Fasting Space

Want to give a special hello to everyone on the podcast.

So nice to have you here listening with me.

The audio for these podcasts.

Most of the time it's cut down from live sessions
that I do on YouTube.

There's usually links to this in the bottom
on most podcast players.

Encourage you to check out the YouTube session
if you'd like to connect.

I'm giving you this note here today
because this was an especially visual live stream

where I took footage from my land

and showing goats eating through invasive species, using it

as I think a powerful analogy for understanding
what's happening in the body.

So if you don't have access to the YouTube

stream, let me just paint the picture for you.

We're in the woods of Wisconsin.

It's overgrown by invasive species.

There's thorny bramble things and buckthorn trees

and garlic mustard growing in and poison ivy, all kinds of things.

And we're bringing in a helpful team of goats to munch

through all this stuff, get all the junk out.

have that picture while I'm describing this.

If you'd like to see it, head over to YouTube and real happy

to have you here, and let's jump in to that session.

Welcome everyone to fasting space.

Today I am going head to head with the goats.

We're going to try to explain autophagy to you in a way

that is practical and accessible,

giving you both a powerful metaphor for health
and also some knowledge about it.

Really happy to have you here with me.

If you're here, live, do say hello in the comments

and let me know
as we're going along questions that you have about it.

Say hi in the comments here
if you're coming through on the replay too.

So we're sitting here, we're out in the woods

and we got the goats go into town chewing.

So think about when we are in, you know, 18 hours

in on a fasting space.

Think what is happening in the body.

Goats are doing what the cell is doing.

It's like,
look at the mess in the woods that we're trying to clean up.

All kinds of invasive species are going on in here.

Buckthorn is in here and happening.

Garlic mustard, all kinds of thorny things.

Poison ivy, maybe even in places.

Goats going to go in, the cleanup crew chewing up

all the overgrowth, all the junk, all the stuff you don't want.

This is what we're going to be talking about today in the cells
that our cells can accumulate

dysfunctional things, broken things, and we want to clean it out.

So goat is looking for overgrowth.

Like literally the minute I put these things into this area

there dive and right in finding stuff to chew up.

This is what is happening in our cells.

When the autophagy switch is flipped

autophagy we're going to dive into it
triggered hormonally insulin level is dropping.

Blood sugar level is heading down.

Switches in to this different setting in the body.

So watch the goats.

All right there.

Lecture is ongoing down here.

Their choosing this up there cleaning the space.

This is what they teach.

Methodical eating everything they can.

So goats don't need a degree.

This is such a great thing.

They just need to be hungry right.

They have their instincts.

They know what they need to do is what happens when we fast.

We are triggering or triggering cellular processes in the body.

Cell knows what to do.

So cell is hungry, right?

Cell always needs energy.

Body needs energy.

This is the metabolism. It's always running.

So we give the body space all of a sudden right.

We're given the goats a space here. They're out of the barn.

They're in this space.

They stuff to clean up.

We open up a space in our body.

Cell knows where the energy is. All right.

So you tell me in the comments

what is the buckthorn in your life right now?

What is in need of autophagy in the space?

It's like we take the cellular process,
bring it out into our life.

Maybe it is a snacking habit right before
we're getting into a bigger fasting space.

Something I try to help you with.

Try to get micro fasting space.

Just getting rid of a snack.

Maybe it is some mental fog or low energy
like we're trying to unleash.

These things take a space to do it in the body.

Some sort of overgrowth.

Something is happening, right?

Maybe we're on a weight loss process.

We're trying to give space to release that energy.

So having some fun with it. Me versus the goats.

What is more helpful?

The goat just chewing, seeing it okay.

Clearing out the space. So we're going to dive into some science.

I'm going to try to give you a more detailed precision answer.

Maybe both things are helpful, but I like the idea.

Head to head with a goat.

Now I walked in there with the goats.

And these are nannies.

These are lady goats.

But even I mean, look at the horns.

They got horns. They even butt heads.

And so I'm not head to head physically

with the goat, I will pass, I say we'll match wits.

Okay?

I try to give you the best science and we'll see what.

Who wins?

