Debunking the Counting Calories Myth with JJ Virgin

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Welcome to the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show with celebrity nutrition expert, Fitness hall of famer and four time New York Times best selling author, JJ Virgin. JJ is a warrior mom whose knowledge and expertise have helped change hundreds of thousands of lives. With over 3.5 million podcast downloads and appearances on Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, the Today Show, Rachael Ray, Larry King, Love.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. This show is about you, not about me. I want to help you find practical, real world ways to dial in your health and mindset so you can finally lose that weight and feel strong and energized. Stop settling for less than your personal best. It's time to find out how to look and feel better than ever. And I'll be right here with you the whole way. Hey, welcome to today's Podcast. This is kind of a fun podcast because I feel vindicated. I feel like the stuff I've been saying for the last 25 years that I took a lot of flack for, I got a lot of heat on some of this stuff. I was saying a study by Dr. David Ludwig just came and proved it all to be true. So there. So here's the deal. Today my guest is me, me, myself and I Today I'm going to be your expert guide on really debunking the calorie myth. And I have said for literally decades, your body's not a bank account, it's a calories. Your body's not a bank account, it's a chemistry lab. And that all calories were not created equal. And I was just told I was wrong, but I knew I was not wrong, so I stayed the course. And I will be talking today about Dr. David Ludwig's study, what it means for all of us. And then I'm also going to go through all our different favorite comfort foods, things we like that would be high carb and show you how to low carb them, how to make them a low sugar impact. And I'll have some really cool resources for you. I talk about a couple of them during the the interview, like how to make how to make miracle noodles. I have some Fun videos with Dr. Jonathan Karp on how to make miracle noodles. So I'll have those on board. I'll give you Some simple swaps for carbs, some fun recipes. So there's loads of cool stuff in the show notes so you're going to want to grab those. Plus I list out all these simple swaps, so get those ones. They are going to be@jjvirgin.com over at Low Carb. Let's make them jjvirgin.com forward slash, low carb. Low carb. L, O, W, C, A, C, A, R, B. Low carb. All right, I just want to do a big shout out. Every. Every podcast we do a shout out. And this one's to three wily girls from the USA who says that here's the subject line is when you know better, you do better. Five stars. This podcast was one of the first podcasts I started listening to nearly four years ago and it's changed my life and my family. My husband had severe acid reflux and allergies. He no longer has to medicine. My two girls, 13 and 14, are now eating healthy food as a choice, not because they have to. I'm a middle aged woman with midlife issues and I'm happy to report I run circles around women half my age. Thank you, jj. Keep rocking it. Yeah, that makes me so happy. I got to tell you. I'm like midlife. I don't even know what to make of that. Midlife, to me, is the new 20. So there. And I just love that. And I'd love to give you a shout out. So if you've not left a review yet, head on over to itunes. Leave a review and be sure while you're there to subscribe and share this goodness with your pals because this is so much more fun to do with other people. All right, welcome to the podcast. So it's jj. I'm on my own today. And today I'm going to be talking about a very, very cool study that.

Just came out and what it means.

For all of us. And I have been saying forever, I mean literally forever, for, gosh, 30 years now, that your body's not a bank account, it's a chemistry lab. And that while calories count, where they come from counts more. And you would think that I was like saying there's no tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, or the Easter Bunny all wrapped up into one. When I started saying this, I got so much flack, but it was really clear to me that your body responded very differently if you had, say, a bunch of potato chips versus a bunch of broccoli. This sounds so obvious, but yet for years it has been calories in calories. Out. Now, can we all agree that that is just ridiculous? And we all know intuitively it doesn't work. And I still remember way back when one of my clients went to a diet doctor and the diet doctor basically said, listen, you need to lose weight, you can do it eating three Snickers bars a day, just count your calories. And I was like, so much work to be done. In fact, that kind of fueled my whole career. So I'm going to start was sharing this study that was published by David Ludwig. He's an MD, PhD. And basically this was covered all over the place a couple weeks ago. New York Times, the LA Times. He has been doing research for 20 years in obesity and diabetes and heart disease. And he has created this carbohydrate insulin model, cim, that basically says overeating isn't what causes weight gain. It's actually the process of gaining weight is what causes us to overeat. Okay, you're going, what? What does that mean? So let me walk you through it. So processed high glycemic load carbohydrates. I'm going to tell you, those are the high sugar impact diet carbohydrates. And those are the things that people been eating for years thinking that they were doing great because they were fat free. Right. What those have done have raised fasting insulin levels. And when insulin levels stay high throughout the day, they basically cause your body to store, not burn, and especially store carbohydrates into your fat cells, which is the last thing you want to do. When insulin's up, you can't access stored fat for fuel. Your body takes those calories and stores them as fat and you're eating and hungry.

