Nourish Your Body with the Right Foods

Mindy Pelz, DC

Let’s talk about food and autophagy. Now, I’m going to go big level here for a moment. Remember that autophagy is your body’s ability to self-heal. That is why we love autophagy because it is the body turning within and saying, okay, these cells need to clean up. And when we look at different levels of autophagy, what I want you to realize is that when I show you the food autophagy and how we can stimulate autophagy through food, it is not the same power as like fasting for 17 hours. So remember, I would guess if I put a hundred fasting experts or health experts here next to me in this video, they would all tell you that the number one way to stimulate autophagy is through fasting, and that starts at 17 hours. And each hour past 17 hours you’re getting more and more autophagy. It’s like a dimmer switch. You turn the dimmer switch on. When you get to 72 hours, it’s like boom, maximum autophagy. So what we’re going to, what I’m going to show you here are some ways that when we see some of these things we can do in our fasting window and some we may want to do our, after our fasting window, but these are a little lower level autophagy stimulators, but they’re great when we start to stack them together. And I’m going to show you how to do that. 

So here we go. Okay. First autophagy stimulating product out there is coffee. Hallelujah. For those of you that are coffee drinkers, we love coffee. And it is the caffeine in the coffee that will make a difference in stimulating autophagy. A lot of you have asked me, what about decaf? So black clean coffee is amazing for stimulating autophagy. The next drink down from that is green tea. And then the one down from that is bergamot which you can find in Earl Gray. So those three, you drink them in your fasting window and you’re enhancing the autophagy effect you’re getting from fasting. Now, if you want to the second category that I want to talk about is oils. And there are two oils that will help you with autophagy. The first is our favorite MCT oil. We love MCT oil, and you’re going to put that together with some clean coffee and now in your fasting window. And now we’re getting ketones or stimulating a deeper sense of autophagy, we’re cleaning ourselves up in a deeper way. So a beautiful way to pair these two together. Now, there is some interesting science showing that extra virgin olive oil also stimulates autophagy. So Zero Acre is really great, really clean, extra virgin olive oil. Olive oil can help with autophagy. And I’ll show you how we’re going to stack this all together in a day. Okay, the next category of autophagy stimulating in Yummy Foods is our berries, but two berries in particular, blueberries and strawberries. And check this out. This is like divine intervention, because this morning, in preparation for this video, I went to my farmer’s market to get some berries. And my local farmer, look at this cool berry he had, it is, I hope you all can see that it is a heart berry. Love it. So I would think that if you could find a heart berry, there may even be more autophagy inside this thing or this thing may stimulate more autophagy inside you. So just thinking. But berries, blueberries, and strawberries are great for stimulating autophagy. Next category, the magic mushroom. Mushrooms of all kinds are getting so much press right now. We are learning so much about the health benefits of mushrooms. And we know there are two types of mushrooms that stimulate autophagy. Chaga and reishi mushrooms are known to really enhance that autophagy effect inside the cells. You can get reishi mushrooms and teas. You can probably get both of those in teas. We’re experimental in our household. This is lion’s mane mushroom. We do a lot of that. Great for brain health, great nootropic. So mushrooms, the world of mushrooms, the understanding of mushrooms when it comes to autophagy. We’ve just begun that discussion here on my channel, but know that those two that I mentioned really help keep you in that state of autophagy. 

Okay, third category. Stay with me here. I know this has got a lot of lists, but I want you to get all this and I’m going to show you at the end of this video how to put it all together. But the third category is spices, and there are a couple of spices that really have a high capability of enhancing autophagy turmeric, which makes me think, you know, all those great studies about turmeric out there makes me wonder if part of the magic of turmeric, turmeric is because it does stimulate autophagy, which is self-healing, self-repairing. So it’s, you know, if you go to one layer deeper on a lot of these studies, you start to see that what these tools are doing is just enhancing a natural process that’s already in your body. Turmeric is not the healer. It stimulates the healer within you, which is so cool. So turmeric and ginger are great. One of my favorite things to do in my fasting window is ginger juice doesn’t seem to mess up my blood sugar. I’ve tested it on a CGM. I just got done wearing my Nutrisense CGM for a couple of weeks and I tested everything. It’s something I do a couple of times a year. But ginger juice, this one is made with ginger and lemon. And ginger juice can be one of those things that tip you into deeper ketosis as well. That’s pretty cool. So and we get the one we use is Ginger Lab. It’s local to us. So I don’t know if you if you’ll be able to find that.