Doctor versus goat. Dual.

Dual stream. So.

Team Goat, you say Team goat is making a compelling case.

Looking at it, they see a mess.

They eat it.

Health is coming right.

This is the thing that we're trying to do.

Autophagy okay. Autophagy on the land.

Autophagy in the body so often I think

is one of the most underappreciated

forces or processes in medicine in the body.

The word autophagy auto self in Greek Fiji

eating itself eating when we stop eating other stuff right.

The body comes in.

We have energy reserves.

This is, you know, obvious to us.

If we're trying to lose weight,
you say, okay, there's more energy in the system that we want,

then we want autophagy, part of the process of releasing that.

But it's so much bigger.

Body goes in.

But this isn't a destructive force. The thing autophagy okay.

It isn't just blasting up stuff that we need
just like the goats don't in and they don't go in there.

They don't just attack the big nice trees that we want.

They go in and they eat all the stuff that you don't want
because this is a natural cycle.

They know what to do.

Body doesn't go in and just start destroying things.

Body is targeting through autophagy things that are not needed.

This is how we see the incredible efficiency of the body.

Body trying to preserve everything that we need

in a fasting space, like the muscle, right?

Like body trying to burn up and use everything
in the most hyper efficient way.

So we accumulate through our metabolic processes,

damaged parts in the cell, and they can build up.

And it's that stuff, the junk pile that

the body will target in this space,
which is such an incredible thing to do.

So I'm going to hit you with some medical words.

Try to dive us a little deeper into it.

Okay, to understand, but I try to unpack it.

I want you to picture a cell like a high tech factory.

Have you seen a video inside of a chip fab,
like one of these factories that actually makes the silicon chips?

Sterile environment, highly

controlled, everything pristinely clean and organized.

Okay, it's like, imagine that stuff is building up in that space.

You say it would affect the quality of the process.

It would make it less efficient.

It would create problems.

This is like the cell, right?

Cell really is a factory. It's making proteins in the body.

And we need these proteins to be working well and in good order

so that our metabolism is functioning and we're feeling our best

and everything can be working well when that's not happening,

when we don't have time and space to sweep the halls
and do all these things,

then we get all these damage things and debris.

Factory can get sluggish, factory can get inefficient.

That's like cellular inefficiency.

So we can break this down into a few steps

is like, think of it like a giant biological recycling program.

Here's our first big medical word.

We got the autophagosome.

All right. So picturing our cell.

All right.

All these different parts in it.

One part in it that we don't think very much about autophagy.

So think of it like a little bubble.

This is like a little double membrane space.

How does it really work.

You know it's like no brain in an auto fascism.

Somehow it's either sent or it decides to go.

It's traveling around the cell.

Think of it like a giant cellular garbage bag, collects
all the junk.

You throw all the unneeded things into

the autophagosome goes around and collects it. Right?

So it's not just laying around. That's like step one.

If you're trying to clean up the factory, you go around,
you got your garbage bin in the bag,

collect all the stuff, sweep it up.

Now you've got it. All right. So that's step one. Autophagy.

Very good thing to be doing in the body.

Bringing it into our goat analogy.

Like going around sometimes you'll see people
you know in a park clearing buckthorn.

They'll collect it in bags to get rid of it
because they can drop seeds.

It can do all this stuff.

When we're out in a park, you know, you'll often see people
then chemically treating it.

The process I love with these goats here,
they just eat the stuff down.

If it's going to pop back up again, okay, then they eat it again
and then it'll die.

No chemicals required.

That's healthy to the body.

Got to get all the chemicals out.

Oh my gosh. All right. Step two with autophagy.

Autophagosome fuzes with a lysosome.

So lysosome in the body.

Think of it in the cell the tiny little structures.

Think of it like a little stomach of the cell
a place where it digests the stuff.

Lace to cut it up. Lysosome.

It's like bring all those little garbage bags in here.

Throw them in the trash compactor.

This trash compactor.

Just like regenerative trash compactor.

So the point of the lysosome is a space.

It's full of acids and enzymes.

Chop all the broken and dysfunctional proteins

and things back into their individual components
so that they can be reused.

