Welcome to the high performance health podcast with your host, Angela Foster, the show where we talk about everything you need to break through limits and achieve a high performance, mind, body and lifestyle.
Hi, friends, In this week's episode of Bite Size bio hacks, we're going to just share with you a clip All About autophagy. Because I think a lot of people get this confused. And many people are kind of under the illusion that if they're doing the safety net fast, they're achieving school cellular autophagy on a daily basis. And that's actually not the case, the case. And my guest, Dr. Joseph Antoon, who is the CEO of proline that breaks this down really simply kind of using the analogy of a company that doesn't have sufficient funds and when it's on under stress, and how the CEO would need to restructure that company. And that's effectively what your body is doing. When you're fasting for a long enough period of time. It's helping with that cellular renewal, it's restructuring things within the body. And that's when you're moving into autophagy. But that doesn't happen as quickly as many people think. And certainly for women, there is the impact of female hormones. We also talk about how exercise is a really good tool for autophagy. And how to optimise your part fasting period and how also to do something known as a molecular fast. So I'm just going to say this snapshot of my interview with Dr. Joseph Anton, really to give you a flavour of that, because if you haven't listened already, maybe you want to go back and listen again. But if you haven't, it's definitely an episode that I would recommend you listen to. And it works super well in conjunction with this week's earlier episode where I interviewed Dr. Stacey Sims, on how to optimise your exercise your fasting, your nutrition, particularly in the perimenopause, or years. But now let me share with you this this clip from my interview with Dr. Joseph Anton. And if you want to listen to the full episode, it's episode 181.
People think it is a calorie deficit, there's only one angle. Probably the most important angle of how fasting works is a stress is by stressing the body. I always give the example of if you're a CEO of a company need a million dollars to operate. Any low calorie diet will give you say $800,000, you can cope with that state you have enough money in the bank, exactly the fat and the glucagon and you can adjust to it. But if I give you $0 Instead of a million dollar, not only you're, you're in a big deficit, but it's such a big stress that that CEO of the company has to restructure the company and this is autophagy. So this stress induced restructuring is exactly what happens to the body. And stress elevates cortisol is way breaking the causal app within fasting there and growth hormone by the way as well. This is why fasting helps the muscle the fasting is yes, you're tapping into glycogen in the muscle but actually fasting increase growth hormone as well and the muscle tone is high is why one of the ways that athletes are incorporating fasting into their training is to play on this duality of let's cut fat, protect the muscle, eat protein after fasting and train the muscle and you get it cycles of rejuvenation and cycles of muscle enhancement
are interesting. But cut the fat out. So you're saying focus on dealing with protein and carbs but not fat.
Yeah, if your goal is to build up muscle, you have to focus on the belief if that's the goal, I'm not talking about longevity so so we've we've just published a trial and prolonged you mentioned we have a fasting mimicking nutrition. So we did prolong that we did two trials on Poland with with muscle the purpose one against Mediterranean diet. And it shows that we protect lean body mass in then we went to athletes, male athletes, you know, these are big guys. And they train intensively they did five days a prolonged with no too low exercise during the five days. And we show that they actually protected lean body mass. And that's the duality of fasting fasting taps into fat as a reserve tries to protect the muscle with the growth hormone. And especially when you deal with problem because we have already plant based protein and prolonged we do have carbs so so you're actually even have nutrients in the body to feed the muscle. And as a result, we see that muscle function is protected when you did the fasting mimicking diet.
Interesting. Yeah. And I want to get into what's in that actually, because I think it's important for people in a moment. So if we just staying with the principles, because I think it will be you know, new to a lot of people that 16 hours is not enough to stimulate autophagy. I had always thought it was longer. I think the sixth DNA, as you say works well for kind of managing metabolic flexibility to a degree with the What about exercise itself being a tool for autophagy? Yes, there's a lot of research now saying well, hang on. Let us see how many stresses we need to put the body through particularly I know we're going to talk About women sex hormones in a moment. But if we are stimulating autophagy through exercise, and you're a regular exercise and a vigorous exercise, do you think that that is doing autophagy? Or do we still need to be fasting on top?
