Fasting vs Exercise: Which One Activates Your Body’s Cellular Cleanup Crew?

Your body has a built-in janitorial crew—an internal system that clears out damaged cells, broken proteins, and toxic waste. It’s called autophagy, and it plays a key role in preventing disease, improving brain function, and extending your healthspan.

But here’s the problem: Most people never give this crew the signal to clock in.

In this episode of Healthspan Digest, host Aaron Shaw breaks down:

• What autophagy is (and why it matters for your energy, immunity, and longevity)
• How fasting and exercise both trigger this powerful process
• The key differences between the two—and which is more effective
• How to combine them for maximum benefit (without burning out)
• A simple once-a-week protocol to kickstart your cellular cleanup crew
• How to eat after to upgrade your recovery and resilience

🎯 The takeaway? You don’t need extreme fasts or brutal workouts. You need to signal your body the right way—and let the internal crew get to work.

💡 Want help integrating this into your routine?

I coach busy professionals who want better performance, better energy, and a better second half of life.

📲 DM me or visit https://healthspanpillars.com

See Coach Aaron behind the scenes in this daily YouTube VLOG on his own health and fitness journey. Subscribe, engage, and extend your healthspan. 

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Transcript

What if I told you that your body has a built-in janitorial crew? A microscopic cleanup team that works night shifts, cleaning up all the toxic waste, the broken parts, all the old junk that's in our system. This is the kind of junk that leads to metabolic disease, cancer, impaired brain health, and impaired immune function. What if I also told you that most people don't even let this cleanup crew clock in? Today we're going to talk about autophagy, how to flip this switch on this cellular cleanup system.

the cellular janitorial crew and how fasting and exercise can both play a role and why combining the two of them may be the single smartest thing to do for long-term health and performance. Welcome to HealthSpan Digest. I'm your host, Aaron Shaw. I am from HealthSpan Physio Coaching. I am a lifelong movement nerd, science nerd, former elite level cyclist, and I'm the guy behind the mic bringing you science-backed BS-free strategies on how to live longer and better.

I work with middle-aged high-performing health conscious clients through my concierge coaching services, people who want results, not fluff. We focus on the five pillars of health span. These are exercise, nutrition, sleep, emotional wellbeing, and preventative care. If that sounds like your kind of operating system, stick around or reach out. My contact information is on all of these podcasts. But let's start out with figuring out what is autophagy? Sounds like a weird word, right?

Well, it literally means self-eating, but don't freak out. This isn't cannibalism, but it is your body's internal janitorial clue. It's sent in to clean up, recycle, and restore. We need to picture that every one of our cells, like 30 trillion cells, imagine that each one of those is an office space. And over time, papers pile up, like on my desk right in front of me. Papers pile up, we have broken furniture,

old technology, maybe leftover takeout containers, things get kind of messy. And without a cleanup crew, this space becomes toxic, really kind of unlivable, dysfunctional at best, dangerous at worst. And this is where autophagy comes in. So this autophagy process sweeps up the floors, cleans up the junk, recycles a broken proteins, even hauls out damaged mitochondria. These are our cells, you know, power generators.

This is the kind of stuff linked to aging, metabolic disease, even brain fog and a whole lot more. So it is essential that we have this cleanup process. No cleanup means chaos. No cleanup is like cellular hoarding. Holding onto a bunch of junk does us no good and it ultimately will accelerate our overall system breakdown. But when is a crew active? When is it really engaged? Well,

We've got a lean, clean, high-performance machine. This is our body we're talking about here. We need to think about improving immunity, improved thinking, sharper thinking, better metabolism, and yes, improved health span. But this is where it gets interesting. We need to think, is it fasting or exercise? Which one of these two will help stimulate the system the most? Because you can't just call up this cleanup crew whenever you feel like it. They show up in response to stress.

the good kind of stress, but there needs to be a stress to the system for this autophagy janitorial crew to show up. So you can think about, you know, the power goes out or the resources run low. The building manager, basically our brain says, okay, team, it's time to come in time to clean up some waste, kind of clean, clean things up, cut some waste. And what is one of the most powerful ways of doing that fasting. So when you stop eating for 12 hours,

So when you stop eating for 12 hours, 16, 24 hours or more, a couple of things happen. One, insulin drops. Something called mTOR slows down. This is a protein that's really crucial for cell regulating cell growth and metabolism. And ultimately this cellular alarm bells go off. So there's a big alarm system goes off screaming, we're low on supplies. We better start recycling. So the janitors get to work, especially in places like our liver.

our brain and our immune system.

So that's what fasting does. Fasting will trigger that, but fasting isn't the only way to clock in this crew. We can also do it through exercise, especially resistance training, high intensity interval training or HIIT, they would call it, and long distance cardio. All of these create metabolic stress. The muscles get micro damaged, which is the purpose of these exercises and our energy gets depleted and the same process happens. The same thing.