And how fantastic is that?

Bringing everything.

This is how efficient can you see in this process
how efficient the body is?

Because then when we're getting all that stuff, you can reuse it.

It's not wasted.

There's like so little is wasted in the body.

You have a dysfunctional protein in the body.

The autophagy space can go grab it,

break it back down into its parts,
and then the body can reuse it again.

This is why when we think about a fasting process,

want people to see it as a rejuvenating practice.

People experience this.

You know, so many cultures throughout the world
have a fasting process of part of some cultural

or spiritual tradition, and in its seen

in that sort of context as a cleansing and rejuvenating thing.

Here we bring it into the cell.

We see literally the ideas from culture

are the mirroring,
the thing that is actually happening in the cell.

It literally is rejuvenating it.

It's taking the old and making it new, like, so amazing.

And you don't have to eat anything to do it.

That's what is so amazing to think about in the autophagy space.

Well, if I don't eat something,
am I not getting enough protein, for example?

Well, we got proteins sitting around

that is just clogging up the pipes in the cell.

Autophagosome comes in, collects all that stuff.

All of a sudden
there's more amino acids, there's more protein available.

Right from what we're using.

This is like the ultimate example of do more with less.

And like don't we need

some of that a rejuvenating process?

So fasting triggering this process in the body.

I was thinking of analogy like next door to me.

Neighbors have excavated the entire yard.

They're building a garage,
putting in a driveway to like doing all this stuff over here.

And then the crew is coming in now
and they're building the garage.

You can't be running both of these processes at the same time.

You can't be demoing the old yard
while you're building up the new garage.

And the thing takes time. You got to switch.

We got a time for one, a time for the other.

This is what is happening in the body.

We've got a time for, and we've got a time for everything else.

And it is a switch in the body.

And we switch into it through sensing

mechanisms, energy sensing mechanisms.

And if we want to dive into a little more science on it,
we got mTOR pathway in the body.

If you have heard of that,

a target of rapamycin okay, you don't need to know that.

But mTOR is the growth switch.

It's the building switch
and it is the time when energy is present.

So when we are eating carbohydrates, protein is coming in.

This is hormonally signaling through insulin and other factors.

All right.

We're going to turn that mTOR on say plenty of resources.

It's like sending the message like build stuff grow extra energy.

This is where we can store it away as fat.

And it is shutting off the process.

So mTOR is on.

Autophagy is shut down. That's what's happening in the cell.

Do you see. And then we flip it over.

Then we start fasting.

The other side of that chain is called control
by something called Ampk.

We could call it the cleansing switch. Okay.

So that insulin is dropping.

Blood sugar is going down.

Ampk switching on.

It's like telling the body.

Hey, external food is not coming in here.

Looks like we're getting some fasting space.

Love fasting space.

Let's start burning some of this junk. Right.

Let's have a bring in the goats.

You know what I mean?
That's what we're saying. Bring in the goats.

Start cleaning this stuff up.

Auto fascism turns on. Do you see that?

There are these spaces that we flip between in the body,
and it is an instant, right?

It's instant when we eat something.

Boom, mTOR hits it.

Turn on the system and we're in.

Okay, but then we are burning off.

That energy takes 12, 13 hours.

Clear that out, flip back over

into the autophagy space, and you head out toward 18 hours.

And it's like really starting to ramp up,
you know, so it's like a dial 13 hours

getting a bit 14, 15, 16 classic kind of 16 eight.

And then man, then we're really tightening in on it.

All right.

So why does that matter? Okay.

We hit some sciency terms.

We kind of just explain what's happening.

It's like the first level is like okay in that space

external energy switch is coming off.

Start relying on the internal process is

the weight loss process is incredible weight

loss process actually because standard dieting right.

Without any space.

I describe many standard diets.

Try to lose weight by continuing to eat all the time.

I say every standard diet, tell you when what to eat,
but never went to stop.

Right?

That we need space in order to give the body the opportunity

to flip these switches and start relying on the internal process

when we're eating little bits all the time, always hitting

that mTOR signal,
it's like kind of telling the body stuff, got to stay locked up.

