Our cells eat themselves in a process called autophagy. Although our body eating itself sounds concerning, it’s actually a normal process of your body and is incredibly important. Autophagy burns fat and even plays a role in preventing cancers, heart diseases, and immune-related problems.

However, we are unknowingly doing little things every day that stop this vital process. 

I’m going to give you the key to speeding autophagy up, and tell you how to get the most benefits from it.

How Autophagy Works

Your body is made up of 70 trillion cells, and it needs materials in order to continue to build more of them. When a cell is low on materials, it eats itself to provide the materials for the next cell.

When your body does that properly, it increases detoxification and has been shown to strengthen your immune system. Autophagy also lowers your insulin levels and cleans up saggy skin and areas where toxins have built up.

Autophagy is your body’s recycling system. Your liver, lungs, and skin get a new layer every 14 days. Your heart gets a new layer every  6 months. And your stomach takes about 90 days to create one.

This means the person you are right now is not necessarily who (or what) you’ll be 6-12 months from now.

That is encouraging news because if you feed your body cleaner materials and get more efficient at building healthier cells, you could be a completely different, healthier person in a year or less. 

What Is Needed For Autophagy?

Autophagy needs to be optimized. It can be very inefficient because the body needs new raw materials to build cells every single day. The body can get these materials from food. or it can recycle from material that’s left over in the body.

If we’re constantly eating, then the body doesn’t have to be very efficient with its recycling program. We’re always feeding it new lumber to build new homes, which are our cells. If we eat 3-5 times a day, we are constantly putting in lots of carbohydrates and proteins which are broken into amino acids. Those amino acids help build the structure of these buildings.

We’re constantly feeding the body, so it just ignores its autophagic recycling program and lets things build up, which can be wasteful. 

Fasting And Autophagy

If we abstain from eating, we cut off the lumber yard supply. Then the body has to find its own material and has to get creative and crank up the recycling program, which cleans up the body. 

Our body sends out white blood cells to find more material. This is what aids your immune system. If you eat less, now your body has to go to work, and your white blood cells can help clean up damaged tissue. Areas of abnormal cells can be cancer cells. They can be microbes, viruses, or things that have built up in your body. Autophagy will start to recycle these. If you have saggy skin from weight loss, one of the best things you can do is abstain from eating to clear out the microbes in your body.

Heart disease is often a buildup of plaque inside the heart. The buildup inside of your brain can become Alzheimer’s. The buildup of abnormal cells that just won’t die can become cancer. You can see how autophagy can directly decrease these chronic diseases that a lot of us are scared of. I’ve had family members with heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s. 

The best thing I can do to prevent going down that same road is to abstain from eating and crank up this recycling system inside of the body. 

What Stops Autophagy

Autophagy is stopped when we put a lot of sugar into our bodies. Sugar fills up that lumber yard. 

Protein is the next culprit because if you get too much of it, the body can actually convert that into sugary carbohydrates.

If we’re putting in a lot of sugar or protein, the body still has the raw materials it needs and doesn’t have to activate autophagy. 

Stress also stops autophagy. The more stressed you are, the more belly fat you’re going to produce. Excess stress slows down the whole recycling system. 

Fat, however, does not have much of an impact on autophagy because of the way the energy is processed. Fat burns very cleanly and doesn’t leave a lot of waste behind. 

Basically, we want to lower carbohydrates, have a moderate form of clean protein, and lower stress levels.

What Helps Autophagy? 

• Age – The younger you are, the better your body recycles.
• Exercise – If we can move our bodies, especially high intensity, low duration, it will activate autophagy inside of our system. 
• Lowering Carbohydrates – We want to consume less sugar and protein, and get more healthy fats. 
• Fasting – One of my five main guidelines for food is fasting. Abstaining from eating for periods of time lowers sugar levels and kickstarts autophagy. 

How To Start Autophagy In The Body

We don’t want to overdo intermittent fasting or any type of fasting. You shouldn’t just stop eating.

We also need healthy, raw materials going in our body, we need nutrients. We’ve just generally overdone the amount of material that we have. We want to curb consumption and balance this out. 

To engage in intermittent fasting you should follow these steps: 

• Go 18 hours without eating. You can have lunch or dinner, but that’s it.
• Go 18 hours without eating again. 
• Extend the 18 hours to 23 hours without eating. 
• Fast for 1-3 days.

This is called rotational fasting, which prevents your body from plateauing, affects age, and lowers your risk of cancer and heart disease. 

Summary

As I keep delivering these concepts that help make health simple, check out some more resources that I have for you so that you can be the solution for your own health.