Does this sound familiar?

I bet it does. So then you go, oh my gosh, I just need to eat less. Well, you're starving. And then your metabolism starts to go down. So what he did, what Dr. David Ludwig did, was he assigned participants to one of three test diets. High carbohydrate, moderate carbohydrate and low carbohydrate for 20 weeks. And they adjusted the calorie intake throughout that time so people maintain their weight. It wasn't about looking at, at weight loss. What it was looking at was looking at what happens with their metabol metabolism. Here's what's crazy cool. And these were looking at people who would have had a high insulin secretion, you know, so they maybe were metabolically damaged in the first place, which is important. But here's the advantage of a low carbohydrate diet. This is crazy exciting. Are you sitting down? The. That could be as much as 400 calories more a day that you burn when your calories are coming from a lower carbohydrate, I'm going to say a low sugar impact diet. So the type of carbohydrate, type of calories you are eating, whether they're coming from carbs, fat or protein, affects the number of calories that you are burning. So that whole calories in, calories out, all calories are created equal. Kaboom. That thing is blown up again, like I've said, forever. Your body is not a bank account, it's a chemistry lab. And while calories count, you know too much of anything's unhealthy, right? It's where they come from that counts the most that is the critical factor here. And I am super duper excited about this. And I'll be recording another podcast on my trifecta of eating making sure you're eating the plate of protein, fat and and fiber from low sugar impact carbs. So make sure you tune in for that one as well. But let's talk now about what you can do. So now you hear this information, and this, by the way, what they considered low carb in this plan was 20% carbohydrate, 20% protein, 60% fat. So let's look at what you need to do. And here's the thing. Non starchy vegetables are going to be your best friend. And you know, in my programs I say eat 5 to 10 servings of non starchy vegetables a day. A day. And a serving is a half a cup of cooked or a cup of raw. These things are negligible. They're never going to push you over the carbohydrate threshold. They're going to be fine. But one of the things I have you do when you do the sugar impact diet is I have you take the highest sugar impact foods. This would be things like corn tortillas or french fries or potato chips, white rice, the highest carbohydrate foods. And I have you start to take those high sugar impact foods and swap them, trade them for medium sugar impact foods so that corn tortilla would switch to a rice tortilla. And then we're making a transition to get you very metabolically flexible. One of your big goals here is you want to be able to use fat for fuel, carbs for fuel, protein for fuel, and you should be able to switch back and forth throughout the day and your body should be able to access stored Fat for fuel. When you haven't eaten for a while and your insulin comes back down because you're very metabolically responsive, right? You haven't damaged your metabolism so your insulin receptors can't hear things anymore and your insulin stays high and you can't access fat for fuel. Super duper important. And so I have you transition taper down over a week or two depending on how damaged your metabolism is. Where you're going from high sugar impact to medium sugar impact foods while you're eating the trifecta of clean protein, healthy fats and those carbs from lots of non starchy vegetables, A little bit of slow low carbs to get your fiber in. But then after you've done that for a week or two and you're able to go four to six hours in between meals, signifying that that you are a fat burner, not a sugar burner, that you can access stored fat for fuel, you're not relying on incoming food all the time because you've hijacked your insulin and you can't access stored body fat, which is bad. Remember metabolic flexibility, you want to be able to use different fuel sources. Then you go to low sugar impact and the whole point is to keep downshifting these carbs so your body in finding out where you do best, where do you feel your best and at what time of day. I know that if I don't eat a little bit of carbs at dinner, I don't feel great. I don't sleep well because it helps boost serotonin which helps raise melatonin, helps me sleep better. So I'm going to give you. I was going through. All right, where do we get slipped up? Because I believe that, gosh, now more than ever it is so easy to find healthy alternatives out there. So I'm going to give you some of my favorites. Again, there's a ton of this stuff in the sugar impact diet. That is what that book was really written about was to look at how to lower your sugar impact and lower your carbs without like sacrificing your taste and being hungry. Okay, so here we go. Rice or quinoa. If you're wondering what to do there, well, you're going to be better off having wild rice. It's much higher in fiber, much less processed. But here's the way that I start to take that down is I will take my wild rice and I will cut it. Now I'm going to tell you, start with one to one. But what I'd love you to do is then Move to two, two parts or more of non starchy vegetables to your one part of starchier veget or starchier carb. So last night for dinner for example, we had a, I had half a cup of wild rice and I actually had a cup and a half. So I did a three to one of cauliflower rice. There's also something called miracle rice. It's made from shirataki mushroom, shirataki noodles and you can substitute that in and it's basically almost calorie free. So either miracle rice or wild rice or either miracle rice or cauliflower rice and you can add that to your wild rice. So that's one easy way to cut carbs if you're doing rice. Next one, pizza crust. Couple different ways to do this. You know, first thing we started to look at was how do we get a gluten free pizza crust? Well, you can have a gluten free pizza crust that's still super high in carbs, right? Potato flour for example. So what you want to look at instead is you can either do a pizza crust using cauliflower and you could use some cauliflower and some gluten free flour, or you can start to take your flours down by using say coconut flour or almond flour. So some of the different nut flours. So either look at cauliflower flour or whole cloud flour. This is hard to say, boy. Cauliflower pizza crust. Because it's possible to do. Now I'm going to give you one other. You know, this is an advanced hack for a pizza