Do you ever feel like that, man,
this energy is locked up inside as I don't have access to it.

Fasting.

Practice a process of learning how to open up that space

in the most thoughtful and gentle way,
so that life and health and energy can flourish.

Comparing out of the body that the cells are released
and can release their resources.

Autophagy is part of a process
of how you help the cells of the body

to release the resources, just like the goats are doing right?

In their analogy,
look how they're teaching us and chewing up every nasty thing.

It's like autophagosome.

Go collect it, all right.

And then bring it to the lysosome.

That's a giant goat stomach, right?

Bust that stuff all up into the nutrients.

Right?

Then you think of the life cycle, the waste of the goat, right?

It's going back into the soil. Is building the soil.

All the nutrients that were originally locked up in a nasty
buckthorn are released into the soil.

And now the native plants, the beautiful prairie grasses
that we want growing here.

The native trees have the energy to build into something stronger.

This is the cycle in nature that is showing us through

that process, the same process mirrored in the body

the energy, the nutrients, the resources locked up

in dysfunctional proteins and structures.

Bring those things into the lysosome.

Bust them up, release them.

You see, the waste product of this is actually the nourishment
that builds the next cycle.

Isn't it beautiful?

Do you see the mirror between these two things?

So beautiful, I say.

So a weight loss process? Yes, it is part of it.

But it is so much more than that.

If that's enough, right?

You don't have to have any other purpose.

But autophagy does so much more as it can happen.

Even on the cellular level.

Entire cells that are worn out
and dysfunctional can go through a process of being recycled

and turn, bring in a stem cell,
bring in a whole new cell to perform a function.

Cells that are broken into dysfunctional parts

in a cell that are broken
and dysfunctional can lead to inflammation,

which we have seen is at the root of so many diseases
and problems.

Dysfunctional proteins that are messed up

and not functioning in their proper way, misfolded,

associated with cognitive decline.

Every organ in our body is like you say,
I want to take care of the organs of the body,

the liver, the pancreas, the kidneys, the heart.

Okay. Everything.

Brain has autophagy programs clear out

and revitalize it through this process.

So you aren't just releasing energy. You say it'd be good enough.

It it was.

But this is how I want you to think about it. This is so fun.

Hunger is hitting during a fasting window.

You see how I'm trying to lose weight.

I'm trying to get a cleansing effect in my body.

I don't have any contraindications to fasting.

Look in the description
I got my video contraindications to fasting.

Okay, make sure we don't have any.

But you open up that space when you need it to realize, hey,
this isn't any kind of deprivation in the body.

This is how our society would typically see it.

Because this is a consumption culture.

Say we got to be consuming things all the time.

We're realizing, oh, there's great value to give some space.

Let these metabolic switches flip.

I say release the goats.

When you're feeling hungry, you say,
oh my goodness, what is going on

is just the goats are heading out to the pasture, right?

It's like they're going to start chewing up this stuff.

It's a barrier to entry to a fasting space,
some hunger in that space.

But that is a hormonal process and it will come and go.

And I do want,
if you've never experienced it, to to have a hunger space,

to use every good tool of mental health

tool that we have a breathwork, a breathing practice,

activating the parasympathetic system,
telling the body everything is safe,

creating a space of mindfulness and thoughtfulness

to bring us into the present moment, away

from any type of discouraging
thought or anxiety centering ourselves.

These are the practices of how you train a fasting process
so that you can get these, you know,

effects happening in the body, maybe using the journal

as a tool to write out about deep thoughts
about our relationship with food.

When we get into that space,
that's how we can give the body a gift.

It's like just like the goats are out on the pasture, right?

Autophagosome. Right?

The process in the cell of the body going in

and clearing out the dysfunctional parts
so that we can revitalize,

renew, protect and strengthen

the good parts that need to be there, just like

we're doing to this forest in the future,
going to be grasslands and native plants,

and these trees are going to be freed
up, trees getting choked out.

A lot of the trees, actually, the nice ones dying

and getting choked out by all the nasty stuff that is coming in.

Do you feel like something like that is happening in the body say,
oh, there's so much in here,

you know, it's like just the overgrowth and things like,
we got to take some space to clear that out.

