3 Secrets to a Better Diet

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If you feel like you're eating healthy but you aren't getting the results you want, like better energy, better focus and fat loss, stay tuned. I'm dropping three little known strategies, really secrets to a better diet that can make all the difference. This channel is all about helping you get healthy, feel better, fast and heal your metabolism to lose the weight. So if you're interested in that like and subscribe to stay up to date with the latest and greatest info. Now let's jump in because this topic is near and dear to my heart. I get really passionate about this because I know dialing in your best diet would be so much easier and actually work for you if you knew some of the things that I've learned. But health is just like anything else. You don't know what you don't know unless someone teaches you how to do it right. And you can really waste your time spinning your wheels, getting frustrated and wondering why you're stuck and then you give up. So there are three things I know will help you get healthy, feel better, fast and lose weight. So let's get right into them and then you can incorporate them into whatever diet you're doing. It really doesn't matter. These are agnostic and work whether you're paleo, keto, vegan, vegetarian or really whatever. All right, the first one is timing is nearly everything. Now for a lot of people, if they're awake, they're eaten. Like if you're in the kitchen, near the kitchen, thinking about the kitchen. So you gotta stop this insanity. You need structure. Structure creates freedom. Now I'm sure you've heard of intermittent fasting and the benefits are huge for.

Your heart, your blood sugar levels, your.

Blood pressure, your gut function, your appetite and weight loss. Now when you're doing an intermittent fast, it's structured around something called an eating window. And your eating window really matters if you want all those benefits. When you limit your meals to a specific window during the day, there's a built in fast from the time that window ends until you start eating the next day. So ideally, when you're doing an intermittent fast, you push your first meal of.

The day to a little bit later.

Like instead of breakfast, have a brunch. And that really isn't as hard as it sounds. If you can close the kitchen after dinner, right? I mean stay out and then push your breakfast to brunch, that creates an easy fasting window of at least 12 hours, probably more like 14. And that time is going to help your body heal and Drop weight. And honestly, you're probably asleep for at least eight hours of it anyway. Right now you can adjust the eating windows too. So you might start with a 12 hour fast and three meals in that 12 hour eating window. And then you're going to want to work your way up to longer fasts with fewer meals. And you can even try Omad, that's one meal a day for those in the know as a tool once in a while to really up those benefits. All right, so let's go through an example so you can see how easy this is to do. Let's say you consolidate your calories into an eight hour window. And that window starts at 10am and ends at 6pm so during the remaining 16 hours of the day you're fasting, you can have water, you can have black coffee or tea, but you can't have any like fruit squeezed into the sparkling water. You can't have anything, any cream in the coffee. That is it. No food, black coffee, water or tea. Now when you do eat, it doesn't mean it's an all you can eat buffet either. I said timing is nearly everything, so it's really important. But portion size and what you're eating still matter too. Now when you're eating balanced meals, you won't even necessarily need three meals a day. But to start, if you're still having those three meals, here's what the timing might look like. You'll have a late breakfast or brunch. After you're out of your fasting window, you'll have two more meals every four to six hours. And, and this is really, really important, stop eating at least three hours before bed. So what's this look like on a 14 hour fast? You get up in the morning, you have water, coffee or tea until breakfast, then maybe 9am is breakfast, 1pm is lunch, and 6pm is dinner. Now I'd love to see you get to a 16 hour fast and rotate that in a couple times a week. But as I mentioned, I really like you to do a 12 hour to start and then you ease into it. And I want you to now think of a 12 hour fast as the rule. It's really that minimum time you want between dinner and the next breakfast. So insulin can return to fasting levels and your body can easily access stored fat for fuel. Plus this fasting also helps trigger something called autophagy, which is your body's way of taking out the cellular trash. And that's super cleansing and detoxifying. Now the one thing that always come up when I mention fasting, you probably already thinking you're like I'm going to