Dr. A breaks down autophagy, your cells' cleaning system, and how to trigger it through diet and fasting. The main approaches are caloric restriction, intermittent fasting (12-13 hours daily), and prolonged fasting (24-72 hours). Exercise and controlling blood sugar also activate the process.
So the first thing is autophagy is, you can think of it as cell cleaning, taking the trash out. We've done content on that. Essentially, it's keeping the amount of dysfunctional parts of the cell, old parts of the cell, damaged parts of the cell, or just metabolic debris moving out of the cell so that we don't build up and have an overburden of trash in the cell that causes the cell to be dysfunctional. So the better our autophagy is, the more normally and at optimum our cells can run. Now, are there non-diet and fast Interesting ways to trigger autophagy? Certainly there are. All of them in some way relate to diet for the most part. Some are sort of separate, but the non-diet things can be— we did some content on mTOR, rapamycin, stuff like that. Some people will try and do some signaling by manipulating mTOR. That's a whole topic on its own. You look on our playlist for that one. There can be direct increase of autophagy from body movements. That'd be like exercise. And moving your body. That can be exercise sends signals that help with cell autophagy, and also exercise improves glucose tolerance, insulin sensitivity, glucose levels, which also feeds over into improving autophagy. But the rest I want to talk about really are going to be either diet, eating or not eating sort of things. So the first thing to think about beyond exercise would be, what can I do with my diet that would tend to push me towards Towards a pro-autophagy chemistry, you could say. Well, for the eating part of your diet, anything that improves blood sugar control and insulin sensitivity will improve your cell's ability to take the trash out, or autophagy. It'll do that through a number of mechanisms. One is it will lower your overall amount of inflammation in your body. Inflammatory signaling can be anti-autophagy, et cetera. And also, as we improve the burning of sugar, decreasing the amount of residual blood sugar that's left in the system and increasing the sensitivity to insulin, that feeds forward into triggering the cell to do more cleanup in autophagy. When we have the opposite to that, where we have insulin insensitivity and high blood sugar or blood sugar roller coaster, the signals are essentially preserving of the cell as it is and non-autophagy. Quick interruption from the regular video. If you are a healthcare practitioner and you have an interest in this topic, we're going to put a link in the description below to my CE website and specifically the webinar that is about this topic. So see you over there. Thanks. The other though is in a spectrum. Caloric restriction is generally calculating the caloric intake you need to keep your body, whatever your size is and weight you want to keep and all that, calculating the macros for the calories you need and using and eating that level, but not eating above it. And you can Look up a lot where you go for days on caloric restriction, but that's one strategy. Triggers autophagy also. Intermittent fasting is where you just stop eating for part of the 24-hour period in the day. So every day you stop eating for a while. Generally, the autophagy-triggering part of intermittent fasting starts 12 to 13 hours. And so if you figure you, you eat dinner and then you stop and you just drink water after dinner, and then you sleep for a number of hours, and then you don't eat right when you get up, you can usually achieve 12 to 13. 13 hours of an intermittent fast. So that's intermittent fasting. Then persistent fasting would be, I'm going to do 24, 48, 72-hour fast, or maybe longer. Again, work with a fasting healthcare provider if you do that, but that also will trigger autophagy. So lifestyle things that you can do for persistent autophagy triggering. Number 1 would be blood sugar regulation. So not too much sugar, but also doing things that improve insulin sensitivity. Number 2 would be not eating too many gross calories over time. Number 3 would be stopping eating after dinner. You can drink all the water you want, but stop eating after dinner and don't have breakfast for a 12 to 13 hour time window. And if you want to and you're cleared by your doctor, you do periodic longer fasts as well. All right, I'm Dr. A. Thanks so much for asking these questions. Please do like, share, and subscribe. We really appreciate all the subscribers and we like it that you like what we're doing. I'll see you all on the next video. So check out some of these other links here too.