So is no sci fi when we talk to the body and the body is a continuum is so. So basically, if autophagy is a cell self eating, right, so it's a cell that had to go and eat and use inside calories, because there's outside depletion. And that happens either with intensive exercise or prolonged less intensive exercise. But if you're, if you're stopping every five minutes to eat a burger, it's not going to happen. But if you do it, if you do it long enough, and it's abandons, right, it's either low food with mild exercise or high exercise with a little bit more food or no food, and no exercise. So you get it, it's the balance. And the duration of which you need depends on the body. If you're very thin, you don't have a lot of reserves, you have high metabolic rate, then you need less exercise to get into autophagy. And you need less period of fasting, you might get into autophagy, you know, by hour 20, or by the end of the first day, very rarely, right. But again, if you're very, very thin, very high metabolic rate, and you exercise once a week faster, you get into artificial a bit sooner than two days, if you're a little bit overweight, you have low metabolic rate, you don't burn fast, your calories and in your body is used to go in that slow mode and you don't exercise, it's going to take you three days to get into autophagy. So it's not sci fi, it's literally the speed of the crisis, the intensity of the crisis, and how much reserves I have to compensate for
it. Yeah, that's really interesting. Thanks for clearing that up. Because I guess that it makes a lot of sense, because actually, if the body recognises that you're very low fat anyway, it's kind of a little bit more scattered right off his desk, it's under or should we say under more stress? Because if there's some kind of famine, when how are we going to feed?
Exactly. So go back to the example of that CEO who needs a million dollar to operate? If he has $100 million in the bank and you tell him you don't have that million dollars? today? He's like, Okay, I'll be at $99 million in the bank. That's not a huge deal. But if he only has 2 million in the bank, and half of it is wiped out, he's going to rush faster to restructure the company to cut costs and to take the cuts, right corrective measures. Yeah.
Okay. So could you then by sort of waking up in a fasted state, where you can see on some sort of device for example, that you're that you're in a more of a fat burning state go and exercise? And would that then be enough if you came home and refuelled in a lean individual athletic individual to have stimulated autophagy for the purposes of longevity?
Again, if How long did you exercise? How long have you didn't eat and how much reserves you have? So you get a measure each person is different? Will you touch, I mean, autophagy happens every day, every moment in the body. It's part of the cycle of cells, but we're talking about accelerating autophagy across all cells. Yes, if you're in a fat burning, if you're saying is already in mild ketogenesis and you exercise intensively and you delayed your food intake and you're thin and you have high metabolic rate, you will touch on artificially, again, we're talking autophagy. It's not like a minute process, it happens yes or no autophagy goes from super mild to more and more, the more the deficit, the longer the deficit, the longer it goes. So you don't want to also just touch at it. It's like we're bargaining, whether it's 16 or 18 hours, even if it happens that our succeeded barely barely started, right? If you want to benefit from it, you want to put your cells into it. You gotta allow time to go and do a masterful autophagy around the body and push for more rejuvenation regeneration. So even if you touch on it a little bit every morning. That's touching, artificial accelerating, limit the rate of artificial cluster, but it's not going into a deep dive, you know, rejuvenative cycle within the body.
And is it helping in that situation to stimulate NAD? Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. As always, the show notes will be over on my website, Angela Foster performance.com forward slash podcast. And you can download the transcript there together with the show notes and all of the other resources that I have on my website, Angela Foster performance.com. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.
Thanks for listening. Remember to review and subscribe, you can grab the show notes, the resources and highlights of everything Angela mentioned over at Angela Foster performance.com You can also snatch up plenty of other goodies, including the highly helpful Angela recommends page which is a list of everything she personally recommend to optimise your mind, body and lifestyle.