be hungry, I'm going to be starving. And I can promise you starving is the last thing you'll be doing when your body isn't a bank account, it's a chemistry lab. And long term calorie deficit is going to downshift your metabolism and make you hold on to weight because your body goes into that survival mode. Then you've got muscle loss, high blood pressure, nausea, irritation, no energy and low blood sugar. And if you're starving, you're also going to get bingy when you do eat. And that does not sound like winning to me. Now even if you're eating only one meal a day, you have to make sure that that meal is as nutrient dense as possible. And include of course, healthy fats, can clean protein and fiber from non starchy veggies and slow low plant based carbs so you don't set off your body's starving alarm bells. The other thing I want to make sure you do is not snack. Now I know you're probably already plotting your snacking strategy, but there's no snacking. Because every time you eat your insulin levels go up. And over time this is going to increase your risk of insulin resistance and damage your metabolism, which means you're not able to burn stored fat for fuel. Got to give your body time to digest what you ate at your last meal and allow both your blood sugar and insulin to return to fasting levels. So you're encouraging your body to burn stored fat for fuel. So as you can see, snacking is a self sabotaging habit that you've got to break full stop. You need to just break up with snacking already. Sweet and salty snacks spike cravings, so you can never have just one. I mean, you know that Pringles commercial where the people's hand keeps getting stuck, stuck at the bottom of the tube? It hits so close to home, doesn't it? I mean, here it is right here and look, it doesn't fit. It doesn't fit. I mean, snacking is just a vicious cycle and it makes you feel lousy. And by the time the consequences hit your waist, you've got a lot of work to do to unwind whatever you put there. So remove your triggers from the house and when you feel the urge to snack, try water or green tea. And stop. By the way, you'll find this interesting. Snacking is agnostic about the clock and will put pounds on you no matter when you do it. But after dinner Snacking is a big no no for intermittent fasting. Nighttime snacking actually increases your risk of obesity. A study published in the Journal of Obesity showed that mice fed a high fat diet before sleep gained about 48% body weight compared to the mice that ate that same amount at other times of the day. Holy smokes. All right, so what about drinking? Now? You don't usually think much about it on a diet, except for the whole water, black coffee, green tea, and easy on the alcohol thing. But timing matters for liquids too. When you're fasting before your first meal and after your last meal, you're only allowed black coffee, water and tea. But when you're in your eating windows, you can have teas with fruit essence or make a frothy latte with some coconut milk or coconut creamer. And here's what you're really waiting to hear. A what about the wine? So, you know a glass of red wine from our friends over at Dry Farm? Totally. Okay. But I want you to really be careful about the amount of alcohol you're taking in. And if you're doing those drinks that have like the umbrella in them, forget it because you're going to get a lot of sugar, sugar with that and you're going to hijack the good work you're doing on your blood sugar and gut healing. That's why I stick with Dry Farm wines because it's lab tested and it's low in sugar and free of all those metabolism damaging additives. I mean, they have these really high standards. So I'll drop a link to their website below. Okay, now second secret. Planning is mission critical. Now remember what I said earlier about how structure creates freedom? Here it is again. If you need to grab something as you're running out the door in the morning, or you get home late and just want something fast, odds are you're seriously stacked the deck against making a good choice unless you planned for it. Unless you have good food in the house and it's ready to go, you have to be smart about how you approach meal preparation if you want your diet to work for you. Prepping makes sticking to your diet so much easier. And all it takes is a little planning and knowing a few shortcuts. First, keep your pantry, fridge and freezer as well stocked as possible so you always have what you need to make a healthy meal by the plate or to make smoothies and salads. Again, you have it all stocked up. You should see my fridge and freezer. I can just make a meal or a smoothie in a minute. Now smoothies and salads, I love them because they're such fast go tos. So here's what I recommend. You make a list and do at least one big grocery run a week that you know might take a few hours to build some meals for the entire week, right? So you do the grocery run and