Chapter 6

Ready, Set, Glow!

Minimum Exercise for Maximum Youth

Exercise—just the word can put me on the defensive. And I know I’m not alone. We all have our go-to excuses for why we can’t work out today.

I’m too tired. This is the most common reason most people don’t exercise. Know this, though: Research reveals that working out can actually make you more energetic.

I don’t have time. You’re busy, for sure. But the time is there. There are 24 hours in a day and 7 days in a week. So if you aim to spend 8 hours a day sleeping, and if you have to use about 40 to 50 hours a week working—you still have between 60 and 70 hours left! On Glow15, you only need 2 of those hours—total—to reap the benefits of exercise. So what are you going to do with all your free time?

Exercise makes me eat more. Actually, the opposite may be true. A study at Brigham Young University found that exercising may actually suppress your appetite.

I’ve used all of the above excuses, and not because I’m lazy. We’ve all come up with reasons why we can’t exercise—but the truth is, exercise is your best defense against aging. It helps you build bone, gain muscle, and lose weight—and it can boost your mood.

But did you know exercise can also boost your autophagy and add years to your life? In this chapter, I’ll give you the Glow15 excuse-proof strategies—and help you change your exercise psyche from a defensive response to an offensive one.

How Exercise Activates Autophagy

Fear of exercise may actually be good for your autophagy—that is, if it can elicit acute or healthy stress. Remember, stress is good for promoting autophagy. Autophagy loves stress! And creating healthy stress can help you get the most out of your workout so you look and feel younger.

There are two common types of stress: acute and chronic. Acute stress is temporary. It can be caused by one-off triggers, like a surprising or embarrassing moment or hitting your funny bone. Chronic stress is long-lasting—like financial worries or arthritis.

One of the biggest differences between the two is their impact on our health. Acute stress can often be healthy—it can help us move faster during an emergency or study harder before an exam—whereas chronic stress has been linked to health problems, including heart disease, depression, and obesity.

We’ve all heard the stories of the “fight or flight” response. Think of the adrenaline-driven mother who found incredible superpowers to save her child by lifting a car or fending off an attacker. The cause here is acute stress and the response is physical activity. And that does more than just reunite mother and child. That stress response boosts autophagy to create more beneficial cell components and remove negative ones.

When we exercise, we’re actually putting our bodies under acute stress. When we go for a run or a bike ride or climb up a flight of stairs, our heart rate accelerates to pump blood and oxygen to our muscles. Our hearts don’t want to beat that fast all the time, but they need to do so to help us get through the session.

That’s a form of stress. The same thing happens when we lift weights or do any other form of exercise. The actions we take when we work our bodies cause microscopic tears in our muscles. That sets autophagy in motion, as you’re now in stress-response mode—and autophagy activates to remove and repair the damage. This makes your muscles stronger and more resilient—in anticipation that you may just do that same thing again and your muscles need to be better prepared for the stress the next time it happens. The result of an exercise session? Short-term stress for long-lasting benefits.

Until recently, few researchers looked into the effect of exercise on autophagy within cells. Once they did start studying it, they observed that exercise seems to have the ability to boost autophagy, specifically in cells found in bones and the heart. Autophagy rates increase when cells are starved or when they’re placed under physiological stress, like increasing heart rate and straining muscles. That’s exactly what happens during exercise. In fact, it’s such an exciting part of research that some have suggested that the true benefit of exercise is that it helps get rid of our toxic waste via autophagy, and that’s what provides all the long-term benefits like improved cardiovascular health and immune system.

One of the leading pioneers in autophagy research, Dr. Beth Levine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, showed that exercise activates autophagy in muscle cells. She did this by looking at mice running on treadmills—first seeing autophagy increase at 30 minutes, then maximizing to 100 percent at 80 minutes, and then plateauing. The American Aging Association recently ran its own human study in older adults, which supported Dr. Levine’s findings.

A related benefit? Exercise helps burn fat. Because excess body fat gunks up the autophagy process, exercise is like a one-two autophagy punch—it improves the system by stressing the cells and by getting fat out of the way. Dr. Heather Hausenblas, associate dean of the School of Applied Health Sciences at Jacksonville University in Florida, says that exercise is like the “high-speed Internet” compared to the “dial-up” in the cellular cleanup process. That’s because exercise cleans up the garbage inside the cells very quickly (the high-speed Internet); it moves very slowly when we just sit around (dial-up).