Same things get triggered. Your body says, Hey, we're going to mess clean up here. There's been some tissue damage. again, the gerontorial crew shows up, but this time it's a little bit different. This time is focused on your muscles, your heart and your mitochondria. It's really more localized than fasting. So we can imagine fasting as we're really putting stress on the entire system by depriving it of calorie intake where exercise is more localized, more

precision. So it's a deep cleaning in the areas under strain.

But there's a plot twist here. Most people think you got to pick one or the other. Either I fast or I work out. But what if you timed it just right? Could you get the benefits of both? In a few minutes, I'll kind of explain how you may be able to finesse this a little bit to get the best of both worlds. But what I do want to make sure to think about here is that if you are fasted, we got to remember, food is fuel.

In order to exercise, we have to have some fuel. So there's going to be a balance point there where if we cut out too much fuel, we need to adjust our expectations for how well we can perform physically, how well we can exercise. So what is our move here? This is what I would suggest for anybody who's interested in exploring this would be once per week, do a fairly low intensity

Fasted workout, so I'm not talking like a three-day water fast. I'm just talking literally skipping breakfast So wait at least 12 hours, maybe 14 hours after your last meal and then Go for a two-hour zone to bike ride. So we're talking zones. We're talking cardiac zones heart based on heart rate, but Equivalent may be like a brisk walk something gets your heart rate up a little bit

Not so you're huffing and puffing, but enough to get the blood pump a little bit, cause your heart rate elevated a little bit. Do that for 30 minutes, 45 minutes, maybe an hour. If you're already pretty well trained or you can do a moderate strength training circuit, not super intense. we've to keep in mind that our body needs fuel to exercise to perform well. And if we are intentionally not fueling beforehand, and we're just going straight to the performance side, we need to kind of tamper down our expectations a little bit.

But by doing this, this may take a little practice, but by doing this, you're layering fasting's systemic cleanup with exercises, localized cleanup, localized stress. So this is like maybe sending in the janitors and calling the pressure washers at the same time. So you're getting both. Also the key here is that afterwards, after you go through this fasted exercise session, we need to be smart. We need to refuel.

immediately start thinking protein, maybe some antioxidants, make sure you're getting hydration. That's the rebuild phase. So we're not just cleaning out the house. actually upgrading the systems.

And here's the pro tip. You don't need to do this every single day. Even just once a week, we'll give your body time to do kind of this deep clean, recover and adapt. Remember autophagy isn't about suffering. is about signaling. So just trying to signal our system, kind of raising your hand saying, Hey, we need to get the cleanup crew in here. It's just enough to stress the system to make sure that the cleanup crew comes in, does their jobs.

builds you back a little bit better so can carry on to the next stresses of life. We're talking about cancer, brain health, metabolic disease, immune system function, super important. And again, autophagy is a very natural process that happens all the time. But for those of us that want to extend our health span, if we want to be strong, vibrant, healthy, we want to keep our, you know, we don't want to be hoarders of

broken mitochondria, disease cells or whatnot. We want this regular cleanup system to kick into gear. We want this janitorial system to come in maybe once a week or once every two weeks. We need to be thoughtful about it and intentional with it. So the one thing I would suggest, so there's the one thing I would do today to extend your health span is this. I would schedule one morning this week, one morning in the next seven days,

where you do a zone two cardio session. This is pretty low intensity. It's not zero intensity. So it's a little bit of effort, but it's a zone two cardio session where you're going to get your heart rate up to let's say 70 or 75 % of its max. And you're going to do this for half an hour to one hour, but you're going to do it after you haven't had anything to eat for the past at least 12 hours, 12, 14, maybe 16 hours.

give that a shot. And what again, what we're doing here is we are kicking in, we're signaling to our body to jumpstart this autophagy process, get the janitorial crew in there. You're going to get the benefits of being fasted. So there's a systemic stress and you're to get the benefit of actually doing specific exercise. So you're going to get the precision autophagy effects to specific muscles, specific parts of our system. So it's a win-win. So the next time you think about

fasting or pushing through a workout, don't just think about it as weight loss or a cardio burn. Think about it as activating the systems cleanup crew. And if you want help building this into your week, let me know how does this fit into your life. I recognize that this concept is, for one thing, this concept is incredibly vast and very complicated and this is a super short version of it.

But if you want to figure out a way to integrate this into your life, let me know. So what I do with my coaching clients all the time, there is a sweet spot where you get a great return on your investment. And then there's overdoing, be it the exercise part or the fasting part where you actually cause more harm than good. So there is a little bit of finesse to it, but it is a beautiful system. It's built into our body. So you can send me a DM. You can check out my contact information that's associated with this episode. Check out my website. is on this episode as well.

It is your cleanup crew, invest in it. You can do fasting, you can do exercise, and if you're really savvy, you can do a little bit of both. So until next time, keep showing up, keep cleaning your house, your internal house, stay durable. You are a high-performance machine. You're just gonna put little effort into it. So this is HealthSpan Digest. My name's Aaron Shaw. See you next time.