Can Fasting Be Keeping Me From Losing Weight?

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Keeping me from Losing weight? This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times bestselling author, celebrity nutrition expert and and fitness hall of famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions, and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert. Diane Masters from Facebook asks, can fasting be keeping me from losing weight? I eat two meals a day and the scale just won't budge. I primarily eat protein and vegetables and a paleo smoothie from you a couple of times a week. And I'm getting so frustrated. Hey, it's J.J. and I bet you are. And I've got the perfect person to answer this question. I've got intermittent fasting expert Cynthia Thurlow with me. By the way, her TEDx talk on intermittent fasting.

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Well, this is a common question. And so when someone is intermittent fasting, there can be many reasons why they may not be losing weight. And so the first thing that I like to focus, focus on is sleep quality. Because as I've told more than one woman in my lifetime, if I can't get you to sleep through the night, I can't get you to lose weight. So one thing that's really important is that high quality sleep, cold, dark room, ensuring that you are off electronics an hour or so before bed, creating a sleep ritual, and ensuring you're getting a solid 70 hours a night of sleep. Without question, if you are getting less than seven hours a night of sleep, there's actually study data to suggest that your ability to control your blood sugar, which can impact weight loss as well as many other things, can be adversely impacted. So make sure your sleep is dialed in. And more importantly, if you're in perimenopause or beyond the five to seven years preceding menopause, you got to sleep. Secondly, stress, we know that stress, and there's no one that's listening that doesn't experience stress. But really critical if you are a female, if you're experiencing stress. And our body does not differentiate between the stress of being chased by a rabid dog or the stress that we have when we argue with someone, or the stress we experience when we're in a car. So really critical that you are dialing in on stress and finding ways to work through that. And that could be as simple as meditation. It could be reading a book, it could be exercising, connecting with your loved ones, making sure that every single day you're doing something to help combat stress. Because stress will drive up inflammation. And stress also secretes a hormone called cortisol that Our bodies need but will turn into a fat storage hormone if you are not careful. Another area that can contribute to difficulty losing weight are underlying food sensitivities. So I always think it's really critical to do elimination diets and remove the most inflammatory foods. That could be dairy, it could be gluten, could be grains. Processed sugars and alcohol can really derail our efforts at trying to lose weight. And lastly, I want to point out, you know, intermittent fasting is a strategy and you know, it doesn't necessarily work up front for everyone. So it requires a bit of fine tuning and some of it can even include, you know, altering your fasting and feeding windows so that you're not consistently doing the same exact hours every single day. And by this I would mean if you're Normally doing a 16, 8, maybe you need to do, you know, one or two 20 hour fasting, you know, windows during your week, or maybe you need to have a feast day where you open up your feeding window and you are consuming food over a 12 hour period because we don't want our bodies thinking that we're starving. So it's really important that we provide variety and that we're providing little minor stressors that can make a big difference in how successful you are with intermittent fasting. Hope that was helpful.

This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert. I do this five times a week, so make sure you never miss a show by going to subscribetojay.com.

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