The best part: You can expect instant results. Autophagy ramps up during and immediately after one single bout of endurance exercise. And it has long-lasting results. Researchers in Austria found that older people who regularly worked out throughout their adult lives were stronger and more youthful. That manifests itself not only in things like bones and muscles, but also at the microscopic cellular levels—in that “older” bodies present themselves to be much younger than they actually are. So no matter your current age, exercise can slow the age-related decline in autophagy and make a significant difference in offsetting muscle atrophy and extending longevity.

Are you ready? Are you set? Let’s glow!

The Glow15 Workout Guidelines

I don’t want you to think of exercise as another sacrifice you have to make. Instead I want you to reframe the idea of exercise and think of the Glow15 workouts as a great way to make yourself a priority.

Instead of thinking that exercising is just another thing you have to do, think of it as an opportunity to take back your time. Do it for yourself. It’s a simple way to be bold. Have the courage to make an excuse to make time for you. This is not selfish; this is self-health.

And when you do make that time for yourself, you will find that you are so much more present in your life—from work to family. Taking time for yourself actually allows you to give time to others. Practicing self-health allows you to be more focused, calmer, and more grounded. And in turn, this will help you be a better mother, wife, friend, worker, confidante, caregiver—woman!

I know that the first step can be the hardest—whether you’re exercising for the first time or making a change in the type of workouts you do. Remember, fear of change is usually harder than the change itself. But if you can get out of your own head, I promise you that the results can be transforming. Not just physically, but mentally, too. The high that you get from accomplishing these workouts and the strength that you will feel, I believe, will become two of your most valuable assets.

Glow15 Success Story

Sharon “Exercise helped get me off my meds”

“Glow15 not only transformed my health, it changed the way I feel about myself. It even inspired me to help others make the same changes. Before this, I was overweight, pre-diabetic and taking medication for high blood pressure. I knew I was setting a bad example for my daughter. The ironic part: I am an executive operations coordinator for medical professionals. I spend my days helping others better their health, but I was neglecting my own. Then, I started Glow15 and began paying attention. I changed my diet and my sleep schedule, but the biggest change I made was exercise. I had never really worked out before, and while at first it was really difficult, I kept at it. And I kept keeping at it, huffing and puffing my way through group fitness classes until it became fun. After just 15 days of doing HIIT and resistance training, I lost 6.5 pounds! I started to look forward to class, and I recruited my coworkers to join me. We continued to see changes—not just in our weight, but in our attitudes. Working out made us all happier and more positive, and that made us keep moving. By the next fifteen-day cycle I lost over 13 pounds and reduced my body fat by 5 percent. And I’m proud to say I no longer need my blood pressure medication. And my daughter took notice and started to follow my example. Together, we are committed to making Glow15 a permanent part of our lifestyle.”

Here’s the best part about Glow15 exercise: Less is more. You don’t actually need a lot of time to get results. You can be smart and efficient—boosting your autophagy quickly and effectively by following some specific guidelines.

Exercise on High days only. Remember, High days are when you’re not fasting and are eating normal to high amounts of protein. So that means you will not exercise every day. Again, the most natural and efficient way to activate autophagy is through stress. And the two best ways to do that are fasting and exercise. You don’t need to exercise on fasting days because it’s important to alternate how and when you stress your cells. As you already know, autophagy is best optimized when it’s turned on and off, like breathing in and out, or in the case of exercise, huffing and puffing. Working out these four days a week is what allows our bodies to flip that switch. It’s a myth that we have to exercise for hours on end to achieve the best results. You will see results in two weeks only working out eight total times, and—especially if you haven’t done much exercise recently—you will feel different instantly. Stronger, younger, more energetic, and, yes, more sore. The mood-boosting benefits extend to hours (and often days!) beyond your workout.

All you need is 30 minutes. That’s right—just 30 minutes to boost your autophagy and get antiaging benefits for your brain and body. According to Dr. Beth Levine, exercise can be even faster than nutrient deprivation at inducing autophagy. In her experiment, she proved that after just 30 minutes on a treadmill, autophagy is induced, and further concluded that exercising at a high intensity for that amount of time further activates autophagy by 40 to 50 percent. It is important to note that the rate increased up until 80 minutes on the treadmill, at which point it plateaued. In the journal Nature, Dr. Levine says that “autophagy may represent a cellular mechanism by which exercise prolongs life and protects against cancer, cardiovascular disorders, and inflammatory diseases.” Her findings not only gave her an excuse to not exercise for a lengthy amount of time, but inspired her to get her own treadmill.

Run on empty. Exercising on an empty stomach can increase how much autophagy your cells engage in, indicating again that the stress of exercise takes a greater—and quicker—toll on our bodies when we’re not adequately fueled.

