ate, that like, muffin you ate. You want to be burning off the belly fat. And to do that, you need to be insulin sensitive and have insulin low, not super duper low, right? Everything's in a balance, but low. So back down to its fasting levels. And the way you do that is to eat less and less often. And that's why intermittent fasting can be so great. That's why this 12 hour overnight fast and then we've talked about on the weekends, hey, sleep in, then have like a late breakfast, lunch, have a brunch, then have an early dinner and skip a meal like we used to do thousands of years ago. Thousands of years ago, we did not have three meals and three snacks. We didn't have three meals probably most of the time, and we definitely weren't snacking. So, you know, this is what you want to think about is eating less, eating less often, being able to go four to six hours between meals. That says that you're a fat burner, not a sugar burner. Because you're not dying in between meals because your body's able to access stored fat for fuel. This is what we want to teach our bodies how to do. We don't do it if we're eating breakfast, then a snack, then lunch, then a snack, then dinner, then a snack. And especially you want to shut that kitchen down after dinner. Get the heck out of there and stay out of there. And if you're hungry, have a glass of water. That's been shown to shut down 100% of evening hunger pangs. So stop that and remember a little bit of carbs at dinner. Slow, low carbs, especially like I talk about in the sugar impact diet. That is critical, mission critical, because it's going to help boost serotonin that will go and make melatonin and help you so sleep. So very, very important there. All righty. Thank you so much, Shannon, for jumping on to my Facebook live and asking that question. And big gratitude today too, goes to digging this game. Who gave a five star view. Love it. Very informative and thank you for that. And thank you for everybody who's been leaving reviews. Here's why. Not only do we all love it, we all read them on the team here. It's kind of one of the ways we get graded. You know, we don't know we're out here, out here slugging away in our houses and then we get these reviews, we go, people are watching and listening. We are making a difference and that's why we do what we do. So we super appreciate it. And plus, I know people are like, which podcast can I should I listen to? So when you go out there and you leave a review, it helps a bunch. So thanks in advance. I'd love to read your review on air. So if you haven't done it yet, this is a big plea for help. Jump on over to my iTunes page, JJ Virgin Lifestyle Show. While you're there, be sure to subscribe and share this with your pals and leave that review. And I'd love to highlight you on our next show. Alrighty, see you next week.

Bye.

That's all for this episode of the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show, which marks another step towards a healthier body and mind. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to the show and we'll talk to you next week.

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