then you set yourself up with some prep, double or triple your recipes and freeze what you're not making right away or stick the extras in the fridge for lunches the next day. Bonus if you have a slow cooker because these things can be a lifesaver on busy days. And then you have to expect life to happen no matter what. If you get stuck somewhere and it's past meal time and your blood sugar is cratering, you know you're going to die for the nearest vending machine if you don't have other options. So don't risk blowing it. Just carry some emergency food with you. Now, my emergency food, I carry Reignite wellness bars, I carry Paleo Valley grass beef sticks or turkey sticks, and an easy one is just carry some low roasted nuts. All right, third secret. The third secret to a better diet is macros matter. You want to eat by the plate, which you can see here. And I'll also put in a link below the plate is a great tool to help you get hooked on healthy swaps, crush your cravings and get the right foods in. When you're doing your eating window, you'll fill up your plate like this. First you want balanced meals of clean, lean protein, healthy fats and fiber from a colorful array of non starchy veggies. And then of course a small amount of what I call slow low sugar impact carbs. So here's what this looks like. It's about 6 to 8 ounces of protein. Now this depends. If your protein is higher in fat, then you're going to have a bigger serving of it to get the protein grams that you want. Then two to four servings of a healthy fat. So a healthy fat, that would be something like a half of a small avocado, 10 nuts, a tablespoon of olive oil, a cup of coconut milk. So easy things that you're going to make sure again, 2 to 4 servings there increase it if you're maintaining your weight, decrease it if you're trying to lose a little bit. But make sure that you're always getting that fat in because it is so satiating. Super important. Then two or more. And I'm going to underline more servings of non starchy vegetables because it is so critical to get those in. And again with the non starchies, what you want to think of for a serving is a half a cup of cooked or a cup of raw. And more is better. Like 5 servings for the day is sort of my minimal amount. I'd love you to have 10. All right. And then slow, low carbs. This is zero to two servings per meal. I actually feel better when my first meal of the day I don't really have much there. I'm more in a keto state. And then I have a little bit at night. I find that helps me sleep. So a serving, depending on what it is, is usually about a half to three, four of a cup of something. But generally it's much more around about a half of a cup of wild rice or legumes or things like that or a cup of fruit. Now you can adjust there. You play around with those carbs if you're more active or athletic. But the big key thing here is food is information. So eating in this balance sends the message to your body to keep that blood sugar stable and keep that insulin low, which is so critical for being able to use stored fat for fuel. And you can get a lot more info on that in my book, the Sugar Impact Diet. So check that out too. Now the protein on the plate is great for filling you up and it slows down stomach emptying, which keeps the hunger hormone ghrelin suppressed. And what's cool about protein is it doesn't really impact your blood sugar or spike insulin. And it's the most thermic of all of the macronutrients. Like it is three times more thermic of all the macronutrients, which means that it requires a lot more energy to digest it. And my favorite things for protein, Wild fish shout out to my friends at Vital Choice, especially the salmon and the halibut. I love grass fed beef, grass fed lamb, pastured pork and chicken. And and then if I'm doing more plant based, I'll switch over and I'll get. And again, these are always going to have some carbs or fat. So I might do some quinoa or lentils that goes on the carby side or nuts and seeds that goes over onto the more fat side. So I'm always making sure that I'm balancing that out. And the other place I always win is with my protein powders from Reignite Wellness Now. Healthy fats. We need healthy fats for so many things. We can't live without protein or fat. We can live without carbs, by the way, just might be a little crabby. So healthy fats are so important to help lower your triglycerides, reduce inflammation and heal your gut and also will help you accelerate your fast fat loss, which all this stuff is going to help you reduce your risk for chronic disease. And of course they help you be more satiated and help you curb your cravings. But you want to make an oil change here. I said healthy fats because the wrong fats can be very pro inflammatory. So, so we want to focus on things like avocado and olive oil. I love avocado oil as well. Raw nuts and seeds, coconut, all of these types of things that help reduce inflammation