Your body needs more nutrients during exercise than during rest, and this makes your cellular cleansing cleanup crew work harder. So try exercising first thing in the morning if you can. If that’s not possible, you should still exercise on an empty stomach; just wait 1 to 2 hours after eating before you work out.

Pregame with caffeine. Instead of eating, drink caffeine before your workout. Not only does caffeine promote autophagy, it can actually help you exercise better and boost the fat-burning benefits. According to a new study published in the Journal of Applied Physiology, drinking caffeine—like my favorite AutophaTea—prior to exercise not only gives you additional energy, it also improves your performance. And the boost from caffeine may help you burn fat.

Turn up the heat. Another way to increase autophagy? Heat shock. A study in the journal Autophagy explains that heat stress—achieved by exercising in temperatures above 86°F to raise your core body temperature—boosts autophagy by activating genes that optimize heat shock proteins inside your cells. These heat shock proteins help prevent plaque formation in your brain and vascular system and are also involved in longevity. While it may seem counterintuitive when you are already planning to sweat, added heat can actually be good for you. There are a few ways you can initiate heat shock when exercising, like turning up the room temperature or wearing extra layers or working out outdoors on a hot day. You can also raise your core temperature immediately after exercise to get the benefits by taking a hot bath or using a steam room or sauna. Note: Be careful to not overdo it in the heat, and make sure you drink plenty of water.

Refuel with protein. Remember, you’re working out on a High day, which also means you’re eating normal to high amounts of protein. After your workout, make sure you refuel with protein. This may seem counterintuitive, because high protein consumption turns off autophagy. But studies show that consuming just one serving of protein once you’re through with a workout (especially one that involves strength training) raises the level of autophagy occurring in your muscle cells. Researchers say this is all part of the adaptation your muscles undergo when you start taxing them with resistance exercises. So aim for one serving of protein (try one of the High day Egg15 recipes!) within 30 minutes after cooling down from your workout.

Keep on going. Don’t give up. Dr. Hausenblas warns against taking too much time off. She found a study that showed the autophagy benefits of exercise disappeared if people stopped working out for two weeks. So let these fifteen days serve as an inspirational foundation to keep on going. Dr. Hausenblas also suggested that you shouldn’t be afraid to get out of your comfort zone and try something new—make sure you keep adding challenges to your workouts to give your body new (healthy) stressors that trigger autophagy. There’s preliminary data to suggest that the novelty of a new exercise initiates more autophagy as well. That’s because the more you challenge your muscles in novel ways, the more opportunities you offer them to adapt and make use of your cellular cleansing cleanup crew.

Before you keep going, you need to get started. And I know that first step can be the hardest one. One of the best ways to get past your fear—of exercise, of a new routine, of change—is to properly prepare. Here, that means figuring out what works best for you: Are you motivated by music? If so, download a new playlist. Will you be more accountable if you enlist a workout partner? If so, get a friend to “glow” with you. Do you find the gym intimidating, too far to get to, or are you just not ready to let others see you sweat? If so, my youth-boosting Glow15 workouts can be done in the comfort of your own home. The point is that you should think about what backdrop—whether it’s environmental or interpersonal—will help kindle your motivational fire. I’m confident that once you get into a groove, your fire will be fully stoked. That’s because once you see and feel the effects, you will want to experience more.

Above all, remember, the point is not perfection. Perfect is boring. Perfect is basic. Perfect is pointless. The best thing you can do for your body and brain is to challenge them. This will activate autophagy and keep you engaged, motivated, and looking and feeling young!

Glow15’s youth-boosting workouts can be adapted to any fitness level—whether you’re a novice or a more advanced athlete. But this doesn’t mean you need to join a gym or buy fancy exercise equipment. Instead, they are designed to work with your lifestyle to most effectively boost your autophagy in the least amount of time.

The Glow15 Workouts

There are two types of exercise scientifically proven to best initiate autophagy. They will allow you to work and challenge your body in different ways. And in just fifteen days, you will notice a difference. In the way you look. In the way you feel. In what you can physically do.

You’ll do two high-intensity interval training (HIIT) workouts and two resistance exercise training (RET) workouts each week.