Okay, the next category of autophagy stimulating foods is fish. Now with fish, there’s a couple of fish you’re going to want to lean into. Salmon has a great capability of stimulating autophagy. Black cod is another one. Sardines are another one. If you love sardines, more power to you. I just haven’t been able to love them very much. I love salmon and I do love black cod. So it’s the fattier fishes. They have more omega threes and that is the part that helps to initiate autophagy and keep that self-repair going. Always with fish, you want to make sure it’s wild and that it’s coming from the cleanest sources possible. So we’ll let you do your research on that. This is a local one to us. Two more categories. I want to talk about Sulforaphane. This is a fancy nutrient that we find in cruciferous vegetables. I don’t have any here to show you, but it’s the broccoli, it’s the Brussels sprouts, and the broccoli sprouts that can enhance autophagy. And then we’ve got our supplements now before I dive into the supplements, here’s what I want you to know. A lot of what I am teaching you all here is how to use typical things you do on a day-to-day basis, like fasting or a worldwide audience. I know wherever you live, I can teach you fasting when I come and I show you foods. Yeah, I can. I can go into some of the specialty foods that I find here. I’m in California, but I want to try to give you some things that you can find local to you. And I don’t know what’s local to you, so but I like using food and fasting as the first healer. And then when we go into supplements, supplements should be exactly what the darn word says. It should be a supplement to your fasting regime and your good food regime. So you want to be able to use these supplements as a way to enhance autophagy after you’ve done the fasting and the food. And here are the best supplements for enhancing autophagy. The first is vitamin D, and the reason I’m bringing vitamin D up is because remember that vitamin D is like a boat that carries your hormones around your whole body. If your vitamin D levels are low, not only is your immune system low, but you don’t have as many boats to carry all these hormones that you want to get into the cell. A really good example of that would be thyroid hormone. 

Do you know that you have receptors, sites for your T3 thyroid hormone on every single cell in your body? Okay. Well, I could do a whole video showing you how to make sure that you’re producing T three, but do you have the boats to carry them around your body? So I know that we love to see vitamin D levels up around 60 and 70 for hormonal health. So that’s a little side. And when you’re looking at vitamin D, you want to put it together with vitamin K, those two together, especially when we’re trying to stimulate autophagy, other supplements that are great are berberine, berberine balances blood sugar so maybe that’s why it helps. Spermidine, a lot of people got really into spermidine after Dave Asprey did a big podcast on spermidine. But I got to tell you that I wouldn’t go to the supplement first. I would go to food and fasting first. We also know that things like resveratrol and CBD and acetyl l-carnitine are also great nutrients for stimulating autophagy. Okay, now how do we put this all together? Because it’s just a bunch of words that I’m telling you until I show you how to put it into action. 

And here’s what I would say when we set out to do a longer, fast, like 17 hours, remember at 17 hours, that is when autophagy begins. It’s like a dimmer switch. So we’re just slowly turning up autophagy and it’ll keep going up every hour after 17. You’ll get a little higher and a little bit more and a little bit more. At 72, it hits its peak, and that’s when you’ve got Max Autophagy just from fasting alone. Now, what if after you hit that 17 or as you’re moving towards that 17-hour mark, you throw in your organic mold-free coffee and you put a little bit of MCT oil in it. Okay, now we’re double stacking, triple stacking our autophagy behaviors. We’re getting more autophagy than just fasting alone. Okay, then you go to break your fast. What if you break your fast with berries and maybe a little bit of fermented yogurt? That would be awesome. We’re feeding the microbiome, we’re enhancing autophagy even more. Okay, then what if you’re in the afternoon before you have your big meal? You pour yourself some ginger juice. Okay, we’re still in autophagy, then you come to dinner. What if you did something where you put some salmon together with some mushrooms and you drizzle it with extra virgin olive oil and maybe put some ginger and turmeric on top as a seasoning, just saying. Now, everything you’ve done that day has been geared towards autophagy. Remember, when it comes to protein, we got to keep our protein under 20 grams, otherwise it pulls you out of autophagy. So keeping specific, we want to keep that meal under 20. So it pulls it doesn’t pull you out. So that’s how you stack this. This is how you go from I’m not in control of my health to I am in control of my health. So we don’t need a fancy doctor always to give us some fancy advice to heal ourselves. Now, we do want to work in collaboration with your doctor, which is why it’s so beautiful. How many doctors are on my channel sending their patients here? Thank you. If you’re one of them. I know a lot of health practitioners are using this as a resource, and I appreciate it. I think you should. You should involve your patient in the healing process. So when we use fasting, when we use food, we want to understand that the healing is happening. Because you were designed to be a self-healing machine. And every time we give the credit to the supplement, every time we give the credit to the food, every time we give the credit to the doctor, we take the credit away from ourselves. And you are doing the healing. And that is the whole premise of everything I’m teaching here. It’s the whole premise of Fast Like a Girl. You are in control, you are the healer. And it’s little, little tricks like fasting and food. Help you wake up that healer inside of you.