and do not raise insulin and actually may even help your blood sugar. Okay. Remember too when I talked about protein earlier, I said if you're eating a higher fat protein, you'll need more of that protein source because you've got the fat in it. So case in point would be something like grass fed beef or wild salmon. You've got to count both the protein and the fat in there. So again, if you're doing some great wild salmon, maybe you're having 8 ounces of that. You can count in two servings of fat there too. All right, cool. Let's talk carbs. Now, super important, I want you to get your carbs as close to nature as possible. So that means eating kale rather than kale chips, right? Or you've seen those veggie straws and things like that. No, no, no, just eat the veggies. So that would be things like all of the non starchy vegetables from the rainbow, brussels sprouts and broccoli and cauliflower, etc. And then you're going to do your starchier carbs are going to be things and this is where you really want to look, as close to nature as possible. Now all of these things are going to have had some processing. If you're getting wild rice, it's you're not going out into the fields. Same with quinoa or legumes. But you really want to have them as close as possible so they haven't damaged things and added in damaged fats. So legumes, wild rice, quinoa, squashes, potatoes and fruit, and especially berries. And I love these because they are loaded with fiber. And when you do fiber, it's going to help slow your blood sugar response, keeps it more stable, feeds your gut microbiome. Right. And helps with good digestion, plus slows down stomach emptying and helps you Feel fuller. And if you're getting some of that resistant starch in from greener bananas or, or cold potatoes can help you burn fat too. So there's so many good things about fiber. I want you to get at least 50 grams a day. More is better there too. But if you haven't been eating much fiber, we're going to change this over the course of a couple weeks, not overnight, because if you do it overnight, you will feel bloated and uncomfortable. So we make this shift over time. All right, what else does it do? It also, fiber can also help reduce the risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes. So I mean, come on, like, fiber is such a rock star. It's so amazing. So remember, you're going to eat zero to two servings of these starchy carbs at each meal and then you're going to go crazy on the non starchy veggies. The more the better. And again, I want you to get in at least five servings a day. Super duper important. And one of the easy ways you can do that. Cauliflower rice has become one of my biggest go to's to throw in a lot of stuff. Now I just have to do one little riff on fruit because I put fruit into the starchy carb category because I want you to understand that fruit's really good for you and it's not a free food. So I have people do one to two servings of fruit a day. And I really like to emphasize berries or slightly green bananas like my favorite fruits. I like the apple for the pectin is very gut healing. But my most favorites are berries with all those deep colors and so much fiber. And then just a slightly, it's just turning ripe banana. Freeze them that way. Use half of it in the smoothie to get that resistant starch. But do not go crazy on the fruit because you will get too much sugar. So one to two servings a day. Stick with that in your smoothie. And by the way, like, let's talk smoothie, let's say that maybe you threw in a half a cup of blueberries and a half of a barely ripe green banana, added in some extra greens in there because you won't taste them. So it's a great way to sneak them in. Maybe a little chia or flax seed for extra fiber when you do that and you're using my Reignite wellness protein powder, that can get you like 10, 10 grams, 20 grams of fiber easily to start your day. In fact, done that way, that's about 20 grams. So that's a great way to start the day. All right, I want you to stick to the these three secret weapons. I want you to grab them right now and commit right now to at least starting with one of them this week, the next next week, and then the next the following week. And this is going to be something that you're going to become. It's going to become a habit for you. It's going to help you get and stay healthy, lose the weight as a bonus, and most importantly, avoid the weight regain. That's the biggest one of all. Now don't forget to hit like and subscribe and join me next time. For Today, tips on how to get metabolically healthy. See you soon. For more info on this and other health topics I cover or to rate and review, find me on Instagram, Facebook and my website, jjvirgin.com and don't forget to subscribe to my show so you won't miss a single episode. Go to subscribetoj.com thanks again for being with me me this week.

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