Have you heard about the popular method for tidying up your home?  (Check out the show on Netflix…Tidying Up)  Organization specialist and author Marie Kondo has developed a system to approach getting your house in order.

In short, you go through your possessions and keep the things you like and get rid of the stuff you don’t.  In the end, not only are you more organized, but your life has changed!

Did you know that there are mechanisms that do this “tidying up” thing inside of the body?

It’s true.  There is a process called “Autophagy” (Auto meaning self and Phagy meaning to eat).

The 2016 Nobel Prize in Medicine went to Dr. Ohsumi on the subject of Autophagy.  They are learning more and more on how this process works on “tidying up” your body.

In your home, when things are messy, broken, piled up, disorganized, etc…it can be hard to find what you want, or hard to be really comfortable or happy.

In your body’s cells there are many important structures that can get broken and damaged and not work right.  These can ‘clog up the works’ similar to your home.  It can cause a body to operate less efficiently.

Autophagy is the body’s process of recycling those broken structures and using their components for energy and to make other cell parts that are needed.  This gets rid of old and broken down structures and makes new and well-functioning cell organelles.

The benefits of healthy autophagy action are a slowing of the aging process, prevention of neuro-degeneration (memory loss, dementia, etc...), decreased inflammation and improved skin health.

As bodies get older the amount of autophagy slows down.  There are ways to increase it however for the young and the old.

You can increase it by the following actions:

1. High Fat, Low Carb diet—Whole30 and Ketogenic diets fall under this category
2. Intermittent Fasting—we all fast, some more than others. A simple fast would be to eat dinner at 7pm and then don’t eat again until break-fast at 7am.  This is a 12 hour intermittent fast.  I suggest you look up intermittent fasting for more info.
3. High Intensity Interval Training—otherwise known as HIIT, is intense exercise for short periods of time and then rest, alternating back and forth. For example, riding with high intensity on a stationary bike for 1 minute and then take a 1 minute break, then high intensity for another minute and then another minute rest…repeat up to 8 cycles. This has been found to stimulate autophagy, anti-inflammation, brain derived growth factor (BDNF) and growth hormone.
4. Protein Fasting—simply put this is eating very low amounts of protein for a day or two. Now the body needs to find some proteins for its normal function. This stimulates autophagy to recycle old and broken proteins to form new proteins.
5. Get great sleep—Very important and often overlooked.

It seems that Marie Kondo’s Tidying Up is very popular right now. It is easy to draw parallels between cleaning up your home and cleaning up your body.

By the way, Marie Kondo believes (and so do I) that tidying up your home will also improve your health.

If you are interested in improving your performance, your memory and  your health then you should really check out this topic of autophagy and do things to improve it in your body.

Call Bunch Chiropractic in Tustin today to schedule an appointment!