High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT): Don’t be alarmed by the words high intensity. HIIT involves working in short bursts until you’re out of breath. This is beneficial because that limited deficiency of oxygen activates autophagy. HIIT workouts pair low-effort periods with high-effort periods: Work hard in short bursts and then have time to recover before doing it all over again. So, for example, you might do 1 minute of harder effort, followed by 1 minute of moderate effort—in any form of exercise you like. Because intensity is measured by your heart rate, the exercise is customized for you. A beginner, for instance, may find a brisk walk or jog will be their high intensity; whereas someone who works out regularly may need to sprint to reach their target heart rate. Best of all, the total workout time is short. You need to do just 30 minutes to see the benefits.

Now, you may be asking, What exactly are moderate and hard effort? Good question, and this depends a bit on your fitness level, since there’s no way to standardize effort to every woman. How do you determine what high intensity means for you? One of the best ways is to figure out your target heart rate. According to the American Heart Association, to find your target heart rate, you have to calculate your resting heart rate, or the beats per minute when your heart is at rest. I’ve given you instructions here. A resting heart rate under 80 beats per minute is considered healthy. The more you exercise, the lower your heart rate tends to be.

Next, calculate your maximum heart rate—this is the maximum number of beats per minute your heart can handle during exercise. The basic way to do this is to subtract your age from 220. For example, if you’re 40 years old, subtract 40 from 220 to get a maximum heart rate of 180.

And finally, your target heart rate or your anaerobic threshold—the ideal level at which your heart is being worked but not overworked—for the Glow15 HIIT exercises is between 70 and 85 percent of your maximum heart rate.

So if you’re 40, and your maximum heart rate is 180, you multiply 180 by .7 to get 70 percent of your maximum, which is 126. So your target heart rate would be 126 beats per minute. For a higher target—85 percent of your max—you would aim for 153 beats per minute. If you are a beginner, it is best to start with a target heart rate of 70 percent and work your way up to 85 percent. This obviously is easier to measure with a heart rate monitor or activity tracking device, which you can buy online. I always use one.

Another (somewhat less mathematical and easier) way to determine your high-intensity level is through perceived exertion scale. Think of effort as being on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being all-out effort, like a sprint, and 1 being a leisurely walk—sitting on the couch would be a 0. Moderate effort would be a 3 or 4 on the scale and harder effort would be in the 6 to 8 range. Now imagine how that works in practical terms. Let’s say you go out for a run. You would jog easily (an effort of 3 or 4) for a minute and then follow that with a minute when you push the pace and are huffing and puffing (that’s your 6 to 8 on the scale). Alternating between the two for a period of time (in this case, 30 minutes) is how high-intensity interval training works.

What’s great about this kind of workout is that you can do it in a variety of forms, such as running, swimming, spinning, rowing, etc. . . . Plus, some sports are naturally high-interval, like tennis, when you’re going back and forth between hard effort and then periods of rest in between points. There are also many popular fitness classes that use HIIT—from Orange Theory to Barry’s Boot Camp to CrossFit—even Soulcycle or Flywheel classes combine periods of intense activity with moderate exercise.

The reason this works so well is that our bodies cycle through anaerobic exercise in which we’re deprived of oxygen; the scientific term for this is hypoxia. When you feel out of breath after pushing yourself, that’s your body trying to get oxygen. Now, that doesn’t exactly seem like it would be a good thing, but the benefit is that the deficiency of oxygen in short bursts activates autophagy. And with HIIT, this happens when you reach your anaerobic threshold—your target heart rate or the high end of your perceived exertion scale.

A study in the journal Cell Metabolism found that interval training improved the health and number of the mitochondria in cells. This is important because mitochondria serve as the power plants of the cells, meaning that improvement in their health can translate to more energy. In this study, older people experienced nearly a 70 percent increase in the capacity of the mitochondria, while others had a nearly 50 percent increase. Researchers at McMasters University in Canada have done lots of work in this area, showing that interval training helps improve age- and disease-related indicators such as blood pressure and cardiovascular health. One of the leading researchers reported that one of the best parts about interval training is that you don’t have to reach a certain level to experience benefits—it’s all relative to the individual. “You just need to feel some brief discomfort,” he said. And that’s a good way to put it; those periods of higher effort on the scale won’t feel all that comfortable, but they’re momentary. And that momentary stress is what creates the autophagic effect.

You should do HIIT two days a week, and again, I want you to pick whatever activity you most like. (More details about how to exactly do this workout can be found here.)

Resistance Exercise Training (RET): What gives your body tone and that lean and strong look? Well, that’s resistance training. This workout is about strength training, where you push against or fight a force in order to exercise your muscles. RET activates autophagy by stressing cells in your muscles; this is key to maintaining muscle mass, which decreases with age.