And I'll tell you, that's a space

high, high value, very high value.

Like I was saying autophagy.

Underappreciated in the body.

Underappreciated.

Incredible process for bringing health and healing to the body.

Fasting space.

The way I see it, the thing that I'm

trying to do help to make a fasting space accessible

and understandable to people
so that we can get more of these effects happening.

This like to me, it would be like the fundamental base

layer of health care is autophagy,

which is the space of making everything in the body is refreshed

and renewed is like maintenance mode for the body.

Like if we take your car into the shop,
then make sure all the fluid levels are tapped off.

It's clean everything out.

Maybe you got to take it out there, run it through the car
wash, vacuum it up.

Just get it in the best condition, right?

Fasting space like a tune up for the body.

Clean out all the stuff like detailing the car.

In the big picture. We're not getting much of this.

We don't have a health care system
that encourages people to have it,

to don't
realize one of the very most fundamental processes in the body.

This is what I think is so profound.

It's like we
we are in a culture, in a society and a health system,

in a space
where we are literally drowning in metabolic dysfunction.

Or it's like the large majority of people in our society

is it's come to be seen as normal, like the default pathway.

It is not normal for human beings to be unhealthy, right?

It is normal for people
to have flourishing across a lifespan. And.

Don't you want it to be the case?

I want it to be the case for you.

I want it to be the case for everyone.

I think I that's why I say so underappreciated.

Here's like a second kind of analogy with the go.

It's like it used to be the case that we had
megafauna called megafauna,

giant mastodons, huge creatures come through and

and we had bison, the buffalo, like,

all across the land, like large animals

clearing the land all the time, chewing this stuff up

for the most part, across an entire continent.

We've killed off all the megafauna, cordoned off
all of the large animals into spaces.

And then this is part of the reason why we have a problem

with invasive species coming in, you know,

because, like, everything that would normally eat
them up is gone in spaces like this.

Okay?

Bringing back the animals into the space,

help to restore some natural balance is just the same year
that is happening in the body.

Never had any fasting spaces like all the megafauna is gone like,

but we can bring things back into balance, opening up that space.

It's like release the goats.

The body has the ability to do it.

The body is just waiting for the space and opportunity.

That's like the land is there.

The seeds are in the ground of like the native stuff is
all here is needs

space to take everything that is choking it out and get it out.

This is why I really am optimistic.

I'm doing my best to be optimistic in the face of like,

you know, huge amounts of dis health,

both for people, for land, for society and culture.

I believe that deep healing is possible when we start looking

to nature and natural cycles,
and we see that we are part of nature.

And just like nature can heal and we're going to be

sealing, seeing, healing happening on land through this process

that we're releasing resources
and taking things that are not in their spot.

You know, I was trying even to have compassion for buckthorn.

You know, buckthorn is a real plant. It has its place.

It's just over in Europe somewhere,
not supposed to be in Wisconsin.

And but it's trying to do its best.

Okay. But everything needs to come into balance.

Get buckthorn in its place, have an appreciation

for wherever
it is supposed to be, but not here in our oak savanna,

where we're supposed to have oak trees
and prairie plants and stuff like this.

Okay.

Just like ourselves, we're not supposed to be having diabetes
and metabolic dysfunction and all these things.

And by realigning the body,

natural systems and processes,
the way it is supposed to be running,

we're going to have healing happening for people to is happening.

Okay? Who is winning the goats.

They're just doing their thing, okay?

They don't know about autophagosome.

They're just doing what they do.

Look at them chewing down on that buckthorn tree.

Okay. What is more helpful to you?

Just the tangible metaphor.

Goats chewing through overgrown stuff or diving

deep and understanding the science part of it.

Lysosomes and mTOR pathways in this sort of thing.

What do you like?

What is helpful?

Maybe both?

Let me know in the comments.

Who wins Team Doctor or Team Goat? And.

I hope either way that all these thoughts are helpful to you.

Autophagy.

So underappreciated.

I say it's like a giant gift you can give the body.

Thank you for sharing this space with me.

I hope you have a beautiful day.

Look forward to connecting with you on the channel again soon.