Every year when the light changes, my body starts asking for different things. Different food, different support, different everything. And every year I have to remind myself that’s a real physiological event and not a mood!
So this week I pulled everything off the shelf and went through it honestly. Some of it earned its spot back. Some of it didn’t. Nothing on that shelf is permanent, and nothing on yours should be either. Your protocol isn’t supposed to be a tattoo!
Here’s what’s actually changing.
Reishi is having a moment over here
I’ve been drinking King Coffee from Organo all summer, and off and on for years before that. The reason I keep coming back to it is the reishi, which is the whole point of that coffee.
This fall I’m adding reishi spore capsules on top of it. Spores are the concentrated version, and I wanted more of it going into the season where everybody starts passing things around.
Here’s the genetic piece. Reishi is an immunomodulator, which means it works on the signaling. The genes that govern that signaling are your interleukins — IL-6, IL-1B, and TNF — and they show up all over your Body by Design® report. These same markers are also in your microbiome, your soft tissue, and your recovery categories, because inflammatory load is cumulative and it doesn’t just stay in one place.
On IL-6 specifically, the CC genotype runs a more inflated response and takes longer to recover. That’s not a defect, it’s a setting. And it’s a setting that responds beautifully to the right inputs.
Astaxanthin out, ginger in
My custom blend is getting reworked for fall. Astaxanthin comes out — it’s been in there and it earned its spot, but I want that real estate doing something else for the next few months.
Ginger goes in, and it’s pulling the same lever. Ginger upregulates interleukins, so it stacks directly with the reishi on the immune signaling side. It’s also a gut motility win at the exact time of year everything slows down and gets heavier.
Vitamin C, dosed up 🤓
This is the one I get genuinely nerdy about, because it’s personal for me and it’s common.
Your vitamin C transporters are SLC23A1 and SLC23A2. They’re the doors. They decide how much vitamin C actually makes it out of your gut and into your cells, and how much of it you hold onto once it’s there. Variants there mean you can eat the same oranges as your sister, take the same supplement as your sister, and end up with a meaningfully different level in your blood.
That’s why I chose to dose vitamin C higher than a label would tell you to. My DNA taught me this!
Your custom blend can be reworked seasonally, same as mine — that’s the whole point of having one. If you’ve done your Body by Design testing and you want to talk through a fall version, book a custom blend consult here.
Food: the chia pudding is back 😅
This one made me laugh because it’s such a throwback. I used to swear by chia pudding for breakfast and somewhere along the way I just stopped.
It’s back! And the one thing that changed everything: use ground chia seeds, not whole. Ground blends up smooth and creamy instead of turning into a bowl of little beads. It genuinely makes all the difference.
My version right now is just the new banana-flavored Equip protein powder (use code DESIGNERGENES) and the ground chia, blended with a bit of Fairlife lactose-free milk and a small spoon of peanut butter. YUM!!
The lactose-free part is an MCM6 decision: the marker that helps you decide whether you keep producing lactase. Mine’s actually fine — dairy doesn’t typically bother me, but it’s bad for my boyfriend, so lactose-free is what lives in our fridge.
Protein, fiber, and a blood sugar stabilizer in one bowl, without sitting heavy — which matters in fall, when the food gets richer and the gut gets slower.
Sleep: I’m not moving my schedule
I’m genetically more sensitive to shifts in circadian rhythm than average, and I’ve stopped fighting it. When the time changes, I keep my schedule exactly where it is.
The markers I’d point you to are your CLOCK genes, PER3, and MTNR1B, your melatonin receptor. They sit together under Circadian Rhythm on your report, and they’re the difference between someone who shrugs off a time change in a day and someone who feels scrambled for three weeks.
Once the time changes, my red light panel goes back into the morning routine. Morning light is the input that anchors the whole rhythm, and in November I’m not getting enough of it from the sky.
