Can’t Lose Weight? Get Healthy First. Tips for Better Sleep

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Hey, this is JJ Virgin. Thanks so much for joining me. This is Ask the Health Expert. In each episode, I put the power of health in your hands and share ways to get healthy, lose weight, heal your gut, detox, and lots more so you can look and feel better fast. If you'd rather watch the video, hey, I did put on my makeup and do my hair, so check it out on my YouTube channel. Hey, it's J.J. here. Now let's be honest. The holidays are basically a financial ambush. Travel, hosting gifts, surprise holiday school things. Suddenly you're wondering how December turned into a spending spree. If you want to keep your finances under control this holiday season, you need to be using Monarch. It's rated the Wall Street Journal's best budgeting app of 2025. Monarch is the all in one personal finance tool that brings your entire financial life together in one clean interface on your laptop or your phone. What really grabbed my attention is how fast those little holiday expenses pile up with Monarch. Seeing everything in one place makes it a lot harder to accidentally overspend, and honestly, I appreciate anything that keeps me from starting January with a money hangover. You'll love exploring the holiday spending category. Imagine how good it will feel to actually see what's happening before your credit card statement does that whole dramatic reveal thing. Monarch basically shows you exactly where the money is going in real time, and that level of clarity could change everything, right? Don't let financial opportunity slip through the cracks. Use the code virgin@monarch.com in your browser for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year@monarch.com with code Virgin.