You might immediately think of lifting weights as a form of RET, and you’re right, but that doesn’t have to only mean lifting heavy weights. You can practice RET with your own body weight—push-ups, lunges, and squats are all forms of very good resistance training. Yoga can be a form of RET. Or you can even use normal household items, like gallons of water, bags of rice, books, or even supplies like laundry detergent or toiletry containers.

The point of this kind of workout—which, again, you will do two times a week—is that you will be putting stress on your cells to eventually rebuild muscle tissue and thus activate your autophagy.

RET remains the most effective treatment for the loss of muscle mass and strength. Evidence suggests that autophagic signaling is altered in aged skeletal muscles. But a study in the journal Experimental Gerontology found regular resistance training activates autophagy and helps prevent the loss of muscle mass while improving muscle strength. One study from the University of New Mexico even showed that RET changed the way that genes were expressed in an older group of people, and the researchers noted that it was an indication of not only slowing the aging process, but reversing it.

RET helps you build that lean muscle tissue, which will improve your posture and make your body better able to withstand injuries, not to mention make you look leaner and change your body shape. Perhaps even more important, adding lean tissue will actually help you burn fat. That’s because muscle is what scientists would call “metabolically expensive”—that is, your muscles need a lot of calories to sustain themselves. Because your muscles need those calories, there’s less chance that extra calories will be deposited and stored in your body as fat. So adding this lean tissue improves your ability to not only lose weight but also keep it off.

Don’t worry—you’re not going to beef up like a bodybuilder by doing RET. These workouts will help build lean muscle and help keep you fit—with strong and sexy muscles, not big and bulky ones.

Glow15 Success Story

Lyndee “Exercise gave me the confidence I’d been missing”

“I’m a 37-year-old mom of two, and I’ve watched the numbers on my scale slowly increase over the past few years. Each time I get on, I tell myself that I can work off the weight. I tried all kinds of workouts and never saw the scale move. And I worked out hard! It’s really disappointing to put in all that effort and not see results. I felt like a failure. But with Glow15, for the first time, I’m winning! I not only lost weight—7 pounds in 15 days—I also lost inches. I tried both HIIT and RET. Surprisingly I liked the interval training most because you can vary the exercises, and even when it sucks and you feel like you can’t breathe, it’s over quickly, you get a break and then move on to something different. It felt like a little bit of pain for a whole lot of gain. And I did gain something invaluable—confidence. I stand up for myself now—and for me, that’s a big deal. I guess I was a little bit of a pushover before and never shared my opinion because I didn’t believe it had value. Glow15 changed that. It gave me self-worth. That newfound backbone has made all the difference—I love the feeling of respect I get from my friends, my family, and most of all my own self-respect.”

The key for both HIIT and RET on Glow15 is that you can customize the workouts to your fitness level and abilities. Everything is relative. Your intensity and strength levels will increase as you get stronger and fitter, but even if you’re a beginner, you can reap the benefits. Whether you get your heart rate up with a brisk walk or a full-out run or are challenged by lifting paperback books or multiple encyclopedias, if you commit to the Glow15 workouts four days a week, you will boost your autophagy and feel like a better, healthier version of you. See the specific workouts starting here.

A Bedroom Exercise to Boost Autophagy

One of the most natural biological ways to create acute stress to initiate autophagy is through sex. Yes, that’s right—sex can help keep you young! You will naturally turn up the heat as your core body temperature increases during sex. And not only can it be both HIIT—depending on your intensity—and RET—depending on your position(!)—but it’s probably the most enjoyable way to get in your 30-minute workout! Intimate bedroom moments have given researchers new clues about combating aging—specifically with spermidine. You may remember from chapter 4 that spermidine, which induces autophagy, is found in foods like grapefruit and cheese, but it is also an important constituent of semen. A team of European researchers, led by biologist Frank Madeo from the University of Graz in Austria, has found that spermidine is necessary for cell growth and maturation, but as cells age, their level of spermidine falls. He showed that giving an extra dose of spermidine to certain organisms and cells significantly increased their life span. Plus, if getting closer to your partner weren’t enough to get you getting busy, think of the calories you can burn in the bedroom. On average, a half hour of sex burns the same calories as a 15-minute run. According to researchers at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania, you may even be able to stave off the flu with antibodies released during sex. And Dr. James Couch, a neurology professor at Southern Illinois University’s Clinic, did a study on female headache sufferers. He found that nearly half of the women in the study experienced full relief after sex. And sex can help you look younger, too. An experiment at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital in Scotland found that partners who had sex at least four times per week were viewed as looking up to twelve years younger than their actual age. Hit the sheets!