crust, but it's awesome and you get used to these things is you take a portobello mushroom and you make a pizza out of that. There you go. Works great. Love it. Okay, next one. Anything you're using flour anywhere you're using flour. You can either switch it out for coconut flour or almond flour. I just made some when we were making Thanksgiving, I had Thanksgiving with Bri, my girlfriend, Brie, argot singer, the Betty Rocker. And we made what would have traditionally been like flour coated. We were trying to replace the dirky onions on top of a casserole, which my mother and her mother used to do. And what we did instead was we coated the onions with almond flour and then put them on an oiled pan, avocado oil and roasted them. Works awesome. So you can use those different types of flours. Okay, next one. What about pastas? It's never been easier, right? So you know, first thing that you do is you switch off the gluten pastas to say a rice pasta or a lentil pasta, but then. Or black bean pasta. But then the next step is let's go, go down from there. And so spaghetti squash makes a great one. Spiralizers. So I just got brought home mine from the desert, my nutribullet veggie bullet, which spiralizes everything. So you can make zucchini, you can make butternut squash, you can make all sorts of great noodles there. And again, what you could do is say use a lentil or a black bean pasta and do one half cup of that and two cups of. Or a cup or two of the veggie noodles. Say spaghetti squash or spiralized noodles. Here's one other one you can use is the miracle noodles. Just like I talked about with the rice. They also make pasta. And you want to make sure if you're using mirror miracle noodles, which are shirataki mushrooms, I actually had. And we'll put this in the show notes. By the way, I had Jonathan, I'm blanking on his last name, who is the founder of miracle Noodles. He's a doc over in Santa Monica, Dermatologist. Anyway, he got really interested in diabetes and how to help with that and found these shirataki noodles in Japan and brought them back. And it actually came over to my house and taught me how to do this correctly. Because there is an art to this. You got to drain them and rinse them because they sound smell like the sea. Because they're sea noodle, they're sea vegetables. And then you've got to rinse them. And then you dry saute them and put a little oil in afterwards and they get really yummy. So you have to prepare them. But boy, they can be fantastic. And again, as you're lowering down, think about half a cup of say a lentil noodle and one to two cups of one of the veggie noodles or miracle noodles. Okay, what about tortillas? So if you've been doing a corn tortilla, switch on over to a coconut tortilla. Now a little higher carbohydrate. It would be a cassava tortilla from siete. I love siete foods. But coconut even better. Or a coconut and cassava. Right. So here's a easy way to lower things down. If you're doing mashed potatoes. Here's a couple different ways to do mashed potatoes. So let's say you're doing mashed potatoes. You can cut them with cauliflower or you can make it all cauliflower. So again, how. Where are you Transitioning with mashed sweet potatoes. You could cut them with butternut squash or pumpkin, or just make a mashed potato, butternut squash or a mashed pumpkin or a combo. Yummy. If you're doing french fries and you've switched over to be better with sweet potato fries, try switching over to butternut squash phrase. These are in my Sugar Impact Diet cookbook. They are killer, amazing. And you can make them with avocado oil. Super easy for chips if you're lowering chips. So here's such an easy one. I mean, the first thing is switching off the gluten and switching off the corn and doing that cassava. But another really easy one to do is kale chips. And I have a recipe for those again in Sugar Impact Diet, because they are really easy to make. I want you to beware of a lot of the commercial kale chips because they put a lot of caca on them. They should be. That's a scientific term, caca. They should be very, very low carb, very, very low calorie. But I mean, I've, I've seen chocolate kale chips, right? The defense reps. I actually, I will admit I had to try them because, I mean, it's like I had to. But it was like they snuck a little kale in. It was like, you know, I ate chocolate with some kale on it. It was kind of ridiculous. Okay, next one, if you want to lower the carbs in your oatmeal, try adding in, replacing. Do a fourth of a cup of dry oatmeal. Do a half a cup to a cup of berries, and then do 2 tablespoons of chia. And even better, if you let that chia sit in some coconut milk overnight and really puff up and expand. Right? That's a great way to lower the oatmeal. If you're doing cereal, try some coconut flakes. Those work great. Great. And if you're doing pancakes, you can use protein powder. So I put my protein powder, I especially like to use my Paleo, all in one protein powder. You can use that with some almond or coconut flour. So, I mean, here's the deal. Like, these are all such easy, easy ways to lower the carbs. This is not a hard thing to do. It's not painful. And again, this is what I walk you through in the Sugar Impact Diet to help you lower these things down. I was just so happy when I saw David Ludwig's, Dr. David Ludwig's new study coming out that actually finally validated, which we all have known to be true for years and years and years is that calories are not created equal, that your body is a chemistry lab, not a bank account. That you need to think about the hormonal response of foods when you eat them. When you're eating a high sugar impact diet that's going to raise insulin, raise blood sugar if insulin stays up throughout the day because you're eating every couple hours and snacking like the whole popular culture tells you to do. Insulin stays up, locks the doors of fat cells. You can't access stored fat for fuel, and you're just going to be hungry. Then you try to stop doing that and you fail because you're hungry. And you know if you're hungry, you're just setting yourself up for fail. We're hardwired to survive this stuff. You know that you've created metabolic flexibility and that you're resilient when you could go four to six hours without eating, when you can fast for a day without feeling like you're absolutely freaking out. Right? You should be able to do that because your body should be able to access stored fat. So that is the big, big key. You know you are a fat burner when you can go four to six hours between meals. Alrighty. Now, after the break, I'll be answering a listener's question, so stay with me.