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What if you found out that as hard as you've been trying to lose weight, it may have nothing to do with your diet? Welcome to the series about all the things that are keeping you from losing weight that are not what you eat. Now, next up is number three. Hey there. I'm JJ Virgin. I'm four times New York Times best selling author and a fitness hall of famer. And I am here to help you live your healthiest life. And if you want to keep up with things that will help you do just that, let's stay connected. All you have to do is hit like on this video and subscribe to this channel. So you're trying to lose weight, huh? Have you ever tried a diet? All right, you can stop laughing hysterically now. Pick yourself off the floor and guess what? You may not be able to diet your way to weight loss. Shocker. Now it doesn't matter how disciplined you are, and you definitely can't starve your way there. Why would you even upset me like that? So there are a lot of things that could be causing your body to hang on to those extra pounds. In the other videos, we talked about gut health, your gut microbiome and toxins. And now number three, can you guess it? It's sleep. If you're not sleeping, you gotta fix it. It's horrible and dangerous for your health on so many levels. And if your issue is clinical, like sleep apnea or insomnia, you have to see a sleep specialist to get it taken care of. But no matter why you're exhausted, you're set up to fail, the weight will never come off. Sleep deprivation wreaks havoc on your hormones and makes you crave carbs, essentially, especially sugar. Now, I'm sure you desperately want to sleep, but you may not know why you can't. It could be that you don't feel like you can find enough hours in the day, so you're overdoing it on the caffeine, or you're having a couple extra glasses of wine to help you fall asleep. Or you can't stop exercising too late at night, or you can't put your phone down and you're blasting yourself with blue light. Anxiety and depression can also keep you from sleeping. Or maybe your serotonin is low. Bottom line, though, is if you're not sleeping well, you can't burn fat. You're feeling down, you got no energy, and you're craving a sugar fix. Any of that sound familiar? Listen, one single sleep deprived night can throw your stress hormones out of balance. And that alone can make you hungrier and signal your body to hold on to fat. And right here, right around your belly. And stress inhibits sleep and a lack of sleep increases stress. Around and around and around we go. Then you become this stressed out zombie and that hormonal mess spins off fat that sticks to your waistline. Now we can all agree that is not what we're aiming for, right? So studies, this is crazy, show that if you only sleep five hours a night, you are 50% more likely to be obese than people who get a full eight hours. 50%. Holy smokes. So sleep has got to be an absolute priority. And by the way, that was if you were sleeping five hours. But there's clear research showing that failure to get seven to eight hours of quality sleep a night sets you up for obesity. Now, when you're tired, it's not only harder to make good food choices and exercise choices because you're tired, but without sleep, you're never going to look and feel your best, whether you want to lose a few pounds or not. So the sweet spot if you want to burn fat, build muscle and lower the stress is seven to nine hours of quality sleep every single night. So if it's like bedtime for Bonzo at your place every night, here are a few tips and just try these, they're so easy and I promise they will make a big, huge difference. Here they are. Number one, try to go to sleep and get up around the same time every day. Now first one is making sure that you get up around the same time every single day. So here's what we're going to do. Look at what time you want to wake up. Let's say you want to wake up at six in the morning and you know you need to get seven to nine hours of sleep. Let's do the math. You need to power down at around 9:00'. Clock. Okay, so you've got your power down hour, my friend, Dr. Michael Bruce, the sleep doctor, coined that. What you're going to do is you're going to make sure that you power down all your electronics because the blue light from your phone or your tablet messes up your sleep way after you turn them off. So you're going to put them to bed and throw on a pair of those, like those super cool blue blocker glasses that all the biohackers wear. They're wearing them for a reason. And you want to create some calm there. So you want to lower those stress hormones, meditate, maybe put on one of the Dr. Joe Dispenza Sleep Meditations Journal on gratitude. Have some chamomile tea, my favorite. Have an Epsom salt bath with a little lavender cut back on the alcohol note. I didn't say no alcohol. All right? I said cut back. I love my dry farm wine, but I'm careful. I'm not having a bottle, I'm having a glass. So of course you have a bottle. You're going to fall asleep or pass out, but you know what's going to happen. You're going to wake up in the middle night because your stress hormones boomeranged and you got thirsty because you were so dehydrated. Here's a little trick on drinking. If you're drinking, you have one drink, you have twice as much water. Now, another thing that's really important for helping you sleep is caffeine. No, don't drink a bunch of caffeine to sleep. Cut back on the caffeine. You might be a slow caffeine metabolizer. And you'll notice this if you have caffeine in the afternoon and all of a sudden you feel very wired. So keep your caffeine to the morning, cut it off at noon, and then switch over to like decaf green tea in the afternoon. And here's what I do every single night. Every single night, I use Reignite Wellness Sleep Candy. I actually formulated this one myself. And I stay away from pharmaceuticals because those don't help you get deep sleep. Here's the cool thing with sleep candy doesn't give you a hangover. It just calms your nervous system and calms your mind and helps you relax. Plus, it's natural and it's delicious. So here are the key ingredients in melatonin combined with 5 HTP and vitamin B6 and inositol and L theanine, both of which can help with stress and relaxation. All right, so that's bedtime. Alright, that's really, really important. But here's some things you can do during the day that are going to help you too. Number one, shut your kitchen down after dinner. Now this is important. Eat an early dinner. Do not go eating at 9 and try to go to bed at 10. You want to eat your dinner at least three to four hours before bed. And you're going to eat by the clock, right? That three to four hours before bed, you're going to bed at 10. What time does that mean? Eat dinner at 6 and then eat by the virgin diet plate. And that means clean protein, healthy fats, and slow low carbs. So you have that Nice steady blood sugar control. Then after dinner, the kitchen is closed. In my perfect world, the kitchen will be locked down. Snacks after dinner, if you think you're hungry, you're not. By the way, just have a glass of water. That shuts down your hunger pangs. But have one glass. Don't have a ton of glasses because then you'll have to get up in the middle of night. All right, next one, Exercise. So exercise helps you sleep, but it matters when you do it. And I remember I lived in Japan in my 20s and I taught aerobics and I had to teach an aerobics class at 8 o' clock at night and I went to bed at 2 in the morning because of this. It had me so wired. So work out early in the day. It's the better time to do it anyway. And if you want to do a little walk after dinner, that's fantastic. But don't do a big, hard, intense workout in the nighttime that can impact your sleep. Next one, stress. All right, I know managing stress is way easier said than done, but there are things that you can do. So. So just like you're creating that whole calm before bedtime, think about the other things that are going to help with stress. Exercise. High intensity interval training helps your sympathetic nervous system handle stress better. So that's a huge one. Meditation is another great one. Find your bliss there. Meditation or tapping or qigong, a gratitude practice connecting more with your community. That's super important. And then think about those things that add stress. Maybe you could cut some of those out. Kind of a crazy thought, huh? All right. And then napping. Wait, you have time to nap? I'm so jealous. All right, a little napping can be great, like 10 to 20 minutes. But more than that can actually kind of mess you up. So if you want to throw a little nap in the afternoon or maybe a little meditation. Awesome. All right, there you have it. So see how easy these things are and simple to put into your life. And this is the goal we're going to get. Seven to nine hours of quality sleep that's going to help you crush those cravings and help you burn fat. I hope you got some great tips in this video. More importantly, I hope that you put them to use and you are sleeping like a baby in no time. And don't forget to like and subscribe. So you keep the healthy lifestyle intel tips and tricks coming in the next video. We're going to take a break from this series, but don't worry, it will be back after this next one. So if you can't lose the weight and you know it's not your diet, stick with me as we go through the rest of the list of what it could be. In the next video, I'm going to teach you how to intermittent fast and get results without suffering. You heard me right. See you there.

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 this week.

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