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Welcome back. This is the time where I answer a listener's question. But before I get into that, I just want to remind you, grab a grab those show notes@jjvirgin.com forward/low carb lo W C A R B because we have so much goodness in this week's episode. Now I'm gonna do a little shout out to Tara. So I recorded these podcasts, this one live on Facebook and Instagram. So loads of questions as it was going on. Tara wanted to know, how do I know how many carbohydrates I should be eating? Oh my gosh. This is one of those questions. Like the biggest question I get asked is what the heck should I eat? Next up is how many carbs should I have? How much fat should I have? I think what we're going to find over the next decade is that it depends. Don't you hate that answer? I'm sorry. But here's the thing. It depends. It depends on a variety of factors. Your genetics. There are some people genetically who need eat a lower fat diet. Most don't. But there's one specific APOE4.4 gene that needs to eat a little bit lower saturated fat. Okay, then we've got issues with adrenal health, with if you've got things going on with adrenals, you have to be careful not to go too low carb. Then we have to look at how much you're working out and what type of working out you're doing. But it's safe to say that most people probably eating too many carbs and the wrong types of fats and not enough non starchy vegetables. That's just what I see around the, you know, around my world. And then also they're eating protein but they're not digesting it well and they probably need digestive enzymes. So I built the Sugar Impact diet and this is my belief, is that everyone needs to go on their own, be their own personal health detective and go on their journey. The Virgin Diet set up to take you through that journey, that process, to figure out your hidden food intolerances. Which foods work for you and which foods don't. So you can customize a diet that will work for you for the long haul. Now, you need to do it every year because you can develop food intolerances at any time due to stress, due to gut issues that can create leaky gut. The next step is to figure out how many carbohydrates you should eat and what type of impact they're having on your body. And that's the Sugar Impact Diet, because just like all calories were not created equal, all carbohydrates are not created equal either. And so you've got to not just consider how many carbs should I have? But where are those carbs coming from? And safe to say that you should be probably lowering them down and then also looking at how many you're having at each meal. I tend to do best when I eat very little in the morning, moderate at lunch and dinner and dinner. I always do better if I have a little bit of carbs, like a half a cup of wild rice or half a cup of roasted potatoes. It helps me sleep at night by boosting serotonin that helps make melatonin, helps me sleep well. But again, I'm going to encourage you to go through the Sugar Impact Diet and go through the process yourself to start to taper down, make that transition from sugar burner to fat burner so you're very metabolically flexible. And then you'll be able to get that feeling of, where do I feel best? How many carbohydrates work best for me? But again, most importantly, it's not just about carbs. Just like all calories were not created, all carbs weren't either created equal. And we want to make sure that you're eating carbs that are as minimally processed, as close to nature as possible, as high in fiber as possible as well. Alrighty. Thank you so much for that. I'd love to have you guys join me when I'm on Instagram and Facebook, because that's where I grab these questions. So, JJ Virgin official on Facebook. JJ Virgin on Instagram. And if you've not left a review yet, please, please, please, I'd love to give you a shout out on the show. All right, see you next week. Bye.

That's all for this episode of the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show, which marks another step towards a healthier body and mind. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to the show and we'll talk to you next week.

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